W. is visiting and I give him my bed, inflating another one in the living room.
I’m ill, I tell W. ‘You’re not ill, you’ve got a cold. A mild one.’
No one knows about it when W. is ill, he says. ‘I’m not a whiner like you’.
We watch the scene in A Scanner Darkly, where Freck has his sins read to him by a creature from between dimensions. ‘We’re going to read your sins to you in shifts. It will take all eternity’. This gives W. an idea.
Later, W. installs himself in the chair of judgement. I’m on the pump up bed, ill on the floor. ‘I’m going to list your shortcomings’, he says. ‘Your life. Where should I begin?’
W.’s at his happiest criticising me. I like being criticised, he says. ‘Masochism and sadism’, says W. ‘It’s perfect’.
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