No one had spoken to Clare for a very long time, if ever. Clare was, nevertheless, aware it was imperative that she descend. She seemed able to recall having been told that the tower was of such a height that it would take her around six hours to go down it, a full day’s work if she kept constantly in motion and took a leisurely lunch. Among the difficulties inherent to this venture were the facts that 1. There was no place anywhere on the tower, once one began to descend, at which it was possible to rest; 2. Clare was afraid of heights; and 3. The stairs that ran in a spiral around the exterior had stone treads that were at most five inches at their widest, by a meager ten inches across, meaning that to walk down, one had to dispense entirely with the idea of leaning against the side of the tower with one’s right shoulder, staring down at the steps, moving forward in one’s descent, and instead one had to face outward, pressing one’s back against the tower and taking the stairs one by one, placing one’s feet in an awkward sideways shuffle, progressing haltingly while staring into the cerulean void. So maybe it would take eight hours. Or twelve. Clare knew this was all rather specific, given she was hallucinating. The tower seemed to have no interior at all. Clare stood looking at a pile of crushed glass and rubbish tips at the tower’s mossy circular top. There was nothing to sustain her.

So Clare had begun. But beginning had not been enough.

After the eighth or ninth day of sideways walking, Clare had come to the conclusion that she had either misunderstood the messages about the time required or that these messages were incorrect to begin with. It continued. It continues. It reminds her sometimes of the time she went to hear her father read at the Poetry Project when she was fourteen and he was in town and was reading with the famous poet John Ashbery, and John Ashbery read a long poem in sentences and the sentences were such that Clare is unsure if later anyone remembered the poems her father read. And after, Clare had sat in a bar on 8th Street and it was balmy spring and she hadn’t said anything to anyone until she had gone home. And years later when she had mentioned this to her mother, her mother had said, “But you never went to his reading, don’t you remember? That was the night Alain was here and I made you stay in. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.”

However, today it is April, and Clare is older and walking toward Building 109 so that she can collect the last packet of the semester. The air is like bathwater. It gives an amniotic feel. Time is buoyant. It rocks. It vibrates eerily backward every once in a while.