Suicide? How could it be otherwise, I ask you! Of course it was a temptation, luring me into the canal’s black mirror. With relish I tell how I clambered down the steeply paved embankment with the desperate intention of drowning myself, but comically afraid I might slip on the cold wet stone and fall into the cold water, afraid of the policeman up on the bridge whose dumpy silhouette (together with that of the man he was inaudibly talking to), surrounded by a bloodless aureole, dug a dark hole in the thick fog glowing in the light of a streetlamp—a double hole, since the plump, lightless volume of the cop cast a large reflection into the foggy light. The silhouette was thus transformed into negative space: negative space of negative light and its pale echo; lightless, hollow pattern and its material reverberation as light. Yet both are weighty: weighty the dematerialized core of negative light and the husk of etiolating material light, weighty-unweighty in padded, cylindrical volumosity; the thick winter coats of the two men bulging rollers of negative light with handles of bulging roller-sleeves, raised up on bulging pant-leg pads; the dachshund on a leash frozen hard as iron, a sausage-roller; the policeman’s cap a sausage slice on top of a sausage wheel; the man’s Tyrolean hat a sausage-end; the breaths of man and cop a sausage bubble finely integrated into the crackling light, blown delicately as glass into the Christmas Eve glimmer of frost-heavy fog, breaths united in a cloud of rime. (Of course, I hadn’t eaten anything all day, just roamed around against my Christmas Eve yearning in the mirrored lights of the canal; of course, I was sick with hunger; of course I was cold in my thin little coat . . .)

And then, the other thing, compacted of deeper, more formless and sinister darknesses: a blackened double creature at the base of the bridge arch, something indeterminable lying heavy and motionless on the footing, and indeterminably joined with it something uncertain bending over it and preparing to—what? Murder it? Shake it awake? Throttle it? Rape it? Copulate with it?—And no way for me to escape: impossible to scramble up the slick blocks of the embankment, impossible every step backward on the narrow ledge . . . (rising from the water the crypt-like breath of cold putrefaction)—

—and the roller-policeman on the bridge turns—swinging his overcoat-roller around its axis, taking leave of the roller-man on the bridge who raises his sausage-end and is dragged off by the dachshund-sausage at the end of his iron rod—he turns and strides off weightily, growing smaller as he disappears into his endlessly increasing light echo—

(—and I feast my eyes on the entranced, despairing childlike eyes of S., his empathy for my—his—suffering, the boy in distress; his pained poet’s eyes that envy me, the liar in his glory—)

—and me at the bridge arch, chilled and feverish in my thin schoolboy’s coat, my pale young face taut with cold, the pounding of my heart in my temples, my breath hammering on the anvil of my larynx, planted in my tracks, driven like a thunderbolt onto the narrow footing of the embankment with stringy mandrake roots of fear, trembling with every soundless step of the retreating policeman on the bridge—