"How can I thank you," she gushes. She puts her hand on his shoulder, he
thinks quickly about the Battle of
Stalingrad.
"Where can we go and be private?" she whispers. He gestures to the stairs in the back and she leads him by the hand up, to his bedroom, a mess of thrown books and endlessly dirty laundry feet deep on the floor. Saul begins to undress her. Slowly he removes her dress. Less slowly, grinning feverishly, he strips off her undergarments. And here is where the trouble begins and the day becomes strange.
Now it seems they're not late but just
in time.
They must have scared away the
burglars because here are both their TV sets, the big Zenith and the smaller
Sony, lying in the grass a few feet from their front walk.
Except that they
aren't lying in the grass at all, they're actually drifting a few inches off the
ground, suspended somehow in open air, no wires, pulleys, or other gimmicks in
evidence. The two dark boxes
As she is trying to understand what this could mean,
Lorraine feels Harry tug weakly at her pajama sleeve. He is looking away down the
length of their little cul-de-sac, where yet another
phenomenon
has caught his
eye. She follows his gaze and sees that they are not the only ones so strangely
visited tonight. Other televisions have come wafting out of houses all up
and
down the street and have started to spin and tumble slowly in the flat glare of
the streetlamps.
While this is a fascinating and compelling metaphor, the structural inadequacy of having nothing but nodes and disjunctive links is not to be solved by having nodes and links philosophically trade places but by the much more obvious expedient of providing more explicit structure.
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