The red bumps could be compared to each little pebble on an individual raspberry, only they’ve been unknitted from their thimble collective and spread about your legs with red juicy fingers, but then left there to rot.

“I like you just the way you are,” my girlfriend was fond of saying. And it was true, very much. But it isn’t the way people “are” that girlfriends notice; it’s how they imagine or dream up your future allotment of genetic predisposition. That is to say, my girlfriend had a kind soul, a really kind soul, and she was good at finding that in everyone: the good we carry around, curling like some bloodied fetus inside us. And of course, they imagine and they just might be right, that without the right nutrients and elements available, you might just go and abort that fetus if they don’t manage to get their allotment of support in there. So, my girlfriend saw my budding goodness, and yes, she loved me just the way I was—pregnant with goodness—but so too did my next girlfriend love me for the mean streak I had, those chisel-tongued criticisms I spat at the backs of each and every person who came close enough to make me panic.

I have a blister on the back of my foot, sniff.

And I sing an hallelujah to the air, just as the bird does. And my song is no one's. But there's no passion suffered in pain and in love that's not followed by an hallelujah.

Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marco Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: "You advance always with your head turned back?" or "Is what you see always behind you?" or rather, "Does your journey take place only in the past?"

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past.

[...]

"Journeys to relive your past?" was the Khan's question at this point, a question which could also have bee formulated: "Journeys to recover your future?"

And Marco's answer was: "Elsewhere is a negative mirror..."

*

But what enhanced for Kublai every event or piece of news reported by his inarticulate informer was the space that remained around it, a void not filled with words. The descriptions of cities Marco Polo visited had this virtue: you could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.

*

I realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language of Hypatia... True, also in Hypatia the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbor then, but climb the citadel's highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by? There is no language without deceit.