International Sad Hits

…Self Storage, cont.

K. often indulged in research. He considered it an indulgence not because it interfered with his duties at the self-storage facility - there was little to do, he never felt remiss - but because he knew that like other indulgences, research led him down a path that threatened not to return, like the longest, dark hallways in the building. Each topic stretched beyond his vision.

Although materials in the facility were limited, K. had over time amassed an impressive library of abandoned books. Unlike the paintings he continually found in the hallways, books were almost never left out for the trash - those few that were, he tended to reject as well: beach novels with creased covers; outdated desk calendars; self-help books with broken spines that fell open to what K. took to be the first and last page ever consulted in them.

But more than a few of the units K. opened yielded carefully cared for, even alphabetized collections of books. These were largely hardcover, scholarly volumes - the detritus of academic careers. There were boxes of excess from overfilled bookcases, labeled for future possible use however unlikely; multiple copies of an author’s own works, still unpacked from the publisher; colleagues’ books, personally dedicated on the title pages but otherwise crisply unread; massive, fusty multi-volume sets later reprinted in more convenient but less charming editions; texts for courses long deleted from university offerings, larded with decaying bookmarks and notepapers.

It was in a reference book on literary terms that K. first found mention of mora. Puzzling over the problem of the clock with its two simultaneous times, K. stopped in this particular encyclopedia at the following:

“DURATION: One of the three intonational characteristics of spoken sound, the other two being stress (see ACCENT) and pitch (q.v.). In poetry, d. concerns the timing of syllables, words, and lines, such timing being either actual or conventional - much more so the latter than the former.”

This distinction felt immediately useful to K. – the conventional reading of the clock was one particular time. But the actual reading of the clock was two moments simultaneously, which corresponded to K.’s actual experience of time.

K. was elated at this newfound vocabulary. So much was explained! He thought of the paintings he had rescued: each depicted an image in conventional time. But the object of the painting itself - from its creation to its rejection to K.’s adoption of it to its present place in the building - this K. could see in actual time, like a slideshow whose frame kept changing, though the image at its center remained constant.

…Self Storage, cont.

While Frieda continued to search the files, K.’s mind returned to his earlier days at the facility. The messengers that used to deliver his salary appeared before him, in their various outfits appropriate to motorcycle transport and the changing weather. In winter, one would appear bound into gear so tightly it seemed momentum alone kept him upright, as he stiffly entered the room, handed K. his envelope, and pivoted back out like a trolley turned round at the end of the line. In autumn, the rider always looked windswept even though he never removed his helmet, with leaves and dust following him in and out of the room. In summer, K. would take note of the various pads which slowly emerged from under heavier cover, a protective structure revealed more than the body itself. In spring the messenger often arrived wet or, worse yet for the office, covered in mud, sometimes with goggles splattered so thoroughly K. wondered if the rider even saw him, rising from his chair and accepting the envelope with a courteous nod that K. intended as a gesture of camaraderie between the two halves of this operation: one static (K.), the other in constant returning motion, like an asteroid.

“What do you remember of Barnabas?” asked Frieda, still flipping through files with a rhythm that seemed to have put K. into a trance. He looked up - though he did not know what he had been looking down at - and Frieda turned to meet his eyes.

“Barnabas?” he said, helplessly. “I don’t think I have ever known anyone by that name.”

“You may not have known his name, but you knew him,” said Frieda, matter-of-factly. Her confidence was contagious. K. immediately felt sure he had known a Barnabas. But that seemed to be all he knew about the matter. Frieda coached him:

“The messenger, the envelope…”

K. felt blinded for a moment, as he realized the messengers of those years might all have been one. He never spoke to them, so he could not distinguish their voices. He never saw their eyes, at least not clearly, due to their goggles. And what he took to be their various bodies might only have been their different costumes, as the seasons and weather changed. Barnabas? K. tried to match the name to all the messengers of his memory. He found no discordance — like the landlady, who appeared in K.’s mind as so many landladies, K. had multiplied the Barnabases, filing each of his appearances under a different heading: Messenger 1, Messenger 2, and so on, until the messengers stopped appearing.

“But what happened to Barnabas?” he asked Frieda, at the end of this internal adjustment.

Frieda’s eyes narrowed. “You keep secrets, don’t you, K.?”

K. could not tell if she was asking him to keep a secret, or if she was accusing him of having withheld information. He waited for her next statement, to clarify the situation.

But Frieda said nothing further, she returned to her files. K.’s mind returned to Barnabas. Had they never spoken to one another? In the very back of the drawer, K. found a single encounter - could it have been the first? - that included language. It was a messenger whose lower face had been visible, it must have been in fair weather. The beard was dark but thin. The lips were delicate, curled in what K. took to be a mean expression until he heard the voice they helped shape: sing-songy, lingering on tones in a flexible rhythm based neither on the syllable nor stress but on what K. later learned is called “mora.”

It was in fact the file of research that K. had done on mora which finally halted Frieda’s march of information.

…Self Storage, cont.

When K. looked up, Frieda was in the doorway. His expression lagged behind his nervous system, so although he was feeling surprise to the point of shock, Frieda saw a blank stare. She stared back.

Frieda’s stare chased K.’s surprise back inward, the initial message never reached his muscles. His shock, driven beneath the skin and toward the heart, froze him to the core. After a few moments, he realized he could not move. Frieda continued to stare.

Never letting go of his eyes with hers, she moved toward one of the filing cabinets against the walls, and opened it deliberately. Only then did she release K.’s gaze, turning to look at the folders within.

“You dust the files?” she said, casually. Her tone had no relation to her body language, which was alert as an animal. But her speech was the lazy chat of a bored co-worker. “I have never seen such clean files. When did you last open this?”

The direct question freed K.’s tongue. He knew the answer. “Last week,” he said. “I dust all the files, in a rotating pattern that begins to the left of the door from your point of view - stage right, you might say. That case is the first I dust in the sequence, which began again last week.” K.’s thoroughness was automatic, and allowed him to speak fluently about such a topic even though his initial message of surprise at seeing Frieda was now finally reaching his extremities, which began to tremble slightly. He stammered his next remark, which wasn’t as automatic: “Do you keep files too?” he asked, in what he felt was an effort at personal engagement.

Frieda didn’t answer until she had flipped through the entire top drawer. She opened the next one down. “It’s a hobby,” she said over her shoulder. “To each his own.”

K. was startled again, this time by her words. As Frieda flipped through the rest of the first filing cabinet to the left of the door, K. felt his memory being fanned through as well. Was there a thumb tab with this phrase, he wondered? Was there a file with his name on it?

…Self Storage, cont.

K. felt unsettled after the encounter with Art and Jerry. Their brawl was unpleasant to witness, and at such close range could even have been dangerous. But more disturbing to K. was that it reminded him of his meeting with Frieda. She, too, had been looking for him in particular, though he could not imagine why.

It was near noon, an hour K. often found himself thinking of Frieda because of the timing of her singular visit. When he returned to the office, a nostalgic tune was playing. Lately K. had noticed that the quality of the music in his office changed with the hour of day - even, it sometimes seemed to him, with his differing activities. Now a mellow mix of woodwinds introduced a World War II-era crooner, delivering his ballad with enough vibrato to establish sincerity, but not so much as to sell the emotion in his words.

A rose must remain with the sun and the rain
Or its lovely promise won’t come true
To each his own, to each his own
And my own is you [1]

The logic, as well as the singer’s detached tone, gave K. pause. If my own were you, would each still have his or her own? Or is ownership of another a dissolution of both, a transformation where each and own are no longer distinguishable? Such a union brought Art and Jerry back to mind, but K. decided they were too distinct to illustrate it accurately. In their stead, he hit upon the idea of a snake that had swallowed its tail, coiling into an ever smaller point.

This mysterious image would apply only if the each and own were mutual, K. reasoned. If my own is you, but your own is not me, then the snake would be swallowing not itself but another. To an observer, that postprandial snake might be indistinguishable from before the encounter, there would be no transformation. Except, thought K. with a shudder, the own would have disappeared completely from the scene, consumed by the each.

The singer continued:

What good is a song if the words don’t belong
And a dream must be a dream for two

A surprisingly chipper male choir joined in for the refrain:

No good alone to each his own
For me there’s you

K. took note of the change this presented. The end of the first chorus - “My own is you,” with its promise of mystical transformation - had become a simple statement of desire: “For me there’s you.” In the surface noise of the old recording, K. now heard the hissing of the snake. The middle eight that followed belonged to its leathery voice, the voice of the each:

If a flame is to grow there must be a glow
To open each door there’s a key
I need you I know, I can’t let you go

The turnaround was a desperate last cry from the own:

Your touch means too much to me!

K. felt drained. As he slumped in his chair, the band took over the melody, bashing it out to give the dancers a boost until the solo sax reclaimed it for melancholy. The final chorus was epilogue, sung by the sated snake (with backing chorus):

Two lips must insist on two more to be kissed
Or they’ll never know what love can do
To each his own, I’ve found my own
One and only you

Loneliness had won the day, though not without a struggle.

…Self Storage, cont.

It was in that very hallway that K. was startled one day by two young men - boys, perhaps, judging by their body language and constant nudging and pushing of one another. But if these were boys they had men’s faces: lined, careworn faces mismatched to their open-mouthed expressions.

K. never addressed the patrons he ran across - it was so rare in any case - because he felt they were there for private reasons, and as a representative of the facility he should act in a manner commensurate with that trust. His habit (one could hardly call it a habit, he had so little occasion to practice it, but it had been thoroughly worked out in advance) was to make his eyes available, though without seeking contact. If contact were made, he would acknowledge it directly and then avert his gaze, not in a manner that communicated actual aversion of course, but simply that he needed his eyes again to help direct him on his path. Above all, he decided, he would refrain from casual pleasantries like those he had heard his landlady use so often. “How are you?” seemed ridiculous in any case, given the anonymous nature of the storage business. “Nice weather” was equally inappropriate, since they would almost certainly be indoors, and largely in the dark. Other introductory phrases he rejected because they seemed to require a second exchange: a banal introductory remark such as, “Hello, I am the caretaker of this facility,” or a cheerful business inanity like, “Always glad to see the customers happy!” were gambits that might not lead directly to an exit. Safest, K. decided, was to say nothing, and follow the path of his eyes.

This time, the inanities came pouring out of the two men, however. “You are the caretaker!” said one, a bit taller than his compatriot, although the difference in height seemed to happen at the floor, since above the waist he was actually quite compact. His eyes stared at two points on either side of K.’s head, missing his form entirely. A cap was pushed back on his forehead, which like his body was quite short but sat above an elongated face punctuated by an open jaw, extending it even further down toward his gangly legs. His voice was loud, certainly much louder than necessary in the cavernous area of the building they found themselves in. And its echo was shrill, as if only the most grating tones managed to find the walls around them, the more mellow ones falling in a heap at K.’s feet.

K. looked to the other, not with surprise so much as curiosity. “You are the caretaker!” he said in turn, though with a different emphasis. This one was squat in the legs, but with a huge barrel chest that eventually swelled nearly to the height of his companion. His head was rounder than would allow for a cap. He had no hair, but this lent him the air of a baby more than an old man. Ears stuck out from this childish head at odd angles, which seemed to change as he rotated toward his companion to repeat, in a more concise variation: “The caretaker!”

“I am indeed, gentlemen,” said K., maintaining the formality he felt appropriate. He said nothing further, in the hope that this exchange would go only one round. Eyes back to the path, he leaned forward and was about to take his next step when both men slid in front of him, like a sliding door closing together. They were surprisingly adroit in this maneuver, K. noticed, as if out of long habit.

“Don’t you want to know our names?” said the taller one, sounding hurt. “We know yours!” added the shorter one, for which he received a swift kick in the shin from his companion. This was returned with a punch in the arm. Which led to a shoving match between the two so violent, K. was forced to step backwards, rather than ahead as he had planned. The scuffling subsided.

“Thank you for your kindness,” said K, trying to diffuse what he judged was becoming a difficult situation. “However, please be assured your anonymity is safe with me, as a professional representative of this self-storage facility.”

The two stared at K., the tall one’s eyes drifting further apart, the short one’s ears waving forward and back like feelers. A silent moment passed between the three, bonding them together in the atmosphere of the building. Dust disturbed by the pair’s scuffling began to settle back onto horizontal surfaces: latches, the tops of paintings, the toes of their shoes.

“So you know us?” said the tall one at last, pushing some of the floating dust toward K. with his breath. “Anonymous is what we are supposed to be, but you knew that too.”

“I bet he doesn’t know your real name, Art,” said the short one. The tall one punched him in the stomach. “That is my real name!” he said. “Just like yours is Jerry.”

Jerry returned the punch, but to the jaw. “Jeremiah!” he said in a strangled voice. “Arthur!” said Art, throwing Jerry to the dusty floor. The two rolled past K., who stepped aside and decided to pursue the original plan, averting his eyes and continuing his path.

…Self Storage, cont.

Eventually, all the available hallways were filled with images; there was hardly any wall space left. And yet the paintings kept appearing.

It was about this time that the messengers stopped arriving with his pay envelope, and K. started to open units he felt sure had been abandoned. The signs of abandonment were subtle: heavy dust on the latch; a rusty lock; hinges that showed no sign of having been separated recently. But the surest indication, K. found, was a lack of trash - paintings, specifically. While he could never be sure from which particular unit a given painting had come, K. felt confident that the paintings were not carried far within the building. A painting left at the end of an aisle was, he believed, almost certainly from that aisle, or at most one or two aisles away.

After a period of finding no trash in a given area, K. began more detailed examinations, such as placing bits of paper on latches, or tracing a line of chalk before doorways, to see if they were eventually disturbed. In time, K. became adept at detecting any sign of life that had made its way lately through a space. And he grew even better at the contrary: sensing a lack of life, not only in the present but projected backwards.

An abandoned unit presented this lifeless sensation from the outside; but from the inside, behind the closed door, K. could sometimes feel something else - lives embodied in objects. In the end, it was the contrast between these two - the abandoned exterior and the occupied interior - that determined which units K. would open. He thought of it as a ratio: the greater the difference in life, the more likely K. was to cut the lock.

Would an empty unit, visited regularly, possess this same ratio? K. worried about the potential miscalculation; but reasoned that in this case, the owner may not resent or even notice the intrusion, since there would be nothing inside to take.

The first unit K. opened - the one with camping supplies that had so helpfully sustained him - he converted into a place to keep the additional paintings that kept appearing in the halls. The camping equipment had been neatly stored on racks, which K. was able to repurpose for smaller, easel works. But there were a couple of larger images that had surfaced recently, which would not fit in any kind of rack; indeed, they were too big to hang in any of the hallways, even if there were still space on the walls. These he decided to hang in the unit itself.

The paintings inside this unit could not serve as signs, as they were invisible to K. on his daily rounds. Nevertheless, K. found that knowing they were in a particular unit changed his sense of that part of the building. His alternating sensations of occupation and abandonment - flipping back and forth like alternating current - stopped when he entered this hallway, which felt steady, or static. Was it because he himself was now occupying one of its spaces? he wondered. Or was it because that space no longer presented a binary choice, or a ratio, but was in a sense both wholly occupied and wholly abandoned - layered one over the other like the two times told by the clock.

…Self Storage, cont.

The painted clock was placed in an inset that few would have occasion to enter, but which K. always checked during his rounds. Unlike the warehouse areas of the building, with their efficient rows of identical units under a high shared ceiling, this corner had a low ceiling and plaster walls which fully separated one room from the next. On the exterior, it filled one of the many angles and protrusions that made the building so difficult to map in one’s mind - its “footprint” more a series of steps, or perhaps missteps, as if one were looking for an eroded trail in the woods.

The clearest markers on the inside were the long hallways of the largest spaces, hallways one could look down 100 yards at a time. But these too took unexpected turns that sent them off another direction, like a fork in the trail. Even when these bends were at right angles, they didn’t necessarily return or connect to anywhere else, making the experience of the interior less chart than maze.

These long hallways, with their blocks of units placed end to end, offered little wall space for hanging pictures, so K. used instead the odd, leftover spaces for his increasingly large collection of paintings. As an unexpected consequence, the paintings helped orient him; the more images he hung on the walls, he discovered, the less often he found himself lost inside the building. This K. learned first from a topographic map of Alaska, which wasn’t a painting but whose tactile qualities made it not quite a piece of printing, either. The mountains and ravines of the map, like braille, stopped K. in his rounds when he first picked it up. What might be read here through touch, he thought, is similar to what I read in paintings through sight. The map seemed less schematic than a specific slice of time; or a compressed, unmoving representation of time. These glaciers, the shape of which K. could measure with his fingers, won’t melt or slide; they will remain in this form regardless of all the moments they have lived through since, or will live through to come.

K. pinned Alaska in a dark corner of the building, an area with a series of enclosed hallways that he always found particularly disorienting. But once he could see its white, icy profile emerging from the featureless brown of Canada and the USSR, picked out against the cold blue of the Bering Sea like a Northern Renaissance portrait of a pockmarked, bulbous face, he knew precisely where he was in the storage facility.

The map he treated like a painting, led to paintings treated as maps. Nearest the office, at the first confusing fork on his way toward the interior, K. placed a painting of an arid, mountainous landscape, with a stream in the foreground quickly bending out of sight. The angle of the water’s sharp turn was echoed by the angular hills rising above it, making clear the stream’s homely role of filling and flattening the lowest points of this view. Higher up, a low light - morning light, K. thought, since it came from the right and he had the distinct impression this view faced north - picked out irregular rock faces, and improbably a bright brown area on the near bank of the river. This area should have been in shadow, reasoned K., rising as it did toward the sun and a stand of trees, which should at minimum be casting their own shadows across it. A mistake; a liberty of the artist; or was it in fact lit by some second source of light, out of view to the west? 

This pastoral image with confusingly multiple light sources K. chose as a marker for an important spot of confusion - with his back to the office, it warned him of the first unexpected branching of the corridor ahead, not unlike the quick turn of the stream in the painting. And coming from the interior of the building, it served as a sign that the office lay just ahead, to one side of this final doubling. (The other side of the split led, eventually, back to this same place, but in a loop that K. had more than once feared was perpetual.) Placing the painting close to this divide, K. found he could just make out that oddly bright brown patch before taking the turn he had so many times regretted. Was the field lit by his own office light, he wondered? He could no longer remember for sure whether it had appeared quite so bright, before he chose to hang it at this junction.

…Self Storage, cont.

Images were another matter, however; K. collected them continually. Even his landlady, each day in the same flowered smock, each day leaning on her broom, was not one but many images for K. He strove to collapse them like those accordion postcard sets sold at tourist attractions, to pack them into one archetypal or perhaps composite image on the cover: Landlady in Morning Light. But the cover always hinged open, and inside he found the landlady in the bright sun; the landlady with her hair covered in plastic against the rain; the landlady with the neighbor’s dog; the landlady with the new broom of which she seemed proud; the landlady complaining of a headache to a neighbor; the landlady pointlessly flirting with the burly garbage man; and on, and on, until he reached the landlady reaching for his hand to say goodbye but not waiting for his to grasp it.

K.’s collections of images were all like this: he saw through time, in a sense. Or it might be said: he could not reconcile images with time, they seemed forever in conflict. Sometimes, to test this problem, he would stare at the clock in his office - an old school clock, with the two hands large and clear for lessons, and a third more delicate one leaping from second to second and trembling a bit after each landing, as if the gulf just crossed required recovery and a gathering of strength before setting off again. Oof, oof, oof, thought K., not tick, tick, tick. His test was to stare at this clock, and try to form one image of it. Not an image of each leap of the second hand. One unified image of the clock.

The only way, K. found, was to close his eyes and think not of this clock, but a painting of a clock.

The painted clock in K.’s mind was in fact hanging in one of the hallways of the storage facility. Among K.’s primary duties was removing unwanted objects from the hallways and entrances, where people often left them. From the very beginning, K. found paintings amid these discards: children’s paintings; Sunday paintings; family paintings; tourist paintings; paintings purchased in an antiques store on a whim; paintings deliberately collected but now rejected; paintings inherited but not understood; paintings beloved by one but not another; paintings treasured until they were not.

K. couldn’t bear to see these paintings in the trash, so he took to hanging them in the hallways instead - carefully placing them in a different part of the building than he had found them, lest their original owners be annoyed at this reuse. The clock had been one of the first objects rescued in this manner: it had a oversize, round black frame and a white face with only four Roman numerals at the cardinal points: XII, III, VI, and IX. The two hands were ribbon, emerging together from a hole in the center and each heading for an independent exit, where they permanently marked the hour at ten to midnight.

Why ribbons instead of painted hands was one of the curiosities that gave K. pause as he initially took hold of this work. The white face was brushily, even sloppily filled in - perhaps it was part of a stage set, he reasoned. Perhaps the dimension of the ribbon was enough to suggest solid hands in front of a clock face, when seen under bright lights.

But why K. always read this clock as ten to midnight, and not ten to noon, was a puzzle he didn’t consider until much later, long after placing the object in one of the most obscure bends in the building. It only fully occurred to him, truly, after Frieda’s visit, although he could not remember a time he did not know that each moment actually presents two clocks at once.

…Self Storage, cont.

It had been a long time since Frieda’s visit. The radio stayed on now in K.’s office. And K., too, had gradually spent more and more time there until he finally gave up his outside home, and moved in. There were numerous practical reasons for the move, which he had recounted to himself; but none explained the magnetic attraction he felt to the building, a pull that had become so strong he had to exert himself to pass its threshold. Once past, K. felt less free than untethered - his first steps out the door were like walking off the edge of a moving sidewalk, his body going forward but his feet still sliding back. The attraction must be strongest in his shoes, he reasoned; but examining their behavior on their own, off his feet, produced no similar results.

K.’s landlady was kind but clearly confused when he announced his departure. “I didn’t realize you still lived here!” she blurted out, evidently embarrassed. It had been months - possibly years - since they had spoken, it was true. But hadn’t he passed her on the street nearly every morning, on his walk to work? There she would be in her flowered smock, as she was on this particular day too, sweeping the sidewalk, watering the bony plants in front of the modest building, or leaning on her broom gossiping with another neighbor. K. had assumed that she too had seen him each morning, as he punctually exited the building. Perhaps his usual polite nod was too subtle to be noticed? he wondered. Or had he in some manner been camouflaged, as Frieda had explained?

The encounter with the landlady had been awkward, but uneventful; as she hadn’t realized he was still in the building, she was not put out by his leaving. Indeed, she revealed that she had also forgotten about the apartment he occupied - thinking of it now, she looked like someone reaching for details from a fleeting dream, or distant memory. “Does it have a red door?” she asked K. “Why yes, of course. I have never painted the door myself; I always thought it was your own choice of color,” he replied, meeting her eye in an effort not to similarly fade from view. “Yes yes of course it was,” she said, unconvincingly. But further conversation revealed that she could not clearly say where his apartment was located within the building. “Dear Landlady,” said K. - he had always been formal with her, out of respect for her age - “It is not a very large building. Have you lost other apartments in it?” he added, with what he judged was an appropriate tone of concern, although in truth it may have been more for himself than for her. “I have never lost an apartment!” she declared, defensively. And then: “Until now, I suppose. Well, goodbye K.,” she concluded, reaching for his hand but not waiting for him to grasp hers. She walked past to greet a different neighbor.

K. moved his belongings on a wet day, although he could have chosen any moment he wanted. He was, in a sense, his own boss in this regard: the landlady did not remember that he lived in her house, and there was no one to answer to at the office, other than himself.

And Frieda? K. felt wistful. Recently he had fixed on the idea that she too was living somewhere in the self-storage facility. Might her apartment be invisible to him, in the same way that his was to the landlady?

As K. packed a few possessions to move permanently to the office, he felt the irony - but at a distance, like his landlady thinking of the door to his missing apartment, which she had once painted such a loud red - that he was among the least likely ever to be in need of a storage unit. He had always avoided a claim over objects - this was in fact high on his list of conscious reasons for giving up the apartment. It seemed he didn’t even need one room.

…Self Storage, cont.

Frieda was gone, so K. had no one to ask why there was no other dial - if this was a radio, wouldn’t there be a tuner as well? - or where else this music could be coming from. As for why he hadn’t noticed it before, Frieda had already made clear: he had. There’s no missing a bug the size of an airplane. But including it in one’s view was another matter.

K. looked around at the familiar office, straining to see more objects hidden from him in plain sight. He examined the volume knob under the desk, and found it attached to a wire which snaked down a table leg to the floor, then ran like a rodent across the floor to the nearest wall, along that wall to the corner of the room, up the corner to the ceiling, and out the top. Dust fell in K.’s eye as he poked gingerly at the hole in the ceiling, and he scrambled off the chair he was standing on.

When he was able to open his eyes, he thought he could hear music again. This time it wasn’t emanating from the speaker that Frieda had pointed out - it was coming from the tiny hole in the ceiling.

K. stood once more on the chair, and stretched his ear toward the hole despite the dust. He could just faintly hear strings, swelling in what seemed like a patriotic tune. He jumped down - this was such an unusually athletic gesture for K., it gave him a rush of adrenalin - went straight to his desk and turned the volume knob. Strings swelled out of the speaker on the wall. Now that he could hear more clearly, he realized it wasn’t a patriotic tune; it was the “Can-Can,” played as if it were an anthem.

This time K. left the volume on, and fell back heavily in his chair. He sat there in a kind of stupor, listening as the music continued - from the nationalistic “Can-Can,” to a crooner smoothly singing:

Don’t look so sad, I know it’s over
But life goes on, and this old world will keep on turning
Let’s just be glad we had some time to spend together
There’s no need to watch the bridges that we’re burning [1]

K. waited for those opening lines to repeat, but the singer instead stretched like a cat and meandered off, repeating an anodyne chorus endlessly, humming it, handing it off to strings and taking it back, changing keys, even whispering over it at one point with reassuring but meaningless words - anything except returning to that distressing first image. Had K. heard the words correctly? Were these banal lovers in fact saboteurs, holding hands on some lofty perch as they watched the destruction they had wrought below…?

A voice interrupted the singer, bringing this puzzling plot to an end if not conclusion: “This is the memory station,” it said, with the mellifluous calm of a radio dj. And another song began.