Lew Basnight reports to the Inconvenience for Fair surveillance, and we get his backstory, as through a glass darkly. Lew has been charged with some nameless, unforgivable, unremembered wrong. Unoriginal sinner, victim of bad luck or “Spontaneous Hallucination,” scorned and abandoned he wanders “the urban unmappable” in “a kind of waking swoon”. “Was it still Chicago?” he wonders. The winter, “a sub-zero-degrees version of Hell” says yes.
Winter gives way to spring, and Lew keeps slipping into altered states. Aboard a tramcar, the passing street scene rendered in slo-mo detail worthy of Scorcese,
He entered, all too briefly, a condition he had no memory of having sought, which he later came to think of as grace.… Lew found himself surrounded by a luminosity new to him, not even observed in dreams,… He understood that things were exactly what they were. It seemed all that he could bear. (p.42)
He had learned to step to the side of the day. (p.44)
As in a Python sketch, Nate Privett shows up to teach Lew the benefits of Not Being Seen. A person with “a keen sympathy for the invisible” is a natural for the agency.
“Working for the Eye,” Lew hones his craft, practicing,
Not exactly invisibility. Excursion. (p.44)
2 comments:
Thanks for the comment. But I have not yet read Proust. Here is what I plan on doing: http://bilingual.wordpress.com/
2007/01/03/the-year-of-p/.
How did you find me anyway? I just opened the blog yesterday and have not written anything so far.
Anyhoo, I have been to your blog before you visited mine. So you are probably more famous than you might think.
Interesting to know.
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