During the month in question, Mousa stopped waking up in the normal sense.

He opened his eyes. Yes.

He left sleep. More or less.

But waking did not deliver him into the world.

He had been using K. Not for fun, exactly, maybe escape, but escape was the wrong word too. Escape implies a direction, a door, a map. K was whiter than that. Flatter. It took him nowhere. It thinned the glue here. It felt as if the hidden staff inside the senses had gone home early and left the building unlocked.

The eye still saw. The ear still heard. The skin still registered cold, fabric, water, stair rails, cigarette smoke. But the little treaty between sensation and meaning had weakened. The world kept coming in. It just no longer came in finished.

He wrote that down.

He did not expect writing to save him. That would have been sentimental. He wrote because the sentences began before he did. The first notebook entry, if he later remembered it right, said: K opens nothing. It removes padding. Then: The day is assembled. Then, later, in smaller letters, as if somebody were listening through the wall: Reality is a repeated agreement. He hated how that sounded. Too neat. Too online. Too much like something a damaged man would say while staring at a ceiling stain and pretending he had broken through to first principles. But the sentence stayed, out of stubbornness more than wisdom.

On the fourth or fifth day, maybe the sixth, symbols began to accumulate.

A crack above the window. Branching.

A cup-ring on the table. Then another.

A dark knot in the wood floor.

The tram wires over the street. Crossing and crossing.

The green pharmacy cross blinking in the distance.

Three flashes. Pause. Three flashes. Pause.

He had read enough bad and partial things about Kabbalah to be dangerous to himself. Too little to understand it, enough to misuse it, enough to let the ten spheres drift over whatever surface needed structure. Ceiling crack as tree. Table stain as sephirah. Hallway light as path. Drain as abyss. The whole apartment wanted to diagram itself. This frightened him less than it should have, which was its own problem, because fear would have meant distance. Fear would have meant: this is happening to me. But there was no good me-position left, only moving intensities. Near. Far. Sharpened. Muted. Charged. Drained. The room was not haunted. It was over-read. It had become too legible in the wrong direction.

He tried to correct for this. He told himself: stop. It is only a crack. Only a lamp. Only bad sleep. Only chemistry. Only Berlin winter. Only your own head folding in on itself again.

But “only” had lost force.

And besides, what was “only chemistry”?

A phrase for people who think chemistry is not already metaphysics in work clothes.

By the second week he no longer trusted categories with hard edges. Drug. Symbol. Idea. Hallucination. Archetype. Memory. Myth. They were different things, he thought, but they bled into one another under pressure, and most people survived by not noticing the bleed.

The city outside kept moving. That was obscene. Delivery men. Tram bells. Lovers fighting in the street at 2 a.m. Schoolchildren in puffer jackets. Men washing blood from the sidewalk after some small and forgettable violence. Döner wrappers. Vape smoke. Rain on scaffolding. The ordinary theater of continuity. To Mousa it looked administered now, sequenced, as if each thing arrived already tagged by some invisible office.

Cross. Wait. Buy. Swipe. Scan. Sign.

Take a number.

Accept cookies.

Enter code.

Confirm identity.

He wrote:

The city is a ritual disguised as convenience.

Then:

No. Ritual is too old a word.

Then:

An operating system with weather.

That also annoyed him. But less.

By then the alchemical language had started to leak in. He never chose it. It was there whenever he reached for anything else. Blackening. Whitening. Reddening. Burn. Wash. Distill. Rot. Coagulate. The old sequence. The old theater of matter suffering its way into another rank.

First the black stage. Nigredo, though he felt it before he had the word. Rot in the continuity of self. Memory became strips. Fragments. Childhood kitchen. Train window. One woman laughing in bed. His father looking at receipts. A school corridor. A dead cat by the canal. Skin. Hospital light. Shame. Heat. Prayer. Pornography. Metro announcements. The little films detached from sequence and floated beside one another, equal in weight. That was the horror. No hierarchy. No before and after with moral force.

Then the white phase. The pale one. The stripped one. The city became clean in a terrible way. Plastic shone too much. Supermarkets were lit like clinics. His own hands looked less like hands and more like tools that had been assigned to him temporarily. The skin on his fingers appeared almost rented.

Then heat.

He felt it walking at night. The heat was in the structure of things more than in the air. In the way light sat on wet pavement. In the metal scream of the U-Bahn turning. In the red pharmacy sign. In the cheap gold of a kebab shop menu. In the body itself, which he began to understand less as a self than as a furnace with opinions. The archetypes arrived around then, or rather he noticed them, since they had been there all along, hidden in posture, in jobs, in faces, in systems.

One part of him said: you are a man in Berlin. Slightly wrecked. Under-slept. Flooded with K and symbols and half-digested books. You are not receiving doctrine. You are glitching. Another part said: yes, but glitches reveal the frame.

White plate in sink.

Halo of oil.

Circle within circle.

Tree in the stain.

No.

Streetlamp through blinds.

Ten bars. Or nine.

Could not count.

Counted anyway.

Malkuth = floor dirt.

Yesod = hallway hum.

Hod = the screen.

Netzach = pulse in the groin.

Tiphareth = false gold on wet asphalt.

Kether = glare. Only glare.

No no.

Wrong system.

The body as flask.

The mouth as gate.

The eyes as furnaces.

The room as retort.

The city as athanor.

The trains circulating vapor under the neighborhoods.

Everyone being cooked. Slowly.

Into what.

Into image. Into labor. Into confession. Into profile. Into type.

There is no in.

There is no out.

Only thresholds.

Only membranes.

Only processed weather.

He stopped sleeping right. Or slept too hard. Or slept in slices. At some point dream and waking stopped respecting the border guards. He would stand in the bathroom and feel that he was still dreaming. Then he would dream of waking in the room and feel that this was the more solid state. He distrusted both. The mirror became tactical. He avoided it when he could. Monsters would have been easier. What he saw in it was arrangement, a face assembled from older claims.

He began to suspect that psychosis had less to do with seeing what was not there than with seeing relation without the usual filters. Too much relation. Too quickly. Too little social pacing. Madness as surplus connection. An excess of binding power.

This idea did not calm him.

Nothing calmed him.

But it did give him a kind of bitter companionship, a sentence to sit beside.

On the thirtieth night, or what he decided was the thirtieth, he dreamed a corridor of mirrors, or something rougher than a corridor: a sequence of reflective interruptions. In each one a different language tried to claim the month. Mysticism. Chemistry. Diagnosis. Archetype. Trauma. Code. Religion. Market logic. Symbolic debris. None was complete. Each was hungry. At the end there was no door, only a sentence, suspended there more than written.

THERE IS NO INSIDE.

THERE IS NO OUTSIDE.

THERE IS ONLY WHAT PASSES THROUGH.