STATE OF SCALP

Rita Gachassin, 28, took the oath and then the stand, after which she stated clearly that she did not go into the building with the full intention of harming the bald man. She elaborated: her legs took her there; she went with whistle-clean motives with regard to the bald man despite all outward appearance; her inward imagination of what might transpire stood in stark contrast to how events unfolded; she had a friend at the building and was on her way to see if she could share his bed; she had woken up early with an itch to see him; she had been for coffee; she had been for pastries; she had gone to two separate establishments to spend more time and thus delay her arrival to the building; she was not stalling Gregory so much as she was setting the terms for when she saw him; she had attended a series of parties at his house; she was not a married woman and so whose business was it if she became involved with him; Gregory was not the bald man although Gregory was bald; the amount of hair he possessed atop his head was not the issue; when she thought of the bald man she thought of a state of mind rather than a state of scalp; she was never the president of a society devoted to the collection of merchandise associated with spy movies; who had even introduced that idea in the first place?; she demanded to know; she had met the bald man at one of Gregory’s parties, at which time he was identified as a business associate; she could not fairly be expected to control everything that transpired that morning and in the days to come; the cannon was to be loaded with powder, in a manner of speaking, and the tops of the iron railings sharpened until they cut across any palm that came in contact with them; the second of these instructions was not a metaphor at all; she was not sure she loved Gregory but he allowed her to feel pleasure and sometimes that was enough; when a head contacted pavement after a distance in the air, even hair could not protect it from cracking like an egg; the bald man fell as fast as anything, as Galileo proved. She concluded with a statement that left the gallery gasping: “My own arm was not sufficiently long to push anyone over anything.”

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