Daddy’s Autobiography. The girl would never write anything with such a title, but she stays quiet, because she doesn’t see any point in contradicting him. What are you thinking about? interrupts her mother, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. The girl breaks her reverie for a fraction of a second to glance at her mother before looking straight ahead again without answering. She recalls that character of that screenwriter’s, the young college chick, who went around collecting the beginnings of novels. In a similar way, one could go around collecting the endings of novels. The girl would love to find something to work with in this. She tries remembering some of the endings that have impressed her most. She remembers one in particular, by someone who, had he been a novelist instead of a gangster or a spy, might have pleased her father immensely. As for his favorite writer, the author of jealousy and solitude, she’s not sure which ending her father would choose. The novel has numerous volumes, and some of the endings to those volumes are pages long, during which the author may describe a particular house, a particular street, a garden walk, the scent of a shrub, a person’s gait, memories of events that took an instant to transpire, experiences that took an instant to experience, while, for the reader, unfortunately, those instants seem more like years. Cousin McGregor, on the other hand, can only offer something pitifully pithy: “. . and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.” But the girl’s trying to remember another ending, one her father mentioned to her before, which goes something like: “. . it does not look to me as if you were ever going to write that autobiography. You know what I am going to do. I am going to write it for you.” It’s the kind of ending she’d love to have for her own novel. She smiles, thinking about the phrase, tries changing the voice: I’m certain you were never going to write your autobiography. . The girl laughs; it reminds her of the dead screenwriter. Perhaps he actually finished his screenplay before he croaked, but that’s immaterial, because at the end of the day, the only work that matters to the girl is her own. Doesn’t she want to be a writer? Well, she has a good story at her fingertips: the last days of the screenwriter, with maybe a few passing references to those former friends of hers. No one will believe these things really happened, so she’ll write it, but using the screenwriter’s voice. The novel will be a homage to that last photo he never got to take of her, in which she’s dressed in a tuxedo, or perhaps just wearing the jacket, double-breasted but unbuttoned, with a bowtie around her neck, and wearing her mother’s high-heel shoes, which are clearly too big for her: a novel in which she appears ostensibly naked. In a way, it will be a continuation, the second part of the story about Cousin Dedalus she was so anxious to write, but in which he’ll no longer be the protagonist. A novel that will write itself as it’s being read. Whether she was hypnotized or not, she’s resolute about pursuing her vocation, and for that, she has all the time in the world. The constructions of the mind are the constructions of the No World, she tells herself, as she grabs her notebook and tears out the pages of her former scribbling, one at a time, until she reaches a blank page, and inscribes her new title at the top. Perhaps she could imagine the stories succeeding one another in concentric circles, like the layers of an onion, or like those old Russian dolls, a series of stories within stories. Or perhaps she should think more along the lines of two mirrors reflecting each other, an effect that’s always bothered her, but the more she thought about it, the more she imagined that this infinite regress would still take the form of a spiral, a spiral folding in on itself, for when it remains on the mirror’s flat plane, this gives it the appearance of having concentric circles, although the circles grow smaller and smaller ad infinitum, but if pulled outward from that invisible, infinitesimally small center, it would assume the shape of a cone. She has yet to decide which concept will serve her best; it doesn’t really matter, as long as she doesn’t renew her futile obsession to write a dodecaphonic novel. But there’s no rush, she can begin anytime, or choose to postpone things a little longer. It’s the same as with those voices she hears calling her from the other side of the universe, pronouncing her name with a “ka.” It’s a secret she’s not sure will ever be revealed, although she doesn’t really care, because she’s learned how to be patient, how to wait. When the revelation does occur, though, she expects it will be in the form of a discovery, definitive proof that there really is something outside the mind, a hypothetical reality existing somewhere in the great beyond. A single thought expanding outward, creating a nebulous galaxy without a definite shape, because it’s immaterial, ethereal, something resembling God, in other words, something that doesn’t physically exist, although it’s capable of creating a world, a whole universe around itself, and even of envisioning a brain, something with weight and extension, in which it suspends its disbelief and imagines itself contained, a brain that can draw upon the space between stars — just as the initial thought drew upon the surrounding nothingness — to create its own universe and invent itself. She takes a look in the side-view mirror in case anyone’s following her. Although perhaps it’s more out of habit, as she’s no longer afraid of the alien hunters. The sedative’s practically worn off, and she’s feeling alive again. Her mother stops at a traffic light before they enter the town center, peers beneath her sunglasses, and reads the heading written on the otherwise blank page. What was it you said the No World meant? she asks. The girl doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have the time to be answering stupid questions because she has the story at the tips of her fingers, and, moreover, she knows that when something’s struggling to break free, she needs to give it an outlet. So she leaves a space after the title, and begins writing: “The screenwriter stands with his luggage, facing the hotel, having just gotten out of a taxi, thinking he ought to know, or at least have a good idea, how the story he intends to write is going to end. .” Her mother suspects something’s wrong. I think you should take a break, she says. All this writing can’t be good for your health. “6.41 The sense of the No World must lie outside of it,” the girl continues, not paying the least attention.