Hello, Michael! Djuna said, and the 100000000000000000000000000 miles between himself and human beings became like a small pencil addition on a note paper and not a state of being. They were laid aside like a student's abstractions, and now he was sitting in a café and Donald at his right was merely a very beautiful boy of which there were so many, cut out like a clay pigeon at the fair, with only a façade, and that is what Djuna had called him from the very beginning (the first time she had said it he had been angry and brooded on the insufferable jealousy of woman). Hello, Michael! How is your clay pigeon today?

Such fine threads passed between Michael and Djuna. He could always seize the intermediary color of her mood. That was his charm, his quality, this fine incision from his knowledge of woman, this capacity for dealing in essences.

This love without possibility of incarnation which took place between Djuna and all the descendants of Michael, the lineage of these carriers of subtleties known only to men of his race.

They had found a territory which existed beyond sensual countries, and by a communion of swift words could charm each other actively in spite of the knowledge that this enchantment would have no ordinary culmination.

"Djuna," said Michael, "I see all your thoughts running in all directions, like minnows."

Then immediately he knew this in her was a symptom of anxiety, and he avoided the question which would have wounded her: "Has Paul's father sent him to India?"

For in the way she sat there he knew she was awaiting a mortal blow.

At this moment there appeared on the marble-topped tables the stains of drink, the sediments and dregs of false beatitudes.

At this moment the organ grinder changed his tune, and ceased to shower the profligacies of Carmen.

The laughter of Pagliacci bleached by city fumes, wailed like a loon out of the organ, so that the monkey cornered by a joviality which had neither a sound of man or monkey rattled his chains in greater desperation and saluted with his red Turkish hat every stranger who might deliver him from this loud-speaker tree to which he had been tied.

He danced a pleading dance to be delivered from this tree from which the twisting of a handle brought forth black birds of corrugated melodies.

But as the pennies fell he remembered his responsibilities, his prayer for silent trees vanished from his eyes as he attempted a gesture of gratitude with his red Turkish hat.

Djuna walked back again into her labyrinthian cities of the interior.

Where music bears no titles flowing like a subterranean river carrying all the moods, sensations and impressions into dissolutions forming and reforming a world in terms of flow...

where houses wear but façades exposed to easy entrances and exits

where streets do not bear a name because they are the streets of secret sorrows