Back at work in the First American Title Insurance and Real Estate Company, back at work in his night classes, Jim finds he cannot keep Sheila Mayer and her jigsaw puzzles from his mind. Now it’s the principal element of the uneasiness that oppresses him. And he can’t escape it.

Hana is still working hard, she has no time. Hana is working, he is not.

Finally, impelled to it, he sits at his computer and stares at the screen. He’s got to work, to really work, he’s got to. Tonight it’s as much an escape from his life, from his uneasiness, as anything else. But any motive will do at this point.

He thinks about his poetry. He considers the poetry of his time. The thing is, he doesn’t like the poetry of his time. Flashy, deliberately ignorant, concerned only with surfaces, with the look, the great California image, reflected in mirrors a million times.… It’s postmodernism, the tired end of postmodernism, which makes utterly useless all his culturevulturing, because for postmodernism there is no past. Any mall zombie can write postmodern literature, and in fact as far as Jim can tell from the video interviews, that’s who is writing it. No, no, no. He refuses. He can’t do that anymore.

And yet this is his time, his moment; what else can he write about but now? He lives in a postmodern world, there is no way out of that.

Two of the writers most important to Jim wrote about this matter of one’s subject. Albert Camus, and then Athol Fugard, echoing Camus—both said that it was one’s job to be a witness to one’s times. That was the writer’s crucial, central function. Camus and the Second World War, then the subjugation of Algeria—Fugard and apartheid in South Africa: they lived in miserable times, in some ways, but by God it gave them something to write about! They had something to witness!

While Jim—Jim lives in the richest country of all time, what’s happening man, nothing’s happening man.… Jack-in-the-Box is faster than McDonald’s!

My Lord, what a place to have to be a witness to.

But how did it get this way?

Hmm. Jim mulls that over. It isn’t really clear, yet; but something in that question seems to suggest a possible avenue of action for him. An approach.

But that brings up a second problem: it’s all been done before.