I watch emphatic speaker’s mouth, and I can’t hear his words really, only the strident tone. I am falling under the spell of that clipped speaking of his. There are moments where the mouth seems to take an entirely new position without any intermediate movement, simply jumping from one to another like a sleight of hand too fast to follow with the eye, so that the mouth actually seems to flash like lightning. I feel something like a weak panic at this man’s unceasing, precise, emphatic mouth speaking those written words he has fanatically memorized. What other motion of a part of the body, and only a part, the rest still, so controlled, rapid, transfixing? But then, after all, it isn’t hard for me to shift my gaze to the flame of the lamp on the table.

There it is, the flame. I will think, which necessarily means I will think obsessively, about this flame.

Is it there?

What is there?

Is it there the way an object is there every moment, considering that it is not exactly an object but a procedure?

Or an exhalation?

Are all things like flames, in that they only seem to be as it were stable entities because, after all, it’s always the same name, more or less, more or less the same, used for them? I mean, it must be something stable because I keep on recognizing it and calling it that, this time, another time, over and over, but then again how can I know that I am recognizing, and not just sort of improvising with myself? Or repeating myself?

I won’t write down a word of this. It’s not history. Just nonsense, that comes and goes like this fire here. Although it’s history that gives light and heat. So I pass the time in the evening, before, as I know will happen before it does happen, Jil Punkinflake claps me on the shoulder, and we go bottle-hunting as before, in a place where I can watch as a flame as before becomes a million flames through ranks and files of essentially similar bottles. If I were a poet I would say something about fire in the bottles, bottled fire, time is fire as before, bottled time, time is sand, sand in fire is glass made into bottles, hourglasses, fire burns time in me as I get drunk as before and forgetful; and I drink, and the drink burns my throat and slakes my thirst somehow at once, and I get dizzy and forgetful, and now—empty bottles. Splatter of vomit in the street.

*

I hear Jil Punkinflake’s sharply intaken breath.

“That old woman there!”

He points to a bald old woman in a shapeless, colorless linen gown, emerging from the rubble that borders our little camp. A white band swaddles her neck up to the ears, and her intent, falcon face swivels this way and that, face cool and keen as a biting, weightless wind. Jil Punkinflake’s face wears an awestruck expression.