Section 0026

     That still makes me laugh.

     “Go ahead,” Harvey says.
     “I’ll wait.”
     We sat there talking about the wonderful winters in Montreal. Frau Adele had turned pale. Law, order, morality, justice, wisdom, any abstraction seems like a cruel joke perpetrated on a helpless world of idiots.

     Adjust the seasoning and set aside.


     “My asshole is occluding.”

     The course through the apparatus takes 12 hours. The landscape is not uniformly bleak. The sound of a breaking wave began at one end of the beach and traveled its length, and before the sound reached the other end another wave began to break. But Achoura’s happiness was short-lived. It was already dusk, the first stars coming out in the sky; and on the table was set a hurricane lamp, whose low dull flame looked a doleful bird caught in a glass cage. She takes a few steps into the room, goes over to the heavy chest and opens its top drawer. Immediately, there was the sound of flesh slapping against flesh, grunts of exertion, the noise from hundreds of pounds of wet humanity colliding. He was falling backwards and she was falling against him, and he could feel the carpet beneath them and the hem of a night shirt brush his face. Nevertheless, Hervey discovers a residue of conventional emotion within himself. It was like being awake while you talk in your sleep.
     Darkness came, incomprehensible.  We’re all smart and bored and unable to connect.

     “What does this signify?”


     A crack. And now another six months went by. The mind is an amazing thing, and during the weeks I was unconscious, I had a prolonged dream, more vivid than any I’ve ever had, about a beautiful place in Italy.