Then, far, far away, the broken line of a repeated fluting came filtering through: flickering and fading like a will-o’-the-wisp, flickering and fading, it sewed the tiny stitches of its seam into the moor of the celestial expanses:

—ancient yearning prophecy of doom—tadpole of the Word:

in the embryonic liquid of the umlaut to the unborn consonants—In the great maternal belly of night, space-time was conceived

—tape measure of my patiently stretched impatience—

The voices of spirits were startled. They fluttered in chaos like pale birds (the powdering of gulls in the headlight beams when I drove through the night to my son in Holland):

One voice close by:

“Are you still speaking?”

Another, half-remote:

“You still don’t have a connection?”

One very far:

“Paris, hello, Paris?”

Far, far away, another coming toward me:

“Le numéro ne répond pas, m’sieur.”

Again, the half-remote one:

“Hamburg, can you hear me? The party in Paris is not answering!”

The close voice, lunging:

“The party in Paris is not picking up.”

I said, “Please keep trying. Someone has to answer. It’s a hotel.”

The last sentence stood like a mountain: planted there by faith.

I listened to my own voice passing through the cosmos. (My breath had thrust its way between me and the echoing expanses. It perched on my chest like a beloved cat: a purring of the secret of myself.)

•

I was no longer a magician. I no longer conjured up lower, subservient spirits in order to awaken a slumbering corpse and have her follow me, sleepwalking from the underworld into life. Something more powerful had emerged from me, walking through the night with my voice, like the word of an archangel:

It announced to the anguished waker the tiding of patience.

Beneath it, the earth had gone wintry and rigid: a poor people’s land in the broken poetry of a collage: snowy expanses of paper, forests scattered like shreds of felt; the rusty wire ribbing of the plowland in the stringwork of roads, glass shards, glittering like ponds—and settlements like Bethlehem: humble earth-stars, sheltered from burning out by God’s hollow hand.

My voice passed over them, across a thousand leagues, to arouse again the sparse rippling of the strand of pearls, the monosyllabic flute tones:

Tracer trajectory fading in its goal—

the tiding of PATIENCE cleaved to the telephone switchboard in the Hôtel Épicure.

Here, it was transformed into a desperately malicious buzzing, and it feebly sawed away at the trunk of the stillness

—which had grown into the stairway chasms with crooked roots and sprouted its branches into the corridors and rustled its dark foliage in the rooms over the gaping mouths of the sleepers—

sawed away and dulled its teeth with each of its powerless strokes.

•

This went on night after night from twelve to four. If I then fell asleep, I dreamed and committed my murder.

•