Yes, Ms. Wand? said he to Ms. Wand. (What is that: a stain on a portion of the desk which I have known was there but haven’t really experienced as having been there. I will probably clean it up before I experience it as there.) (What is that: corner of a room. If only I could call it that and know it forever as such. Had I any grasp at all of cardinal directions, so that I could, for example, call that corner the SW corner. Someone could say, in which corner would you like me to put it? And I would say, put what? And they would say “the statue”, and I would say, put the statue in the south-west corner, if you don’t mind. And he would say, which one is the South-West? Or she would say that, or someone would say that. And I would say, it’s that one, and I would point to it, and I would be correct, not that that person would know it, because nobody knows the cardinal directions. But he would think that I knew it and would be correct. And then I would look at the statue there perhaps, perhaps I should after all have a statue there, and it would indicate to me some good ideas on important topics. I might learn something about myself by looking on this statue.)
Yes, Ms. Wand? (Ms. Wand, having rejected what she initially thought, turned back. What had she initially thought?) If only he could be more serious or less so, or seem more so and laugh more at how serious he seemed. If only he could laugh more, oh how that would improve things! O how his laughter would ring! His laughter would fall from him constantly! But instead, as a person would look gravely down at an elderly friend who had fallen; so would Assuss look down toward the grave of his feet, at those very moments when he ought to have been laughing at himself. He looked like a man horrified for a friend at those moments when he should have been most laughing at himself, though of course he didn’t have a friend. Sprawling on the floor, that friend, unable to rise, that grand heavy statue of the emperor having fallen, what an emptiness there was in Assuss’ chest. Ms. Wand, who had those very capacities of character, was very good for laughing at her own silly ways, which were not at all silly but to be admired — Ms. Wand had friends, though of course she was a robot, as were her friends, or at least tantamount to robots, as was he himself, but now what was he saying? Why was he thinking, why wasn’t he laughing? This was a concern.
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 