Consequences and the laws of thermodynamics are the only things that matter, he thinks, his eyes empty of focus, but still occupied by a small errant red balloon drifting up and away over the parking lot. The best laws are estimates for the illusion of causality anyway. Just below the jostling dot, an atrophied calypso of rusted roller coaster tracks. The returning mistress winter strokes his cheek through the open window of his van, his head settled dog-like on the mantle, and he turns his collar up. After a moment, he cleans his glasses. Distracted no longer by the red traveler in the monolith of the Octobering sky, reality creeps back into to Gene’s gauzy perceptions. He can see her face in the door of the morning bedroom, half-hidden by the frame, spying on him.

“Hey you.” She smiles, slightly. “Everything all right?”

He can see the tears in her eyes. This was what, now, a week ago? Yes, on the bed beside him: a paper with the article he had been reading in disbelief.

Coney Goes Kooky

A new attraction may take Coney Island’s status from revered hispter/freak hangout up to the esoteric realms of the surrealists. Dubbed “Little Congo,” a new attraction, that has recently gained political endorsement from the Borough President as well as neighborhood businessmen, will be a drive through wild animal habitat housing up to two troops—nearly twenty-four—African Chimpanzees. The attraction will be one-of-a-kind in the world and actually has support from a large number of groups that would otherwise be politically at odds with one another. It would seem that strife and difficulty with poachers in the African inlands has made a plight of the Central African primate…

That she’d had anything to do with it hardly mattered compared with how she’d had anything to do with it. He wasn’t sure what paled more in comparison, her loss of resolve for them or for her own ideals. Either way, she was unrecognizable.