irk was glad he was on acid, though he hadn’t counted on upsetting the bride. He had always gotten along with Marla. He was grateful, in fact, for her many timely interventions that prevented more than one incident from becoming irredeemably ugly. No, he’d stupidly forgotten to take Marla’s feelings into account and now here he was making an ass of himself. “Sorry, Marla,” he mutters, while licking the frosting from his fingers, silently wishing he were surrounded by his followers, rather than with the Unknown. Fuck. Revenge, as they say, is a dish that tastes better cold, and he certainly hadn’t been his usual cool self lately. Despite that, he was glad to be tripping, and fuck Scott, anyway. Shit, his invitation, addressed in his unmistakable (though often unintelligible) scrawl, arrived two weeks after William got his, and William’s arrived a month after everybody else in the goddamned globe got one. Jesus, he should have taken it more seriously when Scott started “jokingly” referring to “his” hypertext novel, “his Unknown web site”, “his prose” as opposed to “our” (meaning, clearly inferior) poems. Dirk feels like he’s too young to be nostalgic for the good old days, when the Unknown was a lark and not some fascist assignment-generating machine. He needs another drink, too, it seems.

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