This Census-Taker(35)

The Hope Is So:

Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. -

Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize

Interests. So

Reach Our Government’s Ultimate Ends.





“I dreamed of the hole,” I murmured. I rolled with the mule. I heard the man and his voice calmed me. He was close and I was unafraid.

I dreamed of the hole, I said. I remember saying it, but I don’t remember the dream exactly, though all my memories before that moment and after—forever after, you might say—had and have to them a must and coldness that can only have come from inside a hill. I’ve supposed that these recollections are what make me fretful at introspective times, so I believe what I said was true, but too, I think I dreamed of another city than that conical one of the discarded, that I’d visited that place I’d started to draw between the flowers on the wall, the uncertain charcoal city bustling with citizens of endless kinds and business, the limits of which spread out so every country I would ultimately come to, in which to count those I’d learn are my scattered compatriots and my business, would be in its outskirts, and I according to some purpose looking for the message left for me there, and counting there too.

There were rises in the distance, against the clouded sky behind us. I counted absences in my head. One of the rises must have been the hill, with its counter-hill, and its bridge, from where I’d come, from which my manager and I were just newly descended.





To Mic





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


For all their help with this book, my deepest thanks to Mark Bould, Mic Cheetham, Julie Crisp, Rupa DasGupta, Maria Dahvana Headley, Simon Kavanagh, Tessa McWatt, Susie Nicklin, Sue Powell, Max Schaefer, and Rosie Warren. I’m very grateful to all at Macmillan and Picador, especially Nick Blake, Robert Clark, Ansa KhanKhattack, Neil Lang, Ravi Mirchandani, and Lauren Welch; and all at Random House, in particular Keith Clayton, Penelope Haynes, David Moench, Tricia Narwani, Scott Shannon, David G. Stevenson, Annette Szlachta-McGinn, my editor, Mark Tavani, and Betsy Wilson.

Much of this book was written during a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH; and then as a residency fellow of the Lannan Foundation, in Marfa, TX. I am profoundly grateful to both organizations for their generous support.

Among the countless writers to whom I’m indebted, I want here to pay particular tribute to Mary Butts, Barbara Comyns, John Hawkes, Jane Gaskell, Denis Johnson, Anna Kavan, Edward St. Aubyn, and Roland Topor.