IT SEEMS--but who knows, this will take place so far in the future--that I used to haunt the smoking crater of an hyperactive volcano, on Mars no doubt, waiting for an illumination, a cooling of the air so long overdue. I was always going in circles in the red and poisonous fumes, lazy and apprehensive, my fur bristling, my claws alert. Or rather, it was a vast enclosed space, an abandoned German hangar, and the air itself was rusting in the sclerotic silence of oblivion. No, it was simply Paris. At the Chien Qui Fume. That's it. And besides, I wasn't there.
Then rhumbi, triangles, no, pure brass diagonals were executing an innocent man, playing the forbidden and banal concert, squabbling in sharp tones. Refining the search and filtering the results, one can identify voices. On the other side of the frequency, then, how many girls, four, speak Americanly of him?
The one, multiplying secretly, would like to...
Call him, the other attacks.
To write, that would work better, whistles the third.
The last, hitherto unseen, an old lady in black, living cliché, is death who says: "Forget."
Next this turns into a blur, gets complicated, repeats itself. At times there is not enough space, not enough time. Two huge floating machines try briskly, maladroitly, to exit the German kitchen. One of them gets stuck in the volcano's crater.
We are extraordinary lucky sometimes. It is perfectly possible for someone to be born a second time. One's shadow reappears under every new sun.
She--you know who it is, and if not, no matter--saves the stranger in extremis, pressing on his belly. Drums.
The vortex of cinders becomes a storm; then a gust of wind; next, a breeze, before dying out. The particles impress themselves slowly upon the mind, sometimes drawing strange figures.
