index

The typewriter ribbon needs changing again. She has been working through the same passage for forty minutes, and the letters are getting fainter. But the visitors expect to hear the keys striking, so she keeps typing the same line: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

A group of teenagers clusters around her desk. One of them reads her nameplate aloud. The girl with purple hair takes a video of her inserting a fresh ribbon. Her friend whispers, “She’s actually reading.”

She is reading. Page by page, line by line. Her copy has handwritten notes in the margins, annotations she made herself after hours of obsessing about intentions. The pages are soft from handling.

“Excuse me,” says a woman in a Harvard sweatshirt. “Could you explain stream of consciousness?”

She looks up from pages covered in careful analysis, layers of notes. “Imagine your thoughts have no punctuation,” she tells the woman. “Everything flows into everything else, like water.”

The visitor stares at her, then at her handwriting, then back at her. “You came up with that yourself?”

Behind the Harvard woman, a man in a baseball cap is reading the titles on her bookshelf. He picks up her copy of Finnegans Wake and holds it like it might bite him. “How long does it take to read this?”

“Months,” she says. “Maybe years.”

He puts it down quickly.

…