Lorn looks awful. Her lower belly is distended. She doesn’t want to talk. I want to know what she is thinking. I want to help her. I want to help everyone. I can’t even help myself.

I have been thinking that functional men are intelligent, but they are merely good at
following instructions, I said.
They are conformist, Amy said.
Robots, I said.
You share a wall, Amy said.
I can hear them fucking, I said. It disgusts me. He’s a jack hammer twenty minutes at a time.
My step father doesn’t care about my brother. I said. He’s using him. He may know that he is using him but does it because he needs his approval. He doesn’t think that he’s a good person. My mother was the same way. She wasn’t able to do anything for herself. She would resist but eventually she acceded to his power. She needed to feel protected.
Frank was the same way with me, Amy said. He could only seduce. He was incapable of love. His father abused his mother.
Fifty year old Amy had color in her face. She had been a week in Southern California. She likes her life. She has a staid good paying job as an editor for a science blog. She used to work for planned parenthood and other political and social campaigns that she cared about. Her schedule is deadening her sensibility. When she lies near my armpit she looks arable and very young.
Was Pynchon Jewish I said.
He was a wasp, Amy said.
I read Gravity’s Rainbow, I said. I remember the black Nazi paratroopers.
The whole novel is nothing but research, Amy said.
Amy misleads herself and is misled. She had no idea her former boyfriend was a sex addict. He was a pain slut. He had a Domme who whacked him with a cane. He said that the bruises on his body were from the occasional fall when he hiked. The Domme said that the worse it was in real life the worse she would hurt him. It became difficult for
Amy’s boy friend to tell the difference between pleasure and pain when his life went to shit and the beatings intensity increased.
Zyklon B was basically invented by a Jewish scientist, Amy said.
I have that need to belong, I said. I would almost do anything to be accepted.
You don’t belong to anything, Amy said.
Basically your enemies fuck you in the end, I said. And you don’t see it coming.
Pynchon would agree with you, Amy said.
Does anyone know what he looks like, I said.
Not really, said Amy.
I wish I had a God I could pray to to avenge me, I said.
One of Proust’s characters said protestants are joyless. I’m reading his short stories in a dual translation book. I first read a paragraph in French and then the translation. I would never be able to make it out in French.