EPILOGUE

Fake City

[Outside Time]

The window, street, room, street, the window; I was in the window; I looked out onto the street. The room, in its dim luminance, was behind. The room was a BOX that contained both myself and the dim luminance. The window, night, street, window; for how long had I been in the window, staring out, in the narrow, dark, dim light? For how long had I been…? It seemed like always. Always me in the window, always the street below. It hadn’t always been night, no, I knew that much. The room was a BOX containing dim luminance and… The little roaches scurried past. They went about their roach-business in the dim-dark, in the narrow, dark, near-light. They crawled into my coffee cup and died.

I could feel I was dissipating. I was like a cloud. It… just like a cloud in the sunny summer sky: fluffy, puffed, growing thinner, then away. Maybe I should have worried about this. But what was left to worry? A narrow shell? A distant, dim dark? Some spark? No, a hollow. What was there, without a…? Hollow.

Once, there’d been a person. He was named Finch. Had I been Finch? No, no… that wasn’t right. A finch was a kind of bird. It was the sort of bird that flew stupid into windows and died. Boom! Broken necks were common to the death among the finch-birds. So, I thought, was a heroin overdose, but that didn’t make any sense. But if that were not the case, if I were not the finch-bird-person, then who was the person? I mean… Because I was fairly certain – certain enough, certain as anything – that the bird-person had not been me. No. No. I was here in the window, in the window in the night, all night, I was in the window and I had not smashed against it and died.

I had not overdosed on heroin and died. That was him. He was gone now, off into the flutter-land, not here, not me. I… I was here.

Wait… what would I actually know, and would I know, if or when I’d…?

The thing in the window was an empty thing. Right. The thing in the window was an…

No, not empty: the thing outside the window, quick and cold, the thing in the sky-air. That thing that was there. I would call it. I would call it: Mosquito. That’s it, there you go. Because who do you know? You know Mosquito. No, wait, you don’t. But the thing is… Thing. Is. Mosquito does know you.

And there was this. There were, I mean, there were these things too. One, two… three things; three new things, and he… he… (who again?) he…

Well, shit, he’d just left these things on the table here, that guy, whoever, the little table near beside where I, where… I…

Look. Listen.

Here: these things he. He. He just left this, this… these things here: this… agh! A gun? Bang: a gun. A badge, policeman’s badge, all shiny; sort of shiny. And a hat hat hat, what a fucked-up hat, what am I supposed to do with a fucked-up, crumpled hat, just left like that? Left here, like that, hold onto it, I guess? I guess…?

Okay fine.