“They say this not through art, but under a divine influence; for if they had learned through art to speak fully on a single subject, they would know how to speak on every subject.”

 After reading these lines, it is not hard for us to imagine Sorge closing the book in his hand and placing it on the table by his bedside, examining his face in the mirror and wondering whether he needed to shave, deciding that he did not look too disheveled to go out, and slipping on the trench coat hanging in the hall. And then closing the door behind him, walking down the stairs, finding himself in a rainy and thoughtful Tokyo morning. The oddity that would never even cross our minds, perhaps one we couldn’t guess even if we had unlimited chances, is that Sorge ducks into the first church he comes across and starts praying. Watching the man in front of him, standing with his arms stretched out to either side in the shape of a cross, Sorge lifts his head slightly and brings his palms together. From here on, things get easier for a while, because we say that if he’s doing this, he must be muttering something too. Incomplete sentences pulled out of whatever parts of a prayer or hymn he can remember. Just as we expect him to get up and start walking out of the church, Sorge sits down in front of the church organ on a raised platform and begins playing a composition by Henry Purcell. At this point, a question begins to form in our minds: might the man we’ve been imagining not be the famous Soviet spy Richard Sorge? He could be a traveler passing through Tokyo, or a priest of German origin working at the church. Or we might think he is a musician who tunes organs for money, and perhaps, remembering that we imagined he hadn’t shaved either, infer that he is a volunteer, a devout man.

 Or let’s go back a little; why did we imagine a rainy and thoughtful Tokyo morning? Perhaps that was the detail that misled us, that made us take a completely wrong turn. Let’s imagine the man going back inside the building and, before stepping out onto the street, reading the writing on his own electricity meter. The electricity meters are lined up in a single row along the entire right side of the corridor at the entrance to the building. The third meter belongs to the man’s apartment. Are the words on it written in the Latin alphabet? Or in Japanese? If they’re in Japanese, then on our side we also need to make clear how the man knows that the third meter is his: is it the third meter from the street door, or the third starting from the end of the corridor, from inside the building?

 Let’s continue, accepting that if the writing is in Japanese, most of us Europeans wouldn’t be able to read the numbers, and accepting that what is written on the meter is in German and says a few things about the Bavarian electricity distribution company. Let’s go back outside the building. Let’s make sure Sorge has left the building too, because we wouldn’t want to be the ones walking instead of him on this rainy and thoughtful Augsburg morning.

 Maybe a little early, but if no one objects, let’s imagine this time that instead of going to church, he goes to the nearest open pub, because things had started getting mixed up in the church.

 We don’t think there’s any need to check again where the oddities began.

 Of course, if beginning by imagining the man’s name as Sorge is the first deviation, then things are different. In that case, we need to discuss it with someone beside us, because at that point there was a nothingness in which nothing had yet begun. And the person beside us has to be a real person, so that the reference of the point emerging from the nothingness is a human thought.

 “What are you doing?” asked the one beside me.

 “I’m imagining what’s inside by closing one eye and looking at the cover of the book,” I said.

 “How?”

 “I close one eye and squint the other. I see random clusters of letters, some forwards, sometimes backwards.”

 He must have understood that I was going to continue, because he went quiet.

 “Jor...Orge...Lui...Uis...Siu...Gres...One...Ones...Ficci...Ion...Sorge...Org...”

 “That’s how I do it. I make up stories from these words,” I said, finishing.

 “What’s the point of this ridiculous process?” he said. He looked bored.

 “I get to read the things that could be written inside the book without opening the cover.”

 “What if what’s written inside has nothing to do with what you’ve made up?”

 “Isn’t that better? I get a few more new stories. But maybe it’s better not to read the book at all until all the stories written on the cover are finished.”

 So what we’re left with is a story frozen in the lines above. Since the sentences are not going to change, from here on it is no different from walking through a museum made of words. So we don’t need to be too creative either. We’ll just wander between the lines and look around a little, that’s all.

 Some readers, as I did, won’t pay much attention to Plato’s Ion Dialogue that Sorge left on the table; they will see a book that could be yellow, beige, white, or red, depending on which publishing house printed it. It may have been bought recently; the edge of a page, or of the cover, may be slightly curled. This is a feature not of the story but of the museum: the details of the objects on display change depending on the person walking through it. Some visitors, on the other hand, will imagine not so much the content of the dialogues as Plato’s childhood, where he grew up, what happened to him on his way to becoming a great philosopher, looking at the book lying closed on a piece of wood held up by four makeshift wooden legs. And of course, some of us will know the subject well enough to say that Plato grew up on a farm, that he received his first philosophy lessons from a student of Heraclitus whose name I can’t remember now, and to tell us about Plato’s family, his friends, what foods he liked. Still, in the end, for most of us we are talking about a book sitting on a table.

 From here on, what we will see are increasingly simpler objects, or clusters of words pointing to those objects and happenings. There does not seem to be much chance of our having to dive deep into Plato’s world. So we can move through the museum of words in a more relaxed, almost unserious state of mind.

 The mirror seems to have lost its mirror-ness. Before us is the translucent portrait of a man with slightly unshaven stubble, and when we take a step back, we gain the metaphysical possibility of seeing both Sorge’s face and the back of his head at the same time. That’s all; a mirror, and inside it a face we know is not going to be shaved. The man has not yet made a decision in that frozen moment; he seems to be examining his face. Or perhaps it was at that very moment that he decided not to shave. Here, although we have written the text together, we see that there is a limit to what even we know about the moments. Naturally enough, some of us are not interested in the man’s face at all. The number of people saying, “We could have turned the mirror into a fantastic apparatus,” is greater than one might think. The man would pass through the mirror, reach another universe, and there, within regimes of reality woven around different physical laws and different languages, he would do entirely different things. Someone else would remember Tarkovsky. Nothing prevents us from thinking any of this.

 Let’s leave how Sorge puts on the trench coat, its color, how worn it is, its brand if it has one—all of it—to the imagination of different readers. Because we have a problem. Not a big one, but it needs to be dealt with: as written above, the only moment we have in the museum is Sorge closing the door from the outside. Since none of us has read him opening the door and stepping outside, one of us has to open it. There is no other way for us to get into that part of the museum. Let’s ask one reader to volunteer and give them the job of imagining, for all of us, the moment the door opens. That way, like you, I too will get the chance to read something we haven’t written before. A small new excitement, perhaps, but an excitement nonetheless.

 When we step outside the door—at least, something catches the attention of some of us among those who did step outside: not all the readers have come through the door. Some are still in front of the mirror, examining Sorge’s face, perhaps trying to describe who he looks like, or perhaps they have got into a discussion about various tricks that could be done with a mirror.

 Perhaps some of them, while continuing to read these lines, have passed through the mirror into another universe and are now on another journey among the shifted worlds there. Perhaps you are one of them, perhaps you are not, but the tour does not continue this way. Outside, Tokyo’s thoughtful rain and a journey from Tokyo to Augsburg are waiting for our party.

 We pass by the electricity meters; whether they were there during our previous passage is more a matter of individual taste than of the story itself. Those who wish can look at the meters while walking down the corridor, think about what language the writing on them is in; we have until we get outside.

 Out on the street, we come across a situation we are not very used to. The raindrops are hanging motionless in the air. In the time we spent opening the door, Sorge has moved a little farther ahead of us; he is standing on the opposite sidewalk in a walking pose. Since the rain is not falling but has remained rigid in the air, our possibilities for describing him have also diminished considerably. Once again, we have to ask a few readers for help.

 Perhaps this is a reader who cuts their walk short when the rain starts and goes back home. When they reach the shelter of their veranda, for some reason they pick up this book without taking off their clothes, open to this page, and a drop running down from their raincoat falls right onto these lines we are reading and wets the book. Another reader, while putting ice into their drink, drops it from a little too high, and for some reason the splash lands on this same page again. If the rain in the museum were real, it would make something like this happen. Let’s thank these two readers and move on.

 When we reach the church section, some readers notice that we left Sorge on the sidewalk as a frozen moment and refuse to enter the church without him. While we wait for Sorge to arrive, we hold a quick vote. Some readers vote to go straight to the pub scene, while others want to go into the church together with Sorge. One reader suggests that, while those who went into the church are walking through that section, we give a mirror to those who stayed outside. But realizing that if we ever invent any way of getting out of the museum, we will find ourselves in an endless landscape of stories stretching from the Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent myth all the way to the berserker who defended Stamford Bridge alone, we all decide to go back inside the building and read what is written on the electricity meters. Thankfully, we are still in Augsburg, and we can go to the pub.

 The museum tour ends here. Much later, we see two readers talking to each other; the book in their hands may have been what brought them together. Judging by their swimming shorts and tanned skin, they seem to be somewhere on holiday.

 “Are you reading Ion Sorge Org too?” asks the lighter-haired one.

 “Yes,” says the other.

 “There’s something I’m curious about. You’re one of the readers too, after all.”

 The dark-haired one only raises the book in his hand slightly in reply. The lighter-haired one continues.

 “Did you open the door?”

 “No. I thought someone would open it anyway,” replies the dark-haired reader.

 “I thought the same thing at the time. So who opened the door?”

 “One of the readers, of course. Wasn’t that what it said?”

 “Yes, but what if everyone thought someone would open it anyway?”

 “The writer reads what he writes too, doesn’t he? Maybe he disguised himself as a reader and opened it.”

 “Someone must have opened it in the end, otherwise we couldn’t have got out. Yes, it makes sense to me too that the writer opened it disguised as a reader.”

 Here I need to point something out to the readers: I only drew attention to the fact that the door had not been opened in the previous reading, and asked one of our readers to open it for us. I put the door into the text simply as a door, thinking that being opened or closed was among the possibilities of being a door. Besides, if I were to step into a phone booth like Clark Kent and disguise myself in front of that many people, surely someone would see me. I only pointed to a hinged plane of possibilities. And I would also like to thank the reader who opened it, for obliging us.

 Once again I’m looking at the cover of the book in front of me. The words I’ve extracted are below:

 “Bones” “Lui” “Regression”