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Your author sits at a wooden table in a small apartment in Dallas, writing with black ink. He's smoking again. He can't even taste the cigarettes anymore, but he wants them, the way he wanted brilliance once. That somber little box of butts is Literature, he thinks, a little package of death. But the analogy breaks down fast. Because what about the smoke? Or the body poisoned by it? Or the Sunday Times strewn across the table, the small box of Red Top matches, the scissors and the ashtray and the forgotten plants dying in the window? Are they Buddhas? Killers?

And what about Lenny? He'll die, that's certain, but what is there to say about it? He lacks cohesion, this author, focus. He thinks about women all day. He has no truth. Lenny, maybe, has truth, but no one wants it. Certainly your author has no use for it. He's after the Poem, you see, Fame, that sort of thing. Time to smoke lots of cigarettes and think of Kafka.