Day 5: Rm 329

When I returned to my dormroom today, there was a diamond-shaped piece of red paper stuck on my door and incredibly loud music playing inside. For a moment I was disconcerted. Could it be that someone else had claimed my room? I knocked once. After one full minute it dawned on me that the music playing was Ian Brown's Fear. Inside, patiently waiting for 5 days, were a small fridge and 2 large boxes.

The weather in Boston is worse than in New York today. It is raining, and the city is darkening outside the rain-spotted windows. I am trying to block out the sound of water flowing through the pipes behind the walls. As my mind turns to the trip, I try to imagine what kind of living arrangement Kobo Abe had while writing Kangaroo Notebook, a book I had taken with me to New York. Was it a one-room affair? Did snake-like water pipes run outside the walls and explode into tightly gnarled sprinklers? Were the city lights dimming before even midnight? For now the answers lie between these 2 covers, in a universe to which I will shortly return, where a radish sprout-sprouting patient rides on an automatic hospital bed on an inexorable psychosis of a journey.