He came to believe that he had made all sorts of mistakes in his thinking. He believed that he had been tricking himself and others into thinking he understood things. The doubt became intense enough that he began to record himself. This would allow him to replay conversations after they had occurred. He would listen to what he had said and become convinced by himself, and this would reassure him. He would believe again that he had expressed what he was trying to express as well as he could have and no better than that. He was proud of himself for having said so little. He was proud of the tightness of his emails' prose, which did not stretch, did not claim. He was becoming an operator, he believed. I am becoming an operator, he would repeat in his head like a pop song as he moved through the grocery store. He imagined that the people around him were saying it too. He did not understand what it meant, but he regarded this lack of understanding as crucial. He regarded it as the sort of thing he had always wanted for himself. Eventually, he became sick of the phrase, just like a pop song. I am becoming an operator, what a sick and tired phrase, he'd think, all angry with himself for ever having felt an affinity toward something like that. In this manner, he would train himself not to get it stuck in his head anymore, and he would feel irritated when people around him talked like that about anyone at all.

Again too along this course he understood things that he had not understood before. Here you have a tool. Yes, it is similar to this other tool, but they are not identical. This one works like this. It is good for this. That other one is good for that other thing. You do not have to understand more than that. You do not have to understand the similarities and differences between these two tools and what they are doing. You are going to try to understand that aren't you, he said, chuckling. You are going to try to combine their articles, he said, but you do not inquire wisely concerning this, he said, chuckling, hunched around his hands as they worked the hitch, sweat dripping into his eye and burning there.

Sometimes, still, the claims of those who claimed things drew him. He heard them, he wanted to untie them, stick their frayed ends in the ground like roots, and burn them down and chuckle. He would forget himself, would walk toward them, his voice beginning to stretch and mumble the way it does in troubled dreams. Trying to say things that he believed he was capable of saying, things he had as it were formerly said, things that he no longer knew how to say but whose geometries his body remembered, the way you remember the first few movements of a kata from your childhood karate class. The intent was to destroy, but he found he was worse at it than he had been in former times. Worse at what? Where am I? he asked, looking around. He saw faces that he did not recognize and they were almost all looking the same general direction, saying the same general thing. As is common in these situations, their inflections cycled; they repeated themselves. He would try, at first, to figure out what they were saying, but the computations became exceedingly complex. He would stop trying to figure out what they were saying, would listen only to the rhythm and would in this way learn to be less confused about what they were up to. He understood them to be coordinating themselves with themselves. He understood it to be an exceedingly complex and tiresome thing that they were doing. He believed that he understood their project and its equilibria and so he became very sick and tired and he left. He walked away from them and they became quieter. At last, he could not hear them at all. But what was I trying to do? he would say, and he would try to remember. For these situations, his recordings were invaluable. He found that when he listened to himself, it came back together. He understood who he had been and what he had been up to, before the interruption. And he took it up again, and he ran it from the top, or he ran it from the end, it did not matter very much — it would not, to a third party, have mattered very much which he did, what mattered was that he was back at it.

Some of his friends observed a transformation and disliked it. Some of his friends seemed to observe a transformation and those friends for the most part disliked it. They believed that he was becoming closed off. They did not hear from him anymore; they believed he was becoming closed off. They believed he was going inward. No, he would say, That is not what you mean. What you mean is that I am becoming closed off to you.

They disliked it because they were losing a friend. It is a horrible thing to lose a friend, they said, and their saying this made him angry. What did they understand? They didn't understand a single thing. What could it possibly mean to go inward? As if he were some kind of light bulb which could be on or off. What you mean is that I do not entertain precisely you in precisely the way I entertained you before, he said.

What the hell do you mean? they said. What the hell could you possibly mean by that?

He concentrated on them. He understood them perfectly. He understood that they didn't know what they were saying. They wanted him. They wanted him to take them inside of him and they wanted this because he had formerly built for them stories of an inside. He had then pointed at those devices and said, That is me, I am like that, and some of his friends had believed him. That they could pass a test, could understand. It would be warm and also airy and free, etc., in such constructions, he had claimed. He had lied, he believed (he was quite hard on himself). He was paying the price for lying, now (he was really just paying the price for allowing himself vainly to do works for people with whom he had no intention to spend much time). But the fact that he had lied, in his constructions, and the fact that they protested his removing the constructions did not mean he was doing damage to them thereby. It is no punishment, he believed, to refuse to cook them those cookies. We are now adults, he said. We should be able to resist these temptations. By hook or by crook, he said. They were astonished. Astonished! It is cruel to talk to your friends that way.

Then they would all heave some sighs and get some soda pop, and then they would go back to what they were doing and would forget all about it. Months would pass. They would think of him in passing and would try to remember what they had been going on about in those conversations with him, at the benches by the river. They had been faulting him for something or other. Something he couldn't control, they supposed. They would feel bad, as one does when one thinks about a time when one faulted someone for something he couldn't control.

It was on the other hand of course possible that it had been something he could control, and that it was precisely that fact which had annoyed them so much. But even in that case, they really couldn't fault him, they decided. They had after all behaved similarly at various times, to various people in their own lives. There is no accounting for taste, they would say and shake their heads and try to concentrate again on whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. You cannot fixate on these things. There is nothing to be gained, and you are just going to fall behind on whatever it is you are supposed to be doing.