swim, lift and drag balanced into descent.She is in the belly of a turtle. What she has left behind—she tries not to think of it—burns. She thinks, rather, of water,the ocean, kelp, tides, California.Outside, America grows toward her, suddenly large, mountainous, alarming.No place for a chelonian. Why does she know that word?Wonders why she knows that and not something useful, something like God.

She checks her watch and listens.Amidst the roaring, a door, almost unheard, opens.She imagines the people who took two weeksto pack the hundreds of cables, the seven thousand square feet of silk.Did they work at night? Were they tired, thoughtless, depressed?Were their minds on their task those long warehouse days?Two long minutes the cables untangle, the cloth unfurls;whomping and foomping and hissing, it stutters a long(admittedly based on the very real fact that many men do actually behave in this way for much or at least some of the time), whereas women were always seen as victims of male domination and oppression. For some feminists there followed from this view a giant leap of faith, in which it was alleged that all men were either actual or at least potential sexual abusers of women, while women, on the other hand, were seen as fundamentally saintly and almost asexual beings open to corruption by men; and those women who, by doing things like actively going out, picking up and fucking blokes (or even entering into relationships with ‘the enemy’), were in fact merely living as the dupes of men and their patriarchal system. Subsequently,