Brown-Eyed Medusa: Clyde trolls the park.

Clyde sauntered, and he felt vaguely french in his suit coat and all, vaguely exotic in his fancy wanderer clothes, in MacNamara Park, crossing the acreage, Effingsly Durham at his side.

She had been called Eff-kenzie or other things, even had her father give long lectures where he explained they'd be friends if she wasn't his daughter; she lapsed into a kind of dull mortified silence during all that, the fake names and musing, the protracted spoken daydreams of her father.

But she wouldn't be confused with Greer's girl, Isis Holsclaugh, she wouldn't do that in any form or fashion, nor even wear her hair the same way, lest it should spawn confusion; she just wouldn't have that, and she, like all the others, shared that one thing in common, along with the fat girl selling lemonade in her vertical stripes--her couch cover shirt looked like a television test pattern--on her table, Lemonade, from the signage, and some variation of Faygo, or Sunkist or Fanta flavors, purples and oranges, and some mysterious yellow that could have been like five different things itself.

Clyde didn't really walk or amble, he kind of elapsed or just sort of happened to a ribbon of the property, a kind of magnesium flare trail along the place, and others crawled, overhead like ants, underfoot like dusky figures in an impressionist painting, largely faceless kind of totems.

The two, Effie and Clyde, had dined at Le Shoney's, and paid for their meal somewhere in the middle of a protracted conversation, where Clyde talked to her while staring at the waitresses, and then the crossed the park while he stared at all the women in the park, and it seemed his sole occupation in life might have been graphic, vulgar daydreams of sex with strange women.  Greer called him "Throwpickle", because of his kind of delusional interdimensionality, where he walked liked some Native American shaman, between the worlds, and his business was some sort of cloud of vaguery that he sang at sometimes, few times, and it showered him not in rain drops, but in hundred dollar greenbacks.

He kind of just happened along like he was in a wheel-barrow or something.  Floating, breezing: elapsing.

Now and then, some younger people would jog along, usually one at a time: women in ponytails, men in sleeveless shirts.  There was a kickball game or something, something with a big old ball and an indistinct grouping of people across the greenery, and there were scattered people playing with dogs.

He considered visiting Greer, ditching Effie into the indefinite fog of whatever occupied her hours, while he somehow thought, in the meantime, on the trip to Greer's work, thought of something partly interesting to say, something that had some teeth in it that bespoke kind of an attitude towards things, kind of a guarded sort of dissatisfaction, and how to do that, and also make Greer laugh.  Clyde's ontology acknowledged that Greer was usually on an endorphin high from constant sex with his girlfriend, so not much could make a crater on the surface of that one's thoughts, and Clyde would find something that at once arrested his attention, grabbed him in his boo-boo, and managed to have held in a stew of clothing sales and sex with the girlfriend, his own indefinite fog of schedule and work duties.

They had called Clyde "Throwpickle" sometimes, but he had so many names, and Clyde himself could be called literally anything, sitting there pulling in air from the room, exhaling waste gases, sitting there while the threads in his exotic clothes got ever the looser, the colors faded, and it would become, like he had thought a long time, an abysmal thing, like Clyde's thought so often of the very novelty of existence.