And this room in monochrome
Don’t bring a torch. You won’t need it. I have furnished us with a single, swinging light which will provide us with quite enough shadows to stare each other down and out inside this featureless room.
I have decided, decreed, determined that you can interrogate me in black and white. It will be a learning process, because I am turning from colour to monochrome even as we don’t speak, even as we sit here and growl under our breaths like caged and discontented tigers. In the hush, our hearing is assaulted by the constant sound of thought cogs grinding their sparks into the passing memories on our factory assembly lines, processing one after another. Pass, seal, package. Pass, seal, package. Fail. Reject.
Write the questions and leave them on the table in front of me. Better still, write them on the table itself. Scratch them into the embittered, tired wood with that shard of frosted glass you’ve been carrying around for just such an opportunity, the one you’ve kept wrapped in tissue paper and ferreted away into a secret inner pocket as if it was a precious gift from some long departed lover.
Now. Shine the light in my eyes and I promise to tell you truths, more or less. If you listen, I can tell you so many complete and complex truths that your ears will pop and block just like they do on those dead and tired, dead tired evenings when you immerse yourself in the lukewarm bath water and slowly mouth a wish to stay like that forever. Knowing that, knowing my plan for this overheated night, surely you can’t still be wishing for me to pull the plug and wake you from your drowning reverie, can you?
First question, then. Ask it in a whisper, with a smile. Go on.