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longer than the dildo, and he hardly ever fucked her with it. I guess that's how he liked it. He stared with teary eyes at his erect cock. She watched him from the bed ... She smoked Camel Lights and maybe at some point she imagined that the furniture in the room and even her lover were empty things that she had to invest with meaning ... Purpletinted scene: before she pulls down her tights, she tells him about her day... "Everything is disgustingly still, frozen somewhere in the air." Hotel room lamp. A stenciled pattern, dark green. Frayed rug. Girl on all fours who moans as the vibrator enters her cunt. She had long legs and she was eighteen, in those days she was in the drug trade and she was doing all right, she even opened a checking account and bought a motorcycle. It may seem strange but I never wanted to sleep with her. Someone applauds from a dark corner. The policeman would snuggle up beside her and take her hands. Then he would guide them to his crotch and she could spend an hour or two getting him off. That winter she wore a red kneelength wool coat. My voice fades, splinters. She was just a sad girl, I think, lost now among the multitudes. She looked in the mirror and asked, "Did you do anything nice today?" The cop from Narcotics walks away down an avenue of larches. His eyes were cold, sometimes I saw him in my dreams sitting in the waiting room of a bus station. Loneliness is an aspect of natural human egotism. One day the person you love will say she doesn't love you and you won't understand. It happened to me. I would've liked her to tell me how to endure her absence. She didn't say anything. Only the inventors survive. In my dream, a skinny old bum comes up to the policeman to ask for a light. When the policeman reaches into his pocket for a lighter the bum sticks him with a knife. The cop falls without a sound. (I'm sitting very still in my room in Distrito V, all that moves is my arm to raise a cigarette to my lips.) Now it's her turn to be lost. Adolescent faces stream by in the car's rearview mirror. A nervous tic. Fissure, half saliva, half coffee, in the bottom lip. The redhead walks her motorcycle away down a treelined street ... "Disgustingly still" ... "She says to the fog: it's all right, I'm staying with you"...

34. LAUNCH RAMPS
    It's a scene of squares, nothing else. They sit on the screen all day, like a still photograph. It gets dark. In the distance there's a cluster of houses with smoke beginning to trickle from the chimneys. The houses are in a valley surrounded by brown hills. The squares grow damp. From their edges seeps a kind of cartilaginous sweat. Now it's definitely night; at the foot of one of the hills a workman buries a package wrapped in newspaper. We can see the article: in a suburb of Barcelona there's a playground as dangerous as a minefield. In one of the photographs that accompany the story, a slide is visible a few yards from an abyss; two children with goosebumps wave from the top of the slide. Back to the squares. The surface has changed into something that vaguely reminds us, like Rorschach blots, of offices in a police station. From the desks a drooling man, breathing with difficulty, stares at the squares, trying to recognize the houses, the hills, the footsteps of the workman fading into the brown and sepia darkness. Now the squares flicker. A plainclothes policeman walks down a narrow, deserted hallway. He opens a door. Before him spreads a landscape of launch ramps. The policeman's footsteps echo in the silent yard. The door closes.

35. A HOSPITAL
    The girl weighs 60 pounds now. She's in the hospital and it seems she's losing ground. "Destroy your stray phrases." I didn't understand what she meant until much later. Doubt was cast on my honesty, my reliability: they said I slept while I was on guard duty. Really, they were after someone else and I happened to show up at the wrong time. The girl weighs 6o pounds now and she probably won't leave the hospital alive.