Transit - Excerpt

He presides as if alone in the room, as if there is no one here to notice. One thinks for a moment that his face is familiar, the torso under the crumpled shirt, the condition of his concealed aspirations, his guard-gray cardboard-cold sense of waste. A knowing evolved for protection-projection-description does nothing to alter him. If he is known through recommendation, one recommendation forsaking all others…but he skillfully evades detection. He evades. One can sense his completing, his distaste for this moment by the flat, inflexible line of his mouth. But already he is starting to slip out of focus, neither memory nor fact can intrude. A woman joins him, he does not look up. Her voice is warm and tame, a light fur. She positions this fur as if he is listening "…the men got down on all fours like dogs, yipping and whining, can you imagine!" Amusement makes her syllables tremble, one can't hear each word, just the texture of fur. "I know who I am, I'm aware of the room, the people here, your face, I'm not ill," someone says in a low voice behind her. Here is the line between cup and saucer, here is the limit of voices. Here is the place where volumes collide or retreat or defeat one another. The pressure of confinement, the skill of preventing-in any beginning: indulgence, some liquid-a cup and saucer or a glass.