Jay seemed the one nearest to the earth, for there was the dew of pleasure upon his lips, there was this roseate bloom of content on his cheeks because he was nearest to the earth. He could possess the world physically whenever he wished, he could bite into it, eat it, digest it without difficulty. He had an ample appetite, he was not discriminating, he had a good digestion. So his face shone with the solid colors of Dutch paintings, with the blood tones of a well-nourished man, in a world never far from his teeth, never made invisible or insubstantial, for he carried no inner chamber in which the present scene must repeat itself for the commentator.

He carried no inner chamber in which this scene must be stored in order to be possessed. He carried no echo and no retentions. No snail roof around his body, no veils, no insulators.

His entrances and exits were as fluid, mobile, facile, as his drinking and its consequences. For him there was no sense of space between human beings, no distance to traverse, no obstacles to overcome to reach one another, no effort to make.

Because of his confidence in the natural movements of the planets, a pattern all arranged beforehand by some humorous astrologer, he always showed a smiling face in this lantern slide of life in Paris, and felt no strings of bondage, of restraint, and no tightrope walking as the others did.

From the first moment when he had cut utterly the umbilical cord between himself and his mother by running away from home at the age of fourteen and never once returning, he had known this absence of spools, lassos, webs, safety nets. He had eluded them all.

Thus in the sky of the café tables rotating, the others circled around him to drink of his gaiety, hoping to catch his secret formula.

Was it because he had accepted that such an indifference to effort led men to the edge of the river, to sleep under bridges, was it because he had decided that he did not mind sleeping under bridges, drinking from the fountain, smoking cigarette butts, eating soup from the soup line of the Hospital de la Santé?

Was this his secret? To relinquish, to dispossess one's self of all wishes, to renounce, to be attached to no one, to hold no dream, to live in a state of anarchy?

Actually he never reached the last stage. He always met someone who assumed the responsibility of his existence.

But he could sense whoever unwound from the center of a spool and rewound himself back into it again at night, or the one who sought to lasso the loved one into an indissoluble spiral, or the one who flung himself from heights intent on catching the swing midway and fearful of a fatal slip into abysms.

This always incited him to grasp giant scissors and cut through all the patterns.