Everyone else, Clare thinks, is hungover. They have feted Loudermilk’s demise. They are presently sorting through their own recent ethanol-soaked pasts and will arrive at provisional conclusions before they exit their dwellings to drag themselves toward the site of acquiescence to packet protocol. They are heavy with the previous night’s disclosures. Next week they are likely to demand administrative justice. Clare keeps thinking that there must be a story in this, but she can’t quite make it out. She recalls again what a beautiful voice the real poet had, his line about Clintonian masks. It’s been a while, too, since she thought so directly about her tower. She looks down at her feet, but it’s just the Cretan sidewalk. Troy Loudermilk, Loudermilk’s full name is—as Anton Beans had said. Troy, whom Clare has briefly met. God, the trip is taking a while.

She is expecting Building 109 to be deserted. However, when she opens the door there is chatter and a lot of it. Everyone is standing in the front room, pressed together, as if they’re witnessing a new contest. Clare has just made the decision to attempt to sneak by, when what is/are the actual object(s) of fascination catch(es) Clare’s eye, which is, it must be said, the verb-related understatement of the year, since Clare is well-nigh frozen.

Someone has xeroxed her vagina.

Not Clare’s vagina, but someone’s. Actually, maybe Clare means “vulva”? Someone has presumably clambered atop one of the trusty Seminars machines, dropped trou, pressed lips to plate.

This person—enterprising and biologically female, not to mention well versed in the intricacies of desktop printing—has subsequently taken the step of scanning said genital copy and converting it to a PDF of sizable dimensions, such that she has been able to print it out on some nine—Clare is not at the moment one for counting—eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets of paper, taking advantage of the office’s impressive laser printer. The original Xerox has been reconstituted, rectangle by eight-and-a-half-by-eleven rectangle, on the wall of the Seminars HQ front parlor in a prominent location, one normally occupied by an oil portrait of dopey old Rainer Dodds, kindly patriarch, shaking hands with Henry Ford as out the window behind them horticulture and industry glowingly coexist, invisible music sailing over the land.

The original portrait lies facedown on the rug. It appears, somehow, to be sleeping.

It’s a nice vulva, too. It appears friendly.

It is also, Clare realizes, a materialization of the title of her recent story.

Clare has not gone unperceived.

The origin of the world, Clare is thinking.