It is the same question. Clare has asked it for at least a month now. Is it OK to not be working, to be unable to work? Her mind begins to speed up and she knows that she will spend the next twenty minutes only trying to slow it enough so that it will remain with the sentence, with the dim containers that are words, so that it will willingly squeeze through, into and out of, words to produce articulation, so that the world will not end, the plane will not fall out of the sky, the officer will lay down his arm, the children may hold reasonable opinions rather than signs imploring U.S. aid; so Clare may do what is called thinking, may experience discrete thought rather than bounding through the endless black and rainbow that is the mountain-heap of images constituting the trash heap of her being. The world keeps ending, in myriad and novel, fresh and sudden, gradual, mechanized ways. It isn’t quite her memory, she thinks, this ferocious slideshow. The visions aren’t organized in the style of a narrative, something personal that follows a human agent from cradle to eventual grave. If she only sits here, the images cycle at a terrific rate; they clatter and swish and fold in half. They shiver and multiply. She thinks of names. It gets a little better. She thinks, hotly, of her own small success—but mostly she thinks of failure and death. She cannot find her way out of the labyrinthine enclosure, this psychotic office park. She must recall her body. She must gently alert it to the necessity of getting out of bed, of washing face and hands and stepping to the kitchenette to heat water. She must stay here, with the hands, with her face. Yes, she foresees the possibility of rising, but at a great distance, a horizon. It inspires nausea. A bunker buster is a type of bomb designed to penetrate hardened targets. She can’t think. Therefore, she cannot work. And, meanwhile, the world keeps ending. Yet how can she live in the time that remains without work, or, rather, work in the paltry time that remains? For surely it is not OK to not work. This is the price that must be paid for being, for the condition of being squired around in a sentient frame. One must work to justify one’s being. There is no right, otherwise. Oh, certainly, for others there is a right. Some people—the poet Loudermilk, for example—are perfect. They have appeared in the world with automatic integration. They are one and whole and true and would never engage in this sort of dialogue. For the question persists: Is it OK to not work? We will all die so soon. Clare can barely breathe and the end of her nose is cold. Others are probably better than she is. With a lurching motion she forces herself out of bed. She fights up through the thicket of images. She tastes chalk. There is nothing to be done. She wobbles toward the kettle. Aeneas prayed to be allowed to descend to the underworld. She has hardly spoken to another human for nearly a month. The Bill Clinton head hangs by its neckhole from the knob of the closet door.