Had the floor gotten hot? He looked and saw he’d spilled his coffee in his rush to get to the mannequins. Maybe the little woman had come by to put sugar in his coffee. She’d never done that before, but it would explain how the coffee got so sticky. It was a little difficult to walk. And now Ali had gotten mixed up, because he was coming through the cafeteria doorway, carrying the Samsonite. Just behind him was the man in the brown suit, running in the opposite direction, toward the parking lot.

The little woman was licking Hoseyn’s ears. She had lost her mind. Now she was kissing him, her tongue in his mouth, and the pills were coming with it, but did he want that? It had all been a gentle game, didn’t she know that? She had known it for months. Why today had she chosen to break their unspoken agreement? He hoped his wife would never hear of this. He tried to embrace his wife, but she broke away from him and walked to the table where his mother was sitting. He picked up his briefcase. He would go even that far. He could not let his mother speak to his wife. She would tell her. There was the one thing he had kept from her. He had made the mistake of pretending it wasn’t there, even to himself, but it was there, it had happened. There was one way to get rid of it, though, and he was not afraid to take the step. He raised the briefcase above his mother’s head, and down it went, bashing, bashing, bashing. But the explosion didn’t follow. His mother had escaped. All he was doing was hitting a chair, and it had skittered across the cafeteria to the doorway. People were running to right it, several of them, with their hands in the air like kites without strings. The briefcase, for all its clicks, had failed. It was useless. The gardener was sick, the hoe was dull, a broken river had found him, and he would never get past the burning chair in this room of rain.

5.   EDITED SCENES OF
ADVENTURE