If it were any colder, I could disengage

The writer sits on the edge of a bed I haven't owned in six years, looking lankier than he is in a soldier's greatcoat and a crumpled collarless shirt, smoking. All my writers are nervous types, and they smoke too much, which I can't. (Benson & Hedges, sometimes Kents smell like my grandmother. I sat out on the porch with her and added spices to a bowl of cold water, trying to make soup. She quit when I was eleven. I walk through some stranger's cloud of smoke and think of her, but it still makes my head slam up shop.) This one has tousled celery-grey hair and the face of someone who wears glasses without them, raw and slightly apprehensive; he has a wristwatch, but it doesn't work. I have a fever. This is a nightmare. I thought it was a lucid dream, but I was wrong.

—I wrote this a little before nine in the morning, in a kind of blurry experimental half-sleep. I'd woken up freezing, what felt like hours earlier, but hadn't been awake enough to stretch out of bed and close the windows. I felt terrible, so I went back to sleep for five minutes and woke up nearly an hour and a half later, feeling worse. I don't actually think I'm feverish. I was reading Bulgakov's Notes on the Cuff & Other Stories (1991) as I was falling asleep, which couldn't have helped. If I still feel like this by tonight, all the exiles I talk about are going to come out ghosts.