And if he is a consultant for O'Barr Associates, if he is a senior consultant for acquisitions, and if he works in the Dunlovey building and oversees junior efficiency ratings, if he works there with a man named William who is not a consultant but from the law offices, and if William is the sort of person who spends his lunch hour by taking, say, a walk through the Geological Research offices so that he can learn about earthquakes- after all, this is California- and if William tells him one day while at work that one day having exhausted the secretaries pool at Geo-Res Will wandered around Duncan Heights and discovered a big bug display, and if he remembered that about Will sometime later with a few hours to kill, if this is him, if he is inquisitive, he will go to Duncan Heights to look for the bugs, he will wander around the construction going on and wonder where the heck the entrance is, for Duncan Heights is constructed oddly, more oddly than Dunlovey, where he works, is constructed, like a big donut, that is, each floor is four hallways who's inside offices look into a sort of courtyard, except that on the first floor there are fewer hallways such that the courtyard is open in one side and then on a corner, too, but Duncan Heights, Duncan, is a gigantic H who's first floor is not H-like, but once he finds the entrance he will not be able to find the staircase, he must take the staircase if he is a senior consultant at O'Barr Associates and a little too fond of Twinkies, but he will not find it, he will take the elevator to the seventh floor, and then find the stairs, and because of the shape of Duncan, the H, he will wander around the halls as efficiently as possible but doubling back now and again, looking at the displays of stuffed birds and rock collections and viral peptides and posters about Mars and wood and dinosaurs and grass and photography: there is an art photography studio in Duncan Heights too, probably because of the access to chemicals.

Eventually he will get down from the seventh floor to the second floor, and will find this box, and he will say to himself, was that worth it? Yes, because there is a display of beetles, great big gigantic flesh-eating beetles, and there is a display of mantisii, traditional husband's head eating mantisii, and there is also that box of docile roaches, which he will see and wonder if they are real, until he notices their antennae moving, which will freak him right the heck out.

But if his name is Mark, all bets are off. If his name is Mark Trade all bets are off, because Mark, he is not inquisitive. Not in the traditional sense, not in the morally correct sense, he is only pruriently inquisitive, he moots. He rode up to the seventh floor, and wandered around the halls, he looked at the displays and posters, he tried to decipher the memos and letters on desks concerning biological research, mentally, even though he got two F's in chemistry in high-school and never once took a course in biology, but he's always been good at tests, if not application. He walked down the various flights of various stares, gazing out the stairwell windows at the San Franscisco skyline as he sunk lower and lower to its base, and he found those God damned bugs, and all he could think about was what would it be like if they were not bugs, but people? There where displays about dinosaurs, paleontological displays, and it said that dinosaurs where around for a lot longer than human beings, so how come they didn't have civilization? Maybe they did? Maybe they had speech and philosophy and the kind of arguments, thought Mark, with which he is becoming increasingly disillusioned, which makes him think his brain was not made for thinking, he doesn't like thinking, he's always been good at it but now he doesn't want to do it: it's not thoughts so much but the self-stroking process of happily navigating the silly little nuances of subtlety that heretofore made him think he was quite the stud boy. Who says dinosaurs didn't do that too? And bugs, insects, cockroaches, roaches have been around since the dinosaurs and longer, so, how come they can't do it, too? Somehow? Mark wonders, what if they were people? What if these roaches were people- would he want to fuck one?

Because if he is Mark Trade, that's where he is in his life. He leaves Duncan Heights to go buy some coffee, and there at the outdoor coffee shop near the corner of Market and San Pedro is a woman who is reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin and quietly sipping her coffee. She is in her early twenties or, God help him, late teens, she is wearing jeans and a sweater, nothing to print in a men's magazine, but on the table next to her steaming cup of joe is a pair of very small navy blue sweat pants, folded very very neatly, and he can see the string, the drawstring, sort of carelessly laying atop the waist and upper-thigh fabric, and for some reason that really charges his batteries, it really makes him think about how great it would be for this woman, any woman, to just stand up and smile at him and give him a lingering stare that makes him uncomfortable and then inhale deeply through her nose and sort of slit her eyes and allow the corners of her mouth to just ever so slightly curl up and wave her antennae and then walk away with an erotic shutter (he has long since abandoned fantasies of random naked acts of intercourse with large/small/medium bosomed women with wonderful derrieres and legs that would make an Anglican minister break down and weep. Masturbation is ultimately more satisfying, with a magazine or an internet site, or, maybe in the future when Mark has become more comfortable with the bulge that twinkies has given him on his abdomen, with a real live woman there, cooing at him, but still, he's in charge of the stimulation).

If he is Mark Trade, after he got his coffee, Ethiopian with more sugar in it than the average Ethiopian ever sees in a lifetime, he walked to his job in the Dunlovey building and was accosted by a former junior exec who wondered why he got such a good recommendation after quitting to pursue mergers when he didn't show up half the Fridays for work, he seemed almost angry but in a nice way, as if a bad rep was his plan, he was a big guy, he used to show up when he showed up at all with a cup of Grogbuster which is coffee with a double shot of espresso; Mark only just started drinking coffee last week. And while talking to the ex-exec he saw a roach walk by at the end of the sidewalk and she was wearing thigh-high black hose.

Quite drooling, Mark thought. He's always liked hosiery, ever since he was a child, and when he reached puberty he added sex to his association with hosiery, he likes pantyhose even though lots of leg-men don't, he likes sheer-to-waist but finds control top stimulating on occasion, sometimes nude sometimes black sometimes white, depends on his mood, although rarely any of the other colors like red or green although blue has its moments in his fantasy world of all women having shaved legs and wearing hosiery and liking it. He likes stockings, too, the kind that one wears with garters, he's a sucker for those sites on the 'net, and he likes thigh-highs too, Mark thinks, he really gets excited in his heart when he sees the naked bit of thigh beneath a skirt and above the top of the stocking. Mark knows, he's always told people and always believed that even a fat woman or a woman with horrible legs is God damned pretty in hosiery.

This one would have been pretty even in jeans or sweats but she's wearing those black thigh highs and he was distracted. If he met her in a bar, would he offer to buy her a drink, gazing at one of her six legs and her hose and offering to light the cigarette twisting in her shiny black mandibles? He stopped listening to what the guy was saying and eventually the guy wandered off and when he did Mark looked for the woman but could not find here anywhere on the sidewalk. Maybe she went into the Dunlovey building so he went into the Dunlovey building and went up the stairs to the mezzanine right ahead of a woman who was not wearing hose but a very short dress. The difference between a skirt and a dress is that a skirt stops at the waist (he loves putting his hand on a woman's thorax) but a dress goes all the way to the armpits if it's sleeveless or the shoulders if it is not. It's very short

And here's the thing, for Mark Trade: ever since he was a junior executive himself he mastered the ability to walk up a flight of stairs behind a woman at just the right distance to see her underwear if seeing it is at all possible. But he was ahead of the woman and so could not try to see. He could have gone up one flight, paused at the landing, and then walked behind her, and he did pause, and he was going to follow her, but at that second he realized some things:

Mark Trade is a man. He's 29, is a senor consultant, drives an 93 Honda Civic, four door, beat-up blue, no cd player. He's into internet gaming and card-collecting. Fantasy cards, not sports. He's been eating too many twinkies of late, and has a slight paunch. But it's going away since he started drinking coffee, a week ago. They say that nervous people, fidgety people, burn more calories.

The man used to be like all men, stereotypical, used to want to have sex with every half-way decent woman he met, used to find scantily clad women arousing, used to have to hide his bulge whenever he caught a flash of leg or, if he was having a lucky day, a woman facing him knelt down to pick up a pencil and he got a millisecond's glimpse of not only decolletage this time but an actual nipple. He used to peruse pornography on occasion, like other men, used to fantasize in the shower or in his bed, about famous women and beautiful women that he had met or seen, imagining various scenes, various positions, various acts. He was always polite in his fantasies, and often hosiery of some kind played a part.

The man was like other men, used to "get lucky" on occasion, was an effective if not brilliant lover, had an on again off again girlfriend, with her established a routine but satisfactory sex-life. But then things sort of changed. He sort of changed. He never drank, never took drugs, never took medicines, even, and he decided to apply these asthetics to other mind-numbing and mind-altering substances. He stopped watching TV, stopped listening to rock 'n roll. He tried to read more. And after that, whenever he was walking up a flight of stairs behind a roach who was wearing a short skirt, he would, indeed, still sneak a glimpse of white panties or the soft crotch of her nude pantyhose, and it made him happy when saw or tried to see these things, made him feel like he was having a a good day- but it ceased to be arousing. He didn't feel like what he had done was sexual in any way. Certainly it was still impolite, certainly these women would not want to have him or any man look up their dresses, so certainly he still felt guilty, a little bit. But the man no longer thought about sexual intercourse, positions, oral acts with Latin names, when he saw what he saw, or came close to seeing what he wanted to see.

He liked women, and wanted to be with them, he decided. Women made him feel good, made him feel all right. Maybe it was Freudian, maybe he was looking for a comfortable mother, maybe. Who knows? The man had a crush on a girl who worked across the street, in a ticket office, she was beautiful, had a lovely round face and bright blue eyes and short red hair which she wore in a long strand which fell down her cheek and curled under her chin, a beautiful slender exoskeleton. He had a crush on her but the man didn't think about her and him in a naked and sweaty collision which culminated in ejaculation or blood-letting. He imagined them fully clothed, arm-in-arm, sitting in a love seat and watching dark art films. He wore dress pants and a dress shirt, casual but not sweaty pants and t-shirty so. She wore an ankle length skirt and dark hose, a loose black knit sweater which exposed her graceful neck which now and again he would caress with the back of the fingers on his left hand. They rested their heads together, her hair smelled wonderful, she smelled wonderful, just a hint of perfume but beneath that the subtler but deeper richer smell of a woman's clean skin. He was in love, wanted nothing more than the very molecules of the universe to freeze so that he could be there and feel that forever.

But life is not about forever. Live is about change. He knew that, and he hated it. He hated her for it, hated himself. And so he got up, went to their bedroom where they slept in silk pajamas every night, their legs touching from the hip to the knee, he opened the closet and picked out some basic clothes. A few pairs of jeans, some underwear, some socks, some t-shirts. Put them in a backpack. Everything else he stuffed into a plastic trash bag. He went into their study and grabbed a few books: something by Thomas Berger, something by Victor Hugo. Everything else: plastic trash bag. Knickknacks, notepads, magazines, computer disks, old nintendo cartridges: trash bag.

He went into the living room where she was watching the movie. He looked at her for a long time. She was so beautiful. The ancients, the Greeks, they invented the word beautiful because metaphors cease to work, imagery falls short, beautiful was not just the woman but also his reaction, his soul twisting around his heart when he looked at her, his ache. He said, "I have to simplify. Life is too complicated, love is too complicated, it's bigger than me, I don't know who I am, I don't know if I must know who I am but I love you so much that I want us both to die. I must make things simple, I must throw everything away, I must find a place where I can rent a small room, eat instant noodles and drink instant tea, wander around inadequate libraries and read inadequate books and spend fourteen hours a day sleeping. I need a pause button, I need a fast forward button, I need to stop thinking, I'm tired of thinking, I don't want to think anymore.

"I want to be a cockroach, I want to sit docile and still on a soggy log and just sit there. I'll fuck when the chemicals in my tiny brain tell me too, I'll eat when the big gloved hand drops bits of rotten twinkie in the glass box, but for the rest of the day my body and my brain will just lie there and not even know that time is a thing which passes for larger, more sophisticated human beings."