"This is your room," the landlord had told me, so I felt no qualms, before unpacking, in searching it from top to bottom.

It was a pretty, salon-like space, with a central arch slightly inset from the walls, dividing the bed and wardrobe at one end from the double windows and plinth desk at the other. I opened both sashes and looked out over the leaded roof of a church to a park in which a woman in a pullover was walking a small dog.

I opened all the drawers and turned out their tender bundles of pencil shavings, tacks and hair-pins, offcuts of paper and card. I lifted the edges of the carpet to retrieve a cigarette butt, spent matches and a pair of Canadian cents. I poked around in the shoe space inside the wardrobe, and then, standing on the bed, counted the ring pulls and bottle-caps that someone had thrown on top of it. The chair seemed to scrape more than it should, and, turning it over, I found a drawing pin embedded in its right leg to steady it. Finally I lifted the mattress and looked inside the pillow slip, shuffling the folded blankets that had been placed on a night-table beside it. Nothing.

I was looking for the residual image of the man or woman who had preceded me. It wasn't exactly that I wanted anything so specific as their name; indeed, the less I could find out the better. Rather, I wanted to find some material symbol through which I could recreate that person as a potentiality, a point of focus that would rekindle in me a sense of their necessary mystery, the instinctive difference which would prevent us from coexisting in the same place and time. The room still retained that sense of presence which is only perceptible to those who have just abandoned one room and not yet made their home in another; and I was deferring as long as possible my need to accept the space which these walls contained, to spread out my books and papers and thereby annul its past forever.

That first night I slept in my clothes on the unmade bed, wondering if people had argued or made love here, and to which quarters of the city their destinies had taken them. Wakening before dawn, I walked to the windows to look back at the room, satisfying myself that the integrity of its past remained as yet unaltered by my addition to it. But I knew that this farce could not endure, and that in time it would be precisely the fact that I chose to leave it as it had been that would define my identity within it. There was nothing I could do to stop some kind of meaning from accumulating within it as a consequence of my presence - something which threatened me, since I would be forced to accept that meaning as my own.

But I did not want to exist for myself; I wanted to exist in the possibilities which could only be supplied from without. I was listening to the clatter of the subway, hearing the clink of a baseball bat where a hidden game was taking place somewhere behind the trees. Re-reading my stories, I found a cocooned history which could no longer be mine precisely because it had been written down; it was as though in reading them I was moving into their space, replacing their material effects with my own, dismissing a former tenant who I had not troubled to understand.

It had begun to pour with rain. I could not pull the window shut, until I found the wedge of paper, folded over and over, which had been carried perhaps for years up and down upon its guide. The sheet was torn in half; therefore I could only read part of the letter which had been written upon it, and which I suddenly felt an impulse to transcribe. But beyond affirming that it made sense of an initialled hair-slide I chanced to find later that day, pinched over the lip of a poster rail as if strung up there to dry, I have nothing to say. I was on the point of making my habitual mistake and exhausting the implications of these objects in order to write myself into their space. Instead, it is best I leave that space to its potential, and thereby the future of an uncertain past within which many separate people may live, rather than impose upon it the proscribed certainty of my present, which gives me ownership over it but displaces its past forever.

On a windy street there must be a hundred scraps of paper blowing about. Look for them, and you will find them. Nothing will ever stop you from picking up any one of them, reading it, and demanding involuntarily, "Where did this come from? Who wrote it? When? And was her life any better than mine?"