Some time goes by, perhaps minutes, perhaps hours. The girl chooses to be silent. In this respect, their rendezvouses differ very little from each other. There’s always a point at which she chooses not to speak. She’s forgotten the reason she came: to seek the screenwriter’s approval of her writing, to tell him she’s leaving the neighboring country’s capital, that’s she’s finally decided to follow her own path in life, to say good-bye without a fuss, although, perhaps, with a little pain. She returns the pages of her novel to the envelope. It’s time for her to leave, she says, while placing the envelope on the bed beside the newspapers. But she’s the screenwriter’s only reason for living. He has to be with her. The girl doesn’t share the sentiment. Perhaps she’ll write to him from their native city, send him more chapters of her novel, and keep him abreast of the voices that pronounce her name with a “ka.” Not that she has any intention of keeping these promises, but she thinks it’s important for him to hear them. She doesn’t want to talk about love, affection, or anything like that. It will only make parting more painful. Don’t go, he begs her. She looks at him. Don’t leave me. The girl looks out the window into the street. She doesn’t think anyone’s been following her tonight, but she must always be vigilant. I won’t be able to live without you, the screenwriter mumbles, who wants her to run away with him to a mythical place, a city of gold, where money isn’t needed, where hardship and penury are mere states of mind. Literary talent, he says, develops slowly, by degrees; it needs time to mature — many more days, many more years in fact, than the time she’s invested so far. It’s the same with love. The girl disagrees. She thinks love is an uncontrollable passion — from its very beginning to its usually bitter ending. This isn’t the case with literature, she says. Or if it is, it isn’t the case with her. There are countries whose climates are amenable to such excesses. She remembers the words of a song she’s heard: to spend all night having sex, all day writing masterpieces. . But the misty-eyed screenwriter doesn’t pay attention to her. He’s dreaming about the bed in the golden city in which they’ll die of exhaustion making love, the last wish of an old man who doesn’t have a future to look forward to, or a past to look back on. And as he dreams, rising above the cloudy foundation on which he’s promised to build them a castle, the sound of his door creaking open sends him plummeting back to Earth. He rushes to follow her out. But I’m promising you a paradise, he says, stopping her in front of the elevator. The girl takes the gun out and inserts a clip. Well, I’m promising you a bullet in the chest, she says, threatening him with it before putting it away again. After she gets in the elevator, he goes back into his room and watches her walking down the street, refusing to blink until she disappears at the point where the boulevards intersect. Does paradise exist? he wonders. And death? Then, later on, alone in his room, he reads: “5.5562 That which we know, we know purely on logical grounds. The room is empty. The female student’s been opening the doors of all the rooms. So far, all have been empty, bereft of both people and furniture. The old professor cum alien hunter watches her from the kitchen doorway. Aren’t you staying for a good-bye kiss? he asks her. She continues opening doors. All he has left is a bar of soap and a towel in the bathroom. Will she stay? he asks. She doesn’t answer right away. He’ll give her more time. In one of the rooms, all they’ve left behind after taking the furniture is a small pile of blankets under a sheet on the hardwood floor. The old professor feels strange taking his clothes off in an empty room, having to put some newspaper down on the floor so that there’s a clean space for him to heap his clothes. And he could never lie on the floor without a blanket. It would feel like his bones were scraping up against paving stones. The girl, on the other hand, strips nonchalantly, feeling no different than she usually does, except that she believes this meeting will be their last, that it marks the end of a phase in her life. After making love on the hardwood floor, they remain there, lying next to one another, motionless. It’s summer, so it’s quite warm, both outside and in.” There’s a space separating the end of this paragraph and the beginning of the next. This, along with the girl’s use of W’s numerical notation, is a structural idiosyncrasy she uses throughout the narrative. The screenwriter thinks the paragraphs are like a succession of scenes in a movie. Why didn’t he notice this before she left? At the end of the day, style isn’t everything, he says to himself, regretting not having taken better advantage of the time he had with her. “5.5563 Our problems are not abstract, but perhaps the most concrete that there are. Some time goes by, perhaps minutes, perhaps hours. The girl lies next to him on top of some blankets and sheets she found in another room, listening silently, as he whispers to her an encomium on her skin, as he tells her how much he’s longed to feel its flawless texture, smooth and youthful, nary a wrinkle. . he’s never felt as drawn to something before, he says. Before, he’d have laughed at himself, but now, whenever he’s within touching distance of a young woman, he’s overcome with an almost uncontrollable desire. The girl stares at him. It’s because I’m old, he continues. Such feelings are a symptom of decrepitude. Sometimes, in the summer, he takes the metro early in the morning, around the time young women — recently showered and perfumed, with their hair still wet — are climbing on in droves. It’s like being swallowed by a wave. And he doesn’t need much. A furtive brush of the finger will do. Just touching a woman’s hair awakens an uncontrollable desire in him. It excites his alien hunter’s instinct. If he ever touched a woman’s hair on the metro, he says, he’d have to jump out of the car with her under his arm, and carry her away to his studio. He’d have to take her photograph, find her halo, and then make passionate love to her. He wouldn’t be able to help himself. The female student tells him she’s attracted to older men. She doesn’t know whether she said it because it’s true, or because she wanted to flatter him. But then she thinks to herself, it must be true; otherwise she wouldn’t be lying naked beside a retired old professor. And perhaps she wouldn’t have agreed to play the game if it wasn’t true. A game in which she gets more and more involved each day, and in which there’s a player who doesn’t even know he’s playing a part in it. You don’t have to love me, he says. All he wants right now is to be near her, to lie next to her on the floor. He waits for her to say something. She doesn’t say anything. I’ll wait for you, he eventually says, hoping to ease her reluctance to speak. What time does the ship leave, she asks him, and why the City in Outer Space? But she asks only for the sake of asking. She has no intention of seeing him off on his journey. Because, he says, only there can he be free. She seems to think he’ll be even busier there than here. Maybe she’ll come visit him, maybe not. Her words are judicious, her tone tentative. It’s more likely to be not. The old professor closes his eyes and touches her breasts. He wonders if he’ll ever see her again, touch her again, if his flight into exile is futile, if it wouldn’t be better to stay, to just fall on his knees and surrender to her. 5.6 The limits of language mean the limits of the No World. When he thinks about it again years later, as he wanders the empty streets of the desolate city, or languishes in the control room looking at the stars, and feels he wants to cry but knows he cannot because space has stolen his ability to cry, and he maintains an air of dignified sadness, regretting all the tears he cannot shed, the old man concludes he should have fallen on his knees, he should have surrendered to her when he had the chance.” The screenwriter rereads the part about a character who’s an unwilling participant in a game. He doesn’t think this is plausible. It must be a literary device. What role would he have in such a game, he wonders, how would he know he wasn’t breaking the rules?