They had a very deep affection for their big toe, because they believed that it was the part of their bodies which differentiated them from all other animals. That was only logical, of course, since human beings were the only mammals that had a big toe in their feet. That led to a strange association between �human nature� and �big toes�, and that what would explain why the people who moved outside the walls to eat themselves started with their toes.

I even tried to convince myself that if my screen was my horizon line, then I must be sitting on the new beach of the new globalized world, and what I was hearing was only the soothing sounds of the waves crashing on the rocks beneath me. But to no avail. My human imagination couldn�t keep up the illusion of that bad simulacrum of a wave for more than a fraction of a second.

Dear Tim,

To be honest I've known for a while that something must be wrong when it comes to Suzanne. I�m in my mother�s shop and every day I see her turning up to work in the building opposite. She comes to the door and enters and then not long after she leaves again. I know for a fact that she doesn't work there anymore. She was fired a long time ago, but she keeps on going there each day, still wearing her heavy make up like ancient knights wore their shields.

And suddenly the thought of the Papin sisters filled my head, or more accurately what Paul Eluard and Benjamin Peret said upon hearing of their liberating crime: �They emerged fully armed from a song by Maldoror�. There was something very paranoiac about the ambivalence in Christine�s look, and the fact that her trousers bore the evidence that we knew each other for a long time, too long maybe, triggered a deep longing for a different past, and possibly for the potentiality of another future.