They’ve called him a beacon, the creator of the modern world, and the inventor of the human. His characters are kings, princes, soldiers, clerks, impostors, witches, murderers, et al. He limns the whole spectrum of human society — the high and the low, the wicked and the good: specters of the No World, as the girl would say. He shows us heaven and hell exist within us and without, and teaches us that appearances can often be deceiving. The dramatist par excellence surpasses every other writer we know. His wit, energy, and scope of invention bespeak a man of illimitable intellect and boundless creative power. He’s the greatest comedian, the most sublime tragedian of them all, and as someone once said of his characters, the secret to their depth, their humanity, is their ability to overhear themselves, and in doing so, to change. For all these reasons, therefore, he has to be read. In the end, he gave up poetry and the theater, dying three years later. Perhaps of unemployment. There are people who can’t bear not having a job, the screenwriter says. Later, in the middle of the night, he asks the girl to read to him some fragments from her diary. She’s thought about giving up writing; if she hasn’t done so yet, it’s because only in writing does she feel alive. She opens her diary and leafs through its pages, chooses a passage about her walk back to the foosball bars; then one about loneliness, about her feeling like she’s a writer although she doesn’t write; and another about the futility of trying to evade her extraterrestrial pursuers. The screenwriter listens to her voice, deems it firm, assured, if slightly monotonous, and looks at her face, the movement of her lips, the way her hands grip the diary. She once wrote that everything whirls around her at great speed, that her rehearsals are only a game, her writings only a game, even her life’s only an elaborate game in which events seem to succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, all her arguments with her mother and the young conductor, all her disappointments in love, are just part of this elaborate game. She’s written that everyone pronounces her name with a “ka,” and that this is a way of giving meaning to something that has no meaning. It’s like being on drugs all day, she thinks. Perhaps she’s been searching high and low for the face of her cousin Dedalus. Perhaps she hopes to see him again. The screenwriter believes there are secrets we should keep to ourselves, that they shouldn’t be confessed, except perhaps to a diary. The girl reads aloud, her head pillowed against his graying chest, speaking of her father, of the neighboring country’s capital, and of herself. She feels more like a writer than ever, she says, and that she often imagines discovering her mother in flagrante with a secret lover. She turns on the TV and flips through the channels. On the news, there’s talk of other places in the world where people don’t know the game exists. She turns the TV off and goes to the piano. She wants to set her performance apart from everyone else’s. Perhaps she’s found a way to do so by slowing it down. But she can’t really trust herself after taking so many pills — a strange distrust, since the young conductor insists the pills will enhance her emotional states, and raise the level of her performance to near genius, which will compensate for the foibles of youth and inexperience. There aren’t too many hours left until concert at the church in front of the writers’ café, and there isn’t enough time for her to find a way to make her performance unique. After thinking about it, though, she believes she’s already found a way, but the young conductor and brilliant composer aren’t satisfied with it. Yet, she shouldn’t doubt herself. She lies down naked at the foot of the bed and writes again until she falls asleep. She awakens to the faint light of dawn streaming in the window. She dreamed she was driving around in a yellow convertible, and she recalls how it gleamed, the way things only do in dreams, and the way it seemed to glide so smoothly, silently along through the outskirts of the city, with the young conductor in the driver’s seat, and the brilliant composer sitting beside him, while she was in the backseat standing up, reciting a poem, playing the part of the cosmic clown. On the sidewalk, people had stopped to listen to her, and she saw the face of her cousin among them. She then asked the young conductor to stop the car, but it seemed as though the words never reached his ears, and Cousin Dedalus vanished among the pedestrians, who all dispersed, continuing on their way to nowhere in particular, dropping into the margins of her dream. It seems strange to her now that the car drove so smoothly, as if gliding over a thin layer of oil, strange that she noticed the one face among so many others. She’d like to decipher the meaning of the dream, but she can only guess that it must have something to do with the concerts and her obsession with finding her cousin. After a while, feeling a little weary, she stops reading from her diary and gets out of bed. The screenwriter smokes a joint as she gets dressed. Will you come back tomorrow? he asks. Tomorrow’s opening night, she says. No it’s not, he says, tomorrow’s just a momentary blip in the boundless expanse of time; right now, tomorrow’s but a barely perceived premonition in the brain — not a psychic premonition, but a forecast, as of the weather, and the weathergirl’s frequently wrong. She takes the joint from between his fingers and takes a deep drag before returning it. She goes over to the window and opens the curtains to looks down on the deserted streets. What do you see? the screenwriter asks, the question half-muffled, his face half-buried in the pillow. She doesn’t answer. She finds it difficult to describe the figure she sees lurking almost imperceptibly in the shadows. It’s the same figure she sees every night, like having a recurring dream. Maybe she’s only imagining it. Maybe it’s nothing.