These termite houses should be teeming with people, whole tribes must be living here, but you don’t see them, you barely hear them (and if you do, they’re abstracted into a hum of plumbing). Nevertheless, I picture them as anthropomorphic, flattened like the trolls in a Dubuffet painting and yet palpitating (the insane Maupassant foresaw them in the horlà, who comes after man). I won’t run into them, alas. They have been swallowed up by the residential mechanism, incorporated into it without a trace. I cannot expect any more spiritual utterance than a question from a fetal voice emerging from the sieve holes of the mouthpiece under the buzzer-and-name-platelet mountings before the door lock springs open, a question wrapped in rustling tinfoil and pickled in machine oil: “Hello? Who is it?”

But can I then in good conscience answer “Me?” (Who am I? Who am I in the face of this new world?) And even if I dared to say “Me,” I wouldn’t be taking a safe position. The signal of technological behavior patterns that would allow me into the honeycomb labyrinths here or there (beyond them the conversation with the metallic voice ghost would not survive), would be irrelevant. The residential mechanism overcomes dehumanization by multi-digited repeatability of the same setup: it basically makes no difference whether I go here or there, I would merely be arriving at an experience that can be repeated at random. Each of these twelve enormous housing machines is threaded with the capillaries of six stairwells (exactly similar to the one I now enter), each of which leads, on each of the twenty-two stories, to three medium-size or studio flats. That, according to Adam Riese (sic!), makes 4,752 four-to-six-celled lairs for consumers of the goods of life on an elevated self-service level. Theoretically (with just one studio flat per landing), the same experience with one of 1,464 unattached women, not intrinsically different from the broad, could be granted to me 1,464 times: I enter and find my bearings with somnambulistic sureness in the very same topography; to the left of the tiny vestibule are the bedroom and bathroom, to the right the living room and kitchenette; through the half-open (and intersecting) door, I see a female shoulder busy over kitchen chores (the shoulder covered with the synthetic and wool of a thinnish sweater lightly fragrant with cologne, soup broth, and femaleness; the odors vie for predominance, the female smell wins by a nose over the soup broth, the cologne evanesces in a field of straggling contenders). I sense the erotic appeal of the eel-round flesh of an upper arm naked from shoulder to elbow, the stays of the brassiere under the armpit, the curving of the back adorned with a half ribbon of apron string, the plump roundness of the hip in a plaid skirt jersey skirt corduroy skirt who-knows-what-kind-of skirt, the somewhat crooked seam of the nylon stocking over a full calf. The head is covered for the time being; if it moves and a slice of it becomes visible, then one may assume with a likelihood verging on certainty that the neck hairline, razor-cut too high, would irritate me in all 1,464 cases, that a voice with a monotonously singsong and rather nasally constricted Hamburg tone would say, “Hi there, just make yourself at home till I’m ready, everything’s prepared out there—a whole bunch of magazines just came in!”