Jorge Rodolfo Fernández walks around his Budget Suites of America apartment, around and around without stopping. He hasn’t shown up for work on Las Vegas Boulevard for a number of days. He crosses the 15 feet from one wall to the other, turns around and goes back, and, when he gets to the first wall again, turns around and goes back, day and night, until, exhausted, he collapses on the mattress, where he stays for the shortest amount of time necessary before he can get up and continue his trajectory again. It isn’t that he’s been struck by a fatal disease, like the neighbor’s dog, which went mad and began running around in circles and carried on that way for several days until it had worn a circular groove in the ground 20 inches deep, and fell over dead (turned out it was a coyote), nor has he been fired from his job as empties collector, nor has a letter come announcing the imminent death of his mother in Buenos Aires, no, something far worse: he’s lost faith in Jorge Luis Borges. He doesn’t know how it happened, but one day he got up, looked at the maestro’s portrait, and knew that the negative pressure he felt bearing inside his body was the fruit of some emptiness, new and strange. He felt that the photo wasn’t looking at him anymore, that the face seemed to have been portrayed devoid of any future inclination; the portrait was nothing more than two eyes bedded in that rough, strictly present, metal and silver moment, 68 years ago now. Then he tried reading the works, and found himself bored after two lines. He got to a point of thinking that this sensation of pure intransitivity was due to Borges’s blindness, before discarding the idea as fantastical, or, in any case, irrelevant. Since then he’s been struggling to work out a way of recovering his lost faith, ricocheting from wall to wall, staring at the floor. Reaching one of the walls, he thinks he has divided into two Jorge Rodolfos: one turns on its heel, re-embarking on the cyclical movement, continuing being him, while the other doesn’t turn, but carries straight on, never stopping, becoming lost in the nebulous trajectory of that which knows neither past nor future, which knows what tender insects and light particles know; and the one who carries on divides into two, in turn, again, a miserable soul who turns and returns, a dreamer who continues, who in turn will divide into two once more, and so on, until coming to form this assembly of clustered loops that is consciousness. A boyfriend and girlfriend are sitting outside his apartment on the footway that isn’t really a footway. They speak of going traveling, it’s a toss-up between Denver, Los Angeles, and, why not, Paris, they smoke and become excited, not that there’s any point because they don’t have any money anyway, plus they’ve known for a long while that traveling is an antiquated, absurd activity, the pastime of decidedly uncool people a whole century in the past.