I am not a writer, I said to the interrogator, and yet she expected a story. It had to be written, calligraphically recorded and delivered to her office by the 5th of November, or else. The record turned on the old gramophone, the little dog of “his master’s voice” getting dizzier by each song refrain, and I could not get it into the interrogator’s mind that I was not a writer. Of all interrogation rooms this was certainly the nicest I had ever visited. The threat of violence was couched in hues of civility and echoes of bourgeois politeness. It seemed a comfortable place to visit and for this it was more effective than the bare cement walls of the modernist prison. Even as I was transferred from my cell on block 4 of the state penitentiary’s fourth wing (out of 16 – they like multiples of 4 here) I knew that I was in for something far more persuasive than electroshocks and water-boarding. I was in for the whole “we are co-opting you in the bourgeois dream routine.” Men far stronger than me succumbed. And here I was, German Jazz piping through the old gramophone’s speaker, resisting her demands (for the interrogator was a woman, inevitably). Who did I think I was, I told myself. I needed to write a story and offer it to her before the dog puked from the frenetic dance on the turntable and before I was forever excluded from this bourgeois promise. What was there to hide after all? The fact that I desired this other woman, or maybe the fear that I could fall for her (this other woman)? Both questions loomed perilously over my head as I contemplated the possible narrative routes that my story could take. I knew it would not be too difficult to make the November 5th deadline. And then I could climb the wall to some sort of freedom.