When there's a break in conversation I move to make actual plans: Why don't you meet me at Pikram Point and we'll go from there? 'No', she objects: 'As I said, I have no interest in' the blechy cafeteria. I assure her I meant the Italian place—to be honest I'm not sure what I meant but I certainly mean the Italian place now. She agrees and we go our several ways.
I head home—rooms I am renting from a guy; echoes of my Cape Canaveral beachfront condo—which for some reason is now *not* over yonder by the cafeteria and the Italian place but instead is quite close to the classroom where we have been working. (Doing what? No clue. Educating, presumably.) I hunt for a particular green shirt to wear to dinner. It is hiding. I have only recently assigned clothing to drawers and haven't quite memorized my own arrangement. The bedroom is laid out essentially as the back room in my grandparents' trailer (excuse me: mobile home: Nanny would insist) where I used to stay as a child, nearly every weekend of the 1970s. In the dresser on the southern wall I find shirts in the middle drawer but they are crammed in with socks on top. What was I thinking? I start picking up the socks and piling them in the crook of my right arm. The shirt I'm looking for still isn't in evidence, but I need to find a new place for the socks. I check the drawers under the bed but they are filled with my landlord's things. I notice an object that resembles a gun at first, but it's just an eyeglass case. I amuse myself thinking that the eyeglass case must now, without fail, go off in the third act. Finally I find an empty drawer to serve as sock drawer.
I suppose I am running out of time so, green shirt or no, I head toward Pikram Point. Somehow part of this travel involves a boat. The restaurants are in the neighborhood immediately east of Pikram Point, and the place itself is well signed. Still, the whole surrounding area is not anything like a grid: it very much resembles a hybrid theme park/shopping district, all laid out in spidery geometry for pedestrian traffic only. I have to follow the signs and remind myself of landmarks I think I remember from last time and hope to remember next time. A sign directs me through an arcade, on the end of which is a stage, maybe a foot off the ground, covered but open-air on two sides, on which a group of some five or six people are singing in an Eastern European language. They are all wearing black tunics with gold hems and wee heraldic motifs embroidered in matching gold. I cannot tell what language or where the musical tradition is from. It is not Georgian but I guess that it is geographically and ethnically close. I naturally stop to observe.
Between songs one of the male choristers explains to the audience they're listening to really bawdy stuff: the song may sound respectable, he says, but it's even more fun in the original language. Some guy at the front of the audience drunkenly says 'I know!' and the singer (good-naturedly) says 'How do you know? Do you speak [dream-obscured language]?' Drunk dude shuts up and does a pantomime version of hemming and hawing. But the singers want to drive the point home, so one of the women proposes to give a translation of the song they most recently finished singing. It's a first-person register of sins, compiled from every wastrel and dissolute youth featured in Carmina Burana. Stuff like: 'I ransom fellow criminals so I can drink the bounty'... While she's reciting the English translation, the smokin'est guy onstage (think Jaro Bouchac) acts out each listed transgression, including: 'I open up a bottle and I pour it down my pants'. The point of this is not quite clear; presumably the author hopes to induce someone to go diving in after the spilt liquor. And it's true: I really want to volunteer in any case.
But that appears to be the whole song, and the group moves on to their next number, and I head off to Pikram Point to find my friend, who turns out to be a cat running around like a crazy person.
