For me to be having this conversation with you—any conversation, I suppose—I have to make a series of concessions not just to your point of view but to the actual form of the world seen from your place in it. I can do that. But the problem is that for you it is never a question of point of view. You’re never troubled to find yourself discussing quite peculiar things in a fairly normal way. Maybe it’s just the naivete that you bring to the table. You might say: Well, how else would you discuss them? But when the subject is chimeras arent you already on somewhat shaky ground? I’ve thought from early on that the Kid was there not to supply something but to keep something at bay. And in the meantime the whole business is subsumed under the rubric of a single reality which itself remains unaddressable. I wake in the night in my room and lie there listening to the quiet. You ask where they are. I dont know where they are. But they are not nowhere. Nowhere like nothing requires for its affirmation a witness which it cannot supply by its own definition. You’d be loath to grant these beings a will of their own, but if they were not possessed of something like autonomy in what sense could they then be said to exist? I’ve no power either to conjure them forth or send them packing. I dont speak for them or see to their hygiene or their wardrobe. I said that they were indistinguishable from living beings, but the truth is that their reality is if anything more striking. Not just the Kid but all of them. Their movements, their speech, the color and the fold of their clothes. There’s nothing dreamlike about them. None of this is much help, is it? Well, people dont listen to loonies. Until they say something funny.

Do you think that I listen to you?

Your prototypical looney. You asked me that before.

What did you answer before?

Let me put this out.

Here.

Thank you. You do okay. To answer your question.

What is it that he’s keeping at bay?

The Kid?

The Kid.

I dont think there’s a simple answer to that. If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.

How would that be a help? I dont understand.

I’m sorry. But that’s really all I have.

You wake and you know that they are somewhere. The beings. But your explanation seems a bit philosophical. If it is an explanation.

I know. You could just ask what it is that chimeras do on their day off.

Yes. You could. Is Berkeley still a part of your life?

Everything in my life is a part of my life. I dont have the luxury of forgetting things. I was probably eight or nine before I realized that things went away. When people said that they didnt remember I thought it meant that they just didnt want to talk about it. Where I live things dont go away. Everything that has happened is pretty much still here.