5 Pieces for piano, her own unique interpretation, which she must leave behind so that posterity will remember who she was. Meanwhile, her father will be spending more time getting to know the young college chick. When not waiting in the hotel room, or on his vigil in the station, the girl’s father always visits the young college chick. The girl believes her father works twenty-four hours a day. The contrast of the girl writing alone in the room with her father lying in bed with his throwaway girlfriend accents the many distances between them. The screenwriter gets up from his typewriter and goes to the kitchen. He lights a cigarette while waiting for the coffee to prepare. He doesn’t feel like going to the café in the plaza. He opens the fridge to make sure there’s enough food, decides to fix something with whatever he can find. Then he picks up the telephone and calls the black prostitute, asks her if she can come to the hotel. He wants her to be with him while he writes. It’ll only be for a couple of hours, he says in an almost-whisper. On the other end, the prostitute is smiling as she remindes him that the price is higher if she travels. He tells her not to worry about the price, that her presence alone is bound to bring him luck. He then hangs up, and returns to his desk to resume writing. . Alone in her father’s hotel room, the girl is writing in her notebook, doing some literary exercises in observation — writing a series of short, descriptive vignettes — as she resolved to do whenever she wasn’t making progress with her novel, as a form of self-resuscitation. She describes the old hotel room she’s staying in: how the balcony looks, shrouded by timeworn curtains, barely translucent with all the stains; the high, flaking ceilings raining plaster on the carpet; the walls; the once kitsch, now obscenely discolored wallpaper; and finally, of course, the room’s furnishings. She describes what she sees because she believes the exercises will hone her skills as a writer, and whenever she gets writer’s block, she exercises. Then she decides to reads some of the writers the screenwriter recommended, perhaps as a nod to the gossamer thread still connecting them. On her father’s nightstand, the jazz CDs, magazines, and newspapers continue to mount, but now completely cover the monumental work of his favorite author — warder of cherished memories, master of subordinate clauses. The screenwriter would relish explaining to the girl’s father that his favorite author doesn’t write about lost time at all, nor jealousy, nor any other subject he has defined him by, but of a world that disappears before his eyes, a world overwhelmed by change, by time’s ineluctable progress, sometimes slow, sometimes rapid, always inconceivable, especially to those who lived in times past; explaining that his favorite author is nothing but a hoarder of memories, a starry-eyed futilitarian in search of a past he can never retrieve, and yet tries to nonetheless, for whatever reason, being unable to abandon his quest, perhaps because the guerdon’s in the searching, in the writing about a world of refinement and bon ton, of frivolity and effeminacy, of waxen moustaches and scented handkerchiefs, a world that was his own, and could limn to the smallest detail, a world in which he believed, for there was none other to believe in. Of course, this is in stark contrast to the screenwriter, who doesn’t write about his past, who couldn’t bear the reprisal of so many bruised memories. The girl reads in a short introduction that, through the cumulative effect of describing many small and seemingly insignificant events, the author creates a magnificent crumbling mosaic of a world in crisis; that he seems to bask in the recollection of those who lived in that world, of hours that have long since tolled, epitomizing both in a plethora of fictive personalities; that we don’t know if he confabulated his memories of early childhood, such memories being unreliable at best, or if he likewise supplemented his memories of youth and early adulthood; that perhaps his vision of a bootless world, empty and decadent, was only that, and vanished only from his own memory, and that his wistfulness, his yearning, is symptomatic of a man who’d have mourned the loss of any age, any time, because the only thing that truly vanishes is the self located there, located then, so the narrator interprets the end of his age as the end of the self, and the end of the self as end of the world entire.