The men and women were dressed in rutilant festive colors she had never seen before, or was she dressing them with the intense light of her own dreaming, for she saw their gaiety, their relation to each other as something unparalleled in splendor. That night she yearned so deeply for this unattainable party, fearing she would never attend it, or else that if she did she would not be dressed in those heightened colors, she would not be so shining, so free. She saw herself attending but invisible, made invisible by timidity.

Now when she had reached this Party, where she had been visible and desired, a new danger threatened her: a mood which came and carried her off like an abductor, back into darkness.

This mood was always provoked by a phrase out of a dream: "This is not the place."

(What place? Was it the first party she wanted and none other, the one painted out of the darkness of her solitude?)

The second phrase would follow: "He is not the one."

Fatal phrase, like a black magic potion which annihilated the present. Instantly she was outside, locked out, thrust out by no one but herself, by a mood which cut her off from fraternity.

Merely by wishing to be elsewhere, where it might be more marvelous, made the near, the palpable seem then like an obstruction, a delay to the more marvelous place awaiting her, the more wonderful personage kept waiting. The present was murdered by this insistent, whispering, interfering cream, this invisible map constantly pointing to unexplored countries, a compass pointing to mirage.

But as quickly as she was deprived of ears, eyes, touch and placed adrift in space, as quickly as warm contact broke, she was granted another kind of ear, eye, touch, and contact.

She no longer saw the Chess Player as made of wood directed by a delicate geometric inner apparatus, as everyone saw him. She saw him before his crystallization, saw the incident which alchemized him into wood, into a chess player of geometric patterns. There, where a blighted love had made its first incision and the blood had turned to tree sap to become wood and move with geometric carefulness, there she placed her words calling to his warmth before it had congealed.

But the Chess Player was irritated. He addressed a man he did not recognize.

From the glass bastions of her city of the interior she could see all the excrescences, deformities, disguises, but as she moved among their hidden selves she incurred great angers.

"You demand we shed our greatest protections!"

"I demand nothing. I wanted to attend a Party. But the Party had dissolved in this strange acid of awareness which only dissolves the calluses, and I see the beginning."

"Stand on your square," said the Chess Player. "I shall bring you someone who will make you dance."