The book had been priced at two euros in a used bookshop in the city where Kern had been living at twenty-nine. He had bought it because the first line interested him. He could not remember now what the first line had said. He knew only that by page two hundred he had noticed something off: a word that had not been there the day before. By page four hundred he had understood that the book was longer than it had been. By page five hundred, he had verified this: counted the pages, then counted them again a week later, and there were eleven more.
He had considered many explanations. He had eliminated all of them except the one that seemed true, which was that the book was continuing to write itself.
He was fifty-two now. The book was four thousand, seven hundred and eighteen pages. He had bought a larger shelf.
The book was not random. That was the thing that kept him from discarding it, or donating it, or burning it, which he had considered twice in the first year and not since. The book had concerns. It returned to images. There was a recurring figure of a woman on a bridge who appeared in different contexts across several hundred pages in the middle section. There were threads about inheritance, about what survives transmission. There were paragraphs he was almost certain were about him, obliquely, in ways that might be projection.
He sat down with new pages each morning. There were usually between two and eight new pages overnight. Sometimes none. Once, in a period of unusual output, forty-three pages in a week.
He had told no one. He had considered it several times and each time decided that what would be lost in the telling was worth more than whatever confirmation or help the telling might provide.
He turned the page. Three new paragraphs since yesterday. The woman on the bridge had returned, in winter now, in a scene Kern had the feeling he had been waiting for without knowing he had been waiting for it.
He read slowly.