But my book still glows in me. It has burnt to ashes nearly a third of my life.

It screwed up my marriage with Christa and drove Dawn to the madhouse. It was the lie (never fully exposed, yet shining through everywhere and soon filtering into everything) that kept Gaia from trusting me (which then caused her death). It turned my son (a child with eyes like well water in which I was reflected as a star) into a bitter little bookkeeper of my unkept promises and unfulfilled assurances—hence turned me into an ever shrewder swindler, an ever craftier liar and counterfeiter. It turned my existence into a more and more threadbare as-if.

For whatever I write, it ultimately writes me. Whatever I narrate, it ultimately narrates me. In other words, it is not I who live my life, my book lives me. And what I live and how I live are determined by the success or failure of my book.

So I live my life dissolutely, banking on the fact that my book (should it succeed) might not rectify things but will in any case justify them (and that it doesn’t matter anyway if the book doesn’t succeed). I live into the notebook of botched attempts, so to speak: toward a still-incomplete final draft. I can allow myself to drift along however chance determines, whatever circumstances dictate. Even in a no-exit situation, when all bridges are burned, I am exempt from decision, because decision comes not with what immediately happens but on the pages of my books.

Thus my book lives me, over and beyond the dramatic high points of my existence, from which peaks I may survey a battlefield—not necessarily a field of honor, for the time being; on which (for the time being) only others are killed in action. I myself tarry outside the events until the decision has been made, has fallen, with my book. Reality presents itself to me in two alienated ways; on the one hand, delayed in the weightlessly weighty movement of slow motion, in which my seeing eyes perceive “reality”; on the other hand (experienced by me as lived) as arbitrarily swift, uninfluenceable, and inevitable as if filmed in fast motion.

And all this has the ineluctabilty with which, terrorized until I scream in primal horror, and yet voluptuously paralyzed by curiosity about the foreknown, I dream that I am luring the old crone across the threshold of my cellar in order to murder her brutally.

•

I have not left this room for eight days and nights. Madame gets me wine, bread, cold meat, and eggs (which I drink raw from the shell). The handsome Pole brings the food to my room, sets it down at the door, knocks, and is usually gone by the time I open. The chambermaid comes every morning, makes the bed, and finds little else to tidy up. I don’t let her touch my papers.

These papers drive me to despair. Each one directs me to another, which it refers to, which it adds to or is added to by—and which is not at hand. Because, with some other junk that I have left behind, it lies in some trunk in Hamburg, Munich, Barcelona, or Rome, or wherever else it was my movie-parasitical hotel-lobby-loafing life cast me away. Or even worse, it has been destroyed in some auto-da-fé like the one I have instituted here.