"No, baby. You're something. I don't blame Paul. But I play only for
myself. Never mix romance in a deal."
She slapped me and ran out of the room.
My ears ring all the time, anyway--night and day, day and night, as in
the song, a sound like spring peepers at a distance, sometimes like a
million dinner bells tinkling, tinkling, tinkling, and at other times
like a flutenote I'd give a great deal to stop. They rang harder,
now. She'd hit with her hand taut and compressed hard air against the
shrill, soniferous membrane. It hurt like the dentist. I scrunched
myself together and let the sweat roll and looked out the window. The
pain calmed down and I kept staring out, hating the earth, afraid,
miserable, cheap. I fought back.
Once upon a time, billions of years ago, there was a Knower who is
identified these days by the name of God.
He was totally conscious.
He was the Custodian, which is to say the Other Property, of
mass-energy and space-time. He was the sublime entropy of the
primordial atom, It, the universe, the stable pattern, the All,
harmoniously balanced, a fixed ecstasy unmoving and so without Age.