Now, when she concentrated as fully as she was capable of she remembered the drink and an imprecise replica of this initial conversation but there were some minutes (she wasn't sure how many) that she couldn't account for as if she had slipped and fallen into some vacuous abyss unawares and then had mysteriously gotten to the other side of the chasm, slapping off the mud that besmirched her clothing without being much more cognizant than this. Maybe she had serviced him during this period or maybe she had just fallen into a vacuous state of one who knew the state of the world: the multitudes who were calculative and disingenuous users; life as the frivolous extroverted game of using others to rack up points; a smile as an artifice; society as billiard balls slapping against each other and rebounding; they who were customers of that which was deleterious to them and were ready to use or be used to get it; and the few higher ones linked to compassion and empathy, whose intellect saw the world and yet had to give a cheerful rendering of it as "life" because one did have to live in this world and celebrate it the best one was able to do. For the empathic ones, hidden beneath hardened facades, their sensitivities were under the scabs of hardened smiles. "Can't figure out why you'd come all the way to Ithaca for some weed if you are living in Albany like there ain't drugs in other cities." "Don't know anybody else," she said. "Just the Candyman." Her fingers paused in this unbuttoning of the blouse as if a wave of sensibility had momentarily washed upon her. Obviously she hadn't serviced him yet but she could see that she was ready to do so. She detoured his eyes from staring at her breasts by asking him to show her his different brands of marijuana. She thought of Nathaniel to clog her urging to be intimate with Candyman but she couldn't remember many specifics about yesterday no matter how hard she tried. Still she unsuccessfully concentrated in the hope that her ponderings would pull back the memory. It was the following: Yesterday Nathaniel stepped off the school bus and went inside. She was seated on her white colonial chair as superciliously cold, hard, and beyond human frailties as the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial seen on a winter day. She was the throned Antarctic queen. "Hey there. How was school?" she asked coldly "Same." "We need to talk!," she said. "What's wrong?" he asked. He looked petrified as if she had discovered his secret relationship with the man who had made going into R-rated movies so easy for him (just the cost of showing his behind and letting those fingers graze on his two hills and this payment deferred until after a movie or movies were finished). "Nothing she said. She smiled her haughty smile and spoke in her typical phlegmatic tone. "I'm wondering about taking another trip abroad." "With or without me?"