It was Kafka that led me from the south to the north, W. knows that. It was Kafka that led me into the university. Before Kafka, there was my warehouse life. My life as a finder of UTLs, unable-to-locates, searching up and down the warehouse aisles.

I stumbled when I tried to convey it to W., which is a good sign, he says. I spoke of the castle hill, veiled in mist and darkness, and of the buzzling and whistling on the telephone line. I spoke of the illusory emptiness into which K. looked up as he crossed the wooden bridge, and of his abjection and passivity as he sought to settle his business with the authorities. What was I getting at?, W. wonders. What was I trying to say?

The world around me was unreal, I told W. that. The warehouse was unreal. The suburbs in which I had grown up, and on which the warehouse had been built, were likewise unreal. Despair reveals the truth of the world: isn’t that what was revealed to me by Kafka’s book? Despair reveals the nullity of things.

I had a vision, I told W., he remembers. I saw the workers around me like rats in a rat-run. I saw the pristine buildings around me like rat-pens, like rat-mazes. Absurdity was doing experiments on us: that’s what I saw, wasn’t it? Madness had us caged in the suburbs like laboratory rats ...

My soul was a UTL: isn't that what I saw? Life was an unable-to-locate, although no one seemed to know it but me.

The Castle made my life quiver like a compass needle. Things pointed in one direction: north! Out of the warehouse! Out of the south! North: to where dereliction, like The Castle, revealed things in their truth!  North: to where the destruction at the created order had worn through!