Also known as: A.J. (on bylines), the editor-in-chief (on good days), Fuckface’s oldest friend (on bad ones)
Occupation: Editor-in-chief of Momentul. Investigative journalist. Reluctant lecturer in Visceral Journalism.
First appears: Chapter 000
Status: Forty, since the day before yesterday. Still here, against medical advice.
Face: Not available. I prefer to be read.
My philosophy of life
Paradox is the brother I never had. We grew up in the same room without our parents noticing: he got the contradictions, I got the vocabulary. I do not believe in truth the way my colleagues believe in it, as a thing you find under a stone and carry to the printing press. I believe in it the way you believe in a lighthouse: you never reach it, you only avoid the rocks. I love poetry, though Dia was right, it isn’t poetry I love. It is poetic thinking, the moment two things that had nothing to say to each other suddenly turn out to be the same thing. Everything else, including my career, is footnotes.
What I think they think of me
That I am a talented man wasting himself with great discipline. My father would add that I write without writing, for people who read me in the bathroom and forget me as soon as they flush. My doorman, Viktor, thinks of me as a contract with a clause about violence. He is the only one who has read it.
What I think of me
At sixteen I promised Hunter S. Thompson I would keep up with his excesses until I turned forty. I keep my promises; it is the rest of my life I have trouble with. I have tattoos only where a pair of briefs and an undershirt can hide them. I call this discretion. It is fear, cut to measure.
The most interesting things I never said
If you wish to contemplate the grandeur of human failure, listen to someone making a promise to himself.
The empty promise is the most democratic of human lies.
Time is an unforgiving critic, and the human epidermis an exceptionally unreliable gallery.
Birth is an act of counterfeiting; life, an obstinate persistence in confusion.
I have never lied to a reader. I have only lied to myself, which is where readers come from.
A man who quotes too much is not hiding behind other people’s words; he is hiding other people inside his own.
Paradox is the only relative who never asked me for anything.
Andrei’s footnote: You will only ever see my back. It is the part of me that has been best written.
