Section 0005

     “Maybe I ought to just say goodbye right here,” I say.
     Before that I had made my living by cadging odd jobs from newspapers, by reporting a donkey show here or a wedding there; I had earned a few pounds by addressing envelopes, reading to old ladies, making artificial flowers, teaching the alphabet to small children in kindergarten.
     “I did not know of these powers.”
     Love was a curse that had somehow skipped me, which was no doubt why I was so good at multiple-choice tests and memorizing poetry. No one cared what my ass looked like.

     Empty enigmas, arrested time, signs which refuse to signify, giant enlargement of the tiny detail, narratives which come full circle: We are in a flat and discontinuous universe where each thing refers only to itself.
     “Oh God.”
     “Silence, all of you,” the count exclaimed.
     “Hey,” I ask. Let us make the test.
     So we took a taxi; we hit on a rickety car, driven by an old man. In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods. The unseen broom stopped to listen. What’s more, inasmuch as this singular event is composed within the language of the poem, it happens more than once.

     A world totally new, a world awesome and forbidding, is at our door. It looked at me.