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By Root 476 0

my feet. Parthenon Café. The letters are in crimson neon, daring the dark street. I don’t want to go in. It will be full of teenagers, and perhaps one of them will say “Hello, Miss Cameron,” a carried-over politeness from when he or she was one of my children. The Parthenon is beside the Queen Victoria Hotel, and there is a door from the hotel lobby which leads into the café. If you sit in one of the Parthenon’s front booths, you can look through and observe the oak counter, the wheezing horsehair chairs and the brass spittoons that are considerately kept there for the old men who congregate each afternoon and evening to parse the past, put it in its place and establish their place with it. The management suffers them. There aren’t so many of them now. Only three tonight, I see as I open the door and slip into the nearest booth. Only three old men, quite uncommunicative, hard as iron spikes. The door into the hotel lobby is open, and I’m relieved that the old men aren’t speaking. I remember once being embarrassed by hearing an old man in there singing in a creaking voice as light and brittle as mouse feet on straw –

Fare you well, old Joe Clark,

Fare you well, I’m gone.

Fare you well, old Joe Clark,

Good-bye, Betsy Brown.

What I thought in those days was – whatever you feel, don’t say or sing it, because if you do it will mortify me. If I went in there now, unbidden, young to them, strange in my white raincoat, and said Forgive me, they would think I had lost my mind.

“Yes?”

“Oh. Coffee, please.”

The kids of sixteen and seventeen are not actually dancing, but making as though to do so. They look so assured, so handsome. If only they don’t look in my direction, it will be a stroke of luck for me. Am I bent over my coffee cup? No, damn it, I won’t. Haven’t I as much right to be here as they have? I know this, but I don’t believe it.

All right. I know, I know. I know I have to do something. I can’t bear it. I have to get rid of it. I guess that is the phrase which is used. Get rid of it. Like a casual itch which one could scratch and abolish. I have to get rid of it. Excess baggage. Garbage. If I could just get rid of everything, and belong to myself, and not have to consider anything else. I have to get it out of me.

It will be infinitesimal. It couldn’t be seen with the human eye, it’s that small, but the thing will grow. That is what will happen to it and to me. It will have a voice. It will be able to cry out. I could bear a living creature. It would be possible. Something you could touch and could see that it had the framework of bones, the bones that weren’t set for all time but would lengthen and change by themselves, and that it had features, and a skull in which the convoluted maze did as it pleased, irrespective of theories, and that it had eyes. It would be possessed of the means of seeing.

“Want anything else?”

“No. No, thanks. That’s all.”

The coffee is pallid and lukewarm. I have to drink it. It seems to be a peculiar medicine.

The tall and handsome children dance very restrained, now, as though the world were too terrible to be tackled outright and had to be held at arm’s length instead. And I admire them.

Rachel. You must decide what to do. Do I have to? What will you do, else? I don’t know. I don’t know what will become of me.

“Could I – could I have another coffee, please?”

“Certainly, madam.”

Madam. Ten years ago Miklos would have said Miss. He has a built-in acclimatizer to take note of the years without having to notice.

Where you’re goin’, girl,

The road ain’t long.

Take from your shiny purse

Your two-dollar song.

The machine music whirls around me, and I hear it and don’t hear it. I don’t know where to go. I know what I have to do, and what I have to have done to me. But how in hell am I going to do it? I don’t know where to go.

Let us be practical, because in the last analysis that is all that matters. Could I go to Doctor Raven? What would I say? Look – I want you to recommend to me someone who is willing to perform an act that is classified as criminal and illegal? Obviously,