She threw one thing after another; she was the woman who threw things.

He rested at the table attentively; the "other man" in such cases is always civil, broad-minded, kindly and attentive.

What divided them was betrayal, but already too many things were changing in the room, so he hid it under his palm to have something to remember it all by.

Finally, I watched and speculated, since it is the outsider's part in such cases to do no more than watch and speculate. Time governed the room, the objects falling neatly in their places. But the room had also slipped out of time, a mere material enactment of betrayal in one of its infinite number of forms. There has always been betrayal, and with betrayal anger, and, in answer to that anger, denial or acceptance. All that changes are the faces and the reasons.

What she threw was not significant; it was the throwing itself that embodied her rejection. She threw the things he had given her, but she also threw things of her own, since she in turn had given a part of herself to him, and this also needed to be destroyed. The part she could not throw away was still beating in her breast, but she made amends for this with the number and diversity of other objects she had accumulated to throw in its stead. Inviting him to identify each object as a shared experience of one kind or another, she stretched her anger to the point of the arbitrary, in order to denounce not only a world but a world-vision which had ended.

The man would not be perturbed; he owed it to betrayal itself either to acknowledge or to disown all accusations. Keeping silent, he looked down with feigned interest at the mouse of himself curled up in his palm. He felt sorry it had to endure this spectacle; he felt sorry that the mouse was what it was, and that it knew itself to be so.

"Very well then; go!" she said at last.

"Very well then; hear!" instantly mimicked Hear and the faculties of aural recognition.

"Very well then; see!" no less instantly - even already - mimicked See and the powers of visual distinction.

The room was resonant with shock; everything interrogated; everything affirmed.

She was walking about the room clockwise like a wound-up doll, not looking at what she threw or where it had been thrown. The man was sitting, his elbow upon the table, chin resting in the palm of his hand, his fingers stuck out like a tongue. His eyes, meeting mine in the mirror, were dirty as bilgewater, as if they had collected the dust and grime of each of the newly displaced objects about him.

So he bent down and stirred the fragments of a tea-cup which were lying beside the tin-opener, pretending to believe the rearrangement was important. Without haste, he began to express some thoughts which had no relevance. He moved to the door with reluctant dignity, turning his back slowly to suggest that he had nothing to fear. He was convincing neither himself nor her; he was convincing someone with partial knowledge - me, perhaps; he was offering to time in general the acceptable state of affairs which would have made up a concurrent but incompatible present, willing it to make an exchange. At last he opened the door, and left.

Outside the door, crossing the boulevard, night had displaced the day; vision was now the limit of itself. It was not him but him-ness which was crossing the boulevard; it was not her but her-ness which had been left in the room. Betrayal, as a sensation of division, was neither individual nor abstract; it was present all about him, complete in its every potentiality. Unable to free the present from the past, his only recourse was to stand in the future, blowing out the careless mouth of smoke he knew he would have reserved for this occasion. He would be saying, wryly, "It happened years ago, of course; but I still remember it." And, taking solace now in something he thought he might one day say, perhaps he would never need to say those words at all. Perhaps, by living that future now, he could de-rail the past that must have anteceded it, so that the two would never coincide.

Later that evening he caught her call. Putting the receiver from his ear, he felt her words dissolving, even as he intended their dismissal. And, hanging it up on the gibbet of the stand, he snuffed out their life forever. Volition at that moment was a wonderful thing. It was joined to action as the word patella is joined to the word knee-cap; in a timeless instant the world becomes our intentions.

Testing the hypothesis, he put out his hand to take up the tea-cup. The hand went out. His fingers settled about its handle. He lifted the tea-cup. All of these things were trivial but marvellous, since the mind could split each moment into a thousand smaller ones. One could pour years of one's life into something without either past or future, because it was defined not by temporality, but by desire.

The woman and the man are dust and ashes, buried in a blaze of petroleum as a consequence of somebody else's accident. But reality is not the objective relation of thing to thing, but the intention of one thing toward another. The man may be dead, but nevertheless he is still watching his hand, trying to discriminate every last detail of that hand, as he stretches it towards a tea-cup that will never be broken, the invisible mouse beside it that will never be born.