It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead
of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.
I was not S, I was A. I was not a middle-aged married man living in a village in the rural
Midlands with a dog, a comfortable life, a ponch of a long walk across isolated fields
and a beer-drinking habit.
I was Auster, a sallow-skinned, dark-complexioned man who was a man of his own.
I wrote existential detective stories and lived in a brownstone in Brooklyn, New York,
who floundered the city streets, spelling out his own name around street corners.
By chance I came across this word, apophenia, or maybe it wasn't by chance, a tendency to
perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.
Apophenia.
I tried to make a pattern.
A pattern recognition.
I got a one-way ticket on the 806 to the outskirts of town in Walthamstow, Tradesburg.
A goatee, BOC obsessive, was asking questions about Sandy Perlman.
Outside the Geoffrey Lewis gig, there is a man wearing a full t-shirt.
A drunk in a pub in Leeds asked me,
What English band does Yogi?
The Tango sound like, Oasis, Stolen Kisses, Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba, M-E-S, Haunts, Tribute, Fest,
The Presswitch Village, Joy Division, T-shirts, Somewhere is Always, 1973, or 1873, and Uriah
Heath are always playing.
The missing link between the Dream Syndicate and the Go-Between.
It's Lee Redding.
2,000 steps past the midnight.
Talking, taxi drivers, immigration, Dutch football, the man in the Buddha vine.
If it's the second Thursday of the month in July, at 21.15 Central European Time,
I must be in Derrida, Moritzburg, Rotterdam, Metallica, Immigration, aged, old, in the Golden Rye.
Sour grapefruit in the Locus Publicus.
The amount of travel tax needed to get a metro pass earned you a metro pass.
Rotterdam, beer-like muddy water, canal water, draught water.
The idea of the internet rekindling our own paths.
Crops with information we'd rather not know.
Who is Betsy Spangles?
Synchronicity, patinicity, agenticity, clustering illusion.
The fog still slept on the wing above the drowning city.
R.L. Stevenson, or J.G. Ballard, in Pelted in early July, the chemical toilet spot the country lays.
Drinking a pint of Shires in the Red Line, like I'm a member of the cast of The Archers.
Wondering why the pub is called the Blind Rabbah.
Apophenia.
Philip K. Dick was a paranoid schizophrenic with drug issues.
As we enter into the future, he predicted America turns Nazi, and we dance to Robotic Abbott so we can forget.
That was the Auster Amble.
That was the Auster Preamble.
One by one.
One by one, I tore the pages from the notebook, crumpled them in my hand, and dropped them into the trash bin on the platform.
I came to the last page, just as the train was pulling out.