*

Air fresh and cool round my shoulders, still early in the year.

Everything seems to spin away from me as though I were near the center of a vast level wheel, which collects and disperses and collects again out of the substance and people of the city. I can feel the dizziness whirling up to me, and I have to stop and hold my head in my hands. How can I leave this place in uniform, march and get shot at? It’s a bad dream. The worst dream.

I duck into the post office and line up in the clammy gloom under a low arched ceiling. Like being inside a clam, I imagine, deep under the sea I’ve never seen. The counter is marble topped with greasy steel and the clerk behind it is no less impassive, explaining to me that the money I was told my parents would wire to me here has not come, pointing numbly again and again to the spot in his thumby ledger where my name would be if there were any legitimate reason for me to expect such a money order which there isn’t. I feel something cold and disgusting splash behind my face, trying to ooze out of my eyes, but satisfied with warping my voice so that I can hardly make myself understood. This, on the assumption that there were any human beings present to understand me. I am sickly trying to explain myself to a glazed crust filled with grey clam mush. The other patrons are understandably curious about this adventure of mine, and I can feel their runty eyes peer after me as I leave in a hurry.

It all seems less gay and diverting in the stark blare of sunlight outside. I have only the few lonely amber coins of Shoanly clacking in my pocket, already too little to send a message of explanation back home. What do you do with a good explanation no one can hear? I feel conspicuous and cursed. I take those ways which seem likely to lead me away from all these people who have places in the world. Of course, so do I, but it’s not one I want. I reject it. I would reject it. The Edek ...

Wherever I turn my head, small panes of glass shoot light spears at me, hunting my eyes. Now I wend along bookstall streets, funnelled in light as air on the wind. Bits of paper hurry around me, in and out of shop doorways and alleys, cross and recross the street in front of me. As paper goes, it’s a busy street. The books stand in neat rows sandwiched in together, and among them sit figures perched atop tall stools within the obscurity of a deep doorway, barely visible in the gloom. My finger etches a groove in the dust that clings to spines patched with gilt titles. Look at this The Seven [dull old] Syntagmas. I had to read that. Here’s a bright new copy I’d buy if I had the money of Séance Paralogia by Hathebeth Huthebie, who used to be my teacher. Perhaps I could trade my Syntax for it.