Well, you’re wrong, champ—these happen to be towns all located on the borders of Time Zones, is all. Ha, ha! Caught you with your hand in your pants! Go on, show us all what you were doing or leave the area, we don’t need your kind around. There’s nothing so loathsome as a sentimental surrealist.

“Now—the eastern towns we’ve listed are on Eastern War Time. All the other towns along the interface are on Central. The western towns just read off are on Central, while the other towns along that interface are on Mountain….”

Which is all our Sentimental Surrealist, leaving the area, gets to hear. Just as well. He is more involved, or “unhealthily obsessed,” if you like, with the moment of sun-silence inside the white tile greasy-spoon. It seems like a place he has been (Kenosha, Wisconsin?) already, though he can’t remember in what connection. They called him “the Kenosha Kid,” though this may be apocryphal. By now, the only other room he can remember being in was a two-color room, nothing but the two exact colors, for all the lamps, furniture, drapes, walls, ceiling, rug, radio, even book jackets in the shelves—everything was either (1) Deep Cheap-Perfume Aquamarine, or (2) Creamy Chocolate FBI-Shoe Brown. That may’ve been in Kenosha, may not. If he tries he will remember, in a minute, how he got to the white tiled room half an hour before hose-out time. He is sitting with a coffee cup half full, heavy sugar and cream, crumbs of a pineapple Danish under the saucer where his fingers can’t reach. Sooner or later he’ll have to move the saucer to get them. He’s just holding off. But it isn’t sooner and it isn’t later, because

the sound-shadow comes down on him,

settles around his table, with the invisible long vortex surfaces that brought it here swooping up away like whorls of an Aetheric Danish, audible only by virtue of accidental bits of sound-debris that may happen to be caught in the eddying, voices far away out at sea our position is two seven degrees two six minutes north, a woman crying in some high-pitched language, ocean waves in gale winds, a voice reciting in Japanese,

Hi wa Ri ni katazu,

Ri wa Ho ni katazu,

Ho wa Ken ni katazu,

Ken wa Ten ni katazu,

which is the slogan of a Kamikaze unit, an Ohka outfit—it means

Injustice cannot conquer Principle,

Principle cannot conquer Law,

Law cannot conquer Power,

Power cannot conquer Heaven.

Hi, Ri, Ho, Ken, Ten go Jap-gibbering away on the long solar eddy and leave the Kenosha Kid at the riveted table, where the roaring of the sun has stopped. He is hearing, for the first time, the mighty river of his blood, the Titan’s drum of his heart.