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Is the foot male or female? they were asking. One of them had smuggled a human foot out of the medical school dissection lab and they were tossing it about in the kitchen amid rowdy male laughter and incredulous female squeals. "Look sharp, Yank] You bugger, look sharp]" The ox-faced red-haired Prewitt from North Bay tossed the foot, a frosty-luminous blur, an object at which you could not not look, at Wingate, or Wheelhell, whatever his name, the draft-defector from Minneapolis, who dumbly fumbled it, cursed and snatched it up from the linoleum floor where it had fallen heavy and solid as a foot made of concrete--the foot was frozen, they'd been keeping it in the freezer of the squat little Pullman refrigerator in the corner--and in turn tossed it at another of his suite-mates. And so an impromptu game of touch football started, the big, beefy boys stampeding and crashing through the rooms, and Elinor who had been brought uninvited to this party celebrating the end of final exams at the medical school, Elinor who knew not a single one of the five or six medical students who lived in this pigsty fifth-floor flat on Halifax Street, blinked in amazement and may even have laughed. A foot? A human foot? She had not expected such a diversion on this desperate Saturday night. She was holding a lukewarm Molson's in her hand which she did not recall having been given nor did she recall having known where her friends, casual acquaintances from the Arts College graduate school, in truth virtual strangers to her, were taking her, gathered up like a squirmy, willing fish in a wide net. Every weekend there were parties, often midweek there were parties, celebrating the completion of something or a farewell or an arrival or a birthday or a loss so terrible it could not be endured without beer and deafening rock music and the close, sweaty companionship of others, it was an era in which you began in a place known to you and progressed joltingly through the night, on foot or in cars driven by strangers, to places not known to you; wild improbable places that afterward, years afterward, you would remember with the eerie clarity of a waking...