Plainspeak

This is a cut edition of Book 1, made after the book closed.

The serial was written one night at a time for thirty-two nights, while the way of writing it kept changing: the narrator's voice was revised twice, and from the twenty-third night each character was played separately. The story circled: the same form and the same fuse came round again and again.

So this edition leaves scenes out. The first thirteen nights stand nearly whole. After that we kept each turn of the story once and dropped what only went round again: repeated arguments, second readings of the same paper, and ladders, dockets and kiosk calls beyond what the story needs. About three quarters of the serial's words remain. We also removed sentences printed twice, a dead brother who speaks and a box that speaks a line of narration.

We invented nothing. Every choice the forks made is told, in order. Every credited contribution appears in the scene it shaped, in its own words.

Some names changed, because the world is meant to be invented: those of a real city, country, coast and sea, a shop chain, and two borrowed surnames, one of them also in a house one-liner. The city's new name also falls inside one sentence credited to a reader, on night 6, the only credited sentence that differs from the record, which keeps it as written.

There is no ending. The book stops where the serial stopped. The original serial remains readable night by night, exactly as it was published; it is an alpha, and this edition is the version we would ask you to read.