Category: W.

We were laughing, but at you. You were laughing, but you were alone in your laughter, on the other side of our laughter. We were on one side, laughing, and you were on the other, similarly laughing. But everything depends upon where you are when you laugh.

We were watching you as we'd always watched you. And you – you'd seen yourself for the first time. And what had you seen? What we had always seen. What we had been watching for some time. And now you'd seen it. Now you wanted to join the club – the laughing club.

But do you really think you could laugh at yourself the way we laughed at you? Did you think you could join our side? You're alone, that's the truth, and how long can you laugh? Alone – laughing in your cage, your box. Laughing in the cell of your stupidity. And listening to your laughter echo. And listening to your laughter die away.

In the end, we don't envy you. In the end, you should never have found out. You should have believed your own lies, your alibis. And now you know? And now it's become clear? But nothing is clear. A scorpion can't sting itself. A tarantula is immune to its own poison. And the actor cannot be his own audience – not right there, not immediately.

Then who are you? Who are you now? Caught between yourself and yourself. Lost between two facing mirrors, and that's the curse, isn't? You have to live on, don't you? You've survived your collapse, when you were only collapse. So what are you now?

A dresser crab builds its shell from whatever's to hand. It takes what it can, what it must, in order to have a shell. Its defence is borrowed. And you? You've built your life, which is to say, the failure of your life, from whatever you could find. And what you've found! What you've stumbled across!

You chanced yourself into a library, didn't you? You read. You thought you were entitled to read. You snuck in when no one as watching, and there you were with all the others, reading. Reading like a reader. But unlike them, you had no idea how to read. Unlike them, fluent readers, turning page after page, you were only a would-be reader, a reader-pretend. You turned pages as they did; your eyes scanned the lines as theirs did. But what could you take in? What could you read, really read?

And one day - and what a day! - you thought you'd begin to write, too, didn't you? That was the next step, the most hilarious one. You thought you could write, that you were entitled to write. And couldn't you fill a page like the others? Couldn't you type, or at least perform a simulacrum of typing, your fat little fingers hitting the keys? It's a wonder you could type, with your fingers. What a joke! If you began laughing, you could never stop. You began writing, and you couldn't stop that, either. Logorrhea. Literary diarrhoea streaming down your legs.

You read, you thought, so you could write. But in fact, you could do neither, and were entitled to neither. You could not read – reading is alien to you – but writing is yet more alien. The ability to write is the most distant thing from you of all. You – write? But you did write, didn't you? Or you called it writing. You thought it was writing. No one else thought so, but you thought so, didn't you? For a while at least. For too long, but not forever …

A dresser crab, scuttling along the sea-floor. A crab, clothing itself in whatever was to hand. And what was to hand was the scholar's mantle, wasn't it? What was to hand was the library-ruse and the writing-ruse – my God, what a joke! But if you began laughing, what then? If you even started to laugh?

The circle of your obsessions has become narrower, says W. That's the change in me. That's the essential change he's seen over the years. 

Once they passed through the whole world, my obsessions. You confused them for ambition, genuine ambition. You wanted to learn things, master whole areas of knowledge. My God, you could confuse yourself with someone with ability! You studied, didn't you? You read. You even wrote. You – wrote! It's amazing. You wrote and published.

What temerity! What lack of understanding! Yes, you'd deluded yourself completely, it was quite magnificent. You confused yourself for a scholar, a man of letters. You wrote learned articles. You spoke with learned people on learned topics …

You thought you were part of something, didn't you? You walked in cloisters, in Oxford colleges. Ambition – that's what you had, wasn't it? The horizon couldn't limit you. Ah, what aspirations you had! You would write one book, and then another. And you did it: you wrote one book and then another.

Everyone laughed. We were all laughing up our sleeves, but you didn't notice, did you? The circle of your obsessions had not closed tight around you. You weren't yet being strangled. It wasn't yet a garrotte.

Your obsessions reigned as far as the horizon – further! You thought, you really thought you were entitled to write … And then what? What happened? Doubt crept in. Doubt snuck in the door. Were you really permitted to write? Were you elected to read? To publish? To share your thoughts with the world?

What a disgrace!: that's what you said to yourself in your loneliest hour, wasn't it? I'm a disgrace: that's what your heart whispered. For the most part, you could choose not to hear it. The world was too loud. You were too loud. But then, in the quiet of the night … Then, just after you turned off the light … A new obsession began to form: your disgrace. What was its origin? Where had it gone wrong? At what stage did it all go wrong, as it so clearly had?

Doubt crept in. Obsession. Your ambition was eaten out from within. It rotted from inside. It had dawned on you, hadn't it? What had you done? For what had you been responsible? Guilt: that was the word, wasn't it? Humiliation. Because you'd humiliated yourself, hadn't you? You were a dunce turned to the wall in your corner … 

What had you done? What hadn't you done? What hadn't you spared the world? Your thoughts. Your books. My God, your books!

One day you understood that there were no excuses. That you were inexcusable. That you couldn't apologise enough for yourself. That your life was already that: an apology, an excuse. A scorpion stinging itself to death. A tarantula seething in its own poison.

Your obsessions didn't range as freely. Your horizon shrank. Once the sea – the far blue distance, and now? A room. Less than a room. A cone of light. A modem and a computer. Type, fat boy. So you typed. You typed, and what did you type? Your confession, your autocritique …

Tighter still it drew, the circle of your obsessions. Tighter until it was taut around your own neck, and strangling. Tighter until your face turned blue. And that's what it is now, isn't it: blue. You're gasping for breath, aren't you? But you can't allow yourself to breathe. Your obsessions are strangling you.

My God, how do you spend your time? What do you actually do? Write endlessly of your own failure. Write your autoconfession, your apology. You're sick of yourself, aren't you? But you can't be rid of yourself. And that's it, your life – the whole drama of your life. The circle of your obsessions. The circle become garrotte, become noose. The circle pulling tighter …

Type, fat boy, make us laugh! Because we're all laughing at you. We're watching you humiliate yourself. We're watching how far you can take it, your humiliation. You're not a hunger artist – you're an humiliation artist. And we're here to watch your disgrace. We're here to watch your ongoing disgrace.

W. has grown increasingly convinced that intellectual conversation itself is an affectation. At first, he had supposed it was bad manners to talk of abstract things at dinner. When you eat, eat, that's what he had thought, and save the abstract matters for later.

But now? Intellectual conversation – so-called intellectual conversation – is itself a ruse, an excuse, he says. We have to plunge into concrete matters, W. says. Our conversation must be as concrete as our eating.

Herzog trained that chicken, the one in Stroszek - did you know that?, says W. He trained it to dance longer than the 3-5 seconds it was used to. For months he would train it (as well as other chickens – a whole troupe – just in case this one died), withholding the food it would usually get after its dance, extending the dancing period, until he reached 15 seconds.

15 seconds! It's not much. Herzog likes to film in still shots, with no cuts. An image, just an image. But this time, he had to cut – he had to intercut the dancing chicken with other images. The car that was set to circle outside the arcade. Bruno on the chairlift. Luckily, these are very fine images … But the chicken is at the core. The chicken is the centre.

Herzog talks of finding images adequate to the world, to the new world. The chicken is cosmic, that's what we have to understand. The chicken, the dancing chicken, is everything.

W. dreams of a thought that would be the equivalent of that chicken. A thought, a single thought adequate to the disaster, equal to it … He dreams it will coalesce from a feeling, like a star. That a feeling could be reduced to a precise point …

Above the sense that it's all at an end, that it's all finished, which mustn't be simply an intellectual idea. It has to be felt. You have to take it to your heart. The flat, wide plain must be at your heart. The blasted plain. So that above it, like a star, a single idea might be born. A single thought, like a crown.

In some sense, W. says, we have to exhaust thought. We have to run it ragged, run it to its very end, like the car Bruno sets running in circles outside the arcade. It has to run until it burns, until it catches fire. Then and only then, something might happen.

We have to think like a chicken. We have to dance, says. W. Go on, fat boy, do your chicken dance. Go on, do the funky chicken … Perhaps I am the chicken, and W. is the thinker. Perhaps I am the chicken dancing, endlessly dancing, and he is the one who has to think what that means.

But sometimes W. thinks he is the chicken, that he is only a chicken-thinker and a dancing-thinker, which is to say, not a thinker at all. He supposes he is cursed to be able to accomplish only a simulacrum of thought, when what is essential is to think, really to think.

Perhaps I am a purer dancer than he is. Perhaps I am more ready to dance, and to the limit of my abilities. Perhaps that's the pinnacle of my life, W. says, my dancing, my continuous dancing which is there beneath everything I say and do.

It's glorious!, W. says of this dancing, though it just irritates most people. Why are you hanging out with Lars?, they ask him. They can't see it, W. says. It's been up to him, W., to see my significance. That's his gift, his only gift. He's like a man with a dancing bear, only no one can see that's it's dancing. Can't you see it, can't you see the bear?, W. says, although sometimes he says chicken instead of bear. And they can't, W. says. They can't see a thing.

It's like theology, W. says. The theology of an absent God. The theology of an absent chicken. No one can see the chicken. No one believes in the chicken. But still, the chicken is there. And the chicken won't stop, says W. The chicken won't stop!

Sometimes, though, W. supposes that the chicken, the dancing chicken is between us. We have to think of the chicken as a form of relation, W. says, with great seriousness. He and I might be the terms of this relation, but the relation itself precedes us, and we only make sense because of it.

Perhaps that's what our friendship is, W. says: a chicken dancing. Perhaps our friendship is itself a great duty to the world, a great sacrifice. Oh, it's not a sacrifice for me, W. knows that. I've been lucky! It was pure luck for me, becoming the term of a relation. How else would I have redeemed my life? How else the misery and squalor of my life?

The chicken is between us, W. says, almost mystically. That's what we have to understand: it's the mode of our relation. It's what happens between us. We depend upon it. Our very friendship. Our interaction. We belong to the chicken, to the dancing chicken. We are friends of the chicken. No: we are friends by way of the chicken.

'No one can benefit from redemption/ That star stands far too high./ And if you had arrived there too,/ You would still stand in your own way'. W. is reading out loud from Scholem's didactic poem. – 'How do you think it applies to you?', W. says. 'Do you get in your own way?' I get in his way, that's for sure, W. says. And perhaps, in my company, something in him also gets in his way. It's my fault, he's sure of that. If it wasn't for me, would he reach the star of redemption? He'll never know, W. says. He suspects not. 

Unexpectedly, we find Graceland immensely moving. It surprises us – we'd heard it was awful, terribly kitsch – but we find it restrained and moving. Elvis's contemplation garden, where he went to think over things. The grave of his twin brother, who died at birth, and of his beloved mother and father, who lived in Graceland with him. And, of course, his own grave, marked Elvis Aaron Presley, 1935-1977 - how terrible! how sad!

Graceland's surprisingly small, we agree. The kitchen, for example – it's like any suburban kitchen. The living room, the dining room. Elvis was a man of modest tastes. We admire his Bauhaus style squash court, which he designed himself. Imagine it – Elvis the architect, Elvis the modernist. But this really was his design. He drew up the blueprints, he had them approved, he insisted on building a modernist squash court in the grounds of Graceland.

In retrospect, we agreed, we wish we'd signed up for the V.I.P. tour. After all, you come to Graceland just once in your life. It's a one-off. We missed the Elvis By Night exhibition – Elvis, we learned, was largely nocturnal – and the tour of his planes, one of which was named after his daughter, Lisa Marie. 'Taking care of business', it read on its tailfin.

Still, we saw the jungle room, with its famous indoor waterfall – and we admired copies of the cheques Elvis had sent to local charities which covered the whole wall. We only saw one of his jumpsuits – again, the jumpsuit tour, magnificent as it sounded, was for V.I.P.s only. If only we'd paid those few extra dollars …

And we arrived out at the contemplation garden, the perfect end of the tour. What did we contemplate? The squash court – Elvis's Bauhaus squash court. His short life, which ended in the bathroom almost directly above the main entrance to Graceland, above the stone lions. And the mediocrity of our lives, with so little achieved, compared to the King.

Do they really have porches in America? They really do have porches. You can sit on the front porch – the front portion of the porch – and watch the world go by, or you can sit at the back for some privacy. Americans don't go in for gardening, we notice: the back garden – brown grass, uncut – simply runs out unfenced onto the road behind. It's exactly the same as the front garden.

But the Americans are tremendously neighbourly, we notice that. Didn't our hosts' neighbour bake a tart for us, their visitors? She brought it over, and we ate it with our Bourbon. She greeted us, and we her. What part of England are you from?, she asked, and we told her. We told her we were heading to the Smokies with our hosts – a long drive, by our standards – and she said it would be a great trip. Have a great trip, she said.

That wouldn't happen in England, we agree, that neighbourliness. The Americans, in general, are a friendly people. They're articulate: they're able to talk, and they talk at length, interestingly, being free with their opinions. There's nothing guarded about them, from our perspective. They give of themselves.

Hadn't we found, in nearly any situation in public, that we were drawn into conversation by the Americans around us, whoever they were? Perhaps it was our accents. Perhaps our bearing. More likely, it was because we had Sal with us, who inspires conversation. People talk to Sal, have you noticed that?, says W. No one would talk to us if it wasn't for Sal.

Americans have the pioneer spirit, we've noticed. They move about a great deal. We were told, on several occasions by our interlocutors, of marriages and divorces, of moving around. They move from here to there just like that. From state to state … they're used to vast distances. They're used to travel, to uprooting themselves, they're not like us. The Americans are a pioneer people, we decide.

Haven't we always liked – basically liked - Americans? Haven't we always found them tremendously fresh, unprejudiced? They make us feel old and crabbed. Old, and from Old Europe. Americans will talk about anything, anything. They don't distinguish between the private and the public, not really. They keep nothing from you. The things we've heard on our American travels! To us, from Old Europe, it is sheer generosity. To think, these people are willing to share so much with us, with strangers. But probably they talk this way all the time.

For us – for me especially, says W. – talking is a great effort. I'm stuck mostly in mute indifference, W. says. It's only when I'm drunk that I speak, says W., and then almost entirely nonsensically. We're a reserved people, we English. We need to be drunk to talk, except for W., who has real manners, but then he's part Canadian. Especially me. I speak in great incoherent gales when I'm drunk. I talk rubbish, sheer rubbish. I bluster. I talk smut. And then I turn, W. says, I always turn. I become maudlin, and then vicious. I'm like Blanche Dubois, W. says.

Of course, I'm English through and through, W. says. I have all the sins of the English, which is odd, because my parents were emigrants. He'd expect more from me, W. says, given that my parents were emigrants. He, of course, has his relationship to Canada, that's what saved him. His part-Canadian soul. His Canadian citizenship. He nearly had a Canadian adolescence. Imagine! Imagine what would have become of him! As it is, he had a part Canadian boyhood. He knows something of the Yukon. He carries something of the Yukon in his soul.

And here we are in America. Here we are, ambassadors for our home country. The English abroad! What a thought!, W. says. To be English, and abroad! We call the Americans 'sir' and 'madam'. We heard it was very important to be polite over here. The Americans, despite their apparent informality, are keen on formality, on formal relations. They're not like Australians. That's why I have to be especially careful, W. says. Let Sal do the talking, W. says. She calls everyone 'sir' and 'madam'. She has charm, W. says. Wit. We lack charm – well, W. has some charm, he says, and we lack wit, although W. has more than me.

Luckily, we have Sal on our side. What would we do if it wasn't for her? Who would look after our tickets? Who would see us safely on the Greyhound? She's our eyes, says W. And our ears. And our sense. We're idiots in America, W. says, and we think back to Herzog's film. He's the elderly neighbour, whatever his name was – Scheitzer, I remind him, oh yes, Schiezer, W. says – and I'm Stroszek himself, I'm Bruno S. Without Sal, he'd be arrested and I'd shoot myself on a chairlift. Without Sal, says W., the chicken wouldn't stop.

We're lost in America! Here we are, in the deep south, pretty much, and thoroughly lost! What are we doing here? What led us here? Some terrible mistake, we agree. Some lapse in the logic of the universe. Is that really the Mississippi? It really is the Mississippi, wide and brown. Why is it so brown?, I ask W. It's full of mud, W. says. Water and mud.

On the banks of the river, Sal takes photos of us for W.'s facebook page. He rides me like a horse. I ride him like a horse. Sal rides both of us, like two horses. Stop arsing about you two, she says, though she finds it all very funny. And behind us, the great brown Mississippi, rolling improbably along.

America's so big!, we agree. It's overwhelming, really, when you think about. How far is it to the coast? A thousand miles? Two thousand miles? Some great, improbable distance, we're agreed. Some distance of which we cannot conceive. There's so much space here. America's so exposed. We think of the terrible signs we saw on the Greyhound bus of a passing hurricane. Houses torn up, trees destroyed and flung about. I took pictures. I'd never seen anything like it. America's in danger, we're agreed. It's too big! It's too vast!

We never like to be too far from the sea, W. especially. Doesn't he always demand, when he visits me, to be taken to the sea? Doesn't he always take me directly to the sea, whenever I visit him? I'll meet you at the sea, he tells me, when I text him from the airport. And I have to go straight there, straight to the sea to meet him. And in the middle of America, when the sea's so far away? What then? What to do?

Our hosts drive us around Nashville. They show us the sights. But we know, like us, it doesn't satisfy them. We know they're waiting for us to break, for us to say: but this terrible, so they can say, yes, it is terrible; yes, it's a living death. Because that's what it is: pure terror; and that's what it is, a living death. How will they survive here? How will we, for that matter, survive here?

The zoning of the city. Here, hospitals, dozens of them, one block after another. There, car dealerships, dozens of them. It's zoned, it's all zoned. You have to take your car to get from one zone to another. You have to take your car to get anywhere, or do anything. And we can't even drive, W. and I! We can't drive, and Sal can't drive, though she's said she's going to learn to drive, when we go back to England. She can't drive, we can't drive, which means we're utterly dependent on our hosts, our poor hosts, who detest driving. They've been forced into driving, they tell us, which is terrible.

They're Canadians, they say. They don't drive. They walk, they tell us. They cycle through the wilderness, they say. They paddle canoes. They're not made for this driving existence. For a few months, they tried to manage without a car in Nashville. They cycled everywhere, for miles and miles. They cycled right out of the city. They cycled from far flung government building to government building, while they were becoming American citizens. They cycled out to their favourite Mexican restaurant and their favourite Vietnamese restaurant, but in the end, it was too much. They have a car now, something they never thought they would own – something they thought they would never have to own. They own a car – it's too much for them, as Canadians.

Canadians, if they really have to drive, car pool. They drive in groups. They hire cars together. No doubt they sing as they drive. No doubt their voices ring out on the Canadian highways, the great, wide, continent-spanning Canadian highways, in harmony, in sweet unison. But they are fundamentally non-drivers, say our Canadian hosts. As are we, W. and I, Sal as well – we're fundamentally non-drivers, we have that in common.

The sad thing is, Nashville used to have a train station, our hosts tell us. They even drive us past it, the station, which has been converted into some kind of retail space. Imagine it, W. says, a city without a railway station. He's appalled. He's horrified. His voice trembles and shakes. A city without a railway station! It's enough to send you insane.

W. had great visions of travelling by train in America. Of travelling through the great expanse of America, dreaming of the coast – the east coast, the west coast, it didn't matter – dreaming of the coast, the American coast, the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific, which one didn't concern him. The bus is a poor substitute, we agree.

I, in my turn, had visions of a fifties style Greyhound bus, a silver beast, a great gleaming insect, very sleek and streamlined. A fifties style bus, slicing through the air … The reality is disappointing. The reality destroys us. The most mediocre of buses, on the most erratic of schedules …

There's not much open to the non-driver in America, we agree. It's not a country for the non-driver, who is not so much as yet unskilled in driving, which is to say, unable to drive, as unable to think of driving and unable to conceive of driving. Unable to think or conceive of driving, and of the whole world of driving. What can driving possibly mean to us? How can we understand the mind of a driver? But our hosts, nevertheless, are driving. Our hosts – our friends – have been forced into driving, and all across the state, to the Smokies. It's madness!

We're not made for this life, none of us. We confirm it for our hosts: America's not for them. Granted, we are not Canadians as they are – though W. is part Canadian, and has Canadian citizenship – but we understand their plight. We're in favour of Americans – we like Americans – but their country baffles us, and more than that, destroys us. Little by little, we're being destroyed. We need to get back! We need to go home!

Sal and I love to bicker. It's how they show affection, W. explains to our hosts. Canadians don't need to bicker, W. explains to Sal and I. They're open-hearted, open-souled. It's the expansiveness of their country. It's the Yukon, which is really the heart of Canada.

We come from a tiny island, he tells our hosts. We're like rats crawling over rats. We have crabbed souls, W. says. Of course, W.'s soul, because of his childhood in Canada, is a little less crabbed than that of Sal and I. He's not a bickerer. These two are bickerers, he says to our hosts of Sal and I, but he's not a bickerer. He can behave in company.

Our hosts are lost in America, in the heart of America. How can they survive there, two Canadians, two innocent and open-souled Canadians, in the middle of Nashville? Wasn't one of them mugged almost as soon as he arrived? Wasn't he bounced violently against a chainlink fence by the punches?

Lying on the ground, he vowed never to go out again. Better to stay inside, with your Bourbon. Better to venture only out to your porch, with your Bourbon. And that's where he sits in the evening, watching the joggers in what he calls 'yuppie hour'.

Bourbon makes a great deal of sense in America. W. calls it 'sipping Bourbon'. Let's go and get some sipping Bourbon, he says. We bring home a bottle of Knob Creek or Woodford Reserve and drink it over ice on the porch.

Our hosts play us old blues songs, and sing for us. All Canadians can sing, in our imagination. They have compulsory singing lessons just as they have compulsory swimming lessons. We tell them they should never venture further than their porch. They should sit there on the porch, and that's as far as they should go, sipping Bourbon and singing duets in the American night.

As we drive across Tennessee towards the Smokies, our hosts tell us about the Yukon. The open spaces. The lakes, beside which you can pitch your teepee. Hadn't they spent whole summers by the lakes, in the Yukon, in their teepees?

We have trouble, W. and I, imagining ourselves in teepees. Our Canadian hosts – latterly stranded in Nashville – are people of the expanses. They have expansive souls. We, however, have crabbed souls. We're men of the city, W. tells them. We'd be lost in the Yukon.

What would we do there? Looking out over the lakes, we would have to search our souls – a melancholy act. We'd have to contemplate our failure yet again, and from a new perspective. How could it end but in a drowning, two blue corpses face down in the water?

We sang about cocks, didn't we?, W. asks me the next day. He's full of remorse. Once again, we went too far, he says. Our host had a guitar; we were to sing together, to share the songs of our countries, our childhoods. We were to sing, as Canadians like to do after dinner. For a Canadian, W. explained to me, it's only natural to sing after dinner. To sing, and to listen to others sing, and perhaps to learn new songs, and perhaps to teach songs to others.

But what did we sing? What songs did we send floating up into the night? Songs about cocks, W. says. Songs in which we replaced one key word with the word, cock. We drowned them out in our excitement, the Canadians. We drowned them out in our hilarity. We've let ourselves down again, W. says. He's let himself down. Wasn't he supposed to be the sensible one in our party? Didn't he feel himself personally responsible for our behaviour?

A visit to my hometown. Show me the suburbs, W. says. Give me a guided tour. He wants to know where it all went wrong. – 'You started well enough, didn't you? You had advantages in life'. Where did it go wrong?, W. asks. When did it go wrong?

Hadn't I told him about the last patches of wilderness – the sand dunes, the long grass where we'd play as children? We'd bring our bikes along there and scramble up and down the cliffs. We'd start fires in the dry grass …

But the dunes were transformed into a golf course. The wilderness closed up. We were stuck in the suburbs, which were growing around us. Vandals' trips to the new houses. Thieves' trips to the construction sites. We'd cycle out to the army range. We'd climb the low hills and look out into the distance. Something was missing from our lives – what was it?

Was that when it happened?, W. asks with great avidity. Was that when it all went wrong? 

The suburbs were completing themselves, I told him. No wilderness left. Time had stopped going forward. We lived the same day again and again … When did my friends disappear into drugs? When did they disappear into drinking?

Had it happened yet?, W. says. It was happening, I tell him. When did it happen – at what point? I tell him I'm not sure. 

Like many others, I went to work for the new companies. There were an infinite number of them. All interchangable, more or less. Vast grey boxes set in vast car parks. Sometimes a pond of koi fish. Sometimes a view of the Swiss chalet style hotel and the dry ski slope. An infinite number of them, and an infinite number of us, too, contract workers, temps …

Which company was it that had a suite of meeting rooms named after philosophers? We'll have a meeting in Berkeley. Let's book Locke. Is Hume free? … -'Did you try and persuade them to call a room Rosenzweig? Did you get them to call one Rosenstock-Huessy?'

A new kind of wilderness: I wandered all day through the corridors in the great grey boxes, from coffee machine to coffee machine. I'd stare off out of windows. I'd admire koi ponds or the Swiss chalet style hotel. I'd plant myself in the foyer and read trade magazines at lunchtime.

It had already happened, hadn't it?, W. says. Oh yes, long ago, I tell him. I'd taken a wrong turn, he says. But there were only wrong turns. My life, in its entirety, was a wrong turn.

'Your years of unemployment', says W. I don't speak much of them, either. Years unemployed! I was young then, W. remembers my telling him. Very young. I used to cycle. I would ride about my bike, I told him. I'd have my little pantheistic ecstasies, I told him.

I'd get out old maps and cycle to barrows, or what I took to be barrows, W. says. Doubtless they were only refuse heaps. Doubtless they were only great piles of rubbish abandoned in the woods. And then I'd cycle out all day, mapless, with no particular aim.

Through the new estates, through what remained of the woodland – muddy tracks along field-edges, overgrown bridleways and footpaths. The quarried river with its fenced off nature reserves. And above it all, W. remembers my telling him, the blank, indifferent sky. The vast anti-cathedral of the sky.

Later it would make me shiver. Later, feeling exposed, terribly exposed, I'd stay indoors. Didn't I come to fear the day? Ah, but I was young then. Very young. I still had a kind of optimism, which is to say, a blindness in relation to the future. I still had faith in my barrows and my Roman roads.

I could carry my bike over railway bridges. I cycled through glades of tree stumps left by foresters. I cycled through golf courses, banks of green grass beneath sprinklers. I followed the private road through the plantation, and the course of the stream as it temporarily emerged from its culvert.

I was a king of the scrappy woodland along the railway, king of the new estates. The white light hadn't eaten into my soul yet, had it? The white light hadn't eaten me away.

'Your illness. You don't like to talk about that, do you? What was wrong with you exactly?' No one knows, I tell him. I couldn't get a diagnosis. Or not a reliable one, anyway.

W. believes I was ill, he says. It's not just my usual kind of fantasy. He can tell by my reserve on the topic. Usually I'll talk about anything – anything. Usually, I'll share the most intimate details of my life. But this time …

My life was bleak, wasn't it? I must have thought I was at the end. W. is someone who might say he thinks he's at the end, but he has no idea what it might mean, he says, to be at the end. – 'At the end of your wits. At the end of your tether: that was your life, wasn't it?'

He knows it involved a lot of drinking, my illness, W. says. Hadn't I said as much? Fourpacks of lager from Kwik Save. Stale gingerbread men from a discount Greggs. Stale eclairs with yellow cream. And days and days on the sofa, cake crumbs all around me. Days on the sofa, with the smell of sweet, stale beer, the curtains drawn against the day.

What did I do? Watch TV, W. remembers my telling him that. He's had to piece together the story of my illness, he says. But he sees it all now. A fat man, growing fatter, slouched with the TV in front of him. A fat man in tracksuit bottoms and a teeshirt, daytime TV, spilled beer, drawn curtains …

What was it that kept me from cutting my own throat?, W. asks. Why didn't I book myself in to one of those Swiss suicide clinics? He'd've done if he'd have had my life.

What was wrong with me?, W. asks. Tiredness, that was it, wasn't it? I'd been a hamster on the wheel, hadn't I? I'd run too much, too far. I'd outrun myself. Time to catch up. Time to do myself in.

In the end, I could barely lift my arms, W. remembers my telling him. My hands were not mine. I thought I'd have to get sheltered accommodation. That really would have been the end, wouldn't it?, W. says. Sheltered accommodation. Sheltered from what? And who would bring me gingerbread men? Who stale eclairs with yellow cream?

Sometimes W. thinks he should make a study of my life. He wants to take notes, to sketch a kind of physiognomy of thought. He would reduce my life, the profusion of my life, to a few simple principles and thereby show what I am to the world.

But why bother? It should be clear to anyone with any sense. Nothing is hidden, in my case, and perhaps it's not even that noteworthy.

But then, too, W. says, a context is needed – a critical introduction, as you get in the new edition of a classic work of literature. My idiocy needs to be explained, W. says. It needs to be set back into its time, its social and political history if its true extent is to be gauged. It needs a border drawn around it, a frame and an explanatory plaque.

'Your intellectual career', W. says, laughing. 'Your career … how will you account for that? What will you tell them?' My God, how lucky I was to be lost among the mediocrities! How lucky to be born in a mediocre age! – 'No one watches out for you; no one notices. Do you think anyone is following what you do? Of course not! And you're lucky, because if they were …'

I pass for a non-entity, W. says, though I'm no non-entity. I pass for an ordinary mediocrity, though I am not that, either. – 'Something is dying in you. Something is coming to an end'. I'm a sign, a symptom, W. says. What matters is to read me correctly. And is that his task? Is that what he was put on earth to do?

Benjamin thought he could detect the signs of a turning of the age in the Paris Arcades. He took notes; he transcribed and assembled – he thought it was sufficient to show, rather than comment. Would it be sufficient to show, rather than tell in my case?, W. wonders. No: I need a commentary, W. says. I need an interpreter. Below everything I say, as in the subtitles on a foreign film, the words bullshit, bullshit, bullshit should succeed one another in inexhaustible profusion.

'Do your chicken dance', says W. 'Do the funky chicken'. W. likes to watch me dance. It's so improbable, he says. So graceless.

I'm a frenetic dancer, W. says. I've got ants in my pants. Isn't that what I told him: I've got ants in my pants? I tell him I never said such a thing. It's a fantasy. Never mind, W. says. – 'Do your chicken dance. Go on, cheer me up'.

He does an impression. – 'This is how you dance', W. says. 'Do you see?' He flaps his arms. He turns his knees inwards. He hops about on his feet. I can't help it, he says. He knows I can't help it …

He had ideas, the dying Bataille said, but they didn't dance for him any more. W. has no ideas, but I'm going to dance for him, aren't I? Dance, fat boy, dance!

The chicken stops here. That on the run off groove of the fourth side of Still, Joy Division's posthumous album. On the second and third sides, the imprints of chicken feet. On the first side: the chicken won't stop. But the chicken did stop … How was the chicken, Stroszek's dancing chicken brought to an end?

The end, the end. It won't occur as quickly as that. It won't be punctual. It'll be late for itself. It'll be late arriving. And in the meantime … That meantime may be the span of our lives. But it may be but a single day, a single honour, a moment …

The conditions are here. The conditions for the end are here. The chicken won't stop, not now. It's dancing. It's dancing on the hot plate beneath its feet. That's what happens when you put a coin in the slot, as Bruno did (Bruno S. playing Bruno Stroszek).

The plate heats up, the chicken dances. Over it all, Sonny Terry's harmonica. An uptempo blues. A quick blues, bubbling along, and the chicken dancing.

W. likes to see me dance, he says. – 'Go on, dance, fat boy!' We're non-dancers, he always says, and that's our strength. We dance, but we don't care about dancing. Real dancers envy us. Our freedom, which is really our stupidity. They've told us so.

But the secret is we dance like that chicken. Because we have to. Because the floor is hot. Because someone put a coin in the slot. And that's so of our lives, too, isn't it? Who put the coin in the slot? Who are we amusing? Ourselves? Hardly ourselves. The joke's worn out.

We're a sideshow. The catastrophe's happening elsewhere, offscreen. Bruno Stroszek shoots himself off camera. We infer he shot himself because his empty ski lift chair comes rolling into view. There it is: empty. Where's Bruno?

We heard the gunshot. He had a rifle with him, and a frozen turkey. He lay the frozen turkey beside him, and – one presumes – put the barrel of the rifle in his mouth, and that was it …

Why did he have a frozen turkey with him?, W. wonders. We've forgotten. He had a frozen turkey and a rifle, and put some coins in the slots of various machines to watch the duck play a drum, the rabbit ride a fire truck and the chicken dance. The chicken won't stop. And we won't stop, will we, fat boy?, W. says.

Nothing has happened to us, W. says, not really. We've led ordinary lives; we're just like anyone else. But we've a sense, don't we, that things might be different?

Leave this place!, we tell the young people we run into. Get out of this country! And for those of us left here? Drink! Drink your way through the day. 

Haven't I spent years doing just that?, W. says. I'm like an advance guard, a scout, out ahead of everyone. Yes, sometimes he has the sense of that: I'm ahead of him, ahead of everyone, drinking on my own in the squalor of my flat.

I'm preparing myself, W. says. I know what's to come, and I've prioritised rightly. Live each day as though it were the last, the very last. Drink your way through it. Numb yourself.

If only death would come cleanly! If only it would fall like a great axe from the sky! But that's not how it will come, and that's the horror. You won't be able to die: isn't that it? The power to die will be taken from you.

That's why you have to drink yourself into a stupor. It's practice, practice for the coming end. That's how to meet death: dead drunk, and without a care. That's how to meet the death that will not come.

Drink! says W. Drink! Really, there's nothing else for it. There's nothing better to do. The days are too long. This day, for example – what time is it? just after lunch. Just after lunch – it's unbearable! Only drinking can save us. We'll float drunkenly through the afternoon. We'll lie back and float, like idiots in a lido …

Administration is our good fortune, W. says. Our endless bureaucracy. Because we can still believe that if we had time, we could produce a masterwork.

Imagine it! Time, just time – and silence. And a room – a bed, a desk, a window. The world reduced to a room. You'd rise from your bed and go straight to your desk. Straight there – it's no distance.

Straight to work! Reading with care and patience. Beginning to write – a few notes. Exercises at the barre. And then it would begin, the real work. Then it would begin again, taking off from yesterday – one page, another – who's counting?

How the day would be crossed! A great bridge, spanning from morning and evening! And you'd arrive on the otherwise tired but content: a day had passed. Another day of work.

And in the evening, after dinner? You might read a novel. You might look out of the window, muse, as you would be entitled to muse. And the next day, rising, it would all begin again, workday melting into workday, the great project arching through the months and the seasons and the years …

But luckily we have our administration. Luckily we have our alibis. Imagine it, if we were to be given time. Imagine it – a room, the world reduced to a room: a bed, a desk, a window. And some books, I add. And some books, says W.

We'd deface the books and set fire to the desk. We'd jump on the bed like idiot children and smash our fists through the window. Then we'd hang ourselves, or masturbate, one of the two …

Oh, how has it come to this? How has it come to so little?

The chicken won't stop. The chicken stops here. There's a great deal to meditate upon in these phrases, W. says. They're like mantras to him. Weren't they etched into the first and last side of Joy Division's Still?

They're from Herzog's film Stroszek. Ian Curtis watched it just before he killed himself. Stroszek, which ends with the coin operated attractions in which a duck plays a drum, a rabbit rides a fire truck and a chicken dances. The chicken won't stop.

How much that film means to him!, W. says. To us! Which one am I?, he wonders, Bruno Stroszek or his elderly neighbour, Scheitz, so obsessed with animal magnetism? Scheitz is arrested, of course – he and Bruno hold up a barber shop. The police take him away, and Bruno? He rides off on a ski-lift and shoots himself.

'That's what'll happen to us when we go to America', W. says. 'You'll shoot yourself, and I'll be arrested'. All that will be left is the animals the duck, the rabbit and the chicken, and some blues harmonica music. The chicken won't stop. The chicken stops here.

The apocalypse: our alibi, our excuse. The greatest of sick notes. What could we achieve? What could have we have done?

We knew it was coming; we set down our pens. We knew a new dawn – the opposite of dawn – was spreading dark rays behind the horizon; we closed our books. So it was coming; it really was time.

But it was only its conditions that had come. Only the chance of its coming, likely as it was. We've entered a new phase. We're expectant; the sky has darkened as before the thunderstorm, and the storm will come, but when?

We're watching out for lightning. Listening out to hear the rumble. Show us a sign! But our lives are full of signs. Too full; overfull. Life is burgeoning with death. The night – the bright stars – with the disaster to come.

Will the sun plunge into the sea? It will be as if the sun has fallen into the sea. Will the stars fall from the sky? It will be as if those stars have fallen. W. and I fall asleep with dreams of the apocalypse wrapped around us like blankets.

The apocalypse is coming – yes, that's certain and, because of that certainty, reassuring. Because if it were not? If it were not to come? Upon what could we blame our vague sense of dread? Upon what our sense of purposelessness? Upon what this frittering away of our lives? Upon what our endless chatter? 

We need an excuse; we have one. We need a correlate; we have that too, and it's coming closer by the day. 

Relief. Relief mixed in with disgust, with horror. Relief that that disgust, that horror has a reason to exist. And our impotence in the face of the disaster? The fact that we can do nothing? Relief that our idiocy too has a reason to exist.

Where's it all going? Where's it all leading? Is there a pattern? Is the pattern falling apart? W.'s in the dark, and it's not a propitious darkness. It is not a resting place. There are terrible stirrings out there. Murmurs.

Something is awakening. Something is turning in its sleep. And as it turns, we turn too. And as it awakens, something in us awakens. Will our lives make sense one day, when it wakes? Will it all become clear on the day another part of us stands and stretches in the sun?

He knows what I'll be doing when the apocalypse comes. The same as ever, W. says. The usual thing. I'll be in my tub, furiously masturbating. Furiously masturbating!

Just like Diogenes, W. says. Only not like him, for with me there is no point – it's not about mocking the pretensions of others; it's not a call for natural virtue over against the false word of society. It's like a chimp in the zoo, W. says. A chimp with foam on his lips and nothing better to do.

These are the days, W. says. This is the reckoning. Of what though? He's unsure. There must be some kind of accounting, he knows that. Someone must be keeping score, but who?

Sometimes he thinks a great blow will strike down from the sky. It's preparing itself there, he thinks: some blot of lightning, some storm after which it will all have become clear. He watches from the train window when he commutes to work. It is there, he knows, behind the windowless wall of his office.

The judgement: when will it strike down?, W. wonders. When will it come?

Am I an idiot dreaming he's a genius, W. wonders, or – this is unlikely – a genius dreaming he's an idiot? Because there is something genius-like about my idiocy. It's extent. It's splendour.

I've kept him entertained – I've kept everyone entertained, like some idiot conjurer. How do I keep pulling the scarves of my idiocy out of my hat? How have I managed to humiliate myself over and over again?

It must take some kind of genius, W. has often supposed that. It must be the result of some entirely unforeseen order of ability. But then, too, perhaps it is my idiocy to mistake myself for a genius; perhaps that's it.

My incessant activity. My remorselessness: it's as if I thought there were a great task allotted to me. As if I thought it was duty to humanity to press on. Don't I know that everyone's laughing? Don't I know their eyes are streaming with tears of laughter?

W. knows I think I got one over on the world, that I fleeced everyone. He knows behind my gratitude lies resentment, that my smile is the smile of a con-man, a robber. – 'You think you've got away with something, don't you?', W. says. 'You think they don't know'.

But in fact, I've got away with nothing. The fact that I have a career, that I've been able to publish this and then that, has fooled no one. All I've done is humiliate myself. All I've done is to bring myself down. I thought I could raise myself a little higher – thought that I could lift myself a little above the rest, but what have I done?

Reached a height only to cast myself down a little further. Climbed only in order to fall, and I'm taking him with me. How was W. caught up in this adventure?, he often wonders. How was he implicated in it all? But still there he is, with me, crawling along the parapet, on his hands and knees, thinking he got away with it all …