He’s interrupted by the lobsters, three brick-red monsters on meadow-green lettuce leaves, surrounded by green wedges of lime and white-bordered yellow wedges of lemon (“Book it ‘For food and drink,’ Bussekins—and here, have a piece yourself. It’s easier with these shears!”)

and while they fall to with plastic cups and paper plates scared up from somewhere or other—the lobster flesh is elastic and tender and conjures up images of anthropophagy; our fingers fishing it out of the shell smell of vaginal manipulations. We devour what we’re offered, and since Frau Busse’s gone home, Carlotta opens the God-knows-how-manyeth bottle of Söhnlein Dry. And Witte talks, keeps talking, and talks and talks and talks—

—the sky in the large windows turns a dusty turquoise green and the light in the room is completely dematerialized, the lighting conditions of an abstract world,

abstract as the presence of the woman lounging next to him in an armchair—no, she’s lying diagonally in leisurely siesta mode, legs stretched out and crossed. She barely moves, raising her arm only now and then to reach for her glass, fish a cigarette from her case, or support herself as she leans forward to have him light it—

abstract as the condition of inebriation whose successive phases of euphoria I observe in myself and measure in Witte’s increasingly confused talk while outside the sky turns inky, first as pale as the final washing of his handkerchief and then, as if being run backwards, a deeper and deeper sepia—

—and far below on the road, the motley trickle of tinny vehicles is embellished with a dance of white and red stars, the tail lights of the tinny vehicles trickling up and down, semiological signs for the presence of—what? of human beings?—in this abstract world—people I can’t see, people who have been absorbed by their shiny, motley, drivable crustacean shells

and while windows light up “like crossword puzzles” on the stelae of high-rises here and in the distance across fields of rubble, construction excavations, factory sites

—blue and red light begins to pulse through a tangle of neon tubes as if showing the blood vessels of the resurrected city. . .

• • •