THE GAME

In a housing development, the Man on the Balcony, tired of television and his wife, starts playing the game he formulates -- watching the windows light up across the way, spying on the people and the life that goes on in other apartments. He formulates the rules and his wife starts to play and they become The Watching Couple (a ""negro"" nets you 15 points, a cop 20, and James Joyce wins). The Gentleman Who First Discovered the Watching Couple is the next of all the people who will start to play the game -- think of the status if you have a grand piano or a waterfall in your apartment. But it becomes less if other people copy you. Pretty soon the game is played all over, commercialized and exported. Has man conquered this three room apartment? Are there truly social repercussions here? One suspects that this is only catchy, good-natured, peepingtomfoolery designed to snag the curiosity of the ""adult reading a book (3 points)"" which might be a novel (that's six more) before he loses the game by turning on the tube (minus 19).