Ralph crossing the courtyard, at the far end from the pool, where the olive trees are and the grass is careless with new daisies, thought:

1     There was something about me that was vanilla.

1.1   He would keep me safe, he could, it wasn’t that mad.

1.2   If only kindness came in instant, if kindness even worked.

2     People are ingenious machines. You don’t love them. The beloved is a graven image of what can be loved. How many times had someone made him a teddy bear, but I love you but I love you. Love took place between genitalia. This is what he knew, from his experience, to be true.

Sidestepping one of Remember’s turds, Ralph looked up at a bent olive tree as if to say, compadre. He paused. He loved the tree and wondered why that seemed all right. Rita Perkins told him horseshit, male horseshit. Boy thinks he’s Jesus Christ, ain’t even found the damn on switch.

It all came back to Denise Cadwallader. The white cat had met them off the bus: they were teenagers, they weren’t embarrassed to think it was a messenger. They’d followed it down a muddy path and up. It jogged along readily, with uncatlike stamina. They were still in Pokhara’s equivalent of suburbs, still meeting people with burdens on the road. Then the cat leapt and Ralph knew. He had not anticipated knowing anything. He fell down. He could see the mountains but they were a clumsy drawing. Denise was a crude figurine. That sense of the world being the lack of something dogged him for years, and when it stopped dogging him, he felt unmoored.

3     How do you lie to these people? He passed down the corridor into the dining room. By staying close to the wall, he kept out of sight of the open sliding door. Now he heard the audience, a discontented murmur. There must be enough people: otherwise they whispered. He remembered that he’d had a Valium but couldn’t feel it. The tendency to hard-on had gone.

I came hurrying past, superstitiously avoiding his eye. I walked on and out into the Land of the Lost. He felt everything all over again. He understood how people gave up their souls for a moment’s pleasure.

Listening to me begin the intro spiel, with a little nagging voice in his sub-brain reminding him what it cost me to do the intro spiel, keeping tabs on my unremarkable performance, which must seem to me like public humiliation, Ralph –

4     didn’t grow up in a mansion. No one put Ralph through Stanford.

4.1   No one could tell him I didn’t have my stash.

4.2   Once the deed’s done, probably just a comfort fuck.

4.3   But. But the word but is just why things hurt

5     and

standing on the sidewalk that night outside the Ping Pong, driven spare by my opportunistic tears, he’d felt bitter and desperate; he’d smoked and watched traffic as if harshness was an antidote; been visited by the image of his mother, as she looked just before death, when her face was like a broken window; and he longed to see things grow and live, for a fucking change: and if he were God, he would rain on the forest, all night, just to make himself feel better.

At best, he could do the wrong thing well. He heard his cue and just walked in like people walk into rooms and everyone looks at them.