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60 Scenario The restricted clubs were sticky with ardor: it was like being under an old car, changing the oil, ratcheting free the muffler, serving them. Of course they seemed content, full of self-expression, complete with opinions like dress designs from the fifties long after the blueprints lost their luster. You have to imagine is no longer a viable strategy. All the gaps, the lacunas, rifts between me and them were singing in church and setting fire to the churches, while the quilt on the club wall was a display of fabric once loved, but now fashioned of borders and barricades. Inside was a hovel, a burrow, a hole, the windows crushed glass on the floor like rhinestones at the five-and-ten, while she was a spiked collar under me in her strapless gown, crossing the border, wearing a kerchief, affecting an accent that would allay the guard’s suspicion, the guard dogs and the songs they growled, pale echoes of the calm she must have known, must have known in the birthing room the way I knew the hallway with the lights off and the door locked, the whole crew of them knocking. Outside: the traffic and trafficking, clamping a hand over your mouth. ...

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