WHITE BOOKunsigned

(2004)

1.RESIDENTI’d lived in the same city for years, but without ever finding my place there; no one knew who I was, though I often tried to tell them my name, perhaps they did remember my name but nothing more, seeing my face only reminded them that they had forgotten something, or maybe they never heard my name at all, for I’d learned that my voice didn’t carry very far. So I applied myself to becoming more demonstrative, first by arranging my body into various social contortions which, though painfully awkward to maintain, did gain some positive attention. And yet I soon became disheartened. Not that the occasional criticism I received was undeserved; in fact people often seemed too lenient, as if to dissuade me from wasting time making improvements. I had no idea how to overcome the

extraordinary resistance I met, how to enlist their help in finding my home here. Surely there was some function I could serve, if only I would let go the absurd longing for distinction; any kind of life was preferable to this one, and yet the moment I surrendered my aims it seemed that I’d been too easily discouraged.

2.SIZERecently I’d discovered that I was somewhat larger than I'd thought. For years I’d suspected that I lacked substance; at one time I’d thought this was due to my having kept poor track of my measurements, and so I’d begun daily recording my height and weight, then my girth at several points, and later, using calipers and some long sterilized pins, my actual thickness. Nevertheless I could not achieve a sense of definition. And yet because I worked so hard to achieve it, because I suffered so much when I failed, it almost made me uneasy when one morning the problem seemed to have disappeared while I'd slept. Only last week I’d barely come to the waist of someone who stood six feet, the same height as me; nor could I even stand in front of another person, I was always repelled to the side. Now I was planted like a tree.

Moreover, having finally established solidity, I actually began to grow in size. Small increments, yes; no one noticed unless I prompted them to do so, but people responded with sincere appreciation of the gains I had made, even if they were not yet obvious to the human eye, and they gave their encouragement without reserve, as if the desirability of growing were self-evident. Maybe they were only trying to humor me, who knows. But fortunately no one asked me to explain why I had suddenly started to grow, because I wasn’t sure that I could. Perhaps it was because the tendency of my life had been to shrink, to occupy as little space as possible. Or possibly I wished to be in greater conformance with standards of physical appearance that other people found attractive, to resemble a person to whom they would be drawn, and even if they never beat my doors down to offer themselves, the mechanics of social intercourse would work more smoothly for me

now. How could they not? For my prior physical state had always set the tone for the impressions that others formed about me, and I was finally willing to acknowledge that this tone was frankly always a negative one, even more so because it was obvious that I achieved that state through my own rigorous design.

3.SISTERHow many years it had been since I was separated from my mind! I knew it to be located somewhere in the vast dark tracts of falsehood in which I had stumbled through several decades of life, but where? Someone had once told me that my younger sister, whom I generally avoided, knew exactly where my mind could be found, but my sister had found her home in the world and the sight of her paralyzed me with envy; I refused to ask her where it was, even when I wanted to know. And so I continued to circle my mind, or so I believed, this mind in which I belonged, or once did belong, and I never saw anything of this mind except my younger sister. My sister! I ought to have learned that the more impoverished a relationship becomes, the greater its contribution to an untraceable self-contempt. But even

thinking of her brought back all the disquieting boredom of childhood, the subdued loneliness each of us had passively watched the other endure. Her flattened facial expressions all said, you never did a thing for me, brother, and they had said it over and over again, for thirty years. Nothing leaves one more defenseless than an unspoken resentment; I lived in fear of the day it would finally be declared, though without knowing what I was afraid of. And I desperately wanted to be helpful to someone, but to whom? Certainly not my sister; I raised my level of spite to match what I believed she felt towards me, and I could not ask for her forgiveness though I had the disagreeable feeling that were I to do so, my mind would have been restored to me immediately. True, I had once believed that a brief apology might clear away years of congealed disappointment, even if I was unsure what to apologize for. When I experimentally voiced one

to her, it did at first feel as though the barriers between us had collapsed at a single stroke, and we established a provisional intimacy and trust that once even allowed us to briefly explore physical relations with each other. For a moment I felt that I was not alone in the world, and it seemed that not being alone was the key to finding my mind, or at least the cure for the need to find it. Of course it took only the slightest shake of everyday events to rupture this symbiotic connection between my sister and me, to drive us back into safety of our stubborn antipathy; my efforts to shake free of it merely proved that the true line of battle lay at a depth that words could never reach.

4.INJURYI had a minor accident while performing some experiments; the next day a lesion had appeared on my abdomen, and it seemed to be taking a long time to heal. Every night I gauged its depth with a small metal ruler but I saw nothing to get too concerned about; the minute changes I observed were probably due to fluctuations in the pressure I applied to the ruler when I inserted it into the wound. When I finally showed it to a couple of friends, they scrutinized the area and asked if it hurt much, but they were reluctant to give an opinion and seemed impatient to change the subject. I also noticed they appeared to be looking not at the injury but instead at my pointed finger. I don’t know, maybe this was their way of telling me I needed to take care of the problem on my own time. But from then on I made a point of

asking for practical advice, even from people I knew were not qualified to give it, just to reassure them I was looking not for sympathy but a solution. The advice I received was impossible to make sense of; I still tried to follow it, less with the object of healing the wound than of maintaining my ties to the community. Though I’d not yet benefited from them, I didn’t want to lose those relationships at any cost, and I was fairly sure that making the effort to follow people’s recommendations would hold their esteem; I did my best to create the impression that I was applying their suggestions with encouraging results. Sometimes I imagined these lies were the real cause of the lesion, but they also appeared to keep it from getting worse, and I tried to postpone the day they would be discovered.

5.NEIGHBORWe were neighbors and then fast friends; he preferred my room to his own and this was fine with me. But as time passed our contempt for each other finally began to surface. Of course our suspicions had been acute from the very beginning, but we had implicitly chosen to deny them, thereby remaining largely ignorant of how much we really disliked one another. Instead we amazed ourselves with how much we had in common; sleep barely interrupted our endless exchange of old secrets, and our only regret was that we had not met each other sooner.But finally we exhausted our supply of false disclosures. I turned off the lights: for several days I’d been unable to think of a thing to say, and the windows would not go black. A few moments later he reversed the switch, stating that he'd rather the lights were left

on for the time being. By pure coincidence he had replicated the sound of my voice, or of what had been my voice. It was then that our minds began to study destruction.

6.OPTIONSI had three to choose from. Three what? I wasn’t exactly sure. Hopefully a selection of objects that would capture the public imagination, increase my range of influence. The most marked variation between them was size; simply speaking, one was small, the second medium, the third large. Certainly there were other differences, major differences, but they were hard to visualize because I was so absorbed with longing for a place in the world, which has always been a world of people accessorized by objects. And now there were three of them; at first I really liked the small one best: it appeared to be a vest that harnessed cylinders of propellant to my back, with folding struts to keep my arms and legs comfortably adducted, detachable wheels. The medium object was the same size as me.

Which would seem to make it the obvious choice. But what was it, exactly? This one was murky, transitory, of ill-defined shape, red one minute and blue the next; it might have been some type of living thing, and I wasn’t keen on the possibility that it might grow to unmanageable size. The third object was a large square area of darkness, for which I felt a guilty attraction. I experimentally pushed my hand inside it and felt a pleasant resistance, but then it would dart like a black flame to another corner of the room, leaving me stirred with hostility and desire. Soon I was bogged in ambivalence, unable to make up my mind between the three, and I began to realize that this was only one of many items that needed my attention. Yet I could not surrender the idea that this decision was of greater moment than the others, would have enormous bearing on my own life and possibly on many others around me. I decided to take a nap to break the impasse,

and as I lay on the sofa I overheard someone in the next room talking on the phone. Apparently I’d been procrastinating much longer than I’d thought; no doubt he had been brought in to deal with the backlog of work that I’d been avoiding. I listened meditatively to my papers being stacked and slithered into place, trying to picture where he was putting them by identifying the sounds they made at the various points of contact with my desk and filing cabinets. But then he began to recite a maddeningly overlong joke to his friend on the line; I tried to ignore him but could not stop listening.

7.PERSONAI resembled no one, so I selected a friend to copy: I began duplicating his features, and disembodied features of my own which clashed with those I wanted to display. The results were not lasting; to hold them in place I identified the forces of life that had shaped my friend and subjected myself to them. This succeeded to a degree; once I was even mistaken for him by a family member, but I soon became sickened by our shared characteristics; there was no way to distinguish the traits I’d affected from those of my birth: as such I felt stripped of both, and this effect was compounded by the new friends I later obtained to put things back to normal. In the end I got rid of all my friends and sent them over to my neighbor. One by one I sent them away until his house was full and mine was empty.

8.HOUSEHOLDI had several brothers, sometimes four or five; the number fluctuated constantly, though usually within that range, and they all lived together in one house. Tired of being alone, I moved in with them for a time. All of my brothers were good with their hands; one would expect that with this much labor and expertise in supply, our house would stand above most others. But what my brothers and I lived in could hardly stand at all; rarely were there more than two walls in the air at any given time, though they hardly ever put down their tools; appliances short-circuited in the puddles that ran across every floor, and so much dirt had been tracked inside that pale weeds grew in the corners of some of the rooms, at least until, for an error in the latest blueprints, the walls had to be torn down and redone. My brothers,

however, tolerated this disaster of a home as if everyone in the world lived in one just like it. Privately, I often sat in judgment on their disorderly manner of living, but I always stopped short of trying myself to improve our condition, because I had to recognize that my brothers were satisfied with an unfinished house, and I would have felt no more at ease in a completed one. So I adopted a neutral stance on its construction, which I decided to neither participate in nor stand in the way of. I doubt I could have stopped it even if I’d wanted to, for building of this house seemed driven by something outside of human will; my brothers were diligently playing a role which they did not feel a need to understand, and they were curiously unconcerned by the moldering piles of lumber and the mud into which they sank. Perhaps this was what freed them from the strictness of purpose that always undermined my own projects; they adapted easily even to the

unaccountable changes in their own number, while my own survival could be threatened by the most insignificant things. Sometimes I wondered if the anxiety I felt could be attributed to this lack of involvement in their lives; when we spoke I understood little of what they said, even less of what came from my own mouth, and yet we continued to behave as though we had heard each other perfectly. Still, there were worse places in the world for me to be than nearby my brothers, for they had always accepted my presence without question or complaint. And that was probably more than I did for them; because such patience was unknown to me I often believed that I persisted here through my own ingenuity and resolve, and I would feel certain that, although I contributed nothing to it, this house, and even my brothers, could not have existed without me.

9.DILEMMAThings seemed to be going pretty well, then one morning I suddenly became aware that they were not; in fact I had already rushed past some very obvious warning signs. At first I strained to turn the situation around on my own, but eventually I gave in and decided to phone for assistance; I placed a call and waited for help to arrive. No one came; maybe I had described my position as being more dangerous than it really was, and this had discouraged anyone from getting involved. I made a second call to retract the exaggerations I might have made, and soon a man arrived to help me. Or supposedly a man: often he appeared more as a chair or a piece of clothing; once I thought he was the bad air that filled the room. Apparently he had become sick on the way to reach me. I soon gave up trying to explain

my problems to him, so absorbed he was by his own; there was no sign of comprehension in his face, if that is what one would call it. I saw only a look of unspeakable sadness which I could not take my eyes away from, and I would have kept staring at him long after he died if my own worries had not finally forced me away.

10.WANDERERS: AMy companions and I were surveying the desert, looking for a place to make our home. Each new site we examined was more unappealing than the last, at least to me. I did not speak of my doubts, though, being unsure of their validity, and I soon began to feel that my ambivalence was a burden to the others: I wondered if I should pull away from them while I still had the choice to do so. One day we came on a metal post in the ground. While my companions rested I dug a hole at the base. From my pack I withdrew a photograph they had taken of me at our first meeting. Seeing my smile had always made me ill at ease. I dropped the picture into the hole and covered it with sand. Gone forever, I thought. I felt nothing unusual, though. We slept for a few hours, and when I rose I noticed several large flies sitting on the

mound of sand, their abdomens pumping as though to draw from something beneath it. Shortly we resumed our search, though instead of continuing our linear path we began to spiral outward with the post as our focus, and the diameter of our circles increased in such small increments that it was many weeks before it was finally out of sight.

11.WANDERERS: BWe ventured to find the ocean but could not: I often felt that, so long as I was joined to my companions, what was sought would never be found. Sometimes I believed they encumbered me, at others it seemed that my own haze of anxiety cast a pall over the others, bending their hopes and warping their sense of direction. Occasionally one of us would have a persuasive estimate of our geographical position and where we should go, but it was always pulled apart in the undertow of our lust to be separated from each other. One year, just before the onset of winter, we did find a canal of brownish slow water; in the cold we followed it for a hundred miles and then could go no further, for here this canal intersected ten others, each one flowing in a different direction, in the hulking concrete overpasses that ran to every

horizon. No doubt each man was thinking that none of the others could possibly withstand this degree of frustration; each believed that he alone had the strength left to aim for higher goals, which could be that much more easily reached now that the weaker elements of our group would soon be eliminated. But these obstacles only bound us more tightly together; silently we stood beneath one of the massive dripping aqueducts, heavy with disappointment at seeing that all the others were still there.

12.WANDERERS: COur mood lifted when we returned to the arid regions we had come to know. On one expedition, toward evening, we spotted the aluminum fuselage of a derelict aircraft glowing in the twilight. The nose of the plane rested on the ground but it seemed almost intact– some of the panels on top the fuselage had been removed by salvagers; the huge aircraft had filled with rainwater, and the frontal landing gear had collapsed under the weight. Using a rock as a hammer, we drove a heavy bolt through the underside of the fuselage, and the water rushed out so forcibly as to gouge a reservoir for itself in the hardened ground. While one of us built a perimeter wall to contain the overflow, the others excavated the long channel to irrigate our dried and distant property, so far unproductive. To distribute the workload fairly we periodically changed positions.

13.WANDERERS: DThere was a large and ragged bird. As it flew dirt and scale fell from its wings, and behind the long black beak was a compact brain for the execution of a single purpose: the bird began to gather things, gathering them one at a time and from disparate regions, and carrying them back to a high flat place under the sun. The distances covered were enormous and slow, the destinations ever more remote, and yet what was retrieved always appeared to be constituted of the same glutinous gray substance. The bird would drop these effects on the ground, and with its beak puzzle at them in the sand for a moment before cautiously unfolding its dilapidated wings for another interminable flight. At length these parts began to assume an ambiguously human form, and when it was completed the bird coughed a thick white fluid over the figure, as if to join the pieces

together. More vexing to those of us who saw it, however, was the posture the bird then assumed before the product of its labor: poised before the figure with partially opened wings, the bird looked as though it meant to leap into this thing it had made, and thereby finally escape from itself. And in this position of readiness it remained locked stiff, though in the months that went by before it began to visibly decay it was difficult to mark the moment the bird actually perished. But it was really the figure in the sand that exerted a stronger fascination over us; perhaps it was merely the shape, or the peculiar substance of which it was made. Of course no one dared touch it, but when the figure was torn apart and devoured during the night we all felt a sense of loss, and the sight of a dog sneaking around with something hidden between its jaws provoked us to a rage that the hardest beating could not satisfy.

14.WANDERERS: EFor the first time we ventured north: barely a mile from our settlement we discovered a stream which we had never imagined to be there. The stream was dark and deep and fast, and soon it broadened into a beautiful river. Before long we were all getting hungry, but in our impatience it never occurred to us to go back for supplies: instead we walked along the river looking for something to eat. Someone spotted a large black mass floating in the water; we pursued it for miles but the river would not push it to shore, and none of us could swim to reach it. At length we contrived to lure it in with the pieces of string we each carried. A difficult maneuver, for we had no hooks, and the mass had no appendage around which the string could catch; we depended on the traction of the wet string against the surface of the mass to set it

rolling toward us in the water. Our progress was slow, as the strings came back covered with dark stains that had a stimulating odor, and each person took time to pass the string through his mouth before casting it out again. Through this process the mass was gradually eaten away, and when we finally retrieved it from the river it was no more than a small black ball which immediately melted in our hands. By this time night had fallen and it was too dark to find our way home. We lay down shivering on the warm sand, but tired as we were, none of us could fall asleep.

15.WANDERERS: FThe sea met the land, and trees grew on the land where the land met the sea. If rain flattened the sea, the water turned the color of lead and the weighted limbs of the trees sagged down to the land. If the tide rose at midnight, the sea carried the fish past the trees and into the filling fields beyond.

16.SOMNAMBULUSI was gone for a while. But I came back, through the same door I’d left. Some people were waiting for me. How had I occupied myself ? I could no longer maintain that this was an inappropriate question. The initial response I gave, which I composed unassisted, collapsed before developing into a series of discrete and audible words, but after several consultations I was able to cite activities which were generally regarded as productive uses of time; whenever possible, I mentioned names of persons who could corroborate my answer.

17.CORRESPONDENCEMy father and I had fallen into the mistaken convention of regarding each other as friends; we began to have arguments that ended badly, the latest one nearly in violence; we hadn’t spoken since. Eventually I would find a businesslike letter of reproof waiting in my mailbox, though it would take him a week to develop a conviction that I had exploited his willingness to treat me as an equal, and several more to refine his thoughts into a terse and disciplined summation of my character. Having received such letters before I could guess at its style and contents, at what he would accuse me of, and I did not doubt that it would be logically constructed and persuasive, with enough basis in fact as to appear, at first glance at least, irrefutable. For he had confided to me several times how much pleasure he got out of

building an unanswerable argument, how he often wished he could find some application for this; though these letters were ostensibly aimed at putting me on notice, they may have been motivated by an even deeper need to stretch himself to a height I could not reach. Which predisposed me to ignore this letter entirely; however if I chose not to open the letter, I would have to return it immediately– for if I kept the letter I would, at some point, have to read it, and if I read the letter I would then be compelled to answer it: while it was possible to dismiss accusations I knew were forthcoming, they were not so easy to ignore once I saw them on paper, for his words always sounded more convincing than I expected, and tended to come at a time when I was tired of holding my position and therefore liable to treat them far more seriously than I should have. Further, though I had become more adept at pointing out the manifold discrepancies between his

perceptions and reality, I was discouraged by the sheer number of them; I often felt that to be heard at all I would have to straighten out everything he had ever said. For he himself saw no discrepancy whatsoever, though he would grudgingly acknowledge that certain people seemed determined to force him to admit there was one, but this preoccupation, as he saw it, only revealed their dissatisfaction with their own lives, their boredom with themselves and their craving for distraction. His defensive self-aggrandizement almost bordered on paranoia, but it was held in check by an equally powerful internal demand to affect an imperturbable optimism towards life, or at least an unshakable confidence in his ability to surmount any obstacle that life presented to him; he was hardly aware of his edginess around strangers, though he would maintain that he only felt accepted by a few close friends; however this, too, was more wish than fact, since it

was his friends that found him most oppressive. Perhaps it was because I represented something of a last resort that he felt so threatened by any discord between us whenever he felt misunderstood by the world and needed someone to appreciate him for what he imagined himself to be, he unfortunately came looking for me. And why not? I had served this function for years, but lately I wasn’t sure that the world ever misunderstood anyone, and while being sought after sometimes checked my own general leaning to despondency, it also seemed to deepen it, but so gradually and insidiously that my relations to him did not appear as a contributing factor. Thus I avoided my father without feeling I had a legitimate reason for doing so, and this induced a guilt which I could relieve only by becoming even more yielding. Sometimes I wondered if it was this very guilt that now led me to expect an adroitly reasoned ultimatum. Probably I was

overestimating my familiarity with his tactics; he might have realized that a letter was not necessary; he would affect a benevolent willingness to let the matter drop entirely, as though I needed no further reminder of my sins, since after all they were hurting me more than anyone else. Before others he would dissociate himself from the dispute, and if asked for news of me he would merely report that I seemed to be somewhat depressed and confrontational lately, which of course concerned him, but given that I could be finally caught in the grip of some personal problems which I’d managed to evade for a long time, my irritability was understandable and could even be a good sign.

18.GUESTSLate in the evening, one of my friends stopped by on his way home. When I answered the door I felt a sudden dread of talking with anyone, and without thinking I told him that I was on my way out– I'd just learned of some problems back at work that I needed to tackle right away, but he could make himself at home while I was gone; there was even an extra room if he felt like staying over. My friend agreed that it was getting late for him to walk all the way home; he removed his jacket and introduced himself to my roommate, who had been watching us from the sofa. My roommate… according to his references, which I had not checked very carefully, he was employed at some kind of regular job, but as far as I could see, his only occupation was being a constant and vaguely morose presence in my household.

At first he was so unobtrusive I often forgot he was there, but lately I’d been coming home at odd hours to see if he was ever gone. Privately, I apologized to my friend for having to spend the rest of the evening with him, but in a minute the two of them were already conversing with less restraint than they usually showed with me. I checked my watch several times, then quietly excused myself. Once outside, I stole around to the back gate and reentered unobserved; I went to my room, locked the door and waited there quietly until morning came. When I heard my friend getting up, I emerged from my room and explained that I had returned in the middle of the night; the situation at work was taken care of, had practically fixed itself before I’d arrived. My friend was barely listening; he was too preoccupied with leaving to discern that I wasn’t telling the truth, and my roommate had disappeared, hopefully for good; maybe I’d been right in thinking that

patience was the only thing that would get rid of him. Then I noticed several deep bite marks on the side of my friend’s face, which he’d attempted to cover with some kind of paste. This needed some discussion, but how much? I was exhausted, I could hardly keep my eyes open. It was clear that time was running out for both of us, so we restricted our conversation to the mundane details of his plans for the day.

19.PROFESSIONA change of outlook, that was what I needed, so I decided to learn a new profession, I joined an agency on probationary terms: my behavior was monitored closely, but at least I was now shielded from the audit of my own eyes, which had never proven reliable; exasperated with their wavering focus, I had often acted impulsively and had begun to predict a short and useless life. Of course I cited the usual reasons for seeking a position, though their discrepancy with the real one made me suspicious of my immediate hiring, and then of the rapid advances I made: my choice of assignments was determined less by innate ability than desire to conceal its absence, and for this reason I could not rate my performance very highly. I continued to expect that it would collapse under the first strain, though in reality

failure was doubtful, since I could relieve my anxiety only by adhering strictly to the directions that were given.

20.PARTNERFor a long time I worked alone, then one day I was assigned a partner. I was happy to have him, my only reservation being that no one would explain to me why he was there; not once had I ever complained of being overloaded, and if my abilities were sometimes stretched to the breaking point it was only because I waited longer than most to ask for help. Still I wondered if someone had decided I couldn’t pull my own weight. But the allocation of help rarely follows the demand for it; probably there were not enough assignments to go around and the personnel department was trying to find something for everyone to do. No doubt there were better methods of relieving the financial difficulties into which we sank deeper every day, but people often tolerate mismanagement if it makes life easier, and I was no exception.

Besides, I enjoyed sharing my skills with my new colleague, and for the first time in my career I felt proud of the effort I’d made to learn them. At the beginning I actually could have accomplished more on my own, but that had to be expected during any period of orientation. Soon he would find his bearings, perhaps even surpass me in some areas; by then personnel would probably decide our office was overstaffed and reassign him elsewhere. But even so, the training he would have acquired might benefit him in the future, and life was so much more peaceful when I felt I was being useful to somebody. So even though I was impatient to know how long our arrangement would last, the pleasure of his company made it easy to put my worries aside. For he was responsive to my instructions almost to a fault; not only did he copy to the letter my approach to every procedure, he even mirrored my attendant hand gestures, facial expressions, and

intonations of voice. What a relief that he came at a time in my life when I was no longer so offended by the sight of myself. But having explained a particular protocol, I would look to him for some sign of understanding and he would answer with the exact same look of expectation. Were it not for the fact that he mastered the necessary skills much more quickly than I had done, this look might have put into question his ability to function without me, but all it really showed, I believe, was that my new partner had a remarkable ability to absorb the world around him. He ascribed his rapid progress to my own ability as a teacher, out of politeness to be sure, but even if his compliments were never wholly sincere, they came so unexpectedly that I could not help reporting to everyone how well he was doing. I hadn’t guessed that people would become so interested in his development; the way they pressed me for details of his latest

achievement made me somewhat uneasy. More than once I suspected that I was inadvertently grooming my replacement, and if I’d been given notice I wouldn’t have been surprised. Often it seemed that nothing better could happen to me, for I’d never been comfortable in the position I was hired for; I hung on because I could not voluntarily give up an opportunity to improve myself, regardless how unpromising it was. At these times I saw my partner not as my competition but as my relief, and I dreaded the day we would finally be separated.

21.VISITOne summer afternoon I went to visit my sister, just to find out how things were. Our houses were connected not by a road but a narrow channel of water; the channel was hardly more than a gutter; one could span its width with outstretched arms, and it was never so deep that one could not climb out of it at almost any point; even from a crouched position the tops of outlying trees could be seen over the rim; the concrete walls were smooth and flat except where the black roots had burst through. The water appeared stagnant; I studied a floating piece of clothing to track its imperceptible flow. Did the clothing belong to her? I’d forgotten what she liked to wear; we really had drifted apart, my sister and I. But the water was only a few inches deep, except in sections where the channel floor had collapsed. Here I

could not touch the bottom with my feet, and I slid down into the water and floated on my stomach. It had a questionable smell but did not hurt my eyes; I stared down without shutting them and held my breath until the water conveyed me to the opposite end of the narrow pool. Because it moved so slowly I often felt my lungs would burst before my head bumped the sharp lip of the pool’s edge, and I lunged forward with crashing strokes.

22.ADVISORBack when I was having more than the usual amount of trouble adapting to things, I had an advisor with whom I kept regular appointments. I’d since moved on; it had been years since I’d thought about him, until someone mentioned that lately he had been asking all about me, how I was doing and so on; he’d even recalled, according to my friend, how much he had liked me. Well that’s something, I thought, to be liked by your advisor, that changes everything. And so one evening I almost dropped in to see how he was getting along, but I turned away from the door before he opened it; the sudden informality would have embarrassed us both. So instead I began to write him a postcard that summarized my recent achievements, but in the end I was reluctant to share credit for any of them, for such a card

would have conceded that the time I’d spent under his guidance was not a total waste: my advisor had failed me again and again, had always abandoned me at the crucial moment, or so I privately maintained, for it was only after I dismissed him that I began to make some headway. And yet it made me uneasy when people spoke of my finally making an ordinary start in life as if it were a singular personal achievement, a natural outcome of diligence, courage and meticulous planning, even a precursor of greater contributions to come. Perhaps it was in reaction to this attitude that others remarked my recovery was not really surprising, even implying that it was too late for it to do any good at all. I was often encouraged to dismiss these statements as being founded in jealousy, but in fact their conservative outlook was in closer accord with my own: I was content to finally be able to disappear into the flow of life, to know that I was not blocking it but

also to feel no obligation to force it ahead; if I leaned on someone it was only to rest for a moment, and while I was useful to some people, I purposely avoided becoming too useful. And yet sometimes I wondered if I would have made these gains much earlier without the intervention of my advisor; I often felt compelled to judge whether the overall influence he’d had on my life was good or bad. It was a childish manner of thinking that could not tolerate ambiguity, that always drowned itself in an outpour of guilt-ridden accusations against him. Dismayed by the anger that poured out of me, afraid there would be no end to it, I would then concede that nothing had ever discouraged him from trying to help me, in his own way, but the moment I did so I would begin to wonder why all this help had not been more useful, and this seemed reason enough to probe his counsel once more for the subtle misdirection that had been quietly concealed within it.

23.ATTENDANCEI’d decided to skip a meeting, I had to sort out some personal business. An unexplained absence would have led people to expect that I would soon default on more serious commitments, so I told everyone there had been an accident; I emphasized that my injuries seemed to be healing rapidly, though I still made several incisions on my skin to support my claim in case anyone decided to verify it. I was advised to stay home, and in due time I resumed a schedule of regular attendance. Presenting false information about myself had the usual consequences: the hours I’d stolen were wasted staring at the ceiling and my personal affairs were in worse shape than ever, and at the next meeting I talked much more than I should have, requesting additional

responsibilities as if to compensate for my recent absence. Of course this seemed to further confuse my identity; to keep intact what part of it remained, I began to give false information on a regular basis.

24.ZOOMy partner and I would sometimes drop by the city zoo; it was a quiet place to kill time, perhaps due to its state of neglect, for the zoo’s planned renovation was already years behind schedule. The primate house was in particularly bad condition; the yellow tiles that covered the inside of the cages had broken loose from years of incessant pounding, and the animals had begun chewing through the rotten substrate, perhaps out of the dumb anxiety induced by confinement, or perhaps in search of some nutrient that our dated research had overlooked. But because they did not attempt to escape through the holes they had made, repairs were again postponed, and the zoo had become such a depressing sight that it was abandoned by most of its visitors, and later, deprived of operating funds, by all but the most

essential employees. The occasional elopement was more by accident than intent, as if the animals only wandered out of their cages in their sleep; soon the custodians would probably tire of leading them back to their cages and let them roam unmolested, and entrust their confinement to the low fence that circled the grounds. Once one lost its way through the front gate and strayed into the adjacent city park, but there it all ended, in the center of a huddle of mute bystanders. Perhaps it was not so strange how at such moments we forgot our own complicity at the very moment it ought to have filled us with shame, how mesmerized we were by the creature gasping at our feet, as if we were hearing the sound of our own breathing for the very first time. Most of us had never seen a thing die so completely by itself, particularly at such close range, and the sight touched us with a horror we had not felt since we were children.

25.COUNSELThere was a man for whom, at the urging of several coworkers, I had undertaken to be a mentor of sorts. Why they thought this was a good idea was never very clear to me; their reasoning was vague but stated with such earnestness that I felt obligated to begin meeting with him. That was a year ago, and so far the results had been so indefinite I’d begun to wonder how I could pass him off to someone else. But these affiliations often dissolve slowly with neither party being to blame, so I didn’t think too much about it and simply continued to do what I could whenever he called on me. Lately, however, people had begun asking how this man and I were getting along. Fine, I said. Which was the truth far as I knew; his tone and bearing were always polite and betrayed no hidden antagonism. I was not claiming that I had always

done my absolute best for him, or that if he did harbor any resentment towards me it would be entirely without cause, but even if I were to concede that sometimes it did feel as though we were becoming estranged, I was optimistic that our relationship would balance out, once we established the appropriate distance between us. Besides, while it was possible that I’d not been of much use to him, no one could hold me responsible for actually solving his problems. He may have been of a different opinion; he never made an implicit or overt assertion of blame, but whenever he botched things he carefully emphasized that his mistakes did not reflect on me in any way, and naturally this drew attention to how they did. It was a ridiculous idea, of course, that he was compiling his personal failures into an indictment against me. Once I made the mistake of suggesting as much, in a humorous way of course, and this resulted in our not

speaking to each other for some time. For several months after, I regarded this as our falling-out period, yet when looked at objectively, this interval lasted no longer than that which normally passed between our conversations. At times he seemed more remote than before, perhaps he was trying to figure things out on his own now, but it was hard to tell. What he really did with his hours I had no idea; he was often vague about what he was working on. Sometimes he spoke of a mysterious project that would soon yield astonishing results, and then appeared embarrassed at having given too much away. I took this as a cue to drop the subject, but he interpreted my self-restraint as indifference; thereafter he pretended to be keeping his successes all to himself, though we both knew these to be imaginary.

26.SURVEILLANCEWe had been stationed outside the building for longer than we could remember, endlessly shifting among the hiding places from which we studied the suspects. Any doubts we’d held about what was occurring inside the premises had long been resolved; we could have forced our way in at any time, and yet we did not. No doubt we were partially immobilized by a human reluctance to acknowledge that the horrors we witnessed there could be perpetrated with such quiet regularity, requiring no more than a darkened windowpane to shield them from the civic eye. We remained in place on the pretext that we needed more evidence of wrongdoing, though we knew within ourselves that we really wished to sustain the strangely intoxicating disbelief we felt at seeing the suspects undeterred by our presence, which we now

made little effort to conceal. It was as if we were witnessing the end of the world, but with no inclination to shelter ourselves from it or to prevent it from happening, though the power to do so was within easy reach. When one of them exited the building and passed beside us, we actually spoke to him, saying, are you not aware that we have observed and documented your actions from the beginning of time? Do you realize how thoughtlessly you have given us the right to destroy the life inside you, as a life has never before been destroyed? And this was true, we could have eliminated him on the spot. But he was unmoved by our questions, indifferent to our stares, in fact he walked right by us as if we were invisible, so closely that we felt the breeze of his passing. We stood there like shamed children, hypnotized by the dust raised in his footsteps, these small clouds that would one day fill the skies and blacken the earth forever.

27.SUMMERI had trouble staying in touch with some of my friends; they moved around a lot, or seemed to. By the time I got around to contacting them at one address they’d picked up and gone to another. Probably I waited too long. But I decided to keep trying until I found one of them; following a map someone had furnished me with several months ago, I found my way to his apartment building and took the stairs down to the basement level hallway. I found where his apartment number should have been, but there was no number, no door, just an empty black nameplate mounted to the bare concrete wall. I felt of the wall to see if there was a door hidden in it, but of course it was just a wall. To tell the truth I was not all that surprised. How many times had he invited me over, and I put him off with

another excuse? For some minutes I stood staring at the empty nameplate. Actually it might not have been a nameplate but rather a rectangular hole, or something else entirely; I studied it from several angles and could perceive neither surface nor depth. I began to feel dizzy and a little sick to my stomach so I turned to walk home. Outside it was a brilliant day, but I felt afraid. Of what? Isolation, age and shame, I suppose. I sped up my walk to chase it away. As I crossed the streets they seemed to have a remarkable number of lanes.

28.PROTOTYPEMy father presented me with a new car, or so I understood, as I did not recall the presentation itself, only that another car had come to me, which was supposed to have passed from my father’s hands. But more peculiar than this method of presentation, or of non-presentation, was the car itself, which was clearly of his own manufacture; in fact it resembled some blueprints that I remembered seeing on the corner of his desk when I was a child. There was something disturbing about this which took me a while to identify, but all the same I was glad to have it because I was currently without transportation; my father had presented me with many cars before, but they had disintegrated with careless use, or, as happened in three cases, they were transformed by the improper applications I forced

them into, in other words they ceased to be cars and began to be something else. Or, the vanity and selfishness with which I contaminated them made them shallow, literally two-dimensional; one could fold them like pieces of paper. Probably, this new car would end up like the others. But when I inspected the chassis more closely, I began to think differently: whatever the resemblance, this car could not possibly have come from those blueprints I remembered. For it had been designed and built as a mechanical embodiment of all the errors I had made in my life, including some very recent ones, and the erotic intensity of all the hopes I had maintained was sickeningly rendered in its inner framework. How could this machine have been conceived so long ago? At first I thought my father had become diabolical. Later I understood that he was merely trying to recover some parts of life I had destroyed. I decided to adopt a neutral stance

towards this car problem, but I still felt like a child pretending to be unimpressed by the ingenuity of a rival, and though I was now beginning to sense the true depths of feeling from which my father’s gifts came, I continued to ruin them with my habitually reckless management.

29.ENEMYLately I’d begun making some real headway in learning how to take charge of things, to move my own corner of the world and to take what I needed to survive, even should it come at my neighbor's expense. And yet all of my progress could be destroyed in an instant by the sudden appearance of an enemy from the old days. This generally happened, as it did on this afternoon, when I was rushing down the sidewalk on some minor business errand; we spotted each other at once, and before he even opened his mouth to speak the first malignant word to me I dropped at his feet and asked him to force his fingers into my mouth. He obliged by pushing in his entire hand, and then, after withdrawing it and shaking it distastefully, asked the companion who stood at his shoulder to do the same. After this they

walked on, and for several days I was able to carry on as if nothing had happened. But one morning I stopped by the apartment of a cousin who lived nearby; I had often confided troubling events to him because he was perceptive and impartial enough to help me understand them, was sympathetic and yet unsparing in relating observations that were often humiliating but essential for my development. But when I saw his face I changed my mind, for my cousin looked sick with something: during periods where was feeling unsure of his own place in the world, I was likely to be identified as part of the problem; he would then diligently recite my faults, incriminating me with evidence I myself had given him, but recasting my words so as to make it appear that I had let them slip unintentionally.

30.HABITATI had obtained a pet of uncertain species. It appeared to be some type of arthropod, with many legs and a translucent gray exoskeleton, though somehow, when I was not observing it directly, it left the impression of being a human hand, in spite of the fact that in no detail, except perhaps size, did it resemble a hand in the least. Of its habits and behaviors I had learned very little, for it would sit absolutely still on the armrest of my favorite chair for days at a time. For this reason one would think that I soon became oblivious to its presence, but in fact I only grew more sensitive to the minutest changes in its condition; I often gave the chair a shake to make sure it was not dead, and I could see the blackish musculature beneath the transparent shell contract to maintain its grip. For a while I thought

the creature might liven up in an aquatic environment. But when I experimentally dropped it into a pail of water, the thing went into convulsions that were so disgusting to watch I turned away and left it to drown. When I later returned and saw that it had survived the ordeal, having somehow thrown itself out of the pail and resumed its position on the armrest, I was not entirely relieved, for I’d had no success with other aspects of its maintenance and care. I didn’t know what to feed it, though I’d tried everything, chopping it all into a mash that the thing could pick at with its feeble pincers, but so far it had shown no interest in anything I had prepared. One evening when I inadvertently left a dinner plate on the floor, I noticed that the arthropod had dropped from the chair and was moving slowly towards it, but then it began trying not to tear at the food but instead rather pathetically to manipulate the fork and knife. Of course once I

finished cutting the remnants into edible form the creature was back on the armrest, and there it has remained since. Poor thing! But something would have to give soon, for the people I lived with were no longer hiding their resentment over the fact that I had given the creature the run of the largest room in the apartment. Further, it was not the only one I owned. I had several other creatures, much larger and just as needful of my attention, that I had confined beneath my bed because I did not have the courage to destroy them. For a time they were so quiet I had almost forgotten about them, but yesterday I discovered that they begun to emit clicking, bubbling sounds that resembled the phonemes of human speech. I suppose I was glad they were still alive after all this time, though their fretful noises voiced with heart-rending simplicity the suffering that my neglect had caused them.

31.ARRIVALA close friend who had always lived very far away had recently finished building a house next door to mine. One might expect that we’d hardly spend a minute apart from each other, particularly since, as far as I knew, he had no contacts here. The fact was I now saw less of him than ever, and when I did go to visit my friend I frequently had trouble finding him in his own house, though if I saw him later he would assure me that he’d been there the whole time; he would remind me of the numerous hallways and rooms that were of identical design and suggest that perhaps I was checking the same ones over and over again. Certainly I’d not expected that he would be at my beck and call just because he lived close by, but I was beginning to question why it was so difficult to see my friend, and pursuing him had become

so tiring that these hallways seemed to gently incline, regardless which direction one was heading. How much I’d missed him! For while our communication might be interrupted for years at a time, the simple fact that he was alive had always made me feel a little less alone. And yet it must also be said that I was still inclined to see him in an excessively favorable light, that my affection for him may have stood in blinding contrast to feelings of which I was hardly aware; perhaps it was not coincidental that since my friend had returned, I was often stirred awake by small ominous movements in the air, generated by the climax of something terrible happening very far away. But certainly he saw the need to establish himself in the community, and when I finally found him in his home, I should not have been surprised that he was never by himself; in fact he was generally surrounded by a company of people whom I supposed were new

colleagues. I had trouble concealing my hurt when, during a group tour, he took all of us into a huge round room that he described as being the principle of the entire house, a room which I’d not even known to exist, but it wasn’t my place to criticize him for trying to make an impression. Still I wondered if he might be succeeding a little too quickly, for friends made this easily usually turn out to be the wrong kinds of friends; blood flows through so many who don’t know what they are. Once he held a dinner in the round room, which I attended despite my dislike of this room: the round room, large dimension notwithstanding, induced in me an intense claustrophobia, and although it was voluminous and bare of furnishing except for a long narrow table in the middle, I would go into the round room as into an inescapable enclosure, and so deep was this rupture between perception and fact that I could only presume a similar breach

separated my friend and I. For my friend adored the room as much as I despised it, and this adoration was so strong as to have become the standard by which he seemed to measure the world around him; consequently the association between the round room and my friend was of such strength that sometimes I could not differentiate between them. The other guests, too, seemed to share in this relationship with the round room, evidenced by the fact that at random intervals they would disappear, becoming absorbed into the curved walls and blinking in and out of corporeality so that for the entire evening I felt alone and yet disagreeably aware that I could be observed from every angle. Had I believed that I was entitled to never feel out of place in a friend’s home? Perhaps so. Sometimes I thought I’d ruled out too quickly the possibility that this man was no friend at all, but I knew too well that these problems were often of my own making; recently

I’d begun to speak about my friend with a colleague of my own, and though my colleague listened for a while with the patience that had first drawn me to him, he finally began to express his frustration with my lack of progress towards a solution; I was deliberately making the same mistakes over and over again, pretending to be defeated by the complexity of the problem in order to gain sympathy and at the same time blind others to the true nature of the difficulty so that it might remain forever unsolved. Maybe I should have tried to talk things over with my friend instead, but frankly I was glad that I never did. No doubt I was afraid of discovering that my complaints were groundless, but on the other hand I did realize how selfish they really were, and I felt it unfair to move the load over onto his shoulders just because he was my friend. It remains unclear whether this was an act of discretion guided by sensitivity to another’s feelings, or a routine lie of

omission. Possibly it was both. But I began to wonder if I, too, should not pack up and move away from everything I knew, just as my friend had done. Of course it was not clear either whether I merely wished to run from the fact that I was unable to sustain something so simple as a friendship, though sometimes I wanted to be near him more than ever. But that my life here was not going in the best direction, this was beyond debate, and his coming to town was perhaps the clearest warning to leave that I was ever going to get.

32.ANONYM: AAfter years of struggling to pinpoint the source of my unrest, I finally comprehended that my identity was missing, or had receded; somehow it had faded out of me, but by such slow degrees that I detected nothing wrong until it was gone. As those near to me did not seem to suspect that my identity was absent, my exercises at retrieving it should not have been discussed casually or without discretion. Nonetheless I had mentioned them to several people, during moments when I believed myself to be making measurable progress and to have finally settled on reliable methods of investigation, when it seemed that the search would not be impeded by the presence of bystanders, as well as during moments when my absolute lack of progress engendered more frustration than I could possibly bear alone. These

disclosures made no sense to them whatever, and after an uncomfortable pause I would try to change the subject. Evasion uses up staggering amounts of mental energy; once I even had to lie down and go to sleep until the after-effects subsided, and it was less like sleeping than watching the light drain out of a room. After a few hours had passed, I began counting down from ten to the moment I would stand up and put on my clothes. Just as I arrived at two, I heard a visitor’s feet scraping outside my door; I closed my eyes and did not open them again until the following morning.

33.ANONYM: BAt intervals I would circulate journals of my attempts to locate my identity, hoping that by divulging my methods and procedures I might attract the attention of someone who would understand the magnitude of what I was up against; even if they could offer nothing in the way of guidance or encouragement, the smallest communication with them might partially reconcile the two lives I was leading, for the principles that guided my private conduct and the principles that guided my public conduct were at such variance that they were at constant risk of destroying each other. I submitted the notebooks to the persons I’d carefully selected, but their response was generally marked by boredom or confusion; maybe they had expected something entertaining or poignant, or at least a compelling portrait

of themselves. Probably I was showing them to the wrong kinds of people. But how many kinds of people were there? More on earth than in heaven, apparently. Most backed a step away from me, a few took one towards. If someone wandered close enough I would take every advantage I could, although these couplings soon turned malignant.

34.ANONYM: CBut the notebooks did not amount to a full and exact disclosure, for though I had documented, with as much precision as I was capable, everything which pertained to the search for my identity, I had also purged my records of all references to it, as revealing my identity as the object of this search would have invited people to make assumptions about me that would have been impossible to disprove. Anyway, there was nothing to say of my identity, except that it was absent: my identity could only be described in terms of this absence, of the consequences this absence had for me, and once these consequences had been fully defined, all references to this identity simply vanished from the account, as if by mathematical cancellation, and again it became the nothing which it was.

35.ANONYM: DI dreamed: a tall building was erected in the center of a basin in the desert. Then it began to rain, until the rain became a flood, and when the flood found the basin the building was submerged in the rising water. When the rain stopped the water was drawn from the giant reservoir; it was drawn and drawn again, and finally the top of the building appeared. The water lowered more, and the windows of its upper floors were visible now. I began the long swim from shore; when I reached the building I was near to sinking under and looked for something to hold on to, but the concrete walls were slippery with algae. So I floated on my back into one of the open windows, out from underneath the hot sun; to avoid striking a submerged fixture I moved as little as possible. I could hear the distant boom of water roaring

through the new dam that was under construction, the faraway shouts of the laborers. I rested beneath the perspiring ceilings a few feet above me as the languid flow of the soft black water drew me from one room to the next. The light dimmed as I floated through the maze of rooms towards the center of the building, and I heard the sound of something breathing, just ahead. It was my identity, waiting there in the dark. A shudder of pleasure went through me then, breaking the surface tension that held me afloat, and I began slipping under at last. What had I done to finally get here? Nothing I could take special credit for, certainly, but as the waters closed over my head I drowsily tried to recall when I had ever felt such a sense of achievement.

36.ANONYM: EAt last I gave up trying to explain myself to anyone, for it always resulted in embarrassment; instead I began, in conversations with others, to feign concern with the general predicaments of life so I could pursue my analyses without being sabotaged by my own longing for approval. It was not easy to conceal that my entire life was now organized around the attainment of a secret objective, almost impossible without telling one lie after another. At times the sense of estrangement was so painful that I would perceive in the people around me a stubborn opposition to my plans, which was all the more effective for being silent: given the state of things it was remarkable that I never supposed there might be a conspiracy against me. But the resistance I encountered seemed less like the work of an organized

movement than simply the collective disapproval of frivolous enterprise, which, being that I was part of this collective and shared its most deeply held convictions, was nearly impossible to disregard.

37.ANONYM: FOver the months I had built a number of apparatus for the extraction of my identity. They could be disassembled quickly into their component parts if someone showed up at the door, but these parts, since they were impossible to conceal, by their very presence threatened to disclose the purpose of my work; there was nothing telling in their appearance except their apparent lack of obvious utility, but people would soon begin to ask questions about them. I had spent some time anticipating exactly what these questions would be and then rehearsing my answers, but I saw that no amount of practice would eliminate the defensive tone in my voice, which of itself would discredit my answers and prompt additional questions which I had not anticipated. Eventually I discovered the answer to this problem

was to build apparatus which in every way resembled common household appliances and which could even be operated as such, thereby discouraging people from making inferences about my character from their presence, as the functions they served in the extraction of my identity were carefully hidden inside their structure.

38.ANONYM: GChanges of life were blowing in, new demands were being made of me, naturally I resisted them. Sometimes I succeeded, though I did not benefit by this, for in order to resist the demands I had to suspend the search for my identity, and once the demands had been resisted I was too tired to use the free time I had secured. An empty day ahead: not knowing how to begin it, I saw pre-conditions for beginning that I had failed to meet: often it seemed I did not know what I was beginning, or that I had thought too much about what I was beginning, which could only drive me to think even more. It was always a relief to find that I had omitted something, to discover the obstacle that had been frustrating my plans, so much that I was discovering obstacles more or less continuously, though by doing so I

deepened the guilt of knowing they were entirely self-imposed. At times I felt defeated by an unknown, by an unseen, by an unheard, and yet I still sensed that my capacity to resist was not yet exhausted: it became clear that the only conditions favorable to the recovery of my identity were absolute physical and mental isolation and reduction of stimuli to minimum biologic requirements, but I felt neither pleasure nor a sense of security in restricting my needs, and my attempts to do so usually provoked a violent counter-reaction; the austerity of my surroundings masked a life of frantic consumption and waste.

39.ANONYM: HI’d become so isolated over the last several months, suddenly it appeared that I had nothing to say to anyone, of course I’d been feeling like that for some time, in that I had been, prior to that moment, aware of having no idea what to say to anyone, but this had not seemed to me a disagreeable or malefic condition, whereas now it did seem to me a disagreeable and malefic condition, and that possibly I had forced my thoughts and feelings into an organization that was incompatible with life. Further, there were a number of objects which said much more about me than I could, and they were saying it all the time: I often thought people were only pretending to listen to me, while trying not to lose focus on what these objects were saying. All I

heard was a static hiss that rose in volume whenever I began talking, but apparently they could make sense of it, and even responded to the hiss as if it were my own voice.

40.ANONYM: IIt often happened that, when I was making no progress in the extraction of my identity, I began, without conscious aim, a nervous inventory of the things in my room, in fact this was the only time I made such an evaluation, when progress with my identity had halted, the evaluation was always preceded by a halt in progress. Consequently I began to see a relationship between the function and placement of the things in my room and the halt in progress with my identity. One evening the arrangement of things inside of my room became so critical as to be impossible to resolve, except by discarding all of the things inside of my room, and thereafter living in a room that was empty. I worked steadily through the night, disposing of almost everything I owned. At dawn I sat on the floor of my empty room in

complete defeat. Never in my life had I wanted anything so badly as I wanted my identity right then, though I vaguely understood that to keep living I would have to let it go forever. How diseased with obstinacy I had become! While the absence of identity had once seemed to fully explain my fear of the days ahead, now the absence of identity did not explain anything at all, it could only explain that which had already been explained, and therefore did not need to be explained again, and could not explain what had not been explained.

41.ANONYM: JOne morning I rode the elevator to the roof of a building downtown,just to look around; I knew nothing of what was happening in my own city, though I’d often tried to decide whether I belonged there or not, at least until I found out how many people were preoccupied with that very question. Regardless how they answered it, their lives never seemed to change, despite their perpetual longing to do drastic and irreversible things. Perhaps I really was tethered to my life as I knew it; I was still in the habit of believing that if I could only think a little more clearly then an opening would present itself, although thinking had not ever generated a solution; even where every condition that facilitated clear thinking had been met, no solution came. I had never imagined that I could be contained so easily.

42.DELAYI was en route to an appointment with my advisor, rehearsing the statements I had prepared, when I noticed an acquaintance I hadn’t seen in a while laying in an awkward position on the shoulder of the road. Recently someone had told me that he was not doing very well. At first he looked to be asleep, but his eyes were open; they appeared to fix on me as I approached him, but rather like the eyes of a face on a poster, and for a moment I thought he was dead. It might have been appropriate to stop and help him, but I was already running late, and if I took on responsibility for him without public support I would have to bring him to the appointment with me, which wouldn’t look good at all. And where then? Paired with another I would forget the next

destination I’d had in mind, would have to defer to this man to lead me through his own degrading orbit, not being able to break free of him until finally we returned to where we began.

43.NOCTURNALI woke abruptly in the middle of the night, believing that I was married: I had not known where, or even who, my wife was, but suddenly I sensed there was someone laying next to me in the very bed in which I’d imagined I’d always sleep alone, and I knew at once, without even turning on the light to examine her face, that it was her. Not that the light would have helped me to see her better anyway, for she had painted herself black from head to toe, and at any rate seeing her clearly would only have confused me and diluted the exquisite relief I felt upon finding her there. For I had just about given up on ever finding my wife; in fact I had long passed from wondering if I had ever really married at all into certitude that any marriage, whether past, present or future, was completely out of the question. And now

here she was; evidently I had been married from the very beginning but had soon become entangled in an agonizingly protracted erotic game of loss and forgetfulness. Unfortunately it was not yet over; even now I understood that she would go away if I touched her, and I realized with horror how easy it might have been to be happy all of these years. But soon the pale first light of morning began to show in the windows, and a few minutes later I turned my thoughts to how to complete several jobs that I’d been putting off for months.

44.AUTUMNMaybe it was my own fault for permitting it, or failing to refuse forcefully enough. But sometimes I did feel that I was being used. People tired of their responsibilities and without further consideration simply handed them over to me. Incidents like this were not at all uncommon: I would be walking around my house thinking I finally had some time to myself, when I would see sitting silently in one of my chairs a person that someone else had gotten sick of and deposited with me. They didn’t speak, they didn’t listen, they didn’t look even slightly apologetic for the fact that no one else wanted them; one saw that they sensed it was incumbent upon them to look apologetic, and when they attempted to look apologetic for not looking properly apologetic it was ten times more infuriating. Without exception they

were invalids of some type, mainly the type that were not identifiably sick and yet infiltrated a healthy household and relentlessly bled it dry until that household was destroyed or until every room and every object of utility therein was appropriated for the maintenance of that invalid, so that the household was a household no more but instead a massively complicated prosthetic device. Soon I was going to have to put a stop to this; yesterday’s case must go on record as being the worst yet. Invalid was hardly the word. It had a head, yes, in fact someone had placed a hat on it thinking this would make it blend with the surroundings, but most of the body was missing except for a cartilaginous sack of organs that hung below the neck. It was mounted to a steel armature that someone had wired to the back of the chair so as to give the appearance of a seated person. I unwound the wires, staring directly into the thing’s wet eyes to purposely inflame myself. I

slung it over my shoulder and instantly it began to leak a disgusting fluid that seeped through my clothes. This time I wasn’t even going to look for the man who had given me this little present, I would simply throw it away, and regarding the manner of disposal I would exercise no discretion whatsoever. I carried it to a public reservoir that was nearby and leapt into the cold water. Locking its head between my knees I casually swam out to the middle of the reservoir. When I let go it dropped like a stone but somehow managed to seize the end of my foot in its mouth. Gently I disengaged my foot and continued to tread water as I surveyed the shore for observers, though only out of habit. A stiff breeze hissed through the trees, and I noted the leaves were turning yellow.

45.VENGEANCEI’d taken delivery of a brand new bed; it was much too small, though this was no one’s fault but my own, as for some reason I often bought things knowing they were not quite right. For a minute I was exasperated with myself, but what for? Hating your faults only makes them stronger. So I edged onto the new bed and bent myself into the awkward position required to maintain my equilibrium. A child’s bed, practically, yet somehow it was comforting. It was not yet evening, but instantly I became drowsy. I’d been going at it pretty hard lately, wondering if I’d ever get to the top of the hill. All in all, though, I had to say that things were getting better; the world was beginning to yield to me a little, and plenty would trade their problems for mine any day of the week. But just before my eyes closed it occurred to me that this

new bed might be exactly the right size to tie a man down to before cutting his throat. The unexpected thought did not startle me awake; instead I hazily reflected that, from this moment on, my life was never going to be quite the same, for I could no longer disown the tremendous capacity for retaliation, so powerful that my hands warmed in anticipation of releasing it. As I dropped into oblivion all the binds of empathy and habitual deliberation suddenly fell away from me, and I could hardly wait to cause the destruction of which I’d always been capable.

46.COLDI slept first through the alarm and then the day; when I awoke it was already dark again and I was chilled through. I looked for the blanket that had slipped from my bed, and I discovered that I was inside what appeared to be a huge refrigerated locker. For what reason? Sometimes it happens that you are in a place where you would only be for a very powerful reason, for no reason. Possibly I had been misclassified, but given my tendency to fault others for complications I’d brought on myself, more likely I had been classified to the letter of a lie I had once told, apparently forgotten by no one but myself. At any rate the inside of the locker was so consistent with my ordinary surroundings that I had been moved there without my noticing a transition of any kind. But it was some minutes before I realized that

the body occupying the shelf beneath mine was that of my wife, for nearly all of the black paint had peeled off her skin, and frankly it had never been easy for me to describe her in her natural state. Well, that was my marriage, for better or worse, and now that it was over I considered that perhaps I might at least not be drawn so easily into situations like this one. Which I presumed had finally played out to its end, but I was thinking how to make a fresh start, the heavy door opened and a man entered; he drew back the sheet over my wife and spread her legs wide, and then he rapidly unbuttoned his pants and relieved himself in her. I was paralyzed by the expression of terrific strain on his face, horrified by the effort it took to move anything in this world. It astonished me that people didn’t die of exhaustion just thinking about what they had to do. I had always kept my own obligations to a minimum, but not only had this resulted in neither

freedom nor accomplishment, the idea of having to meet them for another thirty or forty years was intolerable. Probably it was this very manner of thinking that had delivered me into my current circumstances, but sometimes you get out of trouble the same way you get into it, so I decided to wait until this matter had resolved before I made any drastic changes.

47.BUILDERS: AWe were an impatient people; like everyone else we continually exhorted ourselves to be more patient in all matters of life, probably because of the axioms that were drilled into our heads when we were children, but none of us seriously believed that patience brought results; we heard only the voices of our parents and teachers as they drove us to persist at tasks in which we had lost all interest. And so it was always a relief to abandon practically everything we started, for even though we never finished anything we were always exhausted; our ambitions depressed us and it was good to see them destroyed by apathy, to drop to the ground and fall asleep with the sun in our eyes. And yet we woke from our inertia more desperate for achievement than ever, painfully conscious of the hours we had wasted. Once again

we moved to force every thought, word and gesture into compliance with our goals: this pursuit did not help us get along in the world and was doubtless the cause of unspeakable mental anguish, but it was the only one suited to our habits of living.

48.BUILDERS: BWe could not understand why we failed again and again; often we suspected that we were not equipped to realize our ambitions but we always had at hand a new strategy of concealing our deficits from our own eyes. It seemed imminent that one day our powers of denial would be exhausted, and then we would be gripped by the dismal truth, but as we drew closer to that point we discovered that we would not die of shame as we once feared; in fact it seemed that a better life waited for us if we could only stop scheming to circumvent our lack of natural ability. But to stop scheming– this, too, was impossible. And so once again we would begin to explore what we might do differently to achieve the results we wanted; we studied the lives of those who had gone before us, incessantly comparing their methods to our own; we

persisted in believing that it was not a lack of innate strength but rather its misapplication that caused all our problems. But because we were incapable of living with our mistakes we had become a lazy and superstitious people; all our energy was absorbed with calculating the right combination of circumstances that would make further failure impossible, and we had behaved this way for so long that if we had once possessed the initiative to accomplish our project, we had long forgotten how to exercise it.

49.BUILDERS: CIt had occurred to us many times before that our goals were not realistic, but only during interludes of despair when we had no new formulae for achieving them overnight. Sometimes we thought to induce ourselves by setting an arbitrary deadline for the project, though if the deadline were self-imposed, the reward could be nothing more than the removal of a penalty that we'd never have had to serve in the first place, and the penalty nothing more than the absence of this reward: meet the deadline or do not meet the deadline and the result was exactly the same. Possibly it was better to not meet the deadline, for then we could attribute the impasse to our failure to meet the deadline, and then grant ourselves one extension after another. On the other hand the imposition of a deadline was also an attempt to

acknowledge the limits of human expenditure, a method by which we tried to terminate a thought before it sank into pointless rumination or an act of manual labor before it became a means of achieving oblivion through physical exhaustion. Ideally we worked while we cared to work, and stopped when we were tired. But too often there was no such locus of internal guidance, we even regarded the point at which we became sick of work as the point where the work truly began, where we might at last exceed our personal limitations. The setting of a deadline was partly designed to block us from following this futile path, but the fact that we could even conceive of such a thing as a deadline indicated that deep within ourselves we suspected that it was not futile at all, and no self-placed barrier could possibly stop us.

50.BUILDERS: DUp to now we had endeavored to complete large segments of the project at once. No doubt this program of working was underwritten by vanity, by the need to periodically celebrate our accomplishments even if they were far from reaching our ultimate goal, but as the years passed we had come to understand that, even if vanity was an obstacle, it was one that would always be with us, and the harder we tried to purge ourselves of it the more it suffocated us. Lately, however, we were coming to realize that this method of completing large segments at once did pose its own difficulties, for the act of placing a milestone engendered a number of expectations as to how our lives might change for the better when we reached it, for example that our confidence in the validity of the project, as well as our hope of really

finishing it, would be renewed, so that the daily fare of drudgery and disappointment might be a little less burdensome; that the sight of our progress might gain the attention of a few bystanders and that beneath the warmth of their appreciation we might work with more self-assurance and less of the internal strife that had so often nearly destroyed us. Of course these expectations were never gratified; all that happened was that we moved a little closer to an end over which we had known nothing but agonizing doubt. For a while we pretended to be untouched by the pain of disillusionment, and we began a new segment straightaway, but the labor was onerous and mechanical and our hands and minds had no real life inside them. Disgusted by the products of these insincere efforts, we often gave in to a despair from which it took months to recover.

51.BUILDERS: EAt length we conspired to finish the project by arranging for it to self-destruct. It felt strange to finally be planning the one act that felt natural to us; perhaps we desired to make the most of the inextinguishable moment of pleasure that we each hoped would consume us when our labors collapsed into a smoking ruin. Our preparations were somewhat deceitful; to those who had often observed our work with benign curiosity, we casually suggested that we might not be able to keep it up much longer, but we spoke of our reservations lightly, as though they were no more than passing doubts that attend any human endeavor. Later it would become apparent that these hints had been, in reality, horrendous understatements. Perhaps we were only trying to indict the world for failing to take our efforts

more seriously, or to bury beneath a pile of rubble the shameful fact that, after all these years, our work had not produced a single structure that a human being could live in. But we were tired of new beginnings; it was the end to which our hearts were now fixed. Mindful that someone might try to interfere with our final plans, we continued to downplay the gravity of doubts that had already turned lethal, and sometimes with our neighbors we even talked hopefully of the days ahead.

52.ALGORITHMYou were without foothold in your own mental life. But rather than struggling to find one, you concerned yourself instead with meeting the obsessional requirements you'd assumed, so you could display purposeful physical movement and at the same time escape the unthinkable confusion of having to decide what your life meant to you. It was always there, however, that initial cognizance of the enormous self-deception taking place, that cold awareness you had strayed outside the margin in which your abilities directed you to live, all in order to achieve your deluded notions of merit… only now to become a delusion, a living falsity incapable of knowing its own secrets.

53.REFUGEI was living temporarily with several people whom I believed were members of my own family; our state was in bad shape and we had drawn together in order to better survive the evil times that were certainly ahead. We had even managed to find residence in some rooms that I’d lived in as a child, or that at least resembled them in certain details. Sometimes I wondered if I was overstraining myself to secure some feeling of familiarity with the place and people I’d once been so close to, because when I tried to itemize those details which I could positively identify, the resulting list fell far short of being compelling evidence that I was back where my life had begun. But given the circumstances I thought it best to indulge the pretense for the time being, and in fact I may have indulged it to an excessive

degree: one evening I confided to my mother how sad and tired I was, and I began crying so much that a puddle began to form at my feet, all the tears saved up over a lifetime of monotony and ceaseless struggle. It would have been better had she not reacted to this tantrum, or even if she had shown nothing but scorn. But instead she gave me all of the pity I was seeking and pulled me even deeper into the arms of my family; she may have actually been relieved to have something distract her from the danger that loomed ahead of us all. Nevertheless it was too late to turn back now; ask for help and you have to submit to what is offered. She took me back to my old bed, and I reluctantly moved over to accommodate one of my brothers whom she insisted stay with me so that I should not be alone. I advised him that I was a restless sleeper but he acted as if he didn’t mind at all; I was more than a little repulsed by the effeminate manner he had acquired in the years since

I’d last seen him. Perhaps I’d just never noticed it before. Seeing that I was not warmed by his presence my brother appealed to my vanity by asking about my latest accomplishments, and when I did not answer he began recalling them himself, exclaiming how extraordinary they were. I shut my eyes and pretended to doze off, for my brother was not speaking sincerely, but I couldn't fall asleep just yet, for some of his words were not wholly disagreeable to me.

54.CUSTODIANOn the care of young: I could at last be trusted not to drop infants and small children when I held them aloft and/or carried them. At worst a shoe would fall, or perhaps a tooth or a portion of hair, but the general body of the thing I could bear safely. Of course it would take some time for people to develop confidence in me, but I’d already won over two or three and there was no reason to think the trend would not continue. Not that I expected to succeed without even trying, as for a long time I had not been trusted by anyone, and that, too, was a trend which might continue for some time before dying out. One morning, however, I pulled back the blanket in which I had wrapped an infant the night before, and in its place were three white cylindrical objects, each slightly larger than a human finger. They had the look and feel of

a soft and dense wax, and yet were utterly weightless in the most disturbing way. I took them up and hurried outside where I deposited them in the woods, though not as far away as I would have liked, because it nauseated me to hold them. I mentioned this to no one, because I could not ascertain the degree to which I was responsible for the incident. For all I knew, people expected it to happen, but neglected to inform me ahead of time. So I decided to stick to the path I was already on and not concern myself with a cross-examination that might never come, for while it could benefit me to understand the kinds of questions I might eventually be asked, it would not look good if I answered them too readily. Besides, so many things in the world needed looking after, and how many people were truly good custodians to begin with? It was unlikely that I would be eliminated from duty just because I was not one of them; nevertheless I kept

reminding myself of examples of incompetence far worse than mine that had completely escaped general notice, for the days when I could afford to make light of my ineptitude at certain tasks had ended some time ago.

55.HYDROMORPHONE: AEnvy was the only thing keeping me alive. I often spoke of wanting to belong to the human community around me, but mine was the predatory eye that shadowed other people’s happiness, waiting for an opportunity to steal some of it, the material comforts and sensual pleasures that appeared to be a natural consequence of an inner love and trust in life which seemed absent in me; I continued to measure myself against the status I ought to have attained, a status which I once felt so sure of achieving that I regarded myself as though I’d already done so. Now I found myself overshadowed by many whose modest contributions I once regarded with such disdain.

56.HYDROMORPHONE: BPeriodically I injected moderate doses, obtained by theft from an employer. The hours passed more easily, and no deviance of conduct was noted; in fact my perpetual restlessness was eased so that I actually carried out my functions more effectively, and I was often appreciated for my expedience and discipline. The consequences would certainly one day be severe, but since I did not want to live otherwise it was a sensible risk to assume; I was impressed by the capacity of a hypodermic to put all disturbances of guilt and anxiety into immediate and total remission. And though this effect could only be achieved for a small fraction of the day, the prospect of temporary relief filled the remaining hours with a sense of expectation I’d not known since I was a child.

57.HYDROMORPHONE: CAt first I was overwhelmed with fear of being discovered, but soon I became aroused by it; the chronic sense of emptiness now became paranoia, a far more tolerable mental state since, within it, I could scheme to evade the threat of detection. This internal transformation seemed to have little to do with being narcotized; I felt it most deeply in the moments of abandoning my tenuous and frequent resolutions to never do it again. Only for an instant might I feel defeated by a senseless and destructive compulsion, and then I became exhilarated by freely indulging it, by what seemed a decision to go to war against life rather than accept the position it had marked for me. There was an immediate quickening in my step, and instantly I felt alive, attentive, vigilant, happy. The burden of self-contempt did not merely lighten, it

was removed completely, and this often happened before I even took the first injection. But most remarkable was how little adaptation was required to meet the demands of what would seem to be an entirely new way of life: the rigorous focus on certain projects, the practice of keeping them a carefully guarded secret, and even the methods of concealment I employed, were easily transferred. My thoughts had always revolved around some secret enterprise or other; the sense that I was a fraud, that I was on a fundamentally dishonest basis with the world around me, was not a new phenomenon.

58.HYDROMORPHONE: DThough it diverted you from your covert effort to become something else through propitious changes in your chemical structure, you did not neglect to try and improve your general mode of living, and daily you labored to make those advances in work and in love that purportedly made life more satisfying, so that you would not look conspicuously inert to your peers.

59.HYDROMORPHONE: EI saw that I was becoming sick, but with what, precisely, I was not sure. Moreover I had the unpleasant sense that the illness would never erupt into a specific symptom that I could resist; instead I would just slowly deflate, as it were, until I was nothing but a few folds of naked skin, but unfortunately a skin with consciousness, deprived of every sensibility but fear. Of course things weren’t so bad just yet; whatever was wrong might right itself just as mysteriously as it had infiltrated my life; the fading outlines of muscle might redraw themselves even more sharply than before, and I would resume the enterprises I’d momentarily had to forfeit with increased vitality; perhaps I’d even been afflicted by this many times before but had recovered by doing nothing more than giving my head a short rest. No doubt I’d

overreacted when I’d asked my mother to come look after me; I resolved never to discuss it with anyone if this ever happened again in the future, for her presence was an irritating reminder of my weakness. My perspective had been distorted by my condition and she actually appeared to me as being no older than myself, but with restless energy that should have abounded in me. Several times I’d been on the point of asking her to leave me to my own devices, of telling her that I was merely playing sick, but sensing my anxiety she would take me into her arms and console me as one would a child. This did little to ease my discomfort, but the sensation was pleasant as it was distressing, and being that this was my only connection to the world right now it was impossible to ask her to stop.

60.NOVEMBERIt was very early in the winter, and I was walking across an immense park, through the dry slippery leaves, up and down the low bare hills.Where did the leaves come from? For there were no trees around. It was a cold brilliant day and the wind skated over the low hills and sent the leaves up into little whorls all around me. My right hand was warm in my coat pocket, my left hand frozen around the wire handle of an overfilled pail, and as I slipped through the leaves its contents pitched over the rim, wetting my numbed feet. The liquid was in fact a quantity of blood that I no longer used, and I was trying to get to a place of disposal. Maybe I was inordinately concerned about spilling it. What would it really matter? All the same my heart nearly stopped every time I stumbled, and I poignantly regretted not having used a

larger container. In the back of my mind I was not at all ready to throw it away, was anxious that I would surely find a need for it in the future. But my feet kept on; I always felt better when I followed a plan through to the end, for it often helped me solve other problems which I’d previously thought to be unrelated. And it was such a beautiful day; the white sun was easing my cramped legs, and I broke into a smooth lope as I began to deliberate over a neighbor I’d recently been having trouble with.

61.RECEPTIONBy midnight the room had filled with people. The man pushed up against me seemed reluctant to talk; he politely answered my questions but the second I turned my back he slipped away. Only then did I realize who it was. Perhaps it was not unusual that I’d failed to recognize him: he had given me his name, but this name belonged to a hundred different people, and many of these looked alike to me; further, it had been years since I’d heard from him, and our relationship had been short term, consisting only of a few vaguely embarrassing transactions; if he had recognized me, I understood why he had said nothing. I knew I would have avoided the subject also, probably for the same reason, not to mention that now we could both start over from the very beginning. And yet when I thought about this later it seemed the new year was already ruined beyond repair.

62.CONCILIATIONMy father and I both needed to get away for a while; we decided to take a trip. This was the first time we had traveled together since I was a child, and for most of my life I had resisted my natural accord with him. But now we were bound by mutual need: our destination was so far away as to require a succession of automobiles to reach it, and we’d had nothing to eat since our departure. In our hunger all resentments were forgotten; with only a few words of preliminary discussion we seized a person who had been walking at roadside and put him to death without delay, collaborating with an ease we had never known between us. This person had no human identity, none that I was aware of, he was merely food shaped like a human, and I felt secure in presuming that my father regarded him in exactly the same light. I’d

never known how easily things could come when we worked together. But as we did not wish to lose time we took turns eating; one drove while the other fed in the back seat. Curiously, by the time we reached bone, the remains did not appear human anymore but were rather like those of a large bird. I didn’t give it much thought, however, since I was not sure my father had noted it, and I did not want to disturb the fragile alliance we had taken so long to realize.

63.MARATHONFor many years a marathon skiing competition had been staged in the northern region of our state; from its peak altitudes the elevation fell so gradually that a competent racer could glide down the descending series of rolling hills for distances exceeding a hundred miles without once coming to rest. The length of the race, in fact, was determined by how far south the snows had reached that year, and since an uncommonly cold winter had blanketed the land almost all the way down to the coast, many of the contestants looked to be in a state of anxious rapture over the vast distance to be covered, though each one seemed to feel within himself the serene certainty that he would not fail to exceed the limits of human endurance. Since I was a child I had wanted to join this peculiar competition, and every year my failure to

do so weighed more heavily on me; I dejectedly followed the other spectators from the starting gate to the convoy of vehicles from which we observed the racers as we rode alongside them on the highway adjacent to the ski run. In no time they had achieved such velocity that it was difficult to keep pace with them, and yet they appeared so relaxed that they often looked to have fallen asleep, waking only long enough to make rapid adjustments to their alignment. In years past I could usually shake off the envy I felt as the leaders accelerated further and further away, but lately my life was reaching a state of crisis on several fronts at once, and I sank into a depression such as I’d not felt in years. Becoming a racer would have changed nothing, I thought. But when a moment later I recognized that I was no longer standing in the observation bus but instead on top a pair of racing skis speeding silently down the hill, I was not altogether surprised, and as the

conversion was not wholly unexpected I lost only a slight amount of velocity as I struggled to gain my balance. I was not suitably dressed, but we were already at midpoint, only a few thousand feet above sea level, and my muscles warmed quickly; the winter air was gentle and quiet and I imagined I could smell the ocean, still a hundred miles away. Where I stood in rank with my fellow competitors, I did not know; every time I crested a hill I could see, for a few seconds, the man ahead of me at the top of the next one before he disappeared down the slope. I took in enormous lungfuls of air as if to draw myself closer to him, but as day passed into evening I neither gained nor lost an inch. To make the hours go by more easily I worked at perfecting this breathing technique, inhaling with my face into the wind and exhaling between my knees. The net propulsive force was certainly negligible, until one multiplied it by the hundreds of thousands of

times it might be employed within a race such as this one; even if this year it fell to my lot to finish last, coupling techniques such as the synchronous breathing with more traditional training exercises would one day elevate me into the higher ranks, and as I zoomed up and down the moonlit hills I became quite lost in thought, buoyant with my plans for the future. But as the night slipped by I gradually lost focus on matters at hand, and before I knew it a new day had begun; perhaps that was why the race ended as it did, or rather why it never ended at all– instead it ceased, in a manner of speaking, to be. For although the course was showing ever longer patches of bare ground, over which it was becoming increasingly difficult to jump, the officials that were usually stationed along the final miles were nowhere in evidence; the side-lying highway was jammed not with a caravan of exhausted spectators but rather with millions of commuters pushing

through their daily business, clogging every entry into the approaching city. The tenacity with which they pursued their lives seemed incomprehensible to me, at least while I maintained my superior vantage point, but it was not long before I finally ground to a stop. Sadly I discarded my two skis and attempted to merge into the monstrous human traffic around me, but slowly as it moved, I could barely keep up with it.

64.CLOTHINGI was stopped on a busy sidewalk, trying to rearrange my clothing, somehow I had put on everything backwards, or perhaps in the wrong order, nothing fit correctly, it might have been that these were not even my clothes, possibly I was wearing someone else’s clothes, and had instinctively put them on inside out so their owner would not recognize them. With a series of discreet peristaltic movements I eased myself back indoors, and later that night when the streets had emptied I dumped the clothes into an aqueduct and watched them float away in the icy black water. Back in my room I reconsidered my prospects. They really weren’t bad at all; tomorrow I would walk into my future naked and unafraid, and I slept deeply. But then morning came, and before my head had cleared someone asked, who are you?

No one, I lied. Perhaps that was why the new day unfolded exactly like the previous one, except that the man who had questioned me– before today a completely negligible person– now seemed to turn up everywhere I went, and by evening the sight of him made me want to crawl out of my skin. I needed to change everything about myself, somehow; that was when I began seriously considering the idea of moving away for a while, weighing up both the good points and the bad so as to come to the best decision.

65.MEMENTOGoing through some correspondence from way back, I found a rough portrait of me that someone had sketched on the back of an envelope. From a better time, or a worse time? It was not possible to tell. There was a perplexing accuracy in the haphazardly penciled lines, as if the man who’d drawn them had seen right where I was headed. First I erased the name, then the eyes and the nose and the mouth, and all the years behind and beside me were fused into a single day without beginning or end. Outside someone was walking through the frozen leaves. Tomorrow I would go look for my friends.

66.DEPARTUREIn a hurry to get home, or away from it: there was a black engine, pulling black cars; I sat inside one of the black cars, looking out the window, and glided alongside it simultaneously, as a scavenging bird might follow a barge out to sea. The train thundered across the endless flats at an appalling velocity, and my ears rang with the din of the engine ahead. But then out the window I saw a person standing beside the track: the face was young and gray and pained, of uncertain sex, and oblivious to the black monstrosity roaring past it. It was of such beauty that as it flashed by I felt as though my heart were torn from my chest. Once separated from the world, I thought, it is not so easy to come back. I skated through the soundless air, hovering just above the car I was sitting in, and I beheld the expanse of fear that could engulf a

lifetime. The land was so brilliant and emptied and white! The rails had already disappeared, of course, and the wheels of the engine hissed and cracked through the hard white sand, losing none of their awful momentum.