Is it possible, I ask myself, to retreat any further. Step into my bedroom and close the door. Outside the window the familiar, almost comically bleak blankness of the white siding over the staircase attached to the neighboring building, sulphurous brick, the hammering gray sky. It starts raining. Drifts on my lap, a friend, a second self inscribing the Möbius-strip satisfactions of writing about writing. Each particular drop of rain has its inch of earth into which it sinks. A flood is coming, a human flood to wash inhumanity away. I’m listening in my bedroom, writing out of the rain.