Five Easy Pieces, which I remember, though I have forgotten what happens before or after. The waiter refused to take back the second bottle, Steva would not allow it to be put on the bill, and though we pretended not to notice, soon we were all taking part, and who knows how long it would have gone on, had Dragan Mišović not said that he would take the bottle, he had things to do, and the wine would come in handy. He looked at me as if I knew what he meant. I didn't. I was thinking feverishly about what the opening of the triangles might mean, but nothing came to mind. The one thing I could think of was that paper pinwheel attached to a stick that we toted around as children. They weren't triangles, of course, but when we ran, the pinwheel spun around, and, shrieking with joy, we imagined we were helicopters. This didn't include any opening, which, obviously, was the substance of Dragan's message, and judging by the look he sent my way as he raised the wine bottle victoriously in the air, I would learn the truth with wine, whether I wanted to or not. The quarrel with the waiter brought our party to a close; after all that had been said, there was no reason for us to stay there any longer. Steva tapped the rim of his glass with a knife, and once the conversation died down, he thanked us for easing, if only briefly, the pain of living abroad, and he hoped we'd get together again the next time he visited. He did live out in the middle of nowhere, behind God's back, but as long as God was there to be seen, things couldn't be so bad. Zlata started sniffling, real tears rolled from her eyes, her face contorted in an ugly grimace, and with a trembling voice she said to Steva that he shouldn't go back, that we needed him here, there were fewer and fewer of us with each passing day, and we were getting weaker. As she said this, choking back sobs, she kneaded my thigh with such ferocity that for days I had to nurse my bruises. There was no mark, however, on my lower arm from the three-hour nuzzle of the assorted breasts. Outside, in front of the restaurant, rain greeted us, so our goodbyes turned into a frantic exchange of hugs, kisses, handshakes, and waving. No one had an umbrella, so they all rushed to their cars, bus stops, houses, and apartments, including, to my great surprise, Dragan Mišović, who caught up with Steva the Horse at a gallop down Zmaj Jovina Street, the tails of his greatcoat flapping. I was left standing there alone. I hadn't expected this to happen and had no idea what to do with myself. I was convinced that Dragan Mišović would take me somewhere, maybe off to a sheltered bench on the quay or to another restaurant to explain the real meaning of the opening of the triangles, and when this did not happen, I almost felt paralyzed. It was raining harder and the drops pelted the pavement, turning into bubbles. I stuck my hands into my jacket pockets, and, in the left pocket, felt a slip of paper. I pulled it out and opened it. Judging by the initials at the bottom, it was a message from Dragan Mišović. He must have slipped it in when he whispered to me that the triangles were starting to open. The rain and gusting wind kept me from reading it, I folded it and put it back in the pocket. When I got home, soaked to the skin, I looked for it desperately — it must have dropped from my pocket as I hurried along the Danube, lashed by the rain and the wind. My thought was to go straight back to the quay, though it was highly unlikely, with the weather, that I would be able to retrieve the misplaced note, and even if I were to find it, snagged in a bush or under a bench, who knows whether the note would still be legible. I feared that now the writing was no more than a blot, but I was prepared to search for it nevertheless, because in the blot, as in a Rorschach test, there might be meaning, a message that could be a signpost for a traveler who had no idea where he was headed and why. Clearly, desperation had taken hold of me and threatened to turn into downright depression. Marko, if I had said that to him, would probably have just rolled his eyes. So what, he would have said, everybody is swallowing pills anyway, pills for sedation, pills for a better mood or against a bad mood, one more or less doesn't mean much, especially when the entire country is on one big psychiatrist's couch. And then he would pull out a joint, the cure for everything but fractures, as he often said, and he would offer to calm me down. I would have enjoyed the joint, no doubt, but first I had to face the elementary calamity, like a fireman in an American movie, and venture out to save the lost message, and then, as I put my jacket back on, I felt the paper under my fingertips. Dragan Mišović's message. Sometimes things know how to toy with us. I've no idea how the paper had vanished from my left pocket only to turn up there again; maybe I moved it unconsciously from pocket to pocket as I hurried along the quay, I'll never know. Secrets, after all, should remain secrets. I took off the jacket, hung it on the coat hook, went into the living room, sat down in the armchair, and started reading. Fifteen years ago, the message said, a Belgrade artist came up with a piece of conceptual art: he wrote the same sentence over and over again on adhesive stickers. The stickers too were identical, but the sentence on each sticker was written differently: in block letters, in cursive, typed, glued, colored, uneven lettering. The artist put the stickers up wherever he happened to be: in a bus, on the front door of a house he visited, on the sidewalk, on newspaper kiosks, shop windows, lampposts, park benches. The sentence, which he wrote out countless times, was WHERE is ALL THIS TAKING us? It never occurred to the artist that this might be construed as political provocation. It had come to him when he was sitting in the kitchen, drinking coffee, watching treetops sway in gusts of wind, thinking about life. Where was all this taking us, humankind, the entire system, evolution, everything we know and don't know? Is there a goal, he wondered, and if there is, when will we reach it? He decided that there no goal, but then suddenly realized that everybody should be asked this question, so that once everybody was thinking about it, someone might come up with an answer. From there to the notion of stickers was a small step, and before long there was a trail behind him of stickers with this, as he saw it, pressing question on the essence of human existence and survival on earth. The only thing he did not anticipate was the possibility of a political reading and interpretation of his sentence, yet that is precisely what happened. The 1980s were on the way out and the foundations of the former country had already begun to wobble and crumble, the intelligence service soon developed an interest in this person who, in the opinion of those in the know, was cleverly stirring the population to doubt and unrest with the stickers, found in many places, including a public restroom at the bus station and a ticket counter at the train station. The artist was arrested, just as he was gluing stickers rendered in psychedelic colors to the glass wall of the swimming pool at the Sports Hall in Zemun during a Zagreb rock band concert. He didn't resist, he confessed to his activities, holding fast to his assertion that his intention was purely artistic. During the search of his apartment several more stickers turned up, as well as a large quantity of drawing supplies, a typewriter whose letters matched the letters on the posted stickers, and a map of Belgrade that included Zemun and New Belgrade indicating the locations on which the artist had left or planned to leave his mark. Of special interest, and we need to pay attention here, is that the artist's project, once finished, was meant to describe the shape of an equilateral triangle stretching from the old core of Zemun to Palilula and Košutnjak in Belgrade. The map was the main evidence of the artist's evil intentions, though no one could put a finger on what precisely these intentions were, but the district attorney understood that there was nothing behind it all, and the artist was quickly released from jail, packed up his belongings, and left for the Netherlands. However, the map, stickers, and drawing tools, including his portable typewriter, were never returned, and no one knows what happened to them. Before his departure the artist apparently said he found the inspiration for his work in a mysterious triangle with a point at its center that had appeared on the Belgrade streets and on public transportation in the late 1960s and early 1970s and about which to this day various theories and rumors were circulating. Here you should note, the letter said, switching to address me directly, in both cases these were triangles, which is key to understanding what came next. As most people do, you assume math to be a waste of time and you don't see the point of it, except in its more practical aspects, such as counting money or calculating interest rates, and I'd be glad to convince you otherwise, but this is not the moment. You have many other problems ahead of you, no point in my adding another. Back to the triangles. At the beginning of the last century, Helge von Koch, a mathematician, found a curve that was infinite in circumference, yet enclosed a finite area. This would mean, at least in theory, that you could pick it up and put it in your pocket, which would mean that the pocket would contain infinity. You could put it in an envelope and send it to someone who wanted infinity or who hadn't yet had a chance to see it. The Koch curve is made by dividing the given segment of line into three equal parts, and then replacing the middle part with the sides of a triangle in such a way that we get four segments, of which each one is equal to one third of the original segment. By repeating this procedure, one gets Koch's infinite curve, and if we start with an equilateral triangle and apply this procedure to all three sides, we will arrive at what is called the Koch snowflake, which some call the Koch star. What is of particular interest here is that the first shape formed in the opening of the triangle is a six-pointed star, and though the sides curl, if I can put it that way, they retain a recognizable six-pointed shape. At one moment it may assume the shape of a circle, which means that, in a reciprocal process, a circle can be turned into a six-pointed star. It is here somewhere that the explanation of the sign you showed me several weeks ago is hidden. So triangles can open, perhaps they have already started to do so, and the one thing that must not be forgotten is the point. I know there is no dot on the above-mentioned sign, but if you can't see it, it doesn't mean it isn't there. Apparently, with his curve Koch intended to demonstrate the limitations of classical mathematical analysis, which shows that sometimes a single snowflake can cause more trouble than an entire snowstorm, and that's the way to look for the apparently missing dot. In other words, the opening of the triangle leads to the rediscovery of a point that I would gladly call the Borges Aleph, but it is at the same time both more and less than that. So let's never forget that everything, even the infinity you have put in your pocket, must in the end come back to the point from which everything emerged. I put down the paper and took a deep breath. I'd never been good at math, I barely got by in secondary school, and now I had to recognize in a mathematical description a signpost for my destiny. I could feel a throbbing in my temples, after which, I knew, a nasty headache would follow if I didn't immediately take something to kill the pain. I staggered off to the bathroom, took two painkillers, staggered back, glanced out the window, sat again in the armchair, got up again, went into the kitchen and ate a square of chocolate, went back to the window, looked at the facing building, then flicked on the TV. If I'm lucky, I thought, I'll find a porn movie, and sure enough, after two or three clicks on the remote I caught sight of interlaced limbs and heard a woman's voice modulating the sounds of