It is 2014 and I am volunteering for a museum, working in the stores and helping to re-catalogue the artefacts held there; the ones that aren't on display. It is the run up to the centenary of the outbreak of World War One,  and I am tasked with organizing and recording all of the ephemeral items relating to the war. To create an archive, if you will. Papers, letters, postcards, rations books, diaries, recipes, official government notices, and more fall within my domain, and I am enraptured. A long standing fascination with 'the everyday' means this is right up my street, and I throw myself into the task with gusto.

I feel privileged to have access to so much information, so many individual accounts, so much life. But my brain can't work out how to put it all together to form a complete picture. The whole, it transpires, is bigger than the sum of its parts. To find a way to relay this feeling, I turn to the diagram. I draw a large exploded view diagram of a camera, and label each of its parts with the accession number and descriptor for every World War One ephemera item. The diagram is analogous of the archive, I explain to people—all of the pieces seem to be there, but I can't mentally assemble it to produce something tangible, something I can experience. Understanding each individual museum item does not mean I understand the war. Knowing that all of these pieces come together to make a camera does not mean I know how cameras work.

*

It is late one Thursday night and I'm chatting to B. by email. I'm telling her about what I've been reading and I type, 'I'm not gonna lie, all roads lead to Deleuze'. B. replies and quotes my words back to me, she writes that this needs to be a title for something. I start to think about what the terrain might be like on these roads to Deleuze, and whether Guattari lives in the same imagined city, or just nearby. Perhaps they are two sides of a great river. Buda and Pest. Deleuze and Guattari. Perhaps Guattari is the river. And what will this Deleuze-Ville look like when I get there? I start to sketch.

It takes a while to get going. I remember terms such as lines of flight and rhizome, and place them on my map. The Thousand Plateau Plaza pops up, and minor lanes lead to Kafka Close. Psychoanalysis City is close by, but not in sight, only accessible by Schizoanalysis Street, beyond the Great Guattari River. I remember that Deleuze rejected Heidegger's notion of 'the end of metaphysics', and my Metaphysical Road becomes the Metaphysical Cul-de-Sac—Dead End, No Access to Heidegger Hill. I look at the clock and realise it is 3am and I am drawing small trees in the Rhizome Woods. I take myself to bed.

*

It is 2016, and two hours ago I found my partner dead on our bathroom floor. The police have driven me to his mother's house, and the rest of the family are on their way. I have taken my cat in a carry-box, and a bag with a jumper, some paracetamol, and a two litre bottle of Pepsi Max in it. I am insatiably thirsty. I forget the cat's medication, my phone charger, and anything else that might actually be useful. I have emailed my Ph.D. supervisors, apologising for the fact that I will not be able to attend my supervision meeting that morning. I am in shock, but do not forget my manners.

The police want to ask me some questions about what happened. The family queries whether this needs to be done so soon, but apparently it does, before my mind starts to recreate the events that have happened, block things out, make it a bit easier for me. I don't know why they need to ask me so many things, but I am polite, I do not feel in a position to question their methods. The female police officer is looking at me with the sad, pitiful eyes I will be on the receiving end of for years to come.

They want me to run through what has happened. What time was it when I woke up? Where did I find the body? Where is the bathroom in relation to the bedroom? Was the bathroom door locked? How did I unlock it from the other side? Where did I get the knife from to do this? Where is the kitchen in relation to the bathroom in relation to the body in relation to the bedroom in relation to the front door I let the paramedics in through?

I am tired, thirsty—so thirsty—and cold. I do not have the energy to answer all of these questions. I ask them for a pen and paper and I sit in silence and draw a map.

__

[Here] is a link to the one paragraph story On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges.