Part Two: The Red Towns

Entry 53. 2066–2088. The drifting years. The tax rises.

The record marks a gap here and will keep marking them, because the second book must now teach the reader how to read it. Book One moved at the speed of a life. This book moves at the speed of a masquerade, which is the speed of erosion: decades of nothing, and then a coastline gone. The entries from here forward are the headlands. The gaps are the sea. When I skip eleven years, reader, do not imagine the years were empty; imagine they were full of exactly what your own years are full of, work and weather and meals and small kindnesses, worn by a man under a name the record has no reason to disturb. I was alive the whole time. That was the whole assignment.