(xxv)


Padding down the hall in my holy tennis shoes. Abstracted: the fields, their fluxes; the commutators, then, of those same fluxes. Looking up, I see her coming. She is staring straight ahead, with a peculiar smile.

“Hello,” I say.

She says nothing.

I smile at her, then.

She'll say nothing still. She turns her head away instead, and smiles at the wall.

And so we pass.

Giuseppe finds me half an hour later, drinking coffee in the Student Union. I am still laughing. “What?” he asks, with an uncertain grin. “Nothing,” I say. “But I'm in love.”

We pose the question for discussion: how long may one subsist, upon the Occasional Smile.