The fly in the emotional ointment here being the initially-mentioned Don Megala, eternal student, dulcimer-craeftig, whose connection with Myrnaloy Trask, visible through Collective Copy's window via the reflecting umber glass of the ever-halted Northampton bus, is undeniable, though ambiguous -- Megala being in his heyday an epic drinker and chaser of skirt, both the denim skirts of Northampton's straight female leftists and the tartan skirts of the aesthetically-inclined Smith College set whose poetry readings, madrigal recitals, and sherry-and-scone mixers Megala haunts, earning himself the designation Der Döpplebanger by Smith's artistes-in-the-know -- and Myrnaloy being shy, withdrawn, clearly inexperienced, and, even more clearly, deeply ambivalent about men.
      It is now appropriate to note that Barry Dingle and Don Megala enjoy some slight acquaintance through the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, that Megala had been going through the motions on an abortive sociobiology dissertation while Dingle completed his undergraduate studies in Digestive Science, that they had had in common a mentor and advisor -- one W.W. Skeat, a socio-digestive biologist best known for his thesis that the underlying and true cause of cancer is in fact plain old human saliva -- and had both done substantial research under and lab-assisting for this mentor, advisor, Skeat. Noted further is the fact that Megala regards Dingle with the jolly condescension reserved for the cross-eyed, buck-toothed and sock-and-sandal-shod, while Dingle, lately under the emotional aegis of his homunculoid love, harbors for Megala a mute dislike, an active wish to do him harm, from a distance.
      Megala being the fly in the ointment of romance vis à vis Myrnaloy, it is understandable that Barry Dingle, whenever the opportunity presents itself, arranges to observe Myrnaloy and Megala together -- not actually following M & M, mind you, given documented eye-and mobility-troubles, but rather just arranging to be located, inconspicuously, wherever they are likely to appear together.
      Opportunities for such observation are not few, Myrnaloy and Megala to be seen by Dingle variously: sipping four-dollar espressos at Northampton's Leftward Ho Cafe; strolling hand in hand through any one of the city's fifty-six used-book stores; waving a shared banner at weekly allies of the Northampton Anti-Nuclear And Non-Aligned Nations' And Neighbors' Alliance, Myrnaloy having been recording secretary of NANANANANA since its mid-seventies inception; exercising together on the town common's public aerobics palestrae; etc.; and, of course, variously talking, confiding, nuzzling, arguing, being ambiguous, all in the bus-reflected Collective Copy window.
      Not to mention patronizing Adam Baum's own Good Things to Eat, Ltd., The Whole Thing's chief sit-down competition, a tiny-windowed establishment which Dingle, incurring substantial professional risk, begins incospicuously patronizing as well. Picture Dingle, in early '83, hunched, poncho-swaddled, his cotton pellets grimed with the floor's sawdust, in a Good Things booth as M & M establish themselves over a whole-grain dinner at their usual table directly behind him. They are deep in conversation. Barry Dingle and his immoderate love listen. Myrnaloy seems just to have finished pouring an ambivalent heart out to Megala on the subject of men and sex. Dingle's ears are aprick, his carrot cake hardening and pepper-mint tea chilling, untouched.
      Myrnaloy, on the last leg of a redditive narrative journey, is revealing, fragilely, with many stuttered pauses, that she is terrified of sex. Thoroughly terrified. She alludes to some shadowy long-ago trauma, some betrayal, the details of which Megala, judging from the sympathetic and reinforcing soft sounds he keeps making as he chews, already knows. Barry Dingle's love gnashes its teeth at Barry's not knowing what Megala knows. Myrnaloy's voice is trembling; she is revealing that she is, at thirty-five, flower-child-past and all, still technically maiden. She states that sex holds a great, albeit undefinable, terror for her.
      Don Megala gives Myrnaloy Trask to understand that he understands, that he regards -- nay, genuflects to her attitude as one more than just understandable, don't you know, but as somehow deeply sexually-politically correct. He reveals that he lost his own innocence at fifteen and has been terrified ever since. That he lives in sexual terror. That sex is, by nature, terrifying.
      To Dingle's horror he finds himself in significant agreement with Megala.
      But what Megala is about here, Barry is roughly told, is clear. Yes Dingle's love smells impending seduction. Dingle searches through his angled glasses for some reflecting surface in the restaurant, anything in which to study Myrnaloy's facial reaction to Megala's inevitable upcoming arguments. He imagines her looking down, rouged with self-revelation, dabbing at nothing with a recycled napkin, smiling hesitantly, gratefully, at Megala's understanding, his willingness to share a vulnerability. Yet it's the willingness-to-share gambit. The homunculoid establishes itself in an orbit of impotent rage around Dingle's carved heart.
      Because But wonderful, too, Megala is going on to muse out loud. His voice is pocked with the tiny hesitations of purposeful sincerity. Sex, Megala means. Even the terror of sex is, in fact, wonderful, in a terrible sort of way.
      Dingle envisions Megala's delicate white hands covering Myrnaloy's delicate white hands. Dingle is pale, helpless, staring into the distant fossil of his dinner.
      Because sex also being, let's both be honest with ourselves and admit it, a pretty big thing in this predominantly short and unhappy life, Megala adds. How sad it would be to depart the coil without taking, as it were, a look around at life, to see what's what. Surely sex is one of the big whats in life, to be at least looked at, no? Or so he tells himself, he tells her, whenever his perfectly appropriate terror threatens to get the best.
      Dingle envisions clean binocular eye-contact between M & M.
      And it's hard to think of a more natural thing in this life, Megala muses out loud, than intimacy between a man and a woman who share mutual concerns and respect and correctness. Who care. No? A natural, natural thing. Like the coruscating flora of autumn. A cotton Nehru jacket dried on the line. A bird wheeling before a stiff gust. And, irony of ineluctable ironies, are not the very most natural things in life often the most terrifying? Does ... could Myrnaloy share this feeling, this insight? This sad, wonderful, terrifying irony?
      Dingle hears Myrnaloy make a gentle noise variously indicative of: agreement, gratitude, admiration, the recognition of something unseen that's been recognized for her. Dingle's love twirls, staring balefully at its blurred reflection in Dingle's clean pounding courage-scripted heart.
      There is the violent sound of Megala vacuuming the bottom of his glass with a straw. Each of Dingle's eyes contemplates its reflection in the other.
      An absolute scuttling mink, hisses Barry Dingle's love.
      Pardon? whispers Barry Dingle.
      This guy is a sterling example of a mink, says the homunculoid.
      A mink?
      A technical term for a certain kind of low-rent player in the love game, the love says; 'Mink,' noun, meaning basically someone who's smooth on the outside, but inside still basically just a weasel.
      A smooth weasel?
      The guy is minkness in motion, says the love, and here we sit, inert. It goes for a shiny metatarsal's tip, in the sawdust.
      Megala and Myrnaloy exit Good Things. Dingle can finally see them, far away, through the cashier's little round window to which he's half-run, limping. They are detaching the leash of Myrnaloy's Nixon from a Good Things leash-hook. Disappearing in a direction opposite that of Collective Copy. Leaving behind a slim trail of Nixon's digestive distress.
      The following couples grapple into the wee hours of this early June night: Myrnaloy Trask and Don Megala; Barry Dingle and Barry Dingle's love.


Fly-ridden ointment or not, recall that Barry Dingle has, as of 6 June, reoriented himself, that the needle of his emotional compass now points, shakily or not, toward the pole of action. Action number one is taking place right this minute, on the morning of 6 June, as Dingle sits at his fiberboard TWT desk, absent his thick glasses, composing an advertisement for a new line of wheat germ with coconut and date-dust mixed right in. He hand-letters a flier outlining nutritional virtues and introductory discounts. He finishes flier, caps magic marker, submits flier to Nigel for the correction of doubled letters and incongruities of scale, and lets Nigel edit while he, Dingle, drifts pensively through the store's bulk-aisle, past broad side windows, past clean sunwashed plastic trashcans brimming with granolas, past nuts, dried fruit, protein powders, bran-barrels, trowels, degradable baggies, scales, to The Whole Thing's frontal display pane. In the window of the idling bus can be seen Myrnaloy, fetchingly distant at the control of her Xerox behind the CC customer counter. The arched-bridge-esque figure of Nixon is to be seen ranging over a spread-out pile of invalidated bulletin-board submissions. Against the CC counter leans Don Megala, flushed and shiny, speaking out of one side of his mouth to Baum, the Good Things proprietor whose fliers enjoy, through the influence of Megala, a consistent place on a Collective Copy board whose facilities Dingle has never had the gumption even to request.
      Nigel pronounces the flier clean copy. Dingle finds the thing in his hands, alludes to a vague problem with the copier in The Whole Thing's stock room, and says perhaps he'll just whisk over next door to Collective Copy. Nigel mans the TWT con while Dingle embarks on what is possibly history's slowest whisk, three wide elliptical passes at the copy center's entrance, last-second veerings, sudden reversals of flight at the compulsion of the homunculoid, who has only to feint at Dingle's sandals to get its point across. The closure of ellipse number three sees Dingle pass under the bulletin board, fumble between the old wooden door's two apparent knobs, glom finally on to the genuine article, hear the ching of the customer bell, and enter the lair of M & M. The place is hot, full of the dry chemical wind of roaring copier and rattling automatic collator. Flier in hand, Dingle steps over the tortured figure of Nixon and makes for the customer counter.
      Baum having decamped at TWT's approach, here is Megala, alone, under his arm a used copy of Stuart Gilbert's Ulysses-guide. Megala greets Dingle with broad enthusiasm, extends a doubled hand. Dingle hopes very much he won't be clapped on the back. Smells of cork and yeast exit Megala's mouth; his eyes are red as certain toes, a filigreed road-guide to the state of post-lunch fermentation he now enjoys. Dingle's tense smiling cheeks spasm as two Myrnaloys leave the copier and approach; Megala has called for a look at this flier of Dingle's, here. Myrnaloy Trask is close. Two denim skirts, two workshirts the pale blue of tired laundry, Xerox aprons, four knee-socks. Eyes and forehead framed in tiny dry wrinkles and squeezed in a kind of tight pain against the hot June window-light, but Dingle can see only two milky facial outlines that resist resolution or rapprochement. A customer enters, as does a unit of spring wind, carrying to the counter the rich smell of Nixon. Megala wrinkles his nose, reaches across the pitted counter for what appears to Dingle as the twin-towered facade of a Bass Ale.
      Megala, with a flourish, introduces Dingle to Myrnaloy. Her hand is white and delicate, if a bit unsoft. Dingle's tongue is dry meat in his mouth. Myrnaloy acknowledges Dingle as somehow connected with The Whole Thing, next door. Megala outlines Dingle's curriculum vitae for Myrnaloy. Dingle brandishes the advertisement, requests copies. Costs are negotiated, specifications specified; Myrnaloy retreats to her machines. Nixon sniffs with ominous interest at Dingle's sandals.
      Megala comments on the weather, the bus, the lager, the Laffer Curve's impact on the whole-grain and dulcimer trades. Largely without punctuation. At least two of his three sheets are flapping. Dingle can tell, standing here at the counter, fingering the collar of his poncho, that Myrnaloy is still within earshot, despite the roar of Xeroxes, from the unmistakable way Megala directs his voice to the wide empty parqueted space between Dingle and Trask. There are twine-gnarled subtexts here to which Barry is not privy: Megala's loud voice is making Myrnaloy strangely tight-lipped; Dingle watches her face expand at the sides. His love tightens the screws on a digit, shrieking silently at Dingle to act, to speak, reveal something of himself before this woman and her mink of a beau.
      So I see you have at least one Stuart Gilbert, there, under your arm, Dingle says to Megala. I guess I'll assume, he says, that the Stuart Gilbert you have there under your arm is material for a dissertation.
      Assume away, says Megala, who's been counting heavily on the source in question and is now disappointed, to say nothing of pissed, to find that Gilbert's work on what Megala keeps calling The Big U' is just a reference guide, not an analysis -- original, as opposed to recapitulatory, scholarship is not a Megala-strength.
      Assume away, he says; worthless, though, the man vastly overrated, important implications overlooked, mere surfaces scratched, Dedalus's oedipal psyche stands unrevealed, the metamorphosis from young artist to Telemachoid heir a blank, his dead love-object a scholastic deletion.
      So a challenge, then, says Dingle.
      Or a study in futility, smiles Megala, less wryly than he means to, eyeing a red triangle on the Bass bottle in some sort of thousand-yard expectation.
      At this point Dingle finds himself staring at the images of Myrnaloy Trask bent reproductively over the photographic strobe of the copier. He makes certain observations -- mute, internal, lyrical about her breasts, which happen to be budging almost geologically against her worn work-shirt; about the hip-induced swells in her denim skirt; about the bristly shine of her white legs above the socks' wool. Standard metaphors are invoked. Now, in a gesture of thoroughly unconscious cooperation, Myrnaloy brings her right ankle up behind her and tends to the top of a tired sock. Dingle perspires freely. His eyes stare into each other over the bridge of his nose. There is a sinister protrusion near the hem of a certain poncho. Dingle shifts closer to the protective counter. Megala drinks at his bottle. Nixon diddles on a box of Hammermill bond.
      Megala, soaring on the wings of futility's study, waxes nostalgic, collegial. He asks after Skeat. Dingle has not seen Skeat for years, believes him to be out West, living on grants. Myrnaloy glances through the flash of photocopy at the post-prandial foot-traffic on the sidewalk outside. Megala calls to her, jolly, regarding a Dingle-anecdote, set in the UMass research laboratory of W.W. Skeat, an incident dated 1968. He says the incident concerns Dingle. Dingle's immoderate love whispers encouragement. Myrnaloy's eyes register what could be called interest. Dingle clears his throat. Two Myrnaloys move through blinking mists toward the counter, the copier on automatic pilot. Dingle tells.
      Picture this. It is 1968. Barry Dingle, burning the midnight fluorescence in the basement laboratory of Skeat, is bent over the special microscope he, Dingle, requires to fuse a slide studied into unified, eyelash-free focus. He wears a white lab-coat and thongs. He is using the microscope to observe the activities of some routine germs, parameciae, in a droplet of saliva from the mouth of a melanoma patient. The germs swim aimlessly around, engage in activities. Dingle observes them. Then, on a whim,
      On a whim, mind you, he says,
      he removes the slide from its clips, turns it around, reinserts it, and again bends to observe. He notes something curious in the movements of the germs at issue.
      Megala belches, incurring the empathy of Nixon. Myrnaloy betrays distaste, looks back again at Dingle, who's still crowding the counter.
      Dingle, in the past, in the lab, becomes excited. He turns the scope's slide again. Looks. Sure enough. The germs are swimming north. Not aimless. Not just around. North. Only aimless if seen from one angle. Turn the slide, the wily germs take sharp lefts and rights, head due north again.
      Megala chuckles. Myrnaloy's four eyes are on Dingle, perplexed. North? she says.
      Not just around, Megala says. The aimlessness only apparent.
      North, Dingle says. They swim north. Sense the ephemeral pull of some deep geologic magnet. Heed its call.
      North for the summer, says Megala.
      Dingle manipulates the hood of his poncho. And the whole on-a-whim insight a matter of perspective, was what excites, he says. See? Look from just one angle: things seem aimless, disordered. Flux reigns. Change the angle: illumination. Pattern. Order.
      His love whips a checkered flag downward.
      Look at a thing from some variety of perspectives, Dingle says; input from let's say even just two completely different angles: see matters in a whole new light, potentially.
      Northern expedition, ruminates Megala.
      It was exciting, Dingle says quietly.
      Except it was Skeat was the one who wrote it up, Megala says. Got himself a Guggenheim^2 out of it. Dingle here got no credit. Skeat gave him the academic shaft. The big femur.

^2 See W.W. Skeat, "The Intrinsic Northern Orientation of the Paramecium in Neoplastic Human Saliva," Principium Salivato, v.2, nos 2&3, 1970.

      Dingle smiles shyly. Credit not important. The insight itself important. Epiphany under cold lights. Beside myself with joy, that night.
      The homunculoid thumbs-ups its approval, reclines on a shiny ventricle, polishing its fingernails against the front of its tunic.
      Myrnaloy: And now you manage The Whole Thing?
      Yes. Problems in terms of medical-school applications. Finances. Vision.
      The Skeat thesis, laughs Megala. Watch what you swallow, Myrnalove.
      The relevant Xerox grinds into automatic shut-off. Myrnaloy retrieves Dingle's original, hands him a stack of warm noisome copy.
      Fine, fine copies, Dingle says, flipping through, willing himself not to squint. Myrnaloy punches up his bill.
      Megala gestures over at the register. Why not let Dingle put one upon the old board, Myrnaloy, he suggests, grinning. A quo for his quid.
      Really a first-rate new product, Dingle stammers, gratitude and resentment toward Megala swirling together oily in his heart, which pounds. Excited about the chance to be part of, he says; happy to arrange a complimentary.
      Why not, Myrnaloy says tightly, figuring tax.
      Dingle's immoderate love senses tension between tight Myrnaloy and scabrous Don.
      I sense tension here, it says. It takes care of Dingle's potentially disastrous poncho-protrusion so that he's free at last to leave the pelvic shelter of the store's counter.
      Thanks, mutters a relieved Dingle.
      No problem, says Megala. The inevitable dreaded back-clap descends; Dingle's small coughing fit is also quashed. Megala and Nixon head for the restroom. Myrnaloy removes tools from a double-locked drawer marked BOARD, heads for the door, Dingle and Dingle's love in emotional tow.
      Dingle stands in sunlight before the complicatedly-colored bulletin board with Myrnaloy Trask. He is dizzy from the ripe distinctively feminine fragrance that surrounds this slatternly woman who is not unerotic.
      Really a well-edited board, he says; admired it in passing on countless.
      Myrnaloy says nothing. With practiced tweezes of a staple-claw she amputates a slick proclamation for a trampoline-a-thon benefitting the Quebecois Separatist Party, the final gymnast having succumbed June 4. Dingle's wheat-germ-and-dust notice inherits its position, is staple-gunned into place.
      Dingle's own personal notice has been attracted by two professionally typeset, black-and-white notices that sit dead center on the board's prized eye-level row. The images almost focus. He squints, covers an eye, reads slowly, transfixed by the following flier's text: