“I thought of the three of us—myself, Trumilcik, and Elaine—each present there via our more or less phantasmagorical versions of each other, our recondite emblems of ourselves. And for a moment I felt I was at the point of grasping what it was that made the full unfolding of another human being into one’s consciousness so painfully dazzling that one spent one’s life contriving ways of filtering them, blocking them out, setting up labyrinthine passageways between oneself and them, kidnapping their images for various exploitative purposes of one’s own, and generally doing all one could to fend off their problematic, objective reality. The phone rang.”