The voices weave a matrix that tries to trap my silence, trick me. But, for all I know, it could be a dream. In the intermittent languishings that spark the riots my little recorder turns on. It’s old and slightly rusted and runs on logic -which is very expensive these days, you know. But it will suffice, even if it only picks up colours or shapes or tones or moods or clever aphorisms. I collect the absurdities, the distances and proximities that make each experience alive.

.....that boy who lived in the condo complex where I worked that atrocity of a summer, his affected New York-Italian accent, how he once worked in a grocery store where privileged aisles were stocked by employees with seniority and the less fortunate ones (the toilet paper and tampons aisle?) were stocked only by the rookies..... the techno-industrial musician I knew who coloured his penis with a fluorescent marker and watched it glow under an ultraviolet lamp for an hour..... my graffiti artist friend who roams the subway tunnels and the sub-subway tunnels late at night looking for answers to metaphysical questions, to spiritual and ethical questions, who can never find love.....

    I’ve had this habit of collecting stories for a while now, Doctor. Now it’s exacerbated as I include the dreams and smelly little eavesdroppings. So I’ve got this sort of time capsule, this library of codified emotions and ideas stolen and perverted. So all experiences are under my ownership and control. Which is wrong, of course, maybe even a lie. But this whole business of writing is based on lying -and playing God. This Eternal Search for Truth and Beauty culminates in a big fat juicy lie once it becomes concrete. And there’s Truth and Beauty in that, too. Because this gig is about understanding. Understanding is next to Godliness and that’s why I write.

    She is checking her watch for the fifth time in the ten minutes she’s been here. She is sitting in the corner. Her knees are up, her feet on the chair in front of her. She is reading, or glancing at, a book by Sartre. Perhaps it is a book about Sartre. She takes a cigarette from a silver case and smokes it painfully. It is a chore. She looks up through the narrow space between her book and the brim of her cap at some men near her. The men are sitting across the aisle. They are drinking beer and conversing noisily. She checks her watch a sixth time. Only her eyelids, hands and forearms move. The rest of her body is paralysed. Her lips are pursed. She smashes out her cigarette in a glass ashtray and is checking her watch again. I think it is possible that I’m looking in a mirror but the girl in front of me is wearing green and I am in purple today.