Free The Cloud of Unknowing by Mimi Lipson Page B

a boombox and a lift-and-play record player. Next to the sleeping bag a picture, torn out of a magazine, was taped to the wall. Kitty bent forward to look: a girl with short hair and thick false eyelashes in black tights and a T-shirt, posing atop an expensive-looking leather footstool shaped like a rhinoceros. Her arms were gracefully outstretched with one leg extended behind her.
    â€œThat’s Edie Sedgwick,” Jim said.
    â€œWho?”
    â€œFrom the Factory.”
    â€œWhat factory?”
    â€œAndy Warhol’s Factory.”
    â€œOh.” Kitty had heard of Andy Warhol but she didn’t understand the part about a factory.
    Still wearing their coats, they sat down on the floor across from each other, each leaning against a wall, and Jim put on the Shangri-Las. The record had an echoey sound to it, as if it had been made specifically to be listened to in a room like this: a cold room with no furniture. The tough, sad girls were Out in the Street, they were Walking in the Sand, they could Never Go Home Anymore. It was dark when the record ended, but Jim didn’t turn on the light. Kitty had a strong desire to tell him about Conrad and Holly and the abortion, and about how shewas worried that she still felt some pain from it. But she could sense that he would not want her to, so instead she talked about Western Mystical Philosophy and how, now that she’d finally started to do the reading, she felt like everything related to it—even the record they’d just listened to.
    â€œRelates how?” he asked.
    â€œWell, like, Plotinus. I read this thing last night that keeps going through my head: ‘The soul, different from the divinity but sprung from it, must needs love.’”
    Jim exhaled. “Yeah, that’s great, just all by itself. I don’t even want to know what it means or where it comes from, you know? Sometimes I’ll just open up a book in the middle and get some great phrase, or a good, technical-sounding word that I can drop into my novel somewhere. That’s where my head’s at.”
    Later, in the hallway, it occurred to her why the picture of the girl in the black tights had been taped to the wall, at that height, by the sleeping bag.
    The next time she was at the library, she remembered what Jim had said, and she looked up The Thief’s Journal —the book she’d checked out for him in September. She opened it up at random and read.
    Picturing the world outside, its shapelessness and confusion even more perfect at night, I turned it into a godhead of which I was not only the cherished pretext, object of so much care and caution, chosen and superlatively led despite ordeals that were painful and exhausting to the point of despair, but also the sole purpose of so many labors.
    Kitty started dropping in on Jim at the 7-Eleven when she stayed late at the library. Sometimes, if she was at home in theevening, he would come by her house and they would wander around for a while until he had to go to work. They walked along the median strip of Powell Boulevard, past vast, sparsely stocked thrift stores. They watched some firemen put out a practice blaze in a hollow cement structure in the middle of an asphalt lot. The factories by the river were dark and quiet, except for a few that glowed with swing-shift lights, their exhaust fans humming in the night. Mostly, Jim and Kitty walked through wet, foggy emptiness. Portland was a lonely city, a place where drifters reached the edge of the continent. Jim showed her a hobo camp under the Burnside Bridge near the downtown soup kitchens.
    Once, they went to the diner with the pies and saw the waitress who only had teeth on one side of her mouth. Afterward, walking home, Kitty started to tell Jim about Conrad. He looked straight ahead while she spoke, nodding, but he stopped her before she got to the Spaghetti-Os and what came next.
    â€œI want to tell you something, Kitty,” he said. “This