Vin opens his mailbox and retrieves an envelope postmarked with an image of a bearded man in an Eastern Orthodox cassock. The return address is Lithuanian. He runs upstairs, tears open the seal, and removes a baggy of white powder from inside. Vin finds the couch and dumps the baggy's contents onto his clouded copy of Omensetter's Luck.
Chopping, dragging, aligning the coarse crystals, Vin feels excited and begins to let ideomotor reflex take over. First he makes basic shapes: an X, a circle; then three minutes spent on a spiral, its tail completing in an arrow pointing outward. Takes a pic, sends it to Kat. Vin cuts a notch off the arrow and drags it to the other side of the book. He picks up a half straw from the table and vacuums the powder up his left nostril.
Vin closes his eyes, back hits soft, reopens with sight locked in on where white wall meets white ceiling, shift horizontal to point where two meets one, half a cube wants completion, periphery creeps inward till suddenly the cube appears and Vin is inside, not quite trapped but it feels that way until spidery sensations ameliorate the thought, provide the respite of forget. With the comfort of crawling Vin glimpses the book where the one-pointed arrow of powder looks like a scythe and he laughs though knowing it's probably a bad and very real omen. The words on the book's cover look German.
Phone wakes, beckons Vin's attention. Its autonomy feels harrowing—Vin considers for the first time that we carry unpredictable intelligence in our pockets. It listens and communicates. Does it know? Message from Kat: 'lol omw.' Vin puts the phone down—masochism.
Glancing towards the window, Vin catches sight of a Las Meninas postcard propped up on the bookshelf. He reaches over and grabs it, brings it inches to his face, locks eyes with the Infanta. He feels her judgement and the weight of the West. But they are east and we are west but I am east. His eyes moisten, for it is too much and it's always been too much. He scans eleven o'clock, self-recognition, Velasquez's trap door out of Stendhal syndrome. Vin puts the postcard back.
Head reposed, eyelids close. Cliffs of Moher. Back open: the pattern of the chessboard across the room increases surface area until the earth's hidden micro-latitudinal/longitudinal lines show face for a sec, then fade. Vin feels dismayed with the clinical nature of reality being revealed to him. Shut again: the cliffs are still there, but something's different. He's lost it.