But this is how puzzling the whole experience became: as I got rid of things, new things would appear. I had to pick up that mess before I could start. There was some sense that this was the detritus of not one but several previous attempts to inhabit the room. The floor was littered with stuff like dirty flex, yellow cardboard boxes of nails, bags of chemicals that had burst in the heat, and the plastic toys you buy for hamsters. Someone had built a shelter out of flattened cardboard boxes in one corner. I soon found an unoccupied room, characterised by a large table full of neglected plants in pots and some veinous diagrams at different heights on the walls. This information was known only to the figures of authority who often squatted in a line along one side of the corridor eating a vegetarian meal. It was impossible to calculate how many rooms there were in the long house. I had work that needed to be done: even more, perhaps, it needed to be organised. Tired of my original quarters, I was looking for somewhere quiet and without distractions. Yet others were really good rooms, cool, intact, full of contemporary sound equipment, interesting steamed plywood furniture and themes from Western lifestyle magazines. Others were occupied by people like me who had never stayed in one place long enough to learn to look after themselves. Some rooms were dilapidated, with holes in the floors, collapsed ceilings and an air of abandonment. While the corridor had no windows, the rooms looked out on to a harbour lively with heat and warships. I had lived the whole of that month in a long house with a single corridor running past every room.
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