Or perhaps I was awake already; lamplight burned in my eyes, I’d woken in the chair, contorted and broken in the cage of a posture the chair had forced upon me. Thirst had made me burst out sweating, exhaustion had jolted me out of my sleep, summer’s thick night air seemed to flow in through the window, though the window was closed… light made me moonstruck, but it was the light of the lamp beneath which I was putrefying. And something tore at me, some kind of rheumatic pain, as though coarse, unclean threads were pulling through my flesh; my upper body, lying on the table, on the slimy oilcloth, had been wrenched around as if by an artillery explosion, and with eyes wide open I stared into the burning lamp. My field of vision seemed crossed by myriad intersecting black lines, my vision was gridded by those lines, as if all the time I’d been asleep I’d been staring through a grate into a brighter space above me, and the outline of the bars had inscribed themselves deep onto my retinas. — Of course it was the alcohol that had hurled me down onto this table, as always it was the alcohol that so maliciously halved and corrupted my gaze. I couldn’t recall when I’d imbibed the vast quantities of alcohol it took to do that. I lacked the courage to poison myself with hard liquor; instead I swallowed enormous quantities of inferior, brass-colored beer, which had a devious, insidiously addling effect on my mind. But this was precisely the effect I thought best suited to my unstable psyche. The beer made me bitter and nasty, it filled me with greasy, maudlin stoicism, tears ran down my cheeks, seeming to calm me, though their hypocritical source was an envy of all that was human. It calmed me to think I was sitting beneath life… staring up from underneath into the life I myself could not start living: this thought simultaneously unsettled and calmed me; my life, I suddenly knew, had been left behind in the body of my mother, but she wasn’t here… I could only stare up into the life above me, through an iron square, observing the life of the cripple luminously putrefying above me… his corrosive moonshine dripped through the grate onto my face… one last time—no one was left to hold the pot under him—he had pissed himself in dying… no, he hadn’t rapped his stick tonight, he couldn’t any longer, no matter how loudly I’d bellowed my love up at him. And my bellowing had made me insatiably thirsty; finally rising, falling all over myself, I stumbled to the water tap… poisoned, I was poisoned… but it was as though instead of the usual black-brown water the tap emitted the sound of dark letters, in whose evil stench I dried out even more. Where was I…? Suddenly I imagined I was in an ancient, hideously dry, puritanical place, in a desert-like vacuum, enclosed by an aura of petrified asceticism that had been forced upon me, while all around me the walls I could not reach, the bloated, grinning walls oozed the oil of life… Didn’t I suddenly find myself in the depths of a basement that hadn’t been aired for fifty years, one of the basements I knew from my previous women’s factory, whose damp underground cells I’d searched in senseless, panicked obsession in order to discover some kind of secret… whenever, that is, the perpetual state of hopelessness became unbearable, the state arising from the fact that no woman’s foot ever stepped on the grate above me… oh, the basements to which I descended when my endless anxiety over the possibility of desire began to bore me to death, down to find a safe place to masturbate, penetrating deeper and deeper into hellish levels of the catacombs, into the labyrinth over which the former ammunition factory loomed. — And with that, I thought, I’m describing my life, my life with all its undergrounds, basement cells, underfloors, underpinnings; I’m finally putting a name to it, and perhaps by so doing I’m finally acknowledging it… but as always when that thought crossed my mind, I was too drunk to accept it. — The Enemy is Listening!—as on many of the doors in the factory’s half-forgotten underground facilities, this sign hung on the iron door of my basement where the molds were kept, ancient, barely legible, nearly rusted away… It seemed to me that in my dream I’d been forcefully and brutally dragged back into the old basement, where I was held captive and separated from the women. Far above me I heard the nerve-shattering noise of the artillery shells being lathed. Shells, shells, a host of shells lined up neatly in handy crates, each shell with the appearance of a bulging reddish-yellow glans, stiff pricks, shells, shells, homosexual shells on pricks of banana-colored brass that had all passed through the gentle hands of the women prisoners who worked above me in that noise that pulverized my mind… metal-hard pricks in the females’ oil-soft hands: I, in my basement, was shut out from it all. And ultimately I was shut out from the depraved desire which the sight of those shells might spark in the women’s heads, and which the gentle caresses of their love-spoiled hands communicated to the appalling organs as they stood them up twenty units to a package; and the message of this desire was: Death to men.