Finally, I got my coffee and washed down each paragraph with it. Caffeine is no help, but the shape of the cup, the warmth of the white enamel, the natural ability of the tongue to feel the bitterness—all is a ritual that evokes an illusion of being alive. The dark circle left by the cup on the napkin looks like a Zen symbol—ink from an upturned inkwell that once wrote a thousand words at once. Dream is equal to reality when written on paper. Life is a letter, and I am the grammatical error. I am the cancer of this plot. I’m someone’s perverted word association. Do you know that our brain deliberately limits the length of the chain of associations so that we can react faster to danger? Well, apparently mine doesn’t. Ergo, Buddha kills his own body to feed the starving tigress that he loves in a dream that only the Dalai Lama could conceive, novocaine kills love and Cain kills Abel, so that God will finally speak to him. A man, who doesn’t speak to anyone, is writing our novel. The walls of his bare room are covered with its text.

And then he says:

“You can’t sleep here.”

I wake up with a start. The waiter is standing in front of me.

“What?”

“I said you can’t sleep here.”

“I’m not sleeping, I’m thinking.”

There was something else. Something critically important about post office number thirty-three. It’s gone now.

“Yes, you were. You snored.”

I crumple a napkin. I hate it when people wake me up.

“Till what time are you open? 2 AM?”

I pay the bill, swallow a double dose of red pills, slip a table knife into my pocket and leave. Time keeps joking with me. It’s already past midnight. The city is soaked in a yellow gouache of street lights. Shadows flow into each other, taking the form of their prisons: cracks in the walls, stone arches, fountains, mouths of statues. I walk on the verge of awakening, I examine pain fenced off by the glass wall of analgesics. Spider in the aquarium.

I walk parallel to the Via Cardinale, along the embankment, crossing from lane to lane, diagonally approaching the train station. It’s as if the city has turned itself inside out. That’s how it usually is in the nightmares where I’m being chased, and I flee, but no matter how I try, I can’t outrun the killers—each time I turn around, I see them closer and closer. (Relax, Fryderyk—the professor clears his throat after a long silence—psychopaths typically dream that they are chasing others, not the other way around. Ergo, you are not a psychopath—just a depressive borderline personality.) Hidden by day, the now-lowered metal shutters of the clothing stores, bakeries, and souvenir shops are densely covered with strange graffiti, incomprehensible inscriptions, crossed out, painted over by other artists. Homeless people, drug dealers, strange tourists, young people migrating from club to club, pimps, immigrant women grabbing at their sleeves: “Wait, cuore mio, come here, come here.” They beckon to me with a quick, authoritative wave of the hand, palm down, the way one would call to a child. My steps and their inviting hiss unravel along the narrow stone streets, different modulations repeating into their echo.