Out of the Loop

It is May when I next find myself again in Dr K’s office in Saska Kępa, the same four flights of stairs, the same plants, Piłsudski still on his horse and Vicky in the chair by the window. I do not. For a moment I…

It occurs to him late. Annoyingly so. Perhaps because all important things occur late. The book had never really been about him. The point had always been elsewhere. Three boys. Not symbolic ones. With trainers and arguments and strange food preferences and opinions about things…

“Denouewot?” the Boy starts. “The end. Fin,” the Man explains. “Tying up the loose strings. Miss Marple.” There are too many endings. Too many fins. This becomes the problem. Not that the book lacks conclusion, but that it possesses them in industrial quantities, stacked like…

“You should read your own book sometimes,” says the Boy. The Man now he sits at the kitchen table with the manuscript spread before him. The Boy sits opposite. Not nine years old. Not really. Older than that now. Fifty-eight in fact. Tired. Sad sometimes.…

The Editor had always assumed he would be the last to go. The Boy cracked. The Man, well, was never quite there. Lacan sobbed. But the Editor remained. He remained because he had to. Somebody had to keep the sentences moving. Somebody had to maintain…

The lecture theatre has migrated again and now exists in Paris and in the Man’s head at four in the morning. Lacan arrives late. He looks magnificent in the way only ageing French intellectuals and certain disappointed alcoholics can look: magnificent, exhausted, theatrical, faintly ridiculous.…

Long fingers descend along the wall before the body appears, then the nose, the teeth, the thin moral architecture of the face, Nosferatu arriving down the landing, three steps above the Man, ready in judgment. “You are destroying family,” Witek says. Not hello. Not good…

It happened on a Saturday morning in February, though in truth the marriage had been ending for years. Not betrayal exactly. Exhaustion. Translation failure. Two people repeatedly offering one another versions of love the other could no longer metabolise. The boys were out. Cups remained…