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    hallucination, it's a hallucination that you can't simply
    throw off.
    If only you had a word, a noun. If only you could shout
    out: Aha, at last, now I know what it was that I found
    so disturbing! If only you could jump for joy, jump up and
    down, find a way out of this linguistic labyrinth, this
    anagram of signification, this sixty-four-thousand-dollar
    conundrum. But you simply can't fall back on any such
    option: you must stubbornly go on, pursuing your vision to
    its logical conclusion.
    If only, oh if only you could pin down its point of origin,
    that's all you ask. But it's all such a fog, it's all so
    distant. . .
    This diary lasts about six months. Day by day, as twilight falls,
    Vowl jots down, in a typically finicky fashion, a host of insignifi-
    cant notations: drank up all my provision of liquor, bought an
    LP for my cousin Julot for passing his bac with flying colours,
    took my Moroccan kaftan to a local laundry, said hullo to a man
    living down my road notwithstanding that Azor, his pug-dog,
    has a habit of shitting on my doormat, and so on; notations, too,
    on his books, on his chums, on a puzzling word or an intriguing
    fact (a QC at court who couldn't finish his oration; a hooligan
    firing blank shots at nobody in particular; a compositor at a
    printing plant wilfully vandalising his own typographic
    apparatus . . . ).
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    Now and again, automatically clicking a Bic with his thumb,
    Vowl would pass on to his own autobiography, would submit
    his own past to psychological analysis, touching, most notably,
    on his hallucination and Ishmail's island.
    A particular day dawns on which it's a synopsis of a book, a
    wholly imaginary book, that finds its way into his diary:
    In a far country is found a small boy, Aignan, just two days
    away from his fifth birthday and living in an old mansion that's
    collapsing about him. This small boy has a nanny who, without
    any warning at all, ups and says to him, "As a child, Aignan, you
    had 25 cousins. Ah, what tranquil days - days without wars or
    riots! But, abruptly, your cousins would start to vanish - to this
    day nobody knows why. And, today, it's your turn to go away,
    to withdraw from our sight, for, if you don't, it is, as Wordsworth
    might put it — and you know, my darling," adds this palindromic
    matron, "almost all of Wordsworth is worth words of almost
    all - it is, I say, intimations of mortality for all of us."
    So Aignan slinks away out of town. And in classic Bildungs-
    roman fashion his story starts off with a short moral fabliau:
    barring his path, a Sphinx accosts him.
    "Aha," says this fantastic (and not so dumb) animal, lustily
    licking its lips, "what a scrumptious sandwich for my lunch! How
    long ago it is I last saw such a plump and juicy human child in
    my vicinity!"
    "Whoa, Sphinx, whoa! Just hold on a mo!" says Aignan, who
    knows his Lacan backwards. "You must first of all quiz my wits.
    Your famous conundrum, you know."
    "My conundrum?" says his antagonist, caught short by this
    unusual invitation. "What for? You can't throw any light on its
    solution. Nobody can. So stop fooling about."
    But, just a tad suspicious, it adds, "Or possibly you think you
    can?"
    "Who knows?" says Aignan with a roguish grin.
    "I must say you sound a bit of a show-off, you brattish boy,
    you, but I won't hold that against you. I'm willing to play fair,
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    I don't mind allowing your ambition to act as a cushion to your
    annihilation."
    So saying, with harp in paw, it hums aloud for an instant and,
    making an airy harp-string glissando, starts to sing.
    Which animal do you know
    That has a body as curving as a bow
    And draws back inwards as straight as an arrow?
    "Moi! Moi!" Aignan (no doubt a fan of Miss Piggy) shouts back
    at it.
    A frown furrows its horridly bulging brow.
    "You think so?"
    "Why, naturally," says Aignan.
    "I fancy you ought to know," says his inquisitor mournfully.
    For an instant nobody says a word. A cold north wind cuts a
    blast through a