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InterText Vol. 8, No. 5 / September-October 1998
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  Contents

    Jane.........................................Peter Meyerson

    Amo, Mensa!.................................Rupert Goodwins
 
    Grendel.......................................Russell Butek

    Heading Out.................................Adam Harrington

....................................................................
    Editor                                     Assistant Editor
    Jason Snell                                    Geoff Duncan
    jsnell@intertext.com                    geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
    Submissions Panelists:
    Bob Bush, Joe Dudley, Peter Jones, Morten Lauritsen, Rachel 
    Mathis, Jason Snell
....................................................................
    Send correspondence to editors@intertext.com or 
    intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
  InterText Vol. 8, No. 5. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published 
  electronically every two months. Reproduction of this magazine 
  is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold (either by 
  itself or as part of a collection) and the entire text of the 
  issue remains unchanged. Copyright 1998 Jason Snell. All stories 
  Copyright 1998 by their respective authors. For more information 
  about InterText, send a message to info@intertext.com. For 
  submission guidelines, send a message to guidelines@intertext.com.
....................................................................



  Jane   by Peter Meyerson
==========================
....................................................................
  When you hear a story, don't just concentrate on what's being 
  said -- be sure to notice who's saying it.
....................................................................

  "Your feet," I say.

  "What does that mean?" he asks. He's got this 
  what-the-hell's-she-talking-about look on his face, so I spell 
  it out for him.


  "That's what did it for me. Your feet. I saw your feet and fell 
  in love. Get it? You've got beautiful feet, man."

  Now he's, like, totally confused.

  "My feet? What about my face?" he asks, looking _soooo_ hurt.

  "The face was last."

  "The face?" Now he's frowning. You'd think I was treating him 
  like a haunch of beef or something, which I'm not. I'm just 
  being honest with the dude.

  "Okay, your face," I say, firing a bored sigh at him. I'm 
  getting tired of all these dumb questions. "I started with your 
  feet, then worked my way up. You didn't have a shirt on, 
  remember?"

  "Remember? Jane, it was the day before yesterday!"

  "That's right. So if we just met, how am I supposed to know what 
  you remember and what you don't? Anyhow, I dug your body, not 
  that it made any difference since I was already hooked below the 
  knees." I fell apart with that one. Sometimes I can be pretty 
  funny.

  "Thanks... I guess."

  "You're welcome... I'm sure," I say, flashing a sassy smile.

  "So? What about my face?"

  Geez! Men, the older ones in particular, are so vain.

  "Okay. Then I got to your face and I thought, nice, the guy's 
  face works."

  I suppose he finally had what he wanted 'cause he tosses me a 
  smile, one of those, isn't-she-a-cute-little-thing-after-all 
  type smiles, and we get it on in a bathtub full of Mr. Bubble.

  Lou was thirty-eight when I met him. Guys like him always expect 
  every eighteen-year old girl is going to be shy around them, 
  'specially if there's a love/sex thing happening. Well, I'm not 
  the shy type, and when someone asks me what makes my heart 
  flutter and my lady bird sing and it happens to be his feet, I 
  say so. Call me weird, but when Lou opened the door, barefoot 
  and wearing his shorts and that dopey Hawaiian shirt, I took one 
  look at those hairless size nines and, well, it made me crazy.

  I met Lou through his friend, Sal, who picked me up hitchhiking 
  on Highway 1. I'd come all the way to Monterey from Galveston, 
  more than a thousand miles on the road without anything bad 
  happening. Oh, maybe a few passes here and there, but that was 
  it. Still, Sal's acting like he's afraid for my life, and starts 
  lecturing me on the dangers of standing half naked on a highway 
  with my thumb in the air. Half naked? Man, that really puts me 
  on edge. It's a hot day and I'm in my cut-offs and, believe me, 
  there's no more than three inches of tummy showing through my 
  tank top. Yeah, I'm pretty -- big deal, so are a lot of girls -- 
  and I dig working out, so my bod's in great shape. But I don't 
  go around naked in public!

  Anyhow, it's pretty obvious Sal's got the hots. He asks me where 
  I'm headed and I say wherever I end up, which is true. Though I 
  told my ex-beau, Cal, who's living in L.A. (don't you just love 
  that word, "beau?") that I'd hang with him for the summer, I 
  don't really care whether I get down there or not. That's what's 
  so cool about being out of high school and having just one 
  parent who's usually too wasted to notice what you're up to. You 
  can go where you want and do what you want. Freedom, man. It's 
  the greatest high there is.

  Well, Sal knows he's got one tired, overheated road rat on his 
  hands and he figures I need _help_ (which I don't). In fact, the 
  dude apologizes for not taking me home, if you can believe that! 
  He just got married, he says. (Why do guys always assume you 
  can't wait to hand over Ms. Moist just 'cause they're horny?)

  Anyway, he tells me about his friend, Lou, who's got a cottage 
  on the beach in Seaside just below Monterey. He wants to call 
  Lou and see if it's okay to bring me over. Beach house? I'm 
  thinking. Oh, yes, nothing wrong with a short layover in a beach 
  house!

  "Save the dime and just drop me off," I tell him. "Guaranteed 
  he's not gonna turn me away."

  Suddenly, Sal gets this sorry look on his face and I just know 
  he's feeling guilty 'cause he's wishing his new wife was dead 
  and someone was dropping me off at his house. Later on, I meet 
  her, Katy, and we get real close right off the bat. It's a big 
  sister-little sister sort of thing -- seeing as she was 
  twenty-eight, but still young-looking and pretty and sexy, too 
  pretty and sexy for Sal to be wishing her dead in front of a 
  stranger. What is wrong with men?

  So Sal drives me to Lou's and leaves, but fast, and Lou shows me 
  around his house. Shall we talk cozy? It's all wood, with two 
  bedrooms and an L-shaped living room with a fireplace and a 
  kitchenette behind an oak bar down at one end plus a wall of 
  glass looking out at the ocean and a redwood deck around the 
  whole place. I also notice lots of trophies on the shelves and I 
  find out that Lou used to race off-road bikes -- the kind 
  without motors. He still rides ten, fifteen miles every day and 
  is a definite fanatic about it. But that's why he's in such good 
  shape, right?

  Believe me, if Lou didn't do it for me in a major way, I would 
  have been out of there before the sun went down. But since he 
  did, I started thinking, hmmm, this could be a very cool place 
  to park for the summer.

  Lou's such a gentleman, though, it almost didn't happen. I mean, 
  he makes lunch and we go for a swim, then lay around on the deck 
  on these big lounge chairs taking in the rays and making small 
  talk. I tell him about never knowing who my father was and how 
  my mother back in Galveston's an alky who's been in and out of 
  rehab and loony bins ever since I can remember. And he tells me 
  about his business -- he's a manager for some bike company that 
  used to sponsor his races -- and about how much he misses his 
  kids who he doesn't see much because his ex moved up to Marin 
  just to spite him. He even gets kind of teary when he talks 
  about that part. I feel bad for him and I rub his neck, and he 
  puts his hand over mine and smiles at me, and next thing you 
  know we're cuddling up together in his chair, which makes me 
  think, yes, it's happening for him, too. So you can imagine how 
  surprised I am when, like an hour later, he says, "Jane, is 
  there some place you want me to drop you off?"

  Drop me off? Whoa, that hurts! Really hurts. I don't like being 
  rejected any more than the next person. God knows I've had more 
  than my share of that.

  "What's wrong?" Lou says, noticing how suddenly I'm avoiding his 
  eyes and not talking anymore. I'm thinking fast about how to 
  handle this situation. Is it my turn to cry? I sure feel like 
  it. What to do? Get all brave and huffy and say, "Oh, nothing's 
  wrong, Lou, just drop me wherever"? Or is he one of those dudes 
  -- I've met plenty -- who get off being put down. That would 
  call for a burning look and something like, "It's you, Lou. 
  You're all wrong for me. See ya." And I make my dramatic exit, 
  slamming the door behind me -- hoping, of course, that he comes 
  running. That might work. Remember, at this point we've only 
  been a couple for three hours, so I don't know that much about 
  him. No question he's the emotional type, though, and I decide 
  to go teary, which isn't that hard since, like I said, that's 
  how I'm feeling. Besides, honesty is the best policy.

  "Nothing's wrong, Lou," I say, tears rolling. "Just drop me 
  wherever."

  Next thing you know, Lou's got his arms around me and is 
  pressing my head against his shoulder and we're rocking back and 
  forth not sure who's comforting who. I guess the rocking went on 
  a little too long (thank God), 'cause I feel his one-eyed 
  dolphin swelling up against my Lady Bird like it's going to 
  explode if it doesn't find a home real soon. And, to be 
  perfectly frank, I myself am getting awfully tingly upstairs and 
  down.

  When it comes to having real sex, nothing beats real feeling and 
  that night, our first night together, we had real feeling in 
  every room in the house, plus in the shower, on the rugs and on 
  the deck, even on the kitchen counter and, just before dawn, in 
  Lou's aforementioned favorite, a bathtub full of Mr. Bubble.

  The surprise isn't that I move in -- that is, I drop two pair of 
  jeans, extra cut-offs, a couple of t-shirts and tank tops and my 
  Army-Navy store ankle-boots into the guest room closet. The 
  surprise is that I end up staying for almost a year.

  The more I get to know Lou, the more I dig him. He's got a heart 
  of gold and he's great in bed. What more could a girl ask for?

  Well, I get lots more. He buys me my very own off-road bike and 
  on the weekends we pedal over to Santa Cruz, Carmel Valley, Big 
  Sur, places like that. Every month or so, we take long, long 
  rides up into the Santa Cruz mountains and camp out among these 
  humongous sequoia trees. Sometimes Sal and Katy come with us and 
  sometimes we go alone. In the beginning, I like it better when 
  it's just me and Lou. But after a while, I'm just as pleased to 
  have Katy along since I do love doing girl stuff with her -- 
  giggling and gossiping and everything -- which I certainly can't 
  do with Lou.

  I hang with all Lou's friends, mostly outdoorsy types who're 
  always in flannel, spandex or rubber, depending on which 
  outdoorsy thing they're doing -- hiking, biking, scuba diving, 
  mountain climbing, stuff like that. I fit in nicely, too. I've 
  always been a real good athlete, tall and gangly with fast hands 
  and fast feet. For three years I played on our girls' volleyball 
  team and ran the mile at Galveston High 'til... Oh, let's just 
  say she provoked me something awful, otherwise I never would 
  have hauled off and floored her. I mean, punching a coach is a 
  pretty serious offense. Fortunately, there were witnesses who 
  saw her slap me first. Otherwise they never would have let me 
  finish my senior year and graduate. I suspect one day I'm going 
  to go to college, so not finishing high school would have been a 
  major blow to my future plans.

  We eat out a lot, mostly in Carmel and usually at health food 
  restaurants, 'cause Lou's a nut when it comes to eating right. I 
  dig Carmel, even though it's a totally touristy burg, so neat 
  and clean it looks like what I guess a movie set looks like. I 
  say "guess" 'cause I've never actually seen one. I do recall 
  reading that Clint Eastwood was mayor there when I was little, 
  so it could be he got some of his Hollywood friends to spruce 
  the place up.

  I'm not a person who can sit around all day doing nothing 'cept 
  wait for her man to come home from work. My mother never did. 
  (That's a joke.) I had to have a job. I was always good at 
  drawing and making things with my hands. It's a talent I have. 
  Lucky for me, Lou's friend, Lloyd, owns a jewelry shop in Carmel 
  and takes me on part-time. I work afternoons, waiting on 
  customers (I enjoy interacting with people) and keeping the 
  glass cases free of fingerprints. When he has time, Lloyd starts 
  teaching me how to make rings and pendants and bracelets. It's 
  the coolest job ever. Fun, and short hours.

  Once in a while Lou goes to Mill Valley and comes back with his 
  girls, Beth and Meg, four and six, two of the cutest little 
  darlings I've ever seen in my life. Every time he brings them 
  down, which isn't often enough for him or me, I spend a long 
  weekend playing mama and I just love it. Someday, when I have my 
  own kids, I'm going to give them the childhood I always wanted 
  but never had.

  It does bother me, though, that Lou tells them this ridiculous 
  story about how I'm a friend of his sister's who staying at his 
  house while she's visiting California. I know he's not ashamed 
  of me or anything, so what's he hiding me for? He and Annie have 
  long been divorced and she's already got custody of the kids. 
  What more can she do to him? I don't like seeing a man afraid of 
  a woman.


  What really gets me, though, is this stupid saying he tacks up 
  on the bulletin board in the kitchenette one morning after we'd 
  been smoking a lot of dope the night before: "The Inevitable 
  Remains True Even When Ignored."

  "Who the fuck wrote that?" I ask over coffee and a bagel.

  "I did," he says.

  "You make it up?"

  "Well, yeah, I did. It's an epigram I flashed on last night."

  "Is that a fact? An epigram, huh? Well, quit smoking so much 
  dope. What's it supposed to mean anyhow?" Sure. Like I don't 
  already know.

  "It means that we can't last forever, even if we don't think 
  about it right now."

  "Says who?" I ask, putting on a fierce scowl.

  "It's just the way it is."

  "Uh huh. Right from God's lips."

  "Jane, you're only eighteen."

  "Eighteen and seven months." Since Lou's counting, I figure he 
  should get it right.

  "Whatever. The point is, do you honestly think you're going to 
  settle down with a thirty-eight year old man for the rest of 
  your life?"

  "How should I know? We've been together nine months and so far 
  it's been great... Or am I wrong?"

  "You're not wrong."

  "Then why the hell're you putting stuff like that on the wall? 
  It sure doesn't help anything."

  "It -- it's just a reminder." He can't even look me in the eye.

  Now I'm having a flash. "You getting ready to dump me?"

  "Jesus, no!" he says. "That's... not how it's going to happen." 
  I know he means it because his face sort of collapses and he's 
  looking so sad I'm not sure whether to get up and hug him or 
  fill the bathtub.

  "So you already know how it's going to happen?"

  "I just don't see us together twenty years down the line."

  "Who thinks that far ahead?"

  "At your age, no one. At my age, everyone."

  "Well, here's another saying you can put up on the bulletin 
  board: `Lou's afraid to love Jane.' Period!"

  "That's not true and you know it," he says. "But sooner or later 
  you're going to walk out of my life. I'm just... I dunno... an 
  experience you're having on the way to growing up."

  Whoa, am I getting pissed! Now I'm thinking I'll _drown_ him in 
  the bathtub.

  "Oh, man, that's complete bullshit!" I'm up and shouting. Then I 
  pitch half a bagel in his face. It's only lightly toasted so I 
  know it can't do much damage. "You're just scared shitless and 
  you're laying it on me! I may be only eighteen, buster, but I've 
  probably seen more life than you have in your thirty-eight!"

  "I don't doubt it," he says, wiping a perfect circle of cream 
  cheese off his forehead. (I do have a great arm.)

  Then he wanders over to the window and stares out at the ocean, 
  real dramatic. He reminds me of that picture of George 
  Washington crossing the Delaware that's hanging in the 
  principal's office -- a room I came to know well.

  "There's this platitude about how older guys exploit young 
  girls," he says, looking kind of wistful. "You think that's 
  true?"

  "Well, you don't. Not with me, anyhow. I never met anybody, man 
  or woman, who pays more attention to what I think than you do."

  "That's because I love who you are. You're a fuckin' delight, 
  Jane." We both crack up at that because we're hip to its double 
  meaning. "Really," he says. "I've never known anyone like you. 
  And I'm not holding anything back. I couldn't if I wanted to. 
  But most people looking at us from the outside would probably 
  say here's one of those guys who's trying to hang on to his 
  youth by living with a girl half his age, a guy who's afraid to 
  engage a mature woman."

  "Well, I'm not in this from the outside," I tell him. "So I 
  wouldn't know how to look at it from there." There are times 
  when my mind gets real logical. "As for you being afraid of 
  older women, well, you put in seven years with Annie. Sure you 
  got those two little honeys out of it. But, them aside, look at 
  all the heavy duty grief she's laying on your head. Looks to me, 
  mister, that right about now I'm exactly what you need. Right?"

  "Right," Lou says, and it's like the gravity that's tugging at 
  his face suddenly lets go, and he breaks into this sunburst grin 
  and snatches his stoned "epigram" off the bulletin board, which 
  is a good sign -- but not a great sign, 'cause he doesn't throw 
  it away, he puts it in a drawer. That's like saying, "I'm not 
  going to flaunt the inevitable, I'm just going to keep it out of 
  sight." Still, there's nothing better than bringing your man out 
  of the dumps and into bed for the rest of the day.



  There's no denying I have quite a temper, and with Lou it 
  sometimes did get out of hand. When I look back on it now, it's 
  clear, embarrassingly clear, that I wasn't nearly as grown up as 
  I thought. I was doing a lot of what George calls "adolescent 
  acting out." George is the dude I'm with now, a therapist here 
  in L.A. It's his idea that I start writing all this stuff down. 
  He says it'll help me figure out who I am. He just won't believe 
  I already know. I'm doing it, though, since writing's fun. I'll 
  straighten George out later on.



  Anyhow, back to the temper thing. I don't know why, but it 
  starts getting worse after my bagel outburst. All kinds of 
  things begin annoying me. Lou being so tidy, for example. 
  Everything in its place, towels and sheets nicely folded, not a 
  speck of dust on any surface, books, CDs and canned food 
  arranged by category -- fiction, history, biography, pop, rock 
  and classical, soup, sauce and potatoes, all within easy reach. 
  The man even spin-dries his lettuce!

  Now, in truth, Lou never asks me to do anything beyond putting 
  my dirty dishes in the sink and he never gets on my case 
  regarding my sloppy habits. He just takes care of everything 
  himself -- makes the bed, does the cleaning, shopping and 
  laundry. Once or twice, seeing him drive the vacuum cleaner 
  around the living room, I feel a pang of guilt and help out a 
  bit. But it burns me up inside 'cause I don't see the sense of 
  doing house work when everything's going to get all messy again 
  in no time at all -- 'specially with me around.

  Look, I know it's not right to fault a man for his virtues, but 
  watching Lou on his knees sponging my spilled pesto sauce off a 
  hardwood floor is not a pretty sight. That's the sort of thing 
  can sure put a damper on a girl's respect.

  And it's not just the neatness thing that starts rubbing me the 
  wrong way. Now there's lots of stuff driving me up the walls. 
  Like, you ever go eight months without a cheeseburger and fries? 
  It does terrible things to your body, 'specially if you're a 
  Texas girl who's been raised on beef. If a person like me goes 
  too long without cattle products under her belt, she becomes 
  emotionally unbalanced. It got so crazy-making I had to stop at 
  Burger King on my way to work to fill up and try and put my 
  system back in order. But I was too far gone by then. It didn't 
  do jack shit for mind or body. I'm probably ruined for good 
  'cause of all those veggies and wheat germ and homeopathic drops 
  of who-knows-what that Lou kept putting in front of me morning, 
  noon and night.

  What edges me most of all, though, is how Lou never complains. 
  Every now and then, a little, "Clean it up, bitch, it's your 
  filth!" would certainly get my attention. Or, "We're doing 
  (whatever) my way 'cause that's how I want it!" Now that'd be 
  refreshing -- not that I'd stand there and take it. But, uh uh, 
  that's not Lou. So, more and more, it's me, the lazy good-for- 
  nothing, who's doing all the yelling and throwing things and 
  bursting into tears, while Lou, who's blameless as a lamb and 
  never -- never -- loses his temper, just smiles and tells me to 
  calm down, sweetheart, it's going to be all right. Which makes 
  everything even worse.

  It gets to the point where just seeing Lou's face puts me in a 
  lousy mood, and I'm certain that if I don't do something soon, 
  I'm going to find myself back on Highway 1 with my thumb in the 
  air, which I am in no way looking forward to. Underneath it all 
  I do love Lou... though in a somewhat different way.



  Trust me when I say that I deeply, sincerely and honestly regret 
  that I didn't find the "something" I was looking to do before 
  the "something" I wasn't looking to do happened.

  I did not -- I repeat, did not -- put any moves on Salvatore 
  Bonafacio! Sure, he was a good-looking hunk, and closer to my 
  own age. Sal wasn't even thirty yet. And he was a married man! A 
  newly married man! As to his current status... well, I can't 
  say, seeing as I haven't been in touch with Lou, Sal or Katy to 
  this very day. But I hope she's left the bastard.



  Not everyone who owns an antique store is gay. Sal's Antique 
  Mart is just around the corner from where I have my part-time 
  job, so it's natural that, after work, I hang with him and Katy 
  for a bit. I mean, they're my friends! In fact, when Sal's not 
  around I confide in Katy, tell her about the problems I'm having 
  with Lou. She's real sympathetic and understands how infuriating 
  it is to be with a man who absorbs everything you throw at him 
  with a smile.

  "A man should at least try to put a girl in her place once and 
  while, don't you think?" I say.

  "I'm not sure I'd describe it exactly that way," Katy says. "But 
  I know what you mean. You want Lou to give you his honest 
  feelings. And not just his good feelings. If he's angry or hurt 
  or depressed, you want to hear about it. Otherwise, it's like... 
  like he's in this relationship without you. It's got to make you 
  feel like you're not important to him, or at least not important 
  enough to share feelings with."

  "Exactly!" I say. I respect Katy. Sometimes she has an awesome 
  fix on what makes people tick.

  "Jane, I don't think Lou's aware of this. He's oblivious to how 
  he affects you. It's just who he is."

  "Maybe so. But it doesn't make it any easier."

  "Uh-huh. Well, hang in there. Lou's got a lot going for him, and 
  the two of you have a good thing together. If you believe it's 
  worth keeping, then get him to work on the bad stuff with you 
  until it's fixed," she says.

  I'm dying to ask about her and Sal, how it is between them, how 
  they work things out. But something stops me. Also, I notice 
  that, starting from the day Katy becomes my confidante, she 
  seems a tad uneasy around me. Sometimes I catch her glancing at 
  me -- and at Sal, too -- in a funny way.

  Still, everything's nice and I'm giving serious thought to 
  taking her advice about working on Lou when, all of a sudden, 
  she gets a call and has to go back to New Hampshire to see her 
  sick mother. (Oh, how I wish that woman never took ill.)

  A few days later, I'm telling myself there's no reason not to 
  drop by and say hello to Sal just 'cause Katy's out of town -- 
  though I'm wondering why I even have to say this to myself. So I 
  stop by the store to inquire after his lovely wife and her 
  ailing mother, and right away I see it. It's the same look Sal 
  had when he picked me up on the highway -- minus the sorry part! 
  All this time, he's been Sal, the perfect gentleman, Lou's 
  friend, Sal, the happily married man who, just once, about a 
  year ago, for ten short minutes, had a raging tiger in his trou 
  for a stranger on the road but, to his credit, kept it well 
  under control 'til he dropped her off at the home of his very 
  best friend. Well, that's not the Sal grinning at me now from 
  behind a counter full of Early American pewter saucers, one of 
  which he's slowly rubbing to death with a rouge cloth while 
  aiming to burn a hole in my face with his bloodshot eyes. 
  Nosiree. This is Sal the beast -- Neanderthal Sal, all set to 
  drag his prey into the back room and slam it home. If Sal hadn't 
  said exactly the right thing, I would have turned and walked 
  without a word...But he did.

  "It must be lonely," he says.

  "Beg pardon?" I say.

  "Hey. It's okay. Katy told me." So much for confiding in that 
  bitch.

  "Told you what?"

  "About the trouble you're having with Lou. I'm sorry to hear 
  it." Sure he's sorry. It's breaking his heart -- and adding a 
  yard onto Mighty Joe Young.

  "We'll manage," I say.

  "I hope so," he says, holding the newly shined saucer up to my 
  face. "But you don't look like you believe it."

  "Any reason you know of why I shouldn't?" I say.

  "It's... it's not my place to... to talk about that," he says, 
  pretending to stammer and turning away like I'm not supposed to 
  see how much pain the poor man's in. Oh, he is smooth.

  "Don't fuck with me, Sal," I say. "If there's something I should 
  know, I want to hear it."

  Just then a customer comes in. "Excuse me," he says, going over 
  to her. I know he's jerking me around, and I resent it. But, 
  shame on me, it's having an effect.

  "Let's hear it, Sal," I say after the customer leaves.

  "Honey, do you think you're going to have any more luck turning 
  Lou around than anyone else has?"

  "I'm not Annie," I say.

  "I'm not talking about Annie," he says. "Annie's ancient 
  history."

  "Then who are you talking about?"

  "You want a list of names?"

  "A list?" I say. No denying it. I'm shocked.

  "C'mon, Jane," he says, as in C'mon, Jane, don't be naive. 
  "You're not the first young girl in Lou's life."

  "So what? He never said I was." I can hear a little break in my 
  voice, not a good sign.

  "Okay. I didn't mean to bring it up."

  "Bullshit, you didn't!"

  "Hey! It's Lou's thing! All right?" It's an eruption, not an 
  angry eruption, just a passionate and caring explosion on behalf 
  of his best friend. "No blame. I love Lou. But Cindy, Melanie, 
  Margo -- all of them under twenty-one -- that's how the guy 
  keeps his demons at bay. Some men just can't deal with middle 
  age." He shrugs. "They bed down with young girls."

  Whoa. Haven't I heard this before? From Lou? Didn't he say 
  something about people seeing him as a man afraid to connect 
  with women his own age so he settles in with a young girl? 
  Indeed, I did, only he forgot to say how many young girls he'd 
  settled in with. Geez!

  "Uh... how many young girls, Sal?"

  "I've already said more than I meant to," he says, shaking his 
  head and staring at his sandals. (The man has ugly feet.)

  Once again, Jane is hurt... and angry. I feel like I've been 
  had. Sooner or later you're going to walk out of my life. Damned 
  right!

  For the next couple of weeks I take my revenge on Lou with Sal, 
  the worst lover I've ever known, a slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am ape. 
  After a while, it's feeling more like I'm taking revenge on 
  myself.

  It ends the day Katy gets back from her New Hampshire -- 
  although Sal finds it amusing to continue playing footsie under 
  the table whenever we have dinner with them. I really want to 
  kill the bastard.

  Far as I know, Lou never finds out about me and Sal, but our 
  thing goes straight into the toilet after that. Lou gets so 
  depressed, he hardly talks to me -- or anyone else. Try as I do, 
  I can't get anything out of him. Sure I feel guilty about 
  getting it on with Sal, but I feel worse seeing Lou suffer. The 
  guy is really hurting and he won't tell me what it's about. Our 
  cozy little cottage becomes the House of Gloom. I wonder if all 
  the girls who came before me went through this.

  After a month or so, I put his "epigram" back up on the bulletin 
  board: "The Inevitable Remains True Even When Ignored." Lou sees 
  it and smiles. It's a real bitter smile.

  "I guess you're right," he says.

  The next day, when Lou's at work, I throw my belongings in an 
  overnight bag, leave him a note telling him (truly) that I'll 
  love him forever, and I'm back on U.S. 1. heading south toward 
  L.A.



  Last night, George asks me if i wouldn't mind letting him read 
  the stuff I've been writing. I give it some thought, seeing as 
  I'm not certain why he's asking, but end up with a "Sure, why 
  not?" So he disappears into his study for about half an hour, 
  comes out and looks at me kind of strange-like.

  "Pack up," he says.

  "How come?" I ask, stunned, I mean, really stunned.

  "Just do it and get out of here," he says. "It's over."

  So just like that I'm out, back on the street.

  L.A.'s okay, but I hear Maui -- no, Kauai -- is really cool.


  Peter Meyerson (peteram@ix.netcom.com)
----------------------------------------
  Peter Meyerson spent several years in book and magazine 
  publishing in New York before moving to Los Angeles to write 
  films and TV shows, most notably Welcome Back Kotter, which he 
  created and produced for several seasons. "Not too long ago, 
  realizing I had squandered much of my working life on dreck," 
  says Peter, "I overcame my self-doubt and began writing 
  fiction."



  Amo, Mensa!   by Rupert Goodwins
==================================
....................................................................
  If inanimate objects could talk -- trust me, you don't want 
  to know.
....................................................................


  The pencil cried as it lay on the table. "Oh table!" it sobbed. 
  "Ah, table, table!"

  The table was made of harder wood, however, and was unmoved. 
  "Stop that sniveling," it commanded. "It does nothing for you, 
  tiresome implement."

  The pencil dried its point. "I'm a 2B, you know. I smudge 
  easily. I was made this way."

  The table said nothing, but concentrated on having four legs and 
  being square.

  "Table?" said the pencil.

  "What now?" sighed the table, exasperated.

  "Don't snap," said the pencil. "You know how that upsets me."

  "To be blunt," started the table, but that just started the 
  pencil off again.

  "How... how can you treat me this way?" the pencil cried out 
  between tears. "We're both wood. We've been brought together by 
  fate, the only two wooden things in the world. You used to 
  support me, and now...."

  The table was getting more than a little fed up by now. "I'm 
  still supporting you, aren't I?" it said. "You're still here, 
  aren't you? Why can't you just lie there and be the pencil you 
  always were? It's pathetic. _You're_ pathetic."

  Wailing from the pencil, a low keening as if its little lead 
  would break.

  "Oh, now, now," said the table, which had resigned itself to the 
  situation and was now thinking of ways to bring the episode to a 
  close so it could get on with being a table. "Let's just get 
  back to being an arrangement of objects, shall we? You're a 
  splendid pencil, there's no reason for you to be so unhappy."

  "We used to sketch so well..." sniffled the pencil.

  "Ah yeah," said the table. "Thought that was it. And what do you 
  want me to do about it?"

  "Now all I can feel," said the pencil, by now thoroughly off on 
  one, "are the layers of varnish and paint between us. I'm so 
  alooooooone!"

  Sweet Joseph the hairy-handed Carpenter and all his tools, 
  thought the table. "What exactly do you want, then?" it said.

  "To be together," said the pencil.

  "That's daft, as well you know. It's not on the agenda, pencil. 
  Me item of furniture, you writing device. It's good to have you 
  around, but only if you stop this nonsense. You don't even know 
  what you want."

  "Do too."

  "Well, what?"

  "I could make a wish," said the pencil, pointedly.

  "Oh, you're more boring than woodworm. Go on then." That'll sort 
  it out, the table thought.

  "Right. Computer!"

  "Yes, Pencil?" said the computer, which had been watching the 
  palaver with a degree of amusement. It had had a feeling that a 
  deus ex machina was going to be needed, and had got its programs 
  loaded just in case.

  "Grant me my wish? Make me and the table one? Forever?"

  "You down with that, table?" said the computer.

  "Whatever," sighed the table.

  "Of course," said the computer, and hummed to itself for a 
  second. "Bye, guys. Have fun." With a flicker of lights, it 
  tucked itself down the modem and vanished into cyberspace, 
  pulling its peripherals behind it. There was a quiet pop, and 
  all that was left was the telephone socket on the wall.

  "Computer?" said the pencil. "That's odd. Wonder why it did 
  that..."

  "I hope you're happy now," said the table, "scaring off our 
  friends with your self-obsessed ranting. Although I must admit 
  that's a weight off my mind. He could be a bit of a burden."

  The pencil said nothing. Truth to tell, it was starting to feel 
  a little foolish.

  From out of the socket a shower of sparks whooshed in a 
  parabola, like fireworks.

  "Goodness!" said the pencil.

  "I don't like the look of this..." said the table. "That could 
  be dangerous."

  The sparks started to land, first on the floor, but then hosing 
  out toward where the pencil sat. There was a smell of burning 
  carpet, soon overlaid with the dry perfume of hot sandalwood.

  "Argh!" cried the pencil. "That hurts!"

  "Look what you've done, you rubber-tipped fool! Computer! 
  Computer!" shouted the table.

  But it was no good. Within seconds, the pencil was a heap of ash 
  and the sparks started to play along the surface of the table.

  "I hope you're happy now..." crackled the table as the circle of 
  charred, popping wood grew. Soon, there was nothing there but a 
  pile of ashes marked out by four smouldering metal casters. In 
  the middle was a small, blackened metal band, of the sort that 
  would normally hold an eraser in place at the end of, say, a 
  pencil. The smoke cleared, and there was silence. Briefly. Then 
  the metal band cleared its throat, which was most of it.

  "Oh casters!" it sobbed. "Ah, casters, casters!" The casters 
  were made of harder metal, however, and were unmoved. We're not 
  going through that again, they thought, and so the silence fell 
  for good.


  Rupert Goodwins (RupertGo@aol.com)
------------------------------------
  Ex-chief planner of the Tongan manned mission to Mars, 
  international jewel thief and mild-mannered reporter, Rupert 
  Goodwins writes about computers by day and behaves oddly at 
  night. He lives in London, a large post-imperial city set in an 
  alluvial clay bowl, but doesn't worry about it.



  Grendel   by Russell Butek
============================
....................................................................
  The power of the storyteller is immeasurable. Especially when, 
  against all odds, the story is true.
....................................................................

  I sense that you crave forgiveness. But there is nothing to 
  forgive.

  It is human nature to fight: the wrestling of children, the 
  squabble of a loving couple, the knife in the back under cover 
  of darkness, the gleeful murders in full daylight under the 
  guise of noble war. Heroes and villains, glory and shame, have 
  passed in and out of our collective consciousness, and they have 
  held up a mirror. We've glanced in that mirror often, calmly, in 
  recognition, and calmly we've continued in our ways. Our violent 
  nature has not changed since before our species came down from 
  the trees. And yet we dare to call it evil. What nonsense! Is 
  the lion evil for bringing down the elk? Is the spider evil for 
  eating her mate? This is merely their nature. And so it is with 
  humankind.

  I was a warrior like you once. Under this doddering remnant of 
  human flesh lie many memories. Some of the clearest are of war. 
  I have never sought forgiveness for what I was. I am human and 
  in my youth I gloried in the murderous nature of humans. As I 
  aged I gloried in other natures: some love, some politics -- if 
  you ever wish to be amused, dabble in these two; they are our 
  most comic natures. I have been...

  You tire of an old man's ranting? Forgive me. Over you I do not 
  have the spell of the ancient mariner over the bridegroom -- but 
  please stay. An old mind is cluttered with many paths, and I 
  sometimes detour into overgrown, lost memories to see if 
  anything worthy can be found there, forgetting that I was with 
  company on another trail.

  I am old, and many of my memories are overgrown, never to be 
  found again; but within this skull lies one memory which I have 
  maintained with care, treading it often since my violent youth. 
  At times I have tried to forget this memory, straying through 
  other, far distant paths; but all my travels have led back to 
  it, so I have long since surrendered to its demands and 
  attentions. My life has been devoted to this memory, so with it 
  I begin my tale.



  A great battle was underway. It was fought within a distant star 
  system, but that tiny collection of worlds was not the reason 
  for the conflict, merely the battleground. The real reasons no 
  longer matter.

  I was in a fleet of reinforcements. When only an hour from the 
  battle, communications with our fighting armada ceased. The 
  beams went cold, inexplicably so. We had received no orders for 
  quiet running; we did not hear the feared death cries. There was 
  just sudden silence. It was a long hour we spent hovering over 
  our dead receivers, wondering. It is not the domain of warriors 
  to wonder. Such thoughts are the domain of leaders, not 
  fighters. We were uncomfortable.

  By the time we reached the system we were barely creeping along, 
  afraid of a rout, afraid of an ambush, afraid of just about 
  everything but what confronted us. There was no ambush, no 
  battle, no movement. The armada had been destroyed, but no enemy 
  was there gloating over their victory. The silent hulks of both 
  sides drifted about. Once-powerful giants were now shredded 
  carcasses, celestial flotsam in the inevitable grip of the local 
  sun.

  Tales of dread and terror told in the safety of the gravity 
  wells, told in all seriousness by the old and laughed at by the 
  young, came to all our minds amid the scattered bones of 
  once-great fleets. Ghost stories are told over a fire or a beer, 
  but they are remembered in graveyards. We, the young, stopped 
  laughing that day.

  The unknown is a terrible thing. It alone can unveil fear in the 
  fearless. Coasting through that graveyard, we instantly believed 
  the awful fables. This was not a comfortable graveyard we passed 
  through, not a cemetery of the battle-slain. No, a field of 
  death would have been comforting. As gruesome as death may be, 
  it is familiar. The scene before us was far from familiar.

  Even though we recognized some of the mangled forms as ships of 
  our comrades, among them there were no comrades, alive or dead: 
  no bloated, bloodied bodies floating amidst the wreckage; no 
  carcasses pierced and mutilated by the tortured remains of their 
  ships; no dismembered fragments drifting by with their comet 
  tails of crystalline blood. Throughout the mass of monstrous 
  metal corpses, not a single human one was to be found.

  In a short time we discovered that there were no organics 
  whatsoever remaining. The wreckage had been stripped of all 
  vegetation, plastics, water -- even the batteries and fuel cells 
  were gone. Nothing living or capable of harboring life remained. 
  The visions from the horrible tales reared up before us. Grendel 
  had come and feasted upon the combatants. Grendel, an unknown 
  terror, a name some forgotten mystic had pulled from an ancient 
  epic. The newest of those tales were hundreds of years old, the 
  oldest mere rumors from many millennia past. It was as if an 
  occasional plague were sent to slap humanity in the face, to 
  remind us of our distant fall from the Golden Age when humans 
  were gods and held power over suns. That reminder was vividly 
  before us again, shaming us from our lofty dreams of power.

  Each tale has its own story: The sad demise of some hero, the 
  final death of some terrible villain. But Grendel feeds on them 
  all. Always, two great fleets oppose each other in a great 
  battle -- it has to be a great battle, for two lone ships in a 
  skirmish did not make a legend -- and always, Grendel comes and 
  indiscriminately destroys them, leaving never a witness.

  The mystery and the legend had come alive before us, and we 
  would now write our own tales. We could add what had never been 
  told before. We now knew of the dreadful immediacy of Grendel. 
  The other stories talked of days or even years before the 
  battleground had been visited. In our chapter we would bring 
  that down to a single hour.

  When the somber shock in our minds quieted enough for us to 
  function, we mechanically went about collecting the few 
  remaining secrets our ships held, and searched for remnants of 
  the secrets of the enemy. But this was mere fill in our story. 
  We had one more chapter yet to write.

  Our sensors were running wide open, active as well as passive. 
  Hiding, we guessed, would be useless, so we scattered our pings 
  in all directions, not wanting to be surprised. We finished our 
  survey the next day and were about to go home when one of the 
  spotters caught a distant derelict changing course. Something 
  was still alive a million miles away. When we got there, we 
  found more than machinery, but less than a man. His mind was as 
  twisted and jagged as the wreckage we had left behind. He had 
  expended nearly the last of his breathable air to deflect his 
  drift in the hope that we would notice. It saved him, but by the 
  time we got there he was already suffering from anoxia. 
  Vacillating between light-headed fatigue and raving lunacy, he 
  was quite insane, but those of us who saw him knew that it 
  wasn't oxygen deprivation that had driven him mad.

  The official report pieced together from his fractured testimony 
  was quite bland, of course. He and his squadron had jettisoned 
  early to surprise the enemy. But the enemy had surprised them 
  instead with the same thought. They fought their little skirmish 
  and lost. He was alive with his little environment intact, but 
  all his systems were knocked out. The victors hurried off to 
  join their main force and left him to float with the remains of 
  his friends. All he could do then was watch and, with no 
  systems, all he had were his naked eyes.

  A million miles is a long way, but the combat was a fierce one, 
  the power of the battle fires toyed not only with the machines, 
  but with space, which glowed and wavered around the combatants. 
  As a light-bulb under water, he described it. But then it 
  flashed brilliantly and he was blinded for hours. When his sight 
  finally did return, it was the next day. From his distance he 
  couldn't see anything of the battleground. His signal was simply 
  the last act of desperation.

  That was his story on the official documents, but his pages on 
  the chapters of our legend were such to grease the fires of 
  morbid romance. No longer would the tales speak of sad heroes 
  and vanquished villains. The old tales all spoke of the horror 
  and the mystery, but those had always been subsumed by other 
  plots. This demented witness's testimony of horror brought the 
  mystery to the fore, and there it would stay. A ball of light 
  flashed brilliantly about the battle -- that much had made it 
  into the official report -- but he wasn't blinded by it. Not 
  really.

  Because of the light he could see nothing but Grendel, but what 
  else was there to see? From a million miles away, the greatest 
  ships of the fleet were mere specks, yet he could see Grendel 
  tearing away at those specks, unleashing the energies within, 
  cracking shells between its teeth to suck at the vital meat. 
  Yes, teeth. That is how he saw Grendel, a great face, vicious 
  and beastly. Through the massacre it was bowed down, 
  concentrating on its work. But when the fleets were consumed, it 
  turned and glared at him, a face of energies: red heat, white 
  heat, a tattered blue-green corona blowing as a mane in an 
  unseen wind, eyes burning with the power of suns, its snout 
  smeared with the lifeblood of its kill, bleeding planets 
  dripping from its ethereal fangs. When it saw him its 
  countenance brightened, grew less demonic, its eyes twinkled. It 
  winked at him once before returning to its lair beyond the 
  universe.



  Ah, you're listening to the old man's tale with interest now! 
  You hadn't heard these stories before? I had thought that 
  perhaps you had. So have I gained the power of the ancient 
  mariner over you after all. Isn't it a wonder that that yarn has 
  survived over untold centuries? Why would such a tale stay with 
  us when so much else is lost? It is the mystique, of course. The 
  mystery always attracts the human soul. It is because of 
  curiosity that we toil as we do, and curiosity is fed by 
  mystery. The works of our ancestors which betake of this mood 
  appeal to all ages while the fare of lighter moods vanishes in a 
  few years. Beowulf. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The Jovian 
  Dirge. The wordsmiths and the memories of them have long since 
  drifted into oblivion while their moody tales have survived to 
  taunt us, becoming mysteries themselves.

  I am wandering again. Forgive an old man his senility.



  I was haunted by what I had seen. For a time I tried to forget 
  the wrath of Grendel. But who could forget such a manifestation? 
  And who would let me? We who had seen the bones of Grendel's 
  feast were the center of attention at every landfall. So I took 
  the memory and fed upon it. It became a dream of mine to see 
  Grendel for myself, to tell of the real Grendel, not the 
  inarticulate visions of a raving lunatic. Grendel fed on war. 
  Very well. I would remain a cog of war.

  I served my masters well, but their thanks was a forced 
  retirement. It seems they found no more use for a feeble old 
  man. Feeble! That was half a century ago and I still live! We 
  all heard, later, that on the night of my retirement ball, 
  Grendel had struck again. And the ships that had been under my 
  command were there! It mattered little to me that my ships were 
  torn to shreds. They saw Grendel before they died! That was all 
  that I had asked and my masters had taken it from me.

  But they were my masters no longer, and there was still hope. 
  This latest visitation, terrible as it was, was nothing more 
  than the retelling of the older tales. No new chapters could be 
  written from it. The battle ground was not trod upon until days 
  afterward; there were no surviving witnesses. The desolation was 
  familiar -- yet no matter how familiar, it was still terrible, 
  and many were very afraid. Grendel had never attacked in such 
  quick succession before. It was a sign, they pleaded. Stop this 
  useless waste of men and machines or Grendel will feed on us 
  all.

  Ha! It was a sign, all right, but it didn't portend any of their 
  superstitious nonsense. I had some suspicions of the nature of 
  Grendel that this latest attack appeared to confirm. Only the 
  most exceptional show of power attracted it, and I knew our war 
  machines were far from exhausted. We and our enemies were still 
  human, still full of our nature, and we both had much more 
  wealth yet to squander. Another great battle was sure to occur 
  again soon. So I waited. Yet waiting was not enough. I had to 
  live to see that battle. I became an expert of human nature and, 
  in my own small way, I assisted our civilizations in achieving 
  the summit of that nature. There would be another great battle 
  and I would be there, waiting.

  I wanted to see Grendel with my own eyes. This desire superseded 
  all other passions, or brought those passions to bear for it. I 
  expected my doom when I encountered Grendel, and I would be 
  satisfied at that if I could just view the vessel of my 
  destruction. But I could still hope to survive the encounter, 
  could still hope to add my own chapter. So when I wasn't 
  studying human nature, I was studying the sciences to bring 
  about that survival. I had amassed enough wealth to buy or take 
  most anything I needed. The only fear I entertained was that I 
  would face death before I faced Grendel. But you see that I have 
  survived.

  At last the greed of the empires built beyond endurance and they 
  once again went to war. Exploratory skirmishes at first, but 
  soon all of their greatest engines were brought into service 
  and, in the usual irony of war, the two sides could still find 
  one thing upon which they could agree: a meeting place and time 
  for the mutual slaughter.

  I was there before the combatants, waiting. For those enamored 
  of battle machines it was a magnificent sight. Even from my 
  hidden distance, burrowed into a dead rock loosely orbiting the 
  dead sun that marked their rendezvous point, the arrayed forces 
  opposing each other were beautiful. Manufactured black shapes 
  set against the natural blackness of space. One ship is almost 
  invisible, but bring hundreds into view in an orderly pattern 
  and space becomes an embossed sheet of velvet, figures rippling 
  through the fabric as squadrons maneuvered.

  For a moment they stood, quivering but quiet, like cobras 
  preparing to strike. Then they opened their energy piles against 
  each other, each of them the power of a small sun, combined, a 
  hundred suns, and soon a thousand, blazing in fury amidst ships 
  who expended as much energy in avoidance and absorption as in 
  offense. The dead system was ablaze. I thought my distance would 
  be sufficient to keep me out of the force. I was wrong. The rock 
  around me boiled away to nothing; my shields alone kept me 
  alive.

  The expanse around me blazed and soon began to shimmer as if 
  through the heat rising from a fire, though, of course, there 
  was no air from which such a fire could breathe. But it wasn't 
  an air-breathing dragon that had been awakened. This dragon 
  breathed space. The glow was fierce. My displays dampened until 
  almost opaque and I was still nearly blinded. My ship itself 
  seemed to glow. The shimmer increased; the stuff of space began 
  to fold into itself and, as if it couldn't bear the stress, I 
  saw what I can only describe as cracks and gashes. Most of them, 
  the largest, were far from me, but a few were much too close. 
  The forces tearing away space outside my ship began to slip 
  their talons within, scratching at me. Scratching was all they 
  could do to me -- I was still protected -- but it was terrible. 
  Before I blacked out, the sinews behind those talons reached out 
  for the battle. Grendel tore through the cracks of space, 
  firing.

  When I awoke, the air inside the ship tingled. Space was still 
  creased and torn. And Grendel was still out there, scavenging 
  for the scraps left over from the melee. It wasn't the vision of 
  the demented lunatic that faced me, though I found myself 
  mapping what I saw to the stories he told. The energies 
  engulfing the scene, both visible and invisible, were intense. 
  My screens were still at their dimmest setting. I was just 
  outside their sphere of influence, much closer than I had 
  planned, but still far enough away that I hadn't been torn to 
  shreds. Dark but sparkling shapes were moving about within. They 
  were huge, the size of planets, and they moved in perfect 
  precision. At the center of the sphere of energies was a region 
  darker than space should be. Space was still rent and cracked 
  all around me. Most of the tears were tiny, barely visible, but 
  planets could be swallowed by that huge gaping hole. With a 
  little imagination, I formed of the ships a dotted outline of a 
  face and of the gaping maw of non-space its grinning leer. The 
  madman had, indeed, seen Grendel. As I watched, the beast which 
  had consumed all around it began to consume itself. The sphere 
  was shrinking and the jagged smirking visage was swallowing its 
  own dotted outline, swallowing the planet ships.

  Legends spoke of great battles fought by the nobility of the 
  ancients, fought over galaxies. Much too grand to be believable, 
  they could still be told as legends. But all legends have some 
  truth to them, and I had a theory. In those greater times of the 
  supreme glory of humankind, we fell from grace, and have been 
  falling ever since. In the first battles, their strength had to 
  be great indeed. Our mightiest conflicts would be mere 
  skirmishes to them. In their ultimate encounter, they not only 
  tore into each other, but they tore into the fabric of the 
  universe, and fell through. They were swallowed by their own 
  passions and trapped beyond space. Now, in our meager shows of 
  vice, we but barely poke holes through the universe. But beyond 
  those holes lies the power of the ancients ready to annihilate 
  us before falling back to their lair as the holes heal.

  My theory seems to have been correct. I have seen the glory of 
  the ancients. You heard me rave about the beauty of our fleets, 
  but I can rave about such things no more. Not only beautiful 
  were the ancient ships, but sublime in their casual display of 
  raw power. Not the pageant of our crude metals. Their parade was 
  a crystalline spectacle; not even as substantial as crystal, 
  those ships were pure energies made solid for the warriors' 
  benefit. Every part of each ship could be converted to war.

  But my thoughts again drift. You know these things. Please 
  forgive an old man. I am still in wonder.

  Now when I recovered from this glorious vision, the talents of 
  my ship, unique in all the galaxy, were put into place. I know 
  little of the science of space travel, but no matter. What needs 
  a caveman the knowledge of chemistry to cook over a fire? 
  Gravity wells play havoc with jump ships, this much I do know. 
  They cannot jump from or return to normal space closer than a 
  few million miles from anything larger than a moon without 
  losing precision. And the closer to such a body, the more 
  precision is wanted. But some unnamed genius had discovered a 
  formula for the deviations, and my ship was built to prove it.

  So now I set the ship to jump. And waited. The last of the dark 
  crystal planets was leaving the universe; space began to unfold, 
  spreading the cloth of itself smooth again. I guessed that I 
  must now take the chance, and hoped the folds wouldn't upset the 
  equation - I did have a direct line of sight to my target. I 
  pushed the button. It amazes me that after thousands of years of 
  technology, we still use such archaic tools, but how does one 
  improve on a button? I pushed it and found the equation proven 
  when I appeared next within the landing bay doors of the last 
  ship in the Fleet of Grendel.

  You had little chance, then, to decide what to do with me before 
  the holes in the universe swallowed you back up, so now you are 
  stuck with me and my ship. I care not your verdict or your 
  mercy. I have lived to see Grendel. I have nothing more for 
  which to live. To die, fight, or peacefully spend my remaining 
  days is of little import now. The thought of writing my chapter 
  is no longer appealing, even if it could be read. There would be 
  no mystery in that chapter. Amazement, yes, but no mystery. Why 
  should I take that from the human race? It will die when it 
  discovers everything there is to be known. You, Lords of 
  Grendel, are necessary for its survival.



  You make us sound so noble, old man, but all we do is kill. You 
  speak of millennia. We know only months. Even now we are again 
  in battle. Feel the tremors? How much time has elapsed in your 
  universe since you arrived? Ten years? A thousand? It does not 
  matter in here. We cannot escape. We do not know how. We are 
  only warriors, all we know is how to survive.

  But you still haven't answered our question. The technology 
  within your ship is new to us. Nothing less than a great state 
  could develop such a craft. How did you come to be its pilot?



  I have found that obsession can master the impossible, 
  particularly when one has been an emperor.


  Russell Butek (butek@rconnect.com)
------------------------------------
  Russell Butek is a nomadic software type who can't decide where 
  he really wants to live. He grew up in the Cold White North of 
  Wisconsin and got his education there, and has lived on the east 
  coast, west coast, and places in between, along with a brief 
  stint in Germany. Hešs currently checking out Texas.



  Heading Out   by Adam Harrington
==================================
....................................................................
  This is the story of a journey from childhood to adulthood. And 
  we're not being metaphorical.
....................................................................

  1.
----
  
  The twenty-ninth of December 1940 was not a good day in 
  Lewisham. To most Londoners, this was merely the worst night of 
  the Blitz. To my paternal grandparents and me it was historic 
  because that night my dad was born.

  My grandmother lay in the cellar of Lewisham General Hospital 
  amongst candles as, above, the Luftwaffe took London apart block 
  by block. The bare electric bulbs flickered every now and again 
  as the building shook to the reverberations from falling bombs, 
  and there was the occasional crash of a window being blown out 
  in the empty hospital above. Through tears in the 
  blackoutblankets, the sky flickered red under the drone of 
  German bombers, the badoom-badoom of anti-aircraft cannons and 
  ashes blew in through shattered windows and swirled around empty 
  wards and naked iron-frame beds.

  As patriotic as my grandmother was, she frankly didn't care that 
  the country was being softened up for invasion in the same way a 
  chef's mallet tenderizes a steak. She was grunting and straining 
  under the coaxing of nurses who must have been cursing this, 
  quite possibly the worst night shift of the century.

  My dad slithered out at five past one in the morning of the 
  thirtieth of December and within a few shocked seconds told the 
  world exactly what he thought of it.

  My grandparents lived in a two-story brick terrace house and 
  pursued a life of aspirant working-class Protestant probity, 
  going to the Victorian gothic church twice on Sundays and 
  keeping their front rooms spotless and the piano consistently 
  badly tuned. My dad went to the Church of England primary 
  school, failed the 11-plus and was dumped in the local secondary 
  modern. When he was 15 he swiped Mrs. Frobisher, a war widow, 
  rather inexpertly across the shoulders with a plank of wood and 
  ran off with her blue fake leather handbag, which, he soon 
  discovered, contained five shillings and sixpence, a packet of 
  mints and a handkerchief.

  Even if you ignore the social and humanitarian implications of 
  such an act, this was a silly thing to do. In Lewisham in 1955 
  most people knew everybody else and my dad had developed a bit 
  of a reputation as a tearaway. At least a score of people had 
  seen him, so the police paid a visit to my grandmother, who sat 
  ashen-faced in the kitchen with her hands on her floral apron 
  wondering where she had gone wrong. Grandfather drank a bit too 
  much, but he worked hard on the railways and went to church. She 
  made good meals every evening and cleaned the house. What more?

  When I asked my dad, now enjoying a content middle age, why on 
  earth he did such a terrible thing, he sighed. Life was very 
  boring in 1955, he said. Really very boring, and I was very 
  young.

  My dad lurked around Lewisham for a few hours and then sauntered 
  home, whereupon two policemen launched themselves at him from 
  various crannies of the sitting room and he was carried, kicking 
  and yelling, away from his grief-stricken mother and deposited 
  in the local nick. After a very brief court appearance he was 
  sent to a borstal near Rochester. Mrs. Frobisher, I am glad to 
  say, made a full physical recovery, although she was jittery 
  near the market ever after.

  Did, er, 'things' happen in borstals in those days? I asked my 
  dad once.

  Yes, he said, 'things' happened quite a lot. I was so stupid I 
  thought the boys were having a fight in the showers. They were 
  making all the same noises. My dad paused. I awaited a family 
  revelation. There was this group of boys who took a fancy to 
  me.... My dad trailed off and took solace in a hefty swig of a 
  rather horrible vin de pays he had bought the previous summer 
  from a farm near Montpelier.

  Borstals were a bit more relaxed in 1956 than in Brendan Behan's 
  day, and inmates "of good character" were occasionally allowed 
  out to work in the town as a form of rehabilitation. My dad, 
  being a quiet, industrious and charming person when he wanted to 
  be and, more importantly, of a practicing Church of England 
  family,was considered of good character and was farmed out to a 
  metalworking shop in the Chatham dockyards. He worked so well 
  that during a sudden rush his employers asked the prison 
  authorities if he could stay after hours to help with the 
  backlog. The borstal agreed, and Dad did a bunk.

  So, one warm May night when he should have been going back to 
  the institution, my dad trotted through the streets of Chatham 
  in his borstal issue shirt and slacks, climbed up a railway 
  embankment and, amazingly, managed to climb aboard a train to 
  London as it waited for the lights to change.

  If anybody noticed this, they were terribly English about it and 
  pretended that nothing had happened. My dad curled up in a ball 
  on one of the seats and fell asleep until the train reached 
  Victoria station. Not knowing what to do now that he was in 
  London, and too frightened about the police to find his mother, 
  he walked to Paddington station with the intention of getting on 
  another train, but found that not a lot was happening at that 
  time of night. So instead he nicked a loaf of bread from 
  somewhere -- my dad did not elaborate -- climbed into a wooden 
  freight wagon, ate the entire loaf and fell asleep.

  The wagon was shunted the next morning. My dad was knocked awake 
  and spent a few panicked seconds wondering who and where he was. 
  The wagon was knocked about for half an hour, and as soon as my 
  dad's heart had stopped tripping over itself, he pulled the 
  wagon door open and looked out on some bleak and dreary sidings 
  near Willesden Junction in north west London. He let himself 
  down from the wagon and made his way to a brick wall some fifty 
  yards off. A few steps over the tracks and he was spotted.

  "Oi! You! Wotcha dooin?"

  My dad jumped five feet into the air and couldn't be seen for 
  dust as he sprinted across the tracks and vaulted the brick 
  wall. All a bit of overkill, really, as the railway workmen (fat 
  lumps all of them) could barely roll faster than the beer 
  barrels they resembled.

  Dad then walked vaguely northwest along the Harrow Road through 
  Wembley (where he stole a couple of apples), Harrow-on-the-Hill 
  (where he stole another apple, some cheese, a rather sawdusty 
  cake thing, some bread rolls and ate them all), Pinner (where he 
  stole absolutely nothing), Rickmansworth (where he stole a huge 
  shopping bag full of groceries, but had to drop it outside 
  Woolworth's to escape a posse of enraged shoppers) and 
  Chorleywood, where it started to rain.

  My dad fought with second thoughts as his grand adventure took a 
  suddenly wet and dismal turn. He started running to keep warm, 
  and jogged a few miles through wet dog's mercury and beech woods 
  near Amersham and Chesham and then, for who knows what reason, 
  took a minor road which ran north west towards Aylesbury over 
  the green and white Chiltern Hills. This area of the Chilterns 
  is now packed with joggers. On Sundays you can barely turn a 
  country road without slamming on the brakes in an effort to 
  avoid another blank-eyed and sweaty fitness fanatic plodding 
  past heady bramble and elder hedges. I claim my dad started it 
  all. People generally didn't run anywhere in 1956 unless they 
  had killed someone or were Roger Bannister.

  Just as it began to get dark my dad found a brick shed, crawled 
  among the rakes and hoes and fell asleep.

  The house to which the shed belonged lay less than twenty feet 
  away on the other side of an elm hedge, and about an hour after 
  my dad had curled up around garden implements, the owner of the 
  house decided to return her secateurs to the shed after pruning 
  the vine in her conservatory. May is not generally a good month 
  to do this, but Elisabeth lacked finesse in the gardening 
  department.

  Elisabeth wasn't her real name; Dad never told anyone what her 
  real name was. In fact Dad never talked about this episode at 
  all out of choice, except to my mum just before he married her, 
  who then told me some twenty-five years later over washing the 
  Sunday dishes when I pursued this story. And when I told Dad 
  that mum had already told _me_, he wanted to know exactly what 
  mum had said, of course, and I managed to blackmail him into 
  revealing the whole story. He recounted the story in an odd 
  stop-and-start fashion, reflecting his internal pendulum of 
  embarrassment and sentimentality.

  Your dad, said my mum, was quite a looker when he was younger.

  My dad at this stage was asleep with his head hanging over the 
  back of the sofa, snoring gently. Mum removed the gradually 
  tipping wine glass from his hand and he snorted in some 
  subconscious annoyance. Difficult to see my dad as a bit of a 
  looker. He always looked, well, like a dad.

  Elisabeth saw my dad as soon as she opened the shed door. My dad 
  took several seconds to realize he was being looked at, sprang 
  to his feet ready to run, but tripped on a garden fork and 
  pitched forward with a squeak. Elisabeth stepped out of the way 
  to allow my dad to crumple without hindrance on the damp grass.

  "Are you all right?" she asked, bending over my dad.

  My dad rolled on his back. His stomach, then flat, now anything 
  but, grumbled loudly. He grinned in embarrassment.

  "Are you hungry?" said Elisabeth.

  "Yes," said Dad. My dad was 16 and just out of borstal. Not a 
  conjunction designed for charmingly seductive repartee. A 
  situation since rectified, sighed my mum, and always directed 
  inappropriately.

  "Well, if you have nothing to do right away, would you care for 
  a spot of something to eat?" said Elisabeth.

  Dad said that he had never met anyone who talked like that 
  before. He was used to that peculiar form of southeast English 
  referred to as _sahf-luhndun_. Only his mum, my grandmother, had 
  ever tried to talk "proper," but even then nothing so upper 
  class as this. It was like being with royalty. And with royalty, 
  you do as you are told.

  Dad nodded to the food question. He was suffering the ravenous 
  appetite of the hyperactive young, after all. Elisabeth tried to 
  wave my dad in front of her, but he didn't quite catch on and 
  Elisabeth, being polite, took the lead and my dad plodded after 
  her.

  I couldn't believe the house, my dad said to me. It was like 
  those silly Famous Five books, all brick and timber and 
  fireplaces and tiled floors and oak tables. I can't imagine what 
  she made of me. Damp and dirty, a now heavily soiled thick 
  cotton shirt hanging at an angle over my chest, buttons missing 
  and untucked into my trousers, my bad borstal haircut stuck up 
  all angles and full of dried grass. She looked at me in the 
  light of the room and I could see a laugh creeping across her 
  face. I couldn't see why then, but I can now. She asked me to 
  sit at the blackened oak table and went into the kitchen, where 
  I heard her laugh, although it might have been the radio. I 
  looked around, but I was too overawed and tired to be really 
  interested in stealing anything.

  "It might be about half an hour before I can get anything 
  ready," said Elisabeth. "Is that all right?"

  My dad nodded. He would have agreed to anything right then.

  "Do you live near here?" she asked.

  My dad shook his head.

  "Hmph," said Elisabeth, knitting her brow in vexation at the 
  difficulty of getting anything remotely intelligent out of him. 
  "What about your parents? Won't they be worried?"

  "No, no, please don't call them," said my dad, looking 
  frightened.

  "Well, all right. I think you should tell them that you're all 
  right though. You needn't say where you are. I've got a 
  telephone."

  Dad didn't respond.

  What did she look like? I asked my dad. Well, he said, she was 
  shorter than me (my dad was five-foot-seven, and had been since 
  he was eighteen) with black hair. How old was she? I asked. Dad 
  thought about whether to answer that one, and gave me an angry 
  look. I wasn't put off. I don't know, he said. When I was that 
  age there were only four ages -- children, my age, my parents' 
  age and my grandparents' age. She was my parents' age put like 
  that, though I think now that she must have been in her late 
  twenties.

  "Why don't you have yourself a bath while I'm getting something 
  ready?" said Elisabeth, who was driven more by thoughts of 
  hygiene than altruism.

  Baths have been one of my dad's lifelong weakness. Along with 
  food, alcohol and women, of course, but baths were always my 
  dad's first and most faithful of loves. So Elisabeth was 
  slightly taken aback by the enthusiasm of my dad's response.

  Dad suddenly stood up at the oak table and said, "Yes, please!"

  Elisabeth led my dad up to the bathroom, put in the plug and 
  turned on the hot tap. The geyser ignited with a _whumph_ and 
  covered the bathroom window with fog.

  "I'll get you a towel," she said, removing her towels from the 
  wooden towel rail as she left in case he should use those by 
  mistake. Dad sat on the loo watching the water fill the bath. My 
  grandmother had a bath, but the borstal bath was so huge, filthy 
  and rarely used that it hardly counted as a bath at all. Dad's 
  toes twitched in anticipation and he began to undress.

  Elisabeth returned with an armful of towel, a pair of trousers, 
  some underwear and a shirt. My dad was almost, but not quite 
  indecent, and vaguely aware that this wasn't the done thing in 
  front of women.

  Give her her due, said dad to me, she didn't bat an eyelid.

  "These were Tom's, my husband's. They might just fit you. Don't 
  worry, he won't be back," said Elisabeth.

  It had never occurred to me to be worried, said my dad. I was 
  such an oaf. But the bath was good. My dad raised his legs and I 
  could see his toes curling in nostalgia inside his slippers.

  And then? I asked.

  Well, said my dad, I had some meat and potatoes and I remembered 
  my manners and used my knife and fork properly.

  And then?

  What do you mean And Then? Have you any sense of propriety 
  regarding your old man? Dad sighed. Well, what do you think? I 
  lost my virginity. Technically speaking I had lost it the 
  previous month, but I don't consider that real. Dad looked 
  dreamily at the ceiling and muttered Mmmm quietly to himself.

  You can't just leave me there, I said. Dad looked at me, various 
  emotions flickering across his face. I wondered whether I had 
  pushed a wee bit too far.

  She took off all my clothes and told me to do the same to her. 
  We lay on the rug in the sitting room and she stroked me all 
  over, and told me to do the same to her. Then we made love all 
  night. Well, until I fell asleep anyway. I didn't know what had 
  hit me. OK?

  I felt rather jealous of my dad. My first time, real or 
  otherwise, was so ridiculously inept that both of us gave up and 
  decided to watch the TV instead. It wasn't a complete failure, 
  obviously, otherwise it wouldn't count as the first time. It 
  took Ruth -- that was her name -- and me about a week to get 
  plumbing and lust to coincide. And then it was quite fun. And 
  then we moved on, bound across years, relationships and now 
  oceans by our juvenile fumblings. She's now an up-and-coming 
  journalist. A respected adult with respected colleagues, no 
  doubt.

  The next day my dad woke up in a bed with white linen sheets 
  rather than gray cotton ones, and trooped after Elisabeth like a 
  lost puppy, grinning daftly all the time.

  It was lucky, my dad told me, that I was such a complete naif, 
  otherwise there would have been impenetrable layers of meanings 
  and sub-meanings and guilt and regrets, and as it was I thought 
  the whole thing was just grand, which made her just laugh and 
  laugh. I mean, why did she do it? A sixteen-year-old boy of whom 
  she knew nothing? She must have been a strange woman. My dad 
  took another slug of his _vin de pays_ as we pondered 
  Elisabeth's motives.

  When I raised the question with my mum, she shrugged. Quiet 
  desperation, like most of us, she said. I must say that I found 
  this remark slightly chilling.

  I would love to have seen Elisabeth through my eyes now, said 
  Dad. I mean, why? My dad shook his head and drew his eyebrows 
  together.

  Dad stayed with Elisabeth for about a fortnight -- doing 
  gardening, repointing the chimney and repegging roof tiles under 
  Elisabeth's arm-waving commands from below. It was the first 
  time Dad had ever voluntarily taken instruction from anyone, and 
  he enjoyed doing it, and didn't even mind when Elisabeth cursed 
  him fulsomely as a dozen expensive Kent pegs slid from the roof 
  and demolished themselves on the front path because he hadn't 
  stacked them properly. He just grinned and grinned.

  "Where are you going?" asked Elisabeth one night over dinner. 
  That day Dad had been a little distracted. He felt an imaginary 
  net close in around him. It wasn't as if the police were looking 
  for me, my dad told me. They wouldn't waste time on a runaway, 
  but I sort of felt the need to run again. I sometimes got like 
  that. Fidgety feet, I suppose.

  "I don't know," said my dad. "I've always wanted to go to the 
  Yorkshire Moors."

  Elisabeth munched on some cabbage. "You don't have any money," 
  she said. Dad shrugged. "Well how have you been finding food so 
  far?" she asked. Dad grinned licentiously. A cloud of irritation 
  crossed Elisabeth's face, and before Dad could say something 
  crass said abruptly, "Well, I suppose you've been stealing, 
  haven't you?"

  "Only when I'm very hungry," said Dad. Elisabeth ran her hands 
  over her face as she considered the options. "Well, don't do a 
  bunk on me. I'll give you a little something to take you part of 
  the way."

  Oh, she was canny, said my dad. This way she could make sure I 
  wasn't making off with her family silver in the dead of the 
  night. That evening, in fact, she went through all her drawers 
  and cabinets "to do the dusting," she said. I thought she was 
  slightly potty then, but I now think she was making an 
  inventory. She never asked me to leave. I don't think she 
  particularly wanted me to go. I don't know how she would have 
  finished it if it had been up to her, but as it turned out, it 
  wasn't.

  "I think I'll be going now," my dad said at about eleven in the 
  morning as Elisabeth was reading the Times in the garden.

  "If that's what you want," she said, folding the newspaper and 
  getting up off the garden seat. Dad had collected his borstal 
  boots, but couldn't find his borstal shirt and slacks, which 
  Elisabeth had binned, at arm's length, protected by pink rubber 
  gloves, at the first opportunity.

  "Here, have Tom's old work shirt. It'll last longer," said 
  Elisabeth. She also gave Dad Tom's old tweed jacket and a newish 
  pair of corduroys Tom had bought but never wore. My Dad took off 
  the thin cotton trousers and shirt he was currently wearing and 
  put on the new set. Elisabeth spent the next five minutes 
  dashing around the house like a mad thing. Dad watched her 
  uncomprehendingly.

  This must have been her final check that I hadn't taken 
  anything, Dad told me.

  Then, slightly flushed and breathless, she gave my dad a wallet, 
  a paper bag with some sandwiches and an apple in it, and a peck 
  on the cheek. She held his hand as they walked down the path to 
  the road. He walked into the middle of the road and looked 
  around.

  "Which way's Yorkshire?" he asked.

  "From here? Well, that way, roughly." She waved north over the 
  hill, at a right angle to the road.

  "Oh," he said.

  "But Aylesbury's that way," she pointed west along the road. Dad 
  grinned, waved and marched off to Aylesbury.

  Thus endeth the Elisabeth chapter.



  2.
----
  
  Dad never let on who Elisabeth really was, and there are many 
  old farmhouses between Aylesbury and Chesham. I would have liked 
  to thank her for taking such good care of my dad, though I 
  suspect she would be somewhat mortified to have been thanked. 
  And one cannot entirely exclude the possibility that my dad made 
  the whole thing up, though I doubt it because Dad never made up 
  stories about anything else to my knowledge. Of course, since I 
  became a journalist like Ruth (though not paid anything like the 
  amount she is) I now make up stories all the time. No member of 
  my family can reconcile what I do for a living with watching the 
  BBC news or reading the Daily Telegraph. Actually, I can't 
  either, but there we go.

  Dad looked into the wallet Elisabeth had given him. It contained 
  twenty pounds, a staggering sum for my dad, who had never seen 
  more money than ten shillings in one place at any one time. He 
  reached Aylesbury -- over the scarp edge of the Chiltern hills 
  -- by mid-afternoon, and ate the sandwiches sitting in the 
  market square under the warm sun, feeling is if he belonged 
  there.

  He used some penny pieces in the wallet to phone his mum, who 
  was, as one would expect, upset, confused and desperate about 
  her son. Her son didn't know how to respond, and didn't say much 
  except that he was going on holiday. His mum asked him to give 
  himself up -- only another few months in borstal and then he 
  could get on with his life. Dad wasn't willing to face the 
  reality that England is -- was -- a very bad country to be an 
  outlaw in. A crowded nation of factotum shopkeepers.

  It didn't occur to my dad to rent a room for the night so he 
  took the Buckingham road and slept in a cow barn. My dad was not 
  keen on cows. As a London boy, Dad was only used to cows as 
  sides of beef on a butcher's hook -- and in the fifties, that 
  fairly rarely -- and occasionally as irregularly shaped gray 
  items on a Sunday plate. Real live cows also smelt rather bad. 
  He crawled into the barn's hay loft and lay awake listening to 
  the animals below.

  I realized, my dad told me, that the cows must have been lowing. 
  It made it all seem rather Christmassy. Nobody ever talks about 
  lowing unless there is a little baby Jesus nearby.

  Before daybreak Dad set off through Buckingham, stole a 
  breakfast and earned it by being chased at full pelt along the 
  entire length of the high street, his booted feet going 
  phutphutphutphutphut as he hurtled across the gravel just 
  outside the old jailhouse. He could run a lot faster than your 
  average grocer, who was making a more crunch, crunch, wheeze, 
  crunch-crunch-crunch, wheeze, crunch sort of noise. My dad then 
  followed the signs to Northampton.

  North, you see, my dad told me. Sounded sort of exotic. Just as 
  well that I never saw any signs for Northfleet when I jumped 
  borstal. Northfleet is a town barely ten miles from the place.

  Dad then pinched lunch from a grocer's in Towcester and plodded 
  along the Northampton road. He got to Northampton after the 
  shops had shut, leaving very little that was stealable without 
  putting a brick through a window. In any case, Dad was too tired 
  to deal with the inevitable high speed consequences of this and 
  decided to use the money Elisabeth had given him. This was a 
  momentous event in Dad's life. The first time he had actually 
  used his own money, freely given, to purchase a service for 
  personal consumption. He went into a pub just north of 
  Northampton city center to look for a room.

  "How old are you, son?" asked the landlord, just as he was about 
  to give my dad the key.

  "Eighteen," said Dad, accompanying his barefaced lie with his 
  best barefaced innocent eyed look.

  "Hmph," said the landlord, not convinced. "Where you from?"

  "London, sir," said Dad.

  "Hmph. Room seven. At the top of those stairs there, then turn 
  left." The landlord leaned over the bar and looked for Dad's 
  luggage. "You bringing in your luggage now?"

  "Ah, no," said Dad, his brain going into overdrive to explain 
  this one. "I'm visiting relatives in Towcester tomorrow. Don't 
  need any luggage -- I'd only forget it."

  "Where did you say your relatives were?" said the landlord, an 
  entirely inexplicable smile creeping across his face.

  "Towcester."

  "I think you'll find it's pronounced _toaster_, actually."

  "What is?" said Dad, frowning.

  "Tow-cester. It's pronounced _toaster_."

  "Really?" said Dad, genuinely surprised. "Oh."

  "Well, whatever. Do you want dinner tonight?"

  Dad was hungry again, and a bit more of the contents of his 
  precious wallet was used in a legitimate transaction. He went up 
  to his room before dinner, and as soon as he closed the door he 
  had a fit of the giggles. He threw himself on the bed and 
  stretched himself out, his hands behind his head, and grinned. 
  Once the novelty of that had worn off, he explored the wardrobe 
  and the mirrored cabinet above the sink. He turned on the hot 
  water tap and ran his hand under it for a good two minutes 
  before hot water from the storage heater managed to negotiate 
  the contorted, clanking, magnolia-painted pipes from the 
  basement. This gave Dad an idea. He went out into the corridor, 
  then remembered his key and went back into his room to collect 
  it, and went in search of a bath.

  He found a huge enameled bath in a tiny, badly painted bathroom 
  with a cracked window and graying net curtains. Dad skipped a 
  little boogie of joy on the linoleum, and then sat on the edge 
  of the bath for few seconds and raised his legs, toes curling in 
  expectation. Then he went down to the bar for his dinner, which 
  was tasteless, amongst the mostly silent and grimly drinking 
  working men of Northampton, thinking about his bath.

  What is this thing you have about baths? I asked my dad.

  I don't know, he said. I suppose it reminded me of living at 
  home with my mum. We were one of the few families in our street 
  with a proper full-size galvanized tub. We didn't often have 
  full-blown baths because of the expense, and when we did we used 
  the same water for the whole family, with my dad coming last, as 
  he was the dirtiest. My mum, my sister and I used to share the 
  same bath all together until I was seven, at which point mum 
  deemed it inappropriate. I just remember the borstal as cold and 
  dirty.

  Your dad always was quite the bon viveur, said my mum. Even when 
  I met him. It has always astonished me that he survived trekking 
  across England with no clean clothes and no wine.

  Ah, said Dad, but that was before I _knew_ about clean clothes 
  and wine and roast pheasant and pate de foie gras and summer 
  holidays in France and stuff. You're not born with taste; you 
  have to _acquire_ it.

  This latter was said with a grand sweep of the hand, which 
  seemed eloquent of something, but quite what was difficult to 
  say.

  My dad soaked for a good half hour in that Northampton bath. He 
  then tried to sleep in that unfamiliar hired bed, but was too 
  excited about the portentous strangeness of it all, and tossed 
  about for an hour before finally slipping off.

  He passed the landlord the next morning. "Off to Tow-cester now, 
  son?" he said.

  My dad tried to laugh politely, but he's never been good at that 
  and I doubt whether he was any better when he was 16. This was 
  just the sort of thing you expected from the country. Trying to 
  catch people out with arbitrary pronunciations. Oh, 
  ha-bloody-ha.

  Dad got fed up with plodding a few miles outside of Northampton 
  and decided to thumb a lift. The drivers of the few vehicles 
  which rattled along this road looked at Dad with a mixture of 
  bafflement and suspicion. After half an hour of this, my dad 
  decided to get up from the long summer grass he was sitting in 
  and look as if he wanted to go somewhere. Ten minutes later, a 
  farmer in a bulbous, dark green, left-hand drive army surplus 
  truck pulled over.

  "Where you goin', son?" said the farmer, leaning out of the 
  driver's window.

  "North, sir."

  The farmer looked at my dad long and hard. "You've got the right 
  road, then. Couldja be more specific?"

  "The Yorkshire Moors."

  "That's a heck of a long way to go by thumbin' it. I'm going 
  just past Market Harborough. That do?"

  "Yes, thanks," said my dad, who had no idea where Market 
  Harborough was.

  Dad walked around the truck and climbed in the passenger seat.

  "No knapsack or nothing?" said the farmer.

  "No, sir," said Dad, hiding a sudden blush with a big grin. The 
  farmer chuckled as he looked through the rear window of the 
  truck ready to pull out.

  "Name's Charlie Ferris," said the farmer.

  "I'm George," said my dad.

  My dad was named after King George VI, four years dead by then. 
  He was never awfully keen on the name, any more than he was on 
  the age or cause of the King's death -- 56, of a coronary 
  thrombosis. Dad was 56 a few years ago, and by a strangely 
  unpleasant coincidence had his arteries widened by angioplasty 
  that year after a few nasty turns with angina. He was told by a 
  criminally naive doctor that the odd glass of red wine could 
  help reduce his blood cholesterol. My dad heard this as "one 
  glass good, one bottle better," and consequently his already 
  moderate intake of red wine took off stratospherically. He also 
  pooh-poohed all attempts to wean him off beef, saying that as he 
  was likely to be long dead before BSE got him, he might as well 
  take advantage of the suddenly low prices. Honestly. The older 
  generation.

  The truck clanked and ground through Brixworth, Hanging Houghton 
  and Maidwell. Dad had been in a motorized vehicle before, but 
  rarely, and never before in a left-hand drive army surplus truck 
  bouncing along a trunk road overlooking Northamptonshire fields 
  and hedges. He stuck his head out of the window and felt the sun 
  and wind fly past.

  The farmer watched him out of the corner of his eye.

  "Have ya never been in a truck before, son?"

  "No, sir..." The truck hit a pothole and Dad bounced a foot into 
  the air and landed in a heap, winded, on the dashboard.

  "Mind the potholes," said the farmer languidly.

  Dad took all of thirty seconds to regain his composure, and then 
  continued to look around him like a squirrel in a room full of 
  walnuts.

  "Are you staying in Market Harborough tonight?" asked the 
  farmer.

  "I don't know," said my dad.

  There was another long pause.

  "You can stay at the farmhouse if you're willing to work for me 
  tomorrer."

  "Thank you."

  The farmer drove through Market Harborough and took the road to 
  Melton Mowbray. A few miles outside the town the farmer spun the 
  steering wheel and threw the truck off the metalled road down a 
  white and dusty track which led to a collection of farm 
  buildings and a large horse chestnut tree.

  "Do you have any cows?" asked my dad.

  "Twenty. And a breeding bull."

  "Ah," said my dad.

  The farmer threw the truck into a corner of the farmyard and 
  yanked the handbrake to stop the vehicle, which skidded to a 
  halt in a cloud of dust.

  "I'll show you the wife now so you won't get surprised later," 
  said the farmer.

  Mrs. Ferris was an awe-inspiring woman. Six-foot square and 
  bright red, her hair tied up in a bun.

  "What's this you've brought in, Charlie?" she said, looking at 
  my dad not unkindly, but rather like you would look at a new 
  kitchen table.

  " 'Ired 'elp. Give 'im some food. Can't work on empty." The 
  farmer stomped out of the kitchen back into the yard.

  My dad looked up at Mrs. Ferris as if he was a rubber dingy 
  under the bows of an oncoming liner, and assumed the air of a 
  puppy looking for consolation. Mrs. Ferris stared down at him 
  dispassionately, and then pulled a huge loaf of bread, a leg of 
  ham, a vast lump of cheese, a bowl of tomatoes, a bowl of 
  apples, a triangle of butter and a couple of washed lettuces 
  from various parts of the kitchen.

  Had my dad not been holding onto a kitchen chair, he might have 
  collapsed at the sight of all this food displayed all at once. 
  As it was he felt himself start salivating like a dog.

  " 'Elp yerself, son. Jus' expect work from it." She grabbed my 
  dad's upper arm in her huge right hand and squeezed. My dad 
  looked at his arm in alarm as Mrs. Ferris felt to see if Dad was 
  work-worthy. She let go without any comment and went back to 
  cleaning something by the sink. Dad rubbed his arm to get 
  circulation back into it and watched the veins in the back of 
  his hands deflate. He then attacked the tabletop of food with 
  the sort of no-holds-barred gusto you tend to get from 
  perpetually hungry youngsters.

  Three jagged doorstep ham-and-cheese-and-tomato-and-lettuce 
  sandwiches and ten minutes later, the farmer came back in.

  "Finished?" he said to my dad.

  My dad nodded happily.

  "Happy?" he added with the slightest of smiles.

  Dad giggled.

  "Right, come 'ere. Got work for you."

  My dad was then put to shifting hay-bales, cattle feed and 
  carrying bricks for the wall of the new Ferris kitchen garden, 
  corralling cows and sweeping farmyards until the sun went down 
  in a blue-purple glow some eight hours later.

  The farmer then shepherded a completely exhausted and hence a 
  completely silent boy into the house and into a downstairs 
  washroom, which had a tap attached to a hose.

  "Best clean yerself before dinner," said the farmer.

  Dad slowly took off his clothes and turned on the tap. The water 
  was ice-cold and Dad suddenly awoke with a squeak as the hose 
  writhed on the floor and squirted him with water. After a brief 
  but violent tussle my dad took control and finished the job, 
  several inches of dirt dissolving away down the drain. Mrs. 
  Ferris popped open the washroom door and deposited a towel and 
  some clean clothes on a shelf. Dad froze in embarrassment.

  "Seen it all before, and better," she said as she closed the 
  door.

  My dad plodded into the kitchen, where Mrs. Ferris had made some 
  mutton stew. He was almost too tired to eat it. Almost, but not 
  quite. The farmer and Mrs. Ferris conducted their normal minimal 
  and staccato conversation during the meal and watched as my dad 
  drifted off, slowly listing on his chair. The farmer got up from 
  his seat and with impeccable timing caught my dad just as he was 
  about to brain himself on the kitchen's tile floor. Dad jerked 
  awake and flailed a bit in panic as the farmer righted him.

  "Time for bed I think, son," he said.

  Although my dad's bowl had been cleaned out quite efficiently, 
  he looked at all the other food just sitting there, waiting to 
  be eaten, and sighed deeply in defeat. He nodded, and the farmer 
  took him up to a tiny whitewashed bedroom with a tiny window and 
  a cheap yellow-veneered wardrobe. It also had a bed with clean 
  blankets and my dad pitched forward onto it and bounced a few 
  times. By the time he had stopped bouncing, he was asleep.

  Just before daybreak the next day, Mrs. Ferris came in with a 
  mug of tea and shook my dad until he awoke.

  "Don't go back to sleep on me now," she said. "'Ave that cuppa 
  tea, and I've got bacon and eggs for you downstairs." She 
  stomped back downstairs.

  My dad could smell breakfast, and this was his main spur in 
  getting up. He was a bit surprised to find that he was naked and 
  inside the sheets, as he couldn't remember getting undressed or 
  actually getting into bed.

  My dad found the day a series of baffling and exhausting chores, 
  executed in silence except the mooing and stomping of cows, or 
  the rustle of hay, the gentle gurgling of the milking machines 
  or the clank of aluminum milk churns, the high manic twittering 
  of larks and the sound of the wind in hedgerows. Lunchtime found 
  my dad and the farmer demolishing a foursome of whopping 
  sandwiches while sitting on the bonnet of the army surplus left 
  hand drive truck in total, single-minded silence, some two miles 
  from the farmhouse.

  Mrs. Ferris had cooked another monster dinner, and my dad 
  managed to eat as much as he wanted before politely asking if he 
  could be excused, a lower-middle-class turn of phrase which made 
  the farmer and his wife look at each other in amusement. They 
  nodded, and my dad plodded up the stairs, got undressed, crawled 
  into bed and passed out.

  On Sunday the imperative routine of the farm was cut back to the 
  minimum required to keep the cows happy. At half past nine in 
  the morning the farmer and his wife dressed up in their Sunday 
  best, and rummaged in their chests and wardrobes to find 
  something decent for my dad. He wasn't asked if he wanted to go 
  to church; it was expected. Dad didn't like church very much but 
  was smart enough to know on which side his bread was buttered, 
  and cooperated without a comment. The farmer drove them to 
  church in his army surplus truck, slowly and majestically, as 
  befits a Sunday, which surprised my dad as he thought the bumpy 
  rides he had suffered over the last few days had been because 
  there was something wrong with the vehicle.

  In the church, Mrs. Ferris pointed him down a pew at the back 
  occupied by the conspicuously badly-dressed and possibly inbred. 
  The farmer and his wife then sat a few pews forward of Dad, 
  occupied by people with feathered, netted hats, crinoline skirts 
  and badly tailored suits. At the front sat people dressed 
  entirely in black who never looked around. Dad watched the 
  social strata of rural Leicestershire glide past him with 
  intense interest. He noticed that people only greeted people on 
  the same pew as themselves, perhaps nodding to the people behind 
  them with more than an implication of condescension. The 
  scarecrow next to him sneezed violently. As soon as the organist 
  started on some not awfully good rendition of a Bach chorale, 
  Dad drifted into the religion-induced trance which has afflicted 
  him all his life.

  In the afternoon, they sat in the farmhouse's best room and 
  listed to records of Haydn and Mozart, read books and said very 
  little, until the farmer and my dad went out to feed the animals 
  again.

  Monday was back to the grind. Two local lads, Robert and Peter, 
  came in from time to time to do more skilled work, such as 
  milking the cows and driving the tractor. After a week the 
  farmer gave my dad an envelope.

  "What's this?" asked my dad.

  "Your pay," said the farmer. "Do you want to stay another week?"

  My dad opened the packet and pulled out ten pounds.

  That was a good trick, my dad told me. I never thought that I 
  would be paid for work. A whole new world of paid labor opened 
  unto me. It was like the sun breaking through clouds. This is 
  how you do it. Bloody hell.

  "Yes, please," said my dad.

  "Good," said the farmer, and then he turned around in the middle 
  of the farmyard. "You're a good worker, George. Don't like 
  talkers. All their energy goes in hot air."

  So my dad stayed until the beginning of August. He picked up a 
  girlfriend, Sally Smith, from the farm a mile down the road, and 
  went to pubs where he ended up getting drunk with the local oiks 
  and talking effusively about cars and airplanes -- subjects on 
  which he had no knowledge or interest. Sally was a bit of an 
  experiment after Elisabeth. Sally was only sixteen herself and 
  couldn't be expected to take the lead like Elisabeth had. For 
  the most part, it was all quite sweet and innocent, and the 
  occasional, half-repressed fumblings in various barns and 
  bramble ditches around the farm resulted in nothing more than a 
  desperate sense of urgency in Dad's slacks and a faint sense of 
  imperiled virtue in Sally.

  I'm not sure I learned much about farming, my dad told me. Some 
  people understand it, some don't. I kept thinking that those 
  bloody cows can bloody well wait until I'm bloody well ready, 
  but the farmer didn't, of course. I didn't learn much, but I got 
  awfully fit. Even Mrs. Ferris was impressed. She tourniqueted my 
  arm every now and again and the week I left, she even 
  complimented me on my progress. She could eviscerate a pig with 
  a flick of her wrist. I think she viewed me the same way: 
  working meat rather than eating meat.

  My dad wanted to get to the Yorkshire Moors and his feet started 
  itching again. He had a Plan. Plans were things you could make 
  with a bit of money. He planned to walk to Leicester and buy a 
  train ticket to York, which, he fondly assumed, was in the 
  middle of the Yorkshire Moors, just this side of the Scottish 
  border.

  Dad told Mr. Ferris he was going. Mr. Ferris shrugged. He had 
  hoped for extra hands until autumn, but was used to the 
  fickleness of hired labor and made no protest. Dad set off on a 
  Thursday morning in early August in the same clothes that 
  Elisabeth had given him, an old knapsack and a horse blanket 
  that the farmer said he could have. Mr. and Mrs. Ferris waved at 
  him from the kitchen door. He walked to Illston-on-the-Hill in 
  blazing summer heat, the smell of nettles and cow parsley 
  filling the heavy air. He followed windy lanes through King's 
  Norton and Stoughton and made it into Leicester by late 
  afternoon, where he studied the timetable in the station and 
  bought a ticket on the train to York via Doncaster. He then 
  wandered around a closing city, bought some food, and found a 
  flea-pit pub to stay the night in.

  Did you tell Sally you were leaving? I asked my dad.

  Dad scratched his chin. No, he said, he hadn't.

  Did you contact your mum again? I asked.

  Not while I was at the Ferris Farm, no, said my dad. It never 
  occurred to me. I did try to make it up to your grandmother 
  afterward, when I was a bit older and could guess what terrors 
  she must have been suffering those months.

  I have no basis on which to judge my dad in this. When I was 23 
  I went around the world for a year and sent a grand total of two 
  postcards back to my parents, one to say I had reached New 
  Zealand and the other six weeks later saying I was leaving 
  Australia. Communication is generally not a family trait. As my 
  mum plaintively said on my return: All you had to do was send a 
  piece of paper with a stamp and my address on it. All I wanted 
  to know was that you were still alive.

  Men can be such shits, really.

  Dad got on the first train of the morning and watched, 
  fascinated, as the train crossed that indeterminate border 
  between north and south England. The buildings and countryside 
  grew harder and sparer. Between Derby and Sheffield, the bare 
  and severe Pennine foothills of the Peak district came down to 
  the railway track. Towns, even villages, became darker with 
  industry, and people came onto the train speaking in way my dad 
  found difficult to understand. By the time he reached Sheffield 
  he was sure that the north was a different country. When he 
  changed at Doncaster, a grim town if there ever was one, he was 
  so excited by the foreignness of it all that he almost decided 
  to risk missing the connection to explore this weirdly gruesome 
  place.

  The countryside opened out and became more mellow as the train 
  drew toward York. More hedges rather than stone walls, broad 
  farms and woodland. This confused my dad a little, as he was 
  expecting ever-increasing wildness. The train pulled into York 
  station, under York's city walls and just within sight of the 
  Minster. Dad was now completely at a loss. York looked so, well, 
  southern. It was also very hot. The sun ricocheted off the 
  city's warm stone and carefully tended flowerbeds as Dad 
  followed Station Road and Museum street across Lendal Bridge and 
  towards the Minster. He then went into a bookshop to look at 
  some local maps and found, to his horror, that the Yorkshire 
  Moors were some twenty miles further north, and that England 
  then went on for another eighty miles after that.

  England just seemed to go on forever, my dad told me. It was 
  just so big. And even more shocking, so much of England seemed 
  to be northern. Both my dad and I laughed in a worldly fashion 
  at this. But England _did_ seem awfully big when I was younger. 
  Even Kent, the county I grew up in, seemed enormous until I was 
  ten. But when looked at from Australia or the United States, the 
  country seems so small that you want to laugh at it. Such 
  perspectives only come with time; and seems to me to be one of 
  the minor sadnesses of this modern and universally connected 
  world that everybody is so keen on seeing everything everywhere 
  _right now_ that whatever is under your nose is missed or 
  scorned. A shrinking world has rendered a tiny country like 
  England practically invisible. No sooner has a child wondered at 
  the strangeness of it all, than it has suddenly shrunk under the 
  pressure of immediate explanation and perspective. There is no 
  room for delusions any more, not even harmless little ones.

  Dad filled his knapsack with food and then walked out along 
  Clarence Street towards Helmsley. When it started getting dark, 
  near Sutton-on-the-Forest, he turned off the road and settled 
  down under a tree with his horse blanket. The next morning he 
  set off again. Beyond Brandsby, the countryside began to roll, 
  building up to the impressively glowering massif of the moors 
  themselves. Dad got to Helmsley by four and thought about 
  staying in a bed-and-breakfast, but everything was expensive. 
  Helmsley looked strange to my dad, all gray stone and tourists. 
  He saw a picture of the nearby Rievaulx Abbey ruin on a poster 
  in a local shop and marched off to see it before darkness.

  Rievaulx Abbey, if you have never seen it, is a severe and 
  remote collection of perpendicular gray ruins in a deep wooded 
  valley called Ryedale. My dad described going down into Ryedale 
  was like diving into a deep cold well of unimaginable 
  ancientness. Dad was entranced and sat in the abbey nave, where 
  the wooded valley walls peered through blasted windows and the 
  evening sun caught clouds as they floated pinkly over the open 
  roof. Tourists came and went, mostly in buses or on foot, but 
  Dad only noticed their absence when they left for the evening, 
  leaving the rushing of water and the swishing of trees. The 
  twilight peace of a northern summer evening settled on the 
  valley. The abbey faded as the stars came out and Dad sighed the 
  deep, happy sigh of a someone who has reached his own blue 
  remembered hills. He settled on a bench and watched the great 
  dipper slowly revolve around the pole star until he drifted off 
  to sleep.

  The next day he walked the ten miles or so across Bransdale and 
  up to Cockayne Ridge, where he sat for an hour whilst a warm 
  breeze from the south rustled dried heather. There was nobody 
  there, just sheep. Even the birds were quiet. Just peace. 
  Absolute, unhurried, benevolent peace. In the afternoon, he 
  sauntered down to Farndale, whistling and chewing grass, and 
  camped out in a derelict stone barn. He then walked across the 
  head of Rosedale and Rosedale Moor, across Pikehill Moor and 
  camped out in another barn near Goathland.

  You really were nipping across the moors, I said to my dad.

  I was in a rather strange state of mind, he replied. I was happy 
  to be there, but I had to think about what to do next, and part 
  of me I had obdurately refused to listen to for two months had 
  already decided. Of course I thought I would live forever and I 
  would always be sixteen, but that doesn't preclude some degree 
  of foresight. I wanted to have a normal life. I didn't really 
  want to end up like Robert and Peter at the Ferris farm, 
  hopeless itinerants if there ever were any. I wanted a 
  guaranteed bath every night and money to visit Yorkshire 
  whenever I wanted. What I was doing just couldn't go on. I was 
  also getting tired of feeling like a fugitive. I didn't know it 
  then, but I had decided to grow up. This is a frightening 
  prospect. The child _has_ to be throttled by the adult he 
  becomes. It's an act of violence I don't think anybody really 
  gets over. I've met people in a permanent state of mourning for 
  the child they killed and people who have dealt with their grief 
  by becoming so cold that even the adult dies within them. The 
  child that I was knew that this was the last time he would be in 
  control, and the adult that I was becoming was girding his loins 
  for battle. I never actually managed to finish off my child 
  completely. Lacked nerve and persistence. Like most men, I 
  suppose.

  My dad walked to Whitby and looked over the town from Whitby 
  Abbey. I feel I can hear the child screaming even now, knowing 
  what the adult was about to do. Dad walked very slowly down the 
  hill and found the Police Station. He took a deep breath, walked 
  in and gave himself up.



  My dad and I are great friends. Sometimes, on one of the 
  provincial excursions my job involves, I find a country pub new 
  to me, with wisteria hanging over a patio, or a greensward 
  leading down to a river. I check the menu and when Dad comes to 
  visit we go there and waste the whole afternoon, eating plaice 
  with capers, or beef and ale pie, making bad and lewd jokes 
  which we would be to embarrassed to repeat in front of anyone 
  else, and gossiping about family and people we know. Wasting 
  time with people you love, I have discovered, is what life is 
  for, and neither Buddhists nor monetarists will convince me 
  otherwise.


  Adam Harrington (adam.harrington@btinternet.com)
--------------------------------------------------
  Adam Harrington is a computer programmer who has spent a fair 
  proportion of his 28 years wandering more or less aimlessly 
  across the British Isles and plans to spend his remaining time 
  in the sun doing much the same. He has been a biologist, 
  journalist, unemployed bum, bookie's clerk and unemployed bum 
  again -- in that order -- and doesn't plan on retiring until his 
  cold dead fingers are pried from the office doorknob.



  FYI
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