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bathwater in advance, when it comes to the ray. It’s categorically different from man or woman. The woman is this one, a writer, for example, not woman, the man this man, a lawyer, say, not man. ‘The ray’ operates incommensurably. It can be understood generically, as a term for all the rays that ever existed, including the countless millions in deep time, bearing in mind that deep time at once somewhere no one will ever be visiting and, to coin a phrase, the substrate of the present (see above). Or ‘the ray’ can mean just this or that one,singularly. Language wrecks the ray. Revealingly perhaps, the comparison doesn’t hold in the same way in the case of children. The child is closer, in this respect if not in others, to the ray. But the ray is a problem, insuperably so. Or rather, it is an aporia. The ray wrecks language. The revolutionary ray: you reach for words, you riparate. You dream of a new vocabulary, a new reality. Or it dreams you.

    What does a man do on the day his father dies? Outside the sun has taken up the baton for another hot summer day. But the relay has stopped. He wonders if he is capable of driving. He thinks at the time he manages it quite well. Later he will receive a speeding ticket, for driving too fast that morning to collect her from the bus station some twenty miles away. He arrives an hour or so early. He parks close to the station and walks around a crowded Saturday morning country town. Like an altercation developing in his peripheral vision he becomes aware that time has slowed down to a catastrophe. Whatever is occurring is occurring with unbelievable, piece-by-piece, falling-apart diffusing diffracting lentissimo decrepitude. No cinema, mental or mainstreet, could capture it, the jostling soundless shopping centre crowds, the lentic swamp, the shattering lens. What he is trying to make out has slowed down to something grinding but imageless, weightless as the noiseless rip of detaching a retina.
    And at the same time, in this life-ending slowness, this being a mollusc under someone’s descending shoe, he finds himself walking into a clothes store with aMASSIVE UNBEATABLE SUMMER SALE. Disturbed by his own calmness and foresight, he buys a pair of black trousers and a lightweight black raincoat he can wear to the funeral.
    Back at the bus station it is restless, people milling about, dull but strange oppression. He asks does anyone know about the bus from Heathrow. Because it is a Saturday the ticket office is shut. Gradually it emerges that there has been a pile-up on the motorway and the resulting chaos means indefinite delays. He manages to establish that the crash occurred too early for her coach to have been involved. He tries to shrug off the thought that the day is imitating itself. It’s something quite alien, he thinks, to that falseness in the impressions of external things that Ruskin called pathetic fallacy. It’s as if perception itself were a strange mimosa. Everything seems shadowed, shadowing something else.
    It should be hallucinational news.
    He sees a man, a blind man, standing at the very edge of the pavement, in danger of stumbling off the kerb or being swept into the air by the next passing bus. He is wearing an intolerably hot, shabby brown winter coat and bearing a sandwich board with the announcement:
SCIENTISTS DISCOVER NEW MIMESIS
    This waiting at the bus station is an orchestrated revision of what happened in the hospital, in someone else’s mind’s eye. He anticipates, open-mouthed, the reappearance of Mary, even darker-eyed than earlier:
    – Sorry about this, she says, this sort of thing happens from time to time. You just have to wait for it to pass. It is the aleatory procession, you can never tell how long itis going to last. And when it is over is when it begins. Just wait and see.
    It is as if the people who are waiting in vain, either to collect family or friends or to travel themselves, are in truth, unaware, waiting for test results. The