A Princess of The Linear Jungle

district.
    Half past nine, and the designated Block stretched as lonely, sad and empty as a drunkard’s beer keg. Broken streetlights outnumbered functioning ones. Rats dashed from the Riverside of Broadway to the Trackside as if conducting a relay race. Holding her bottle of cheap plonk ready for use as a cudgel, Merritt stayed close to the walls of the buildings, instinctively seeking protection, although against just what, she could not have said. Studying the posted address numbers—when available—she reached the relevant structure. From beyond its thick, humidity-slimed, glazed cinderblock walls, music thumped faintly, and Merritt relaxed a little.
    Her knock on a big metal-sheathed, riveted door eventually brought a response. She expected wariness, but instead the door swung wide, spilling out light and sound.
    A thin Bentoan fellow, amazingly composed despite his sweat-slicked golden face, regarded her with impartial suspicion. “Yes?”
    Merritt had to shout. “Ransome Pivot invited me!”
    The Bentoan nodded politely. “Certainly. Come in.”
    The door swung shut behind her, and Merritt found herself in a vast tall open space, pulsing with music, chatter and odd lighting effects, and festooned with a hundred madcap amateurish decorations. Scattered seating and other furniture seemed lost across the huge, people-packed floorspace. She smelled spilled liquor and dope smoke and a hundred cheap perfumes.
    “I am Henry Yun. Ransome and I are both pre-med. Goodge Adams and I own this joint. Please make yourself at home.”
    Yun left Merritt then, and she stepped with tentative enthusiasm into the scrum.
    Merritt never encountered Ransome that whole evening. But she chatted with dozens of strangers, gradually loosening up with every sip of free-flowing gin. After a while, she realized she was having a great time.
    Goodge Adams proved to be a chubby, excitable short guy, the antithesis to his roommate Henry Yun’s slim sangfroid: earnest and bright-eyed at the moment in an intoxicated fashion. He trapped Merritt in a corner on a broke back sofa, her on the cushions and him perched above on the arm, and bent her ear about the rigors of med school.
    “Nothing but work, endless work! Swotting up awesome big books. And the lab hours. Endless! Not to mention anatomy! And try practicing anatomy without corpses! It’s the essential medical conundrum!”
    One word in the tirade made no sense to Merritt, and not merely because she was very drunk herself. “Corpses? What’s that?”
    Goodge ignored her, or perhaps did not hear her. “And all that competition and struggle, just to graduate at the top of your class. Gotta get hired by the richest hospital, the chicest practice.”
    Here Goodge displayed a sly look for which Merritt could discern no reason. “But Yun and I have a leg-up on the others. Oh, yes, we do! We’re learning anatomy all right, ‘way deeper than the university allows!”
    Goodge leaned forward and ran a hand up Merritt’s leg to her thigh. In her alcoholic haze, she figured she was intended to provide the extra anatomy lesson he refered to. She brusquely displaced his groping paw, causing him to fall drunkenly off the arm of the sofa and lie peacefully on the filthy floor.
    Subsequent hours could only be reassembled in fragments, with many segments missing. But one incident stood out.
    Merritt was in search of the WC. She had wandered far from the crowd, toward the back of the huge building, and had her hand on a doorknob. But the door was locked. She struggled with it, convinced for some unfathomable reason that this room contained the sought-after toilet.
    Then a steely hand clamped her wrist.
    Henry Yun’s face resembled stone. “What are you looking for?”
    “The—the toilet! Let me go, you’re hurting me!”
    Yun released her. “This is the wrong room. Very private. Please follow me.”
    Seated on the toilet, Merritt was unaccountably almost too frightened to pee.
    Full sober awareness returned to her only when she awoke with the light of dawn.
    Merritt sized up her situation with slow horror. She had certainly made some good friends, albeit anonymous ones.
    She lay naked between two other unclothed bodies. One body belonged to a rangy young woman with bobbed black hair and a plethora of tattoos. The other carnal bookend could be claimed by a middle-aged, balding fellow whose potbelly failed to diminish a penis easily twice as large, even flaccid, as any it had previously