Travelling through unfathomable interiors

"A computer is only human," he used to say. "It, too, can break down."

He cancels our meeting at the eleventh hour. I am unlikely to sit on a terrasse in the midday sun drinking orange beer, as was our plan, on my own. So suddenly I have the afternoon free. I find myself walking and making up errands as I go along, things to do, things to accomplish, amid the now nothing of the day. 

At one intersection, my attention turns right, the street is barricaded, pedestrian traffic only. The shops spill their goods out onto the pavement. I move into the current of the crowd, which is not really a crowd, it's a dozen people drifting, and another dozen crisscrossing our paths in the opposite direction, but I gaze up the street, the slight incline to the north, and there I see spaces teeming with faces, colours, movement, I remember this is what it's like to be, to be among people, enjoying summer, profiting from the day, engaging in consumerist activity.

Following this path begins to lead me away from the arbitrary destination I had set, but one more block won't alter the overall trajectory too drastically. I want to reach the crowd, without being in the crowd, but the crowd is an illusion, it keeps receding up the incline of the street — that, or I can't see it when I'm in it.

I need to change my focus, stop looking at what lies in the distance, see what's directly in front of me. I duck into a shop and spend two hours trying on clothes. I have spent a year wearing a black t-shirt dress, I don't trust my fashion sense anymore. What do I want? What do I like? I enjoy the saleslady's attention, she has opinions — not the blue, this one is a better fit, too short, try this. (And this dress is so romantic, so flouncy and feminine, I can't remember if this is the sort of thing I ever wear. Do I still need to project an image onto the world?)

I spend hundreds of dollars on clothes I don't need, but the chartreuse silk is soft like a sunbeam through the honey locust, and my t-shirt dress is threadbare, I imagine I will have to wear proper clothes again one day.

When I get home, all I can talk about is the bookstore a few doors down from the dress shop, with the boxes on tables organized by genre. The sign indicates they are all 0$. I glance through the two small boxes of English books, I recognize several titles as forgettable beach reads of summers past. But one volume leaps out at me, I can't believe my good fortune, Stanislaw Lem's Tales of Pirx the Pilot, I take it to the counter inside to confirm, incredulous, is it really free?, and then nest it carefully in my bag, deep in rayon and chiffon, and I walk away, smiling like chartreuse silk.

Space has three dimensions. . . . Words without meaning. He tried to summon some sense of time, kept repeating the word "time." . . . It was like munching on a wad of paper. Time was a senseless glob. It was not he who was repeating the word, but someone else, inside him. And that someone was enlarging, swelling, transcending all boundaries. He was travelling through unfathomable interiors, a ballooning, preposterous, elephantine finger — not his own, not a real finger, but a fictitious one, coming out of nowhere . . . sovereign, overwhelming, rigid, full of reproach and silly innuendo. . . . And Pirx — not he but his thought processes — reeled back and forth inside this preposterous, fetid, torpid, nullifying mass. . . .