In the brief power outage, I feel my own electricity has been cut off and I will not be able to think. I fear that the power outage may have erased not only the work I have done but also a part of my own memory.
Driving in the rain, I see a crumpled brown thing ahead in the middle of the road. I think it is an animal. I feel sadness for it and for all the animals I have been seeing in the road and by the edge of the road. When I come closer, I find that it is not an animal but a paper bag. Then there is a moment when my sadness from before is still there along with the paper bag, so that I appear to feel sadness for the paper bag.
I am cleaning the kitchen floor. I am afraid of making a certain phone call. Now it is nine o’clock and I am done cleaning the floor. If I hang up this dustpan, if I put away this bucket, then there will be nothing left between me and the phone call, just as in W.’s dream he was not afraid of his execution until they came to shave him, when there was nothing left between him and his execution.
I began hesitating at nine o’clock. I think it must be nearly nine-thirty. But when I look at the clock, I see that only five minutes have gone by: the length of time I feel passing is really only the immensity of my hesitation.
I am reading a sentence by a certain poet as I eat my carrot. Then, although I know I have read it, although I know my eyes have passed along it and I have heard the words in my ears, I am sure I haven’t really read it. I may mean understood it. But I may mean consumed it: I haven’t consumed it because I was already eating the carrot. The carrot was a line, too.
Late in the evening, I am confused by drink and by all the turns in the streets he has led me through, and now he has his arm around me and asks me if I know where I am, in the city. I do not know exactly. He takes me up a few flights of stairs and into a small apartment. It looks familiar to me. Any room can seem like a room remembered from a dream, as can any doorway into a second room, but I look at it longer and I know I have been here before. It was another month, another year, he was not here, someone else was here, I did not know him, and this was an apartment belonging to a stranger.
As I sit waiting at a restaurant table I see out of the corner of my eye again and again a little cat come up onto the white marble doorstep of the restaurant entryway and then, every time I look over, it is not a little cat I see but the shadow, cast by the streetlamp, of a branch of large midsummer leaves moving in the wind from the river.
I am expecting a phone call at ten o’clock. The phone rings at 9:40. I am upstairs. Because I was not expecting it, the ring is sharper and louder. I answer: it is not the person I was expecting, and so the voice is also sharper and louder.
Now it is ten o’clock. I go out onto the front porch. I think the phone may ring while I am out here. I come in, and the phone rings just after I come in. But again it is someone else, and later I will think it was not that person but the other, the one who was supposed to call.
There is his right leg over my right leg, my left leg over his right leg, his left arm under my back, my right arm around his head, his right arm across my chest, my left arm across his right arm, and my right hand stroking his right temple. Now it becomes difficult to tell what part of what body is actually mine and what part his.
I rub his head as it lies pressed against mine, and I hear the strands of his hair chafing against his skull as though it is my own hair chafing against my own skull, as though I now hear with his ears, and from inside his head.
I have decided to take a certain book with me when I go. I am tired and can’t think how I will carry it, though it is a small book. I am reading it before I go, and I read: The antique bracelet she gave me with dozens of flowers etched into the tarnished brass. Now I think that when I go out I will be able to wear the book around my wrist.
Looking out through the window of the coffee shop, I watch for a friend to appear. She is late. I am afraid she will not find this place. Now, if the many people passing in the street are quite unlike my friend, I feel she is still far away, or truly lost. But if a woman passes who is like her, I think she is close and will appear at any moment; and the more women pass who resemble her, or the more they resemble her, the closer I think she is, and the more likely to appear.
I was an unlikely person to invite to this party, and no one is talking to me. I believe the invitation was for someone else.
All day the clock answers my questions about the time very well, and so, wondering what the title of that book was, I look at the face of the clock for an answer.
I so nearly missed the bus, I still believe I am not on it now.
Because it is almost the end of the day, I think it is almost the end of the week.
That was such a peculiar thing to say to me, I do not believe it was said to me.
Because that expert gave me helpful information about his subject, which is horticulture, I think I can ask his advice about another subject, which is family relations.
I had such trouble finding this place, I believe I did not find it. I am talking to the person I came here to meet, but I believe he is still alone, waiting for me.
The ceiling is so high the light fades up under the peak of the roof. It takes a long time to walk through. Dust is everywhere, an even coating of blond dust; around every corner, a rolling table with a drawing board on it, a paper pinned to the board. Around the next corner, and the next, a painting on a wall, half finished, and before it, on the floor, cans of paint, brushes across the cans, and pails of soapy water colored red or blue. Not all the cans of paint are dusty. Not all parts of the floor are dusty.
At first it seems clear that this place is not part of a dream, but a place one moves through in waking life. But rounding the last corner into the remotest part, where the dust lies thickest over the boxes of charcoal sticks from Paris, and a yellowed sheet of muslin over the window is torn symmetrically in two spots, showing a white sky through two small panes of dusty glass, a part of this place that seems to have been forgotten or abandoned, or at least lain undisturbed longer than the rest, one is not sure that this place is not a place in a dream, though whether it lies entirely in that dream or not is hard to say, and if only partly, how it lies at once in that dream and in this waking — whether one stands in this waking and looks through a doorway into that more dusty part, into that dream, or whether one walks from this waking around a corner into the part more thickly covered with dust, into the more filtered light of the dream, the light that comes in through the yellowed sheet.
THE RACE OF THE PATIENT MOTORCYCLISTS
In this race, it is not the swiftest who wins, but the slowest. At first it would seem easy to be the slowest of the motorcyclists, but it is not easy, because it is not in the temperament of a motorcyclist to be slow or patient.
The machines line up at the start, each more impressively outfitted and costly than the next, with white leather seats and armrests, with mahogany inlays, with pairs of antlers on their prows. All these accessories make them so exciting that it is hard not to drive them very fast.
After the starting gun sounds, the racers fire their engines and move off with a great noise, yet gain only inches over the hot, dusty track, their great black boots waddling alongside to steady them. Novices open cans of beer and begin drinking, but seasoned riders know that if they drink they will become too impatient to continue the race. Instead, they listen to radios, watch small portable televisions, and read magazines and light books as they keep an even step going, neither fast enough to lose the race nor slow enough to come to a stop, for, according to the rules, the motorcycles must keep moving forward at all times.