The city is just like the inside of my brain: the words on shop signs create endless waves of associations—the chattering of passersby grows into an opera, travelers scatter foreign words on museum floors, wars carved in stone send out continuous warnings, drunks in the subway make campaign speeches, and in coffee shops, the people at the next table are always putting on a play with an indecipherable plot, as teas and cakes with tea-and-cake–like names go into mouths and down gullets to be digested in stomachs, while money moves from wallets to checkout counters, from companies to banks, and, without learning to add, people keep getting older, as year after year is added to their ages.

The city is an amusement park of the senses, a rehearsal for a revolution, a restaurant serving up loneliness, a workshop for words. Surrounded by city scenes that look like the future, you believe you’ll soon be able to grasp the future itself. This is especially true when you’re intensely, violently waiting for someone, because there’s the fact that even if you meet the awaited person at the appointed time, you will still have the days after that to endure, and that never occurs to you, that you still have all this time to live through, slowly, stoically, moment after moment. You want everything all at once, right now. You’re not afraid of being hurt. You’ll embrace her with your entire body. If she pushes you away, you can quickly step aside. There’s no need for pain—no matter how many times you’re rejected, there are new chances for happiness waiting everywhere in the city streets.

Mayakovsky’s cheeks are red, and his eyes glitter. Maybe he has a high fever. “I spent all night writing a bouquet of ten thousand rose words and gave them all to Lilya the next morning,” he says. “But Lilya threw my roses on the floor and screamed, ‘If you want to write go ahead, you can grow old buried in these scrap-paper poems of yours,’ and then laughed at me, a wild sort of laugh.”

“Anyone would naturally reject roses that were forced on them that way,” I replied. “People have an instinctive urge to protect their own territory, you know.”

“So what should I have done?”

“Why not try slowing down the flow of time until you can’t tell whether you’re waiting or not? Or try walking so slowly you forget who you’re going to meet? Besides,” I started to say and then stopped myself. Mayakovsky was already sneering. This must have sounded awfully cowardly to him. Dilute your desire to meet someone to one-tenth, one-twentieth, one-fortieth of its original intensity, until your heart reaches the point where not meeting her and meeting her feel the same. That way there’s no need to worry about falling into despair. Definitely the coward’s way out.

Be that as it may, it was very odd for Mayakovsky to be standing there, behind glass. Since he was a photograph, I guess it couldn’t be helped. Whether he resided in a two-dimensional or a three-dimensional world wasn’t clear. Determined to find out which, I stepped forward for a closer look, but the face looking back at me from behind the glass was one I’d never seen before. It wasn’t the face of the poet, but my own, reflected in the glass. A human face, eyelashes fluttering, lips slightly parted, apparently breathing with difficulty. There was no one here besides me.