His works weren’t published in his lifetime, at least under his own name, and there isn’t a single surviving manuscript. Some have expressed doubts concerning the authorship of his works; some have questioned whether the author even existed. So thinks the screenwriter on entering an establishment that seems a cross between a dance club and a gay bar, but with the better qualities of both. He has an idea. It’s something relating to what the girl said when she was upset with the young conductor and brilliant composer — and with the whole world, it seemed — and she mentioned something to do with subversive talent. He orders a drink and leans against the bar, watching the middle-aged couples dancing. He can’t imagine the girl’s father coming here to look for a young woman to party with. He’d more likely solicit her services by telephone: young, female undergraduate offers her services to mature executive. Besides, the music’s so loud the screenwriter doubts her father would stay here longer than a minute. He’d more than likely take his young college chick to a local jazz joint, while his daughter takes refuge in a café—one of the modern ones, all chic and swanky, the kind that only cater to exclusive clientele. But then the screenwriter reconsiders. Perhaps she’d choose to take refuge in a foosball bar instead, as long as it isn’t one frequented by the young conductor and brilliant composer. He lights a cigarette and begins reimagining his surroundings, taking as his cue an image from a movie in which a white jazz singer performs nightly in a club that caters mainly to blacks. In a similar place, although more upscale, the girl’s father is leaning against the bar, sipping a cocktail and talking about jazz with the college chick. Neither one is an expert, although they can each name about twenty musicians in the genre. The chick admits her superficial knowledge of jazz, but then advertises her knowledge of literature and classical music. None of her clients have ever brought her to a jazz club before. It’s usually a business dinner, some dancing, and — although she doesn’t say it — a bed at an expensive hotel. Her cultural awareness and educated mien are but a front to make clients believe they have something in common with her, that she’s classy, sophisticated, not just a hooker they’ve paid good money to sleep with. The girl’s father doesn’t give a damn what the others do on their dates with her. In the dimly lit lounge, the screenwriter’s eyes are gleaming, his nostrils flaring as he leers at some of the women. None appear to be available. All couples. So he’s left to imagine how it might have gone had he approached one of them. He looks at the cane by his side. They don’t know what they’re missing, he thinks sullenly. It’s late in the night when he approaches a black prostitute loitering under the flickering neon lights of a sex shop. He hasn’t seen the girl in two days, and he doesn’t expect she’ll be showing up tonight.
He gets back well after midnight, half drunk. The receptionist hands him the key along with an envelope. Without waiting to get to his room, he tears open the envelope there in the lobby, and extracts a card. On it, the girl has written that she’s at the hotel where her father is staying, feeling a little discomfited, because it’s one of those middling hotels in front of the Grand Central Station. It isn’t like her father to stay in such a dump. And she says, moreover, that his room’s registered under another name. The screenwriter doesn’t find this news terribly important; he doesn’t even consider it news, having read about it already in the girl’s work. Also in the envelope is another chapter of her No World. She had written it while waiting for her father in the hotel lobby. The screenwriter imagines her there, sitting on a sofa, and then himself arriving instead of her father, in the early hours of the morning, to find her sleeping there, then carrying her up to his room. The screenwriter has his own reasons for feeling sad, one of which could be that no one was waiting for him here. But loneliness has its counterpart, he thinks, summoning the image of the prostitute under the flickering lights. Loneliness has its solace. He sits down on a sofa in the lobby and keeps reading — a counterpart to the girl who sat on another lobby’s sofa to write down what he now reads. The receptionist, who in this hotel shares the duties of a doorman, looks at him askance, but the screenwriter doesn’t care what he may be thinking, because the admiral at the hotel with the English name never once raised an eyebrow at his behavior. The girl has written a scene in which the old philosophy professor, jaded in the desolate City in Outer Space, recalls the existence of a set of photographic plates. He plans to use them to locate extraterrestrials because, according to him, the images they yield reveal them as surrounded by a halo of light. Right now, though, he’s not looking for any extraterrestrials, and neither does he try to uncover his female student’s hidden past. Beside a white canvas covering a wall, she stands naked. She stoops to gather some paint from a bucket at her feet, and smears it on the whiteness of the canvas, on the whiteness of her flesh. She writes her disconnected phrases about the No World, incomprehensible clauses about twelve-tone music — for dodecaphony is the means by which to communicate with beings from far-flung galaxies: something that should be of interest to an alien hunter, which is to say her teacher, who always photographs her — fixing her posture, directing her every gesture. “2.221 What the No World represents is its sense. 2.225 The No World does not exist a priori. How would I go about finding them? mouths the old professor to himself, referring to the aliens, as he stares out of one of the only intact windows left in the City in Outer Space, a vantage point that offers him a view of the stars. He’s forgotten how old he is. He doubts the validity of his propositions. He can’t be sure if his mind’s playing tricks on him. He can only be sure of the sound of the machine that wakes him every morning and announces the beginning of a new day, although there’s nothing to distinguish one day from the next. All that remain are his memories of her, and of his wish to escape with her to a paradise in outer space, something that couldn’t happen — neither on this world nor the last, and never in this life. How would I go about finding them? inquires a voice in his head, a voice in his memory, while trying to capture all her nakedness as she smears it on the whiteness of the canvass.”