Catechism

I am twenty-three years old and a plagiarist. I steal my friends' and enemies' and acquaintances' lives and put them in my mind. Some day I will take them all out again and use them. Some I have used already. I have no need of comfort; I have no need of company. Everything exists inside my mind. Outside exists inside; reality is only what I choose it to be, and if I choose to make reality a lie, then it is so. I know I am real because I have decided I am. I think, therefore you exist.

Who are you?

You are seven years old and a typewriter. You are crystal and osmotic barrier and iron curtain and drug. You are everything that never existed; you are the sum total of human knowledge from infinity to infinity. You hold the final clue to the ultimate mystery. You are the glue that holds me together.

Who am I?

I am several fragments of my several accumulated lives; I am the total of my fragments. I am held together by blood and bone and glue and mystery. If there was no mystery I would fall apart and if I fall apart there would be a mystery and so I would fall together again. I keep falling apart and putting myself together again because whenever I fall apart I fall together and so I am a mystery and mystery is eternal. It happens to us all.

Who are we?

We are the fragments when I have fallen apart. We are the spaces between the mystery, the mystery of the spaces and every cell and molecule which threatens itself. We are selfdestruction and genocide and retribution. We are the Law and the hangman and the hanged man. We are the dead and the riot and entropy. We are the trace lines on an oscilloscope, nothing more. There is nothing more.

What is nothing?

Nothing is the moment when we know what we are. Nothing is the moment when we have just fallen apart and have not yet fallen together. Nothing is the song that has never been heard, but is compiled through infinity. The song is the puppet master's, and is irrepeatable. Nothing is the bridge between the future and the further future. Nothing is certainty. Nothing is any definition of anything.

What is a definition?

A definition is the moment when everything ends. A definition is death. A definition is the answer to which you must look up the question in the back of your book. There are missing pages. Pages are prisons, and missing pages are inescapable prisons. All is confusion.

What is confusion?

Confusion is an answer. Confusion is a certainty. Confusion is an end without end. Confusion is all the fragments and the coming together and the falling apart and the moment when it is neither together nor apart and the moment when it is both. Confusion is the frontispiece and the first chapter and the appendix.

What is between?

Fragments. Glue. Answers. Definitions. Me. You.

Who are you?

Me.

Who am I?

I am twenty-three years old and a plagiarist.