“A Stirring in the Glue” by Mary Elizabeth Dubois was selected by Joyland as a finalist in the 2021 Open Border Fiction Prize.
◆
I think I was thirteen when I had my first vision. I was standing on tiptoe in the pew with my family, reciting the Glory Be, when the priest’s breviary, held immobile by a white-robed alter girl, suddenly had many realities. Multi-temporal truths. Concomitant timetables. These alternate chronologies appeared, optically, alongside the nubuck-bound book, stacked in a neat filing cabinet of twenty or so images. The images had a shimmery, holographic quality to them, and they were visual in the sense that they showed an actual image of the book, wherever the book may be, in both space and time.
Of course, this wasn’t a theory I would develop until later, when I realized other people did not have these visions (the first two visions were merely a cryptic element of the world, an unexplained, yet mildly comfortable phenomenon with the jejune mysteriousness of hormonal fluctuations or blood on your underwear or your parents’ tax returns). In high school, looking down at the cheerleading captain’s lap-bound purple and white pom-poms during a pep rally, I had my second vision. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I had the third vision, and realized I could touch the filing cabinet and feel something solid.
It was only then that I began to inhabit the objects.
I was living with an eighty-year-old woman at the time, in a two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Bedford Avenue and South 4th Street, exactly three blocks from the East River. We rarely had hot water. We did have an iguana named Adam. The iguana was christened by Eliza, and kept alive by me. All of the furniture was Eliza’s; she had lived in the apartment for twenty-five years, companionless and glitteringly troglodytic. I’d found her ad for the available room online.
I worked at the library. Eliza did not work. She spent most of her days sleeping off a vague but evocative illness, and it was only when I came home that she would emerge from her bed to sit in the living room and play the hammered dulcimer.
The instrument was inherited from her mother, a Polish immigrant whose name was stamped onto the right side of the instrument: Matylda. I called the dulcimer Matylda; Eliza called her Mother. Conversationally, we described the object’s temperament as though she were receptive and available for emotional tenure. With the exception of the exterminator, whose visits Eliza prepared for via blue eye shadow and a sequined turquoise vest (an ensemble Eliza finally revealed was remnant from her days as a dinner cruise waitress), the dulcimer was the only person I ever heard her speak to affectionately.
I mean thing, of course. The dulcimer was also a thing.
Eliza was OK at playing the instrument, technically. Her hands were old, and her fingers sometimes histrionically skidded off the strings, whimsical solecisms. But she wrote the songs she played herself, singing along, and the way she performed this rote revealed something darker, maybe truer, about the effort it had taken for this particular object to end up in these fingers at this moment in time.
The two days that prefaced the dulcimer vision and subsequent inhabitation are still memorable to me now. The evening before, Eliza, Adam, Matylda, and I sat in the living room while the sun sank, watching as the light zipped the striations in the neighbor’s window shade from gold to titian to black. We drank water. The ambulances and bikes went by; there were people sobbing at each other down in yard. Nobody spoke. Eventually, Eliza removed Matylda from her fitted, trapezoidal suitcase, and announced that she was ready and willing to share a new song with us. Adam buried himself inside the empty suitcase. I inspected the design on the lap of my dress, a string of grey dots. Infected-seeming protozoa, I thought.
Eliza sat on her stool, and faced the window.
“Entitled, Ur Phenomena No. 13,” Eliza said. “Or, colloquially, A Stirring in the Glue.”
“So there are twelve preceding songs.”
“One day.”
“But they don’t exist yet.”
“They do.”
“Ha-ha,” I said. “I haven’t heard them.”
“Well,” Eliza said. “Neither have I.”
The song had three verses and a chorus. There were equally spaced interludes between each verse; during these interludes, Eliza breathed emphatically, her chest visually involved in the task. The melody gave me goose bumps on the tops of my thighs, underneath my skirt; the whole song felt like disembodied melancholy. A feeling snipped loose from humanity. An acoustic metaphysics, complete and logically sound without any human counterpart. As though what we thought of as “human” feelings were inherent to the universe somehow, us exempting.
The lyrics went like this:
The plainsmen wet their hands within
the ready-made monsoon.
But up here in the mountains
I have seen the weather’s womb.
Just as these hoary caps once formed,
the storms are made by time,
and now I see the face of space:
a blush, in boundless climb.
For in these hills and fabric plates
atop our nations move,
there is a dynamism found,
a stirring in the glue.
A stirring in the glue.
A stirring in the glue.
When she was finished, Adam lifted his head briefly, in homage.
“The face of space is a blush?” I said.
Eliza was holding her left wrist with her right hand, palm-up, examining the callus on her pointer-finger.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” she said. “Usually.”
◆
The next morning, I woke early to the sound of an ambulance, followed by the screaming of a cat in heat. The half hour after this confluence was more or less silent. I sang the chorus of A Stirring in the Glue, lying in bed, appreciating the water stain that rode the ceiling from north to south. Adam came in, and we stared at each other. I had a suspicion that something was reaching out, wanting to be touched, and it wasn’t Adam, not exactly.
There was no one in the library for at least half the day, but this library was not very popular, nor was the idea of a library very popular in general. This particular, three-room branch of the city’s public library slouched in-between two meatpacking warehouses, and the street was always full of trash. There was no neighborhood ethos; there were no residents wandering by. A magnet high school was a few blocks away, but it was summertime, and it was a science magnet, anyway.
I spent most of my time reorganizing the entire library according to a system I had devised myself. The system had to do with sex. I’d had this fantasy since I was a girl: a bookshelf with titles so increasingly provocative that orgasm would be unavoidable by the time you finished looking at a particular stack. It had to do with duration, but also curation. I would rearrange the books one shelf at a time; I always put them back before my shift ended. But what I really wanted was to be able to arrange the entire library this way, and for the fantasy to be realized.
The first three hours on the day in question I devoted myself to this task, rearranging a single shelf of young adult novels. The titles either described a vampyric situation, or else they were about Paris. This content didn’t seem outside the possibility of arousing me, but it didn’t, and I was sad.
Halfway through the day, two teenagers giggled in, up the unsocial staircase that led to a few more stacks, and then out again. A middle-aged man, a professor-type wearing unseasonable chinos and an always-seasonable, but fashionably anachronistic lorgnette, checked out three Marlowe plays. He complimented my dress, on the account that it was green. When the library was again empty, a young woman entered, and asked after Goethe. We did in fact have a copy of Theory of Colours, but it was out, and, besides, it was fine, she didn’t really have time to read it, anyway.
“How do you feel about reading?” she said, facing me, on the opposite side of the front desk. “Generally?”
“So-so,” I said.
“I guess I mean,” she said. “How much time do you think you’ll allow yourself to read over the course of your life?”
“A year’s worth,” I said.
“That seems low.”
“Does it?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t tell, actually.”
Her hair was bobbed and blonde; she was wearing a white cotton t-shirt over loose jean shorts. Freckles. Freaky-sharp posture. A long neck, punctuated by a green and white jacquard ascot. She suddenly pressed her left palm into the desk, next to the mug of fifteen pencils that were specific to our branch (a huge acronym stamped onto the body: the general library name + slang for the neighborhood). She stared at these pencils, and then at me.
“You’re funny,” she said. “You answered my question so directly and non-judgmentally.”
“I went to college,” I said. “I think that’s what college was about.”
“Wow,” she said.
She removed her hand and walked towards the front entrance, a dotted i.
“I’m coming back,” she said, opening the lone glass door, sending a refracted jewel of light from the stop sign across the street into my eye. “Not for Goethe. But for someone else. And not today. But some other day. I’ll see you then.”
◆
Eliza was still asleep when I got home that evening. I boiled water for pasta, and thought about calling someone. I still didn’t know many people in the city, but there were acquaintances from college who’d ended up here, and I knew if I tried, I could probably attend some kind of social event to meet other people through them. But I was generally less interested in this than I was invested in my anonymity, and in the domesticity of my routine with Eliza. So I usually spent some time thinking about calling, and then didn’t.
I made Adam collard greens and sat in the armchair by the window, watching him eat them. He put his face into the bowl, eating multiple wet leaves at a time, his dewlap dangling underneath the lip of the bowl. A conscious comma. Dismembered sentience.
“Adam,” Eliza said suddenly, from the doorway. The lights were off in the bedroom, but her duvet’s moon-white glow filled the space behind her skinny legs. “I have a new verse.”
While Eliza unpacked the dulcimer, I watched a pillar of light from the window illuminate a parade of dust. The greens and oranges of the sofa and surrounding décor (two tiger-in-the-jungle paintings with the same tiger in different, yet complementary postures and a wicker basket that exposed an involved duo of brown yarn + a vintage brass etui with inlaid yellow stones), made the room look as though it should feel humid; the sunbeam pointed towards a ceramic cantaloupe slice that sat atop three coffee table books. Something about the latter felt refreshing, the dust performing its choreography towards a piece of fake fruit.
As Eliza sat on her stool and plucked the first string, the sunbeam disappeared, taking with it the dust and clamminess. Adam settled inside the dulcimer’s suitcase. The room cooled.
Eliza sang, and while she did, the holographic filing cabinet appeared in front of me for the first time in many years. For the first three verses of the song, I watched the images of the dulcimer pulsate in their glittery column. When Eliza began the new verse, I leaned in closer towards the instrument.
She sang:
The stiffness of the deepest soil
cannot reverse the fact,
that one day galaxies will come
to take this planet back.
There are moments in our lives where we feel as though some old piece of our personality is being nipped off, as though we’re shedding dead brain cells, as though something that used to be valuable and integral to who we were is finally abandoned to make space for the new. That’s how this moment felt. Reaching out to touch a single, strangely Styrofoam-like, image inside the filing cabinet, some part of myself released its hold on past ideals. I reached with connection in mind.
◆
And then I was inside the dulcimer. There were hands on me, but they weren’t Eliza’s hands. I could see a face, and it wasn’t Eliza’s face, although there was a resemblance: a young woman with cropped blonde hair and metal-rimmed glasses. She looked down at me, concentrating, her fingers sliding over my strings. I was a trapezoidal soundboard instead of a human body, steel strings instead of a summer dress. The song wasn’t anything I recognized; it had a jauntiness that most of the things Eliza played lacked.
It was sexy, being touched like that. Anticipating the end of the song. The notes coalescing to produce some kind of announcement, some kind of climactic moment of authority and brilliance and libidinous acoustics.
Instead, before the song could end, I was back in the armchair, a single stripe of hair in front of my left eye. Eliza was staring directly at me, something she did not often do.
“What?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Did I go somewhere?”
I looked over at Adam, who seemed bored, his head resting on the side of the suitcase, his eyes closed.
“You’re always here,” Eliza said, skeptically. “We’re always here.”
Her legs, drooling out of grey polyester shorts, were shaking slightly, the instrument still resting on top of them.
“We’re always here,” she repeated.
◆
The next day at the library, I frantically rearranged two of the philosophy shelves. The book-titles fantasy felt more possible than usual, somehow, but less comforting, more anxious. I wanted to be inside the dulcimer. I wanted Eliza’s mother to be touching me. It suddenly felt immoral that I ever called the dulcimer Matylda. Objects weren’t statically haunted; objects were the vehicles for accessing different points on the grid of space-time. The dulcimer was simply the hang-glider that floated alongside the helix of time and brought me back to Matylda, the thing that allowed for interaction to take place across generations.
The professor-type came in, returning the Marlowe plays and asking after Robert Burton. We located The Anatomy of Melancholy, which was not in its correct place, due to my reorganization. This seemed to amuse him; I felt like he knew why the books were this way, although, of course, he couldn’t. After he complimented my pearl earrings, on account of their being pearl, he left, and I put all of the books back in their appropriate places. I sat at the desk for the rest of the day, unable to un-see a paranoid image of a piece of continent being scooped out of the earth with a spork.
On the walk home, it was already dark, and the moon traipsed from behind the row-homes, a tire-swing, grinning and cruel. A lone mosquito bit me on my thigh, an inch above my skirt-line.
But Eliza didn’t wake up that night, or, if she did, she didn’t emerge from her room. Adam and I sat by the living room window, eating collard greens. We eventually fell asleep together on the sofa. In the early, pre-dawn morning, I thought Eliza came out, but she had the face of the blonde woman from the library, so it must have been a dream intermingling with reality, or else all dream, or else all reality. A moot bulk of skull, rising out of a familiar frame. A proleptical human clone, being born.
◆
I began to feel a panic tiptoeing around my internal monologue. I worried I might never have another vision of the dulcimer. I worried I might never have another vision in general. Eliza resumed playing for Adam and I in the evenings, but she refused to play A Stirring in the Glue.
Weeks went by. After a month or so with no vision and no glue stirring, my panic’s tiptoe became a gallop, and I rearranged five entire shelves over the course of my six-hour shift, and didn’t have time to put the books back before the other clerk came to take over. The next day, there was a boss-autographed note for me on the front desk: “Fiction A-E (?)” The books were back in their proper order. The clerk had noticed, and put them back.
The day after this episode, sitting behind the front desk, clasping and unclasping my triangle-shaped hairclip, resisting the urge to do it all again, the blonde woman entered, wearing a different but aesthetically harmonizing incarnadine ascot. Her hair was longer, which made her alphabetical-form no longer a dotted i, but a willowy, lowercase l. She smiled manically.
“Oh, yikes!” she said.
“Yikes,” I said.
“That’s right.” She placed both hands on the front desk. “I’ve been back a couple times, but no cigar. You must have sneaky hours!”
“They are sneaky,” I agreed.
A pregnant mother and her toddler were sitting on the tri-colored shag carpet next to the children’s lit shelves. The toddler, historically absorbed by a carpet-bound orange lozenge, cried out to the blonde woman, smiling conspiratorially. I re-clasped my hairclip.
“I want to ask you a question,” the blonde woman said to the toddler. Then she looked at me. “About the experience of looking at a painting. How many hours do you think you’ll spend with paintings, over the course of your life?”
“Looking at paintings?” I said.
“With paintings,” she said.
“Less than a year, looking at paintings. More than that in the proximity of paintings.”
“What about within a painting?” she said.
“What?”
The pregnant mother was ready to check these books out, but could someone please help, she was having trouble standing up while also holding the books and the toddler.
I brought the books back to the desk. The blonde woman went up the staircase, disappearing into the history and sciences stacks.
After the mother left, I went upstairs, something I rarely did. I thought I saw a tinsel of blonde hair, but when I went down the row, there was no one there. The window units sounded like they were chewing something complicated and metallic; I felt uneasy. I imagined this woman’s hands, inhumanely sped-up, reorganizing all of the books shelf-by-shelf, row-by-row.
I checked every row in both sections, and when I was finished, nearing the top of the staircase, I heard the front door hurriedly open and close.
I went back to the desk and sat for the reminder of my shift, clasping and unclasping the hairclip. The professor-type came in at some point, but he seemed to sense my paranoia, and went to look for his books by himself. He checked out a general science book on continental drift, and failed to comment on any essential quality of any of my accessories. These seemed out of character, and I cried after he left.
◆
That night I asked Eliza to play A Stirring in the Glue.
“I’m having a hard time,” I said to her. I realized I hadn’t said something like this in many years, much less to Eliza. Eliza, sitting on the sofa in her sequined vest (it was extermination day), was holding Adam on her lap. She seemed confused by my confession.
“The exterminator didn’t come today,” she said. “But he was supposed to.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What if he’s dead?”
“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“What if he’s dead, and they don’t replace him, and we never get another exterminator?”
“It really is sad to think about,” I said.
Eliza put Adam on the ground, and he ran into her bedroom, his feet making rain-on-roof-sounds due to sharp nail on linoleum. I sat at the very edge of the armchair and tried to see behind the neighbor’s window shade and into their apartment, which you could sometimes do, depending on the light.
I heard Eliza open the dulcimer case.
“Just this one time,” she said. “Because I know you know.”
“Know what?”
“About it.”
“OK sure,” I said to the neighbor’s impenetrable window shade. “One time.”
She played the entire song, and I stared fixedly at the instrument, but there was no vision. I did feel soothed, to some extent. The familiar melody, the repetition of the chorus, and Eliza’s hands, industrious and otherworldly.
“What made you write this?” I asked her, when the song ended. “The glue stirring, the stirring happening in the glue?”
“Dear,” Eliza said. I realized she was breathing heavily. I turned to her, and we made eye contact. “It’s likely that I will die soon.”
◆
We made plans. The furniture would become mine, along with everything else in the apartment, including Adam. Once the nefarious It happened, the landlord, who Eliza had known for twenty years, would give me time to find a roommate, if I wished to stay. I didn’t yet know if I wished to stay. This was fine. Eliza mentioned the ocean, and so we made plans to go to the ocean.
Amidst these fractional conversations, which took place at brief intervals over the course of a few days, it was troubling to think about the vision. I suspected I had taken some life force out of Eliza by accessing and sexualizing her mother through the dulcimer; I imagined a nucleus of light being ripped out of Eliza’s chest, passing through the instrument, and into me, dulcimer embodied. Brio, violently torn out and transferred.
The day before we were set to go to the ocean, I worked the library. I counted the pencils in the mug (fifteen). I walked each row of the upstairs section, miming the investigative motions of the aforementioned day. There were only five rows, and behind the fifth row, in the corner by the window, there was a shadow produced by an unbolted window unit. The shadow consisted of a steep obtuse angle, capped by an astral ring (the latter being the grey-world’s equivalent of the air conditioner’s temperature knob). I stared at this ring for a long time. I imagined the ring as the metallic center of the earth, shifting slightly, like a doorknob. I imagined that upon the moment of twisting, all humanity would drop dead.
◆
It took over an hour to get to the beach by train. Eliza was bundled in a tall brown turtleneck and felt pants; I wore my one-piece black swimsuit underneath a sheer pink slip. We sat together, by ourselves, on the bench by the connecting train door. We did not speak. We held hands.
The beach was full of lazy, giggly people. I laid out two of our white bath towels, far from the water, closer to the dunes. We sat on these, eating cherries. Adam momentarily crawled out of Eliza’s tote, seemed scared, and then re-submerged. Eliza found this funny. The man with the plastic tub full of cocktails offered us a deal if we bought four mixed drinks and a shot of tequila, and Eliza also found this funny, although we did not accept. At some point she put on a lime green visor.
The ocean was a massive, silvery claw, one that pushes sand-colored coins in an arcade game. Few people were actually in the water; a cool breeze siphoned through the dunes, squeezing out the humidity. I watched the clouds robe the sun, then disrobe her, then clothe her entirely. A child next to us began to scream, and was taken away by a sunburnt woman.
It smelled like sunscreen, and then beer.
After some time, Eliza removed her turtleneck and pants. Underneath was a turquoise bikini, complete with auric hoops attached to the node of each breast. This reminded me of Matylda’s fingers, slick and exact.
“Are you going to go in?” I asked her.
She stood up and took off her visor. She walked to the shore.
I watched her skirt the minor waves for a while, and then eventually sink knee deep, then chest. A man at this equivalent depth offered her a yellow polyurethane noodle, which she accepted. The man seemed to talk at her for a while. The tellurian task of the waves lifting and caressing this woman, and all women, made me sad, then faintly jealous. I checked on Adam, removed my slip, and walked down to the water.
Eliza had abandoned the man at this point, and was fully submerged waist down, the noodle propping up her head and body as she kicked her way further out.
I swam out the same distance, parallel, but with ten to fifteen yards between us. If she noticed me, she didn’t acknowledge it. The waves were bigger, greyer, older-seeming; they moved and ballooned inside my baggy swimsuit. I dove underneath each wave, grabbing fistfuls of sand on the ocean floor. Eventually a grab revealed a gloomy blue shell, which I held onto.
The sheer amount of water sealed off any noise from the beach. As the tide pushed me towards Eliza, I began to hear her song:
- For in these hills and fabric plates
- atop our nations move,
- there is a dynamism found,
- a stirring in the glue.
A stirring in the glue.
A stirring in the glue.
The tide carried me over, and a plane flew above my head in the opposite direction, a displacement. Eliza offered me a section of the noodle, but when I tried to let it support both of us, we both sank further down. She kept the noodle, her swimsuit’s nipple rings making impressions in the foam.
The sun, cloud-faced, gently warmed the lids of our eyes. The birds came and went, performing organizational grace in their obsession with the letter V. The ocean, more importantly vast, it seemed, than deep, stretched out past the horizon, a forward moving vector of slush and jellyfish. I imagined it moved like this, contained in a column, out of the Earth’s atmosphere, out into the universe, for all of time.
◆
When we got home, Eliza’s body was still a paroxysmal, warped thumb in the snug white towel. I tucked her into the duvet, microwaved a soup we had made the day before, and set this soup on her bedside table. Adam, still shy from the sensory assaults of the human world, slept underneath the armchair. I polished my shell with vegetable oil. I put it on top of the dulcimer suitcase.
For the next couple of days, I performed this soup routine for Eliza, in-between shifts at the library. She sometimes woke when I came in, but mostly she slept. Eventually, Adam seemed to get it, and stationed himself on the pillow next to her. When she finally didn’t wake up at all after three consecutive soup rounds, I was initially confused as to what I was supposed to do. I went down and looked for the landlord, who wasn’t home. Then I called 911.
◆
The weeks went by, and I stopped having any ideas about sexual fulfillment through books or phantasmagoric wormholes. It seemed juvenile, with an old woman I had loved dead, and the dulcimer’s song, and Eliza’s mother, permanently inaccessible. Since the day at the ocean, the colors and sounds and smells around me seemed muzzled; falling asleep at night, I would experience this multi-sense deceleration effect, where my thoughts felt like they were moving through deep snow, and the snow smelled like freezer ice.
I picked up Eliza’s ashes from the crematorium. I left them in the plastic bag and tucked it into her bed, half on pillow, half underneath duvet. Hominified soot. I promised the landlord I would find a roommate. I promised the landlord I would call a friend, go to a club with lots of pop-music and mirrors, do something that required makeup and muscles.
The day after the ashes, I arrived at the library to take over an afternoon shift. I counted the pencils. There were only fourteen. This excited me. I went upstairs, pacing up and down each row, and found the pencil on the fourth, in the center of the row. On the fifth, in the corner where the astral ring would appear once the sun began to set, was the blonde woman, fully lettered out on the lozenge-plush carpet. She had several books stacked next to her, but she wasn’t reading. She was wearing a yellow ascot, piebald with dime-sized daisies. A white tennis outfit. Matching Keds.
“What the hell?” I said to her. “Where did you go? Where have you been?”
She looked amused.
“Why would you say something like that to me?” she said.
She sat up, and I sat down across from her, next to the books. She reached out and held my earlobe between her finger and thumb. A signal.
“Is your name Matylda?” I said.
This seemed to confuse her slightly. Then she smiled again.
“We can give this a try, if that’s what you mean,” she said.
She leaned over and kissed me, her mouth wet and almost mean. And then she was pinning me to the ground, her body on top of me, her tongue carving fast, fluid letters into my throat. Our skirts came off partially, but not entirely. The window unit’s mastication seemed to slowly crescendo, an aural parallel. At some point I remember looking over at her stack of books. I read each title. She screamed into my palm as she came.
◆
One day, years later, long after Lydia and I rearranged the entire library according to my fantasy, long after I’d been fired for this, long after she’d moved in with me and then out again, long after the sight of a stupid ascot no longer made me sick with nostalgia, I found the polished blue shell from my day at the ocean with Eliza. It was buried in a box that held old things from that time, in the back of the closet, next to the dulcimer suitcase. I took out the shell and put it on the windowsill. The two women I shared this new apartment with came home. We ate takeout together, and repeated political commentary we’d read on the Internet. We each tried on the tall, wool coat Abby had bought half-off. Then they went out again. When I reentered my room, the shell had donned a holographic filing cabinet.
I reached out and touched the shell.
I stared at the images of the shell at various places and times, imagining how old it was, and where it had been. I felt a little dread, almost what you would feel if you were floating out in deep space, and realized that next to you was something massive, rectangular, and invisible. Geometric, organized inhumanness. A Euclidean carapace on a non-Euclidean form.
And then I was a snail, crawling along the ocean floor. There was compact pressure on my exoskeleton; I moved slowly and deliberately underneath the outline of a coral outcrop. The plane was glamorously colorful and floodlit, but because I was a snail, I could only see the impressions of the polyps, of moving fish. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope pointed at twin neon signs, or a drug-induced close-eyed visual.
As I crawled, I thought about the nature of this snail’s journey, how outside of human time it was, how everything happening on land, the tool-making and the procreation, the wheat-growing and the motherhood, the micro-economies and the rape, couldn’t matter, and didn’t matter to this task. I thought about the curl of conventional sexual desire, and the way it looped around itself inside an internal system, a system for keeping humankind alive and principal and in charge. I thought about Eliza, alone and gorgeous, simply existing, refusing to join in, floating out into space in a turquoise bikini, forever.
Then the gentle thrust of time carried me forward, and I went on to live my life with human beings.