What is he looking at? It's a two-foot-tall assemblage of junk. Post-consumer drift has been cut up, melted down and reshaped, painted and reformed to take the shape of a magpie, complete with black and white feathers cut from product packaging. The magpie's head, barren of feather and flesh, is a gruesome bird skull formed out of melted and sculpted plastics. The body is filled out with metal scrap and rusted machine parts. From somewhere within comes the bird's call: it is the looped sound of a rusty car door creaking shut with a crow's caw layered in. An unseen battery and motor impel the bird to motion, making its wings flap at a creeping pace, moving ever-so slowly with the sound and action of living mechanical death.

Evans turns and looks around the gallery. The sculptures are all varied in theme and appearance, but they all seem to be assemblages like this one: shaped collages of different materials combined to form a new object. Many of them, it seems, also have little toy motors built into them. Around the room little monsters and machines twitch and flex.

Slowly making his way around the room, Evans observes Thomas' creations. It is soothing for him to look on something that someone worked hard to make, but is in itself harmless. Art: look at it, think about it, like it or don't, and move on. It's a good feeling.

When he has taken the time to inspect the two dozen sculptures, Evans finds Buddy, who is standing with a group of acquaintances and holding a plastic cup of red wine.

"Hey, Evans," he says. "Where have you been?"

"Looking at the sculptures."

Buddy turns and scans the room. "Yeah, they're good, aren¡¯t they? Have you met everybody?" He introduces Evans to the half-dozen people he's standing with. Evans greets each of them with a smile and a nod, but he doesn't really pay attention. Buddy continues chatting with the others and our man wanders over to the table where gallery volunteers are selling wine. He buys a plastic glass of white for three dollars. He sips it. It's warm and sickeningly sweet, so he gulps it down and buys a red. He sips it, finds it warm but appropriately so, and wanders off.

The gallery has a second room and Evans drifts in. This room is the same size as the first but is empty except for a clutch of people holding plastic cups of wine and talking. In the middle of the group is a man with a bright blue mohawk. This must be the artist, Thomas. He's small, probably only five foot four. He has dark circles under his eyes and five o'clock shadow. The are a couple guys, but most of the people are hip young girls, probably art students and probably all willing to climb into bed with Thomas.

Evans stands on the outside of the circle and listens to the talk.

"No, she left Slav," Thomas says. "She said because he's crazy when he's drunk. He totally is, too. Once at the Dance Cave he got in a fight with some guy and threw a beer bottle at him. He missed, but you can see the mark in the wall where the bottle hit."

"Holy shit," says one of the guys. "You have to throw a bottle hard to mark a wall."

"Well she's crazy anyway," says one of the girls. "She'll miss Slav. He's nuts, but his is gorgeous. And he is an awesome painter."

"Yeah, but that doesn't make him a good guy to go out with," says another girl.

Evans waits and they yammer on. It's all gossip. He wants to interject and say something like, "Hey, I think your sculptures are pretty cool. They distracted me for a few moments from my crushing depression and I wanted to thank you for that." He turns his back on the little gang and walks out.

Evans takes a gulp of red wine. He sets the empty cup down on the serving table and orders another, fishing change from his pocket. The night is getting expensive.

With wine in his hand our man turns to look for Buddy but his eyes go straight to Carrie, who has just walked in with a female friend. She looks amazing, wearing a blue and brown paisley dress that clings to her figure and knee-high boots of wrinkled leather.

Evans thinks of something funny: Trish, his ex, used to wear black knee-high boots when they first started going out, but those boots seemed to disappear after things got serious. It hadn't really occurred to him until now. Maybe Trish only wore them when she was single. He wonders if she's wearing them again now that he's gone, and a stabbing sadness jabs through his solar plexus. He takes a gulp of wine and backs into the other room.

Thomas and his circle of admirers are moving the other direction, and Evans finds himself swimming backwards against a stream of young art peeps. He turns around and finds himself face to face with Thomas. Up close, the young sculptor looks like he hasn't slept in days.

"Good show," Evans says.

"Thanks, man," Thomas smiles and slips around Evans back into the main room.

Okay, so what now? he wonders. Obviously, he'll have to go face Carrie, even though he's humiliated to do so. She was very nice to him despite his fumbling, ineffectual love-making, but she would probably be as uncomfortable seeing him as he is seeing her. He could spare them both the embarrassment by prying open a window and throwing himself from the fourth floor to the street below. It's an option, but he puts it down as a last resort.

He knocks back the wine. What is that, three cups? In six or seven minutes? Our man winces as he swallows the last of the red. He feels a mild head rush and his cheeks are getting warm. It's not too much, but it's definitely too fast. Not the best idea if he's going to talk to Carrie. He sets the cup down on the floor against the wall, then rethinks and picks it up. He takes a breath and walks back into the main gallery room.

Carrie and her friend stand talking to a couple guys. The guys are hipsters by the look of their hairstyles and upturned collars. Evans makes for Buddy, gripping him by the arm. He whispers in his friend's ear: "She's here."

Buddy looks at Evans. "Who?"

"Who? The only girl I know in this city, you knuckle-head. Carrie."

"Okay, calm down." Buddy casually turns and looks over his shoulder. "Yep, that's her all right. Aren't you going to talk to her?"

"I don't know. I feel like a fucking idiot."

Buddy shrugs. "I don't know why. Just relax, man. Go talk to her. Shit, you slept with her. It's the least you can do."

"Right." Evans sighs, runs his hand through his hair, and heads back to the serving table for another plastic cup of wine.

Suitably fortified, he approaches Carrie. She's beautiful. He admires the way the body-hugging dress shows off her shape. He realizes the wine is probably making him horny, and he sees the danger in that: the only thing more pathetic than being desperate is being horny and desperate. And that's usually followed by being horny, desperate and frustrated.

"Hey," he says when he's almost next to her.

She turns from her friends and gives our man a cold smile. "Hey, asshole," she says. "Can't work a phone?"

Now, if our man Evans had his head screwed on straight he would spot the twinkle in her eye and the warmth behind the cold smile, and he would figure out that she was teasing him and not giving him a genuine recrimination. However, it should be abundantly clear that our man does not have his head screwed on straight. He is depressed and confused and burying his potential humanity under choking layers of self-hatred. Where does it all this darkness come from? He doesn't know.

His cheeks, already red from the fourth cup of wine, flush further.

"Um, yeah," he says. "Sorry about that. I uh, didn't want to call too soon."

"Right." Cold smile. Warmth? "What are you doing here?" she asks.

"Oh." He turns and points at Buddy, who is watching from across the room. "I came with Buddy. You?"

"I'm friends with most of these people."

"Oh. Right. Um...would you like some wine?"

She smiles. "It's all right, Evans. I'll get some."

He smiles an embarrassed smile and drifts away so she can talk to her art cronies. He slinks over to Buddy and jabs him with an elbow.

"Jeez, what?"

"I'm going. You sticking around?"

Buddy looks around at his other friends. "Yeah Evans, I'm sticking around. We just got here."

"Okay. I've seen the art, and now I'm gonna go. I'll talk to you later."

He knocks back the last of his wine and heads to the serving table. He sets his little cup down and orders two more reds. He pays for them, throws two dollars in the tip cup and drinks them down after the other. The two kids working the table silently stare while he works down cups number five and six in the what? fifteen or twenty minutes since arriving? He sets the empties down and turns for the door.

Balance is poor when you're suddenly drunk, but the potential embarrassment of walking like a sailor on shore leave is offset by the sudden sense of being a bad-ass, getting drunk and storming out of the party in dramatic fashion. At least that's how our man Evans sees it. Really, he just drinks too much wine and walks out. No one really notices him except Buddy, who doesn't know what to say, and Carrie, who doesn't know what to feel.