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Chapter seven: The black mink coat looks at her accusingly, "visit him again, check in on him," it seems to scream. But she won't be doing that. Any love in her life is gone.

So Beatrice picks up the black coat and case and disembarks at the next platform. Searching carefully she finds her driver amongst the millions of bodies, greets him briefly and hands him her bag. After 20 minutes of pushing and shoving she wishes she had hung onto it, but eventually they are clear and free. The shock of the polluted air overwhelms her as she struggles to breathe and wonders why she is in here.

But its okay once she enters the car and on the way to the hotel she examines the straight long fingernails and polished nails, so much memory engraved in the scars from her history.

But what will happen next, will these events still be in her memory or will they be erased forever?

"I won't think about it now." she thinks to herself. What she wants now is sleep.

"Driver," she says almost weepily, "stop off at the bar, I want a bottle of absinthe and pack of Lucky Strike, y'hear?"

The driver nods slightly as Lady Beatrice slumps back in her seat beseeching silently to the gods of Olympus, "Inu, Inu, where are you my precious pup?"

The Ka of William S. Burroughs smiled back, through the void. Irrelevance and circularity seemed paramount now. The Ka spoke.

"You gain anonymity from the very act of striving for recognition. You get gain the attention only from the very people who seeks to trample you into non-existence. You disfigure shopping-mall saint worship frighten mystical hula-hoop!"

That last sentiment was bellowed with an intensity that belied its complete lack of sense. "Bah, Humbug!" Beatrice snorted back at the Ka, or the Ka-Ka, as she called that pompous voice in her head. She liked him better when he recited George Carlin monologues after she suffered another rejection from an ill-advised blind date. The Ka started reciting Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" for the thousandth time. Beatrice groaned and scanned the scenery for a distraction, which appeared as the driver stopped outside a dingy pawnshop. Standing at the curb was a teenage boy almost completely covered in bubble wrap beside what appeared to be an alarmingly deformed little albino girl. A loud raspy gasp escaped Beatrice's tar-lined throat as the boy opened the door.

He noticed the horrified Beatrice and remarked, "What, you've never seen a hunchbacked, three-armed, bug-eyed albino dwarf before?" Beatrice shook her head and pressed herself against the door. He helped his companion into the middle seat before seating himself. "I'm Bobby and she's Pi," he said, extending his bubble-wrapped hand.

Beatrice timidly shook it, popping some bubbles. "Pi?" she repeated, looking at Bobby's helmet.

"Her mothers' midwife was an eccentric mathematician. They couldn't agree on a name, so she picked one and then put Pi up for adoption. We're trying to find her mothers, who are conjoined twins sharing one body, so they shouldn't be hard to find." Bobby replied.

"And you?" a bewildered Beatrice asked.

"I'm an epileptic hemophiliac with an overprotective mother," he answered. She nodded and said, "That explains the helmet and bubble wrap.”

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