There was a moment upon awakening when the sludgy character, somewhat like Dante in the Wood of the Suicides, envisioned himself staring at the bark of a talking tree, but the spectacle of a potential I-Thou relationship with a tree in fact was a memory of the last time he fainted with his head propped up against a tree following a bout of shyness so powerful that it made him phhysically ill, and now erupted into a fit of nausea so powerful that he suspected for a moment that he was in fact sitting at a country club luncheon in honour of George W. Bush's compassionate conservatism, and then realized that in fact he was nestled extremely closely to the beautiful, if somewhat feverish, woman who was scribbling all over his blueprints. His nausea instantly disappeared, to be replaced by the overwhelming desire to change his name to Simon de Beauvoir, and behave like a sap trailing after her, spouting masculinist slogans for the next forty years. In the meantime, he played dead, which he did as if he had been born to it, and watched through half-closed eyes the extraordinary machicollations unfolding before him like the dumping of a suitcase of dirty clothes on the laundry room floor after a long trip.

There then came into his mind the classic moment in "The Day The Earth Stood Still" when Michael Rennie changes the equations on Sam Jaffe's blackboard, and Sam Jaffe says, "How do you know these equations work?" and Rennie answers: "Because they got me across a million miles of interstellar space."

For while he had been unconscious, the conscious part of his mind, which had for some unconscionable reason been out getting a burger while all this was going on, suddenly returned, and opened up a Second Front, i.e. "WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, YOU PATHETIC JERK?" This seemed not just apposite, but downright insightful. His unconscious had no answer to that. On the other hand, the lady was extremely close, and gave off an odour which to most nostrils would be redolent of a layer of wet bread, a layer of hamsters, a layer of marmosets, followed by a layer of bread crumbs, followed by a layer of unspayed cat, followed by a layer of mayonnaise, followed by a top layer of wet bread again; but which was strangely moving to the untrepid boob. His being was torn.

Meanwhile, the page filled with ever more of the differentials to which he was uncommonly partial.