On a sensible day, a week before losing not two but two dozen inhibitions, Mouffetard made a momentous decision. He opened a cabinet in which was filed thirty years’ correspondence with someone he had never met in the flesh. The first letter brought tears to his eyes. The second left him confusing insight with ecstasy.
The seventh letter inspired him to dig around in his Glory Hole where he found some banknotes in a currency no longer accepted as legal tender. The discovery called up the scent of roasting chestnuts and the sound of water lapping at an ancient quay. On the third day, he remembered he’d forgotten to put a coin in his mother’s purse so she would have something to give to Harrison on her afternoon walk. Her resources of improvisation were considerable; but he still felt deep regret at the oversight.
His reverie, however, was interrupted by the next letter, which startled his vocal cords into inarticulate sound. It came from his body; or else from a place in his soul that had little truck with his monkey mind. All it was, was “Ah.” When he failed to make the “ah” again, he made a pot of tea and reread the letter. “Enough already with the half-baked koans,” he muttered. “I don’t have all century for this.”
He went to his father’s desk, took out paper, ink and a bamboo brush, and began to write. Laying down his brush at the end of a page, he tore a leaf from Remembrance of Things Past, and rolled a joint. “Regret will not bring back what I have lost,” he thought. "But losing my fist might give me back my hand."
From the letters came a strange light, and with it, the courage to act. "What dread hand dare seize the fire?" he asked himself - knowing the answer at last. On the morning of the seventh day, he scooped up the cremated ashes from the kitchen hearth into an envelope and filed them in his father’s cabinet. Shutting the door behind him, he stepped out into an unfamiliar garden, across which his mother’s clothesline still hung.
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