I will tell you what happened then, Boris. I was on the roof with Eugenia watching the boys across the way pass a cigarette and a skin mag amongst themselves, drinking rum out of a tin. By then, you and she had already become very famous, you see, and those days I would often climb out of the skylight and catch the lingering edge of a storm in my smokes and in my hair.

Boris, it was then that I finally felt it: the something-terrible of your fame, your distances—it was as tactile as a second heartbeat, or your hand, passing precisely through my body. In the seconds that I swayed on that roof, I saw nothing but your old moth-eaten uniform coat, as the other boys downstairs laughed and jostled—as one gust of wind cut me through the fabric of everything.

My friend, I had chased you through the headlines, and could go no farther. I had been asleep for twenty-three years, and when I awoke, I found myself someplace strange.

What I would give to write with the concrete efficiency of an image; and what I would give to be charming in the purest character of the epoch—as so often read about, never met. I continue to find myself lumbering through words—and life—like a giant in an ocean of pebbles, scrutinizing everything because everything is inscrutable. It's a dilemma—life is real, but these words don't mean a thing.

—There you drift in again with your tales of pale abortive love affairs; and meanwhile amongst the taffeta and blue icing the snaggle-toothed and club-footed are swallowing their stories of places they’d like to be, people they’d like to love.

Boris, I am in the alley behind the pub, choking down a cigarette with the dirt crumbling in my hand.

1945

The war is over and he is treading the path of history which he had lifted so unassumingly, an eternity ago, from the pages of crumbling library books--like fingerprints from the scene of the crime. Five years ago, he had stood on a doorstep, and had tried to penetrate the threshold by the sheer centrifugal force of his own fear, but it was, he found, utterly impenetrable after all. In his mind he returned to the beginning--the black yawn of time, over which they had bent their wind-swept golden heads.

He saw the notice in the morning newspaper, buried beneath oversized serifs and exuberant punctuation. It is an inconspicuous cemetery, and an even more inconspicuous grave, slightly damp and resolutely grey.

An old friend.

==

He was never one to linger over the mysterious paths of chance, but here, in this misplaced buttoned-up age of strange sterility, selfishness took him by surprise. What great quantities slipped through him, that is--daily quashed by reminders of the absurdity of his existence, the desperate cling of an unutterable history.

The shops, by this time of night, are closed or closing. The stragglers bundled up in dark mackintoshes shutter their windows hurriedly against the rain, and as each anonymous face blurs wetly in the failing street lamps, he tries not to remember the letters and syllables that once made up the names of two boys, with heads full of dusty books and the day's trifling concerns.

One by one he examines the darkened windows of the buildings along the street. How many secrets must be told and kept every day, behind every pane of glass.

With a turn of the heel he wrenches his drifting mind away, now walking with purpose in another direction. The leather of a little journal is warm in his coat, freshly turned dirt dusting its unmarked covers.

I think I may be prone to pretense. People like to say that it's always better to go with the truth, but I don't like the truth so I am going to side with the lie. If that's childish of me, then so be it--I'm still young at least. It's okay to indulge a little in a few lies when you're young, isn't it? Like smoking a few cigarettes, or doing a few recreational drugs. I've got time, and that invincibility which all youth suffer--if I hide behind some masks of falsehoods, and let myself be a little petty and selfish, at least I shall have time to look back in years to come and say, I'm not like that anymore.

I think we may be all prone to pretense.