conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first two paragraphs for a book with the title 'List of the Lost'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: List of the Lost
  Ezra, Nails, Harri, Justy. You'd dig hard and deep to excavate four names quite so unusual. Yet there they were and there they stood, sounding exactly like what they were. You would be offered a hearty shake of the javelin hand as expressions of possession of command from the four boys, each one fully developed into the blissful torment of their turnabout twentieth year – a pleasantly resolved marital union almost closed off in its camaraderie to the onlookers of the mookish greater world. Look at them now in their manful splendor and wonder how it is that they could possibly part this earth in dirt, as creased corpses, falling back as the skeletons that we already are, yet hidden behind musculature that will fall in time at life's finishing line. At such an unavoidable call they shall be minus all that they now have, here and today, at ease in the confidence of their physical weightlessness, united in athletic skill from which they beg no acquittal. Our four boys have no hidden disappointments, for they equally bear the gift of hip-to-ankle idolized speed, their bodies calmly narcissistic ass-to-the-grass instruments com-mingled to become, as they now knew they were, America's most sovereignly feared college relay team, with a unity that could send shivers through any braying jackass who might be fool enough to doubt them. The race begins and their bodies reply in relay, constantly responsible and on each other's watch; four bodies of one heart, never forgetting themselves as being one single reflection. Imperishable, they train insatiably; companions in pleasure and passionate in sentiments, they are the living picture of the desired physique and the voluntary affection amongst friends that survives time. Beyond each other and their will to run, they seek no other distraction. People magnetically attract others with similar weaknesses, as marriage rings the bell for the servile in hiding. Ezra, Nails, Harri and Justy performed marital duties as joined by strengths, but not weaknesses, and this crowned their lives. They each saw the desirable object within each other, and combined, they had no cause to justify one second of their contract. It may be quite true that we unwisely reduce others in order to make them ours, yet here was a foursome to whom no outward event could dent flesh or expression. It should be said that they were indeed contracting parties, since their combined aim was to dispose of every other half-mile relay team on any known college campus across the land, and this they must do, biological chance providing all the damn-straight confirmation that they would ever need. It is certainly something to dwell excitedly within a body that fully and proudly shows whatever the person is, since we all, for the most part, struggle in haunted fashion, un­­­­aware of ourselves as flesh, looking at a future that does not show promise, or back at a past that couldn't provide any, and permanently petrified at passing through without ever having lived. Undeveloped at twenty years, indecent thoughts at thirty years, the insoluble forty points to psycho­somatic fifty, when moral inhibitions begin to laugh at the thought of further hope. The years pass as quickly as the sentence that describes their speed, yet you cannot believe it until you very suddenly look behind you and see a space once relied upon as being the future. Age sets its own terms, with its growing servitude catching that haunted reflection – one of no distinction because your frown now belongs to time. The wide-eyed girls were many, offering their conscious will as the running boys turned into overlords – strangers to the crowd yet well known in its imagination as the erotic reality of the deltoid deities who have no inhibitions in bodies fully occupied and enjoyed. The crowds look on with a lascivious dependency that a knife to the throat would never force them to admit. In servitude is the watcher, asking of the do-er that he assumes all aspects of the watcher's desire. The body is a thing only, of which we all irrationally fear... how to control, how to control... that which controls us. Heatedly the four gather daily, minus boos and taboos, free of the prohibitions that dishonor us all should we dare remark upon each other's physical good fortune (and lucky are those who might be remarked upon). We simply are not allowed to say. We employ sexual indifference as we gather in groups, schooled, as we are, against eroticisms, and any sudden desire registers as tension should our over-trained prejudices nap whilst our constitutional frigidity catches us looking – or, even worse, allowing ourselves to be looked at. Did you ever compliment a friend, a mere friend, on the directed desire of their eyes? Of course you didn't. Or on their sexually agreeable smile? Of course you wouldn't. Or on their hands – whose touch certainly does something as the waft of their passing being triggers unsuspecting impulses within unsuspecting you? The will to find all of these motions in others runs strong in our being, yet we must only ever observe without acting, and even the very words that are in themselves a form of action... must never be said. Day after day, year after year, we observe without operating, whilst the fact that we are only allowed to observe makes the will run and rise all the stronger. Worth is derived from approval, yet we discount the importance of our will to appreciate others because it is said to be a nothingness, or unwanted, or dangerously unsuspected. Yet, if I feel it, so must you, for it is you who made me feel so. Otherwise what is it that is 'there' for either of us to catch? Electrons from me need electrons from you in order to become electrons. Yet, there they are, and still you say nothing whilst always knowing. Look at the blue of the sky and tell me why you held back. Did you think there would one day be a bluer sky and a better hour? What did you think before you were aware?
  Our four favored athletes have the task of relaying in relay and can therefore knock aside bothersome border boundaries as they guard each other's bodies as if all amounted to just the one. Their success depends upon the communal goal, the spring in eight legs, the combined methodology of four minds, and the maintained perfection of four physical frames; four wheels of the one machine. It is not possible to have any purpose other than the solvent fixity of openness and sharing. They contemplate each other's nature and structure, but not as a grasp on the sensual since, amongst other thoughts, there is a job to be done – a job almost as old as reading, one which fades faster than it blooms, batting away the decline that rots in life, a decline that must always win no matter how much you jog yourself into a headspin. Second by second the body is ponderable, ponderable, ponderable in any reflective surface.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me another paragraph.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Mists of pain shifted and all four boys smiled broadly. Newness began again. Preliminary chatter rose with a stark-tiled echo, and then out into darkness they slackly dragged their sports bags and track tackle amid excited whispers of possibilities. Ezra gestured an I'll catch up with you wave as he dawdled slightly in the barren barracks-styled washroom where necessity raced him into one of the bathroom stalls where, once seated, he rolled out a college events calendar in order to relax his mind enough to allow grand expulsion. The faint drip of a shower-nozzle, very distant slamming of car doors, but there was none of the echo-chamber clatter of epic daytime shrieks and goad-ing gabble that fill these rooms during studious hours. Now, with midnight minutes away, Ezra sat in the eerie silence of a college with no afterlife when unoccupied, and it dies a fast execution without its busy and odorous humans, as a subterranean hush washes through the halls and the building simply cannot live. At nighttime the rooms are spirited away, unable to manage convincing sleep, unable to be anything at all minus its sludgeball students, as life leaves its old soul – as if these bricks and glass thrive only on human blood, and graveyard corridors sob softly with the despair at having no use once the pock-faced pygmies have gone to their homes to moan. The building remains as the stroppy scholars had left it, and it waits for resuscitation when revived by the return of the algebraic washed and the naked life of the brain-dead well-fed. As Ezra sat scrutinizing the sports pages of honor-mad rah-rah teams... Man of the Month, One to Watch, the latest league charts... he felt an arm gently resting around his own right arm, making the same cradling shape as Ezra's own and pressing in warmly as if to shake awake. Ezra stared intently at his arm and then he jumped in sprite fright to lean his full body against the left-side wall of the stall, pulling away from this mysterious sensation. Powerful orbit jetted Ezra out of the 'johnny house' and into the large washroom, where he scrambled to organize his clothes and pull himself together as a rush of unholy phobia and stampeding blind panic told him instinctively that he was in a place that he ought not to be – and in a moment that one ought not to play about with. Timorously a voice then spoke to him with a gentle apprehension, of suffering and terror, of disheartening qualm, so terrified in itself that Ezra felt immediate calm at the sight of the small elfish woman standing pressed into the corner of the room. The human frailty held onto the wall for support, a shrunken and concave visualization that looked as if released from her own grave, in desperately poor health, of distressed hair, and inexplicably cloaked in layers of interwoven garments. Her voice posed no threat to Ezra other than the shock of actually hearing it, and he concealed his fear as his eyes burned into the enslaved creature before him. She spoke with humble yet powerful insistence, torn with a sick desire.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If true love takes the bad days in the same spirit as the good days, then the love of Ezra and Eliza now faced its final test. At ease, they rocked gently together, resuming their love. With her wish to spend the night in her own bed, Ezra drove Eliza the few drowsy blocks towards her parents' home. Although they had nothing to say to one another, what was not said indicated a return to hearts possessed, for their past pride and joy had always indicated a love that could last longer than life – alas, one of the imperialist tricks of romance. The quiet streets were sleepwalking with secrets, the night resting with an inability to whisper, the traffic lights changing without any sign of traffic – their reds and greens talking to no one, fresher air creeping in to disadvantage the impurities of the deadened day. All quiet, all still in this decent and pleasant atmosphere of slumber and repose, where lush houses of beddy-bye shut-eye snoozled in sleepland; a smiling sleep of dreamland. In the middle of a cross-street the hypnotic sedation exploded as an automobile self-propelled itself from nowhere and cannoned into the passenger side of Ezra's car with a sledgehammer smash that folded Eliza into the warped dashboard as she died instantly, head bowed into shattered glass. Ezra fell out of the wreckage and crunched against concrete, as the running feet of the slayer driver were heard darting away from the smashup; that tone, that sound and the silence that surrounded it, the shabby soles of shoes, evidence to be denied, Eliza no longer in possession of thought or those gifts and gestures bestowed at birth. Muscles, voice – all gone, Eliza denied of her revenge, drifting out of this world and no longer in anyone's way, as permanent twilight called to her like the next dance step. But the cheated victim was Ezra once again, condemned to life.
  The true origin of the word 'hero' does not carry connotations of either honor or virtue. A legend is something that might be true or false, and a conundrum is an answer that provides a joke, but generations shift word-definitions in order to suit whatever suits. In a listless dream state, catatonic Ezra is bedded for the unforeseeable narco­tized term at the University Hospital following excessive psycho­­somatic treatments. The transient trackster's pleasures roll speedily through his incapacitated mind, for he has fallen to the reality that very few can bear – of being enfeebled to a desensitized and spiritless resignation. Traumatism has left him frostbitten and chilblained, feverous and flushed, fiery and felled. Delirium has lowered his resistance, and wired-up to the constant blips and blips and tings of surgical machinery his soft face leans sideways... staring out of the window towards the full extent of freedom. As long as he can see out there he is not in here. Attending examiners burst into the room, and nursing sisters whip around Ezra's bed with their certain perspectives and their reams of stress tests and scribbled diagnostics, yet oddly saying nothing at all if asked for information. Ezra's playful days are over, and blood-counts replace them; time, once a gift, is now a punishment. What you have been saved for has had its curtain call. Everything begins in the mind but ends with the body. These, now, are the weakly peaky backroads – under the weather and out of sorts, as white as a measly sheet. No computer-assisted tomography, no heat therapy, no sweat therapy, no urinalysis... nothing, now, can save the airsick slide of the suicidalist. He was once important only because the life within him had importance... but when lack of safety is suddenly nothing to fear? When the will finally gives out, and wants no return? No further tears against the dying of the light, as the quiet exit becomes the logical perspective. The practical nurse of title (but no apparent function) pounds noisily about the room, checking numbers and speaking loudly, not allowing Ezra any sleep, yet his nothingness has already taken him far away from medical examinations and sodium drips and the morbid aspect of badly paid caregivers with their podgy blue hands and their tense understanding – momentarily funny, yet without a breath of tolerance. How to rescue the soul? We suffer only because we believe we are alone, but how to get through without faith in life? Why should Ezra wait any longer – seeing Eliza's smashed face before him and Harri's grave beside him... and the missing Nails and the lost Justy, neither ever seen again on a landscape of far too many strange shadows. As Isaac settled down with a frothy Mimosa, the Lausanne sun warmed up considerably and he at the very least felt grateful for the black-hand syndicate that secured his protection. Here in Lausanne he would begin his memoirs, as most do when all's been done. There were solitary figures idling by the Ouchy bay, and surely the law of averages would prompt at least one of them towards an assenting nod, if only as a basic half-amused act of human kindness.
  Ezra's eyes lowered at the coming of nightfall, with all of its secrets of anonymity. A light from the yard at the back of the hospital threw darting shadows, yet anything recognized by Ezra tortured him, for his body had now absented whilst wondering why it hadn't been allowed to die, and who is it that keeps forcing me back? Figuratively he had indeed already died – our great stylist of the track leaned into a rolling and groaning Harri trembling with exhaustion after a lengthy run and now lying flat on his back on the sun-soaked track, and Ezra kissed him softly on the head and Harri looked up with eyes that shed a gentle melancholy at an affection so unexpected and one that moves different people in different ways. The body at unguarded moments is fully alive to accept more readily, and will not be guided by jealous advice.
  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.