Entry in an Unknown Hand

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested. By some inexplicable oversight nobody jeers when I walk down the street. I have been allowed to go on living in this room. I am not asked to explain my presence anywhere. What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and are any left unexecuted? Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking certain jobs? They are absolutely shameless at the bank—— You’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non- chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested, but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—— they think they are going to surprise me: I, who do nothing but wait. Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up—— very clever. They think that they can scare me. I am always scared. And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you! At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and refuse to go on, it’s not done. I go on dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip, accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white laughter and applause, past a million unlighted windows, peered out at by the retired and their aged attack-dogs— toward my place, the one at the end of the counter, the scalpel on the napkin.