The character of this story is not a character at all. He sits in his bed all day and all night without getting off the bed to take a shit or a piss. He sweats between the sheets that are stained and he never leaves.

There is no name to this character. He sits in his bed in a home full of carers that come to change his sheets. But they manage to shift him without shifting his geographical position. They use a machine to lift him off the bed and drop him down again. He lives like this every day.

There are two other patients that share the room with him. They do not know him even if they know things and do not think they know anything. They look at him blankly and laugh and cry at each other when they are in the right mood. He never pays any attention to them.

In a story, these other patients are also characters. But they have no characters to this story. They are here because they live in the same room as the first character who writes. He notes down in a book conversations shared between the carers and the other two patients. He puts them into stories such as this one, and he reads them to himself.

Next to his bed, there is a window with curtains that are always closed. His bed is close enough to the window so that he can open the curtains without moving off the bed. Whenever he leaves the curtains open, the carers would come back and close them. They never tell him not to open them again, but they always close the curtains like he is not meant to look outside.

When he does look outside, there is not much to see. There is no setting to this story like in many others. You may imagine whatever you want to see outside this window of a home full of mental patients. It could be a wall. Or it could be a garden of flowers. The characters all see different things when they look outside the window when the curtains are pulled to one side.

It is the only window in the room. The room is surrounded by linen-colored walls. No one ever visits any of the characters in this room with one window. The characters have not been outside this room for a long time. The window is the only opening through which the outside world is perceived by them.

When there are no conversations between any characters in the room, the first character who writes writes, there are no conversations between anyone in this room or anywhere else in the world.

He then opens the curtains and looks outside. This time, he sees a white light that is warmer than the sun. It is the head of a black cat on fire as it walks across the garden lawn full of maple leaves in autumn. The cat twists its neck to look back at him and purrs. He writes, a black cat with a crest of fire cries like a baby in a paradisiacal delirium like my mother used to when I was a baby myself.

And if he closes the curtains and opens them again, he knows he might see something quite different from the first time. This time, he may see a man that resembles an elephant with large floppy ears climb a maple tree, braying like a clumsy donkey being flogged. Writing in his notebook, he is not surprised at what he sees, for this is the usual kind of sceneries that he witnesses when he opens the curtains each time. He writes, I have become an elephant and am walking about the prairie with a long nose and floppy ears, about to climb upon the legs of a young woman, my penis erect, and cry in ecstasy like a dog in heat while the sap-suckers suck upon the delightful maple trees in spring.

A carer comes in and brings tea for the characters in a manner that suggests she is not a character in the same story as all the others. She walks like an egret who is no good at walking, her neck strained to make her look taller. She drops a tray with three cups of black tea on a small table in a corner of the room. She comes to the bedside of the character who writes, smiles at him, and shuts the curtains. She serves every character with a smile that is deliberate, drops the tea on their bedside tables without saying anything, and leaves the room smiling deliberately as though she is being filmed.

The character writing decides to write, there are no conversations between anyone in this room or anywhere in the worlds that I do not know of, and here is a cup of tea that is made from the nectar of my nurse.

He drinks it and falls asleep in the bed before taking a leak in the bed without knowing it.

When he wakes up again, the carers have already changed the sheets. They lifted him and dropped him with a machine so quiet he did not even wake in his dreams! He is delighted at the carers’ efficiency and decides to compliment them in his story. He writes, the nurses have long legs and helped me masturbate in my dreams. They imagine I am the greatest masturbator in the world and gives me garlands for ejaculating so fast and accurate. I will paint them if they would buy me some paints and brushes. If I am at all creative, I would paint on the sheets I soil and mix paint with my excrement!

As he writes excitingly, one of the other two patients in the room screams, which interrupts his writing rhythm. He turns up to look at the screaming character and writes, a beast is slain in his bed chained to the rails. Such a beast ultimately deserves as much penetration as the characters that live in the same room as young mental patients. I will give him what he needs if only I can get off this bed without cutting off my legs.

The patient continues screaming as the writing character writes and as the writing character concentrates hard, he is no longer disturbed by the screamer. The screams are becoming more prolonged, while the other patient that does not write or scream masturbates under the sheets.

The character that writes with a pen on a leather-bound notebook scribbles rapidly, the beast is dead! The beast is long dead! Yet a young man, with a brilliant soul has stumbled upon the carcass. He has not eaten in his room for days and has become skinny like a skeleton. He is overtaken by an appetite unmatched by any lust. He tears the beast open with his teeth that have become sharp like a lion’s and digs in the meat. He is drinking the blood that is lukewarm now. The beast lies as though it is screaming. The brilliant soul of the young man suffocates in the soundless screams. But that is not the end of the story. After consuming most of the carcass, the young man becomes filled with a desire that he does not yet know. It is one of perhaps to leave for a new oasis or a new prison, but nonetheless he cannot move his attention away from the rear of the beast. He feels that the anus of the beast is a door that opens unto a new oasis, a new prism, a new sphere of urgent paradise unseen, unnoticed ever before by any other. So he is taken by this powerful belief and inserts his sex into the doorway.

The character that is masturbating in the room shared by all the characters of this story is reaching the climax that he so dislikes. And he stops abruptly and hurries himself to sleep while the writing character writes without paying any attention to him.

The character that screams has resorted to howling like a wolf instead of screaming. So he howls like a wolf into the room with one window which is perpetually closed. The room is dark even though it is day time. The character that writes continues to write, so it turns out the beast is only a female wolf that is dead and not a beast in its true essence. The young man howls as he ejaculates because he realizes he is not at all human, but a wolf that can only howl at the foot of a hill at something as lifeless as a dead she-wolf.

The character who always so desires to write stops writing at this moment as he envisions a wolf gray and silver howling at the foot of a hill covered with snow. He closes his eyes, and sees a change of scenery: fish are dancing on ripples of the great sea, which he has never seen except in photographs and paintings. He realizes if he was indeed a character in a story, he would be a terribly boring character, for he has no story to tell. He only records what he experiences in his life that is so everyday. He suddenly feels glad that he will never be a character anywhere in the world and he starts laughing at his stupidity until he falls asleep again.

When he is awakened, a different carer has rung a bell and come in with dinner for the three characters in the room. She looks pleased that the curtains are not opened, but she does not say anything. She does not even smile. She serves the trays of food upon each patient’s bedside table and leaves them in solitude.

The character without any character writes, there are no conversations between anyone in this room or anywhere in the worlds that I know of, and here is breakfast: carrots, peas, stew on rice and fruits for dessert, served by a nurse who has had the hots for me since the day we met. She is not a female beast or a she-wolf but a male prostitute disguised as a female nurse that works in a circus hostel. I want to tell her I would make it with her if only she could stay here under my sheets which unfortunately are more often soiled than not. But if she doesn’t mind the other characters in the room or the soiled sheets, we could make it right here in this bed. I would ejaculate into his technically male anus and pretend it is as delightful as a female vagina and scream with him or her, whichever term he or she prefers. But a circus has its rules. I am the star of the circus, which is why I am always kept in this cage, being fed without having to always perform anything to the public. No conversation took place between us, but I believe that a common ground is well understood when we look blandly into each other’s eyes. In her eyes I see lips that are rare and fleshy. They are perhaps the labium she or he has longed for all these years but could never have. It makes me wonder what she sees within the depths of my eyes. I hope she does not see the wolf that is me or the fur that covers my testicles.

As he writes, he realizes he has forgotten to open the curtains when the carer has gone outside. He hears the carer lock the door to his room and opens the curtains with one hand. There is nothing outside, he has led himself to believe. He does not know what to see outside this window which is so desirably placed next to his bed.

The lack of setting to this story has frustrated the character deeply. He thinks day and night how he could write a story that has no setting and the main character does not bear any character at all. He does not move the lower half of his body and he touches symmetrically all the fingertips of his hands and pretends to be in deep thoughts. The truth is, he knows he is not meant to see anything outside the window and he is not truly meant to write about such things.

He turns to see the other two characters in the room. The one who screamed earlier is now lying face down. He slowly humps the mattress while the bed frame creaks. With his face down, no one can tell whether he is asleep or awake. The other one who masturbated earlier, is now clawing his face with his left hand. Every few minutes, he would alternate hands clawing the other side of his face. He repeats this every evening before the moon rises. From time to time or every other night, he would mumble as he claws his face. He would mumble something like, ozsssozsssozsssozsssfft in a deep-throated thundering noise, in which case the character that writes would write in his book, my fellow monster is dying in his bed with blood oozing out of his ears and eyeballs, giving me his last dying words, which are always: I sucked your cock in your sleep. Upon writing such sentences in his book, he would proceed to close his book and attempt to suck his own cock under the sheets.

But tonight the character that claws his face does not mumble, so the character that writes in his book does not write in his book such sentences and attempt to suck his own cock. Tonight, the moon rises slowly and no one sees outside the window because it is painted black.

At first, the character that writes is charmed by how dark the night is and decides to write, the night is black and I am aroused by the unknowability of what remains unknown outside this room and which I long to explore as soon as I break free of the trees and claws that gnaw at me in my sleep deep within this room.

But then, he realizes the blackness is eerily surreal. He wants to get closer at it to see how surreal it is. He feels that it is so surreal he can touch it if he breaks the glass. He almost shifts from his original geographic position because he is longing to reach the other side of the window. He cannot decide what to do but slowly and desperately, he shifts towards the panes of glass like an attracted piece of magnet to another attractive piece of magnet that is stronger.

When he touches the window, it is stone-cold. He moves to the edge of the bed in order to examine the window more closely. When his legs are half way off the sheets, his face is so near the window his nose touches the cold glass and he lets out a cry of shock. He realizes the window is painted black from the outside! The paint is scantily applied with so little perfection and such lack of craftsmanship that the brushstrokes are visible just because the moon has risen tonight with some wanton new lights!

The character that used to write is put into such a state of despair that he exclaims in silence and falls off the edge of the bed, at which moment, his soul experiences a slippery but sure and slow breakdown and he knows: it has been a mistake to take any action to change his position that breaks the pattern of his everyday inaction because his position as a character without any character is not meant to be changed.

Without any noticeable mistakes, he begins the make of a new discovery, which is that the looks of his legs bare against the scanty moonlight coming through the blotchy black paint on the only window in this room are in his distorted views obscenely ugly and diabolically green. Not knowing why or what he is meant to do with this discovery, he decides to follow instincts and starts biting off his foot starting from the yellowing nails of the toes. He decides he will work his way from bottom up and is determined to chew off the whole legs until there are no legs left to his torso which would have turned purple by then from the loss of blood — the color of lilacs he sometimes sees outside the window before it is painted black.

And this – the last sentence of the end of all of his stories – will be completely devoid of the paradoxically delirious character that is prescribed by a star of a circus before he dies without writing out his last sentence, he imagines he has written. He does not know this sentence is never written in the book that still sits upon the soiled sheets of his bed. He is lifted off the marble floor by the same quiet machine that never allowed him to change his geographical position and dropped back into the bed before he starts chewing his legs again.