From Tim Peterson:

"Stuffing books into my satchel. No one really said it was okay to take them, but I figure just a few…several large bags later, I'm loaded down and ready to depart.

Look at Emma – she's rich but she lives in that miniscule stand-up shack hardly big enough for a closet, and sleeps on that pallet made out of crates. We are watching this as if at a slide lecture. She seems to just live there and tend her farm, but one night all the lights go on and we see her crying in her real house, which is a mansion. She's crying in the stairwell, screaming at someone on the phone.

My cousin is moving in with some friends downtown. It sounds like a burgeoning romance from how she tells it. Downtown Boston is nightmarish, full of very tall brick skyscrapers – everything also very new and shiny. She is moving in with Frank Bidart and his family. Everyone knows that Frank Bidart isn't the real revolutionary – Robert Bly is, because he’s the one with Mexican blood, in fact he looks somewhat like Cheech Marin and is trying to reassemble the Vietnam poets despite the fact that Denise Levertov is dead this time. But no one's listening to him. Frank Bidart is the one who takes the stage and wags his finger at us talking about "Bush's doublespeak" – I imagine he must look sexy when he does that. My cousin likes him I think it's not clear whether they are romantically involved or whether she is just moving in. We walk by the spot downtown, and she points it out – a tall, teetering sliver of a red brick building so narrow it looks like it will fall over, like it was an add-on stuck into the posh neighborhood as a kind of afterthought. There will be an explosion at the rally, we all know and fear this.

Emma is there, at the rally, the same spunky blonde, who has now dyed her hair black and is speaking with a southern accent she didn't have before. The accent allows her a new way to be the phallus, and she shows it off with gusto. She has also started smoking and all the girls think she's soooo sexy. Several of her "followers" tell me this as we wait for her to come down. The room is very crowded and somehow it's very apparent that treachery will strike and a bomb will go off within seconds, set by Mexican Robert Bly.

I want to surprise B. and show him what I look like in drag, but I don't want him to be attracted to me, but I want to show him I look good in drag. So I ask him to wait downstairs for about ten minutes. He is in an irritated mood. I get up to my room and realize I haven’t shaved my legs. There is really no hope for this idea, and it turns out he got tired of waiting anyway and drove away, the hotel clerk tells me later. In the morning, I go out to window-shop at all the junk shops and $1 dollar stores in the area. There are rusty bedframes, odd springs and gadgets, whole aisles full of used nails and screws and L-brackets, plastic buckets, goggles, those cheap picnic tables with the sun umbrella that you stick in the hole in the middle, curvy straws, wigs, old lawnmowers, a veritable bazaar of used and useless stuff. I wonder why I didn't just come and buy everything when I was first moving in here. I guess I didn't have the patience.

As I'm getting into the elevator with Frank Bidart, it becomes clear that someone is going to assassinate him.

I am talking with an old man who looks like Joe Robinson, but he's not Joe Robinson, he's really just an old man. He has these guys working on his house (he's related to blonde Emma, but I can’t make out whether he's her father or her husband). He lost his house in the fire, he tells me, and would like to rebuild it, but doesn’t know if he can trust the guys he hired. Asks me to follow them while he spends days in the library reading Popular Mechanics and xeroxing articles from it. One day I come by the house and look around. They are clearly incompetent. They have begun at the top of the wall and are moving down toward the bottom. So far, they have built a kind of brick trim several layers thick around the top edge of where the wall will be. The clustered sections do not meet. Held in place by wire, they float there, teetering individually. Now and then a brick falls and goes thunk into the ground. I am not sure how I found this out, but the men are ex-cons. I go back to tell Emma this, and since I have been doing such a good job there, she says I can look around at the bookshelves and let her know if I see anything I like. Scene ends with me going through stacks and stacks of bookshelves, taking this book, this book, this book, putting them into a bag. Some of them aren’t even books I want – they’re just on a good press, like the one called "The Limp Dolphin" whose cover looks like "The Changing Light at Sandover" and is by an author I’ve never heard of before, but I figure what the heck good references. I am taking too many books and it is quite clear I will not be able to drag these home. For some reason K. has appeared and is helping me choose them: "You might…like this one over here…Tim." She is wearing all black as usual, and I assume she has been working with me at Emma's house or is it bookstore? Anyway, I don't want to take the really expensive books because I want Emma to stay in business, so I put back the ones I have selected that are in sealed plastic bags. I am still afraid I won’t be able to move with these huge bags. I have taken too many books, and need to run away with them before Emma returns and notices the empty shelves…