Brian Conn
In a thrifted bowler hat, wearing sunglasses at night, Edwina squeezed lime into pho and called for supervolcanic cataclysm. "Or meteor impact. Something to change everything." She flipped the exhausted lime wedge over the balcony and watched it disappear into the sweltering cacophony of construction drilling, protest shouting, tourist jetskis buzzing on the bioluminescent bay.
Donald tried futilely to gaze into her eyes (that was what the sunglasses were for). "I love revolution," he said uncomprehendingly. "I love keeping count: how many gigatons of rocket to Mars, how many hectares of nanocolony in the asteroids, how many populations of gene-edited—"
"Dear benighted Donald." In a chipped plastic bowl she mixed chili sauce and hoisin sauce, tap tap tap, something spicy something sweet, something turning a dull blood brown. "I am talking about a transformation of world-consciousness; you are talking about the mining of minerals. Rockets don't change people."
"Gene editing changes people."
"Gene editing adjusts people's lungs for indentured spacework. I am talking about a mighty and redemptive blow."
An ambulance cruised past, siren wailing, peaking, finally merging into the shuddering hum of a ventilation system coming online: red into white, a pink sound. Donald vaped passionately. "You have strong opinions," he said; "I love strong opinions. I love the way you eat noodles. It's proof of the axiom of choice."
Edwina regarded him skeptically over a strand of artificial tendon. "You have never before tried to interest me by speaking of the axiom of choice."
"But you know it?"
"Just because I am no longer in a mathematics department does not mean I have become an imbecile. The axiom of choice: from an infinite set of things, that it is possible to choose one thing."
"And you prove it by the way you eat noodles. If you had an infinite bowl of noodles you would still be able to take a bite." He squinted against a floodlight, face bright with beer, or whatever he was vaping, or heatstroke. "That's why you're my champion, Ted. Because you rescue the set of all objects from catastrophic disorder."
The pho was cold, the beer gone. Edwina imagined being the person Donald thought she was, making the choices that made the other choices make sense, streaking like a tracer bullet through the fog of the traceless world. A helicopter thumped overhead and away. "There are no choices, Donald. There is economics and there is cataclysm, and between those two forces we are a statistical fluid. I am never going to marry you."
He blinked moistly, like an anime character. "Are you still working on machine learning?"
"Popstream." She leaned forward, eyes dark under the shadow of the hat, mouth white in the ghastly glare of another flood. "I am training machines to write popstream."
"you there t PRODUCT THU!!!!!"
Creosote—Edwina felt stress hormones surging even before she consciously recognized her project officer's typecode and ludicrous text affectations. Employing her usual cognitive strategy for dealing with this shit, she physically distanced herself from the message and reread it as though it were a transmission from a parallel and inconsequential universe. Creosote, she gathered, desired an update on her current project, a machine-learned popwriting model, which was due Thursday.
That was fair.
"It's functional," she said, "but the output is still boring."
"WORM SEDAN. ungoodenough t! polynesia mussel should be BUNNY'S ONESIE."
From this Edwina gathered that Creosote was attempting to impress upon her the transformative potential of the project in question, a polymedia model. She had been working for Creosote for two months, had never met her, and regarded her as an almost purely abstract stress-generating mechanism.
"give idea," said Creosote.
Now she was talking like a text adventure, the worst thing that could happen; at this point she absolutely would not go away until Edwina gave idea. But Edwina had at best a vague impression that resembled idea from afar, like an old-west facade town hastily constructed to mislead bandits.
Training a popstream model was not unlike educating an exceptionally stupid child via a thousand-year media binge compressed into a day or two. Conventional models were trained with existing popstream; the conceit of polymedia was to use a wider variety of training data—zeta games, GIF automata, skin architectures, synchronized algae, cybernetic mochi, Cacks, Flox, Hollywood. The right training mix would theoretically enable the model to extrapolate the perfect popstream for the total cultural moment, but the right training mix was hard to find; most models generated pure beige.
Creosote texted a spray of question marks in the saturated colors of hypercandy.
"Training with everything at once is like putting every possible flavor in the same soup." She hoped that was a simple enough comparison. "Even if some flavors are good, the combination is bad. So I have to filter the set of all media down to a few flavors that go together, but nobody knows how to do that because the set of all media is unstructured and humongous."
Creosote texted a three-dimensional rotating anus.
Slowly, deliberately, Edwina peeled back a hangnail from the ring finger of her right hand. "What if we forget real media and generate our own fictitious training media? We have all the conventional old models. We can use them to make a focused content universe that we keep to ourselves and just use as training data for the new model. Like breeding a million variations on ginger and then combining them into delicious multidimensional gingerland soup."
Silence from Creosote. A howling rose from the floor; the apartment downstairs had recently turned into an asemic karaoke speakeasy and now Edwina listened to youth crooning gibberish until dawn. She still couldn't stop her brain from trying to parse it, like her building's shitty door AI that kept talking to traffic from the overpass.
"We do good they suck our dicks, ninety years," Creosote said. "Hundred ten years."
No further messages appeared. Edwina's palms were sweating, her heart rate elevated. Fucking body, fucking world. After one hundred seconds she poured herself a shaky cup of coffee and crumpled to the floor in front of the Emerald-City terrarium of Krebs, the Crab of a Different Color. "Don't try too hard, Krebs," she said. "Never try too hard."
The spots on the animal's shell shimmered. Were they finally resolving into a visual language, as the gene-editing combine's contemptible marketing materials claimed they would? She fished a stray molt out of the terrarium with the edge of a brochure. Not just for crabs! Be anyone you want—Access the building blocks of YOU!
"Flap your wings," she told the crab, "change the currents."
It was something Croque Monsieur had told her the first time she met him. They had been in jail together, she for brandishing a knife at a gene-editing facility, he for making recordings of cadaver dogs to process into a symphony; "but we're both doing the same thing," he said: "driving the murmuration. That's a flock of birds, the ones you see wheeling all together like a massive aerial amoeba. The way birds flock in the air, we flock in idea space. Independent agents, emergent collectivity." According to Croque Monsieur everything that produced content was a node in the murmuration—AIs and distortion bots, zombie politicorps and stochastic marketing juntas, even commercial popwriting models—they were all continuously guiding and being guided by each other like a single gestalt consciousness. "Flap your wings," he said, "change the currents." He was already old then, like iron left in the rain.
Edwina couldn't quite bring herself to believe that anything had an effect on anything else, but now every time she built a model she found herself scrolling through media feeds trying to read the currents. Was it something in her model causing the sudden popularity of pistol rituals, uranium enrichment, The Wealth of Nations? But if there were currents they were turbulent and inscrutable. Maybe it was all connected in theory, but the feeds never made any sense; it was just a gray goo of algorithms digesting algorithms all the way down.
Her phone dithered. "Marry me?" Donald's typecode.
"I would prefer not to."
She blocked him. For several minutes she watched streaks of orange light playing over the streets, the flamethrowers of the local drone-dueling league, as Krebs sulked arthropodally behind an urn.
"Bartleby, the Scrivener." She had been quoting it to Donald without thinking—old story, Wall Street clerk refuses to participate but only repeats the talismanic phrase. The axiom of choice must have reminded her of it; after all what was choice but a heroic capacity to effortlessly, ruthlessly, and endlessly prefer not to?
She checked the time, checked the resources on Creosote's account, and set a cheap open-source narrative model the task of rewriting every known human-written story including porn, with one randomly chosen character to be replaced by Bartleby saying only "I would prefer not to," thus eliciting new responses from the other characters and no doubt thoroughly derailing the plot. The total Bartleby-flavored output to be fed as training data into Creosote's new popstream model. Her artificial child would write pop from a world where every story featured Bartleby, and before long all the pop feeds, and all the people who listened to the pop feeds, would be awash in I would prefer not to like a virus.
The wailing downstairs swelled. From the neighboring high-rise came the drone of bass flute and the blue of a strobe: a party. As Edwina hit Submit she wondered who Creosote's client was.
"I have made a discovery, Teddy: we are descended from the horse lords."
"We are all descended from slaves and we are all descended from slavers. We are all descended from everybody and they are all dead." Edwina thumbed the door lock behind her and took her sister's call into the street. Headless electric trailers hurtled past, buffeting her with pressure waves and road dust.
"Mother!" Susan wailed.
"Pancake—" their mother joined the call—"your sister has been working on the horse lords for ages."
Edwina paused in the yard of an abandoned geriatric home to pick a dandelion and tuck it under her hatband. "I'm sure she doesn't mean to be geno-fascist, Mother, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to her."
"You are beastly to me," said Susan. "You used to love horses." She was going to cry.
Edwina hoped she would; it might make her feel better. It had been two weeks since Creosote had scooped the Bartleby model out of dev space, paid her, and wiped all trace of the project. Since then she had been scouring media feeds and found: nothing. No reluctant memes, no recalcitrant games or intractable chatbots, no more sign of this model than of anything else she had ever made. In fact even less, because there wasn't even any Bartleby-flavored pop.
"You follow popstream, don't you, Susan? Have you noticed it changing?"
"Changing? What would it change to?"
"I mean have you noticed yourself preferring not to?"
"Surely everybody would prefer not to. Teddy, are you spiraling?"
Edwina veered right at the end of the bridge and followed a trail down into a wooded gully. The dull roar of traffic changed to an enveloping metallic rumble.
"Where are you?"
"Under a bridge."
"Now she wants to turn into a troll," Susan wailed.
"Not necessarily," their mother said. "Pancake, why are you under a bridge?"
"My friend lives here."
Now they were both wailing, like a Greek chorus being mauled by bears. Satisfied, Edwina ended the call.
As she looked up from the bottom of the dirt embankment she could see Croque Monsieur's low windows and cinderblock wall nestled under the angle of the bridge like some obscure city infrastructure. She scrambled up, raising clouds of orange dust and collecting stones in her shoes, until she was level with the far pier, then followed the berm until she reached a maintenance hole cover.
"It's me." The magnetic lock thunked open as the door AI recognized her voice. The hum of traffic dwindled around her as she followed the underground corridor, and by the time she mounted the spiral staircase it was quiet as a monastery.
Croque Monsieur's hideaway was all clean concrete and washed-out light. On the far wall he had carved the abutment of the bridge into cubbyholes, now overflowing with mushroom cultures, eelskin scarves, and half-built robotic birds. The old industrial pulley that he had used in building the place hung from an I-beam in the kitchen over a row of windows looking down on the river.
He greeted her with a tumbler of homemade bitters. They tasted like the lunar plain before the advent of humankind. "Long time," he said.
She beamed but didn't dare touch him. A gentle but sustained beaming was the highest-bandwidth channel of affection to which Croque Monsieur was open.
He studied her. "You've been talking to your family again."
"Just some people I lived with when I was a child."
"I'm surprised you haven't changed genetics."
"What would I change to? Anyway the combine is monsters and open-source barely works on pigs. Is that an elliptical machine?" There were dumbbells too, everything crisp and new and offgassing formaldehyde, strangely out of place in the handmade environment of the hideaway.
"A project to capture the harmonies of the grueling," he said. "Black-market injectable nanotech is even now sending out metrics from my cells." He opened a screen where his biotelemetry was mapped onto sonic parameters—the old idea of rendering life processes into sound but finer-grained, with realtime readings for hormone levels, enzymes, something about lymph. "All that remains is to exercise until my physiology becomes luminous."
Edwina frowned. Croque Monsieur was older than ASCII and so thin he looked sprayed on. "Maybe you could start with the harmonies of the merely tedious and work your way up?"
"It may come to that; the damn thing won't start unless I give it a phone number." Croque Monsieur didn't have a phone number because, he said, phones were an illusion.
Before he could stop her Edwina ran her thumb chip over the reader. The machine pushed back with an ad for itself. "Done," she said. "It has mine now."
He shuddered. "Deep underground, a marketing algorithm is even now assembling language designed to destabilize your brain chemistry."
"I'll filter it."
"But the absolute offense of the thing." He passed her half a cantaloupe, dry as styrofoam but sweet with injected sucrose. "Until you have your filter trained you may look forward to frequent updates on my caloric budget."
Edwina hesitated. On one hand she had just helped Croque Monsieur, so he was obligated to help her with the Bartleby mystery; on the other hand it seemed stupid now. Popstream was sausage, everybody knew that, not even good sausage but the kind of sausage that was routinely adulterated with drywall. Meanwhile Croque Monsieur was up here capturing the physiological harmonies of the grueling like a proper artist.
"Have you noticed a hopelessness in the pop streams?" she said tentatively.
"Oh very much so. Yes, a weighty and ungovernable hopelessness."
"But a new hopelessness."
"Ah," he said. "No."
"Have you noticed an emerging global media paradigm based upon rejection of all things?"
He thought carefully. "Maybe you'd better explain."
She told him everything.
"And you thought everybody would catch the prefer-not-to bug and down tools?"
"Or something." She was filled with impotent rage, as though she had been unjustly dragged to the bottom of the sea. "You once told me making anything is about getting past the mechanism to the place where you have a choice. Nobody writes pop, nobody even writes the algorithms, it's all machine-learned, no choice. But designing a fantasy media landscape for the algorithm to grow in—I thought that was where I could make a choice. I thought I made a thing. Flap your wings, change the currents."
Croque Monsieur had gone vacant, looking down to the surface of the river furred by rain, the smooth streak under the arc of the bridge. "The red-billed quelea flocks in the millions," he said. "In those numbers it isn't a matter of currents so much as an atmospheric condition. Yet in media space we are a single murmuration hundreds of times larger."
Edwina fought to stop herself from wailing—like Susan, like her mother.
"It has seemed to me recently that all of this is a protracted death hallucination," Croque Monsieur said. "Or like being trapped in the event horizon of a black hole. Time slows abominably and you are stretched, 'like spaghetti' they always say, owing to the diabolical laws of matter."
Edwina wailed. It seemed to bring Croque Monsieur back to earth.
"But you are a Visigoth," he said fondly, "looking for a pattern as though it were a friend. If you want to track your model down you'll need old-fashioned detective work. You could start by extorting analytics from the customer—who were you working for?"
"A woman named Creosote. I don't know who else. It's a cell system, like a guerrilla army."
"Ask her for a date. These guerrilla-cell types are bound to be lonely; she'll melt like cheap printing. Is your dildonics charged?"
Edwina rolled her eyes. "Nobody uses those anymore." Sometimes it was impossible to forget that Croque Monsieur, for all his talk, was an old man who lived in a box. "What if she says no?"
He was already off among the dumbbells, sweeping up packing foam. "If she'd prefer not to? I suppose it means she's kept all the output for herself." When Edwina left he was pushing the elliptical machine to the window so he could watch the river while he ran.
As it transpired the question of dildonics was moot; Creosote was local. She arrived at the mini-golf course wearing rhinestone barrettes and lingerie, accompanied by a monstrous hound.
"I like your outfit," Edwina said, staring at her thighs.
"It's laminate. Why we on date?"
Everything Edwina had planned to say abandoned her. Whether it was due to the mix of pheromones or the implausible level of vocal fry or the forceful gaze of the hound Edwina didn't know, but Creosote was even more stressful in the flesh than she was electronically—and the assumption that she would melt like cheap printing had clearly been reckless. "I have an idea," Edwina managed.
Creosote knocked a golf ball through the throat of a whale, neatly avoiding the rotating uvula. "Money?"
"The murmuration."
"Better idea," Creosote said. "Money." She leaned close. "Listen: new product. Called Bite Me Bite You. Rabbit. Two-headed rabbit. But give injection, makes it belligerent. First head bites second head—second head bites first head—doesn't matter, either way. Dull teeth, tearing—herbivore. Video. Collect micropayments."
Edwina involuntarily pictured blood on mouth fur. "Why do you use an herbivore?"
"Ideal episode, twenty seconds. Use weasel, three seconds. Just explodes. Want in?"
Edwina did not want in. What she wanted, she reminded herself, was analytics. She hit a golf ball through a tunnel filled with Van de Graaff lightning and tried to adapt her conversation strategy. "Actually I do have an idea for making money."
"Money idea?"
"Heaps of money."
Creosote gasped.
"All I need is analytics for the popstream model we trained."
Creosote's voice went cold. "Gone," she said. "Collected."
"By who?"
"Daddies." She brightened. "Better idea! You have crab? Rabbit v. crab. Unique spectacle. Micropayments."
"You want Krebs to fight a two-headed rabbit?"
"Could make crab two-head. Fair? Or leave crab one-head, add claw. Three-claw crab v. two-head rabbit. Fair? How strong is claw."
"Not strong."
"Inject steroids."
Last hole. Creosote's hound bounded over the green among hanging lengths of rainbow tinsel. Creosote laughed and clapped her hands. "Dog-actualized obstruction. Rope drives them wild." She hopped from foot to foot. "Take shot," she said, "dog eats ball."
Edwina took a shot and the hound ate her ball.
"Dog has own analytics," Creosote said. "Has channel." The hound was wearing what Edwina had at first taken to be an orthopedic harness, but which she now realized was an armature for a number of cameras. "Want analytics? Get channel. Get dog and channel."
She took her own shot and sunk a hole in one.
"Favorite course," she said dreamily. "Should win Pulitzer, inventor of how to activate dog with rope. Mesmerism. We going to fuck?"
Old-fashioned detective work.
Creosote had a solid-state mattress on the floor and a freezer full of vodka. When she went to the bathroom Edwina rifled her drive. She found normal porn, fighting games. Gene-editing brochures, the kind they gave you afterward—Now you are anyone you want!
She stopped. She had spent a long time hate-reading gene brochures but what Creosote had was on another level—symbiotic nanotech, RF transmission, protein-based blockchain, tech that was supposed to be years away. It was so obviously worth a fortune that she knew even before she found the contract that Creosote must be indentured, edited up-front on the condition that she work for the combine afterward. Which meant Edwina was working for the combine too. But what did the combine want with popwriting models and gladiator rabbits?
When Creosote came out of the bathroom Edwina was on the other side of the room trying to pretend she didn't know about the artificial proteins even now harvesting weird data from her limbic system. She had changed into ankle beads, translucent glitter wraps, and the scent of sweet diesel. She brushed Edwina with a brown shoulder and voiced on the TV, filling the small room with strobes and cheering as half-women fought electric undead with quarterstaffs.
Without further preamble she pulled Edwina down to the mattress. Her thighs were preternaturally strong. The hound loomed over them, watching.
"Can we turn off its cameras?"
"Doesn't matter. Only records family scenes."
And why worry about the hound when Creosote herself, with her edits, amounted to a next-gen biological camera? Soon Edwina was sparkling with rapture neurons and fizzing with gratification reactions. Was this what it was like to be media, an abstract pattern traversing abstract patterns and finally entering the sensorium of a conscious body? She imagined she was popstream entering Creosote's pleasure center, a blue bolt of infectious information penetrating the brain. But if the gene combine was in Creosote's brain, did that mean Edwina was penetrating the gene combine? Or was the combine, in occupying Creosote's brain, somehow penetrating Edwina?
She came in confusion. Her phone dithered and she turned it off without looking. "Fuck," said Creosote, neutrally.
Later, with the mattress massaging her feet and vodka swirling in a distant immaterial part of her, she watched the hound gnawing on a rubber airplane. At night Creosote, whatever else she did, would put on sweatpants and lie on this stupid mattress in this shitty apartment, huddled against the hound.
A cartoon wasp wearing Aladdin slippers appeared on TV and said, "I would prefer not to."
Edwina sat up. Creosote groped her impatiently. "Cartoon."
"What did it say?"
"Catchphrase."
"How long has it been saying that?"
"A week." She watched the screen with naked awe. "Where does idea come from?"
But Edwina knew where this idea came from. She did not know how or why, but the timing was perfect and more importantly it made sense: Creosote had passed the Bartleby model to the combine and the combine had processed it, had ground her sausage into different sausage, and this cartoon had somehow been spattered with the blood spray. Maybe it was part of a social experiment, maybe it was a marketing department gone rogue, maybe it was even a scheme to produce new gene algorithms; or maybe, like whatever Creosote's job was, like whatever was happening in Creosote's body, it was nothing that could be called intentional but only the unfathomable algorithm of the combine, grinding because grinding was what it knew.
"The problem," Edwina said, "is there is just so much evil."
Creosote's eyes went suddenly flat. "You trying to unionize?" The lines of her face were hard and alien. "Unions stand between you and work. Between you and money." She threw her elbows out and pressed her two fists against the sides of her head, either to illustrate unions coming between Edwina and her money or simply because she was insane. "Lesson I learned the hard way," she said: "money comes straight. Comes raw. Nothing between me and money. Fuck unions."
From the car she called to take her home, Edwina looked up at Creosote's window and thought queasily of the pulsing pipeline of the combine's money flowing through Creosote's accounts, which since Creosote's accounts were held in nanotech in her bloodstream meant flowing through Creosote's body. The silhouette of canine jowls jiggled in the window. She could burn the building down, but Creosote would not even understand.
She gave the car the coordinates of Croque Monsieur's bridge. Pavement rumbled beneath her: cement mixers passing, floodlights and motorcycles, and in the dark scent of leather and artificial watermelon she finally opened her phone; and between the white arc of headlights and the red glow of brakelights, as she flowed with a thousand other autonomous beacons like a collective dragon over the nighttime highway, the messages appeared, row after row of boldface, from Croque Monsieur's elliptical machine.
"WARNING," said the messages. They highlighted a three-digit number. They recommended immediate medical assistance. They were timestamped over an hour ago.
The number was a heart rate: two hundred.
But that couldn't be accurate, she thought; Croque Monsieur would never end in a number so simple and so round.
Afterward she would not remember what happened earlier or later, or the causes of things or the consequences, but only the noise. Sirens and engines drowning in a red gyre of emergency lights, the snarl of a bullhorn, the choppy deafening grumble of the powered ram they brought to break down the walls. The coded chirp of traffic-control beacons and the clank of the greasy chain they slipped over Croque Monsieur's pulley to lower the stretcher down the embankment.
Edwina spent all night at the police station trying to claim the drive on which the physiological event of his death had been rendered into music. The police agreed that such a thing existed and that they had no use for it, but in the end they simply kept it.
When she emerged the sky was yellow brass, the concrete a salt plain, the street crowded with people talking mumbo jumbo and photographing themselves. Her phone dithered: nudes from Creosote, a file from Susan entitled Horse Lords, messages from the elliptical machine complaining of dust.
And there was Donald, grinning and wide-eyed in mere idiocy, walking a bicycle with a Toto basket.
"Did you feed Krebs? Did you get my texts? You didn't have to come."
"I'm sorry to tell you this," Donald said, "but your crab died. I fed him anyway because I promised."
Edwina looked up the street: pulled pork and haze, twins on pennyfarthings, boys in enormous shorts, a laser show about coffee. Down the street: gaming theaters, yoga dungeons, hallucinatory ice cream, robotic dolphin massage, the fucking ballet.
"Croque Monsieur left me his gene copyright," she said. "I can get his sequences edited into my own if I want."
"And turn yourself into him?" Donald giggled bobbleheadedly. "What a goon. You already know who you are—axiom of choice. And if you're choosing from an infinite set, another option doesn't make any difference."
"I guess he was just trying to write his name on the earth."
The blanket over the Toto basket quivered. Edwina had a terrible premonition, struck by something in the way Donald was behaving today—his unusual buoyancy, his extraordinary fatuousness.
"I brought you something," he said.
"No."
"Joy!" Even before he finished whisking away the blanket a fluffy golden puppy collided with her chest. When she made no move to catch it it fell to the sidewalk and, apparently uninjured, transitioned instantly to ecstatic barking.
"No," she said.
"Your crab died, your friend died, your boss is a cyborg, and you won't marry me, but you can't have nothing."
Edwina gazed into the creature's maw. Reflexively she did the math. Would it live fifteen years? Would it shit twice a day? Suppose it would shit seven hundred times a year, maybe up to a thousand, but maybe it would not live fifteen years. Nevertheless Donald was asking her to pick up approximately twelve thousand shits—maybe as many as fifteen thousand.
"What are you going to call him?"
For an instant everything stopped. It was the Bartleby virus, aerosolized by an nth-order process of the gene combine into p-dimensional form and now falling over the earth: people fell silent, robots rested, engines died, the dog looked fearfully at the sky; no drones buzzed, no basses thumped, no criers cried, no lasery gewgaws pinged. Shining air shellacked green lizards onto glittering concrete highrises, and Edwina knew the human era had passed and there would now be emptiness, and the emptiness would pass and behind it would be the eternal and incontrovertible sun-devouring goat, whose bleat is brain plaques, whose eyes are quantum anomalies ringed with asbestos.
Then a leaf blower roared and the moment fell apart. The puppy gazed up at her with warm brown eyes. "Communism," she said.
Donald crouched to fondle the animal. "Who's a good boy? Communism! Who's a sweet boy? Communism! Ooo! Ooooooo!"
She could send the yellow dog away, but she knew she would not. She could harm it but she knew she would not, neither now nor later; she would spare it today and every day, a thousand times a day, in its life perhaps 4.4 million times. Was that all love was, the choice every day to spare the fragile body, to touch but gently and by will alone not to wound?
The puppy, stirred into a frenzy, began to pee on her leg.
"He doesn't mean anything by it," said Donald. "He just gets excited."