Heretically I tune out the monologue of Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu and think about structure. About the rhythm of the text. I gloss. Drift. Await the end. Missippi burns on the television. Spiralling around the kietz in dizzying heat, a storm was sure to break. Lightning struck but once in Kottbuser Tor. Is there anything left to tell?
My flatmates played dice in the kitchen and added each other up. Winning and losing. Night seemed a long way off and typically I was typing, typing, typing. The rules, the rules - to hell with them. We should build small autonomous structures. Crying along to Bonnie Prince Billy. Craving laughter. Craving dancing. Out then into the night then in search of images.
Missippi burns in the background. White hooded figures in a field at night. Spiralling backward into antithetical beliefs. Trapped in ambivalence. The text continues to tick beneath. The Chaote writhes in temporary discomfort as the frame of reference is shifted and he is she, is I.
I recognised the place I always somehow get lost at. The cemetery wall on Zoessener Str. I recognised the large red brick church and avoided the long zigzagging shortcut that always took me to the wrong canal or sometimes to Treptow. The long/short cut that finds an unlit stretch at the back of the Platenbau. "Wenns du gelangen aus den Patent Ampt links abbiegen", or was it right?
Definitely right. Following the U1 home again along a stretch of Gitischner Str that is populated, entirely, by freaks. Almost as soon as the thought crosses the road a grotesquely obese man waddles from the shadows and proffers me a lilac baseball cap full of sweets. I nod and walk on. What was it that Ela had said about relative strangeness?
At Kottbuser Tor I grab some food and sit eating falafel by a lime green motorbike. A man sits on it and scowls and I look away.
On Skalitzer Strasse. a rat faced junky offered me a ticket. The air grew colder as it does sometimes on Weiner Str. Off into the night with my coat pulled tight around me, a cloak of invisibility. The view of the stars is always clearer from the gutter.
Ten police wagons, sirens wailing, sped past towards Lausitzer Platz and by the time I walked there were speeding back again.