ob Wittig and I were running late. It was alleged that there would be an Unknown reading. Back in Cincinnati. Again. We’d read there before. William was going to show up, as was Dirk. William had a brand spanking new van, so he was driving. Dirk said he had something special planned for us. I wondered what that meant. Rob and I flew in to the Cincinnati Airport. That’s not in Cincinnati. That’s in Kentucky. We sat next to some guy named Howard who tracked down consumer scams. I’d seen him on TV, so I lent his wife the Arts and Entertainment section of the New York Times. He said they had it at home, but only the Sunday edition. He said it was hard to keep up with all the newspapers and I agreed. I asked him if anything had been going on in the consumer scam business since I’d left town. Rob came up with an idea for an electronic literature project. Have I mentioned that Rob is very tall, possibly taller than Dirk? He said that yeah, something had been brewing in a very big way and that he was right on top of it. And it involved literature. And religion. And I was curious. And then he told me what he was onto and my heart sank. Seems young men and women all around town were turning up bruised, penniless, and carrying sheaves of poetry. Howard didn’t know exactly what group was involved, but he said that it was some crank group, and that he’d found some leads on the Internet, which led him to take a trip to Chicago. He said it involved hypertext and I ordered another drink. Rob ordered a dark rum in a brandy snifter. I made a little joke about that word, “snifter.” Howard’s wife laughed but nobody else did. I had a feeling something creepy was going on with Dirk so I didn’t mention the Unknown. Rob distracted Howard with some stories about Voltaire. Who knows if the stories were true? I’d been away for a while.

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