City of the Future
They’re still working on our rooms, making room for everything we need room for, sometimes I think we’re here before we’re supposed to be, or before we need to be, as if every room is a waiting room with the standard four doors, two in the front and two in the back, and we’re waiting for the doors to open. The walls are soft as frankfurters, nourishing but not very solid, there isn’t a seam where it all comes together along the seam. When you pass somebody you say not right now, there isn’t time, not even hurrying—it takes too much time. They’re trying to be accommodating, they want everything to be the way we like it, they’d like our rooms to be the way we like them, how do they know what we like? Do they know what we’re like? We’re still unpacking, taking things out, it’s not a concert where you know in advance what you’re supposed to pay attention to, nobody’s asking us where we were before or what we’re doing here, or how much time we have. When we turn around there’s nothing to see, nothing at all—is it possible to be in front of something that isn’t even behind you? Waiting for the doors to open, as in a dispensary: as long as you’re waiting you can watch a program while you’re waiting, or see your friends while you’re waiting, or have sex while you’re waiting, or is this what you’re waiting for? Of course it’s often better to think about things that haven’t even happened, better to wait for something that happens after something else is happening, as if the interior is the residual, inside what it’s not outside of. Only tour guides have something definite in mind from the outset. We almost always enter from the rear, it’s just the way we are, starting at the back and moving up to the front, as if we need to catch up, to what, to what’s ahead of us, it’s not the kind of completeness you don’t even need to pay attention to.