When something real is about to happen to you, you go toward it with a transparent surface parallel to your own front that hums and bisects both your ears, making eyes very alert. The light bends toward chalky blue. Your skin aches. At last: something real.

Here in the tail section of the 00000, Gottfried has found this clear surface before him in fact, literal: the Imipolex shroud. Flotsam from his childhood are rising through his attention. He’s remembering the skin of an apple, bursting with nebulae, a look into curved reddening space. His eyes taken on and on, and further…. The plastic surface flutters minutely: gray-white, mocking, an enemy of color.

The day outside is raw and the victim lightly dressed, but he feels warm in here. His white stockings stretch nicely from his suspender-tabs. He has found a shallow bend in a pipe where he can rest his cheek as he gazes into the shroud. He feels his hair tickling his back, his bared shoulders. It’s a dim, whited room. A room for lying in, bridal and open to the pallid spaces of the evening, waiting for whatever will fall on him.

Phone traffic drones into his wired ear. The voices are metal and drastically filtered. They buzz like the voices of surgeons, heard as you’re going under ether. Though they now only speak the ritual words, he can still tell them apart.

The soft smell of Imipolex, wrapping him absolutely, is a smell he knows. It doesn’t frighten him. It was in the room when he fell asleep so long ago, so deep in sweet paralyzed childhood… it was there as he began to dream. Now it is time to wake, into the breath of what was always real. Come, wake. All is well.

ORPHEUS PUTS DOWN HARP

LOS ANGELES (PNS)—Richard M. Zhlubb, night manager of the Orpheus Theatre on Melrose, has come out against what he calls “irresponsible use of the harmonica.” Or, actually, “harbodica,” since Manager Zhlubb suffers from a chronic adenoidal condition, which affects his speech. Friends and detractors alike think of him as “the Adenoid.” Anyway, Zhlubb states that his queues, especially for midnight showings, have fallen into a state of near anarchy because of the musical instrument.

“It’s been going on ever since our Bengt Ekerot / Maria Casarès Film Festival,” complains Zhlubb, who is fiftyish and jowled, with a permanent five-o’clock shadow (the worst by far of all the Hourly Shadows), and a habit of throwing his arms up into an inverted “peace sign,” which also happens to be semaphore code for the letter U, exposing in the act uncounted yards of white French cuff.

“Here, Richard,” jeers a passerby, “I got your French cuff, right here,” meanwhile exposing himself in the grossest possible way and manipulating his foreskin in a manner your correspondent cannot set upon his page.