(OTH and ER are linked by sunless dust, eminently breathable. Because the unseen air is tenacious of its transparency, it grows to move, to coil the sunless dust into the form of a whirlwind – very like a whale but nearer to a siphon-tube. Their eyes are transformed into lips, giving them both the appearance of bottles. The force of gravity has been suspended. The power of suction does not exert itself, but is felt as a presence. The particles of dust are worded and numbered, crackling merrily like a pea-pod half way to disuse.)

OTH: (Draped in oil-drenched cardboard, wrapping himself in a poster-sized photo of himself) To be is type forme! There, in the ideal state, was a fast-flowing river of wax, slabbed clean on rustless metal – the mouth shut, of course, for decorous mastication. You have to be a third to be a you; you have to have a sharp edge in order to say “there; there” – to observe accurately, to be a true other.

ER: To cut between a strand and a stream is my white move on black – bent, cut and twisted within one type forme. Oh to belong to the lost souls! Ah: the integration of the body, to be terminated by the non-integer, around and between, all the twisting of a strand of string.  I fear the inevitability of the press’s coming for OTH – I cannot say ‘you’; I can only feel a you, another, inside me – ah: papery skin, and Kafka’s clerk beating it out to airy thinness. Intervention would cause the fingers to get lost amidst skin-paper – like overheated coffee when it blows a spoon – like the gyred, congested dust, and the skin of a hard old body which cannot decompose into unity.

OTH: The stream and the string may not answer for all the reassuring black type banks of paring, may make it quite transparent in the hollow of the integer.

ER: White is that which throws back light; black is that which sucks it in; there is no gravity.

OTH: The coffee spoon I had lost had me and my paper draped around it so as to suggest jutting ribs. There was so much of it that I could barely tell the convex from the concave.

ER: A pin through the integer there; tar very much.

OTH: The top goes sideways – understand? The vocative is permitted sideways-on.

ER: Sideways? Spin the ring-colour then?

OTH: Take a breath, thin end on – I want to draw.

ER: Give, take – with weak and heavy-handed friction.

OTH: There is a fanning tightrope around the gap of consciousness.

ER: The buzzing plumbed my last syllable.

OTH: Which you did not utter.

ER: Which I was determined not to utter prior to the row over the stretching, magnifying from either side, alternately, as the side was finally necessary; the fraying and non-fraying of the middle, the fibres really piercing like vicious spikes.

OTH:  The nerves – so many strands and never a shaft. Implied waist-thinning waist-hoops through the side.

ER: For the flow of the current and the margin on which you stand.

OTH: The fibres nourish the windpipe, measuring the underlying repetitive structures – for the hand cannot penetrate it to bend its measures.

ER: You have to drape a stained sheet over it to get a full transparency.

OTH: Sheets around the string, you mean – to make the string visible as something transparent. Dean Swift had a knotty point, umbilical without petals; I regret to say that the rest went to furry mould.

ER: Refinements of our own stretch, don’t you think?

OTH: With rotten teeth for roots, I should imagine.

ER: It’s impossible to identify which set it is, as we only have the sides to guide us.

OTH: Indeed?

ER: The crucial question is – whether the gums come from wholesome trees, or whether from rotted, surplus stock. (He makes a hesitant pause.) Or perhaps widened at the bottom to make a safety pad.

OTH: It is well.

ER: The gum plates are the buckets.

OTH: A string thrust down the windpipe.

ER: Never!

OTH: String and dust make a telescope, or else a fibrous past, in two sizes, rubbed up against it.

ER: There is an incision in her hand, deep and web-shaped; she cut the string for our breath, and sight had no scissors – no razor blade.

OTH: Some measuring rods may give her poison to clear the throat of her soul.

ER: That’s fine.

OTH: I also love the elastic calendar, fork-ringed for all the days after the thirty-second.

ER: Are you an extended category?

OTH: Scum-sheets of half-go lie on my drying line.

ER: In order to be confined to a roll, one must be coiled.

OTH: What is the difference between a coil and a ring?

ER: World without end, amen.

OTH: It must be felt as a ring, combined with the essence of a blue-grey, cream-licked seashore.

ER: If you are a flat sheet, and a target for hard pea-eyeball penetration, you may be – in and through yourself, a colour.

OTH: Involving your own eyeballs too – I intuit that from the bristles, all squared and edged in fish-glue.

ER: I would prefer the plastic container in the paintbox to the paper; there is, after all, somewhere to insert that importunate razor-blade.

OTH: I still regret that the said razor-blade has to narrow down to reach its edge – which is precisely what happens when one looks straight at a colour-sheet.

ER: One feels that an edge without sickness has its own penetrating eyesight.

OTH: Yes: colour – like beads rubbed well in.

ER: Which might truly wrap the sheet up in order to compensate the edge for its lack of thickness, which is what we two are doing here, what we are talking about: Je ne nous vois pas; l’on me personnifie – moi seul.  

OTH: That is the point, and intelligence works in processes of points, in between the two surfaces –

Through lack of thickness, of density, I see rightly, though I do not see an ‘us’ here. How do? How done dear do?

ER: Colour without overlap – unprizeable because it makes a hermetic pulp, cross-swelling to curtail all penetration – too bad.

OTH: If you can see, it will be because your eye-field, your eye-flesh, is on the edge of damned darkness – all safe its periphery, which is the confluence of seeing and touching.

ER: That is a shame, as I had hoped to use all eyelids as decoys.

OTH: Darkness attempted to extend itself so as to embrace a false edge, spread out an ugly roll of itself, in order to cuddle a bent bar of light – the other darkness. The cuddled bar bore an obvious resemblance to the edge. The result, Er, was to steal a march on your eyelid.

ER: Then there can be no black margins in our discussion.

OTH: It is not our discussion; the discussion is not about us.

ER: I think we are standing sideways; if we are to have an audience, let it consist of careless potholes conserving air by lying still and looking upwards, furling their neutralized eyelids.

OTH: The curtain was drawn firmly over during the real performance, so the integrity of the potholes was protected.

ER: When there is a crack in the blackness, that means the play is over, and we will have an opportunity to chatter – which is a substitute for real potency – which will meet its fatal collision, which is its prime and ultimate purpose.

OTH: The emission of our vowels comes from their truncation in the critical space for their peaceful, sleepy breathing.

ER: Then the you is a backward and the I is a forward.

OTH: Correct.

ER: Eureka! I have consummated a reflexive verb. The curtain, the clarifier, in congealed printer’s ink, is 90% of me. Now there can be full weight given to the imperative: GO DROWN YOURSELF.

OTH: On your premises, you cannot go – you were there all the bloody, broken time.