"You're saying I stuck myself in a rut?"

"I'm not saying anything, Rob. I'm asking you what you feel."

"Well. I guess in a sense I did do that. I thought about making some kind of a change. I thought about it a lot," I say, remembering how it was in those bright early days with Sylvia. I remember sitting with her in the cockpit of a parked sailplane on a January night -- we had no other place to go -- and talking about the future. What we would do. How we would beat the odds. There's nothing there for Sigfrid, as far as I can see. I've told Sigfrid all about Sylvia, who married a stockholder in the long run. But we'd broken up long before that. "I suppose," I say, pulling myself up short and trying to get my money's worth out of this session, "that I had a kind of death wish."

"I prefer that you don't use psychiatric terms, Rob."

"Well, you understand what I mean. I knew time was going by. The longer I stayed in the mines the harder it would be to get out. But nothing else looked any better. And there were compensations. My girlfriend, Sylvia. My mother, while she was alive. Friends. Even some fun things. Sailplaning. It is great over the hills, and when you're up high enough Wyoming doesn't look so bad and you can hardly smell the oil."

"You mentioned your girlfriend, Sylvia. Did you get along with her?"

I hesitated, rubbing at my belly. I have almost half a meter of new intestine in there now. They cost fearfully, those things, and sometimes you get the feeling the previous owner wants them back. You wonder who he was. Or she. How he died. Or did he die? Could he still be alive, so poor that he sells off parts of himself, the way I've heard of pretty girls doing with a well-shaped breast or ear?

"Did you make friends with girls easily, Rob?"

"I do now, all right."

"Not now, Rob. I think you said you didn't make friends easily as a child."

"Does anyone?"

"If I understand that question, Robbie, you are asking if anyone remembers childhood as a perfectly happy and easy experience, and of course the answer is 'no.' But some people seem to carry the effects of it over into their lives more than others."

"Yeah. I guess, thinking back, that I was a little afraid of my peer group -- sorry about that, Sigfrid! I mean the other kids. They all seemed to know each other. They had things to say to each other all the time. Secrets. Shared experiences. Interests. I was a loner."

"You were an only child, Robbie?"

"You know I was. Yeah. Maybe that was it. Both my parents worked. And they didn't like me playing near the mines. Dangerous. Well, it really was dangerous for kids. You can get hurt around those machines, or even if there's a slide in the tailings or an outgassing. I stayed at home a lot, watching shows, playing cassettes. Eating. I was a fat kid, Sigfrid. I loved all the starchy, sugary….