Because he exudes an aura of weighty destiny—or at least, an extraordinary sensitivity, a bitter consciousness of being helpless in the face of the termite-like power of all the vulgar, malicious, stupid people in this world, a consciousness that cripples him and lends him the pathetic unwieldiness of a fallen giant, a Titan with severed tendons—one can’t help but perceive all his impulses as much too forceful, much too sweeping and tragic, all his utterances as grandiose and brittle, his person as an ivy-clad ruin, thereby overlooking the alertness of a sensitive and vulnerable person as well as the quite concrete stratagems by which he copes with daily existence: his healthy sense of the practical and merciless eye for the ridiculous, his shrewd and often hard-nosed tactics for handling others—in short, all the routines that make possible the paradox of an emotional economy that keeps the hatefulness of his environment at arm’s length and at the same time allows him to wallow all the more extravagantly in his melancholy—

majestically, of course, behind a decisive “No!” to everything mediocre, banal, and sentimental (under present circumstance a suicidal line to draw)—and majestically unconcerned with the damage he does to himself thereby (as well as via hard liquor and pills)—

What he’s looking for in Whores’ Alley is a manuscript. Another of Gisela’s customers left it with her by accident. He doesn’t know him, hasn’t seen the manuscript either, but only knows about it from the account of the man he fetched out of here after having seen to it that the latter’s three-day absence from home and workplace did not result in a missing-person bulletin. The manuscript is supposedly a film script and apparently extraordinarily brilliant and inventive. As an editor in a publishing house, he works with manuscripts professionally, and the man he led away from here, the discoverer of the manuscript, is a publisher. How the latter was able to get a look at it in the midst of a seventy-five-hour frenzy of torment and lust, an organ symphony of alcohol and drugs, can only be understood as an unbounded déformation professionelle.