They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but I never believed them. They say all writing is an argument with the world, but I’ve never met them, and besides, I no longer live in this or any other world. Where do I live? you ask. I live in a fog, a haze, and the drowsy fumes of daylight make me want to sleep. To sleep, you will recall, is to leave this world, and as soon as you wake you must jump on a carousel if you want to catch back up. It makes me yawn, it makes me put ketchup on my eggs which makes a bloody mess. Now I’m tired again and this is serious business. I need some flowers. A little trip, no more than twenty minutes, to the grocery store and back, that will do the wake-up trick. A big fresh bouquet of flowers lolling around in a vase on the table and I’ll be fine. Sometimes just looking at something can produce a powerful shock of adrenaline. But you mustn’t go further than that—you mustn’t bend down to smell the flowers, that would be disastrous, their fumes would bring too much peace: so much peace coursing through your body would cause another yawn. Now I am in my car, I am on my way to the flowers, and I find traffic peaceful when it is backed up at a stoplight. Just sitting here—I’m in the driver’s seat of course—with a car in front of me and a car behind me, is profoundly nice. It feels right, it feels like everything is exactly the way it is supposed to be, as if everything that ever happened from the beginning of all events, time chief among them, has led to this very line of cars at this very red light; the death of dinosaurs, men and women living in caves, the weaving of cloaks, the whole Middle Ages, the cultivation of maize, the suckling of a little boy who will grow up and die in the wrestling ring—all these things led to this moment, a moment of bluish exhaust rising from the tailpipes of cars as peacefully as smoke from the pipe of an old sailor. Now the light has changed and this historical moment of peace is gone, we are moving forward, I am moving forward towards my flowers and another is moving forward towards his can of soup, still another moving towards, who knows, a sooner death than any of the other customers. In the parking lot I want to sleep but open the door in a great effort to meet the air. Soon I am in the mart itself, I am in the ninth aisle, I am not pushing a cart or anything else, I have never had a baby, I am free and virginal, walking down the aisle on my own two dangling legs, and at the end of the aisle is a garden of leaves and blossoms, I am in the garden, there are plants and flowers, everything is green and alive and growing and there are masses of color to choose from, red, yellow, orange, white, purple, a man is buying flowers for his wife, pink roses wrapped in cellophane—could anything be more idyllic, less argumentative, than that? Yet I want to speak. Stop, I say, as the man bends down over his flowers, flowers that will in time move on and belong to his wife, please don’t smell the roses—but it is too late, he has done it—and now I can smell them, too—the air is saturated with sacred attar—and I, who was so close to being energized, who came all this way from the beginning of time, want nothing now but to fall asleep, to lie down on the floor at the end of the ninth aisle, among the houseplants, and sleep the sleep of ages, having spoken to a man who ignored my sage advice, and now looks as tired of the world as I am.