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Once upon a time, there was a storyteller who introduced into a tale one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, caught off guard, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude. Apostrophe runs away, as geological layers of forwarding addresses turn the multiply-enveloped scene of the narrative into a palimpsest, with reference to which the only certainty is that someone will receive a paper cut rather than useful knowledge. However, in another tense her face pressed out from behind the paper as from an interior, all velvet-papered walls and lamplight, which the storyteller thought to foreclose every time the story drew the curtain on a scene, the contour of nose and cheekbone solidifying for a second in the soft billows of that gauzy fabric which served only to insure that an audience's interest remained with what the tale hoped to leave behind, in its jerky gait stumbling from episode to episode. Again, though, I am lying, as she draws the curtain back and lets the light fall upon you there, a bit below her in the street outside, where all presuppositions stand together in first and second persons, and says, "I am not a bad habit, not on the order of the forces 'driving the urge to differentiate, to identify one and then two,' only for you to make the subsequent half-turn into saying that the latter follows the former, as misdirected speech follows curiosity about a lighted window in a cinderblock rental duplex on a dark night with all the sodium vapor lamps shattered, duping an accomplice into accompanying you to that theatrical "bad neighborhood" in which the passing audience method-acts its way into belief in the constitutive powers of its own direct address to the emptiness of its relation to the stage properties, when in fact I have been here, and have been telling the story of this circle of light, all along." |