When I say that my narrative is not quite representative of the actuality of the experiences it purports to represent, I play no semiological games. That is to say that were the act of signification a wholly successful transaction with the real, I could still never have effected the proper transaction. I have no language for it, there is no language for it. Just as well that words are empty. How terrifying true representation would be!
This story is dotted with flaws and contradictions and riddled with inconsistencies, some of which even the inattentive reader will discover. Some of these gaffes may well be considered felicities of uncertainty and indeterminacy: such is prose. The tale also, it will have been clear, occasionally flaunts its triumphs, small though they may be. I am afraid that the final word about the gluey, tortuous, somehow glamorously perverse relationship that Ben and Clara and I constructed and sent shuffling into the world hasn’t been arrived at; but perhaps the unspeakable has had created some sad analogue of itself, if such is possible. Something has been spoken of, surely, but I can’t determine what or where it is.
In any event, I’ve spent a fair amount of time and attempted a degree of care in the creation and arrangement of these fragments. There are moments or flashes when I believe that I have seen myself, in a quirk of syntax, as I really was, when I can swear that Ben or Clara are wholly if fleetingly present in these simulacra of the past. Moments, flashes, when this admittedly inadequate series of signs seems to body forth a gone time. But I know that this is nonsense, nothing but a ruse with which I have been faithfully complicit so as to make the landscape of my life seem more valuable and interesting than it ever was.