'Well, it's up to you, Ralph,' Trumper said.
'You're a bundle of opinions, Thump-Thump. That's what's so exciting about you.'
'It's your movie.'
'But suppose you did the next one, Thump-Thump. What would it be?'
'I have no plans,' Thumper said, observing the lemon peel in his coffee.
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'But what do you feel, Thump?' Ralph asked him.
Trumper cupped his coffee mug with his hands. 'Heat,' he said. 'At the moment, I feel heat.'
What do I feel? he asked himself later, groping through Tulpen's dark apartment, encountering her clothes with his bare feet.
A bra, I feel a bra under my left foot there. And pain? Yes, pain; my right shin goes ker-crack against the bedroom chair: that's pain.
'Trumper?' from Tulpen, turning over in bed. He crawled in beside her, reached out for her, held on.
'A breast,' he said aloud. I feel a breast.
'Correct,' Tulpen told him, wrapping herself around him now. 'What else do you know?' she whispered. Pain? Well, yes, her teeth nipping his belly; her kiss rough enough to turn his navel inside out. 'I missed you,' he told her. They usually left work together.
But she didn't answer him; her mouth shut on his sleepy life; her teeth worried him, and her thighs suddenly seized his head so tight that in his temples he felt his pulse pick up. His tongue touched her, and in her mouth he reached for her brain.
Then they lay lapped by the cold neon lights from the aquariums. Odd fish darted past them; slow turtles surfaced, keeled over and sank sideways. Trumper lay trying to imagine other ways to live.
He saw a tiny, translucent, turquoise eel, its inner organs visible and somehow functioning. One organ looked like a little plumber's helper; it plunged down, sucked up, and the eel's mouth opened to belch a tiny bubble. As the bubble rose to the surface, other fish investigated it, nudged it, sometimes broke it. A form of speech? Trumper wondered. Was a bubble a word or a whole sentence? Perhaps a paragraph! A tiny, translucent, turquoise poet reading beautifully to his world! Trumper was about to ask Tulpen about this odd eel, but she spoke first.
'Biggie called you tonight,' she said.
Trumper wished he could send up a perfectly lovely bubble. 'What did she want?' he asked, envying the eel's easy communication.
'To speak to you.'
'She didn't leave a message? There's nothing wrong with Colm, is there?'
'She said they were going off for the weekend,' Tulpen told him. 'So if you called and no one was there, not to worry.'
'Well, that's what she called for, then,' Trumper said. 'She didn't say anything was wrong with Colm.'
'She said you usually called on the weekend,' Tulpen said. 'I didn't know that.'
'Well, I call from the studio,' Trumper said. 'Just to talk to Colm. I thought you'd just as soon not hear ...'
'You miss Colm, Trumper?'
'Yes.'
'But not her?'
'Biggie?'
'Yes.'
'No,' Trumper said. 'I don't miss Biggie.'