But he just waved his hand at it, moved closer to the glass, bit the straw, and started sucking his drink. He drank it all to the bottom until the air produced that gargling noise.

"It's not good; it's not good at all. I'm afraid for my work," his voice revealing utter depression. I observed his undernourished little body, all coiled up in wheel chair, and he just rolled his eyes timidly trying to detect if someone was listening in on our conversation, before he added:

"My bones don't obey me anymore," he just said and then he watched me for a moment studying my reaction.

"I know, I know, you'll say it was only to be expected..." I detected a trace of irony in his smile, "and maybe you'll be right...You see I'm bound to this goddamn chair. And my bones don't coalesce anymore, they only break more easily..."

He let out a weary sigh.

"There's no more pain, just a gaping wound, the state of constant decay..."

His lips spread in a sort of a smile:

"I'm changing my physical condition, from solid to liquid, like a comic book hero. I'm the Rubber Man, elusive, elastic, acrobat, nothing can hold me down anymore..." he paused, then continued as if it were some sort of a jest, "Do you ask yourself if you could have made different choices in life?"

I shrug in surrender—after all, everybody wonders what would become of them if they were born in a different city and why they never learned to drive a locomotive?

"I really hate myself sometimes," he whispered, "I'm simply not even able to think about any other possibility in my life. I'm so limited! Can you imagine, I have never regretted being me! Ever! Can you imagine how stupid I am?! Just like a horse put to a carriage, with blind caps on my eyes, able to se only one way, only one path...Silly, aren't I?"

But before I could answer that, a tall, chubby young man joined us, and Rey introduced him to me as his assistant. The boy didn't want anything to drink, so I bid them both farewell, and watched them as they went down the street; young man's broad shoulders leaning as he pushed along the wheel-chair, until they disappeared in the crowd. Young man and the invisible man.

The next few days I spent in one of my twilight moods searching for my evening star to show me the way from day to night. And as if my life hasn't been complicated enough, I had found not one, but two stars, two warm, seductive, possessive Venuses. At dawn I would fled from one, only to run to the other in my lunch break. And my famous stews and seafood salads were my ransom. Which made them both deliciously round, but also made considerable strain on my lower abdomen. Both of them were emancipated enough to find it a pleasant change, this carnival exchange of masks, as well as a source of additional excitement. In short, they wore me down to the very limits of my stamina. I was their toy, in velvet bathrobe, in two shifts, without any hope of relief.

Now and then I would manage to get some of our old gang for a drink, but mostly I kept to myself. There was no news to share. We all hid in our bedrooms and studios. Nothing worth of interest, except pieces of usual gossip and information about new therapists in town. Rey was the only one who managed to challenge our imagination. Somebody, and that somebody was an utterly unreliable colleague of ours, who had heard the whole story from somebody else whom we all knew as a person susceptible to weekend acid trips, well that first somebody told us a story that the other somebody witnessed Xoratio Rey being run over by an automobile. We argued that none of this was ever in the papers, and Rey had just opened an exhibition in Amsterdam, but this somebody explained that Rey wasn't hurt in the accident at all. The story was that the car had hit him at the moment he was wheeling himself over a street. There was some sudden braking, and some people screaming, the chair flew through the air, and the car drove straight across Xoratio's body. The lady driver, after managing to stop the vehicle some fifty meters down the road, came out crying and immediately ran to the victim. And there laid old Rey, on the asphalt, as if he was smeared on it with a butter knife, like melted clay, or a paint spill. Lady screamed and made sign of a cross over her breasts, but then Rey's voice was heard, and he was pretty angry as well: