He nodded to Fox, who pushed K. toward the door.

Chapter 2

You need reality for the illusion to work. And you need the illusion to understand reality. But what do you need to create and understand a book? Where is the boundary between writer, reader, and character? How to know who is who?

You told me in today’s nightmare how to put together the first chapter. I didn’t listen. I knew you fell asleep reading it. Then I understood that it was me that was asleep and watching you slumber. I won’t beat you today.

Let’s start with a name. The Dreamtime. In the generalised discord of our times, we incline to myth and metaphors of the past, but that’s only scratching the surface. Sometimes, in my half-sleep, I see proto-dreams of how our world was created, dreamt by our wandering ancestors as they curled up under the skin of a diprotodon in their caves. In a time before time, when there were only stars, the time before all wars, which humanity has all but forgotten, like a fantastic tale passed from one generation to the next.

How to tell these tales? Not of the creator, but of his dreams. Not of the war, but of its putrid smoke in the upper atmosphere. Not of madness, but of those that follow in its trail, squinting blindly, arms outstretched. Who can say?

Man is a model kit, a set of genetic codes able to organise the most mundane chemical elements into new properties, be it as a living form or as a desire to self-replicate into the future. A book and its heroes are another such device, made of symbols arranged in a certain order. Composed correctly, it reproduces the human imagination and passes it on to family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. It is no less living than that spiky stellar corona of a virus.

A gene contains within it a mere one-thousandth of a detail distinguishing one person from the next. And this unique data point, well you wouldn’t need the Library of Babel (Natasha told me about Borges on one of our walks: “You must read this guy . . . magical realism!”), and not even the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. Just the one book would do. Maybe in one of those collected works distributed by subscription, like the ones that get left on my door in a string bag every week, along with the latest issue of Science and Life. Literature changes us like a virus, leaving its code in the genotype of humanity. Literature creates reality and replicates the author, or rather, leaves a trace of his image, an anatomically exact copy committed to paper. It’s the only way the writer can live after death—not in the genes of his children, but in the genes of those carrying the virus of his ideas.

God what I’d do to get rid of these thoughts in my head. To get out of this terrible city, this mincer of hearts, these mechanical jaws gnawing at me. Where did you put the matches, dear? Hand them over. These pages need burning.