There is the matter, first, of whether he is late, and although he sees that he is not late he feels certain that he is, so he pauses before knocking and waits for this feeling to subside. Already he is framing answers to whatever the one on the other side of the door will wish to ask him. But the answers which he settles on, lacking origins, only trail off. He believes that if he were authentically prepared he would produce both questions and answers in advance. The strength of his answers would seem even to bring the questions into existence. Earlier (while dressing) he composed an informal list of answers to whatever he believed he may be asked, but now that he is here he feels sure that this fraudulent preparedness shows in his face, and he wonders if he might be punished for it by having those questions answered for him before he has been given time to speak, finding himself necessarily, then, without answers. Preparedness might involve clearing his mind of all questions and answers, leaving a spotless and seemingly infinite terrain for viable conference.

Even when he knocks he feels sure that he is late, although he is not—he is early, something which he has every reason to believe. He is at once called inside by a voice which he will find to be different from that which he will hear once he has entered and closed the door behind him. Inside there is a small leather chair, which he takes. The answers he struggles to frame in his mind have become reduced to noises. Occasionally some of these noises will seem to contain an anticipation which he must believe could redeem him.

But when the other speaks, it is as though all traces of questions and answers have already annihilated one another. He is sure that this is a deliberate trick. There was an occasion—too long ago to be sure of—when he employed the same—or a similar—feint. And although he no longer remembers he is certain now that he must have enjoyed the same unease in another which he now finds in himself. But part of the performance, he feels sure, must be in maintaining a perfect opacity in his features. The one behind the desk speaks with a calm that nearly makes him shudder. The longer the trick goes unexposed the more potency it accrues—but if he were to point a finger at the other and accuse him he would feel the despair of those unformed answers, all at once, and then the questions would surely begin to come forth, impenetrable and seemingly infinite. He tries for a few seconds to imagine another time—a time in which he might be able to address these things to the other, and by then a sense of humor will as though have found itself. But for now this is something worse than conjecture. Even an hour from now all of these possibilities will have found their way to certainties, however dull. And the pressure of questions which have not been posed and answers which have not been offered will have vanished. But if he thinks of this now for more than these fleeting seconds, it will take him the remainder of the interval to regain his pace. And all the while the other—the one behind the desk—is speaking. Every so often he refers to a sheet of paper, holding it outward or pointing with a fountain pen to a particular line or column. Soon the telephone rings, seven or eight times. There are still neither questions nor—even less so—answers. All of this speech will have to remain like silence until the penetration of at least a single question—then it will be as though those words had suddenly appeared, as though having pushed themselves up headfirst out of snow. When not speaking aloud, the other forms words on another sheet of paper, and even these are, for now, nearly invisible. He finds this to be so intolerable that he cannot resist rising from the chair—now he will make an effort to pretend, without speaking, that he had never sat down at all. But when he looks at the chair it is as if he sees himself sitting in it. And he cannot be sure that the other does not after all direct that inaudible speech toward the chair.

All of this must mean that the anguish he felt before, regarding questions and whatever answers could ever be put to them, no longer has a place; but he feels no relief, in part because the absence leaves him with no sense of what might come to replace it, in part—and maybe moreover—because he knows even now that the questions will come in their time, and he is less in a position now than ever before to invent appropriate replies. Now he finds himself missing the former quandary, because it was, however impossible to resolve or circumnavigate, at any rate relatively clear. The only course now would be to will every element of the situation to come apart, himself last of all. What he requires is an absolute beginning, one unqualified by any trace of endings. He will—again only by force of will—need to stretch this interval into an eternity which could hold so minuscule a moment. This will have to be how to forget. Every piece of advice he has ever been offered—whether taken or not—seems to hover now, just out of reach. This is the instant he will need to maintain, until all of the jointures of the hours before and after have eased and allowed him space simply to stand up, brush off his knees, and walk away calmly, unmindful of anything.

For a while all of his thoughts are of this dismantling. The one behind the desk talks on and on, folding and unfolding pages from a file. Chances are the sun has moved noticeably in the sky. In no time he has forgotten the chair and the notion of answering questions has disappeared, though there is not very much relief in it. If any of this succeeds he will know because it will have led him to an unmistakable pause. And his belief in these things seems to have its proof in the fact that the one behind the desk has not asked a single question. The truth is that for the first time he is afraid of relief, something which he is certain exists like the rudiments of a language which is no longer spoken. In the midst of all of this he feels a profound desire to take pen and paper and begin writing out anything at all—he is even sure that the other would fail to detect it, but there is something else standing in his way—because he thinks this must be the only form of himself still worthy of manifestation: his questionable handwriting. But he cannot be sure that no trace of pretense—an inevitable result of the manner of fear he feels now—would find its way into that script, and even the slightest trace would alert the other at once. So he stands still.

He suspects that these things have forced into existence another moment, one in which he is feverish to accomplish what might—with luck—leave room enough for this moment to complete itself. He hopes to borrow some discipline from the other moment. It may be helpful to him to think of what may be happening outside—two people who have stopped on the sidewalk, because one of them recognized the other, and who are now laughing together as though all of it had been planned. But it’s the part of him which despairs at how little he could ever know about these people, even if they did exist (and they do not), that threatens to bring him right back where he began—with unspoken questions and his obligation to answer. He considers such a danger embarrassing. If he were to seize pen and paper now, there would be not only the principal desire to assert himself—more dramatically, there would be the effort (irresistible, once begun) to catch up with the things which he might have written already had he begun when the thought first occurred to him. And this strikes him as a game hardly worth playing—but, again, if he fails to forget the idea completely there will probably be consequences. Chances are the pressure will become a sort of gravity which will prevent any movement away from that which frightens him now. He is making a renewed effort not to think of the two figures who might be outside the building, and the worst way to make the effort is to remind himself that there is surely no one there. He cannot exit through the door he used for entry—he’ll have to follow his own frantic inertia until he has worked his way authentically out of this, into another, more tolerable stillness.

While he is thinking of these things he begins to wonder—indistinctly at first—if the questions may in fact already have come, that his patent unawareness of those questions may very easily have been taken for answers. And if this has been the case he has an additional problem: to ascertain what answers his silence may have seemed to provide. There may presumably be another silence which he might—if only he knew what it was—manipulate in such a way as to force the other to disclose that information in detail. There may be no sense thinking of that now. Nevertheless, there could be no reasonable possibility of speaking—every word would ricochet until the room and the entire moment were filled with unintelligible groans and exclamations. And all of these would belong to him. His words would amount to a kind of audible scribbling. No doubt the other would apply—as though by force—whatever organization to the words, but this would surely be most inexcusable of all. The goal now is to maintain a particular silence which will keep speech unnecessary. A single word from him now would be more silent than a thousand hours of sleep.

But also while he is thinking of these things, his left arm becomes detached at the shoulder and falls through his sleeve. The one behind the desk has stopped speaking and watches the arm as it strikes the floor. There follows a different kind of silence, something more total and intolerable. He crouches and picks up the arm in his right hand. Without looking up he begins to work the arm, shoulder-end first, through the cuffs of his shirt and jacket. The other becomes annoyed and says that he had better unbutton his shirt or else he’ll never get the thing attached again. And so he lays the arm on the face of the desk—the other disapproves, so he moves it to the seat of the leather chair—and carefully unbuttons the front of his shirt. When the arm has been restored and he is dressed again he smiles as though to encourage the other to continue where he left off. Once again, questions and answers hover behind something, and although their natures—their particularities—remain hidden, they work on the moment with a different potency. It seems likely to him now that he is sweating. He touches his brow and is surprised to find it completely dry. Likewise, when he glances for the first time at a small clock on the corner of the desk he realizes even now that he is early, although nothing could make him feel more late. A part of him tries to believe, or to pretend, that the clock could be running backwards. But he finds this for the most part too easy, too much—as so many things already should have been—to concede to himself. And he is all but certain now that the questions he dreads will remain implicit.

If the other is arrogant, it is because the perfection of his phrases precedes anything that he might be saying or trying to say—and by now he is likely to be saying almost nothing. Evidently he has long ago won his own battle against the void behind his arsenal of language—he has, by speaking, projected himself to a place where he can hear nothing except his own dumb insistence. He has won the right to allow changes—if they come—to determine their own natures, and he was won the privilege not to care. This may even be why he feels safe with a clock that tells nothing but lies.

The two figures outside the building would undoubtedly be women, and as he thinks of it more carefully he comes to assume that they are still in their late teens. One of them pretends to console the other, who is pretending to need consolation. It is a perfect game, and they hope they will be able to go on playing it forever. If they move closer and begin to embrace each other, it is really because they don’t know how to embrace themselves. But they will not think of this, or else it will come to feel like a sickness. For a moment, though they don’t know it, both are thinking the same thing: they are desperately hoping that the telephone does not ring.

So now the encounter has become something different—the speech of the other has succeeded in burying every trace of the initial possibility. He would like to admit to himself that this is something for which he would never have come. And the arrogance which seemed moments ago so quickly explained turns out to be a theft. The other has not begun to answer these questions because they have not begun to be asked. He must be secretly terrified that they will be asked—but again his thoughts begin to seem unlikely, if not gratuitous. He cannot remember at what point he made the ridiculous mistake of believing he could take ownership of the things he feared by putting them in deliberate arrangements. He would be only a little more surprised to discover that he has succeeded in doing the opposite, and even then only by virtue of the propensity of opposites to present themselves as identical. It would be better now to have something to ask the other—and it excites him to think of liquidating those too easy conclusions from a moment ago. But, if any questions remain, they have come to conceal themselves behind the guise of certain answers. He would be no more at a loss trying to return an infant bird to its shattered egg.

He does not wish to acknowledge that his anguish would be quieted if he could begin to believe that all of his actions and the other’s were the unfolding of something written out by an indifferent intelligence. There would be relief in the uneasy sense of being the physical and living manifestation of sentences. The logic of sentences would bear down like the epitome of indifference. But—again—he does not wish to admit this, even if he is forced to wonder, even somewhat consciously, how it could possibly matter less. And he would feel no reluctance if he could put his hands on the notion that the elements of these things do not really belong to him. Things of this order either do or do not belong to the one affected most by them. Nothing could unmake the ink of sentences except the refusal to own them. But, when he considers how remote such a possibility could be said to be now, what he feels most acutely is a particular guilt. He does not feel sorry for himself, nor does he feel sorry for the other, who has for some time been going through the minute details of what appear to be very old documents. All of the questions that seemed imminent seconds before the discussion began have dissolved in the impossibility of their answers, a mutual suicide of insensible forestalled accidents. And his new longing takes the form of a complete thought, if not itself a sentence. What would rescue him—the only thing that might rescue him now—would be the certainty that this was, after all, a moment among other moments and nothing more. A circumstance like that would no doubt reduce even the other to a byproduct of the recent past. For the first time since coming to this place he can nearly identify the void around which he would like to wrap his arms forever. It also seems likely that what, above all, appealed to him in the notion of being the living manifestation of something written was the eventuality of the ink flowing, finally, out of the pen, bringing this sham of being to a halt.

Once again he feels an indistinct disturbance within himself, and both his right arm and his left leg become detached at the points where they meet the torso. The leg begins to slide down his pant-leg, but he catches his balance with his right leg and clutches the loose thing in the fingers of his remaining hand. The loose arm, however, falls summarily through the sleeve and lands sideways against the base of the abandoned leather chair. For several seconds he leaves the fallen arm where it landed and shifts his weight in all directions in order, he hopes, to reattach the loose thigh. As before, the one behind the desk is neither amused nor sympathetic. In a while the leg seems to have reattached itself, but he has no time to begin to react when the other leg—the right—becomes detached in exactly the same place. This time he is unable to prevent the lost limb from falling through the pant-leg, and in a moment the leg lies beside the arm. The other shakes his head—he can see that the man is helpless—and rises from behind the desk to assist. It takes only a short time for both of them to return the limbs to their original positions. He wants to apologize, but he cannot, because just as he begins to speak his entire face falls to the floor in pieces. Now the other is disgusted—he returns the eyes, nose, cheeks and mouth to their regular places, and then instead of reattaching the chin he slips it, a little smugly, into a breast pocket, explaining that he will have to keep this trifle for himself. It is not immediately clear how sorely he is likely to miss his chin. The two women outside must have gone away by now, though in a short time he feels sure that they have not. They are no longer embracing—it seems possible that they now stand facing opposite directions, both wishing silently that there could be others to talk to, through whom to justify what they now admit to be their unremarkable disinterest in one another. And the more disinterested they are the more identical they become, moment by moment, until they are forced to turn around again, and they both wish to collapse in unbridled laughter, because they realize that they have taken part in something which their absolute importance there would not allow them to see.