I may have been disembandoned.

I have reason to believe people in France, people I thought I'd lost, have returned to me, just like it said they would on the laminated card someone sent me from Key West. I let them go, you see, even though I was sorry to, and they have returned.

If the man who claimed to be a doctor let me go, really go, I think I would not return.

Everything's different and nothing's different

Garland has asked me if he can write for me sometimes, when I don't want to. But I'm not sure.
He says he keeps coming up with ideas that are too long to be aphorisms while he sits for Kelly's painting. She is working on the forehead and eyebrows now. He didn't expect things to go so slowly, and it's giving him a lot of time to think. I'm worried he'll change things with his version of what happens around here, but I like the idea of having someone to help me.

Tonight

This evening we had a program after dinner, a thing Maureen put together. She is a composer, and she specializes in coughatorio, which is like oratorio, only with a kind of learnable tonal coughing instead of singing. I am a soprano, but most people cough in a lower register, so I was with the altos. The key to the kind of coughing style Maureen showed us is to cough from your diaphragm; otherwise your throat gets sore very quickly. I was surprised by how good it sounded once we all got going. The story itself was loosely based on Handel's Belshazzar, but kind of tightened up, because it's hard to convey much story in coughatorio. I'm terribly thirsty now, but I think it would be nice to try again some time. Hopefully more people would participate, because many were coughing along from the audience.

This is a tree

You might have to look pretty hard to see it, but I feel like that's how it always is.



The blue peeping through is sky. I told the man who claimed to be a doctor I'd seen a ham-blue sky, and he did not believe me. But if we have another one, I'll take a picture.

A. W. I. A. 23: An admission

The man who claimed to be a doctor admitted he might not have leveled with me, and there were many things I might have asked him then. While I had him in a snare of his own fashioning I might have, for instance, asked him what he'd been keeping from me or what kinds of things he'd lied about.

But his admission had not come as a surprise to me. I'd already caught him in fabrications and kept silent about it, waiting, gathering ammunition for the big battle that was surely to come.

I wondered what this new ploy was. It looked like a classic counterintelligence maneuver: you give them something big so that you can keep hiding something bigger. If so, then he believed that I was the one ensnared. In that event, whether he was right or not, the best thing to do was to keep still, lest my struggle tighten the knot.

I chose therefore to remain quiet and watchful and wait to see what he let slip next.