better. I sure as fuck wasn’t bothered by old man Z’s words. All those signs I just now finished telling you about quickly vanished in the light of subsequent days or had never been there to begin with, existing only in retrospect.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤAt first only curiosity drove me from one phrase to the next. Often a few days would pass before I’d pick up another mauled scrap, maybe even a week, but still I returned, for ten minutes, maybe twenty minutes, grazing over the scenes, the names, small connections starting to form, minor patterns evolving in those spare slivers of time.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤI never read for more than an hour.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤOf course curiosity killed the cat, and even if satisfaction supposedly brought it back, there’s still that little problem with the man on the radio telling me more and more about some useless information. But I didn’t care. I just turned the radio off.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤAnd then one evening I looked over at my clock and discovered seven hours had passed. Lude had called but I hadn’t noticed the phone ring. I was more than a little surprised when I found his message on my answering machine. That wasn’t the last time I lost sense of time either. In fact it began to happen more often, dozens of hours just blinking by, lost in the twist of so many dangerous sentences.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤSlowly but surely, I grew more and more disoriented, increasingly more detached from the world, something sad and awful straining around the edges of my mouth, surfacing in my eyes. I stopped going out at night. I stopped going out. Nothing could distract me. I felt like I was losing control. Something terrible was going to happen. Eventually something terrible did happen.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤNo one could reach me. Not Thumper, not even Lude. I nailed my windows shut, threw out the closet and bathroom doors, storm proofed everything, and locks, oh yes, I bought plenty of locks, chains too and a dozen measuring tapes, nailing all those straight to the floor and the walls. They looked suspiciously like lost metal roods or, from a different angle, the fragile ribs of some alien ship. However, unlike Zampanô, this wasn’t about smell, this was about space. I wanted a closed, inviolate and most of all immutable space.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤAt least the measuring tapes should have helped.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤThey didn’t.
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