My insides are hollow, so there’s no thinking to be done in there! Instead the external world grants me all my thought. During the dictatorship I thought with fineness and certainty. If I chose to think of fish, suddenly a school of mackerel circled me. If I thought of a procession, it immediately coursed by me, full of colourful banners and laughing children, on its way to the sea.
But since that all ended, I’ve been at the mercy of chaos, walled in by the noisy thoughts of the objects with whom I live. They never stop chattering, refracting me into a thousand prospects. So I’ve been forced to study myself systematically from the inside out, as would a philosopher or doll.
I’m almost unwilling to admit the direction in which this line of thinking has led me, though I now see that it has always been obvious to my fellows. What I have realized is that my bottom does not appear to fit my top. I rest on my foundation well enough, but the line of my breast pulls away ever so slightly from the seat, the tail, the sides below. I did not realize this until, one day, sitting motionless as I do, I observed that one of the mirrors saw me as if I had ears, and then I could hear the emptiness leaking out of me in a slow hiss through the gap between my two halves.
After a meticulous consideration of the possibilities, during which I entered the consciousness of one object, then another, and so on until I had completed a circumscrita of the entire room, I alighted upon what seems the only reasonable conclusion: there must exist another goose much like me, but with slight differences of form. This goose also sits unsecurely on its foundation, for the simple reason that its top perches on my bottom, or its bottom crouches under my top. It too must be undergoing the slow leak of its empty insides out into the world.
I can offer no practical solution to this state of affairs. I have at my disposal neither a method of locating the second goose, nor the ability to switch tops and bottoms, nor even a technique for determining whose half is whose. I am not sure that we could have found a solution in the days of the dictatorship either, but of course during that time such a confusion never would have occurred. Thus I suppose my realization amounts to little more than an intellectual exercise, one that only underlines further what a strange universe surrounds me, this cluttered world against which I must maintain my integrity at all costs.