The camp at the end of the tube always left Franco stunned by beauty. Why was being here so important, and why did the water from the fountain not taste as good as the water from the tube? Surely it must taste better at the source, or at least it should. Franco thought that the problem was in the should; that is, the problem was not ontological but epistemological. ‘Might as well throw myself back into the word game,’ Franco thought, the scene at Davos clearly in his mind. It was a scene that was marked, for the most part, by that thin veneer of adhesive on the back of the adherent name tags that everyone was expected to wear. He despaired over what happened to the wool fibers of his jacket when they became coated by it. Arriving at every check-in table, he always tried to find a way to tuck the tag into his breast pocket so that he would not have to peel of the backing to expose the noxious adhesive. He flipped through a book on origami to see if one of the folded forms would help him, maybe by causing a hook to pop out the back so that he could just hang the tag on his pocket. Sometimes the tags were plastic sleeves with metal safety pins on the back that could be opened and threaded through the material of his coat, but even that method, although much better than the chemical warfare promised by the adhesive, caused worry. Would the metal pin separate two fibers who had clung to each other through all that was required to make the jacket, through the shearing and carding and threading and weaving and dying and cutting and sewing and shaping and ironing? What if it actually pierced one of them?
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