Part One Ofer did not pay much attention to the story of the murder on the news - people had always been doing strange things to each other, in his experience; but Lee's name stirred distant memories. When he tried to recall, the word 'poet' triggered the flow into his mind. It must have been that strange, dreamy kid with the opaque yellow-gray eyes he had taught in the low grades. Ofer remembered him as a tall and very thin, rather precocious child, who spoke in a flowery language unusual in one so young; he had a feeling that Lee was not always in complete accord with the real world around him.
Beyond childhood, Ofer had no knowledge of Lee; now, however, that he had been living in close proximity to Nan, he had a notion of the gaping difference that must have existed between the poet and his Trio mate. Nan, with her manly shape and her passionate nature, had impressed Ofer as being a very physical person. She presented to him, in fact, an ideal form of a woman as a possible sex partner. Since she had completed Ofer's Trio - by outside arrangement! - He felt Nan's attraction for him was becoming a certain permanent fixture in his promiscuous, adventurous sex life; he felt no inclination to let her go before realizing those attractions. She seemed to him the one person he had been looking for all his life.
As easy as it was for Ofer to accept Nan to his Trio, it was not so for Barak. Ofer did not think much of it, taking relationships as they came and making the best of them.
"How're doing, Nan?" He asked her one morning, shortly after she had come to live in their section of the Trio complex; she had not been joining their lovemaking, which made him wonder about her.
"I don't know," she shrugged. "Barak doesn't like me." She sounded a little upset, as if expecting people to accept her more readily.
"Don't pay any attention to Barak - he doesn't like anyone," he promised her.
"He likes you, though, doesn't he?"
"No. He just thinks he's in love with me at the moment. It'll pass."
