The World Is Flat
And It Doesn't Get Any Rounder No Matter How Far You Go
The ship has cleared Newhaven Harbour and entered the open waters of the
English Channel. The Seven Sisters recede toward the horizon. I've just spent
several months drunk, depressed, and underemployed in London, out of control of
what was happening to me, and it's good to know that nothing ties me to any of
that anymore. I feel like an alien astronaut gazing back from the relative
safety of his spaceship. I'm en route; I'm going somewhere. I feel the slow
pitch of the deck under my feet and think of the sea, of freedom and
boundlessness. H. complains of gastric difficulties.
The doors between cars on the SNCF train are French: precise and automatic.
They click open sharply, then hiss shut when I've passed. They remind me of
Star Trek--the commander striding confidently onto his bridge, door hissing
shut behind him, he's handed a report to sign by some yeoman who then beetles
off out of the frame. He knows every detail and can command anyone. I imagine
myself in his place, in command of this vessel, setting its course. I trace on
the map where H. and I have come from and where we're going. To explore
strange new worlds. I and the rest of the landing party have made another
narrow escape from a backward culture, this time on a small, hostile planetoid
called England.
I guess the root of my problem had been my naïveté for the
complicated and subtle semeiotics of the culture that I was dealing with. I
hadn't understood, until it was too late, that `Let me take your particulars,
and we shall ring you back next week' translates to `Get lost, there's no job
here for you'.
The Métro is crowded. The train crawls through the tunnel. I'm amazed
that people can be driven to subject themselves to this. I think of the
driver, constrained as much as we are, waiting for some signal to speed up.
I'm bent sideways, gripping a handhold on the wall, and I ache. People on a
crowded train create a mutual repulsion. Everybody wants to get out of this
horrid pile of sweating flesh, and every desire is subsumed by a yearning for
breath, for the train to speed up, to reach the next station. For the moment,
they simply refuse to admit that they're touching each other, that they are
helpless humans pressed dependently against each other in this gross machine.
I turn my head to study the map on the wall. These lines weave under Paris in
what seems a hopeless chaos. Their clutter of arbitrary turns and strange
termini is irregular, uncomfortable. And yet it's all deterministic,
historically determined, who does what where, what structures grow up in
various parts of the city, where it's necessary to place a station. What would
Haussmann have thought. If he had his way he'd probably want to pull down most
of the city and rebuild it so that its Métro lines would be as
straightforward as its avenues and boulevards. H. and I get off at
Alma-Marceau and cross the Pont de l'Alma to the entrance to the sewers. These
things are open to the public, which is something that less systematic cities
would never think of.
H. and I sit through an automated slide show that tells about the sewer
system, and really plugs the sewer workers. Leur occupation difficile et
dangereuse. Sludge deposits that block the way of the cleaning sled. Gas
bubbles big as beach balls. Accompanied by a sound track consisting of a
voice-over and a lot of stale guitar riffs. I think of Benny Profane and the
alligators, and wonder if there's anything existing in this system that its
architects didn't anticipate. After the flushing machines, dredgers, basins,
and conduits, I'm standing at a railing gazing down at styrofoam cups, bits of
plastic wrap, cigarette ends, pieces of kleenex and paper towels waterlogged
and disintegrating, being swept together in a brown torrent to some settling
tank at Achères. I take a couple photographs.
I walk east with H. to the Ile de la Cité. I figure I should have a
look at Notre Dame, even though I know almost nothing about art and
architecture and when I first learnt that name it was in reference to college
football. There are machines that play recordings about the place in return
for coins, and other machines that illuminate the frescoes in return for more
coins. I tail someone who has money, and check out the frescoes. Some recall
dim memories from stories at Sunday school, or when Ms Dodge used to read the
life of a saint every morning in third grade. I wonder if Ms Dodge is still
alive, and if so, what she's doing. There are religious people walking around
solemn; I'm an intruder. Churches make me uncomfortable, and I've seen enough
of this one. I turn to H. and tell him that we have to go. He slips the mark
back into the novel that he's been reading and follows me out.
H. drags me through the Latin Quarter in an attempt to locate and to purchase
several French books that he wants for his studies. The journals of Camus and
something else, I can't remember. Actually I drag him generally south in order
to give us some direction, and he drags me particularly into any book shop that
takes his fancy. At least I have a goal; at least I'm going someplace.
Everything's so damn full here, I feel as if I've spent half my time stumbling
about with this huge pack on my back looking for a place to go. Most of the
youth in this youth hostel that H. and I have ended up at consists of
middle-aged women, I don't understand. Inmates scream at us from windows high
up in Santé prison; I can't discern the words. The sound is bouncing
off the huge perimeter wall and off the houses opposite, and it's as if the
entire quarter, the entire city, is screaming at me. I must escape. H.
accompanies me.
The train is crowded. Babies are crying. I don't have any paper; I've been
scribbling this on the back of a change receipt. I dream of the antiseptic
white headrests and wide seats in first class. This pack will break my back.
It's too small for all the articles that I carry with me, so I'm holding
another, smaller container, a knapsack, by one of its straps. I twist around
to catch the attention of H. "Anything falling out?" No, he informs. My god,
we are in a Beckett novel. My bicycle, my crutches. No, says H., we've not
been accosted by the police. If we were in a Beckett novel we'd have been
accosted by the police by now. Therefore we're safe; we're not in a Beckett
novel. Modus Tollens.
Some escape. Switzerland is the only place I know of where a coke is more
expensive than a beer. Oh for the good old days of a baguette for three French
francs. The hostel here is too laid back for me. The lobby is occupied by a
collection of youth scoured from all the countries of western Europe, clustered
around a spaniard with short pony-tail and black hat tilted back on his head
getting mellow on his guitar. I buy a drink from the porter, a middle-aged,
pie-bald man with grey fringes down to his shoulders, and ask him what I should
do with the glass when I'm done with it. "The glass?" Like, what-the-hell are
you asking me for? "Throw it out of the window." Uh-huh. Whatever you say,
guy. I rinse it out and leave it in an empty locker. Sometime someone will
discover it and throw it out of the window. Not me. I'd rather not know about
it. Needless entropy sets me on edge.
H. and I haven't much time before it gets dark, and I want to go out and see
the town. "I just need to finish these last ten pages", claims H., "Proust is
almost dead." He had purchased Hayman's new biography before leaving England.
"He's been almost dead all his life", I protest, "put the damn thing down."
It's cool to see the town where Jung hung out at university (and Nietzsche,
adds H.), but there's not a hell of a lot here besides the Rhine and the old
town and a lot of pricey shops, so the next morning H. and I get on the train
to Zürich.
Keep moving, it's important to keep moving. Somewhere around here Lenin spent
his exile and Joyce wrote Ulysses, but all there is now is a confusion of
trams, financial institutions, and again the expensive shops. H. and I have
been living on bread and an occasional chocolate bar. This country has begun
to piss me off and I suspect that very soon I'll find myself again in
transit.
The lady at the station has stuck us with twenty-four hour passes for the
trams instead of the single tickets that H. and I had wanted for the trip to
the hostel. They cost five francs each. Rather than trying to communicate
with a German speaker I forked over the cash. Actually she probably spoke
French at least, and maybe English too. So now, having these things, I figure
H. and I may as well use them. H. and I take the tram down the east side of
the lake and continue on foot towards Kusnacht.
Jung was no fan of conventional, external biography. He interested himself
only in the psychic development of the individual, and considered most external
particulars irrelevant to this. I dig this attitude because it meshes with my
own repugnance at the overabundance of information in this age. Jung happened
to record his home address in Kusnacht in one place in Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, only because he was using it as an example of a detail that
anchored him in the real world, so that he didn't end up having flown off into
space like Nietzsche, whose aftermath he'd experienced at Basel. I explain
this to H. He claims vehemently, in response, that the primary cause of
Nietzsche's collapse was his health, not his intellectual trajectory. Now I
don't know much about Nietzsche, I'm a philistine, but perhaps I enjoy
believing that his end was his going ballistic.
228 Seestra
e is a private house. There's a drive where a car has left tracks
recently. The entrance bulges out into a tower that separates itself from the
rest of the house. This is appropriate. Some of the windows are lighted.
Someone lives there. It's nonessential. I take a photograph. It's dusk by
this time and I wonder whether the light was enough. H. and I turn around.
It's highly important now to get back to the hostel, because H. and I are tired
and must be ready to go to Bollingen tomorrow. H. mentions that he'd like to
get some reading done.
To go to Bollingen one has to change at Rapperswil, and the train to
Rapperswil is a very new commuter train, a double-decker. The driver's voice
announcing the stations is pouting, syrupy, playing with the syllables. Must
be some Teutonic babe with golden curls spilling over the soft flesh of her
shoulders, warm tongue brushing her lips, a drop of spittle glistening
there.... I express this sentiment to H., and he advances the proposition that
she may be a recording.
I've been peering at every house along the shore all the way east from
Bollingen station, and as soon I see it I recognise, that's it, the Tower, the
house from plate nine of Memories, Dreams, Reflections. I've come upon it
maybe halfway between Bollingen and Schmerikon. It's privately owned, and
although I see quite a stock of wood laid in for the winter, there appears to
be no activity there now. I duck through the fence while H. stays on the path
and reads one of the Camus journals that he purchased in Paris.
I'm taking several photographs as I approach the Tower, because at any moment
the rightful owner may appear with guard dogs, a shotgun, an assault rifle, and
a few divisions of armour and heavy artillery and terminate my incursion. I
come in from the road at a distance from the house, keeping a generous volume
of branches between me and the windows. I reach the shore and begin advancing
along it toward the house. I'm approaching the west side, the original tower,
Jung's maternal spirit. He started this two months after his mother died. I
see the wall of the courtyard where he meditated, the final element of the
house's quaternity. Behind the wall must be the stone with his alchemical
inscriptions. The current occupant has a boat beached here, and I think of the
voyage into the unconscious. I begin circling around to the east, and pass
close to the back of the central structure, Jung's self. The division between
the lower (unconscious) and the upper (conscious) parts is clear. He added the
upper storey, the representation of his individuated consciousness, after his
wife died. Jung felt that words, even concretised as ink on paper, were not
sufficient to express his understanding. The stone of the Tower is something
more substantial. I wonder how it'll end, how many centuries, someday it'll
fall down. I think of the sun expanding into a red giant and vaporising this
planet.
I've come around now to the shore again, and I'm approaching from the east,
toward Jung's spritual self. I wonder which window in the spiritual tower
might be Jung's retiring room. I wonder who might be peering at me from it. I
snap another photo. Does this mean I have his soul on film, imprisoned? I may
be getting too near something here. Maybe whoever uses this place now is a
relative of Jung's and wants him left alone. I've become very uptight and have
to get out of here. I dash back out on a diagonal line to the fence. I'm on
the outside again now, not vulnerable. Oh no, officer, I was just, y'know,
looking at it. From the outside. Those footprints? Gee, I dunno, must've
been somebody gone in there this morning. Yes, officer, I'll just be moving
along now.... There is no cop in sight, but H. and I move along anyway, just
in case. I have the Tower on film. All it needs is developing. I think of
film as language and developer as decoder, and the delocalisation of meaning
between language and decoder.
On the train to Vienna I'm fascinated with the toilet. There isn't even a
plastic cover; it's just a hole in the floor with a toilet installed around it,
and I piss right onto the rail. I think of every left wheel of every car to
the rear grinding and squeaking over my urine. You can't do this in England
where the rails are electrified.
In Vienna H. wants to see the Freud museum. Everywhere Jung hung out is
closed, private property, everywhere Freud hung out someone's founded a museum.
The place was opened up in the seventies by a bunch of Freudians. The guide
book is boring, written in the style of analytical psychology. I'm almost
surprised that it doesn't start talking about his birth order and his number of
siblings and all that. H. says that he is satisfied. I take no photographs.
I walk around the Ringstrae with H. He and I have seen it in books.
I'd like to be able to afford more than the basics in food, so I suggest that
H. and I should go to Budapest and take advantage of the exchange rate. H.
concurs. Food. My bellyful. Maybe this is a Beckett novel.
The Hungarian train is filthy, late, and crowded with Hungarians who've come
to Vienna to buy things that aren't for sale in Hungary no matter how much
money you have. They're loaded down with bags and boxes. I see a lot of boxes
with names of computer companies printed on them. I mistrust computers because
they're good at extracting and preserving information. I wonder if I'll ever
go back to computer science. The Europeans call it informatics, and I think
that that term is less veiled. H. and I stand up all the way to Budapest, next
to the toilet. A group of Hungarian men are sitting on their luggage in the
corridor, getting drunk. They step over our luggage to piss. The Hungarian
toilet is a joke.
Crossing the border reminds me of the Bugs Bunny cartoon where Yosemite Sam is
fighting for the South and Bugs Bunny is fighting for the North in the US civil
war. There's an exact dividing line between the warm, sunny South and the
cold, dreary North. As soon as the train pulls out of the border station
things outside the window have become run-down, unkempt, dirty. The railway is
fringed with chemical pipelines and factories pouring black smoke from their
stacks. I wonder what'll be my intake of heavy metals during the next few
days.
I'm not prepared for the concrete effects of an abstraction like currency. Or
rather the concrete effects of differences of ideology as to what, if anything,
is represented by that abstraction. As soon as H. and I step off the train:
"English? You want rooms? I got rooms, center of city. Change money?" A
cacophony of this. I take beds for myself and H. for two nights in a house a
few blocks from the station. Apparently the husband and wife who run the place
support themselves solely on this enterprise. They know the arrival times for
the trains from the west, and whenever there's one due he takes his car to the
station to pick up a load. H. and I change a little money on the black market
and head into the city.
I stop at almost every sidewalk eatery. A filling meal costs about eighty
forints, which is about 70p. I stuff myself. That evening H. and I have a
complete restaurant meal with dessert, plus wine for me and a soda for H., for
about five hundred forints each.
A stench hangs over this city, from the factories and the cars. Strange
coloured streaks of waste slide into the Danube from outlets in the embankment.
The streets remind me of a greasy cinema floor. The whole place needs a good
hosing-down. I imagine all this waste collected and flowing in the gutters.
Like the sewers in Paris.
Hungarian is incomprehensible. In France H. and I knew the language, if not
the idiom. In Switzerland everybody speaks everything, pretty much. In
Austria there were cognates so I could read the signs. But in Hungary, if they
speak anything besides Magyar it'll be German, which doesn't help me. H. and I
get on by pointing at what we want, and handing a pen to the clerk to write
down the price. Thank heaven for Arabic numerals. The universality of
mathematics. There have been radio messages beamed to distant stars,
constructed in mathematical language in the hopes that extraterrestrial
intelligences who share no human culture, none of our theatre, will figure them
out. Numbers and pointing can get a lot accomplished. I think of the
pre-Socratic who was so hung up about Heraclitean flux that he refused to call
anything by name, but only pointed at the objects that he wanted to reference.
By the time he'd finished uttering the name, he thought, it wouldn't be the
same object anymore; it would have changed out from under him.
The pay toilet in Budapest is fantastic. Drop ten forints in the door and the
whole fucking place comes alive for you. The fan whirs into action, the light
flickers on, the toilet begins flushing automatically, gee maybe we're building
up toward liftoff here. There's even flowery wallpaper. But the best part is,
this blinking arrow built into the wall, just like in a pinball machine,
pointing at the john, like, "Right here! Put it here!" This elaborate
contraption has been constructed, I think in a paranoiac flash, as an effort to
distract anyone who uses it from the plain truth of their corporeality, the
fact that all they are at this moment is a human animal relieving itself. I
settle onto the seat, and shit. "Don't miss!" blinks the arrow. Right you
are, I think. How many bonus points? Did I match? A similar arrow is
blinking at the washbasin. "Now wash your hands afterwards!" Gotcha. "Thanks
for using this toilet, and enjoy your stay in our beautiful city!" Sure will.
I exit, the door slams behind me, and the show's over, folks; I have a sense
that the whole toilet has just detumesced. I wonder if my shit is on its way
to becoming part of one of those streams of effluents that H. and I see pouring
into the Danube.
These Hungarians are hung up about crossing against the light. Even when
there's obviously nothing coming they prefer to wait for the walk signal. How
regular, how systematic.
After two days in Budapest H. and I feel that we've taken sufficient advantage
of Hungarian prices and are tired of breathing the pollutants. The
twenty-fifth of December is coming up, I don't know what stops running then,
and I don't want to get stuck here. H. and I load up on cheap Hungarian food
before leaving. It's illegal to take more than a hundred forints' worth of
food out of Hungary, but H. and I have probably already broken the law by
changing money on the black market. H. and I go back to Vienna and then take a
night train to Frankfurt and change there for Mannheim.
Mannheim is not the most interesting city in Germany but my former student
Ralph lives there. It's nice to see him, and nice no longer to be utterly
anonymous and foreign, the complete alien. After several days of the Danube
we're back on the Rhine, at its confluence with the Neckar. I still don't see
any Rhinemaidens; perhaps it's the wrong season. Nothing has arrived at
Ralph's from my publisher, and somehow I'm not surprised.
After a few days of good food and company, H. and I take the train back to
Frankfurt, change there for Kassel, and change at Kassel for Nordhausen.
Nordhausen is just inside what used to be the German Democratic Republic and
again it's like that Bugs Bunny cartoon, only the dividing line's got a bit
smeared over the past few months. Nordhausen is an important destination,
because I'm going there to find the Rocket.
Yes, I do fancy I'm replaying Slothrop. That's what I do, play bits and
pieces of characters. I enjoy confusing literature and life because that's a
consummation or acceptance of what the Universe (Slothrop would say "They")
seems to want. Everything happens to me for the good of literature, not for the
good of me. The only way to salvage it is to become the literature. I have an
intuition that this attitude isn't right but don't know what else to do.
Some people make pilgrimages to Dublin. I go to Nordhausen. Guess I'm not
artsy enough to go to Dublin. Even Pynchon has become superfluous now, but at
least he himself was the one who caused that superfluity. He's said all that
he had to say, and the rest is surplus data. I should invent a time machine,
go back to 1973, and kill him so he doesn't putter around and end up writing
Vineland. (It's no fun, being superfluous, I know.) Then I could play the
criminal, the destroyer of art, the anti-artist. <<Il me restait
à souhaiter qu'ils m'acceuillent avec cries de haine.>>
Everybody'd hate me and perhaps at last I could do something right, perfect my
role, be the complete alien.
Hardly anyone speaks English in the east. I guess it wasn't encouraged. A
sign above the station door says something about an information centre in the
rathaus, a thousand metres straight that-a-way. I walk the kilometer, with H.
following. The lady at the rathaus office doesn't speak English. We struggle
for a while, then she hails someone who's on his way up the stairs. He speaks
to H. and me in a perfect American voice, yet he's obviously part of the local
government. I wonder where he learnt his English, in fact I have a suspicion,
but inquiry would be imprudent. H. and I end up staying in a private house for
fifteen marks each.
I wonder if anyone else has done this. Probably Pynchon hasn't. The steam
engine that takes H. and me to Krimderode must not have changed since the war.
I feel maybe I'm on the way to the mountain with a shipment of A4 parts. Or to
Dora, towing freight cars full of prisoners. Near the tracks at Krimderode I
see an upright stone with some plaque mounted on it. Perhaps it has something
to say about Dora, or even about the Mittelwerke. But no, it's another
monument to Goethe. That's Germany: wherever you go, a Goethestrae, a Goethe
plaque, something. It says he passed by here on his journey into the Harz in
seventeen-something-or-other. Two souls, alas. From Krimderode it's ten or
fifteen minutes' walk north and then west along the Kohnsteinweg and across
another set of tracks to the mountain.
The Dora site is a memorial now, and there's a small museum here. The
caretaker, the old man, is out of the ordinary here, human interaction not
being a big part of what I do. (Perhaps I should have asked him if he
remembered saving Ian Scuffling from Marvy's Mothers. Or helping Luke escape
from the Death Star.) In a mix of Old English and the German vocabulary that
I've picked up in the past week or so I manage to communicate a lot to him: I
have come here because Dora and the Mittelwerke appear in this book. (I show
him page 304.) Very famous American author. Did he know of this book? No.
He examines it with interest, understanding the rocket-technology phrases and
probably some cognates. Perhaps other people will come here because of this
book. The tunnels, they are closed? Yes. No way in? No.
I start on my way up the mountain at the B-tunnel. H. does some reading on a
nearby bench. The tunnel opening is closed up and fenced all around. I take a
small piece of the white stone extracted from the heart of the mountain, an
irrational memento. The parabolic entrance is gone; it's only sheet metal now,
and crumbling stone. But I've seen it in the photographs at the museum; it did
actually exist. I take a photograph.
A few million years of erosion (how appropriate) have made this a low, dumpy
mountain, and within twenty minutes I'm standing on top of it, on top of the
Mittelwerke. I take several photographs. There's a rusted steel hut here;
maybe Enzian slept in it. I think of the Americans and their thing about
"George Washington slept here", and wonder if the Raketenstadt ended up making
the same big deal about Enzian. I think of the quaternity back at Bollingen,
of Jung and his mandalas. I pick up a fragment of the soft, white stone of the
mountain and scratch on the hut:
Then I add:
RAKETEMENSCH
Maybe someone'll see it and be freaked out. No. No-one'll see it. The
rain'll wash it away. Or someone'll see it who doesn't understand it. But you
never know. That's how it is with information.
The descent is rapid (though not ballistic). I retrieve H. On my way out I
pass by dressed-up people coming the other way and realise that I've shown up
here on a Saturday. Religion makes me uncomfortable. These people are all
solemn and thinking of murdered Jews; here am I, I came for a Rocket. It's
time to bug out.
H. and I arrive in Florence on a Monday, and the Uffizi is closed. We've seen
it in books. We walk around the city, stay the night, and proceed to Rome the
next day. Rome closes on Tuesdays. H. and I wander around various ruins.
There are vendors with tables full of souvenirs overpriced and worthless.
Brilliant white statuettes of gods and godesses. I think of all the closets in
all the countries (but especially the United States) that they'll end up being
thrown into, and I think of Ezra Pound going on about all we've done for a room
full of broken statues and columns. I take a photograph of one of the vendors.
This is how I want to remember the place.
Somehow we end up in Vatican City, at Saint Peter's Basilica. These Swiss
Guard types make me nervous. There are all kinds of these nuns and priests
everywhere. I think of Chaucer and the tale of Chaunteclere, his flight down
from the beam. I'm searched on the way in. I get to feeling that maybe
there's something special going on here. Well sure enough, wouldn'tcha know
it's New Year's Day. I've completely lost track of time. It's New Year's Day,
and the Pope is showing up to give some special mass. This is something that I
want not to interfere in.
Fragments from Sunday school keep running themselves through my head,
especially "Honour thy father and thy mother". I want to confess a lot of
things and I wish there were some place to do it or some agent to hear me. I
have to get the hell out of this damn church.
Outside the walls of the Vatican, H. and I wander, trying to find a cheap
tavola calda. I've become very hungry. This part of the city is too touristy,
and we can't find anything cheap. Eventually I wander into a food shop and buy
a cake, because there's no bakery where I might get bread. I split the cake
for H. and myself, and we eat it along with a couple sodas, on the kerb of a
narrow Roman side street.
H. has to get back to Sussex in time for the beginning of term, and I see him
off from Termini. I get him his reservation, put him on the right train, tell
him where and when he has to change. I've given him the whole algorithm, all
he has to do is execute it and not fuck up. I hope he doesn't become confused.
I'm running on the platform and then left standing as the train accelerates,
surprised at the emotion that I am still capable of manifesting. I am now
completely alone. I wonder what it is that I've been running from. I'm amazed
at the concrete power of ideas, of abstraction, to propel me all across
Europe.
When H. was with me, his presence reminded me that I wasn't alone against the
universe, and to the extent that I could control him I provided myself with the
illusion of power. The worst kind of sin is when one hurts other people even
though one knows that it's wrong. Or is that really a sin? This world is so
arbitrary, when you really see it, that I wonder in moments of lucidity if
anything really could be a sin. Once again I'm drowning in a sea of
relativism. Maybe that's why I've been squeamish anytime I've encountered
religion. Religious people know what's right and what's wrong and I don't have
faith to keep myself from thinking that any claim like that is a crock. I
stand on the platform in the wind, tears on my cheeks, a child who's lost his
mother, a lamb separated from the flock, a Faust in his tower, choose your
metaphor.
I take back what I said. It is Beckett. Apparently it's uncool to sleep
outside in Italy. It's doubly uncool to carry a scissors in one's pocket. I
use it to patch my clothes and to cut my hair. I mean, if I really wanted to
stab somebody I'd be carrying a knife, right? Not this piece of shit. It
figures that I'd get done for something cheesy like carrying a goddamn
scissors. I can see myself in the Big House: What'd you do? Armed robbery.
And you? I stabbed someone. Hey you over there, Inglese, what was it that
landed you in the lock-up? Uh, well, actually, I was uh, caught with a
concealed scisssors.
They're all jabbering over me now, these carabinieri. Written Italian is one
thing, but spoken rapidly at one-thirty in the morning I can decipher nothing.
The semi-automatics slung over their shoulders are out of a gangster film. I
understand that I'm about to get arrested, and that there's nothing that I can
do about it. There's a comfort in this, that at last someone else will be
making the decisions, someone else is in control, and I have no repsonsibility
for anything. It's time to concede, to crumple into my pocket this chocolate
wrapper that I've been scribbling on, to make an end.