一六二四年，荷兰参事在台筑密城，命名奥伦治。徽章银地，中心七箭成束，四周蜜柑枝叶果实环绕。二七年，巴达维亚总督转来通知，改称热兰遮。

回到南城那一天，时序已经入冬，然而太阳依旧耀眼。我约了高，但南城车站前的圆环此刻挤满走走停停的车辆，警察吹高了哨音，禁止车辆靠近车站。

“嗨，嗨！”高在对街摇下车窗招手。

我小跑过去，红灯不怎么管用，旋转的车辆煞地自我身边刷过。高急忙打开车门让我进去，喧扰瞬时被挡在外，剩下车内轻软的琴音。

“你的行李呢？”高问。

“就这样了。”

我们跟着车队滑出圆环，耐心等候站前补习班大量释出学子，然后，窗际掠过几株熟悉而枯干的凤凰木，以及旅店般的医院风景，中山路，领着我们再度遇见绿意圆环，再一次旋转，笔直而去，民生路，喧喧嚣嚣，我怔怔望着路途彼端一轮红日正在沉没。

“这一带可变多了吧。”高腾出驾驶盘上的左手，指着前方：”你看，对面那边全是新房子，餐厅，连咖啡馆都有了。”

“没想到连这一区也热闹起来了。过去，它不过是一片淤塞或荒废的河道。”

“是啊，今非昔比--”来不及说完，高又指了一个新路标：”你看见那奇怪的屋顶没？旁边是新建的市政府，对面是文化中心。”

我转过头搜寻，彷佛是个外来观光客一路跟随导游的解说。事实上，高由中部来到南城，不过是两三年间的事。我看看他，侧脸和两三年前相比并没有太大变化。

“这是前任市长新开的六线道，怎么样？够宽吧。”高似乎有点儿兴奋，他说可以再绕几圈让我看个仔细：”那儿，你看见没，那座大桥，再过几个月就通车了......”

“你怎么这样清楚？”我忍不住打断他。

“你不要忘了我的工作。市政重划。说来一切都是市政重划的关系。”他夸张地笑了几声：”给你一张名片吧，以后有事随时记得打电话，你这样一个人真是叫人不放心。”

是张寻常的白底名片，久华工程顾问，规划师，高平生--很久没看见这个名字了。高老嫌这名字不出色，但我始终觉得这是个好名字。我再把名片翻到背面，上头记载了高的工作内容：都市计划市地重划、交通运输规划评估、环保工程规划评估、不动产投资计划咨询......

“也许不该是你到南城来。”我开玩笑说：”你改变了我回忆中的南城。”

“是吗？”他迟疑了一会，只是一会，脸颊上便接而浮出微笑：”看来你还是太恋旧了。我想，一个城市是必须随着时代改头换面的，再说，使人们的生活更舒适一些有什么不好呢？”

我打开行李，俯身感觉腹中传来第一下波动，很轻，像一个若有似无的吻。

环视屋内，我必须承认，心内的确百感交集，这间屋子，我多久不曾居住过了，父母故旧都已离开这个舞台，空荡荡的，只留下光线兀自在这儿变化，我推开门，室内所有过往回忆彷佛尘埃扬起四散，再打开窗，远方那屋型的白色灯塔依旧可见，不，已经不是灯塔了，只是个瞭望台。我想起高的说话，使人们的生活更舒适一些有什么不好呢？填海造陆，就把灯塔翻成瞭望台吧，我立在旧屋阳台俯瞰那隐约的白色迹影，华美秋天已经过去，我在所谓故乡南城的住居摆设依旧简陋非常;恰似那在冬日里受着东北季风吹拂的奥伦治城，摇摇欲坠。

“你要不要再添购一些家具呢？”高好心这样问我，但我还是拒绝了。自岛急逝之后，繁繁琐琐生活配备总叫我感到呕气，活生生的人都无常了，守着恋着这些家当又真能巩固住什么吗？我愈来愈希望自己可以孓然一身，要不我就只是购买那些转眼就会无影无踪的消耗品罢了，直到我发现，岛在我身心之中留下如此爱的礼物--一个若有似无的吻--吻着寂寞的母亲--关于母亲，这样的人生角色，直至如今我依旧虚虚实实，不清楚自己这样一个人，将会牵引什么生命到眼前来，或是有什么未知的行程在等待我，与我的胎儿。几个月了，我经验着种种陌生感受，呕吐，饥饿，在来不及明了的当下，我脑中的疑问往往已被自然的生理感觉所抢夺，我面对腹中这生命如此顽强，如此真实，即便我这身躯再如何意兴躝跚，仍有生命等待我牵引他来，我还未决定自己是否真会在南城定居下来，但是，在岛离去之后，诸多偶然机缘，将我带回南城的路上来，我结束了北城游牧般的工作，打电话给高，这个昔日因恋情尴尬而相互避开的好友，如今因着什么因缘际会反倒定居在南城，成了我在家乡唯一的知人，他对我这几年的事情已经完全不了解了，然而却还能那样自然而感性地说：”家乡的土，总是比较温暖的。”

二、台湾王城

台江陆浮，王城渐失地理要势。一八七四年，沈葆桢抚台，拆热兰遮外城砖材以造亿载金城，居民亦掘废砖造屋，清去日来，热兰遮几已全废。

从抽屉的乱纸堆里翻出一张儿时的全家福相片。我被年轻工整的爸爸抱在怀中，身穿妈妈亲手缝制的花边洋装，一旁妈妈胸襟别花，手牵骏马，一家子谨慎围着身后石碑，而碑上深雕安平古堡四字，一张安平古堡留影。我凝视这相片，讶异不已，宛若悟见前世情愫，安平古堡，这四个在史料里浮过无数次的字，竟大剌剌显现在我身后。岁月未免过于美丽也过于无情，白荒荒的泥土地上照着隐约的冬影。

我再回到桌前，无头绪翻弄桌上书报数据，当荷兰人黯然离开热兰遮城之后，整个十七世纪末叶，我再找不到任何外国船只接近安平的记录。结束北城游牧般的工作，我手头仅仅剩下这些委托的写作记划，区志，沿革志，人物志，说不清时代什么时候变了，转眼家乡南城竟能转而回头哺育我这未成就的离乡人。我在日暮时分疲累睡去，枕在远方的安平港堆，这时，她已日渐淤积，沙堵港湾，大船只能泊靠海岸三浬之外。

然而夜里我几度醒来，彷佛诸多声响催闹，入港时分已到，船身颠颠簸簸。是天上星子还是渔人的提灯？我睁眼望见一片幽光，鬼魅迷离心迷离，我无计可施，任凭摆布，彷佛一股重量翻过身，伏在耳畔低低喘息...是岛吗？我隐约已知，然而无法醒转，直到鸡啼划过黑暗，这片氛围冷冷退去，再度了无痕迹。

哎，这闹市里谁还天真饲着鸡啊，啼声早已乱了谱，黎明不啼暗夜啼。

经常我受着如此不可解说的感应，然而魂灵之说究竟可不可信？难道因为生离死别无理可循，所以我只能寄托这些虚空的执迷？尽管如此，在清醒生活的淘洗之下，我不得不承认，有关岛的真实感觉，已经渐渐在我眼前散焦了，一分一秒，遗忘有关岛的记忆，直到察觉自己什么时候竟已无法瞬间想起岛的脸......像夕阳的影子愈拉愈长，愈拉愈长，终至隐没在完全的黑暗中......死去的人事，再不会孕生任何新的记忆，等在相逢的时候，来补足别离中所被遗忘的记忆。在这一点上来说，死别毕竟是大大狠过生离了。仅有的库存记忆中不断重复，不断更改，或是，不断遗忘。如同死亡现场我已经完全失去岛的身体，接下来，我得再重复地失去更多的什么--坐吃山空--如此，生涯走到三十岁、四十岁，我还能如何地想起岛？我将以一张多么苍老的脸在记忆的光影里寻找岛？而岛是永远年轻吧？我要遗忘岛独自年老，还是与岛一起浮雕在青春的最后片刻里？

晨曦逐渐照亮大地，这美好而公平的晨曦，令苟活的人感到希望也感到哀伤，我想起以前母亲常说，人生只要活到明天早上还能看到日头爬出来就得了。我把窗帘拉开，起身漱洗，像一个跟着太阳走的庄稼人，黎明市街未热，我已错走几条路径，安平市街可说已经面目全非，我找不到熟悉的路途前往旧港，瞎打误撞却到了一片崭新的水域，凉薄雾气弥漫水面，如此接近，眼见水波柔软，非常柔软。我惊异注视着，止水细流，想起前夜读到''烟中唤渡声，风微浪不生''......故乡的景象，在在呈现出我所不熟悉的景象，该说故乡改变了面貌，还是过往生命我不曾留意？故乡，这个青春径要逃开的字词，什么时候它终会用最古老的方式回到我的身体？故乡的意义究竟是什么？就是如此一种身心的方式吗？如同此刻肚腹中的生命，当所有抽象概念都已溃败，他或她仍旧以最身心的方式存在。在岛初初逝去的时光里，我的确瘫痪在人生意义的种种问号里，是后来禁不住腹中生命殷殷叩唤，我才能够走到这里。归乡，谋生，我既感到狼狈也感到惭愧，周遭空气清新，久违多年，经由嗅觉或仅仅只是肌肤的感觉，我便瞬间记起所有的往事，中学时代每天早晨骑脚踏车上学时的景象历历眼前，同样的时间，却是不同沧桑的人了，所有描写归乡的文学所倾心刻划的都是这一份伤逝，我能说出更多的什么吗？

离开水岸，回程的路上，我路过了那张矗立在儿时全家福的安平古堡，不是休假日，古迹两旁除了邻近上班的人潮，古堡本身的景色显得冷清，几个南城固有喝早茶的老人聚在榕树下闲聊。树间有清澈的鸟啼，零落的扫叶工，招呼声，老旧而恒久日日新生，一切似曾相识，想来却也如此遥远。我离开古迹准备回家，却在运河边被熟悉的喇叭声叫住，车窗摇下，是高。

“你经常到这里来吗？”他惊讶问我。

我摇摇头：”回来后第一次，我好多年没来了，不知道变这么多。”

我们站在迎风的安平路上，他正路过要去上班。风吹掀起满天车尘，数十年如一日我微微闻见身边运河的水臭。”说到运河，南城人没有不摇头的。”见我堵起鼻子，高理解微笑：”南北干线，污水尽入其中，怎能不臭？”这气味从小闻大，我倒不知道原因。只以为是死水日渐淤积而臭。高的说法掀起了我的好奇心，便与高站在路边简短谈了一会，原来他们公司这一两年正接下市政府的运河疏浚计划，而高也是其中负责的工作人员之一。

“我们正在兴建污水处理场，也要设置五个污水截流站，以污水下水管道相互连接。以后，市区的污水经节流到污水处理场处理之后，再送出海，而不要像现在这样直接排入运河......”意识到自己过于熟练的职业口吻，高尴尬地抚抚额头，停住了话：”抱歉，说起这么无聊的话来......”

“不，一点也不无聊，只是隔行如隔山，你看我听得似懂非懂的。”

“有兴趣的话，我倒是很乐意给你解释。”高看看表：”也许我们可以另外约个时间，我们很多年没有见面聊聊了，是不是......”

“是，是...”我吱吱唔唔：”就是耽搁你的时间，这次回来，已经麻烦你很多了......”

“要不，”高爽快地说：”我看就今天晚餐如何？既然到安平来了，今天忙完一起吃晚餐如何？”见我没说话，高又明快地作了决定：”你要试试这里的海鲜吗？运河边最大的一家店，你看，就在前头，富碧肴。”

我顺方向看去，的确是富丽堂皇的建筑，这条安平路，久远前是条沼地，然后淤积成沙，遇雨满地泥宁，如今它是一条满天车尘的干燥柏油路，两侧植满菩提，少小每去安平海边戏水这是唯一通道，如今菩提已显老态但仍未成荫，使我总怀疑南城干热不宜栽种菩提作为行道树。我楞看尚在歇息中的富碧肴，纵乐过后早晨的倦容与寂寥。

三、荷兰城

一八九七年，日人夷平部份热兰遮，砌造安平海关公馆，城下四周遍筑职员宿舍。

我沿着运河走回家，在过去，这儿没有灯也没有路，这几年，因为西岸填海造陆，此区如今挤满毫无章法的高楼建筑，以及秩序井然的新路灯。我边走边回想着与高的谈话，身后的富碧肴此刻依旧点燃所有霓虹，在这乡镇的无聊夜晚显得几许妖媚。与高的交谈，若有似无撩起过去的记忆。然而如今他毕竟是个来往公司与安亲班的丈夫与父亲，终日行程排得满满，提一段无济于事的旧恋情所为何用呢。

“为什么你老这么倔强？”高执酒杯问道。我注意到高开始能够饮酒，过去他几乎只是一杯啤酒的酒量;倘若想起这些细琐身边事，面对高一身衬衫西裤职业上班族打扮，我依旧能够记起他当年牛仔裤的学生模样。

“都已经回故乡来了，还能让你说倔强，不知是赢是输？”我苦笑应道。

“我倒觉得你该回到故乡，不是说，故乡是灵感的来源吗？”高表情认真，这回我真笑了，没一会，高又接着问：”对了，老朋友我就直问吧，你这样忽然回南城来，辞了工作靠什么维生？”

这真是个好问题。人生到了某一个阶段，这是必考题。特别回到故乡，开宗明义第一题必答不可。倘若不熟的人招呼问起，我多半还能仿真制造一个标准答案，但面对高，说多说少，说真说假，我一下子反倒拿捏不住轻重，只好故作轻松：”就帮人写写书吧。”

“还写书，”他开玩笑：”人生都快输光了还写。”

“现在学乖了，不输自己，要拿别人的人生来输啰。”我说：”你放心，我接了一些数据差事，还有一两本回忆录，暂时间不会有问题。”

“回忆录？就是那些政坛名人们的回忆录吗？那倒不错，最近书市抢手得很。”

“不，不是那些。”

“那么...是什么呢？”

“一些被遗忘的过去的人，或是...一些已经死去的人吧。”

“听起来...你改行做历史啰。”

“也不尽然，不尽然称得上。”

“唉，看来我也是隔行如隔山，似懂非懂-总之，我希望你有问题一定要告诉我，嗯，回忆录归回忆录，但我看，人总是得从回忆里走出来。继续活下去。”见我怔然，高化解气氛界面又说：”难道不是吗？看看妳自己，都快当妈妈的人了。”

这个话题到此结束，我们之间，似乎从来没有谈过孩子或孩子的父亲，因为这个部分，以现实的眼光来看，确实是难堪的，即便我自己的态度都还不够坦然而勇敢。高转而聊起他在南城的工作，在我完全离开南城这几年，他可以说是见证了南城的沧海桑田。席间他几次帮我夹菜盛汤，要我为腹中营养多吃些，俨然一个熟悉生命世故的成年人。夜色来临，长谈的高毕竟喝多了酒，微醉，离开餐厅一路，他看似清醒却瘫软地扶着我。”我看我来帮你开车吧？”我忍不住问他。他没回答我，兀自凝视着黑暗的运河。我识趣沉默着。片刻，他终于打开了车门，坐进去，我担心再问一次，他转过头答非所问，连口气也变了：”其实我等过你。”他握住我的手：”你要知道，只要你一句话。”

“现在还说这些干嘛。”我微微摔掉他的手。他一楞，也许因此醒了酒，改口道：”好吧，人总是得从回忆里走出来。”他摇下车窗：”我回家啰。”

时间是晚上九点多，在南城家庭，这已经算晚了。小婉会担心的，高的妻子名叫小婉，又是个好名字，他们的名字总显得那么恰如其分。那么，安平呢，我喃喃念着这个地名，感觉腹间又有微微的踢动，如果，如果这小家伙的名字就称为安平，或是称为岛，如何，回答我吧，我是你的母亲呢。而你的父亲已经不在了......想及高不敢明问的神情。什么时候我该清清楚楚告诉他，孩子的父亲死了，在分别的旅程中，岛违背承诺不再回来，而这腹中不过是一个无意遗留的礼物，没有婚姻，连他父亲都来不及知晓的一种诞生--

这个生命把我从沈迷中叫醒，也使我面临抉择，该让所有讯息延续下去？还是让它随岛之消失而消失？如今我选了后者，但有时候，我怀疑自己，是否是个自私的母亲？如果说我曾经犹豫是否迎接这个诞生，相信我，岛，那实在是因为我不知如何养育他，而不只是因为他没有父亲......你告诉我，我该如何向孩子介绍一个完整的世界(世界的残破使你那样愤怒)，孩子将问我许许多多的问题，而我该如何回答他吗(我不回答你便走了)，过去那样简单相信只要活着就是赢家的我，独活渐渐了解原来岛才是那个真正使我世界残破的人--

“你知道港口死了鱼的消息吗？”我问高。

“知道。”他的口吻专业而冷静。

报上说数十万的鱼尸将安平港口满满覆盖，附近渔民捕鱼十几年，不曾见过这景象。我趋车跑过，大雨稍歇，新筑的港口一路画成圆弧裹住海湾，工程车卧在一旁酣睡。没看见报上所说的鱼尸遍布，难道这么快就清除干净了吗？我狐疑想着，同时抓不稳方向地继续徘徊打转，此刻彷佛处在港湾的背部，再往前而去，或许转过弯我可以完整面对港湾，然而，就在这个片刻。我便失去了她。

“什么原因？你知道吗？”

“水产专家的说法是水质溶氧量偏低。”高说：”报上不也写了？”

他问我人在哪里，我答不上来，安平的路实在变太多了，我只能描述出我在一个芒草杂生的电话亭，满空都是模型飞机，由周边三五个人所遥控，疾腾疾降，翻旋打转，并且随时发出刺耳的引擎声。”快离开那里吧，你这孕妇怎么老爱乱跑。”高责怪我。

遍查书案，有关安平的过往，我可说了若指掌，然而，面对她的今貌，我却无比陌生。这难免使我感到丧气，究竟我所作的一切，与这真实的生活有何相关呢。难道我们一群人只为消化预算，厚厚编印几册，放在那间不见阳光，人烟罕至，连覆盖黑布都满是尘埃的安平史迹资料馆吗？此刻我双脚所站恐怕是昔日那可泊千艄的台江汪洋，朝东走，便是鳞比节次洋楼民宅相连的热遮兰街，街外海岸连绵七鲲身屿，脉自东南海中，西转下海，接续不断，势若贯珠。立于一鲲身的红毛旧城远望，二鲲身至七鲲身，渔户晒网笭箵，家家烟月苍茫，渔灯明灭--

然而这一切毕竟都不同了(复道重楼，倾已尽，政府第宅，舞榭歌亭，化为瓦砾)，尽管我能够清楚画出安平往日的轮廓，但此刻我连去港口或是回家的道路都不明白。数十万鱼尸有多少，过去两三百年安平繁衍的鱼鲜又有多少。我继续向高追问这奇怪现象的原因。他解释：”如果待会你找得到港口，那儿的水色应该是泛红的，因为这几天连日大雨，所以光合细菌较多，导致水质溶氧量偏低。”我似懂非懂，永远隔行如隔山，对世界的了解虚无而片断，相对应于高具体的知识，我如何声称我脑中的思惟与愿望是有效的？

“最简单的说法，”高耐心而恳切的说：”运河水质必须改善，上游下游都得照顾，下游的旧港口至今迟迟未能打通，是污染主因之一，更别提复杂的上游了。”

我默默无语，感到自己如此渺小也如此无为，相对于高，这十年来，对这眼前的社会，我真正做过了什么，政治运动，环保运动，乡土运动，一波一波的浪潮，我与岛扑进去又被冲出来，灼热的火光，或是落寞的溃散。”妳到底在追寻什么？”学生时代，高这样问过我，他是那个一直在人群外看我起落浮沈的人，如今，除了伤逝，我可说一事无成，高却默默留在南城，以知识与技术见证了南城的沧海桑田，中年归乡的我，铺陈炒作旧人旧事以度模糊的生机，很难说其中还有什么反对与执着，我怀疑，真且大的反对与执着，究竟会成就什么样的结果呢？那其间激起的力量，不成事又该如何消解呢？自残如岛，偏执如友朋，或是苟活如己，怎么说，过去我们对人生的态度都过于天真或踞傲了，我们这样的的心灵，谈得上生育教养吗，如此一想，我不禁感到痛苦的怀疑与自责。

四、安平古堡

一九三０年，台湾文化三百年纪念大典，日拆海关官舍，城上改建新式洋馆，立”滨田弥兵卫”石碑。光复之后，去其碑文，改题”安平古堡”。

岛，我的下腹渗出血丝，所谓安胎剂使我昏软不已。

岛，你怎么样也不会预料到吧，你这样不要这个世界，却留下一个生命让他从头再走一次。

岛，如果你果真还在什么地方，你见过这个生命吗。他长得什么模样，像你还是像我？

岛，医生说进入六七个月，每当他踢闹我的腹部，我就应该轻轻抚按那个被他踢打的地方，让他可以感觉到我的响应。到怀孕末期，我也可以和他说些体己使他可以感觉的话语，像是手、脚、口或是爱......

岛，你相信这些说法吗？

昏昏沉沉，我感到无比疲倦，彷佛自岛离开之后，我冷静建筑起来的堤防随着海浪缓慢溃散，一点痛苦也没有，能量如细涓如海水，从那个缺口，一缕一缕流泄出走，我感到四周在喧嚣之后变得这样寂静，这样轻盈，青春，爱情，生与死，每一天每一天的晨曦，每一夜每一夜的月光，像灰尘也像布幕慢慢地慢慢地降落......

走出医院，空气很干燥，彷佛雨季已经过去，南城酷热的夏季很快就要来临。

高停了车子在等我。”小心。”他问：”要关冷气吗？”

“可以绕过港口再回去吗？”我说。

“又要去？为什么你最近老去港口。”他摇了摇头：”还是先送你回家，改天再去吧。”

“不，去一下。”我央求他：”就算是经过都好。我在医院里一直梦见港口淹大水。”

“港口哪会淹大水，你相信我，下那一点雨还不够消解南部的干旱呢，不会淹大水。”

“我知道，不过无论如何让我经过一下。”

“好吧。”

又是近暮，彷佛每次都是这个时候，高把车子停在新港边，让我看见几只白鹭丝正在堤防上觅食。

“你喜欢来港口只是因为这些美好的景色吗？”高忽然说话，口气有些不耐。”如果我告诉你这一切只是虚假的景象呢？”

“什么意思？我不知道你为什么和我说这些？”

“有件事也许该告诉你。”高说：”我已经结束，不，辞退了这一区的整治计划。”

我惊讶地看着他。

“我想，我真是黔驴技穷了。”高表情严肃地环视周遭，黄昏静谧，霞红满天，这是安平从来没有变过的夕照。然而，在高的眼神里，我已经无法确定，他对安平的感情是否与我相同，毕竟往日那些我们一起共同走过的地方已经消失了。”你要知道，打通旧港口，固然可以加速港区污水和海水交换，但是，根本之道还是在污染源的断根--否则，只是将污水排入海面，使受污染的区域由渔港更延伸到海岸，这不是更糟吗，可是，我却无法说服他们--”他甩了甩头：”算了，我不想再跟任何人讨论这件事了，总之，过一阵子，我会搬回中部也说不定，该回去了--”

“或许，我来南城是为了追寻什么吧，不过就像你说的，印象中的南城的确被我们改变了。”他如此深刻地望我许久，然后，温柔地笑了笑：”不过，现在不应该再提这些了。”

我沉默不语。

“孩子的父亲是怎样的人？”他忽然问。

“一般的人。”

“去哪里呢？”

“不知道。”

“妳想念他吗？”

“说不上来。”

“妳不想谈吗？”

“嗯。”

“好，那就不谈了，让我们来谈谈孩子吧？男孩女孩？”

“男孩。”

“你要叫他什么名字？”

“岛。”

九月與她，慢著腳步，不多久就和其他同行的人拉開一段距離。社區巷弄安靜，走過每戶人家門前，聽見裡頭傳來一些細碎的聲響。十六夜月，被雲層遮掩一角，這是一個看得見星星的夜晚，兩人腳步聲嬉戲似湊著節奏，叩，叩叩。

走進商店街仍有熟悉的煎茶香味，但店家已經打烊了，剩下來幾間藥房，服飾店，也已進進出出收拾著東西。遠遠傳來平交道響，從東京來的車班就要進站。

車門開啟，一批形色勞頓，渾身上下掛滿沉重背包提袋的人，被吐送出來，月台一時間有了點溫度，但也只是一下子，這些人就像靜靜地幽魂，消散不見影蹤。夜色復歸沉寂。

這是東京市郊的一個小站，這種時間，開往東京的車班是稀少而冷清的。她與九月在月台上，找了張候車椅，坐下來，呆望眼前各式各樣廣告，噴漆字體：風月堂，津田塾，安田生命，產婦人科，自動車免許。

剛才這一路，她們倒底說了什麼呢？九月與她，向來很會說假對白，這是她們看家本領，有時候說著說著假戲真做起來，又俐落抽身而退，什麼事兒都沒有。她們亦十分擅長於不經意處放入一個暗示或警語，然後繼續說到別的事項上去，什麼事兒都沒有。

忽然靜默下來，反倒讓人提心吊膽。月台寬敞，九月忽地探近她的頸項：好香。

軌道迷濛，車子還不來，對街一扇窗戶捻熄了燈，夜色如夢，模糊的蟲鳴。這個世界沒有動靜，只有她的心在地震。九月埋在她的頸項之間，宛如嬰兒一般。

九月回來的消息，她是聽別人說起才知道的。十年分別不見，中間惟有一次電郵。若你還記掛著，那還是別聯絡吧。這是九月的回答，很有她的風格，身前身後，判若兩人。她謹遵受命，與九月一段就此塵封。惟聽朋友講起，留神看了幾支MV，一眼望見九月，便知道事情沒有過去。九月眼神沒變，身體、外貌與姿態，卻是變了。那些變化要強調的就是忘記，就是我很好，若乎全不在乎，要不就是什麼也沒想，不過一路往上爬而已。

這是九月，一個美麗苛刻，經常講反話的人。是真是假，事已至此，九月怎麼說就怎麼做，全盤否定也行，就是不見。可今她卻跨足影視，那千金打點的美貌與身體，處處叫人閃躲不了。九月荒原，她演神經質角色，暴雨將至，雲層詭譎的黑暗，被惡之意志拖曳的美麗夏娃造型，最是傳神。黃碧雲小說寫許之行：我不知道我會喜歡壞女人。

曾經在尋常速食店裡，九月嘻嘻笑得像個孩子，磨磳她說：你看，我們像不像兩個高中生談戀愛？她把一張餐巾紙折來折去，說童年怎樣醜而孤僻，中學時候又如何被女同學欺負。使九月笑得開心都是些簡單事物，少年無邪尤是。苦悶少年時光，她完全不想回頭多看一眼，然而九月，卻彷彿把什麼東西，一些願望，遺留在那裡，如今和她去領回來，竟露出那麼愉快的笑容。

那些時光，九月常來學校等她，兩人沿著鐵軌走到下北澤去吃晚餐。沒課日子，她在早上打電話過來，講這一天打算做些什麼。有時也來她住的留學生會館，完全無利可圖地窩在她房裡翻書，空乏之至就打盹睡著。醒來，去看韓國人打網球，去閱覽室讀日文報紙，要不走過對街的公園，沿著河堤一回合又一回合地散步。天黑去公共廚房做食物，兩人一起端回房間，盤腿坐在床上對著電視機吃晚餐。餐後去搭電車，九月每每幾步路便說要休息，坐在階梯上，家常說話，不知道為什麼要見面，不知道什麼時候該在哪個轉角說再見。九月擺弄著裙擺，有一搭沒一搭地說話，隔著絲襪，探了探，兩人的腳，像做夢。像羚羊的腳。

她不確定九月與她之間為什麼會開展這一段歷程。有一段時間，她以為她們不過是兩個被知識與夢想弄昏了頭，無法被現實感所滿足的女子。她們不過遇見了一個和自己同樣，在過去時光，世界某個角落，暗暗嚐過生命滋味的人。她們不過是想從彼此身上借取力量，或僅僅只是打發寂寞光陰。

她們在車站小店亂逛，買本雜誌坐在河邊翻翻，累了去喝咖啡，何等陽春學生，九月一臉迷濛：啊，我們竟可以這樣簡單就快樂了。她們好似兩個無聊少年，漫長行路，竟希望目的永遠不要抵達，城鎮不要浮現，懷著若有似無的希望一直走下去。她們之間不是沒有屬於情感的直覺，但她們從來沒有說過愛，儘管那是一件多麼容易說出口的事。

諾言，是鋪天蓋地的。關於某些情感，身體、語言、距離，顯得輕而不可靠，放錯了位置，美麗的質素立刻夭折蒸發。她初次感到珍重起來，水杯，眼鏡，襯衫，絲巾，高跟鞋，修容餅，嚴謹清潔冰冷，小蟲般啃咬她的細節，對九月的戀物。

美麗的磁杯，你不要它破碎，乾脆就不要用它。九月從沒明白說過要她留下來的話。她甚至不斷不斷地說：我對你是沒感覺的。

那真是她最該走的時候。賭局下注，莊家再問一次。該收手的。

她們之間，如果沒有繼續發生，就只是打開書本裡的一頁，掃過怵目驚心的一行，闔起來，不再繼續讀下去。

那麼，她們現在是不是仍然在一起，走街，吃飯，看書，或者一起去購物，跑證件，上醫院，她們會愈來愈習慣於複雜與單調，愈來愈被安置於一種難以脫身的成人生活，漫長無邊，瑣瑣碎碎的日子。她們有的是耐心，大過於愛的耐心，隨時記得把對方身邊的空位保留給另一位存在或不存在的人。

但若，沒闔上那本書，那怵目驚心的一行字，即將超時速、超現實地，將她們捲進一片充滿字體、字根、符號情感的祕林。巫婆九月，她在林子裡想些什麼，攪弄一鍋湯，唸一段咒語。她把瓶蓋打開，精靈，菌種，芳香，惡疫，一併竄散而出。

有時愛是勇氣的同義詞，有時愛是恐懼的同義詞。曾經她想不懂九月能從她身上要什麼，如今漸漸明白自己才是給不起的角色。有時愛是加法，有時愛是減法，呼喚愈來愈多，喊出聲的卻愈來愈少。行將失去的美。有時愛是野火焚原，有時愛就靜靜地保留給你。她在一念之間想要跑出那座林子，萬劫不復的錯，鹽柱的逃亡。九月之美，她拿什麼回報，手無寸鐵，就連美貌也沒有。拋下九月，回台灣的夜班飛機，她看自己臉影，在一片黑茫茫宇宙之間，激情光火的旅程，溫柔詭異的盛宴，色壞形空，未免不自量力。

換了身份，換了工作，換了住處，換了語言，但日子還是一天二十四小時照過。眼前的這個世界，從來沒有改變它運轉的規律，雖然你可能早在一夕之間已經成為局外人了。

以為短暫輕薄的聯繫，揮刀斷水，春風吹又生。走向前，走向後，九月動也不動在那裡。情節千真萬確已經結束，可真相到此刻才凌遲般開始揭露。她在此界對著一個不存在的人說話，順著生活波浪一次一次拆解比對，與九月的關係，在筆記本裡一頁一頁給九月寫字，飛快而混亂，她不得不覺悟了，大逃亡才要開始呢。

關於九月的逃亡，可能是生命的謎底，也可能只是過程。真正的答案是什麼往往不是重點，起作用的是我們選擇了哪一個答案帶走。九月回來之後，她曾經害怕天打雷劈在街上遇見她，後來漸漸平靜，看電視或雜誌圖片出現九月的臉，微微起了陌生。她不知道這是應該高興還是悲哀的，就如同她不願意猜測，重逢當下，會是一個真正揮別的瞬間，抑或從遠方再度湧來不能言說的痛楚。

那些禁地，暴浪的海域，沒有意志，不知目標的人，是游不過去的。

她依然經常夢見九月。恍惚而冰冷的夢，在某一個最絕望的瞬間，凍醒過來。

事實上，她從來沒有真正給九月寄出任何信，連一張來自旅地的明信片也沒有。九月面無表情，冰薄如月牙：這一切是你自找的。

愛如死之堅強。她繼續寫著永遠不會寄給九月的信件：是，不是，回去，不回去，說出來，不說出來，事物的背面，以及甜蜜的其他，毀壞了，成就了，在何處重逢吧，永別了。

一節又一節的列車，在夜色裡飛奔，電光石火地帶她們回東京去。窗外市町一站又一站經過，然後有櫻樹林，有流水與大橋。映在玻璃窗上的九月神情看起來累了，對著她迷濛微笑，沒有什麼話非說不可。

那是一個蒼白冰冷的夢。夜歸人孤島似地漂浮在車廂裡，又彷彿每個人身邊都伴著一個屬於他的鬼魅使者。電車速度緩緩放慢下來，快到站了。九月抬起頭，寬容的嘆息：這路是回不去的。

活動中心

　　走到大道盡頭，正紅色的活動中心，如今看起來，有一種屬於過去時代的輝煌。走進去，陳設理所當然已經改變，昔日簡單打菜的自助餐廳換成了宛如百貨公司的美食街，餐廳另一頭的小福利社變成了二十四小時便利商店，碰觸它的自動玻璃門，便替活動中心開了另一個出入口，取捷通往新建於椰林大道盡頭的總圖書館。

　　在過去，這光線並不怎麼明亮的活動中心一樓，集聚了電影、禮堂、演講、餐廳等功能，二樓則有各類社團：思辨的，知識的，慈善的，宗教的，娛樂的，交際的，不同性情的學生約在活動中心碰面看電影，沒事就到社辦報到，消磨光陰，互訴心事，班門弄斧，清談終日，一樓餐廳裡的桌椅就算非用餐時間，也常座無虛席，人人各自吃零食，抄筆記，作功課，語言交換，情侶疊頸打盹纏綿。

　　如果不是因為五月，這個活動中心，在她的回憶之中，應該也會和其他大學時代的回憶一樣，退化成一個他人的舞台，一些零星的故事，無啥大事可記的布景。雖然的確有過一些日子，她曾在那裡買過餐點，看過海報，甚至幾場電影，可無論如何，她不曾在這裡奉獻什麼，沒有過什麼可歌可泣的情節。她與同儕之間總存有那麼一些走不攏的距離，可是五月堅持挑戰那些距離，跳也要跳過來。

　　有段期間，五月幾乎日日到活動中心報到，從沒有光線的租賃洞穴裡爬出來，像木頭傀儡把線從頸後拉緊，把散亂的熱情與悲傷胡亂裹成一團，塞在笑容背後，然後，逢人神采奕奕，甚至幽默大笑，走上活動中心二樓，與人打成一片。

　　那是八○年代的尾聲，所謂五年級發芽的時代，不顧一切的努力，把知性與情感榨壓到極限，且往往是情感越過了知性，人人多少談一點文學、哲學、性別，也談環保、歷史、政治，種種，種種，各個小圈子匯集在活動中心裡來去，那些圈子裡的許多名字後來在不同領域有了各自的光芒，但那是另外的故事了，如果巧合，這些人的記憶盒裡，應該還留著五月所描述過的二樓社辦裡的空間狼藉，人與人的愛情與競合，懷抱理想的青年男女，執著地和自己的風車戰得筋疲力竭。

　　第一次見到五月就在活動中心，五、六個人在餐廳裡併桌清談，吃食四散。五月到的時候已經遲了不少時間。坐下來打招呼說前陣子出車禍，今天可是特別出關來見各位的。

　　一張小臉，下巴裹著紗布，全靠一雙晶亮大眼睛打招呼。她和在場其他人多少電話聊過幾句，五月倒是完全陌生。

　　活動中心磨到天黑，換地方繼續。五月雖然受傷還是活絡得很，有那種能跟每一個人打交道的本事，包括她。五月眨眨眼說：我之前見過你，不過，你應該是不記得了。

　　她的確沒有印象。五月不在乎，繼續說話，沒個停頓。她看著五月，自然將之歸納於和自己不同的人，但又不覺得討厭，活力神氣的人多半尖銳，但五月神氣裡有一種和善。

　　大家邊說邊吃喝，惟獨五月因傷口不方便始終沒吃什麼東西。後來時間晚了，總也餓了的時候，五月吆喝：喂，你們好歹也有個誰去幫我買瓶牛奶吧。

　　她不遲疑便站起來。

　　五月很快從身後趕來：欸，我沒要你去買啊……。

　　沒關係。

　　你知道這附近哪裡有超商嗎？

　　不難找吧。她索性直說：其實是我自己想出來晃晃，你就讓我去幫你買吧。

　　五月沒再阻止，不過，也沒往回走，趕幾步跟上她。不一會，又開口了：怎麼不穿外套呢？

　　還好，沒那麼冷。

　　抖成這樣還說不冷？五月忽地伸過手來摸她的衣衫：這麼薄？

　　這瞬間，彷彿打了個寒顫似地，某些平靜的事態被驚擾了。

　　一個人該如何去描述一個人？有必要嗎？有權利嗎？這麼多年，她反覆自問這些問題。

　　如果有一天，她必須描述五月，那會是真的嗎？她又何必描述五月？是自己須要表達，還是五月須要表達？

　　表達自己，五月應該已經做得夠多了吧。五月對自己毫不保留，她所揭開的，有時候，還遠遠超過了我們所能忍受的。要說五月有什麼沒有表達，也許只是她們之間的故事。五月不是不能寫，是她特意沒有寫，即便寫過也只像個破綻百出的故事，一個事脈與輕重到那裡就兜不攏的空洞。

　　剛認識的時候，五月歷史，她一無所知。五月看起來活得很好，幾乎可以說，生機勃勃。她簡直像個勁量飽滿的電池小熊，為不同的事務跑來跑去，用各種不同音調說不同性質的話。

　　從表面的情節來看，她們兩個人生活毫無交集，個性也不相同，確確實實是不同故事裡的腳色，連活動場域也相隔遙遠，她多數時間留在徐州路的法學院，很少到羅斯福路這邊的大校園來，遑論活動中心，可以說是因為五月，她才真正走上了活動中心的二樓，在那裡看五月作各類花式表演，孔雀梳刷羽毛的交際舞。

　　約在活動中心碰面，通常只為了一起離開活動中心。路上都說些什麼，已經不大記得，或許只是兩個好學生的談話，兩個女孩子的談話。

　　那些話，與其接近感性，毋寧更是大塊大塊的理性，知識與經驗的分享讓她們跨越陌生，並不哀愁，而是愉快，表現得像堅強的孩子，在傷痕的記憶上跳房子，給經驗創造各式各樣的簡碼，像太宰治在《人間失格》玩弄詞彙小遊戲：汽船和火車是悲劇名詞，市營電車和巴士則是喜劇名詞。為何如此？怎麼分的？太宰說得很傲氣：「不知其理的不足以談藝術。」

　　這是驕傲。難道不是驕傲？孤獨者，氣弱者，藉以依靠、藉以撐持的驕傲。這個驕傲不等量於知識，亦無關世俗所謂優等生的形象，不過是玩著一個只有對方才可以陪著一起玩的遊戲，棋逢對手，放心觸探彼此的直覺與天賦。

　　五月形容自己像一隻貪婪的知識怪獸：「我們的求知欲可能讓我們一輩子受苦。」這是預言，但誰以為意呢，在那個驕傲的年紀，從不以為受苦是件沒意義的事。

　　她們執著，往前，在那條椰林大道上，把她們聯繫在一起的，正是一條沒有人替她們準備好可她們必須獨力走向前的摸索之路，沒有父執輩，沒有引燈的導師，也沒有兄弟結盟，且連作為一個男子都不是的，形體單薄尚未長成的女性。宛如幾隻離群獨自冒險叢林的清瘦的鹿，遙望彼時多半仍由男性建立起來的資本與知識城邦，對她們顯露，既雄偉又荊棘，既召喚又無情。

　　離開活動中心，又到底作過什麼呢？無非一起去看片子，去哪裡吃點東西，或在五月的房間裡，一本書接一本書，一個話題接一個話題。那時候，她們都剛踏上寫作之路，各自發表了幾篇作品，但五月有較她更大的藍圖與樂觀要做一個作家，五月房間，格整書架，哪個方位上放了哪幾本書，那畫面至今清楚留在她的腦海裡。

　　之於五月，知識宛若祭壇，在那些書架的環繞下，她們揭露內心傷害的墳塚，她們的友誼在那裡生根，可以說，那些書架就是她們故事最早的背景。除了當年所謂文藝青年必讀的西方社科、哲學書，五月還鍾情安部公房、三島由紀夫，剛剛冒出頭來的村上春樹，以及，太宰治。

　　光復書局所出版的《當代世界小說家讀本》早就斷版多年，但在彼時那真是一個精緻的禮物，每一冊都之於她們生命留下了痕跡。

　　其中，李永熾翻譯的《斜陽》和《人間失格》尤為一個異數，五月為之傾倒，她雖不能完全同意，仍不得不承認其中有著什麼與她不同但依舊穿透打擊到她的沖力，一種不同的痛苦，但確實是痛苦，誠實到讓人迴避不了；每個靈魂都是不同的，但痛苦的靈魂之間有嗅覺般的共感。

　　真正親近相處的時間，說來不會超過一年，但這一年，她們到底如何經歷對方的生命，又了解到什麼深度？五月從不吝於表達意見，也能變換不同方式引人說話，有時候她抵抗五月：你是把我當心理分析嗎？五月倒也不惱怒，嘴角仍有一抹微笑。很多人對五月的印象是，善於傾聽，善於撫慰，善於給人能量。

　　不過，到底是在哪裡岔了出去，她很快便感覺到了五月笑容背後的匱乏與不安。愈靠近五月，愈直感到外表熱鬧的五月生命內底若非乾旱不毛，便宛如著了火般焦痛不已。後來與五月相處的記憶，愈來愈多的嗚咽與吶喊之聲。

　　最糟的時刻，五月敘述裡不乏耽溺，不乏黑暗，不乏驚世駭俗，她聽著，沒有驚嚇，沒有走開，唯一使她無言以對的是關於暴力與血，無法承受痛苦而自殘的傾向。

　　是的，五月自殘的傾向是很早的了。初識時候，她就已經在手腕用菸燙下了傷疤。相較於心靈所敏感到的痛苦，肉體顯得非常小，靈魂太巨大，承載不了，就忍不住想將肉體衝撞開來，加以毀滅，至少予以麻醉。

　　很多年後，她讀柳美里（這個作家把自己獻祭／計於文學的程度是另一個令人咋舌的例子），再一次發現所謂意志的軟弱與堅強之別，實在主觀而難以相較。一方面承擔著常人覺得不可思議的經歷，但另方面卻可能因為小事而頓挫無依，情緒窘迫，無可控制要去做理智知其不可之事，甚至以嗑藥以死求其解脫。

　　當大多數人感覺五月亮得像星，蹦蹦跳跳如小猴的青春時期開始，她便飽受五月死亡黑影威脅，一天到晚要提心吊膽她是否又傷了自己，是否真的會去死，擔心五月碰到足以致死的大小事，是的，純以表象，一般眼光來看，有些事可能真小，小到太宰所說：碰到棉花也會受傷，膽小鬼（弱蟲）有時連幸福也感到畏懼。

　　世人當然可以批評這是軟弱、任性、依賴，但她就是沒法拿這些尺度去裁量五月；一切只是出於本性與極限，她只能試著理解，太宰的譬喻：生出「柔和善良」之心。

　　那依舊還是一個平整乾淨的年代，乾淨得像天永遠是藍的，愛永遠是甜的；世界只是如肉眼所見，領袖就是領袖，百姓就是百姓；男人就是男人，女人就是女人；對就是對，錯就是錯；近朱者赤，近墨者黑，一個好人應該遠離罪行。

　　或者，延續上面提到的太宰詞彙遊戲：罪，如果有罪，世人定義的罪是什麼？要不，也至少告訴我罪的對辭是什麼？法律？不，太宰搖搖頭：世人就是想得這麼簡單，裝腔作勢地生活。那麼，是善嗎？不，善是惡的對辭，不是罪的對辭。「神有撒旦之對，救贖之對是苦惱；愛有恨之對；光有暗之對。善有惡，罪與祈求，罪與悔改，罪與懺悔，罪與……啊，都是同義語。罪的對辭是什麼？」

　　罪，及其對辭。《人間失格》一整個問到底的問號。如果有罪，罪是什麼？因為有罪，所以不值得同情？因為有罪，即便不幸也不得抗議？罪的對辭是什麼？神？有神嗎？還是僅僅只是「世人」？

　　關於同性間的愛戀，她看五月作品《手記》，才知道當年以為五月都想過了，夠勇敢了，沒什麼困擾可以打倒她，沒問題的──這個預設是完全錯了。

　　五月總表現得強韌。寫在《手記》裡那些核心底處的困難，五月到底有沒有講過呢？也許有，一起走路說話的時光，那些細細碎碎，那些糾結摧折的情緒恐怕全都是，只是她沒有聽到深處？不夠感同身受？她不以為人與人的情感需要因為性別而有那麼大的畫地自限，因此五月問題從來沒有驚嚇到她，甚至她有時以為五月放大了情感的痛楚，而把自己陷入痛苦自殘之境。

　　相對五月，她太理性，彼時尚有資本足以撐持理性，相信理性足以梳理悲傷，以為聰明才智會勝過情慾折磨，事實上，應該是她沒能精準測量到五月的恐懼，不知五月內心深淵的恐怖。五月的話：我不要向前走，我不要成為我自己。

　　想來五月是深深被恐懼挾持了。

　　時代安靜得非常自私，沒有人對她伸出援手。

　　彼時和五月讀太宰，總無法同意，膚淺地指責：一個人要死，何必偕人一同？死，不就孤獨至絕，還求作伴？況且是未必相愛、事後連名字都不能牢記的倆人，稱情死太浪漫。

　　後來漸漸了解，這不是重點。重點在於這是怎樣一個被恐懼與不安追殺的人呀。太宰說，零餘者（日蔭者，天光日照，陰影下的人）：人世中悲慘的失敗者與惡德者。

　　零餘者聽了女侍常子對他說：「不要擔心（心配要りません）」，顫抖的心鎮靜下來。

　　零餘者形容常子是那種「冰冷的寒風在身邊吹拂，只有落葉狂舞，已經完全孤立」的人，他把這投射為孤獨而深受打動，在她身邊宛如枯葉在水底找著了可依附的岩石，得以脫離不安和恐懼，得以不再以丑角掩飾自己寡言陰鬱的一面。因而，這個以世人眼光來看，疲倦寒酸的女人，之於太宰是，恩人般的女子。

　　與恩人般的女子一同去投海，未必與愛有關，更多的是彼此的絕望與恥辱。

　　解開腰帶，脫下斗篷。放在同一處，一起跳水。

　　心配要りません。不要擔心。

　　这时五月。她站在影印机前，一页一页翻着五月的笔记本。五月姐姐刚才打过电话说，在路上了。
　　
　　如果不是因为这个约，她此刻应该还是陪伴着父亲，默默翻着报纸，不知道该说什么话。父亲的话愈来愈少了。窗外阴天，梅雨季节。父亲神情不断浮现，每出现一次，她就安抚自己别再去想。她得回神，处理五月的事情。
　　
　　她想在五月姐姐到达之前，把笔记本印完。这些铅笔书写的字迹，也许再过几年就要消逝。几次梦中打开笔记本，一片刷白，使她错愕惊醒，无法判断到底发生过什么。五月活着？抑或已被取消了？那些笔记本在哪里？她浑身冷汗，慢慢拼凑意识，冷静下来，自己跟自己说：答案很清楚，一切就是那样发生过了，笔记本跟着她流转各地，一年一年过去，她愈是埋葬了青春，愈是感到青春灵魂之哀悲未了，人生长夜，很想有个人商量。
　　
　　月前电话，她为之前报上刊出有关五月新闻和姐姐道歉。这则完全没有事先知会的报导，使她尚未准备就绪的心情大乱，同时亦无预警丢了一颗石头，使五月一家想起了五月去世竟然已经十年。
　　
　　啊，姐姐说：好像还是昨天的事情。
　　
　　曾经她们以为十年这个数字够遥远，够客观，够有足够的时间使她们去恢复。孰知倏乎十年，她们不过刚刚喘平了一口气，钟声就响了。
　　
　　
　　
　　她们谈到五月的笔记本，慎重其事，密密麻麻的笔记本。何等丰盈而沉重的逝者记忆。她显得焦虑而犹豫，不知道自己可以决定什么。关于一个早夭的作家，这些笔记本作何意义？她该为谁想得多一些？五月又是怎么想？
　　
　　这些严格工整的铅笔字迹，或将成为她们这一代人最后的手稿。仅仅只是十年，科技与人之关系竟能变化如此之大。如果五月活到今天，她想必继续写着这些笔记，然后，撕下来其中几张，寄给心系的人，也可能将之编织为小说，继续给文学界丢震撼弹。当然，她亦可能已经转成电脑写作，不再需要誊稿，不再需要苦苦等候一封信的抵达，可恨的时差。她想必非常喜欢email，即时沟通的msn，以及永远不换号码的手机……啊，十年之前，这些怎么可能是她们所能料想，然而这些又多么可能给她们带来转机……
　　
　　
　　
　　十年前，和五月讲完最后一通电话，几箱东西辗转交到她手上，她不过是个和五月同样年纪的年轻人，恍恍惚惚放弃学业，恍恍惚惚重拾写作，恍恍惚惚进入就业市场。独自一人。她想起最后一刻挽留五月：这是不行的，她说：我一个人办不到，办不到。
　　
　　不会，你办得到的。五月心思仿佛已在幽冥之境，她重复说了好几次：你办得到的。你办得到的。
　　
　　电话断了。
　　
　　劫后余生。五月遗物和笔记本，某一程度成了她所谓“爱的遗物”。十年来，她有时细细阅读这份礼物，有时又完全将之尘封。这是一份绝对的礼物，可也是一个难解的密码。在记忆缝隙间载浮载沉，五月礼物陪伴着她，有时温柔撑持她走过情绪幽谷，有时却也百般严厉检验着她的余生。
　　
　　她无法确认这是一份个人礼物，抑或一个责任。作为一个挚友，她太熟悉五月写作这些笔记的背影。走向一个作家，五月的志向是明确的，这些笔记，是掏心掏肺的自我反省，是五月孤独的纪录，冰山底层，那庞大的寒冷。然而她不能断定五月自身，以及五月家人，对这些文字发表的想法。她独自反复思量，几近猜疑不安，加以余生种种，不见得容易。她跟姐姐说：我迷失方向了。
　　
　　
　　
　　不忆故无情，如今她非常容易掉泪，却固执努力要做一个无情的人。
　　
　　职场责任，亲人家事，教学写作，一樁一樁，五花大绑无法动弹。这种状况固然方便作个无情的人，但毕竟有些时刻竟因为一点点阳光，一点点音乐，照妖镜般现出千疮百孔的原形，以至于必须把车停在路边，等待心内痛楚的过去。此刻，她在空气停滞的车内，因为报上一则关于小说家前辈走出丧子之痛的报导，按下现实生活的暂停键。
　　
　　报导内容其实很简单，年近七十的小说家热诚不减要开办新杂志。文中同时提及小说家重新布置家居，将儿子房间打通成接待室的事情。报导的语气是明亮的，明亮地引述小说家的谈话，将过度忙碌解释成伤痛的逃避。
　　
　　由于自己的经验，她不确定这则报导是否事前获得小说家了解，或许他只是家常和记者聊到整修的事情，或许他跟她一样在看报的当下起了情感的波澜。报导描述小说家活泼的讲话，让她想起不久前某个早晨，她摆了个三明治在小说家面前，希望他填点肚子再吃药的琐碎记忆。那应该也是小说家所谓过度忙碌的阶段，前一天才挂了急诊，隔早醒来就风尘仆仆赶来再谈戏剧演出之事。小说家一手抓着药袋，一手从提包抽出一篇新的手稿，兴致勃勃跟她说故事的空档，囫囵吞枣把药给吞了下去。
　　
　　去年秋天，她到火车站去接小说家及夫人，南方阳光照在他的黄外套上，气色看来不错。对小说家而言，那应该是他们第一次会面。但事实上，她之前见到小说家，是在另外年轻作家的告别式上。白发父亲来为逝去爱子的挚友送行，这画面，实在叫人不忍。后来相处，她既不提起也没多问，惟某天饭后在夜街纳凉，小说家与夫人问起她的年纪与工作，夫人亲切拉起她的手，关心这一段走出文学青春处理世俗责任的过程。
　　
　　这样很好，师母说：如果可以这样想，很好，很好。
　　
　　师母说到这里转头望向小说家，好似要寻求什么赞同或了解。小说家若无其事点了点头，也许并不是很完全听见了方才的谈话，但注视着车水马龙的眼神看来有点严肃，片刻恍惚。
　　
　　她把话题打住。
　　
　　物伤其类。她不想别人多问，便也知道不打扰别人。与小说家几次谈话，如果她有某些片刻曾经想要说出什么，不过是想诚实以告，事实上是她，是她从小说家身上偷偷汲取着力量。特别是感受到小说家以那种宛若他们已接近时间尾端而年轻人却前景无限的眼光鼓励她多写作的时候，甚者，因为注意到与自己爱子年龄相仿的年轻人的神气而洩漏一丝丝叹息的时候，她很想说：不，真正不完全的是我，真正得到启示的其实是我。她隔着一个距离，看小说家总也不停地写稿，带戏，推活动，对任何朴素善良的人维持着热情的招呼，围坐一起潦草扒便当也无所谓，那样坚毅高热度地活着，使她自惭形秽了。
　　
　　
　　
　　一行人顺着展示方向走。这个介绍台湾文学发展的空间，某个橱窗摆着一本五月的书，横亘百年的文学队伍，五月小小的脸，站上了最后一个位置。
　　
　　姐姐带着老父跑这一趟，说来只为了看自己女儿一面。过了这么多年，五月父亲神情舒缓了些，迎过来满是客气微笑。母亲脚痛，不能多走，坐在长椅上休息，看着孙子跑来跑去。
　　
　　姐姐喊：来，宝贝，来看阿姨的书。
　　
　　三个小孩子靠拢来，在标着性别与情欲的主题柜前，毛毛躁躁的探头。
　　
　　老大是见过阿姨的，现在上中学了，有点过于沉默。老二当初还在肚子里，或许曾经听见阿姨的哭声。至于老三，两岁多还包着尿布的孩子，却能不哭不闹兴致勃勃看完整场电影与表演。
　　
　　就是这一本，姐姐指给小朋友看：这本书是阿姨写的。
　　
　　父亲凑上前去，但隔了点距离，默默羞涩怕被人瞧见。等待小朋友散去走开，她回头望，父亲果然走近橱窗，一个人神情专心地看着。
　　
　　不要打扰他吧，她和姐姐走在前头，继续聊着五月与父亲。如何关于五月的讯息，不管是书还是报纸，买得到的话，他还是会买好几份留着。五月的文学成就，我想他当然是在乎的，可是，实在也有那么多他们不能了解的方式，奇奇怪怪的说法啊……她一边听着姐姐的话，一边回想五月生前在在提及的父亲的温柔人格，父亲的无私支持……
　　
　　此刻，这个丧子之父，出了一趟远门，逐项耐心看着每项文学主体的展览。之于他，这虽非日常熟悉之事，但基于女儿的爱护，他尽力理解着。这样的父亲，就和她自己的父亲一样，是那种被时代压抑着，没有机会琢磨出自己生命光彩的微微的知识分子，他们和善而礼貌，习惯性的低姿态，但到底限沉默而固执。她有意故作无意跟着他，以一种自己都觉得奇妙的情绪，对五月父亲说明墙上所播放那些作家的名字与故事……
　　
　　悲剧人物，是每个时代都有的，坚强的灵魂，也是每个时代都有的。没有人能对悲剧给个清楚的交待。五月之死，戏剧性确立了五月的作家形象，可加在这作家之上的一些限制条件，一些穿凿附会，断章取义，又不时使他们忐忑难安，情何以堪。
　　
　　这么些年，她没有听过五月父亲对任何人发出谴责，他只是接受了一切，背负自杀者的耻辱继续生活，并为自己对别人造成的困扰致歉。不好意思，真是不好意思。没有报复心，就让路过者路过，让一切平静。自家人感叹五月，也只是说：外面讲的什么事情我是不清楚，她自己也没跟我们讲清楚，但实在不管怎么样的情况总是可以商量可以理解，对我们来讲只要她能够还活着什么情况都是可以接受的啊。
　　
　　十年过去，告别的女儿，以另外一种方式出现在他和世人眼前，甚至世人对女儿的诠释远远多过于他这个做父亲的。终于走到陈列百位作家长廊的尾端，小朋友又被姐姐喊拢来，懵懵懂懂的感情，总是羞涩着的父亲，这时倒是毫不闪躲站在那小小一方相片前，慎重端详。
　　
　　再怎么时过境迁，强作欢乐之间，毕竟还是有了那么片刻的寂静。
　　
　　
　　
　　她们几次谈到五月的可惜。可惜她连一篇自己的书评都来不及看见。如果她知道，姐姐说：那些折磨她的，在今天，根本都不是问题。如果五月还活着，如果五月还活着，这个假设句，像是一篇一篇小说的开头，他们这个时代的呼声。如果五月还活着，她可能未必今天这样知名，但却也可能写得更多，触及更多的主题。如果五月还活着，她可能为后来不断又不断的自杀事件黯然神伤，然而也有可能，后来的自杀一件一件都不会发生。如果五月还活着，又或者，一九九五年，如果林燿德还活着，如果张爱玲还活着，是不是之后一连串的事情都不会发生……？
　　
　　这些臆想显然过于甜美了。事实上，十年前的死亡不过是个开端，一切可能只是常态运转而已。如果五月还活着，应该和她一样发了白发，出席着无常的告别式。如果五月还活着，她或安身立命，或更能忍受孤独。如果五月还活着，她将打一通手机给她。如果五月还活着，她会与她分担父亲病老的忧惧，玩笑也好，语重深长也好，要她更大步伐往文学走去，——
　　
　　相对于五月抛下父亲，以死亡换来了戏剧性的声名，向来回避文学道路的她，如今却痛感来不及让父亲看到自己的成就。她们怎么会以为文学如此而已？怎么会以为父亲们有比自己更多的能量去承受生命的磨难？雨愈下愈大，她一叠一叠收好五月的笔记本，作品手稿，五月逝者，时时映照她这幸存者当下的面貌，她在老去，愈来愈频繁的生离死别，十年变化，遗物相对，五月是否还能辨识出她？而她又是否为余生丧失了自己的面貌？
　　
　　
　　
　　姐姐理解地带走了几本笔记，她这座孤独的岛屿仿佛有人上了岸。
　　
　　她想给小说家写一封信，关于那则报导，关于打通的房间，关于五月，关于父亲。
　　
　　她想开始整理，把没有写成的小说写下去，把已经写成的文字集起来，她这个从不与人分享写作的人啊，微微动了念头收集自己的文章，包括一些消息与评论，影印起来给父亲，看一会儿也好。
　　
　　
　　
　　关于五月，意识底层到底是什么样的景观，十年来，她不能看得明白。曾经她以为自己会变得强韧，出于报复也好，愤怒也好，咬牙切齿说人生是要对抗下去的。可毕竟悲痛也是一种激情，星火烧尽，就灼痛地熄灭了，接而笼罩的是更大的黑暗。五月记忆，锁入一个透明密封罐，清楚凝视着彼此，却道不出任何感觉。他人径直说出五月名字，她若非隔阂毫无反应，便是措手不及，心底敲响一座大钟。直至前两三年，她去了欧洲，有意无意走过五月生活的地方。在那里，初次提起五月，最后的自杀记忆。
　　
　　我办不到，办不到。
　　
　　你办得到的。你办得到的。
　　
　　坐在桌子对面的友人惊醒她，敲着水杯问：你不生气吗？你不生气吗？
　　
　　她被问傻了。
　　
　　
　　
　　天黑了，老人小孩都累了。她与姐姐在走廊谈论未来的事。姐姐生命有一种天然的韧性，这些年又因为做了母亲更显坚强，可有些细节亦残余着小女孩的气味，就像非常多年以前五月所跟她形容的一样，任性，直率，抿着嘴角说出甜蜜的话。
　　
　　湿嗒嗒的雨，模糊的交通视线，说来是令人丧气的。但姐姐依旧兴致地领着大家去吃饭。路不好走，幸得到了餐厅，食物还算动人。小孩吃饱再度活泼欢喜起来，跑来跑去说着几岁几年级。她坐在五月父亲对面，慢慢听他说年老齿摇，慢慢等他吃完那一碗面。
　　
　　这些景象，说来和她与五月的情谊毫无关系，但又似乎没有任何违背。一切平常。少者怀之，老者安之。她们还在路上。五月去了遥远的地方。

晴天或雨天，早晨或深夜，從後陽台，從房內的窗，我看見屋後的半屏山。山腳下是縱貫鐵道，從破曉到子夜，火車南來北送，時不時要拉幾聲長喇叭。

附近殘存空地，種著低矮的果樹，幾隻野狗於晚餐或深夜，也總要為搶奪食物地盤，在這裡鬥上幾回合。

好幾年來，我寄居於大城市的邊陲。

這些地方並不美麗也不詩意，多的是為生活拖勞役的人們，他們是微小的中產階級，也有分崩離析、失業無措的家庭。我住上一兩年，搬走時，總差不多是城市擴張計畫延展到那地方的時候。好比住新店時，搭公車到敦化南路上班，經常塞上個把鐘點，搬走後，捷運通車，碧潭橋上的車陣長龍已不復見。

初到高雄，住愛河上游，有溝無水，好不死寂。一搬走，果不期然，河堤整治美化，引來觀光人潮，以前常去購物用餐的幾條街，現即使不是週末假日，也很難找到車位。第二住處愈發邊陲，當初依址尋覓到此，人煙荒遠，水泥廢墟，彷彿連空氣都是毒害的。住進來以後，高鐵工事終日無歇，很是疲勞，不過，夜裡倒是安靜，半屏山的荒蕪反倒留住了山頭滿片夜空，晴夜幾點星光，讓人錯以為漂近了台東的山邊。

就在我很習慣開車進城的時候，路途上漸發現那些熟悉的連鎖超市、藥局、餐廳、診所、房地產，雨後春筍地，朝我居住地區蔓生過來。高鐵通車日近，那個不知道有什麼理由必須蓋得如此龐大的高鐵左營站，像隻巨獸引來了寄生的蟲蠅，使這整區開始聲響沸騰。嶄新傲氣的橘白色列車蓄勢待發地停在軌道上，就連夜間也打燈使它宛如櫥窗裡的高級玩具模型。

襯托著這一片新興景象，是那原本被認為已經廢死去的半屏山。這座山，在過去，一邊是石油，一邊是水泥，兩項偉大基礎產業，將它剝削得徹底，約十年前禁採水泥，才略得休養生息。近年，山土復育漸見成果，從我住處望去的這一面，雖然還蹲伏著那些怪異如同外星基地的水泥廠舍，但過去炸山開礦所留下的醜陋傷口，一天一天，一季一季，被柔軟而綿密的草地所覆蓋，小小的山頭，低低的樹草，也許，再過幾年，可以有一片森林吧。

從來沒有想過，我會在這樣的光景，日復一日看著半屏山的復育。很多很多年前，我想必也是一個搭著火車經過，被這片醜陋怪異的山勢，驚嚇得說不出話來的孩子。人生是不可算計的，我沒想過到高雄來，現在卻在這裡；以為天長地久的依靠，原來隨時可以被取走。許多心事無從打發的日子，我趴在後陽台，看眼前這座被摧殘至極，滿目瘡痍的山，感到往事掠過。這座小山，像一個陌生人的慈悲，對我顯現著復育的可能，總也有那麼突如其來的幾天，幾部怪手或卡車，低調駛進水泥廠，拆毀、載走那些傷害的證據。

再不多久，我將離開這片半屏山，但我會記住它，這段孤獨而安靜的過程。哪天，再從這個地方經過，健忘的人會渾然不覺，宛如傷害從來沒有發生過，休假人潮將沿著登山步道將它走遍，兜售新鮮菱角的小販亦會將它四處包圍。

我的寫作經歷如果從第一篇作品開始算的話是很久了，不過我中間有過幾年的停頓，停頓的一個客觀原因是因為去唸書，然後一個主觀原因主要是我在想，要不要繼續寫東西這件事情。

創作和發表，還有在職業身分上成為一個作家，這幾個問題好像不太一樣，因為後面這兩件事情，也就是說發表或者是你在職業上選擇當一個所謂的作家，這二件事情可能比較複雜一點。以作家身分去介紹自己，跟別人介紹自己或者對自己認識自己，其實我大概都沒有過這樣的經驗，因為這件事情本身他就是比較隱諱的，所以你不可能去想好一段說辭，然後來介紹你這個部份的自己。所以基本上好像目前為止，我沒有過這樣的經驗。那如果在這樣的場合裡面，一定要談我自己，對我自己的一些認識的話，我可能比較年輕的時候寫了一些東西，因此在裡面找到了一種方式，然後這個方式是我覺得跟我自己相處，或者是我去紀錄我認識世界的方式，這源起應該是說是一個外力使然，而不是說我曾經很具體的知道自己是要寫作的。所以真正能很具體的談到寫作，大概是這幾年的事情。我在書裡面有提過，我總覺得它對我來講是一個潘朵拉的盒子，它一開起來就關不上去了，但是那個盒子裡面，我們在引用所謂「潘朵拉盒子」的時候，基本上指的就是這個盒子裡面的東西，可能不是太幸福太美好的，但是它關不回去了。

在成長的時期裡面，我所最敏感的媒介可能是繪畫，比如說一個人坐在你的面前，你要如何的去畫他，這個問題就好像說有一個主題，有一堆材料在你面前，你要如何的去寫他。但是我那個時候，可能我的思維方式比較準確的貼在那個畫上，我會覺得像「霧中風景」那樣的一個畫面，比如說他坐下來讓她幫他畫像的那幾個對話，對我來講就是很重要的一個紀錄。

在那個時期的階段裡面，就是說你要去畫什麼，你要去畫「真實」，可是真實聽起來像陳腔濫調，但是要看你對真實的定義是什麼。妳感受到的東西很多，然後你想要表達的東西也很多，但是當你沒有辦法適當的去表達它的時候，對一個年輕的心靈來講，是一個羈擾的痛苦，我覺得是那個表達，跟你內心所感受到要表達的慾望，跟你所能夠找到的一個合理的、足以與別人溝通的一個表達的方式，跟能力之間的一個平衡的問題。

很顯然的，我在年輕的時候這個平衡是很不穩定的，甚至它是相互衝突的關係。如果說困惑這個東西，年輕時候的困惑就是霧中風景的這片霧的話，那可能我們花了那麼多時間所想要去撥開的，所想要去看見的，就是說這個霧散掉妳可以看看眼前的景象到底是什麼？未來的景象到底是什麼？然後這條路要帶你去的地方到底是哪裡？妳慢慢覺得會有一些新的變化產生，就是說，好像你也不一定希望這片霧一定要散去，或者也許這片霧就是真實，這片霧它一直就在這裡，而沒有散不散去的道理。可能這麼多年過去，慢慢覺得眼前是什麼景象，可能也不是那麼重要，今天想起來有點未免是孤注一擲的。

回來寫東西，很單純的只是回來寫東西這樣一個想法，既然跑出來的話，那其實你就得接受如果這片霧不散，或者這片霧散開，它沒有你所期待的任何事物，這也是你要接受的東西，這也是你要接受的一個方向跟未來，所以才會有那樣的一個句子吧，「無人的風景」。

在日本那幾年，我確實是有一點點像小說中的故事一般，對文字有一點點抗拒的階段，特別是文學性的東西。這跟我前一個階段，就是中斷寫作，然後不再試著寫作，轉而去唸書的一個階段是相連接的。我自己生活所在的那個空間感，跟「說命人」這個小說剛開場的那個基調是相近的，但是我可能在這一篇小說裡面去反省了，去檢討了我自己幾年來對文字的態度。

我很喜歡散步，散步其實它對我來講只是一個很簡單出走的方式，一般在文學上大家比較常見的印象是流浪或者是旅行，可能我把它降到一個比較日常的層次，它對於一個個人空間的保持，可能是很重要的一個，我們可以說它是一個儀式好了。如果大家注意到「散步」這樣一個抒情性的字眼的時候，大家到底是注意到一個畫面裡面一個人與於獨行的散步的景象呢？還是散步的時刻裡面人所應該要去進行的一個內心活動？在台灣我覺得一個個人思索不受打擾的空間，應該大部分還是在書房，或者是在自己的空間裡，在台北甚至在咖啡館都是非常大眾化，都是會受打擾的空間。所以我必須承認說，我回來台灣的這幾年裡面，可以說是幾乎不散步。

談到我的新作品「島」，我覺得我早期的作品跟我自己的連結性會比較弱，或者是說它就是一個純粹的所謂的寫作投稿，一個公開的作品，我們就是去虛構一個故事，或者大家可能讀了會若有所感的故事，可能就是做一件還不錯的衣服，把它做起來。我出生、成長在台南，我現在依然有那種我算不上一個台南人的那種想法，當我這樣說的時候，不是說我不想當一個台南人，但是我覺得我可能要回頭去看我在台南度過的那段歲月。一般提到台南的時候，大家就是在憑弔它的過去，可是我比較想看他的過去是怎麼存在？現在台南人到底有沒有變？或者台南到底變成什麼樣子？我其實只是想是著去寫，或者去回憶住在這裡的生活，我之前在這裡成長的日子，以及此後我將在住在這裡的生活。應該是說我現在換了一個時空，在這個時空下繼續去寫東西，我在想這個時空它自然會找到一個方式進到作品裡面吧。可能這個關心會隨著我人在台南這個時空，而更具體更容易掌握到比較真實的材料吧。我也希望這種真實就會帶出一個比較好的，比較不一樣的台南印象。

我在寫「島」的那篇裡面，寫到說這片土地浮湧出來的時候，其實我自己是蠻驚訝的，因為我們好像就是一直在找一個東西，往一個古蹟裡不斷不斷的去找，想要從裡面找出一個脈絡，自己的歷史、自己的身世，然後一些人的關係，就是不斷去找。可是，事實上今天你來到這裡找，你不見得找的到，然後在這個找的過程裡面，你可能失去信心。其實那個小說在寫一個找的過程，它一直找一直找，找到第九天，然後再找到這個西區來，再往下走其實就已經出海，就已經沒有線索再找了，所以她本來想放棄，然後突然有一大片土地浮湧出來這樣，這也許是一個願望吧，在找不到的盡頭，可以給她一個願望，或者給她一個新的線索。因為事實上她來到那一片可以聯繫另一個土地的去向，事實上她也要猶豫。所以其實那篇小說，我也不能夠說我很確定地形成了什麼觀點，但是可能那個追尋的過程，我覺得現代對我們來講是有意義的吧，也許應該試著去找一下，而不要很快的陷入一個定見裡面。

我自己在現在這個階段，再回來台南的這個時空裡面，其實多多少少也有這樣的意義在，我可能很理所當然的在這裡生活了很久，然後也自以為是的離開了很久，現在也許是回來看看這裡面到底是有什麼東西，或者我自己用我自己的方式找一找，台南到底有什麼東西是值得寫的，或者它現在的樣子到底是什麼樣子，我覺得我也許可以自己回來看一看。

我們約好在信義路與復興南路口，十幾年前，那裡開著一間彼時尚不十分常見的二十四小時不打烊超級市場，即便深夜，也有成排成櫃的豐沛食物，熱鬧音樂。隔鄰地下室是一間廣收國外電影，在八○年代末期知青圈子極為有名的影碟中心。C來了，領我走下樓梯，已是深夜時分，室內如巢穴般棲息著不少邊幅不修的疲倦臉孔，這兒同樣二十四小時不打烊，C是這裡的常客，熱烈掛在她嘴邊的幾部電影多半出自此處。
　　　　
我們沒有花時間挑片，C約我來之前便說好了來看Betty Blue，憂鬱貝蒂。我毫無概念，從名字也摸不著頭緒。服務生領著我們到房間裡去，手腳俐落弄好了設備，才帶上門，影片一開場便赤裸裸湧上一場性愛。記憶裡，可能是還在摸索位置，也可能是還好奇著週遭的氣氛，待回神看到螢幕已然歡愛呻吟之際，臉上不免湧上尷尬神情，好似荒唐闖進他人房間，目睹了不該看的畫面。
　　　　
那份尷尬狼狽，今天想起來，多少反映了八○年代末期的拘謹氣氛；那是四年級前輩感嘆「美好而秩序」的年代的最後關口，我與C，前腳雖已興奮踩進未來的九○年代，但後腳不免還沾黏著啟蒙的八○年代習氣……，因而，那樣一場赤裸，直接，毫不遮掩，長達五分鐘的性愛開端，在我們扭捏望著的同時，不留餘地揭開了我們心中某些區域，使人臉上不禁燒紅起來。那五分鐘內，我沒有轉頭去看C，電視螢幕裡映現的她的臉，模糊而看不清表情，我不知道當下她想些什麼，我甚至猜疑C是否已經看過這部片子，那麼，今日約我來看又是為何呢？我想著這些，臉紅心跳中有了一絲尷尬，進而又湧上了一點悲哀。在C與我之間，到底是怎樣的一種情感呢？這是那個年代無法回答的問題。我們一起端坐著，觀看眼前赤裸的異性交歡，理所當然的傲慢與快樂。C不發一語，連一句輕鬆調笑都沒有，她平常可能會這麼做的，為什麼此刻她不呢？我坐立難安，不知自己該表示什麼。現實也許只是五分鐘的僵局，在記憶裡卻顯得極端漫長。
　　　　
這之後所發生的故事，相對則以極快的速度進行了。憂鬱貝蒂在記憶裡留下了鮮明的黃與藍，洋溢青春的情調，從頭到尾沒有一句聽不懂的對白，沒有一個弄不清的時序，可是，影片終場，我們卻心事重重。我與C走出那間蒼白而又激情的影碟中心，走上通往八○年代終點的夜涼馬路。我不記得那一夜後來我們說了什麼，也不清楚那一夜的憂鬱貝蒂，在我們兩人的歷史裡刻下了什麼。很長一段時間，我甚至不明白憂鬱貝蒂是怎樣的一部片子，不明白貝蒂如此率性何以仍感到憂鬱，不明白她說生命老是在阻擋我是什麼意思，不明白一個人如何能夠挖掉自己的眼睛……
　　　　
我與C疏遠了
　　　　
太多事不明白，自然也不足以明白當年的C。燒得燙手，重得像鉛的C。她在桌前一寫好幾個鐘點，一談起喜愛的書與電影便激動莫名。她翻開託朋友出國買來的雜誌，指給我看：這是村上春樹，這是太宰治，這是三島由紀夫。她正反覆讀著剛出版的《挪威的森林》，我無動於衷，只答應她總有一天我會看。村上春樹後來徹徹底底暢銷了，我卻始終沒讀《挪威的森林》。我在拒絕什麼？一整個時代的流行？還是僅僅關於C的感情？C與她的一幫朋友，在夜闇酒館裡且歌且哭，每個時代都必然有過的意氣風發、挫敗孤獨，他們所擁護的人與書，理論與電影，日後或許成為某一類靈魂的認證標記，可我卻無動於衷；在隱隱然觸著了C的神秘熱情之際，我同時敏感到了熱情之中所往往挾帶之不可言說的危險痛苦──，倘若我們只能對坐無語，那麼，目睹C宛如一隻美麗驕傲的孔雀，跳著那些炫目的知識之舞啊，徒然使人傷感，身外之物。
　　　　
我與C後來疏遠了。我們之間，還需要很多很多的時間，來等待簾幕一重一重揭開。記憶裡有了一段極端安靜的時光。諸多聯繫C的符碼，匿步走進我的生活。我密釀在文字與影像的大酒缸裡，在新生南路台大對面，某些現在已毫無痕跡可辨識的密閉空間裡，拿著以月計費的票根，一小時又一小時，一天又一天，獨自關在隔音棉板分割的小房間裡，K書般看盡了柏格曼，塔可夫斯基，楚浮，高達，維斯康提，小津安二郎，這些人名成為我九○年代開頭的背景。悲苦黯淡的小人物，縫隙裡如蟻如狗的生存與交歡，安靜悠長如逝去之夢的人間小曲，罪惡與良心的大眾世相；無論絕美驚心也好，獎善懲惡也好，老舊的黑白畫面總是危顫顫在小電視螢幕裡變換著，好像隨時都可能燒壞，連配音也是沙啞不清的。離開小房間之際，我通常已兩眼紅澀，說不上來有什麼重要理由非這樣繼續看下去不可。然而明天，後天，我還是會來到同樣的小房間，在那個密閉場域，繼續孤獨地觀看那些伸出手去絕對觸不著，可心靈卻為之激動混亂的各種人生，直到螢幕乾澀打出了FoIon，我起身離開，靈魂軀體皆疲憊不堪地走上大街，目睹九○年代的火種正逐漸地，逐漸地翻燒起來。
　　　　
卑微而瘋狂的愛情。
　　　　
日後我很少再想起憂鬱貝蒂，直到某個星期天早晨，在異國跳蚤市場，努力搜尋廉價家具的同時，無意看到一張面熟如故人的臉，那是憂鬱貝蒂，手托下巴在黃與藍的天際線下瞪著我。一張標著三十七點二度C的二手CD。我買下了它，在租來的狹小房間裡重複播放了好幾年。三十七點二度C，比體溫高一點的，激情。我在腦中搜尋記憶，那漫長的五分鐘，以及其後的故事：一個來路不明的女子，與，一個無法面對現實的海邊油漆工的，愛情。這樣的廣告文案：「絕對心痛的愛情，碰上一次就完了。」不免使我驚動。同時，我發現它還有另一個名字：「巴黎野玫瑰」。時移事往，聽起來像另一部不相干的電影，憂鬱轉成了一個野字。我想起與C的約定，決定為她來讀一讀《挪威的森林》，然而，只在第一章，我的眼光便停住了。渡邊對直子說：你要學著放鬆，把力量從肩膀鬆開，鬆開，你懂嗎？直子搖頭，給他一個固執而悽慘的笑容：不行，這樣一鬆開的話，我整個人恐怕就要散掉了。
　　　　
與C重逢的時候，我並沒有告訴她，我為她讀了村上春樹。C對我的生活很有意見，不談戀愛，不搞聯誼，和外界互動微乎其微。碰到過不去的時候怎麼辦呢？她宛若已經非常嫻熟於生存技巧似地，說得非常溫和。在她開出來的一大堆生存藥方裡，包括具體而即時逼迫我去買了一部錄影機。我們在人聲鼎沸的電器大賣場花了許多時間選購機器，然後彷彿回到當年信義路與復興南路口，在二十四小時不打烊的百事達錄影帶出租店一邊談話一邊挑選片子。已然消瘦衰微的C說起每部影片的故事，口吻比我們天真青春的時代還要熱烈，還要虔誠。我開始感到不安。但一切都太遲了。我們一同重看了「雙面維若妮卡」、「新橋戀人」：一個卑微而癲狂的愛情，比多年之前的憂鬱貝蒂，更使我感到殘酷，不明白。
　　　　
最後留下來的只是那台錄影機。我把C挑了而來不及看的片子給一部一部看完，接著，撈著她遺留的訊息，或者只是我隱約摸出來的路數，三天兩頭進攻百事達。百事達先生不僅記住了我這外國人的臉孔，且十分友善地問：你的朋友呢？我禮貌而微笑回答：她先走了。
　　　　
流浪者之歌，碧海藍天，直到世界末日，各式各樣終將隨時間淡老而去的片名，重複又重複刷洗著我鄰近世紀末的日子，自毀般的心情，我誓言，總有一天，我將對這些殘酷而媚惑的事物失去所有感覺，屆時，我將不再為任何痛苦動容。我固執地挑戰著，兩眼乾澀無感，直至某日，遭遇一支稱為「夜夜夜狂」（LesNuits Fauves）的片子，片名煽情至此，教人忍不住輕蔑，孰料悲劇無孔不入，一夕我竟淚流滿面。

　　初冬,寒气教人还不太习惯,所以感到分外地冷。外头天色阴沉沉的,林桑从衣箱里找出厚外套,这是今年第一次穿它,但衣服是早已穿旧了。在海外那几年,冬温低得吓人,即便多么穷的学生,也得常备几件厚衣。此刻上身这件,犹记是在星期天跳蚤市场上买来的,那时他和阿君,简单娱乐就是去逛跳蚤市场,少少钱换一整天乐趣。阿君挑东西眼光不知该说怪还是独特,总能从一堆毫不起眼的货色里翻找出特别的东西,且那价格通常低廉得很,仿佛除了阿君没有人会去争抢。那些奇奇怪怪的小配件、布料、提包、装饰品,他总不能同意多么好看,但等阿君把它们装饰在屋里或在身上穿搭起来,却有了一股不俗的味道。阿君向来有她自己鲜明的风格,对比突兀而不讲章法,但爱上的人就会很爱,好些朋友就说阿君光凭这跳蚤市场的捞货技巧,就足以回台湾开一家二手精品店转手赚钱,饿不死的。

　　饿不死,这的确是阿君的本事。阿君也常不在乎地调侃自己是草根命,丢到哪里长哪里,怎么样的环境都可以活下去;不像他,阿舍命,嘴上说要吃苦毕竟是挺不住的。他对着镜子把外套扣子一颗一颗扣好,旧衣服旧岁月,过往的经济生活,好像从来没有光彩过,海外那些年更是克难得紧,然而问题并不在穷,这点小事根本打倒不了阿君,她是那种只有百元日币也可以把日子过下去的人,真正使她投降的是他的心。他总想从与阿君的共同生活里逃离,然而眼前生活不尽满意,推翻又要怎么办呢?他嘴巴上说得好听,认为自己随便卷几个纸箱过流浪汉生活也是可以的,事实上,他从来没有真正跨出一步。他恼恨自己,偏偏人对自己的恼恨是最难以承认的,于是便把气全推到阿君身上,认为这么多年就是阿君绊住了他,而他从来没有爱过阿君。

　　他对阿君从来没有承认过,若非旅居海外需要,他们之间恐怕是连结婚登记也不会去做的。在一起那么多年,阿君没要过什么,他也不觉得有什么不对或愧疚。阿君惟一有过的念头只是小孩,然而那些年他的心已经跑得那样远,时不时总在准备哪一刻就要跟阿君提分手,怎么可能再有小孩?泥沼般的婚姻生活,他以为自己欠缺的是真正的爱情、够残忍的心,如此才能让他有所动力来处理与阿君的关系。外遇就是这样来的。谁知一次、两次他还是拖拖拉拉吞吞吐吐,阿君也不复往日理性,两人要嘛完全装死不谈,要嘛闹到歇斯底里,捶胸顿足追不回重点在哪里。他们在这样的关系里惊觉彼此已经变得这样多,不再是当年那对率性革命的情侣,%面对输赢竟然放不开手,对人生残局踌躇恐惧起来。

　　两人真正签字离婚,已经不干任何第三者的事。在好几次闹到大打出手、彼此无比愤恨计较之后,混乱满屋,寂静满屋,他看阿君背影,知道她要放了,两人毕竟走不下去了。不久之后,阿君便回台湾,他以为两人情分终于到了尽头。他安慰自己,尽头是好的,在此分道扬镳,各自展开新人生。

　　没想到,事情完全不是那样。

　　他从山坡居处走下来,穿过捷运地下道,来到铁轨对岸的医院。这一带去日本前他熟得很,但捷运通车后很多地景都改变了。他在医院入口处按了按干洗剂,抹了抹手,准备进入一个与外头两相隔离、截然不同的世界。大厅有人围聚说话,说不多久便哭了起来,然后是止不住的激动呐喊。路过的林桑偷偷瞄了几眼,尽量不流露出好奇神情。生老病死,过往他总习惯避开,告别式的凄凉,医院里疾病折磨的场景,推给阿君代为处理,他能逃则逃,现在,他逃不掉了。

　　电梯上到六楼,一开门就见阿君的看护正在走廊上和人聊天。他轻手轻脚走进病房,阿君睡着了,她体力愈来愈差了。床边小桌搁着写字板,上头阿君字迹纤弱记满她提过的朋友名单。到这地步了,阿君还是什么都自己来,在纸上毫不避讳地交代着身后事,细节诸如家里健身器材、大型家电可分发给谁,工作保险事务问谁,谁会来帮忙清空房子,遗孤爱猫又要托谁,若不就范可找附近哪家动物医院来打麻醉针等等。

　　上头没有他的名字,阿君对他只有口头交代,安抚他说诸事皆已安排妥当,就差时候到了得有个人来打个电话通知大家,而他,就是那个负责通知的人。

　　他有过抗拒,哪来一个责任框架又从天而降砸在他头上?他不是已经和阿君离婚了吗?为什么又是他?

　　实在做梦也没想到,甚少闹病的阿君一病就这么重。当阿君第一次告诉他时,他不以为意,他早已习惯阿君自己料理自己,待至后来回台,见阿君头发掉光,才不免惊惶起来,慌慌张张问了病情。彼时阿君已动完大刀,化疗也告一段落,坐在周末咖啡厅里,看得出来曾特意打扮,花头巾,披披挂挂地戴着,脸上甚至上了淡妆。她老在他面前故作无事,一整个下午尽是口气乐观,说自己怎样抗癌,吃喝讲究,谁又不吝惜给她送营养品,一生时光大约现在最是奢侈云云。阿君深信意志力将会战胜病魔,说自己身体感觉不坏,再休养一两个月,便要回去上班。

　　后来果真这样过了一段日子。其间,他回来几次没地方住,借住阿君家也是有的。那是藏身于传统菜市之间的租处,他跟着阿君在气味混杂的巷弄里走得纳闷,却见阿君跟商贩说笑招呼,踏进一间家庭美发,屋后小楼梯爬上二楼,竟有两间房布置得色彩缤纷。他很意外,和阿君在一起那么多年,没想过阿君生活竟也需要这么多东西;以前他们住屋堆的尽是他的书与收藏,阿君个人拥有的不过简单几叠衣物,现在,放眼望去,完全是女性娇嫩的布置,除了那些砸下重金的抗癌设备:碱性水过滤器、空气滤净机、健身器材之外,花饰、画架、瓶瓶罐罐、杯碗瓢盆、绒毛玩具、拼布抱枕等小物件亦不缺少。窝在阿君丢给他的懒骨头里,他想,阿君是在过另一种生活了,凭她的本事,她可以很容易过得很好,如果她不生病的话;阿君应该觉得跟他离婚是对的,因为她要精彩人生并不难,如果她不生病的话……

　　可是,现在,她病了。那几回合的相处,阿君的话里偶尔会泄漏一些怨哀,想要依靠,使他不知所措。他忽然发现,他没有太多照顾阿君的经验,癌或死这些字眼他也觉得负担不了。他想逃。他跟阿君坦白:我不知道怎么处理。阿君看他几眼,默默收话不再讲下去。总是如此,他不知道怎么办便说实话,两手一摊说实话,阿君会放过他、原谅他。

　　后来,他回台湾便改找弟弟找朋友,没再住过阿君那里,偶尔几通电话问问病情。离日回台,搞得灰头土脸,上百箱书耗神费金,工作又没他想象的容易,只能靠着以前朋友的关系,这里接接计划,那里做做顾问,看似风光,头衔好听,但总没个定数。这些生活里,他单身一人到处栖息停泊,他想他跟阿君毕竟离婚了,就各走各的吧。若非阿君情况后来恶化,他是没准备要和阿君再次恢复成这种关系的。

　　夏天,阿君的癌往腹部、肝脏扩散。秋天再度入院。这回不开刀了,阿君托人捎来消息,简短、明白地说:时日不多,希望见上一见。

　　这消息不能说有多意外,一盘棋局搁久了,最后几步终要点名到他。他想逃,却无所遁逃。他说不出这不关他的事,也不能耍赖说这不是他的局。呆着脑袋到医院,他期待阿君会告诉他怎么办,孰料阿君跟他一样无所遁逃地垮下去了,她躺在病床上,虚弱、安静,看不出想些什么,惟朋友来访,谈及生死后事种种,才泄漏那么几丝情绪。好比前两天跟他一起来的汪明才,以前留学时代的朋友,离开时,从口袋里掏出红包往阿君手中塞。

　　“我不需要钱。”阿君推回去,“你倒说说看,钱现在对我有什么用处?”

　　她没有怒气,也没有怨意,只是苦笑说出了事实,让人不禁要为自己的举动惭愧起来。汪明才腼腆地应答几句,没再硬推,叹口气:“你要想开点。”

　　“我是想开了,总归早晚要走的路。倒是你们也要想得开,你们想得开,我才好走得开。”

　　他听出一丝哽咽。他抬头看阿君,她要走了?她准备好了,那他呢?他打开报纸,心内陌生得仿佛有扇打不开的门。有时候他不明白自己是真准备好了,还是根本还没进入状况?眼前情景仿若阿君只是生了个小病,他煞有介事来演一演探病的情景,或者,如果他不转头看阿君那病瘦的脸,坐在这个房间里也好像只是跟阿君在过家常生活,报纸里那些消息很快可以引他读得兴味盎然:“选举倒数不到百日,随处可见他熟悉的名字与言论,那是他们过去党外岁月的成果,阿君和他共同的回忆,如果他们俩还能一起跟人说点什么兴致勃勃的往事,大约就是那段时期吧,那包含了他和阿君的患难生活,以及那些如今成为台面人物的点点滴滴……

　　阿君在这个时候张开眼睛。他收起报纸,问问早上情况,说点外头天气,两人之间其实没什么话。他把看护没关上的电视调回正常音量,像以前那样佯装自己自在得很,时不时还对选举动态加上几句评论。播到那几则派系庆生新闻,他起兴致转头要叫阿君,但她低垂着眼,一种他不敢猜测她在想些什么的枯萎神情。他独自回味那些已经广为流传的旧照片,十来年前的大象和一帮朋友对比今日竟然显得那样稚嫩,在一幕稍纵即逝的静坐画面中,他甚至看到人群缝隙里的青春阿君……

　　阿君生病的消息一传开,多位朋友包括大象二话不说就开了支票,这是交情,但又有点令人感慨。前几天阿君幽幽地说:“大象要送阿平去美国念书了。”阿平是他和阿君看着长大的小男孩,阿君对待阿平甚至有几分情人意味。这个有着白皙脸庞、活泼、敏感的孩子,当年无论抗议、演讲、行军,跟着爸妈无役不与,在那些充斥愤怒与委屈的场合,童言童语若非教人开心就是让人心碎。如今,阿平十六岁了,有他自己的世界可闯,与他和阿君早已不复往昔亲密甜腻。而大人之间也同样随着时空互起变化,虽然都还是朋友,但随着今昔身份、权力之不同,碰到的问题及其解决方法也跟着不同了:以前没钱,现在有钱;以前有空,现在没空;以前做什么都一票人伙在一起,现在阿君形单影只进出医院,大家都忙,没空来看她,花倒是送了一堆;以前默默无闻的朋友,现在人尽皆知,花卡署名搞得护士和看护工都紧张起来,本以为阿君是毫无家族支撑的单薄女子,这下子竟有名人政要送花,那天老胡匆匆来探,还有人挤来要签名,搞得看护也惊奇了,逢人就要虚荣两句。

　　联系他与阿君的过去,很容易可以做出一份现今政坛点将录,其中有些仍是好友,有些则不然了。偶尔他也有所愤恨,感叹人心冷暖,听他们发表意见,有些依然敲痛心中角落,但有些已经不对劲了。他痛心于以前付出的如今滥用糟蹋至此,且竟有那么些不知哪里冒出来的小角色、墙头草、见风转舵者,以及令他难以置信之聪明伶俐、敢吃敢拿的政治金童;他不知道事情怎会变成这样,选择不是愈来愈多,而是几近没有选项,冲突非但没有化解,且是更草莽地对立;他放任自己心情低落,纵还有三两朋友说得上话,但彼此好有默契地闷嘴不谈,失望透顶惟叹口气罢了。

　　紧接着一场决战即将再来,他们会不会再胜?他看着新闻,不知道自己应该怎么抉择。他依旧不认为自己过往那样相信是错了;他也知道自己不免还是会基于旧情谊而替老朋友找借口;他不希望他们输,但他们赢他似乎也不感到多么高兴了。他看着枯萎的阿君,现在的她很少评论什么,依她的时间演算法,政治输或赢皆影响不了她,因为她是不可能活到答案揭晓的。

　　就在阿君昏昏沉沉即将睡着的时候,门口有人探脸,竟是多年不见的安。海外那几年,安在他家搭饭过一阵子,算是很熟悉他与阿君的人,但他简短打个招呼便让身出去;这阵子,他实在被阿君一帮女朋友骂到怕,在她们的审判下,阿君的病全是他害的。他待在走廊尽头躲避安,没想安从病房出来却主动找到他,邀去楼下咖啡吧坐坐。安一开口便问他现在做些什么,这当然是样板问题,他随便讲点兼课的事,闪过那些囤积在心里其实非常想要倾倒出来的埋怨与求援,这些年,他学会不要轻易说出真心话,也不希望别人莫名其妙说起真心话来。

　　眼前的安看起来气色不错,脸上的微笑是稳定而不虚伪的。这很好,她是怎么办到的?她曾是那么迷惘的一个小女生,叨叨絮絮在电车里、在餐桌上说个没完,对自己要过什么样的人生举棋不定。见他意兴阑珊熬着学位,安也劝过他不如换跑道重新开始。他当她小孩子说大话,他毕竟不是安的年纪,且他当初带着阿君赴日本,何尝不是以为自己正要转换跑道重新开始?他酸溜溜说重新开始谈何容易:“你有后援又年轻,当然可以重新开始,我这可是形势已定,头栽进去洗一半了,不弄完又能如何?”

　　这样的话安通常是接不下去的。这是他的本事,他很知道怎么以退为进。尴尬几回,安不再多提。他反倒有点寂寞起来。其实他心里感谢过她,至少她那么煞有介事地跟他谈论他的人生。那些年,他以为安和他一样是不稳定的人,是那种能够理解不稳定之必要与无奈的人,可现在,连她这样的人也过得很好了。他应该为她高兴,但有另一种不可理喻的懊恼搔弄着他,他想,如果安胆敢再跟他提到重新开始,他就要使出这阵子堵人封口的杀手锏:“重新开始?你瞧瞧我,这年纪,连改行当大楼警卫都有问题吧。”

　　结果,安没提,什么也没提。约莫半个钟点的谈话,安仅仅止乎礼说“局势大不如前,暂时这样也很好,再等等机会”之类。然后,他们谈到阿君时,安感叹阿君命薄,坚强抗癌至此,却在短期间宣告失败。安说起阿君的,家常气味要比悲哀多一些,他由此知道阿君如何兴致勃勃跟人玩电脑,如何重拾画笔,并决心去学意大利文……

　　听起来安一点都不怕。她甚至陪阿君度过一段亲密的抗癌生活,SARS期间上医院,打化疗,看刚跳楼的张国荣的鬼片,枕头贴着枕头睡觉。为什么安可以不怕?自己又为什么想逃?他低下头,感觉自己内心如蜗牛般地蜷缩起来,叫不动,就是叫不动。巨大而无情的死亡,他是败兵一名。寂静黄昏,安没为阿君抱怨什么,也没像阿君其他女朋友那样责备他薄情寡义,惟小心翼翼做结论:“现在,有你陪她,应该是最好的结局了。”

　　两人站起来告别。不过是刚结束下午茶的时间,外头天色却阴郁得好似夜晚已然降临。他站在医院大门口,望着安的背影渐行渐远。“最好的结局”?这小女生当真知道人生的滋味?否则为什么老要装成熟地跟他说关键词。“最好的结局”?他与阿君的结局难道不应该是在办好离婚登记走出户政事务所的那一刻吗?夫妻一场,断不干净也就算了,谁还想出这种结局来整他,无可转圜,不只是关系的结局,还是生命的结局!

　　他回到病房,里头来了护士在帮阿君做排毒,阿君的消化器官几已全部作废,不仅没办法吃,就连排出来都没办法。护理过后,阿君叮咛几句明天老父和律师要来确认遗产与安葬的事情,便似气力尽虚。他让她睡下,离开病房。多年不见阿君父亲,没想到再见是此情景。阿君双亲早早离异,全托阿嬷拉拔长大,这回阿君病况,至今仍尽力瞒着老阿嬷,白发人送黑发人的悲哀,明天得靠那畸零人似的父亲来登场承受。这个婚姻失败、职业不定、四处漂泊、在阿君生命里单薄得像只影子的父亲,对阿君跟他在一起,结不结婚,去不去日本,请不请客,生不生小孩,从来没表示过赞同也没表示过反对,但那阴郁的表情、骨肉亲情也化解不了的疲惫,总让他感到背脊发凉。

　　怀着往事波涌的心绪离开医院,时间说晚不晚,说早不早,一下子还真不知往哪里去。他挤进捷运站人潮,在月台上候着班车来了又去,去了又来,终而登上往北投的列车。北投变得让他不认识了,原本寂寥小调的温泉山径,现在商业炒作热闹,泡汤这个模仿接枝的东洋词汇随处可见,可这情调既不是他入境随俗早已适应的日本温泉乡,亦非他记忆中那个荒废的、隐匿历史角落的旧北投。

　　他往社区深处走,找家比较冷清的旅社,要了一个单人池。光线很暗,卫生不能算太好,但半圆形浴池,木框玻璃窗,仍是旧时款式,很适合他现在的心情。他把自己泡进去,让热气缓缓消解他的疲劳、他的自尊。汗意如地热滚冒,他闭上眼睛深深吸了一口气,没错,就是这种熟悉的硫磺味。

　　赴日前很长一段时间,他和阿君就住在北投山角。那是八十年代,朋友让他们免费借住的老房子,四处怎么刷也刷不干净的黄垢、各种零零落落被氧化掉的家电小物,但他们一点不以为意,在党外杂志风吹草动的惊险生活之余,大伙经常聚在他们这间无政府状态的屋子里吃火锅、打麻将、那卡西,他能唱一曲一曲的老调,又笑又哭。那时节的阿君啊,活力充沛,果敢勤奋,无论琐务、文稿、劳动,样样不挑,样样做。看似最没特色的她却最广受喜欢,骄傲的人也好,暴戾的人也好,苦闷的人也好,阿君总有办法跟他们相处,怎么样的人都会被她的坦率与行动力说服。

　　那是一群人最同心一气的时代,各种不同原因引来的觉醒、创伤、愤怒与绝望,在一起聚合发散出纯粹的美与力,那应是他人生时光最初的抒情小景,也像大多数史诗故事开场所铺底之脆弱的美好,各种情感尚未变质前投射出来的灿烂色泽……真让人怀念啊!然而,故事会继续发展下去,有时候,现实人生的转折、惊爆力道之大,还超越了那些虚构的故事……

　　后来杂志社烧成一片焦黑废墟,他不是全无预料,是不相信真、会、发、生。死去的人果真履行其誓言:OverMyDeadBody。死去的人像一把火,烧烫了他们这群不见棺材不掉泪的旁观者。抒情小景结束了,史诗故事进入精彩主轴,很多朋友就在那时明确介入了政治,可他却发不出声音,槁木死灰地没法再做什么。同样一把火,他被击倒了,某些他以为会实现的东西粉碎了;不过,阿君并没有被击倒,以前他大概会说这是因为阿君想得太少所以没有感觉,可事实证明想得多又有什么用?思想上找不到出路,终了他只能依靠谎言或自我麻痹活下去。他想离开,不再提起,他贪图活下去不要那样痛苦,然而,阿君不怕痛苦,她相信就相信到底,即便被抓、被关甚或活不下去也没什么可怕的,人肉咸咸,阿君老这么说。她最大的筹码就是:她一点筹码都没有,没有什么害怕失去的。

　　他们离开了北投,在海外像一对小夫妻那般克勤克俭地生活。屋子里不再有很多朋友吃饭喝酒说话,一天没有什么工作行程要赶,经常只是把几本书翻过来翻过去,听阿君在砧板上一刀一刀把高丽菜剁成细丝;他们互相依赖的是两人间的感情,最好还有点爱情,可是,他们有吗?他刁钻起来,他不习惯毫不浪漫的生活。他期待台湾朋友来访,听他们各言己志,让阿君在小厨房里绞尽脑汁变出炒米粉、萝卜糕等家乡味道伺候大家。他乐于让自己这座东京小屋成为反抗者的秘密基地。然而,时代在变,东京小屋访客逐年减少,反抗者既已争到舞台,便不再需要挤在秘密基地相濡以沫,剩下来的,仍然只是他与阿君的婚姻生活、眼高手低的学术之路。人近中年,本该要安分秩序,他却反而因为秩序而焦虑得像只蚱蜢,四处乱撞乱跳:来不及了,来不及了,想要的人生再不去试就要没机会了,他惟恐局面真的定下来,日子过得愈平静就愈发不安地挑剔小事吵闹。

　　跟阿君离婚之后,他以为自己会重新开始,可自由于他竟是冷寂,至少不是欢欣鼓舞的。没了阿君帮他料理柴米油盐酱醋茶,他才知道生活很快就一团乱。没有人束缚住他,可以重新开始了,但他还是什么都无精打采的,就连爱情也没那么令他挂念。他考虑过回去找老同志一起做事,但很多局势让他领教到今非昔比,光凭活力、体力、苦干实干未必行得通,还得有具体搞行政、人脉、甚至口头辞令以及繁文缛节的能耐,他得承认这方面他是生手。他不够老,也不够年轻,做头儿,他的历史不够,做幕僚,有更多像安那样的年轻人才可用;过去,他曾愤慨这批年轻人没吃过苦,凭着光鲜学历、咬文嚼字的理论,收割了他们前代人应得的好处,现在,就连这批人都显出了老态,腐败了,他还期待自己排上什么?

　　权位与利益的洗牌结束,他得平心静气接受自己没拿到什么好牌,充其量陪打而已,不如下牌桌吧。现在的他,连拱在一旁看赌局的兴致也渐减了。如果说,这些政治上的改变之于他有什么好处,大约是过往愤怒与悲情有了出路,使他感到胸口轻松一点。至于其后败坏的,他不想管了,他安慰自己,这不是他的责任,更不要想什么救赎。现在,他应该想,人生如何过下去,过得快乐一点,精神一点。

　　他好不容易克服了自己,打算让自己换一种方式活着。却为什么在这种时候,阿君病了!病的实情这样可怕,病魔,病魔,从骨盆腔、肠腔,上延到肝脏,将阿君整个身体予以霸占侵蚀。他发现,病魔和他们以前反抗的霸权异曲同工,全是蚕食、鲸吞,横取豪夺,毫不手软;过去还是看得见的政党、敌人、杀手,现在一刻一刻啃蚀过来的却是谁也看不见的病变、命运、死神——难怪阿君要沉默了,这身体的痛苦、精神的冤屈,是怎么呐喊、争取、抗议甚至自焚都没用的,一个deadbody就只是deadbody哪——

　　死之将至,生之往昔的点点滴滴仿若海浪打上脸来。他觉得自己像个孤独老人守着阿君,目睹病魔怎样分分秒秒掏空他们,没有人可以真正讲讲话,分担他内心庞大的恐惧。他甚至想,也许,当年该顺阿君的意生个小孩,不至于如今两人凄惨以对。原来,阿君是对的,但她却总对他让步。他总怨憎阿君,认为自己人生就是过早卡在阿君这个点上,以至于他只能老是错过、放弃。然而,事实恐怕不是那样,没有阿君以后,他并没有更好;更难堪的是,他再没有理由可以推托。他恍然大悟,原来,阿君一直在给他的人生当垫背——

　　他错了,他愿意承认,他错了。他愿以先前追求的人生交换取消现在这种局面。他知道不能放下阿君不管,但他真想逃开;就算过去一切都是他的错,但也不必要惩罚他到这种地步吧?他捂着脸,泡在熟悉的温泉故乡里,多想像个孩子可以追讨游戏的重来、母亲的原谅,然而阿君那变形的病容使他知道什么叫做残忍,他被狠狠拒绝了,阿君不仅不会再调侃他,也不会再跟他吵架,她连睁眼看他都很少,阿君不再有能力包容他,也不再需要原谅他了——

　　挥之不去记忆与悔恨的纠缠啊,他不断抹去脸上的汗,感觉天旋地转。故乡温泉竟是如此柔溺,然而他得强悍一点,阿君这关无论如何是得挺过的,不能逃,再逃他也实在太差劲了,他怎会是这样的人?他难道错看了自己?莫非阿君比他还更了解他自己?他搓揉自己发白泡烂的身躯,汗水淋漓,他想自己应该哭上一哭,甚至放声呐喊这人生是错了!乱了!可他依然没有流出泪水,怔忪泡到水愈来愈凉,听到女服务生不安地在澡间外叩门:“林桑,时间超过了喔,林桑,林桑,你没事吧?”

　　日后,他确实做到了不逃避,时间允许便去病房,去了不知道该说什么,便拿本书一页一页读。事实上,阿君体力愈来愈差,睡睡醒醒,未必清醒知觉他的存在,更不可能说出什么使他无法应对的话。日子一天一天过去,已经两个多月没有进食的阿君开始幻想食物,像以前海外生活那样轻声细语:如果现在可以吃一碗蚵仔面线或卤肉饭多好呀,要不来一碗热腾腾的牛肉面,加上一盘粉蒸地瓜,还有冬天里香喷喷的药炖排骨汤……当梦里开始出现食物的时候,他们便知道思乡够了,该回去了,倘若一下子回不去,阿君也会用克难材料变出类似料理来。她是饿不死的,不是这么说吗?可怜如今却活生生受着饿的折磨。他要看护工把食物带出房外去吃,这房间,不要有食物的香气,否则太残忍了。

　　最后的晚上,昏迷的阿君有几分钟忽然能够张眼。他靠近她,喊她,说几句无济于事的话。阿君仿佛听着,定定看他。

　　他忽然察觉到,这是阿君在跟他告别。他想自己该说一声对不起,握一握她的手,很温柔很温柔地说:阿君,对不起。

　　偏偏他说不出口。他怕说出口眼泪会掉下来。

　　真是可耻到极点了,在阿君的生命尽头,他在意的竟还是自己的眼泪!阿君闭上眼,他走出病房外,眼泪不听使唤地淌了满脸,不知道是在为阿君哭还是为自己哭。

　　他开始打电话给阿君的朋友们。隔天,交代来诵经助念的朋友依约虔诚肃穆地在阿君病床边守了一天。阿君没再清醒,她闭眼,动也不动,惟一证明她活着的不过是身边那些机器变化。他想,也许,自己等不到机会说对不起了。

　　窗外天色还是阴沉沉的。有人在门上叩着,他知道,每天最早出现的事是清洁工打扫,再来是护士送药,然后是厨房人员派餐。如斯反复,一天,又是一天。然而,这一天可能即将有所不同,截然不同——他初次感觉时间有限得可怕,他试着回想与阿君相遇的这一生,把握住眼前有限的时间,趁阿君还在的时候,重想一遍——然而怎么来得及呢?来不及,来不及了——他慌张混乱不知道该怎么想,怎么解释,怎么收场,很多时候,他根本是愣着,直到那些数据惊动了他——

　　年轻医护人员涌进房来,彼此交换眼神,房内气氛陡地升起一阵惊颤,又很快平静下来,仿佛你我都明白似的,没有人说话。他握住阿君的手,动也不动,没有人在这时候哭出声来,也没有人胆敢在此时叫唤:阿君,阿君——

　　他看着床畔仪表数字倏地陡降下来,曲线图愈来愈缓,最后,水平地,停止了。

　　又是暮色将至之时,岛国纷纷扰扰之际。他不知道该说什么,也不想说什么。原来,生命结束的情景是这样,他竟然真的经历了,阿君,真的与他分离了。叩,叩,这次来的是主治医生,他们站定,鞠躬,近床检视病人状态,抬头看看墙上时钟,如此记下了时间,然后,他们说:请节哀。再鞠个躬,出去了。(纪念二○○三年)

那次会面开启了我和妙津的长久友谊（虽然她后来因为先行出版小说集《鬼的狂欢》而退出了《台大小说选》作者群），我们并非十分相同的人，却奇妙而偏见地分享了彼此的心灵，从生活、知识、情感到文学观，与其说我们因为发现彼此如何契合而成为朋友，不如说我们充满差别，而在这些差别的倾诉与理解之间，发展了柔软的情谊。

九一年我们从大学毕业，方向愈趋不同，屈指可数的几次碰面里，我继续分享她打算写个长篇小说的决心，以及找到工作、辞去工作的点点滴滴。想起来，朋友一场，我们真正在一起的时间并不算多，彼此出国之后更几乎失去联络。妙津的《鳄鱼手记》于九三年底开始连载于报刊我并不知情，直到九四年夏天我回台湾在书店看见已经成书上架的《鳄鱼手记》，她的这一步惊动了我，或许也是华文文学书写的一个惊动。

就在我看完《鳄鱼手记》后不久，鬼使神差地，久无音讯的妙津，从巴黎发了一封明信片到我台南老家，辗转到我手上，仓皇口气，仿佛深海之中又传来她的求救讯息，此后，即是一连串宛如惊涛骇浪、时而清醒昂扬、旋又急坠深谷的悲剧的发生。我曾相信她能以“写”来度过生命危机，她也想要这样做，这就是后来《蒙马特遗书》的创作。可惜，某些电光石火终究还是某些瞬间，将她推落死亡黑洞，妙津于一九九五年六月二十五日以自己的方式结束了生命。最后时刻，她给我打了越洋电话，除了告别，留言要我代为处理书籍文字。那年夏天，我再度回到台北，无可选择收下她在法国友人所带回来的礼物：几叠文件、书稿与日记。其中，《寂寞的群众》与《蒙马特遗书》已相继出版，余下来的，数量最多的是日记。

早相识之初，妙津伏案写日记的姿势便使我印象深刻，严肃、专心、不被打扰，宛如仪式的完成，无论历经怎样的迁徙变动，她总把这些日记带在身边，我知道，这些日记是她最大的财产，她的很多作品也都可以在日记里找到雏形。她不仅是抱着记事心情写日记，而是藉此严密审视自己的心绪，把惊人的诚实、热情投射在这里。这些日记，也许不该只是一份给我个人的礼物，依她性情文格来看，日记的选辑出版应该也是未尝不可。

呈现在这里的两册日记，选自大学时期与留法时期，绝大多数依原状态编辑，不过若遇见明显误字或漏字导致词意难辨，则适度加以修订，有些地方出现较大的时间空缺（如九二年八月至九三年八月），推测是已将日记撕去另作他用。此外，为免不必要的伤害揣想，对人名、地名做了些处理，写于日记周边的摘要备忘，尽可能保留下来，同时，妙津一些随手拍下来的照片或生活物件，也为美术编辑增添了不少灵感。日记出版经过十年延宕，一是基于对相关人物以及隐私的保护考量，二亦盼望流言尘埃落定，在她短暂生命所仅有四本小说集之外，这些日记将展现她丰沛、炽热宛如火山能量的心灵世界。

除了尽到一个编者的说明，我无意多言妙津其人其事。关于悲剧的发生，很难有人能说清楚始末因由，也没有人有绝对的代言权。我只能接受，伤害千真万确发生，死亡无可挽回。然而与其苛责自杀是混乱与弱者的结果，我毋宁相信，在最后时点，妙津亦需要十足的强悍，一瞬间，她对人生可能看得比我们更清明，只是，她坚持就停在那一瞬间。

人生何其美。但得不到也永久得不到，那样的荒凉是更需要强悍的。

这是妙津日记所留下的最后一句话。

赖香吟
二〇〇七九月一日

The walls are so thick they could contain other cells, stairways, casemates, and powder magazines; or else the fortress could be all wall, a full and compact solid, with one live man buried in the middle. The images you summon up when you are imprisoned follow one another without any reciprocal exclusion: the cell, the aperture, the corridors along which the jailer comes twice a day with the soup and the bread could be simply tiny pores in a rock of spongy consistency.

You hear the sea pounding, especially on stormy nights; at times it seems almost that the waves are breaking here against the very wall to which I put my ear; at times they seem to be digging below, under the rocks of the foundations, and my cell seems to be at the top of the tallest tower, and the rumble rises through the prison, a prisoner too, as in the horn of a conch shell.

I prick up my ears: the sounds describe variable, jagged spaces and forms around me. From the jailers' shuffling I try to establish the network of the corridors, the turns, the openings, the straight lines broken by the dragging of the kettle to the threshold of each cell and by the creak of the locks: I succeed only in fixing a succession of points in time, without any correspondence in space. At night the sounds become more distinct, but more uncertain in marking places and distances: somewhere a rat is gnawing, an ill man groans, a boat's siren announces its entry into the Marseilles roads, and Abbé Faria's spade continues digging its way among these stones.

I don't know how many times Abbé Faria has attempted to escape: each time he has worked for months prising up the stone slabs, crumbling the seams of mortar, perforating the rock with rudimentary awls; but at the moment when the pick's last blow should open his way to the rocky shore, he realizes he has come out in a cell that is even deeper in the fortress than the one from which he set out. It requires only a little error of calculation, a slight deviation in the incline of a tunnel and he is penetrating into the prison's viscera with no hope of finding his way again. After every failure, he goes back to correcting the plans and formulas with which he has frescoed the walls of his cell; he goes back to improving his arsenal of improvised tools; and then he resumes his scraping.

2
I too have thought and still think about a method of escape; in fact, I have made so many surmises about the topography of the fortress, about the shortest and surest way to reach the outer bastion and dive into the sea, that I can no longer distinguish between my conjectures and the data based on experience. Working with hypotheses, I can at times construct for myself such a minute and convincing picture of the fortress that in my mind I can move through it completely at my ease; whereas the elements I derive from what I see and what I hear are confused, full of gaps, more and more contradictory.

In the early days of my imprisonment, when my desperate acts of rebellion hadn't yet brought me to rot in this solitary cell, the routine tasks of prison life had caused me to climb up and down stairs and bastions, cross the entrance halls and posterns of the Château d'If; but from all the images retained by my memory, which now I keep arranging and rearranging in my conjectures, there is not one that fits neatly with another, none that helps explain to me the shape of the fortress or the point where I now am. Too many thoughts tormented me then -- about how I, Edmond Dantès, poor but honest sailor, could have run afoul of the law's severity and suddenly lost my freedom -- too many thoughts to allow my attention to concern itself with the plan of my surroundings.

The bay of Marseilles and its islands have been familiar to me since boyhood; and every embarkation of my not long life as a sailor, the departures and the arrivals, had this background; but the seaman's eye, every time it encounters the black fort of If, shifts away in an instinctive fear. So when they brought me here chained in a boat filled with gendarmes, and this cliff and the walls then loomed on the horizon, I understood my fate and bowed my head. I didn't see -- or I don't remember -- the pier where the boat docked, the steps they made me climb, the door that closed behind my back.

Now that, with the passage of years, I have stopped brooding over the chain of infamy and ill-luck that caused my imprisonment, I have come to understand one thing: the only way to escape the prisoner's state is to know how the prison is built.

If I feel no desire to imitate Faria, it is because the very knowledge that someone is seeking an avenue of escape is enough to convince me that such an avenue exists or, at least, that one can set himself the problem of seeking it. So the sound of Faria's digging has become a necessary complement to the concentration of my thoughts. I feel not only that Faria is a man attempting his own escape but also that he is a part of my plan; and not because I am hoping for an avenue to safety opened by him -- he has been wrong so many times by now I have lost all faith in his intuition -- but because the only information I have concerning this place where I am has come to me from the series of his mistakes.

3
The walls and the vaults have been pierced in every direction by the Abbé's pick, but his itineraries continue to wind around themselves like a ball of yarn, and he constantly goes through my cell as he follows, each time, a different course. He has long since lost his sense of orientation: Faria no longer recognizes the cardinal points, indeed he cannot recognize even the zenith and the nadir. At times I hear scratching at the ceiling; a rain of plaster falls on me; a breach opens; Faria's head appears, upside down. Upside down for me, not for him; he crawls out of his tunnel, he walks head down, while nothing about his person is ruffled, not his white hair, nor his beard green with mold, nor the tatters of sackcloth that cover his emaciated loins. He walks across the ceiling and the walls like a fly, he sinks his pick into a certain spot, a hole opens; he disappears.

Sometimes he has hardly disappeared through one wall when he pops out again from the wall opposite: he hasn't yet drawn his heel through the hole here when his beard is already appearing over there. He emerges again, more weary, skeletal, aged, as if years had passed since the last time I saw him.

At other times, however, he has hardly slipped into his tunnel when I hear him make the sound of a long aspiration like somebody preparing to sneeze loudly: in the labyrinth of the fortress there is much cold and damp; but the sneeze never comes. I wait: I wait for a week, for a month, for a year; Faria doesn't come back; I persuade myself he is dead. All of a sudden the wall opposite trembles as if shaken by an earthquake; from the shower of stones Faria looks out, completing his sneeze.

We exchange fewer and fewer words; or we continue conversations I cannot remember ever having begun. I realize Faria has trouble distinguishing one cell from another among the many he crosses in his mistaken journeys. Each cell contains a pallet, a pitcher, a wooden slops bucket, a man standing and looking at the sky through a narrow slit. When Faria appears from underground, the prisoner turns around: he always has the same face, the same voice, the same thoughts. His name is the same: Edmond Dantès. The fortress has no favored points: it repeats in space and time always the same combination of figures.

4
In all my hypotheses of escape, I try to imagine Faria as the protagonist. Not that I tend to identify myself with him: Faria necessarily plays his role so that I can mentally envisage my escape in an objective light, as I could not do if I were living it: I mean, dreaming it in the first person. By now I no longer know if the man I hear digging like a mole is the real Faria opening breaches in the walls of the real fortress of Château d'If or whether it is the hypothesis of a Faria dealing with a hypothetical fortress. It amounts to the same thing in any case: it is the fortress that wins. It is as if, in the contests between Faria and the fortress, I pressed my impartiality so far as to side with the fortress against him . . . no, now I am exaggerating: the contest does not take place only in my mind, but between two real contenders, independently of me; my efforts are directed toward seeing it with detachment, in a performance without anguish.

If I can come to observe fortress and Abbé from a perfectly equidistant point of view, I will be able to discern not only the particular errors Faria makes time after time, but also the error in method which continually defeats him and which I, thanks to my correct setting of the problem, will be able to avoid.

Faria proceeds in this way: he becomes aware of a difficulty, he studies a solution, he tries out the solution, encounters a new difficulty, plans a new solution, and so on and on. For him, once all possible errors and unforeseen elements are eliminated, his escape can only be successful: it all lies in planning and carrying out the perfect escape.

I set out from the opposite premise: there exists a perfect fortress, from which one cannot escape; escape is possible only if in the planning or building of the fortress some error or oversight was made. While Faria continues taking the fortress apart, sounding out its weak points, I continue putting it back together, conjecturing more and more insuperable barriers.

The images of the fortress that Faria and I create are becoming more and more different: Faria, beginning with a simple figure, is complicating it extremely to include in it each of the single unforeseen elements he encounters in his path; I, setting out from the jumble of these data, see in each isolated obstacle the clue to a system of obstacles, I develop each segment into a regular figure, I fit these figures together as the sides of a solid, polyhedron or hyperpolyhedron, I inscribe these polyhedrons in spheres or hyperspheres, and so the more I enclose the form of the fortress the more I simplify it, defining it in a numerical relation or in an algebraic formula.

But to conceive a fortress in this way I need the Abbé Faria constantly combating landslides of rubble, steel bolts, sewers, sentry boxes, leaps into nothingness, recesses in the sustaining walls, because the only way to reinforce the imagined fortress is to put the real one continuously to the test.

5
Therefore: each cell seems separated from the outside only by the thickness of a wall, but Faria as he excavates discovers that in between there is always another cell, and between this cell and the outside, still another. The image I derive is this: a fortress that grows around us, and the longer we remain shut up in it the more it removes us from the outside. The Abbé digs, digs, but the walls increase in thickness, the battlements and the buttresses are multiplied. Perhaps if he can succeed in advancing faster than the fortress expands, Faria at a certain point will find himself outside unawares. It would be necessary to invert the relative speeds so that the fortress, contracting, would expel the Abbé like a cannonball.

But if the fortress grows with the speed of time, to escape one would have to move even faster, retrace time. The moment in which I would find myself outside would be the same moment I entered here: I look out on the bay at last, and what do I see? A boat full of gendarmes is landing at If; in the midst is Edmond Dantès, in chains.

There, I have gone back to imagining myself as the protagonist of the escape, and I have immediately risked not only my future but my past, my memories. Everything that is unclear in the relationship between an innocent prisoner and his prison continues to cast shadows on images and decisions. If the prison is surrounded by my outside, that outside would bring me back inside each time I succeeded in reaching it: the outside is nothing but the past, it is useless to try to escape.

I must conceive of the prison either as a place that is only inside itself without an outside -- that is, giving up the idea of leaving it -- or I must conceive of it not as my prison but as a place with no relation to me inside or outside; that is, I must study an itinerary from inside to outside that precludes the import that "inside" and "outside" have acquired in my emotions; valid, that is, even if instead of "outside" I say "inside" and vice versa.

6
If outside there is the past, perhaps the future is concentrated at the innermost point of the island of If, in other words the avenue of escape is an avenue toward the inside. In the graffiti with which Abbé Faria covers his walls, two maps with ragged outlines alternate, constellated with arrows and marks: one is meant to be the plan of If, the other of an island of the Tuscan archipelago where a treasure is hidden: Monte Cristo.

It is, in fact, to seek this treasure that Abbé Faria wants to escape. To succeed in his intention he has to draw a line that in the map of the island of If carries him from inside to outside and in the map of the island of Monte Cristo carries him from outside to that point which is farther inland than all the other points, the treasure cave. Between an island he cannot leave and an island he cannot enter there must be a relation: therefore in Faria's hieroglyphics the two maps can be superimposed and are almost identical.

It is hard for me to understand whether Faria is now digging in order to dive into the open sea or to penetrate the cave full of gold. In either case, if one looks closely, he is tending toward the same point of arrival: the place of the multiplicity of possible things. At times I visualize this multiplicity as concentrated in a gleaming underground cavern, at times I see it as an irradiating explosion. The treasure of Monte Cristo and the escape from If are two phases of the same process, perhaps successive perhaps periodical as in a pulsation.

The search for the center of If-Monte Cristo does not lead to results that are more sure than those of the march toward its unreachable circumference: in whatever point I find myself the hypersphere stretches out around me in every direction; the center is all around where I am; going deeper means descending into myself. You dig and dig and you do nothing but retrace the same path.

7
Once he has come into possession of the treasure, Faria intends to liberate the Emperor from Elba, give him the means to put himself again at the head of his army . . . The plan of escape-search on the island of If-Monte Cristo is therefore not complete if it does not include also the search-escape of Napoleon from the island where he is confined. Faria digs; he penetrates once again into the cell of Edmond Dantès; he sees the prisoner from behind, looking as usual at the sky through the slit-window; at the sound of the pick the prisoner turns: it is Napoleon Bonaparte. Faria and Dantès-Napoleon together excavate a tunnel in the fortress. The map of If-Monte Cristo-Elba is drawn in such a way that by turning it a certain number of degrees the map of Saint Helena is obtained: the escape is reversed into an exile beyond return.

The confused reasons for which both Faria and Edmond Dantès were imprisoned have, in different ways, something to do with the Bonapartist cause. That hypothetical geometric figure called If-Monte Cristo coincides in certain of its points with another figure called Elba-Saint Helena. There are points of the past and of the future in which Napoleonic history intervenes in our poor prisoners' history, and other points where Faria and I can or could influence a possible return of the Empire.

These intersections make any calculation of predictions even more complicated; there are points where the line that one of us is following bifurcates, ramifies, fans out; each branch can encounter branches that set out from other lines. Along one jagged line Faria goes by, digging; and only a few seconds keep him from bumping into the baggage wagons and cannon of the Imperial Army reconquering France.

We proceed in the dark; only the way our paths twist upon themselves warns us that something has changed in the paths of the others. We may say that Waterloo is the point where the path of Wellington's army might intersect the path of Napoleon; if the two lines meet, the segments beyond that point are cut off; in the map where Faria digs his tunnel, the projection of the Waterloo angle forces him to turn back.

8
The intersections of the various hypothetical lines define a series of planes arranged like the pages of a manuscript on a novelist's desk. Let us call Alexandre Dumas the writer who must deliver to his publisher as soon as possible a novel in twelve volumes entitled The Count of Monte Cristo. His work proceeds in this fashion: two assistants (Auguste Maquet and P. A. Fiorentino) develop one by one the various alternatives that depart from each single point, and they furnish Dumas with the outline of all the possible variants of an enormous supernovel; Dumas selects, rejects, cuts, pastes, interposes; if a given solution is preferred for well-founded reasons but omits an episode he would find it useful to include, he tries to put together the stub-ends of disparate provenance, he joins them with makeshift links, racks his brain to establish an apparent continuity among divergent segments of future. The final result will be the novel The Count of Monte Cristo to be handed to the printer.

The diagrams Faria and I draw on the walls of the prison resemble those Dumas pens on his papers to establish the order of the chosen variants. One bundle of sheets of paper can already be passed for printing: it contains the Marseilles of my youth; moving over the closely written lines I can fight my way onto the docks of the harbor, climb up the Rue de la Canebière in the morning sun, reach the Catalan village perched on the hill, see Mercedes again . . . Another bundle of papers is awaiting the final touches: Dumas is still revising the chapters of the imprisonment in the Château d'If; Faria and I are struggling inside there, ink-stained, in a tangle of revisions ... At the edges of the desk there are piles of paper, the suggestions for the story's continuation which the two assistants are methodically compiling. In one of them, Dantès escapes from prison, finds Faria's treasure, transforms himself into the Count of Monte Cristo with his ashen, impassive face, devotes his implacable will and his boundless wealth to revenge; and the Machiavellian Villefort, the greedy Danglars, the grim Caderousse pay the price of their foul deeds; just as, for so many years among these walls, I had foreseen in my angry daydreams, in my longings for revenge.

Beside this, other sketches for the future are arranged on the desk. Faria opens a breach in the wall, bursts into the study of Alexandre Dumas, casts an impartial dispassionate look on the expanse of pasts and presents and futures -- as I could not do, I who would try to recognize myself with tenderness in the young Dantès just promoted to his captaincy, with pity in the imprisoned Dantès, with delirious grandeur in the Count of Monte Cristo who makes his regal entrance into the proudest salons of Paris; I who in their place would find with dismay so many strangers -- Faria takes a page here, a page there, like a monkey he moves his long hairy arms, hunts for the escape chapter, the page without which all the possible continuations of the novel outside the fortress become impossible. The concentric fortress, If-Monte Cristo-Dumas's desk, contains us prisoners, the treasure, and the supernovel Monte Cristo with its variants and combinations of variants in the nature of billions of billions but still in a finite number. Faria has set his heart on one page among the many, and he does not despair of finding it; I am interested in seeing the accumulation of rejected sheets increase, the solutions which need not be taken into account, which already form a series of piles, a wall . . .

Arranging one after the other all the continuations which allow the story to be extended, probable or improbable as they may be, you obtain the zigzag line of the Monte Cristo of Dumas; whereas connecting the circumstances that prevent the story from continuing you outline the spiral of a novel in negative, a Monte Cristo preceded by the minus sign. A spiral can wind upon itself toward the inside or toward the outside: if it twists toward the inside of itself, the story closes without any possible development; if it turns in widening curves it could, at every turn, include a segment of the Monte Cristo with the plus sign, finally coinciding with the novel Dumas will give to the printer, or perhaps even surpassing it in its wealth of lucky chances. The decisive difference between the two books -- sufficient to cause one to be defined as true and the other as false, even if they are identical -- lies entirely in the method. To plan a book -- or an escape -- the first thing to know is what to exclude.

9
And so we go on dealing with the fortress, Faria sounding out the weak points of the wall and coming up against new obstacles, I reflecting on his unsuccessful attempts in order to conjecture new outlines of walls to add to the plan of my fortress-conjecture.

If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this conceived fortress either will be the same as the real one -- and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here, but at least we will achieve the serenity of one who knows he is here because he could be nowhere else -- or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here -- and this, then, is a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists: we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it.

I climbed into the car suddenly, after a quarrel over the telephone with Y. I live in A, Y lives in B. I wasn't planning to visit her this evening. But during our daily phone call we said dire things to each other; in the end, carried away by my exasperation, I told Y that I wanted to break off our affair; Y answered that it didn't matter to her and that she would immediately telephone Z, my rival. At this point one of us -- I don't remember whether it was she or I -- hung up. Before a minute had passed I realized the motive of our quarrel was trifling compared to the consequences it was creating. To call Y back on the telephone would have been a mistake; the only way to resolve the question was to dash over to B and have a face-to-face explanation with her. So here I am on this superhighway I have driven over hundreds of times at every hour in every season but which never seemed so long to me before.

Or, to put it more clearly, I feel as if I had lost all sense of space and of time: the glowing cones projected by the headlights make the outlines of places sink into vagueness; the numbers of the miles on the signs and the numbers that click over on the dashboard are data that mean nothing to me, that do not respond to the urgency of my questions about what Y is doing at this moment, about what she is thinking. Did she really mean to call Z or was it only a threat, blurted out like that, out of pique? And if she was serious, did she do it immediately after our telephone conversation, or is she thinking it over for a moment, letting her anger subside before she makes up her mind? Like me, Z lives in A; for years he has loved Y hopelessly; if she has telephoned him and invited him over, he has surely set out at top speed toward B in his car; therefore he too is speeding along this superhighway; every car that passes me could be his, as well as every car I pass. It is difficult to be certain: the cars going in the same direction as mine are two red lights when they precede me and two yellow eyes when I see them following me in my rear-view mirror. At the moment of passing I can make out at most what kind of car it is and how many people are inside it, but the cars carrying only their driver are the great majority, and as far as the model is concerned I don't believe Z's automobile is particularly recognizable.

As if that weren't enough, it's begun to rain. My field of vision is reduced to the semicircle of glass swept by the windshield wiper, all the rest is streaked or opaque darkness, the information I receive from outside consists only of yellow and red flashes distorted by a tumult of drops. The only thing I can do with Z is try to pass him and not let him pass me, in whatever car he is, but I won't be able to know if he is here and which car is his. I feel all the cars going in A's direction are equally hostile: every car faster than mine that beats eagerly with its flipper in my mirror asking me to give way causes me a pang of jealousy; and every time I see ahead of me the distance diminish between me and the rear lights of a rival, with an upsurge of triumph I hurl myself into the center lane to reach Y before him.

Only a few minutes' advantage would be enough for me: seeing how promptly I have rushed to her, Y will immediately forget the causes of our quarrel; everything between us will again be as it was before; when Z arrives he will realize he was called into question only because of a kind of game between the two of us; he'll feel he's an intruder. Or perhaps Y at this moment has already regretted everything she said to me, has tried to call me back on the phone, or else she, like me, has decided the best thing was to come in person and has got into her car and is now racing in the direction opposite mine along this superhighway.

Now I have stopped paying attention to the cars going in my direction and I keep looking at those coming toward me which for me consist only in a double star of headlights which dilates until it sweeps the darkness from my field of vision then suddenly disappears behind me dragging a kind of underwater luminescence after it. Y's car is a very common model; like mine, for that matter. Each of these luminous apparitions could be Y speeding toward me, at each one I feel my blood stir as if in an intimacy destined to remain secret, the amorous message addressed exclusively to me is mingled with all the other messages speeding along the superhighway, and yet I couldn't desire from her a message different from this one.

I realize that in rushing toward Y what I desire most is not to find Y at the end of my race: I want Y to be racing toward me, this is the answer I need; what I mean is, I want her to know I'm racing toward her but at the same time I want to know she's racing toward me. The sole thought that comforts me is also the thought that torments me most: the thought that if Y at this moment is speeding toward A, then each time she sees the headlights of a car speeding toward B she will ask herself whether it's I racing toward her, and she will desire it to be I, and she will never be sure. Now two cars going in opposite directions have found themselves for a moment side by side, a flash has illuminated the raindrops, the sound of the motors has become fused as in an abrupt gust of wind: perhaps it was the two of us, or rather it is certain that one car was I and the other car could be she, that is the one I want to be she, the sign in which I want to recognize her, though it is this very sign that makes her unrecognizable to me. Speeding along the superhighway is the only method we have left, she and I, to express what we have to say to each other, but we cannot communicate it or receive the communication as long as we are speeding.

Of course I took my place behind the wheel in order to reach her as fast as possible; but the more I go forward the more I realize that the moment of arrival is not the real end of my race. Our meeting, with all the inessential details a meeting involves, the minute network of sensations and meanings and memories that would spread out before me -- the room with the philodendron, the opaline lamp, the earrings -- and the things I would say to her, some of which would surely be mistaken or mistakable, and the things she would say, to some extent surely jarring or in any case not what I expect, and all the succession of unpredictable consequences that each gesture and each word involved would raise around the things that we have to say to each other, or rather that we want to hear each other say, a storm of such noise that our communication already difficult over the telephone would become even more hazardous, stifled, buried as if under an avalanche of sand. This is why, rather than go on talking, I felt the need to transform the things to be said into a cone of light hurled at a hundred miles an hour, to transform myself into this cone of light moving over the superhighway, because it is certain that such a signal can be received and understood by her without being lost in the ambiguous disorder of secondary vibrations, just as I, to receive and understand the things she has to say to me, would like them to be only (rather, I would like her to be only) this cone of light I see advancing on the superhighway at a speed (I'm guessing, at a glance) of eighty or ninety. What counts is communicating the indispensable, skipping all the superfluous, reducing ourselves to essential communication, to a luminous signal that moves in a given direction, abolishing the complexity of our personalities and situations and facial expressions, leaving them in the shadowy container that the headlights carry behind them and conceal. The Y I love is really that moving band of luminous rays, and all the rest of her can remain implicit; and the me that she can love, the me that has the power of entering that circuit of exaltation which is her affective life, in the flashing of this pass which, through love of her and with a certain risk, I am now attempting.

And also with Z (I haven't forgotten Z for a moment) I can establish the proper relationship only if he is for me simply the flash and glare that follow me, or the taillights I follow: because if I start taking into consideration his person, with its pathetic -- shall we say -- element but also with its undeniably unpleasant aspect, though it is -- I must admit -- also excusable, with all his boring story of unhappy love and his way of behaving which is always a bit questionable . . . well, there's no telling where I would end. Instead, while things continue like this, all is well: Z trying to pass me or allowing himself to be passed by me (but I don't know if it is he), Y hastening toward me (but I don't know if it's she) repentant and again in love, I hurrying to her, jealous and eager (but I'm unable to let her or anyone else know).

Naturally, if I were absolutely alone on this superhighway, if I saw no other cars speeding in either direction, then everything would be much clearer, I would be certain that Z hasn't moved to supplant me, nor has Y moved to make peace with me, facts I might register as positive or negative in my accounting, but which would in any case leave no room for doubt. And yet if I had the power of exchanging my present state of uncertainty for such a negative certainty, I would refuse the bargain without hesitation. The ideal condition for excluding every doubt would prevail if in this part of the world there existed only three automobiles: mine, Y's, and Z's; then no other car could proceed in my direction except Z's, and the only car heading in the opposite direction would surely be Y's. Instead, among the hundreds of cars that the night and the rain reduce to anonymous glimmers, only a motionless observer situated in a favorable position could distinguish one car from the other and perhaps recognize who is inside. This is the contradiction in which I find myself: if I want to receive a message I must give up being a message myself, but the message I want to receive from Y -- namely, that Y has made herself into a message -- has value only if I in turn am a message, and on the other hand the message I am has meaning only if Y doesn't limit herself to receiving it like any ordinary receiver of messages but if she also is that message I am waiting to receive from her.

By now to arrive in B, go up to Y's house, find that she has remained there with her headache brooding over the causes of our quarrel, would give me no satisfaction; if then Z were to arrive also a scene would be the result, histrionic and loathsome; and if instead I were to find out that Z has prudently stayed home or that Y didn't carry out her threat to telephone him, I would feel I had played the fool. On the other hand, if I had remained in A, and Y had gone there to apologize to me, I would have found myself in an embarrassing position: I would have seen Y through different eyes, a weak woman, clinging to me, and something between us would have changed. I can no longer accept any situation other than this transformation of ourselves into the messages of ourselves. And what about Z? Even Z must not escape our fate, he too must be transformed into the message of himself; it would be terrible if I were to run to Y jealous of Z and if Y were running to me, repentant, avoiding Z, while actually Z hasn't remotely thought of stirring from his house . . .

Halfway along the superhighway there is a service station. I stop, I run to the bar, I get a handful of change, I dial the B area code, then Y's number. No answer. I allow the rain of returned coins to pour down with joy: it's clear Y couldn't overcome her impatience, she got into her car, she has rushed toward A. Now I have gone back to the superhighway, but on the other side: I too am rushing toward A. All the cars I pass could be Y, or else all the cars that pass me. On the opposite lane all the cars advancing in the other direction could be Z, in his self-delusion. Or else Y too has stopped at a service station, has telephoned my house in A; not finding me in she has realized I am going to B, she has turned around. Now we are speeding in opposite directions, moving away from each other, and the car I pass or that passes me is Z, who also tried telephoning Y at the halfway point.

Everything is more uncertain than ever but I feel I've now reached a state of inner serenity: as long as we can check our telephone numbers and there is no answer then we will continue, all three of us, speeding back and forth along these white lines, with no points of departure or of arrival to threaten with their sensations and meanings the single-mindedness of our race, freed finally from the awkward thickness of our persons and voices and moods, reduced to luminous signals, the only appropriate way of being for those who wish to be identified with what they say, without the distorting buzz our presence or the presence of others transmits to our messages.

To be sure, the price paid is high but we must accept it: to be indistinguishable from all the other signals that pass along this road, each with his meaning that remains hidden and undecipherable because outside of here there is no one capable of receiving us now and understanding us.

The signal is regulated in such a way that on our side the red light lasts a hundred and eighty seconds and the green light a hundred and twenty, no doubt based on the premise that the perpendicular traffic is heavier and slower. A mistaken premise: calculating the cars I see going by transversely when it is green for them, I would say they are about twice the number of those that in an equally long period manage to break free of our column and pass the signal. This doesn't mean that, once beyond it, they speed: in reality they go on forward with exasperating slowness, which can be considered speed only compared to us since we are virtually motionless with red and green alike. It is also partially the fault of this slowness of theirs that we don't succeed in moving, because when the green goes off for them and comes on for us the intersection is still occupied by their wave, blocked there in the center, and thus at least thirty of our hundred and twenty seconds are lost before a single tire can revolve once here on our side. It must be said that the transverse flow does indeed inflict this delay on us but then it is compensated for by a loss of forty and sometimes sixty seconds before starting again when the green comes on once more for them, thanks to the trail of traffic jams that each of our slow waves drags after it: a loss for them which doesn't actually mean a gain for us because every final delay on our side (and initial delay on the other) corresponds to a greater final delay on the other side (and initial on ours), and this in mounting proportion, so that the green light period remains a deadlock for a longer and longer time on both sides, and this deadlock works more against our progress than theirs.

I realize that when, in this description, I oppose "us" and "them" I include in the term "us" both myself and the man who is chasing me in order to kill me, as if the boundary line of enmity passed not between me and him but rather between those in our column and those in the transverse one. But for all who are here immobilized and impatient, with their feet on the clutch, thoughts and feelings can follow no other course but the one imposed by the respective situations in the currents of traffic; it is therefore admissible to suppose that a community of intention is established between me, who cannot wait to dash away, and him who is waiting for a repetition of his previous opportunity, when in a street on the city's outskirts he managed to fire at me two shots that missed me by sheerest luck, since one bullet shattered the glass of the left side window and the other lodged here in the roof.

It should be added that the community implied in the term "us" is only apparent, because in practice my enmity extends not only to the cars that cross our column but also those in it; and inside our column I feel definitely more hostile toward the cars that precede me and prevent me from advancing than toward those following me, which however would make themselves declared enemies if they tried to pass me, a difficult undertaking in view of the dense jam where every car is stuck fast among the others with a minimum freedom of movement.

In short, the man who at this moment is my mortal enemy is now lost among many other solid bodies where my chafing aversion and fear are also perforce distributed, just as his murderous will though directed exclusively against me is somehow scattered and deflected among a great number of intermediary objects. It is certain in any case that he too, in the calculations he is making simultaneously with me, calls our column "us" and calls "them" the column that crosses ours, just as it is certain that our calculations, though aiming finally at opposite results, have many elements and developments in common.

I want our column to have first a fast movement, then a very slow one, or in other words that the cars in front of me should suddenly start speeding and then after them I too could pass the intersection on the last flicker of green; so then immediately behind my back the line would be blocked for a period of time long enough to allow me to vanish, turn off into a secondary cross street. In all likelihood my pursuer's calculations tend instead to foresee whether he will manage to pass the signal in the same wave with me, if he will succeed in keeping behind me until the cars that separate us are scattered in various directions or at least more thinned out, and if his car will then be able to take its place immediately behind or beside mine, for example in the column at another signal, in a good position to empty his pistol at me (I am unarmed) a second before the green comes on to give him a clear avenue of escape.

In other words, I am relying on the irregularity with which the column's periods of immobility alternate with periods of movement; he on the other hand is counting on the regularity which can be found on an average between periods of movement and periods of immobility for each automobile in the column. The problem then is whether the column is divisible into a series of segments each endowed with a life of its own or whether it must be considered a single indivisible body where the only change one can hope for is a decrease in density as the hours of night approach, to an extreme of rarefaction where only our two cars will remain headed in the same direction and the distance will tend to disappear . . . What our calculations surely have in common is that in both of them the elements that determine the individual motion of our automobiles -- power of the respective motors and ability of the drivers -- count almost for nothing now, and what decides everything is the general movement of the column, or rather the combined movement of the various columns that intersect one another in the city. In short, I and the man commissioned to kill me are as if immobilized in a space that moves on its own, we are soldered to this pseudo-space which breaks up and re-forms and on whose combinations our fate depends.

To evade this situation the simplest method would be to get out of the car. If one or both of us left our automobiles and proceeded on foot, then space would exist again and the possibility of our moving in space. But we are in a street where parking is forbidden; we would have to leave the cars in the midst of the traffic (both his and mine are stolen cars, destined to be abandoned at random when they are no longer of use to us); I could slip away on all fours among the automobiles to keep from exposing myself to his aim, but such an escape would attract attention and I would immediately have the police on my heels. Now I not only cannot seek the protection of the police, but I must also avoid in every way arousing their curiosity; so obviously I mustn't get out of my car even if he leaves his.

My first fear, the moment we found ourselves trapped here, was of seeing him come forward on foot, alone and free in the midst of hundreds of people nailed to their wheels, calmly reviewing the row of cars and, on reaching mine, firing at me whatever bullets remain in his magazine, then running off and escaping. My fears were not unfounded: in the rear-view mirror I was not long in seeing the form of my pursuer extending from the half-open door of his car and stretching his neck above the expanse of metal roofs like someone trying to understand the reason for such an unnaturally prolonged stop; indeed, after a little while I saw his slender figure slip from the vehicle, move a few steps crosswise among the cars. But at that moment the column stirred in one of its intermittent hints of movement; from the line behind his empty car an angry honking rose, and already drivers and passengers were jumping out yelling and making threatening gestures. Certainly they would have chased him and brought him back by force to bend his head over the wheel if he hadn't hastened to resume his seat and put the car in gear, allowing the rest of the line to benefit from the new step forward, short as it was. On this score I can rest assured then: we cannot separate ourselves from our cars, not for a single moment, my pursuer will never dare overtake me on foot because even if he were in time to shoot me he couldn't then elude the fury of the other drivers, ready perhaps even to lynch him, not so much for the homicide in itself as for the traffic jam the two cars -- his and the dead man's -- would cause, stopped in the middle of the street.

I try to explore every hypothesis because the more details I can foresee the more probabilities I have of saving myself. For that matter what else could I do? We aren't moving, not an inch. So far I have considered the column as a linear continuum or else as a fluid current where the individual automobiles flow in disorder. The moment has come to make it clear that in our column the cars are arranged side by side in three lanes and that the alternation of periods of immobility and of movement in each of the three does not correspond with the other two, so that there are moments when only the right-hand line goes forward, or else the center line which is in fact the line where both I and my potential murderer are. If I have neglected such an outstanding element so far it isn't only because the three lines have gradually come to a regular arrangement and I myself was late in noticing it, but also because in reality this fact doesn't modify the situation for better or for worse. Certainly the difference in speed among the various lines would be decisive if the pursuer at a certain point could, for example advancing with the right-hand line, bring his car up beside mine, shoot, and continue on his way. This, however, is also an eventuality that can be excluded: even admitting that from the center line he might manage to force his way into one of the side lines (the cars proceed almost with their bumpers touching but if you know how you can exploit the moment when a little interval opens in the next line between a nose and a tail and can stick your own nose in without minding the protests of dozens of horns), keeping my eye on him in my rear-view mirror I would notice his maneuver before it was completed and I would have plenty of time, given the distance between us, to find a hasty solution with a similar move. I could, that is, slip into the same line, left or right, where he had moved, and thus I would go on preceding him at the same speed; or else I could shift my position to the outside line on the other side, if he moved to the left I could go to the right, and then we would be separated not only by a distance in the direction of traffic but also by a latitudinal division which would immediately become an insuperable barrier.

Let's assume in any case that we could finally be abreast in two adjacent lines; shooting at me isn't just something that he could do at any moment, without risking being blocked in the line waiting for the police with a corpse at the wheel of the neighboring car. Before the opportunity arose for rapid safe action the pursuer would have to stick to my side for God knows how long; and in the meanwhile since the relative speeds of the various lines change irregularly our cars would not stay long at the same level; I could regain my advantage and that wouldn't be too bad because we would go back to our previous position; the greatest risk for my pursuer would be for his line to advance while mine remained behind.

With the pursuer preceding me, I would no longer be pursued. And I could also, to make my new situation conclusive, move into his same line, putting a certain number of cars between him and me. He would be forced to follow the stream, with no possibility of reversing his direction, and by falling in behind him I would be definitively safe. At the signal, seeing him go in one direction, I would take the other, and we would be separated forever.

Anyway, all these hypothetical maneuvers should take into account the fact that, on reaching the signal, those in the right-hand line are obliged to turn right, and those in the left, to turn left (the jam at the intersection allows no second thoughts), whereas those in the center are able at the last moment to choose what they want to do. This is the real reason why both he and I are quite careful not to leave the center line: I want to retain my freedom of choice to the last minute, he wants to be ready to turn in the direction where he sees I have turned.

Suddenly I feel gripped by a gust of enthusiasm: we are really the most alert, my pursuer and I, having placed ourselves in the center line. It's wonderful to know that freedom still exists and at the same time to feel oneself surrounded and protected by a blockade of solid and impenetrable bodies, and to have no concern beyond raising the left foot from the clutch, pressing the right foot on the accelerator for an instant and immediately raising it and lowering the left again on the clutch, actions which above all are not decided by us but dictated by the traffic's general pace.

I am experiencing a moment of well-being and optimism. Basically our movement is equivalent to all other movement, that is, it consists in occupying the space before us and in causing it to flow behind us, and so the moment an empty space is formed in front of me I occupy it, otherwise somebody else would hasten to occupy it; the only possible action on space is the negation of space, I negate it the moment it gives a sign of forming and then I allow it to be formed again behind me where there is immediately somebody else who negates it. In short, this space is never seen and perhaps it doesn't exist, it is only an extension of objects and a measure of distances, the distance between me and my pursuer consists in the number of cars in the line between me and him, and since this number is constant our pursuit is only a pursuit after a manner of speaking, just as it would be difficult to establish that two travelers seated in two coaches of the same train are pursuing each other.

If, however, the number of these interval-cars were to increase or diminish, then our pursuit would once again be a real pursuit, independently of our speeds or our freedom of movement. Now I must once again pay close attention: both eventualities have some likelihood of taking place. Between the position where I am now and the intersection controlled by the signal I notice that a secondary street debouches, almost an alley, from which comes a thin but steady trickle of cars. It would suffice for some of these incoming cars to be inserted between me and him, and immediately my separation would increase, it would be as if I had spurted forward in sudden flight. On our left, instead, in the middle of the street a narrow island set aside for parking now begins; if there are free places or if places become free it would suffice for some of the interval-cars to decide to park and then all of a sudden my pursuer would find the distance separating us shortened.

I must discover a solution in a hurry, and since the only field open to me is the field of theory, I can only go on extending my theoretical knowledge of the situation. Reality, ugly or beautiful as it may be, is something I cannot change: that man has been given the job of overtaking me and killing me, whereas I have been told I can do nothing but run away; these instructions remain valid even in the event that space is abolished in one or in all of its dimensions whereby motion would remain impossible; this doesn't mean I would stop being the pursued or he the pursuer.

I must bear in mind at the same time two types of relationship: on one hand the system that includes all the vehicles simultaneously moving in the center of a city where the total surface of the automobiles equals and perhaps exceeds the total surface of the streets; on the other hand the system created between an armed pursuer and an unarmed pursued man. Now these two types of relationship tend to become identified in the sense that the second is contained in the first as in a recipient which gives it its form and makes it invisible, so that an outside observer is unable to distinguish in the river of identical cars the two which are involved in a lethal pursuit, in a mad race that is hidden within this unbearable stasis.

Let's try to examine each element calmly: a pursuit should consist in the confrontation of the speeds of two bodies moving in space, but since we have seen that a space does not exist independently of the bodies that occupy it, the pursuit will consist only in a series of variations in the relative positions of such bodies. It is the bodies therefore that determine the surrounding space, and if this affirmation seems to contradict both my experience and my pursuer's -- since the two of us can't determine anything at all, neither space to flee in nor space to pursue in -- it is because we are dealing with a property not of single bodies but of the whole complex of bodies in their reciprocal relationships, in their moments of initiative and of indecision, of starting the motor, in their flashing of lights and honking and biting nails and constant angry shifts of gear: neutral, first, second, neutral; neutral, first, second, neutral . . .

Now that we have abolished the concept of space (I think my pursuer in these periods of waiting must also have reached the same conclusions as I) and now that the concept of motion no longer implies the continuous passage of a body through a series of points but only disconnected and irregular displacements of bodies that occupy this point or that, perhaps I will succeed in accepting more patiently the slowness of the line, because what counts is the relative space that is defined and transformed around my car as around every other car in this traffic jam. In short, each car is in the center of a system of relationships which in practice is the equivalent of another, that is, the cars are interchangeable, I mean the cars each with its driver inside; each driver could perfectly well change places with another driver, I with my neighbors and my pursuer with his.

In these shifts of position preferred directions can be discerned locally: for example our line's direction of movement, which even if it doesn't really imply it is moving nevertheless excludes the possibility that one can move in the opposite direction. For us two, then, the direction of pursuit is the preferred one, in fact the only exchange of positions that cannot take place is an exchange between us, or any other exchange in contradiction with our chase. This demonstrates that in this world of interchangeable appearances the pursuer-pursued relationship continues to be the only reality we can rely on. The point is this: if every car -- direction of movement and direction of pursuit remaining constant -- is equal to every other car, the properties of any one car can also be attributed to the others. Therefore nothing rules out the possibility that these lines of cars are all formed of cars being pursued, that each of these cars is fleeing as I am fleeing the threat of an aimed pistol in any one of the cars that follow. Nor can I exclude the further possibility that each car is pursuing another car with homicidal intentions, and that all of a sudden the center of the city will be transformed into a battlefield or the scene of a massacre. Whether this is true or not, the behavior of the cars around me would be no different from what it is now, therefore I am entitled to insist on my hypothesis and to follow the relative positions of any two cars in their various moments, attributing to one the role of the pursued and to the other that of the pursuer. Above all, it is a game that can serve very well to while away the waiting: I have only to interpret every change of position in the lines as an episode in a hypothetical pursuit. For example, now as one of the interval-cars starts flashing its signal light to turn left because it has seen a free space in the parking island, instead of being concerned only with my advantage which is about to be reduced, I can very easily think this is a maneuver in another pursuit, the move of one pursued or of one pursuer among the countless others who surround me, and thus the situation in which so far I have lived subjectively, nailed to my solitary fear, is projected outside me, extended to the general system of which we are all parts.

This isn't the first time that an interval-car has abandoned its place; on one side the parking area and on the other the right-hand line, slightly faster, seem to exercise a strong attraction on the automobiles behind me. As I have continued following the thread of my deductions, the relative space that surrounds me has undergone various changes: at a certain point even my pursuer moved to the right and, exploiting an advance of that line, passed a couple of cars in the central line; then I moved to the right, too; he went back into the central line and I too went back to the center, but I had to drop one car behind whereas he moved forward three. These are all things that before would have made me very uneasy, whereas now they interest me chiefly as special elements in the general system of pursuits whose properties I am trying to establish.

On thinking it over, I deduce that if all the cars are involved in pursuits, the pursuing property would have to be commutative, and anyone who pursues would have to be in his turn pursued and anyone who is pursued would also be pursuing. Among the cars, then, a uniformity and symmetry of relationships would be achieved, where the only difficult element to determine would be the pursued-pursuer interval in each chain of pursuits. In fact this interval could be perhaps twenty cars or perhaps forty, or else none, as -- from what I see in the mirror -- is now my case: at this very moment my pursuer has gained the position directly behind mine.

I should therefore consider myself defeated and admit that I now have left only a few minutes to live, unless in developing my hypothesis I can come upon some saving solution. For example, let's suppose the car pursuing me has behind it a chain of pursuing cars: exactly one second before my pursuer shoots, the pursuer of my pursuer could overtake him and kill him, saving my life. But if two seconds before that happened the pursuer of my pursuer were overtaken and killed by his pursuer, my pursuer would then be saved and free to kill me. A perfect system of pursuits should be based on a simple concatenation of functions: each pursuer has the job of preventing the pursuer ahead of him from shooting his victim, and he has one single means of doing this, namely, by shooting him. The whole problem then lies in knowing at which link the chain will break, because starting from the point where one pursuer succeeds in killing another, then the following pursuer, no longer having to prevent that homicide since it has already been committed, will give up the idea of shooting, and the pursuer who comes after him will have no further reason for shooting since the murder he was to prevent will no longer take place, and thus going back along the chain there will be no more pursued or pursuers.

But if I admit the existence of a chain of pursuits behind me there is no reason why this chain should not also continue through me into the part of the line that precedes me. Now that the signal is turning green and it is probable that in this very period of free movement I can succeed in pushing my way into the intersection where my fate will be decided, I realize the decisive element is not behind me but in my relationship with the man ahead of me. So the only significant alternative is whether my condition of pursued man is destined to remain terminal and asymmetrical (which would seem proved by the fact that in the relationship with my pursuer I am unarmed) or if I too in my turn am a pursuer. If I examine the data of the question more closely one of the hypotheses that occurs is this: I may have been given the assignment of killing a person but not the possibility of using weapons against anyone else for whatever reason: in this case I would be armed only for my victim and disarmed for all the others.

To discover if this hypothesis corresponds to the truth, I have only to extend my hand: if in the glove compartment of my car there is a pistol it is a sign that I too am a pursuer. I have time to check this: I have been unable to take advantage of the green light because the car ahead of me was blocked by the diagonal flow and now the red light has come on again. The perpendicular flow resumes; the car preceding me is in a nasty position, having passed the line of the signal; the driver turns to see if he can back up, he sees me, has an expression of terror. He is the enemy whom I have hunted through all the city and whom I have patiently followed in this long slow line. My right hand, gripping the pistol with its silencer, rests on the gearshift. In the little mirror I see my pursuer aiming at me.

The green comes on, I put the car into gear, racing the engine, I pull down hard with my left hand and at the same time I raise my right to the window and I shoot. The man I was pursuing slumps over the wheel. The man who was pursuing me lowers his pistol, now useless. I have already turned into the cross street. Absolutely nothing has changed: the line moves in little, irregular shifts of position, I am still prisoner of the general system of moving cars, where neither pursuers nor pursued can be distinguished.

So many and so complex are the factors that condition the parabolic movement both of arrows and of felines that I am unable for the moment to judge which of the eventualities is the more probable. I am therefore in one of those situations of uncertainty and expectation where one really doesn't know what to think. And the thought that immediately occurs to me is this: it doesn't seem the first time to me. With this I don't mean to refer to other hunting experiences of mine: an archer, the moment he thinks he's experienced, is lost; every lion we encounter in our brief life is different from every other lion; woe to us if we stop to make comparisons, to deduce our movements from norms and premises. I am speaking of this lion L and of this arrow A which have now reached a third, roughly, of their respective trajectories.

Nor am I to be included among those who believe in the existence of a first and absolute lion, of which all the various individual and approximate lions that jump on us are only shadows or simulacra. In our hard life there is no room for anything that isn't concrete, that can't be grasped by the senses.

Equally alien to me is the view of those who assert that each of us carries within himself from birth a memory of lion that weighs upon his dreams, inherited by sons from fathers, and so when he sees a lion he immediately and spontaneously says: Ha, a lion! I could explain why and how I have come to exclude this idea, but this doesn't seem to me the right moment.

Suffice it to say that by "lion" I mean only this yellow clump that has sprung forth from a bush in the savannah, this hoarse grunt that exhales an odor of bloody flesh, and the white fur of the belly and the pink of the under-paws and the sharp angle of the retractile claws just as I see them over me now with a mixture of sensations that I call "lion" in order to give it a name though I want it to be clear it has nothing to do with the word "lion" nor even with the idea of lion which one might form in other circumstances.

If I say this moment I am living through is not being lived for the first time by me, it's because the sensation I have of it is one of a slight doubling of images, as if at the same time I were seeing not one lion or one arrow but two or more lions and two or more arrows superimposed with a barely perceptible overlapping, so the sinuous outlines of the lion's form and the segment of the arrow seem underlined or rather haloed by finer lines and a more delicate color. The doubling, however, could be only an illusion through which I depict to myself an otherwise indefinable sense of thickness, whereby lion arrow bush are something more than this lion this arrow this bush, namely, the interminable repetition of lion arrow bush arranged in this specific relationship with an interminable repetition of myself in the moment when I have just slackened the string of my bow.

I wouldn't want this sensation as I have described it, however, to resemble too much the recognition of something already seen, arrow in that position, lion in that other and reciprocal relation between the positions of arrow and of lion and of me rooted here with the bow in my hand; I would prefer to say that what I have recognized is only the space, the point of space where the arrow is which would be empty if the arrow weren't there, the empty space which now contains the lion and the space which now contains me, as if in the void of the space we occupy or rather cross -- that is, which the world occupies or rather crosses -- certain points had become recognizable to me in the midst of all the other points equally empty and equally crossed by the world. And bear this in mind: it isn't that this recognition occurs in relation, for example, to the configuration of the terrain, the distance of the river or the forest: the space that surrounds us is a space that is always different, I know this quite well, I know the Earth is a heavenly body that moves in the midst of other moving heavenly bodies, I know that no sign, on the Earth or in the sky, can serve me as an absolute point of reference, I also remember that the stars turn in the wheel of the galaxy and the galaxies move away from one another at speeds proportional to the distance. But the suspicion that has gripped me is precisely this: that I have come to find myself in a space not new to me, that I have returned to a point where we had already passed by. And since it isn't merely a question of me but also of an arrow and a lion, it's no good thinking this is just chance: here time is involved, which continues to cover a trail it has already followed. I could then define as time and not as space that void I felt I recognized as I crossed it.

The question I now ask myself is if a point of time's trail can be superimposed on points of preceding passages. In this case, the impression of the images' thickness would be explained by the repeated beating of time on an identical instant. It might also be, in certain points, an occasional slight overlapping between one passage and the next: images slightly doubled or unfocused would then be the clue that the trail of time is a little worn by use and leaves a narrow margin of play around its obligatory channels. But even if it were simply a momentary optical effect, the accent remains, as of a cadence I seem to feel beating on the instant I am living through. I still wouldn't like what I have said to make this moment seem endowed with a special temporal consistency in the series of moments that precede it and follow it: from the point of view of time it is actually a moment that lasts as long as the others, indifferent to its content, suspended in its course between past and future; what it seems to me I've discovered is only its punctual recurrence in a series that is repeated, identical to itself every time.

In short, the whole problem, now that the arrow is hissing through the air and the lion arches in his spring and I still can't tell if the arrowhead dipped in serpent's venom will pierce the tawny skin between the widened eyes or will miss, abandoning my helpless viscera to the rending that will separate them from the framework of bones to which they are now anchored and will drag and scatter them over the bloodied, dusty ground until before night the vultures and the jackals will have erased the last trace, the whole problem for me is to know if the series of which this second is a part is open or closed. Because if, as I seem to have heard maintained sometimes, it is a finite series, that is if the universe's time began at a certain moment and continues in an explosion of stars and nebulae, more and more rarefied, until the moment when the dispersion will reach the extreme limit and stars and nebulae will start concentrating again, the consequence I must draw is that time will retrace its steps, that the chain of minutes will unroll in the opposite direction, until we are back at the beginning, only to start over again, and all of this will occur infinite times -- and it may just be, then, that time did have a beginning: the universe does nothing but pulsate between two extreme moments, forced to repeat itself forever -- just as it has already repeated itself infinite times and just as this second where I now find myself is repeated.

Let's try to look at it all clearly, then: I find myself in a random space-time intermediary point of a phase of the universe; after hundreds of millions of billions of seconds here the arrow and the lion and I and the bush have found ourselves as we now find ourselves, and this second will be promptly swallowed up and buried in the series of the hundreds of millions of billions of seconds that continues, independently of the outcome, a second from now, of the convergent or divergent flight of the lion and of the arrow; then at a certain point the course will reverse its direction, the universe will repeat its vicissitude backwards, from the effects the causes will punctually arise, so also from these effects I am waiting for and don't know, from an arrow that plows into the ground raising a yellow cloud of dust and tiny fragments of flint or else which pierces the palate of the beast like a new, monstrous tooth, we'll come back to the moment I am now living, the arrow returning to fit itself to the taut bow as if sucked back, the lion falling again behind the bush on his rear legs tensed like a spring, and all the afterward will gradually be erased second by second by the return of the before, it will be forgotten in the dispersal of billions of combinations of neurons within the lobes of brains, so that no one will know he's living in reversed time just as I myself am not now sure in which direction the time I move in is moving, and if the then I'm waiting for hasn't in reality already happened just a second ago, bearing with it my salvation or my death.

What I ask myself is whether, seeing that at this point we have to go back in any case, it wouldn't be wise for me to stop, to stop in space and in time, while the string of the barely slackened bow bends in the direction opposite to the one where it was previously tautened, and while my right foot barely lightened of the weight of the body is lifted in a ninety-degree twist, and to let it be motionless like that to wait until, from the darkness of space-time, the lion emerges again and sets himself against me with all four legs in the air, and the arrow goes back to its place in its trajectory at the exact point where it is now. What, after all, is the use of continuing if sooner or later we will only find ourselves in this situation again? I might as well grant myself a few dozen billion years' repose, and let the rest of the universe continue its spatial and temporal race to the end, and wait for the return trip to jump on again and go back in my story and the universe's to the origin, and then begin once more to find myself here -- or else let time go back by itself and let it approach me again while I stand still and wait -- and then see if the right moment has come for me to make up my mind and take the next step, to go and give a look at what will happen to me in a second, or on the other hand if it's best for me to remain here definitively. For this there is no need for my material particles to be removed from their spatial-temporal course, from the bloody ephemeral victory of the hunter or of the lion: I'm sure that in any case a part of us remains entangled with each single intersection of time and space, and therefore it would be enough not to separate ourselves from this part, to identify with it, letting the rest go on turning as it must turn to the end.

In short, I am offered this possibility: to constitute a fixed point in the oscillating phases of the universe. Shall I seize the opportunity or is it best to skip it? As far as stopping goes, I might well stop not just myself, which I realize wouldn't make much sense, but stop along with me what serves to define this moment for me, arrow lion archer suspended just as we are, forever. It seems to me in fact that if the lion knew clearly how things stand, he too would surely agree to remain where he is now, at about a third of the trajectory of his furious leap, to separate himself from that self-projection which in another second will encounter the rigid jerks of the death agony or the angry crunching of a still-warm human skull. I can speak therefore not only for myself, but also in the name of the lion. And in the name of the arrow, because an arrow can wish for nothing but to be an arrow as it is in this rapid moment, postponing its destiny as blunted scrap which awaits it whichever target it may strike.

Having established, then, that the situation in which we now find ourselves, lion arrow and I in this moment t_0, will occur two times for each coming and going of time, identical to the other times, and that it has been so repeated as often as the universe has repeated its diastole and its systole in the past -- if it really makes sense to speak of past and future for the succession of these phases, when we know that it doesn't make sense within the phases -- an uncertainty still remains about the situation in the successive seconds t_1, t_2, t_3, et cetera, just as things were uncertain in the preceding t_-1, t_-2, t_-3, et cetera.

The alternatives, on closer examination, are these:

either the space-time lines that the universe follows in the phases of its pulsation coincide at every point;

or else they coincide only in certain exceptional points, such as the second I am now living in, diverging then in the others.

If the latter of these alternatives is correct, from the space-time point where I now am there extends a bundle of possibilities which, the more they proceed in time, the more they diverge, conelike, toward futures which are completely different from one another, and each time I find myself here with the arrow and the lion in the air will correspond to a different point X of intersection in their trajectories, each time the lion will be wounded in a different way, he will have a different agony or will find to a different extent new strength to react, or he won't be wounded at all and will fling himself upon me each time in a different way leaving me possibilities of self-defense or not leaving them, and my victories and my defeats in the struggle with the lion prove to be potentially infinite, so the more times I am disemboweled the more probabilities I'll have of hitting the target the next time I find myself here billions and billions of years later, thus I can express no opinion on this present situation of mine because in the event that I am living the fraction of time immediately preceding the clawing of the beast this would be the last moment of a happy period, whereas if what awaits me is the triumph with which the tribe welcomes the victorious lion hunter, what I'm now living is the climax of anguish, the blackest point of the descent to hell which I must make in order to deserve the coming apotheosis. Therefore it's best for me to flee from this situation whatever may be in store for me, because if there's one interval of time that really counts for nothing it's this very moment, definable only in relation to what follows it, that is to say this second in itself doesn't exist, and so there is no possibility not only of staying in it but even of crossing it for the duration of a second, in short it is a jump of time between the moment in which the lion and the arrow took flight and the moment when a spurt of blood will burst from the lion's veins or from mine.

Consider, too, that if from this second infinite lines of possible futures move out in a cone, the same lines arrive obliquely from a past that is also a cone of infinite possibilities, therefore the I who is now here with the lion plunging on him from above and with the arrow cutting its way through the air is a different I every time because past mother father tribe language age experience are different each time, the lion is always another lion even if I see him just like this each time, with his tail which has curved in the leap till the tuft is near the right flank in a movement that could be a lash or a caress, with the mane so open that it covers a great part of the breast and the torso from my sight and allows only the forepaws to emerge laterally raised as if preparing for me a joyous embrace but in reality ready to plunge the claws in my shoulders with all their strength, and the arrow is made of material that is always different, tipped with different heads, poisoned by dissimilar serpents, though always crossing the air in the same parabola and with the same hiss. What doesn't change is the relation between me arrow lion in this moment of uncertainty which is repeated exactly, an uncertainty whose stake is death, but we must agree that if this menacing death is the death of a me with a different past, of a me that yesterday morning didn't go out to gather roots with my girl cousin, that is rightly speaking another me, a stranger, perhaps a stranger who yesterday morning went gathering roots with my girl cousin, therefore an enemy, in any case if here in my place the other times instead of me there was somebody else, it doesn't then matter much to know if the time before or the time after the arrow struck the lion or not.

In this case, then, it's out of the question that stopping in t_0 for the whole cycle of space and time could have any interest for me. However, the other hypothesis still remains: as in the old geometry lines had only to coincide in two points to coincide in all, so it may be that the spatio-temporal lines drawn by the universe in its alternating phases coincide in all their points and therefore not only t_0 but also t_1 and t_2 and everything that will come afterward will coincide with the respective t_1 t_2 t_3 of the other phases, and likewise all the preceding and following seconds, and I will be reduced to having a sole past and a sole future repeated infinite times before and after this moment. One might, however, wonder whether there is any sense in speaking of repetition when time consists in a single series of points not allowing variations in their nature or in their succession: it would then suffice to say that time is finite and always equal to itself, and can thus be considered as given contemporaneously in all its extent forming a pile of layers of present; in other words, we have a time that is absolutely full, since each of the moments into which it can be broken down constitutes a kind of layer that stays there continuously present, inserted among other layers also continuously present. In short, the second t_0 in which we have the arrow A_0 and a bit farther on the lion L_0 and here the me Q_0 is a space-time layer that remains motionless and identical forever, and next to it there is placed t_1 with the arrow A_1 and the lion L_1 and the me Q_1 who have slightly changed their positions, and beside that there is t_2 which contains A_2 and L_2 and Q_2 and so on. In one of these seconds placed in line it is clear who lives and who dies between the lion L_n and the me Q_n, and in the following seconds there are surely taking place either the tribe's festivities for the hunter who returns with the lion's remains or the funeral of the hunter as through the savannah spreads the terror of the prowling murderous lion. Each second is definitive, closed, without interferences from the others, and I, Q_0, here in my territory t_0 can be absolutely calm and take no interest in what is simultaneously happening to Q_1 Q_2 Q_3 Q_n in the respective seconds near mine, because in reality the lions L_1 L_2 L_3 L_n can never take the place of the familiar and still-inoffensive though menacing L_0, held at bay by an arrow in flight A_0 still containing in itself that mortal power that might prove wasted by A_1 A_2 A_3 A_n in their arrangement in segments of the trajectory more and more distant from the target, ridiculing me as the most clumsy archer of the tribe, or rather ridiculing as clumsy that Q_-n who in t_-n takes aim with his bow.

I know the comparison with the frames of a movie film emerges spontaneously, but if I've avoided using it so far you can be sure I've had my reasons. It's true that each second is closed in itself and incommunicable with the others exactly as in a film frame, but to define its content the points Q_0 L_0 A_0 are not enough: with them we would limit it to a little lion-hunting scene, dramatic if you like but surely not displaying a very broad horizon; what must be considered contemporaneously is the totality of the points contained in the universe in that second t_0 not excluding even one, and then it's best to put the film frame right out of your head because it just confuses things.

So now that I have decided to inhabit forever this second t_0 -- and if I hadn't decided to it would be the same thing because as Q_0 I can inhabit no other -- I have ample leisure to look around and to contemplate my second to its full extent. It encompasses on my right a river blackish with hippopotamuses, on my left the savannah blackish-white with zebras, and scattered at various points along the horizon some baobab trees blackish-yellow with toucans, each of these elements marked by the positions occupied respectively by the hippopotamuses H(a)_0, H(b)_0, H(c)_0 et cetera, by the zebras Z(a)_0, Z(b)_0, Z(c)_0 et cetera, the toucans T(a)_0, T(b)_0, T(c)_0 et cetera. It further embraces hut villages and warehouses of importers and exporters, plantations that conceal underground thousands of seeds at different moments of the process of germination, endless deserts with the position of each grain of sand G(a)_0 G(b)_0 . . . G(n^m)_0 transported by the wind, cities at night with lighted windows and dark windows, cities during the day with red and yellow and green traffic lights, production graphs, price indices, stock market figures, epidemics of contagious diseases with the position of each virus, local wars with volleys of bullets B(a)_0 B(b)_0 . . . B(z)_0 B(zz)_0 B(zzz)_0 . . . suspended in their trajectory, bullets which may strike the enemies E(a)_0 E(b)_0 E(c)_0 hidden among the leaves, airplanes with clusters of just-released bombs suspended beneath them, airplanes with clusters of bombs waiting to be released, total war implicit in the international situation (IS)_0 which at some unknown moment (IS)_X will become explicit total war, explosions of supernovae which might change radically the configuration of our galaxy . . .

Each second is a universe, the second I live is the second I live in, la seconde que je vis c'est la seconde où je demeure, I must get used to conceiving my speech simultaneously in all possible languages if I want to live my universe-instant extensively. Through the combination of all contemporaneous data I could achieve an objective knowledge of the universe-instant t_0 in all its spatial extension, me included, since inside t_0 I, Q_0, am not in the least determined by my past Q_-1 Q_-2 Q_-3 et cetera but by the system composed of all the toucans T_0, bullets B_0, viruses V_0, without which the fact that I am Q_0 could not be established. For that matter, since I no longer have to worry about what will happen to Q_1 Q_2 Q_3 et cetera, there's no use in my assuming the subjective point of view that has guided me so far, now I can identify myself with myself as well as with the lion or with the grain of sand or the cost-of-living index or with the enemy or with the enemy's enemy.

To do this I must establish exactly the co-ordinates of all these points and I must calculate certain constants. I could for example emphasize all the components of suspense and uncertainty that obtain both for me and for the lion the arrow the bombs the enemy and the enemy's enemy, and define t_0 as a moment of universal suspense and uncertainty. But this still tells me nothing substantial about t_0 because granted it is indeed a terrifying moment as I believe is now proved, it could also be just one terrifying moment in a series of moments of mounting terror or equally a terrifying moment in a series of decreasing and therefore illusory terror. In other words this established but relative terror of t_0 can assume completely different values, since t_1 t_2 t_3 can transform the substance of t_0 in a radical manner, or to put it more clearly there are the various t_1's of Q_1, L_1, E(a)_1, E(1/a)_1 which have the power to determine the fundamental qualities of t_0.

And here, it seems to me, things start becoming complicated: my line of conduct is to close myself in t_0 and to know nothing of what happens outside of this second, giving up a limited personal point of view in order to live t_0 in all its global objective configuration, but this objective configuration can be grasped not from within t_0 but only by observing it from another universe-instant, for example from t_1 or from t_2, and not from all their extension contemporaneously but by adopting decisively one point of view, that of the enemy or of the enemy's enemy, that of the lion or that of myself.

To sum up: to stay in t_0 I must establish an objective configuration of t_0; to establish an objective configuration of t_0 I must move to t_1; to move into t_1 I must adopt some kind of subjective viewpoint so I might as well keep my own. To sum up further: to stay still in time I must move with time, to become objective I must remain subjective.

Now let's see how I must behave practically: it remains established that I as Q_0 retain my residence in t_0, but I could meanwhile make the quickest possible dash into t_1 and if that isn't enough proceed on to t_2 and t_3, identifying myself temporarily with Q_1 Q_2 Q_3, all this naturally in the hope that the Q series continues and isn't prematurely cut off by the curved claws of L_1 L_2 L_3, because only in this way could I realize how my position of Q_0 in t_0 is really constituted which is the only thing that should matter to me.

But the danger I risk is that the content of t_1, of the universe-instant t_1, is so much more interesting, so much richer than t_0, in emotions and surprises either triumphant or disastrous, that I might be tempted to devote myself entirely to t_1, turning my back on t_0, forgetting that I had moved to t_1 only to gain more information on t_0. And in this curiosity about t_1, in this illegitimate desire for knowledge about a universe-instant that isn't mine, in wanting to discover if I would really be making a good bargain trading my stable and secure citizenship of t_0 for that modicum of novelty that t_1 could offer me, I might take a step into t_2 just to have a more objective notion of t_1; and that step into t_2 might, in turn . . .

If this is how things stand I realize that my situation won't change in the least even if I abandon the hypotheses from which I set out: that is, supposing time knows no repetitions and consists of an irreversible series of seconds each different from the other, and each second happens once and for all, and living in it for its exact length of one second means living in it forever, and t_0 interests me only with regard to the t_1 t_2 t_3's that follow it with their content of life or death in consequence of the movement I performed in shooting the arrow and the movement that the lion performed in making his leap and also of the other movements the lion and I will make in the next seconds and of the fear that for the whole duration of an interminable second keeps me petrified and keeps petrified the lion in midair and the arrow in my sight and the second t_0 swift as it came now swiftly clicks into the following second and traces with no further doubts the trajectory of the lion and of the arrow . . .

Luckily it is shattered. Each fragment is a chain of molecules arranged in a certain order, and thanks to the mere fact of having an order, it has only to float in the midst of the disordered substance and immediately around it other chains of molecules are formed, lined up in the same way. Each chain spreads order around itself, or rather it repeats itself over and over again, and the copies in turn are repeated, always in that geometrical arrangement. A solution of living crystals, all the same, covers the face of the Earth, it is born and dies in every moment without being aware of it, living a discontinuous and perpetual life, always identical to itself in a shattered time and space. Every other form remains shut out forever; including ours.

Up to the moment when the material necessary for self-repetition shows signs of becoming scarce, and then each chain of molecules begins to collect around itself a kind of reserve supply of substances, kept in a kind of packet with everything it needs inside. This cell grows; it grows up to a certain point; it divides in two; the two cells divide into four, into eight, into sixteen; the multiplied cells instead of undulating each by itself stick to one another like colonies or shoals or polyps. The world is covered with a forest of sponges; each sponge multiplies its cells in a network of full and empty spaces which spreads out its mesh and stirs in the currents of the sea. Each cell lives on its own and, all united, they live the unity of their lives. In the winter frost the tissues of the sponge are rent, but the newer cells remain there and start dividing again, they repeat the same sponge in spring. Now we're close to the point and the die is cast: the sea will be drunk by their pores, it will flow into their dense passages; they will live, forever, not we, we who wait vainly for the moment to be generated by them.

But in the monstrous agglomerations of the sea's depths, in the viscous mushroom-beds that begin to crop up from the soft crust of the emergent lands, not all the cells continue to grow superimposed on one another: every now and then a swarm breaks loose, undulates, flies, comes to rest farther on; they begin to divide again, they repeat that sponge or polyp or fungus from which they came. Time now repeats itself in cycles: the phases alternate, always the same. The mushrooms scatter their spores in the wind slightly, and they grow a bit like the perishable mycelium, until other spores ripen which will die, as such, on opening. The great division within living beings has begun: the funguses that do not know death last a day and are reborn in a day, but between the part that transmits the orders of reproduction and the part that carries them out an irreconcilable gap has opened.

By now the battle is joined between those that exist and would like to be eternal and us who don't exist and would like to, at least for a little while. Fearing that a casual mistake might open the way to diversity, those who exist increase their control devices: if the reproduction orders derive from the confrontation of two distinct and identical messages, errors of transmission are more easily eliminated. So the alternation of the phases becomes complicated: from the branches of the polyp attached to the sea-bed transparent medusas are detached, which float halfway to the surface; love among the medusas begins, ephemeral play and luxury of continuity through which the polyps confirm their eternity. On the lands that have emerged, vegetable monsters open fans of leaves, spread out mossy carpets, arch their boughs on which hermaphrodite flowers blossom; so they hope to grant death only a small and hidden part of themselves, but by now the play of crossing messages has invaded the world: that will be the breach through which the crowd of us who do not exist will make our overflowing entrance.

The sea is covered with undulating eggs; a wave lifts them, mixes them with clouds of seed. Each swimming creature that slips from a fertilized egg repeats not one but two beings that were swimming there before him; he will not be the one or the other of those two but yet another, a third; that is, the original two for the first time will die, and the third for the first time has been born.

In the invisible expanse of the program-cells where all the combinations are formed or undone within the species, the original continuity still flows; but between one combination and another the interval is occupied by individuals who are mortal and sexed and different.

The dangers of life without death are avoided -- they say -- forever. Not because from the mud of the boiling swamps the first clot of undivided life cannot again emerge, but because we are all around now -- above all, those of us who act as micro-organisms and bacteria -- ready to fling ourselves on that clot and devour it. Not because the chains of the viruses don't continue repeating themselves in their exact crystalline order, but because this can happen only within our bodies and tissues, in us, the more complex animals and vegetables; so the world of the eternals has been incorporated into the world of the perishable, and their immunity to death serves to guarantee us our mortal condition. We still go swimming over depths of corals and sea anemones, we still walk and make our way through ferns and mosses under the boughs of the original forest, but sexual reproduction has now somehow entered the cycle of even the most ancient species, the spell is broken, the eternals are dead, nobody seems prepared any longer to renounce sex, even the little share of sex that falls to his lot, in order to have again a life that repeats itself interminably.

The victors -- for the present -- are we, the discontinuous. The swamp-forest, defeated, is still around us; we have barely opened a passage with blows of our machete in the thicket of mangrove roots; finally a glimpse of free sky opens over our heads, we raise our eyes shielding them from the sun: above us stretches another roof, the hull of words we secrete constantly. As soon as we are out of the primordial matter, we are bound in a connective tissue that fills the hiatus between our discontinuities, between our deaths and births, a collection of signs, articulated sounds, ideograms, morphemes, numbers, punched cards, magnetic tapes, tattoos, a system of communication that includes social relations, kinship, institutions, merchandise, advertising posters, napalm bombs, namely everything that is language, in the broad sense. The danger still isn't over. We are in a state of alarm, in the forest losing its leaves. Like a duplicate of the Earth's crust, the cap is hardening over our heads: it will be a hostile envelope, a prison, if we don't find the right spot to break it, to prevent its perpetual self-repetition.

The ceiling that covers us is all jutting iron gears; it's like the belly of an automobile under which I have crawled to repair a breakdown, but I can't come out from under it because, while I'm stretched out there with my back on the ground, the car expands, extends, until it covers the whole world. There is no time to lose, I must understand the mechanism, find the place where we can get to work and stop this uncontrolled process, press the buttons that guide the passage to the following phase: that of the machines that reproduce themselves through crossed male and female messages, forcing new machines to be born and the old machines to die.

Everything at a certain point tends to cling around me, even this page where my story is seeking a finale that doesn't conclude it, a net of words where a written I and a written Priscilla meet and multiply into other words and other thoughts, where they may set into motion the chain reaction through which things done or used by men, that is, the elements of their language, can also acquire speech, where machines can speak, exchange the words by which they are constructed, the messages that cause them to move. The circuit of vital information that runs from the nucleic acids to writing is prolonged in the punched tapes of the automata, children of other automata: generations of machines, perhaps better than we, will go on living and speaking lives and words that were also ours; and translated into electronic instructions, the word "I" and the word "Priscilla" will meet again.

So narrating the story of me and Priscilla means first of all defining the relations established between my proteins and Priscilla's proteins, commanded, both mine and hers, by chains of nucleic acids arranged in identical series in each of her cells and in each of mine. Then narrating this story becomes still more complicated than when it was a question of a single cell, not only because the description of the relationship must take into account so many things that happen at the same time but above all because it's necessary to establish who is having relations with whom, before specifying what sort of relations they are. Actually, when you come right down to it, defining the sort of relations isn't after all as important as it seems, because saying we have mental relations, for example, or else, for example, physical relations doesn't change much, since a mental relationship involves several billion special cells called neurons which, however, function by receiving stimuli from such a great number of other cells that we might just as well consider all the trillions of cells of the organism at once as we do when we talk about a physical relationship.

In saying how difficult it is to establish who's having relations with whom we must first clear the decks of a subject that often crops up in conversation: namely, the fact that from one moment to the next I am no longer the same I nor is Priscilla any longer the same Priscilla, because of the continuous renewal of the protein molecules in our cells through, for example, digestion or also respiration which fixes the oxygen in the bloodstream. This kind of argument takes us completely off our course because while it's true that the cells are renewed, in renewing themselves they go on following the program established by those that were there before and so in this sense you could reasonably insist that I continue to be I and Priscilla, Priscilla. This in other words is not the problem, but perhaps it was of some use to raise it because it helps us realize that things aren't as simple as they seem and so we slowly approach the point where we will realize how complicated they are.

Well then, when I say I, or when I say Priscilla, what do I mean? I mean that special configuration which my cells and her cells assume through a special relationship between the environment and a special genetic heritage which from the beginning seemed invented on purpose to cause my cells to be mine and Priscilla's cells to be Priscilla's. As we proceed we'll see that nothing is made on purpose, that nobody has invented anything, that the way I am and Priscilla is really doesn't matter in the least to anyone: all a genetic heritage has to do is to transmit what was transmitted to it for transmitting, not giving a damn about how it's received. But for the moment let's limit ourselves to answering the question if I, in quotes, and Priscilla, in quotes, are our genetic heritage, in quotes, or our form, in quotes. And when I say form I mean both what is seen and what isn't seen, namely, all her way of being Priscilla, the fact that fuchsia or orange is becoming to her, the scent emanating from her skin not only because she was born with a glandular constitution suited to giving off that scent but also because of everything she has eaten in her life and the brands of soap she has used, in other words because of what is called, in quotes, culture, and also her way of walking and of sitting down which comes to her from the way she has moved among those who move in the cities and houses and streets where she's lived, all this but also the things she has in her memory, after having seen them perhaps just once and perhaps at the movies, and also the forgotten things which still remain recorded somewhere in the back of the neurons like all the psychic trauma a person has to swallow from infancy on.

Now, both in the form you see and don't see and in our genetic heritage, Priscilla and I have absolutely identical elements -- common to the two of us, or to the environment, or to the species -- and also elements which establish a difference. Then the problem begins to arise whether the relationship between me and Priscilla is the relationship only between the differential elements, because the common ones can be overlooked in both -- that is, whether by "Priscilla" we must understand "what is peculiar to Priscilla as far as the other members of the species are concerned" -- or whether the relationship is between the common elements, and then we must decide if it's the ones common to the species or to the environment or to the two of us as distinct from the rest of the species and perhaps more beautiful than the others.

On closer examination, if individuals of opposite sex enter into a particular relationship it clearly isn't we who decide but the species, or rather not so much the species as the animal condition, or the vegetable-animal condition of the animal-vegetives distinguished into distinct sexes. Now, in the choice I make of Priscilla to have with her relations whose nature I don't yet know -- and in the choice that Priscilla makes of me, assuming that she does choose me and doesn't change her mind at the last moment -- no one knows what order of priority comes first into play, therefore no one knows how many I's precede the I that I think I am, and how many Priscillas precede the Priscilla toward whom I believe I am running.

In short, the more you simplify the terms of the question the more they become complicated: once we've established that what I call "I" consists of a certain number of amino acids which line up in a certain way, it's logical that inside these molecules all possible relations are foreseen, and from outside we have nothing but the exclusion of some of the possible relations in the form of certain enzymes which block certain processes. Therefore you can say that it's as if everything possible had already happened to me, including the possibility of its not happening: once I am I the cards are all dealt, I dispose of a finite number of possibilities and no more, what happens outside counts for me only if it's translated into operations already foreseen by my nucleic acids, I'm walled up within myself, chained to my molecular program: outside of me I don't have and won't have relations with anything or with anybody. And neither will Priscilla; I mean the real Priscilla, poor thing. If around me and around her there's some stuff that seems to have relations with other stuff, these are facts that don't concern us: in reality for me and for her nothing substantial can happen.

Hardly a cheerful situation, therefore: and not because I was expecting to have a more complex individuality than the one given me, beginning with a special arrangement of an acid and of four basic substances which in their turn command the disposition of about twenty amino acids in the forty-six chromosomes of each cell I have; but because this individuality repeated in each of my cells is mine only after a manner of speaking, since out of forty-six chromosomes twenty-three come to me from my father and twenty-three from my mother, that is, I continue carrying my parents with me in all my cells, and I'll never be able to free myself of this burden.

What my parents programmed me to be in the beginning is what I am: that and nothing else. And in my parents' instructions are contained the instructions of my parents' parents handed down in turn from parent to parent in an endless chain of obedience. The story I wanted to narrate therefore is not only impossible to narrate but first of all impossible to live, because it's all there already, contained in a past that can't be narrated since, in turn, it's included in its own past, in the many individual pasts -- so many that we can't really be sure they aren't the past of the species and of what existed before the species, a general past to which all individual pasts refer but which no matter how far you go back doesn't exist except in the form of individual cases, such as Priscilla and I might be, between which, however, nothing happens, individual or general.

What each of us really is and has is the past; all we are and have is the catalogue of the possibilities that didn't fail, of the experiences that are ready to be repeated. A present doesn't exist, we proceed blindly toward the outside and the afterward, carrying out an established program with materials we fabricate ourselves, always the same. We don't tend toward any future, there's nothing awaiting us, we're shut within the system of a memory which foresees no task but remembering itself. What now leads me and Priscilla to seek each other isn't an impulse toward the afterward: it's the final action of the past that is fulfilled through us. Good-by, Priscilla, our encounter, our embrace are useless, we remain distant, or finally near, in other words forever apart.

Separation, the impossibility of meeting, has been in us from the very beginning. We were born not from a fusion but from a juxtaposition of distinct bodies. Two cells grazed each other: one is lazy and all pulp, the other is only a head and a darting tail. They are egg and seed: they experience a certain timidity; then they rush -- at their different speeds -- and hurry toward each other. The seed plunges headlong into the egg; the tail is left outside; the head -- all full of nucleus -- is shot at the nucleus of the egg; the two nuclei are shattered: you might expect heaven knows what fusion or mingling or exchange of selves; instead, what was written in one nucleus and in the other, those spaced lines, fall in and arrange themselves, on each side, in the new nucleus, very closely printed; the words of both nuclei fit in, whole and clearly separate. In short, nobody was lost in the other, nobody has given in or has given himself; the two cells now one are packaged together but just as they were before: the first thing they feel is a slight disappointment. Meanwhile the double nucleus has begun its sequence of duplications, printing the combined messages of father and mother in each of the offspring cells, perpetuating not so much the union as the unbridgeable distance that separates in each couple the two companions, the failure, the void that remains in the midst of even the most successful couple.

Of course, on every disputed issue our cells can follow the instructions of a single parent and thus feel free of the other's command, but we know what we claim to be in our exterior form counts for little compared to the secret program we carry printed in each cell, where the contradictory orders of father and mother continue arguing. What really counts is this incompatible quarrel of father and mother that each of us drags after him, with the rancor of every point where one partner has had to give way to the other, who then raises his voice still louder in his victory as dominant mate. So the characteristics that determine my interior and exterior form, when they are not the sum or the average of the orders received from father and mother together, are orders denied in the depth of the cells, counterbalanced by different orders which have remained latent, sapped by the suspicion that perhaps the other orders were better. So at times I'm seized with uncertainty as to whether I am really the sum of the dominant characteristics of the past, the result of a series of operations that produced always a number bigger than zero, or whether instead my true essence isn't rather what descends from the succession of defeated characteristics, the total of the terms with the minus sign, of everything that in the tree of derivations has remained excluded, stifled, interrupted: the weight of what hasn't been weighs on me, no less crushing than what has been and couldn't not be. Void, separation and waiting, that's what we are. And such we remain even on the day when the past inside us rediscovers its original forms, clustering into swarms of seed-cells or concentrated ripening of the egg-cells, and finally the words written in the nuclei are no longer the same as before but are no longer part of us either, they're a message beyond us, which already belongs to us no more. In a hidden point in ourselves the double series of orders from the past is divided in two and the new cells find themselves with a simple past, no longer double, which gives them lightness and the illusion of being really new, of having a new past that almost seems a future.

Now, I've said it hastily like this but it's a complicated process, there in the darkness of the nucleus, in the depth of the sex organs, a succession of phases some a bit jumbled with others, but from which there's no turning back. At first the pairs of maternal and paternal messages which thus far had remained separate seem to remember they're couples and they join together two by two, so many fine little threads that become interwoven and confused; the desire to copulate outside myself now leads me to copulate within myself, at the depths of the extreme roots of the matter I'm made of, to couple the memory of the ancient pair I carry within me, the first couple, that is both the one that comes immediately before me, mother and father, and the absolute first one, the couple at the animal-vegetal origins of the first coupling on Earth, and so the forty-six filaments that an obscure and secret cell bears in the nucleus are knotted two by two, still not giving up their old disagreement, since in fact they immediately try to disentangle themselves but remain stuck at some point in the knot, so when in the end they do succeed, with a wrench, in separating -- because meanwhile the mechanism of separation has taken possession of the whole cell, stretching out its pulp -- each chromosome discovers it's changed, made of segments that first belonged some to one and some to the other, and it moves from the other, now changed too, marked by the alternate exchanges of the segments, and already two cells are being detached each with twenty-three chromosomes, one cell's different from the other's, and different from those that were in the previous cell, and at the next doubling there will be four cells all different, each with twenty-three chromosomes, in which what was the father's and the mother's, or rather the fathers' and the mothers', is mingled.

So finally the encounter of the pasts which can never take place in the present of those who believe they are meeting does take place in the form of the past of him who comes afterward and who cannot live that encounter in his own present. We believe we're going toward our marriage, but it is still the marriage of the fathers and the mothers which is celebrated through our expectation and our desire. What seems to us our happiness is perhaps only the happiness of the others' story which ends just where we thought ours began.

And it's pointless for us to run, Priscilla, to meet each other and follow each other: the past disposes of us with blind indifference, and once it has moved those fragments of itself and of us, it doesn't bother afterward how we spend them. We were only the preparation, the envelope, for the encounter of pasts which happens through us but which is already part of another story, the story of the afterward: the encounters always take place before and after us, and in them the elements of the new, forbidden to us, are active: chance, risk, improbability.

This is how we live, not free, surrounded by freedom, driven, acted on by this constant wave which is the combination of the possible cases and which passes through those points of space and of time in which the rose of the pasts is joined to the rose of the futures. The primordial sea was a soup of beringed molecules traversed at intervals by the messages of the similarity and of the difference that surrounded us and imposed new combinations. So the ancient tide rises at intervals in me and in Priscilla following the course of the Moon; so the sexed species respond to the old conditioning which prescribes ages and seasons of loves and also grants extensions and postponements to the ages and the seasons and at times becomes involved in obstinacies and coercions and vices.

In other words, Priscilla and I are only meeting places for messages from the past: not only for messages among themselves, but for messages meeting answers to messages. And as the different elements and molecules answer messages in different ways -- imperceptibly or boundlessly different -- so the messages vary according to the world that receives them and interprets them, or else, to remain the same, they are forced to change. You might say, then, that the messages are not messages at all, that a past to transmit doesn't exist, and only so many futures exist which correct the course of the past, which give it form, which invent it.

The story I wanted to tell is the encounter of two individuals who don't exist, since they are definable only with regard to a past or a future, past and future whose reality is reciprocally doubted. Or else it's a story that cannot be separated from the story of all the rest of what exists, and therefore from the story of what doesn't exist and, not existing, causes what does exist to exist. All we can say is that in certain points and moments that interval of void which is our individual presence is grazed by the wave which continues to renew the combinations of molecules and to complicate them or erase them, and this is enough to give us the certitude that somebody is "I" and somebody is "Priscilla" in the temporal and spatial distribution of the living cells, and that something happens or has happened or will happen which involves us directly and -- I would dare say -- happily and totally. This is in itself enough, Priscilla, to cheer me, when I bend my outstretched neck over yours and I give you a little nip on your yellow fur and you dilate your nostrils, bare your teeth, and kneel on the sand, lowering your hump to the level of my breast so that I can lean on it and press you from behind, bearing down on my rear legs, oh how sweet those sunsets in the oasis you remember when they loosen the burden from the packsaddle and the caravan scatters and we camels feel suddenly light and you break into a run and I trot after you, overtaking you in the grove of palm trees.