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their P.C. credibility, or being talked about by the right set, or mentioned by the right tutors, or if they’re tutors themselves, at the right parties, fuck integrity, fuck originality, fuck art. I care, Eth. I care like fuck, and I want someone to know it.” Her voice, speaking from the heart of a whirlwind of cascading images, held a dark, tightly focused savagery Ethan Ring found disturbing and exciting for the same reasons.
    Mechanistic soulless irrelevancies to the Zeitgeist notwithstanding, she received a Distinction for the Boccioni-verse project and persuaded Ethan to throw a celebration party in his flat.
    “What’s wrong with yours?” he asked.
    “Ah!” was her only answer.
    Everyone from his and her classes who was not too small-spirited to accept turned up. They danced badly to far too loud music. They drank far too much. They smoked atrocious things and popped worse. They behaved abominably in public at antisocial hours, reeling up and down the street on each other’s shoulders, falling on cars, denting bodywork, setting off a Stockhausen symphony of security alarms. All night he watched her moving around his flat talking, laughing, drinking, grinning, looking beautiful and brilliant in a head-turning rubber dress, surrounded by brilliant beautiful drinking laughing talking people as irresistibly drawn to her as he in a cordon he could not penetrate for one word, one laugh, one dance for himself. Returning from the bathroom—so full of dope smoke it disconnected its many visitors from reality as effectively as any of Luka’s virtuality overdubs—he met her in her breathtaking rubber dress filling in clues on the World’s Longest Crossword that ran all the way around his living/sleeping room into the kitchenette space.
    “Ethan.” Her fingers on his arm were urgent in a way he had never felt before. “Come on.” She pulled him away from the World’s Longest Crossword, away from the party, up the stairs to her flat. “Come on .” Into her bedroom. “Three parallel outbounds this evening. A crux, a crisis, a point of transition. This is the time.” She pulled him to her. She smelled of whiskey, warm rubber, and wild wild things. “Why do you think I had the party down in your place?” She locked the door. “Welcome to the Luka-verse.”

T HE VOICE WAKES ME. For the second it takes the tap to download I cannot understand; then glass pyramids of language crystallize in my mind.
    “Please, I’m so hungry, can’t I have something to eat?”
    Dull gray light in the window; dawn light. She is so weak and frail she can hardly hold herself upright in the bed. The dull deathliness is gone from her eyes. There is a new light in her.
    My ribs ache, the backs of my knees throb from having fallen asleep with my feet propped on the dressing table. Head like a loaf of stale bread, mouth like Satan’s rectum. Before I destroy the evidence of my dark art, I permit myself one brief glance.
    Tiferet: Angel of Healing and Wholeness.
    Well-being cascades through my chakra centers from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. Muscular aches and nags are wiped away. I feel I can run a marathon, outspring a greyhound, leap tall buildings in a single bound. I feel Olympian. I feel immortal.
    “Please, mister, something to eat?”
    I go out into the hall and call for Mrs. Morikawa. The house is awake within seconds. I gain the impression that no one has been asleep. While Mrs. Morikawa and family run about filled with joy, preparing miso soup, sloppy rice, tea, I wake Mas.
    “The girl?”
    “She’ll be all right now.”
    He is still drunk with sleep.
    “What… how?”
    “Later. I promise.” What have I forced myself into? What lies, what deceptions, what mistrusts and hurts? A spiritual searcher would pray Lord Daishi for grace to save him from the consequences of doing right, but I am only doubting, profane Ethan Ring. “We should get going if we want to be on the far side of Tokushima City by