394
DAVID ZANE MAIROWITZ
and acceptance of a thousand unknown fluids
in
her receptacle. This
is a virtual 1960s of effects for her, the rapid alternation of psychic
energies and exhaustions. Her rhythm is vague. She feels a flush of
freedom and growth, running headlong in pursuit. She gathers up ter–
ritories of achievement and claims them as part of a new personal
myth. She drifts off from the double-edged razor of Zimmerman and
Mother Munch. She uncovers the roots of her own industry.
And then she fails, in alternation. She struggles with belief as
she sees around her the sputterings of the human mechanism deplet–
ing its own resources. Everywhere the day has run down. She collects
these ruins and projects them on a screen before her. She witnesses a
disappearance of quality and accepts responsibility for it. She trun–
dles up the faded rags of her breed and vows resurrection. Some–
where in this loss of Zimmerman she gains his fists. On the fifteenth
anniversary of her migraine she mounts the blood to her brain and
enters the port of destruction. She has accepted the dim purpose of
her era, its remaking. She leaps.
However, her tomb now mirrors her disaffection with her thrust.
The vitality of commitment is already extinguished and she harbors
only the potential mischief of her act. Yet she must struggle with her
own nature in its apathy, for Kropotkin has surely found her out
with his first look.
The room is cold and dark and she has begun to feel a tickling
in her loins. She searches with a candle and finds she is discharging
a green substance.
He has entered as she knew he would.
If
it were known, he
would be shot. What gives him the security of her silence, even now,
she muses. He sits opposite her. She cannot see his face. It occurs to
her in such light she may show him her defiance.
If
it can be ab–
sorbed, without him being witness to it, she can follow it through.
She realizes, in the silence, that she has always awaited his instiga–
tion. He must speak first.
"You're sapping my attention , Perfidia, haunting my sleep again.
I warn you, keep off me."
In his voice she hears a familiar choking. How easy to remem–
ber
him
without seeing his changeable eyes. She hears, out of another
era, the soft collapse of his hair on her belly and remembers the
signals of fear. Leather crackles as he shifts in his chair and she smells
1
\
\
)
