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Consider Kansas, LuA
The chance exists.
chapter nine
Ned
We have driven four or five or six hundred miles so far today, and hardly a word has been spoken since early morning. Patterns of tension rivet us and hold us apart. Eli angry at Timothy; myself angry at Timothy; Timothy a
There are other tensions this morning. Timothy is sullen and withdrawn, I suppose because he dislikes the paternal/schoolmastery role he had to play last night and resents our having forced it on him. (He surely thinks we deliberately set him up to it.) Also, I suspect Timothy is subliminally peeved at me for having bestowed my favors on sad bestial Mary, gay is gay, in Tim’s book, and he believes, probably correctly, that I’m simply jeering at straights when I dabble in ugly-girl heterosex.
And Oliver is even more quiet than usual. I guess we seem frivolous to him and he detests us for it. Poor purposeful Oliver! A self-made man, as he reminds us now and then by implicit rather than explicit disapproval of our attitudes — a consciously Lincolnesque figure who has pulled himself up out of the corny wastelands of Kansas to attain the lofty status of a pre-med student at the nation’s most tradition-encrusted college, bar one or two, and who through some fluke of fate has found himself sharing an apartment and a destiny with: (1) a poetic pansy, (2) a member of the idle rich, (3) a neurotic Jewish scholastic. While Oliver dedicates himself to preserving lives through the rites of Asklepios, I am content to scribble contemporary incomprehensibilities, Eli is content to translate and elucidate ancient and forgotten incomprehensibilities, and Timothy is content to clip coupons and play polo. You alone, Oliver, have social relevance, you who have vowed to be a healer of mankind. Ha! What if Eli’s temple really does exist and we are granted what we seek? Where’s your healing art then, Oliver? Why be a doctor if mumbo jumbo can let you live forever? Ah, then! Farewell! Oliver’s occupation’s gone!
We are in western Pe