“Little sister don’t cha.. Little sister don’t you.. Little sister,” under her breath she sings in her best Elvis, as the late night library lights flicker with almost imaginary thwuft-da one last time and the stacks became dark. “Don’t you do what your big sister done.” A book falls from the shelve, on it’s spine, opening and an ordinary rock en-tumbled across the floor from within. She bends to lift it before the pages turn any number away from the truth as she might come to know it. These info-drops were meant to be done artfully, but as so often is the case, art in life is tentative and easily collapsible. Just as easy, she may have lost the page, and as an unofficial student she would have been forced either to steal the book, removing its magnetic strip, hidden, or more likely hiding away by the vague light of some thin tall window to leaf through, and examine the book for its obvious or possibly obscured meaning, possibly till morning, risking the bell of the fire alarm, while sneaking from the building locked down tight. As it is she had hung around the stacks for hours for this drop, lacking in stale air breathing oxygen and caffeine.

Centered on page 83, and written between the lines and in very small type the phone number xxx-xxxx, is written.

Downstairs, from a payphone, she breaks open a roll of quarters and dials, hearing from the distant corner of the building another phone ringing in possible coincidence, while the elevator door next to her slides aside suddenly, revealing emptiness within.

“Meet me in the old ___ hall,” the voice says.

With her practiced manly voice, “The new student center?,” she asks.

“The tunnels,” he barks. Right before they begin growing smaller and smaller, and the damp gray walls begin closing in.”

She hangs up. No time is specified so he had likely meant now. Though she suspects that he’s a near nobody, only a currier, test, or diversion, so he better not make her wait after this long library fiasco, the only upside being that it did allow her to realize two new surrealists.

But she decides to make him wait, stopping at Hamerman for a cup of coffee. On line behind her, came an old professor. He seems unfamiliar, but she had stopped attending class years ago, and even as a student she never actually had to frequent lectures. There were a handful Professors, lesser contacts, faces she would memorize on the first day of class until initiating knowing eyecontact. She’d ask him to sign her into the course. They’d come to a non-verbal art to life, underground understanding, he’d eventually give her a C, or B minus, and they’d never need see, or speak again.

Turning to this old professor,. “Do you remember what the building- where the new Student Center is- What was it’s name before?”

Looking around initially annoyed, then straining thoughtfully. “There were two buildings. Building one and building two.”

“But what was it called?”

“I really don’t know,” he blurts as he happy to be free of the changing past, as if it were his restful right to forget.

To the counterperson, “Small Coffee,” she says.

As she sat sipping surprisingly strong coffee from the paper cup, she absently checks its sides for some clandestine message. Someone might have read her annoyance in the library wait, and could easily have extrapolated her steps here. Old habits... She chides herself for being predictable, and, “Dada,” she says conspicuously loud so those seated around would hear. She slaps her own wrist with the opposite hand. Another pair of older professors were seated, silhouetted against the large window.

To either one, “Excuse me.”

Disturbed one peers up from his cupped soup, plastic spoon hand to mouth, but smiles at her relative attractiveness.

“The new student center... What was it before?”

The other looks up stunned in ignorance, they both laugh and first man replies. “I don’t know...,” and, “How soon we forget.”

Her eyes than veer from the pair impolitely to watch the scene outside, and philosophy students walking past. Damn, she thinks her glasses are still on. Quickly for artistic effect, she removes them in one fluid motion, watching others for reaction or acquired style points.

Are you nearsighted, or a little girl trapped in an adult people world?, she writes in her hunter green notebook, “E-mail nearsighted, or [email protected].

Entering the new Student Center, tentatively for the first time since it’s been the _____ building, and where they used to have veiled meetings held within poetry readings, while passing around antifreeze to drink, she’s disoriented, nervous. Heading for the first set of fire stairs, like the nude on a staircase, she descends. Mirrors had been since placed in the corners to deter rape. While she likes the first, the idea of seeing an assailant waiting in ambush at he bottom of the steps, she hasn’t feared the later for some years now.

As the building has been changed, it takes some time to find the entrance, the secret passage. (For obscuring reasons we state that she might have entered the labyrinth through the basement of another building...: the Staller Center perhaps or that scary room behind the rainy night house. What’s rainy nighthouse you ask?)

The tunnels are dark, but every length or so she finds a switch that illumes the next segment of tunnel, times twelve, plus a few forgotten turns until the last, and she finds a pair of men standing dangerous, and might as well have been twins, wearing derbies, and waiting hidden on either side of a threshold, bearing clubs--Magritte.

“Hi,” she says.

SILENCE.

“How do I decide who’s real and who’s not?”

The first man, “I’m real,” he says.

The second man pointing, concurs," he's real.”

And X hesitates for seconds, a step she knows is too far, too long, as the false one comes at her. Regularly, with a self proclaimed master, in an attic, on some main street ghost town, on the south shore, she had studied this very situation for years, and had never been taken as a person of violence, but like trained lightening she struck cracking the advancing man’s nose into his brain. The feel of it made drunk coffee well to her throat. The assailant falls down. Her heart is pounding fast and the real man looks pale so pale as if he’s about to faint.

“Never seen the dead in motion?”

“No.”

And it doesn’t matter who says which.

Save for their segment of tunnel the lights in the regress of adjoining hallway began turning off one by one accompanied by a staggering of movieland running footsteps. They’ve been seen.

Above, across and over the dead man the real one says, “You’re too cool, you know” and as X began taking this as a compliment, perhaps he’s not as artfully deadly as she, he whittled down the statement in clarity. “I’ve been sent to speak to you because you’re appearing too cool, too mysterious... You went to a one of your lonelyplaces in a sexy black gown and cassimere wrap.”

“They’re the only elegant close I own.”

“But they imply at a life so much more.”

“Who saw me.”

“One of the others-- as you call her, The physical representation of Birth of Venus.”

X didn’t realize that Venus was an other.” Down the hall, She looks past him. That statement... about how only idiots wore big pants, it was so unperson. If she stood still, she’d appear art to life like The Birth of Venus, but in contact pre- recruitment she spoke with the wit and wisdom of a non-person. “But I had to use the bathroom.”

“You just freshened your bright RED lipstick, you wanted them to see you. Nonpeople and the others are beginning think of you...wonder.”

“So what... we’re ready.”

“To be notpeople again? They’ll swallow us up and the others will win.”

“And who took it upon Herself to decide... I’m in charge here.”

“Are you...,” the man says with an almost forced, but knowing smile.

And X acquiesces silently.

He continues, “You need to go out and embarrass yourself while attempting to imply at mystery. Fall in love with an nonperson, or possible recruit. Use your tongue as persuasion. Give her taste-test, scare the girl with your loneliness. Imply at your non-existent cunning, power, sacrifice your pride, surrender your mind. You need this. You deserve this,” he’s pleading.

Nodding, she realizes that she’s recently become too hot, playing art for nonpersons eyes and ignoring her own, personal, aesthetic cravings. When was the last time she had been attracted to herself, made love, snapped off rolls and rolls of her nakedness on film for solitary viewing. “You’re right,” she says “I am very hungry.”

But acknowledging her rank, he bestows unto her bow.

A knowing smile she allows herself. I knew it.

“I’ll clean up the mess,” he says gesturing down to the deadman between them.

“What are you gonna do?”

“In the barrels of aspecteous in that wide room,” he points in the right direction. “They’ll be there forever, and found he might be, but in the game we will have twisted and turned, only possibly using him for a prop or artful frame-up.”