get his attention. By getting his attention she could lure him into a story that had the potential of putting him to sleep. The name on his birth certificate was Nathaniel, a name she liked but regretted having given to him. It was her hope that the nickname, "Adagio," would, like magic, get him to be calm if not elicit from the child a rather scholastic attentiveness within his infantile limitations. She often played for him the classical music, "Scaramouche-modere" by Darius Milhaud. It was her favorite adagio if indeed it was an adagio at all. It was adagio enough for her and she believed that was all that mattered. She was seated on a director's chair looking at the slight movements of her child's body and wondering why its mouth could not be equally delicate. She silently called it the Spanish word of "criatura." Her extended family had been a mixture of Germans and German-Argentineans, a passionate and passionless crowd who often did not know if they should call her Gabriela or Gabriele and so they had been reluctant to say anything at all to her. She kissed her son on the forehead but this action provoked vehement cries of cacophony. Assessing that her son had reactions no different than any hard Visigoth, she ignored his bellowing voice and continued the story. "Listen to this, little man. Concentrate. Scream as you will, but concentrate! They, the Antinomians of Atlantis, considered themselves a loose conglomeration of a tribe and did not have any inclination for a central government for governments are only needed to control malevolent men. When the scattered men unified for monthly reproductive sessions with their estranged spouses to ravage their fluids on their--quote- unquote 'their'--women, they were not protected under roofs from the elements but did the banging on the backs of horses. Uncomfortable, you say. I'd agree: uncomfortable but quick and quick ejaculations were what they wanted. This doing it in the open was a rather brave act, wouldn't you say, considering that they could be struck down by lightning should the sun god deem them as gaining more hedonistic pleasure, or spending too much of their thoughts in activities not suited to gentle, uncivilized men. They did not marry in the auspices of a sacrament-oriented fiend from the heavens but acknowledged the vulgarity of their intersections not in affected guilt but by cleansing and anointing their horses afterward. They weren't selfish creatures apart from those 15-minute rides and so they didn't have this wish to hide themselves in the affectation of matrimony and love like modern men and they did not need to hide themselves in clothes. The land of Antinomy was warm, you know. There would have been a different reality if Antinomy had been a little island off of our beloved motherland of Antarctica. Anyhow, in the land of Atlantis or Antinomy a child was born in this manner and grew up not with Mother or Father but in independence and its relationship with the Earth and