I have an astonishing number of notes about S., an almost alarming number. Almost every one refers to him in some way or has a later note connecting to him. But the explanation is simple: I must have reworked most of the other notes during countless revisions of countless versions of my book, with various kinds of structures. Except, of course, for the notes that were done peripherally, so to speak, and not in terms of a specific plan. Granted, this did not come without some specific idea: I cannot deny that I was tempted to depict the character of a certain Johannes Schwab: a generously constructed figure, an editor in a publishing house, intellectual guru, well read to the point of blindness, well informed about anything worth knowing to the point of despair, hence disoriented, painfully aged by abandoning his once passionately nurtured ambition to write a book himself (one of the masterpieces of the century, the classic of the era, needless to say, an opus that would inscribe his name deathlessly in the pantheon of literary titans), a great-minded, great-hearted man, inspired by lovely envy to admire lovingly all those he regards capable of accomplishing such a masterly feat in his stead (Nagel, me), hence (I would almost have said) an alcoholic, based faithfully on my friend S. in all other features and characteristics . . . I won’t deny that I was tempted to capture such a blockbuster of a featured player on the page. Thus the many slips of paper with his name (or the initials J. S.). In the end, the explanation is simple. It can all be like this, or else entirely different.

Still, I likewise cannot deny that I am more and more obsessed with the belief that S. is standing before me, as vivid and physical as in the moment of my recognition of my murder. I mean to say, in the same stunning presentness, with the same almost blissful terror that hits me like a punch in the solar plexus—no, deeper, below the belt. A holy terror, I called it, and I commit myself to this expression, ludicrous as I find it, however much it may evoke the abstruse formulations of my years in Vienna—

Uncle Helmuth’s and Aunt Hertha’s transfigured secrecy whenever they came home from one of the séances of their spiritist community: initiates who had penetrated beyond the primitive practices of moving tables and conjuring up spirits, penetrated into the occult and thereby into the transcendent; who now virtually had a direct connection to Creation’s switchboard, a through line to the Good Lord, who, as chief mechanic, kept a universe of his own invention and personal patent operating eternally by utilizing, as the motor power, energies released by the tension in the polarities of good and evil, light and dark, up and down, positive and negative, and similar pairs of opposites . . .

no perpetuum mobile, alas, if you don’t want to place the promised final victory of good at infinity and bury the hope that the light of the Last Judgment and everlasting transfiguration is nigh; still, an illuminating metaphor for electricians and grease monkeys, in which they could read their ranks in the universe on all sorts of do-it-yourself power meters . . .