His mind is a punctuated wet cord; its traversal, a route of knots.
“Where are you going?” Heading to work. In the car—no: on the bus, bobbing his head to The New Management Singers. What he’s wearing shouldn’t be important, but it is. Impressions made, all that. Shaking hands. Clammy.
“Today I’ll be my Henry Caul.” In truth, he is a wake of abortions: you are what you’ve done wrong. Watching himself in the windows, in the words of others. New, disconnected, useless products of cancer or pure reproductive whimsy pickled in jars. These are little shards harvested to decorate an imaginary him.
“Flavour’s real.” They’ve been made into large features of the mindscape, distant and large and impassable as mountains, inescapable at any speed. The parallax of regret. Always seeming to approach, to be blue. But it just looks that way when it’s headed back to the lungs, exhausted of oxygen.