And that he was a bucket to them.

That needed emptying. It had taken this beauty - the beauty of a young woman's face; this specific face; her face, still flashing backward at him, in a manner that indicated - he did not know what she knew – but how had it taken that face to awaken this/to show him now, that this place existed and it was real.

It was real. It was real. It was real. It was real. It was real. It was real. It was real life/and it was real - not the other place/not only that - this place was real life and it was real but that

he was.

Why?

Down on that grey valley floor, dishwater light; those cuboids, those forms; drained reality, uncoloured, nothing land, just the nothing land before him - he allowed his body its drift; directed, however this time, in connection to her. In a connection he felt pulling out of her too - and in some fashion the guy behind him in whose glance he felt, for reasons at this moment he couldn't really expose to conscious thought. But from her he was filled.

The glands and organs systematically drained in the fashion and the manner required by demons - It was not the word demon. But this was the concept, Pry thought. Massimo, he didn't even know his name, was building a full reality.

He was building the concepts himself, as he drifted toward her – under attack; had been daily and systematically in the manner in which he was physically and psychologically drained by demons; in order that he have nothing. That he have no identity – he had no name, in order that – he didn't know how he knew, but what they did, the women were pregnant.

This was how human beings were made. He knew this. He had been made in this fashion. But when and by whom? And why was his asking this, even more knowing this? A technical impossibility. Why did he have no history? Why did he have to build these concepts himself? Why was he a nothing man in a nothing land, jumbled consciously and deliberately among other nothing people, anonymous. Made to empty himself among them and into them, in repetition, six hours a day in his real life and then poured once more back into the sustaining dream. The thing between which and for which he apparently had been living.

And why only now. These thoughts.

Why only now her. Why only now any kind of methodically, interiorly, self-consciously auto-constructed mode of comprehending any of this; why only now and why only in relation to her beauty. Specifically that of her face. What did this mean? Why?

Why?

Why?

Why, anything, any of this, he knew nothing. - And why that other thing. Why the counterpart to this ignorance he felt on the other side of it.

Why did he have to build these concepts himself and why ignorance, and why out of her, flashing back at him, her eyes, the side of her face, why ignorance, and her nose and her lips, why ignorance, and her eyebrows and her forehead, and her – and why out of her, why ignorance, and why out of her a type of mystery that reigned.

He drifted now. Unable to categorise anything else, unable to render any less vague, more pointed, consciously specific any of these concepts or associations he painstakingly, in direct relation to her beauty, built himself.

He couldn't, so he drifted. But in an entirely new fashion; not upon the sick-making emptiness that had been taught him, but out of something that was communicated, something beneath him, and right now, currently was actually right now being said. This drifted him towards her/the corridor tubes, rising above them, flat upon the plain, menacing chambers in which one emptied oneself, for evil itself, rendered as conscious entities, in some kind of vast spiteful parody - in some kind of crushing malignant joke.

He knew nothing. He was

nothing.

But he was growing.