Chapter Ten: The Writer

I found him. I followed the pages, the pages that were scattered across the street and through the door and up the stairs and down the hallway and into the room. I followed the pages that were scrawled with bits of stories:

a garbage man who finds himself in the middle of an epidemic of cleanliness - people are so consumed with being clean, they die of it.

an astrologist who finds that her stars aren't right anymore: one of them is missing.

conspiracy of librarians. hiding memories. not hidden, hiding. seek and ye shall find.

the city is a woman. the woman is a city. a constantly shifting map is tattooed on her back. her lovers go insane tracing their way through her maze.

seven sleepers. twelve mansions. thirty-two silences. 

words without meaning. all conversations become gibberish.

And so on and on.

I finally found him curled up in a room, dark and dusty, with a small ray of sunlight peaking through the curtains. He was furiously writing in a worn notebook. He looked up at me and said, "Are you real because I wrote you or did I write you because you are real?"

I didn't know how to answer. I merely lowered my hand and he grasped it, a pencil still caught between his fingers.

"Time to go," I said.

"Time," he said. "There is no time. I can go back. I can backdate things. Time can be edited, revised, updated. Time and all things."

I led him out into the cold light of day.