He comes home at midnight. He thinks he is slightly drunk, so he doesn't attempt to write anything down in his notebook. He puts on the earphones, a cocoon of sound, a wave against which his bobbing head can rest. The click of keys. The rasp of a finger running under lines in a book of poetry he had bought earlier in the evening among many other books. How many people had he met in the course of the birthday party to which he was invited to earlier read in the course of their day? And how distant are most of their lives from these necessities that bind him to the page, to the shape of alphabet, to the bars of words detailing music of another kind?

This is where he drowns, the continuous whirlpool that enables him to breathe, to mark off day after day from the calendar that is pasted over his skin. People whose birthday it was today couldn't believe he was as old, or more exactly, as young as he claimed he was. That is because he has become green, and black, and perhaps even more something undefinable from diving repeatedly into the wreck.