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go wrong? At what stage did he stray from the path? These are the questions he asks himself constantly, W. says, and they always come back to the same answer: me. It’s my fault, W. says. Everything went wrong when he met me.
    ‘When did you know you were a failure?’, W. repeatedly asks me. ‘When was it you knew you’d never have a single thought of your own—not one’?
    He asks me these questions, W. says, because he’s constantly posing them to himself. Why is he still so amazed at his lack of ability? He’s not sure. But he is amazed, and he will never get over it, and this will have been his life, this amazement and his inability to get over it.
    What amazes him still further, says W., is that I am almost entirely lacking in the same amazement. I’m like the idiot double of an idiot, W. says, being of the same intelligence (or nearly the same intelligence; I am a few IQ points behind him), of the same degree of laziness (or nearly the same laziness; I am more indolent than he is), but entirely lacking an awareness of what I so signally lack.

 
    Every year I tell W. about my latest plans to escape. It amuses W., who knows I will never escape and nor will he. Why do I think I can escape? Why do I have that temerity? ‘You’re not getting out’, he says, ‘you’re stuck like everybody else’. Two years ago I was going to learn Sanskrit, he reminds me. I was going to become a great scholar of Hinduism . And what was it last year? It was music, wasn’t it? I was going to become a great scholar of music .
    But what did I know about Sanskrit, really? And what did I know about music?—‘Nothing at all’, says W., ‘about either subject’. What work did I do to learn something about Sanskrit and music?—‘None at all!’, says W. ‘Not one bit!’
    There’s no getting out: when am I going to understand that? I’m stuck forever: when am I going to resign myself to the cage of my stupidity?
    W. has been lost in bureaucracy, he says on the phone. He tells me about his recent illness, the most ill he’s ever been.—‘I don’t know how Kafka wrote when he was ill’, says W. When W. was ill, he was farther from writing The Trial than he’s ever been, he says.
    In W.’s mind, he says, ill health has always been linked to genius. Maybe it’s the key to great thoughts, he says, reminding me of the authors we admire who passed close to death. But then, of course, W. has only got a cold, not even flu, not really, let alone tuberculosis or liver failure or anything like that.
    Still, he’s disappointed that not one thought has come to him, not one, especially as it would pertain to the great crises that have gripped the world. He always thinks one might. It worked for Kafka, didn’t it? And what about Blanchot? But W.’s illnesses lead nowhere, he says. They always disappoint him.

 
    We’re off on another trip.—‘How many shirts are you taking?’, asks W. on the phone. Four, I tell him. Four! He says he’ll only take two. He doesn’t sweat as much as me, he says.—‘You sweat a lot, don’t you, fat boy? How many pairs of pants are you taking?’ Four, I tell him.—‘Four pairs of pants’, W. muses. He’ll take four as well, he decides, and four pairs of socks.—‘How many pairs of trousers will you take?’, asks W. One, I tell him.—‘One!’, W. says, ‘after all your accidents? Have you learnt nothing?’ W.’s going to take two pairs of trousers, he says, just in case.
    On the train to Dundee. ‘What are you doing?’, says W. I’m playing Doom on my mobile phone.—‘I haven’t seen you open a book for days’, W. says. Later, I take some gossip magazines out of my bag.—‘Why do you read them?’, says W. ‘Didn’t you bring a book?’ W.’s reading The Star of Redemption again.—‘A proper book!’, he says. ‘I don’t understand it, though’. He shows me unmarked pages. Pages without any annotations, he says, except for question marks, meaning he doesn’t