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shop closed.
    The next day she called Michalski at the office and told him where she would be, and she sat down in front of Barrian’s and told everybody who would listen that the shop was stealing her flute in collusion with a junkie. Most people ignored her. Some argued. A few turned away. Barrian’s people tried to chase her off. An Chu brought her lunch. The day following, when she called the Committee, Michalski said she had been given a week’s unpaid leave. She took a chair to Barrian’s. A man from the hourlies came and interviewed her. Every half hour the shopman from Barrian’s threw buckets of water on her. She talked to everybody who went into the store. Two out of three did business there anyway.
    Tony was unsympathetic. “You shouldn’t own something you can’t afford to lose. You’re a hostage to your possessions. Property is theft.”
    Shaky John was still angry with her for burning him, but she gave him five dollars, and he sat in front of Barrian’s for a day and fired himself up, hour after hour, with morphion, aspirin, barbiturate, horse-downer, distilled water, plastic blood, and milk. Without even talking he turned more people away from Barrian’s in one hour than she had in four days. That evening, the shop sold her back her flute for fifty dollars.
     
    The little tree outside her window put forth pink flowers. Michalski told her it was a dogwood. She spent hours in her office watching the progress of its bloom.
    She had dinner with Tony and they went to a reading of Aeschylus at the university. Tony insisted on leaving at the intermission because the translation was so bad. They sat in a booth in the campus bar and he explained to her that the heart of Greek tragedy was ritual appeasement and no anarchist could ever fathom that because ritual was meaningless to anarchists.
    “How can you say that?” she said. “You can understand something without committing yourself to it, can’t you?”
    “Only in the head, Paula. Not in the gut.” He folded his napkin into quarters. He had already lined up the sauceboats, both their glasses, and the salt and pepper dishes and match-lighter. “You miss the whole absoluteness of the thing. The whole sense that there is nothing else. The self-punishing aspect of nonconformity.”
    Paula set her chin in her hand. She wondered if Tony ever enjoyed anything. It occurred to her that she had heard all this before from him, that he had already told her everything he would ever say to her. She got up and went through the dark barroom toward the door.
    She cut across the park toward the round house of the Biochemistry Building. When he shouted at her, behind her, she stretched her stride. She thrust her hands deep into her jacket pockets. The domelight silvered the grass. Tony galloped up beside her.
    “I’m sorry.” His arm slid around her waist. “Maybe you’re pregnant and that’s why you’re so sensitive lately.”
    “I’m not pregnant.”
    They walked down a slope through the birch trees. A deer bolted away from them. She heard low voices in the dark bushes ahead of them and swerved off to avoid the people there.
    “Tony,” she said. “Good-bye.”
    “What?”
    He stopped, and she turned to face him; she could not see him in the dark, but she knew how he looked, she knew him far too well. She said, “Good-bye, Tony,” and went away through the trees.
     
    The open room of her commune was dark. She stepped across a man asleep on the floor to reach the videone and took a slip of paper out of her box. She stuffed it into her pocket and went down the hall to An Chu’s room. The girl was a long still shape under her bedclothes.
    Paula sank down on the narrow bed in the darkness. “Wake up.” She shook her by the shoulder. “I just broke with Tony.”
    An Chu murmured, still half-asleep, wrapped in blankets, warm against Paula’s hip. In the quiet Paula could hear water dripping in the bath across the hall. Tony would take her back, if she