1. My name is Caio Maximino de Oliveira and I'm a

borderline-disordered

Brazilian person. That's all.

2. My fanciful story is about a beggar that was in the alley a few

hours

before Daniel Quinn ('The City of Glass') enters it to survey Peter

Stillmann's house. I chose this character (that does not appear in

the book)

because I wanted to develop more threads on language that seems to

be a

somewhat central topic on this Auster's short story.

3. As I said before, my name is Caio Maximino de Oliveira, I'm 19 and

my

e-mail address is

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Tom O'Bedlam sat on the alley, having the garbage cans by his side.

He left

his bottle aside and allowed his thoughts to - or his speech, he did

not

know anymore, and couldn't care less - to wander: flyings accross

concepts:

memes, in a whole mental dirive. He did that a lot. Allow his

thoughts to

wander on the vast expanses of his minds. He thought that maybe this

sadness

that he felt on himself (that's how Irishmen, like poor Tom, spoke:

in their

language, they knew that they were not sad or painful, they were not

sadness

or pain; but other people's languages hipnotized them and trapped

them in

rotulated boxes) originated in the distance between the concept of

self and

his self. He could not grasp a conception of self that fully

explained the

sensation of being .................. He also thought that maybe he

could

invent a word to express that, a individual notion of self that

included

rough hands, smell of cheap alcohol, memoirs of loss, Emily inside

his soul,

Emily fleeing and taking away a bit of his self (that thing the was

trying

to find a word for). It could be only a matter of language. His fellow

beggars had created, in longtimeago, a language of signs drawn on

walls to

point food and shelter, a hobo language that sounded paradoxal to him:

chalked on brick walls were visible signs that were no longer

understood as

language by non-hobos: an invisible language made visible to be made

invisible again. Such a sign language, with a seemingly arbitrary

connection

with its own meaning (Saussure said all languages had), could have

only been

sprung from beggars, invisible striders of the city, ignored by all,

unseen

by many, not part of the Spectacle. These thoughts infected his mind,

for he

was Tom O'Bedlam, "able to catch fleas while they jump and

melodies from

birds' beaks", and also his speech, for now he realized that his

thoughts

had gained autonomous, concrete reality as he spoke each of them. He

grabbed

his chalk and drew a symbol on the alley's walls, a symbol that

represented

the world 'barbelith', or Tom's Qabbalistic (it could only be

something

Qabbalistic, he also thought-said) self. He would leave the alley in

seven

minutes, and Quinn would enter the same alley a few hours after this.

But

Quinn knew nothing about Tom O'Bedlam, for the hobo's chalk mark

would not

be seen by anyone without hobo eyes in his head.