“There was nothing out there. It was a barren place. I’d been most of the day looking for a sign of life. Then at last I heard you all in here.” So they have wandered to a balcony, a graceful railing, no one can see them from inside or out: and below them in the streets, streets they have both lost now, are the People. There passes for Pirate and Katje a brief segment of a much longer chronicle, the anonymous How I Came to Love the People. “Her name was Brenda, her face was the bird under the protecting grin of the car in the rain that morning, she knelt and performed fellatio on me, and I ejaculated on her breasts. Her name was Lily, she was 67 last August, she reads off the labels of beer bottles to herself out loud, we coupled in the standard English position, and she patted me on the back and whispered, ‘Good friend.’ His name was Frank, his hair curled away from his face, his eyes were rather sharp but pleasant, he stole from American Army depots, he bum-fucked me and when he came inside me, so did I. Her name was Frangibella, she was black, her face was broken out, she wanted money for dope, her openness was a viper writhing in my heart, I performed cunnilingus upon her. His name was Allan, his buttocks were tanned, I said, where did you find the sun, he answered, the sun is just around the corner, I held him over the pillow and buggered him and he cried with love till I, my piston pungently greased, exploded at last. Her name was Nancy, she was six, we went behind a wall near a crater full of ruins, she rubbed and rubbed against me, her milky little thighs reaching in and out of my own, her eyes were closed, her fair little nostrils moved upward, backward forever, the slope of debris rushed down, steeply, just beside us, we teetered at the edge, on and on, exquisitely. Her name was—” well, all these and many more pass for our young couple here, enough to make them understand that horny Anonymous’s intentions are nothing less than a megalomaniac master plan of sexual love with every individual one of the People in the World—and that when every one, somewhat miraculously, is accounted for at last, that will be a rough definition of “loving the People.”

“Take that, you frauds out there in the Branches,” Pirate wants to strike a humorous note, but doesn’t. He is holding Katje now as if, in a moment, music will start, and they would dance.

“But the People will never love you,” she whispers, “or me. However bad and good are arranged for them, we will always be bad. Do you know where that puts us?”