Just a Chance Encounter

Thanks, Ras. I was wondering if anybody noticed my rather deliberate experimentation. Actually, the sterile and fragmented environments for large American cities are appropriate backdrops for the disenfranchised and the forgotten. The person and the city reflect each other on many levels.

Jawahara,

Another well written piece but this time almost
devoid of your Eastern roots.
This is a coffee version of your regularly well
written tea yet equally palatable in style.

Ras

Feroze, as always, thanks for your comments. The reason for the factual discrepancies and pop references to ``spying,`` are because I did envison the protagonist to be schizophrenic with paranoid delusions, as reported by the television report. Which is why most likely the gun in her victim`s hand were actually keys, and the reason she talked into her watch. I intended then as hints that pointed to her instability.

I gathered information from commonly reported delusions among most patients, and most of whom weave elaborate stories to bolster these hallucinatory experiences.

Hope that clarified it. I intended it to be more of a commentary on the isolated and lonely state of the mentally disabled, rather than a spy thriller.

For me, the television report at Rose`s apartment was the reality, though I suppose I did want to leave the ending ambiguous.

You make Loretta`s unreality extremely real to the reader in the first half, and just as she is beginning to matter to the reader, you change narrators, and effectively flush Loretta`s significance down the drain with Rosalind`s lavender bath water. At first I was a little confused at the sudden change of point of view in this short article. Then I got it: instead of just informing the reader of the plight of the mentally ill homeless, you have drawn us inside to feel it a little, how utterly dismissed and marginalized they are, and how mainstream society shuns them.

Schizophrenics are by no means irrational; they just have trouble with perception---they cannot consistently distinguish their own thought process(the ``voices``) from physical sensory input, a fact which fascinates me. Their internal analysis of a situation becomes the situation (the poor guy with the coffee!). What if the veil separating physical reality from imagined fantasies had holes in it or was completely missing from your psyche; thought becomes reality and reality a mere dream! Oh, the implications...

Nice article

Interesting plot lines.....a cold war revisionistic spy triller with the good (white) spy trying ``come in from the cold``. Now only if we could get Richard Burton`s ghost to portray the character in a grity sort of film noir!

Jawahara, just a few observations if you will allow me.

In the murky world of intelligence, no one refers to themselves as a spy any more. That lable went into disuse the moment Alfred Dreyfuss sailed on a slow boat to Devil`s Island and the only place where that term is used now days is in the Bond movies. The correct term is ``an intelligence officer``. Secondly; most agents do not have numbers identifying them, but code names and lastly, the Covert Operations Corps is too blatant a name and highly unlikely to be associated with an intelligence gathering organization, because it draws too much attention to itself. Covert operations are supposed to be secret and ``in the black``. That is they do not exist. The names used, in the intelligence lexicon to describe operational parameters, tend to be Orwellian in nature, because their intentions are two fold; prevent scrutiny of their operations and hide the true nature their operational details from outsiders.

In fact, American satellites used to gather intelligence are refered to as National Technical Means and never as spy satellites.

I am sorry for this lecure, but I just wanted you to know some of these details for future references. :)

A very nice story, loved the way the author pens down the ambience, it made it seem very real to me. As with the authors previous works, the atmosphere and the way the author portrays the psychology of the characters is very impressive.