Journal: Entry for Kuke

Dear Anna,


Everything is fractured and distant. I live my nights and my days as though reading some version of them, after the fact. As though the Moment is but the fictionalised model of itself, a hightened, gleaming version of the truth but one in which genius and madness go hand in hand; one from which there is no escape.

The chimney smoke clogs the city air during the days, and at night the fog descends, filling the streets. The factories are noisy, working around the clock, the workers numbed and dirty, taking what little solace they can from beer and whiskey and cigarettes snatched between shifts or before collapsing into bed for three, four hours sleep. The little light left in their eyes from last year's hard, hard winter has surely gone out by now.

I exist on the peripheries, writing my articles for the newspaper, (an endeavour seemingly becoming more and more pointless as the passing hours bring us nearer and nearer to the end), and in this I do manage to find some small comfort, I do. If only because it allows me to render the awful scenes before me into some kind of shape, as though the structure of the text and the rhythm of the words can somehow clarify and explain the chaos around us. As though seeing the written words can somehow give meaning to the pointlessness.

(If only because it allows me to remain one step removed from this charnel city.)

People no longer disappear; there are now no calls of foul play or of secret police stalking the streets in the night. No. We are long past that. These days people are simply just not there anymore. We take this in with dull humour, as though saying, What else have we to be surprised at. We accept it as we did when the birds stopped flying.

I have a room near the Library. The old man was generous enough to lend me a lamp, and from the little oil I can scavange I read through the night, searching for some clue, some remnant. He brings me food, sometimes, though I suspect he is just lonely and likes the company. As do I, surely. He remembers you, he says, though he cannot say when you were here, (time has become vague, adrift). He tells me you looked pale towards the end, though you never lost the spark from your eyes.

I hope it is true.

I will be moving on soon. I read your books; the old man took me to your room. I think I can see what you were thinking. I hope I am right. It is madness, to be sure, but I am not uncomfortable with madness.

(I spend the days walking the city to keep moving and to keep warm and to make a map in my head. And I watch it all and I write it down but things are coming to an end and I know I must go. Any day now. I have one thing left to do. Any day now.)

I will see you soon, I will.


Hank.