During the month while he was waiting for David Barber’s music, or whatever it was, Jasper Gwyn had been busy refining other details. He had begun with the furniture. In the warehouse of a junk shop on Regent Street he had found three chairs and an iron bed, rather beat-up, but with a certain style. He had added two shabby leather armchairs the color of cricket balls. He rented two enormous and expensive carpets and bought at an unreasonable price a wall coatrack that came from a French brasserie. At one point he was tempted by a horse from an eighteenth-century merry-go-round and then he realized that things were getting out of hand.
One thing he couldn’t immediately focus on was how he would write, whether standing or sitting at a desk, on a computer, by hand, on big sheets of paper, or in small notebooks. He still had to find out if in fact he was going to write, or if he would confine himself to observing and thinking, then, later, maybe at home, assembling what had occurred to him. For painters it was simple, they had the canvas in front of them—that wasn’t strange. But someone who wished, instead, to write? He could hardly be sitting at a table, in front of a computer. He finally realized that anything would be ridiculous except to start work and discover on the spot, at the right moment, what it made sense to do and what it didn’t. So no desk, no laptop, not even a pencil the first day, he decided. He allowed himself only a modest shoe rack, to place in a corner: he imagined that he would like, each time, to be able to put on the shoes that that day seemed to him most fitting.
Occupied by all these things, he had immediately felt better, and for a while he no longer had to keep at bay the crises that had afflicted him for months. When he felt the sensation of disappearing, whose arrival he had come to recognize, he refused to get frightened and concentrated on his thousands of tasks, carrying them out with an even more maniacal scrupulousness. In attention to the details he found instant relief. This led him, at times, to reach almost literary peaks of perfectionism. He happened, for example, to find himself in the presence of an artisan who made light bulbs. Not lamps: bulbs. He made them by hand. He was an old man with a gloomy workshop in the neighborhood of Camden Town. Jasper Gwyn had looked for him for a long time without even knowing whether he existed, and had finally found him. What he intended to ask him for was not only a very particular light—childish, he would explain—but, in particular, a light that would last for a certain predetermined time. He wanted bulbs that would go out after thirty-two days.
“All at once or suffering death throes?” asked the old man, as if he were thoroughly acquainted with the problem.