I did not sleep very much last night. Nonetheless, sometime after seven o'clock, I managed to dream that I was the owner of an old three-story house in a student neighborhood. It had been mine for years, inherited from someone who should have been closely related to me, although real-life candidates are few (my parents were mysteriously absent). There were two lodgers on the second floor. Their names were Kit and Anny; for the first few months I thought they were male, in their early twenties, until one afternoon I ran into them on the stairs and realized they were both women and closer to my age. I saw them occasionally on the landing, but otherwise not much outside their rooms. They dressed like Russian futurists who had just discovered punk rock—sort of DIY wing collars and waistcoats, Doc Martens and dark suit jackets with individual words stitched into the sleeve, although I could never read them. Kit was spikily chestnut-haired, Anny much darker. They had audible, enthusiastic sex at constantly unpredictable hours. And I cannot remember why one of them invited me in, but their sitting room had small, time-thickened diamond panes and the daybed, the desk, the floor were swamped in drifts of paper, all of them written on, even if only a crossed-out line or two, as though they never threw a draft away. I picked up some of the pages to read through while Kit was unearthing a three-ring binder of CDs or DVDs—I can't remember where Anny was; in the next room, out of shot—which is the point at which it became plain, without any kind of shock or revelation, that my downstairs neighbors were Anakreon and Christopher Marlowe.
If I could draw, this would be the best manga ever.
If I could draw, this would be the best manga ever.