I can't help but wonder now at my naiveté when I look back over the events, or perhaps non-events, of the past two years since I first wrote to you from the bottom of this swamp upon the plain. Two years since I did my best to report to you, on the outside, of the changing conditions here (or perhaps more accurately, my transfiguring perception of otherwise stable conditions). I can no longer, with any assurance, declare myself to be in possession of the fluctuating truths I have claimed ownership of in the past, however, let alone the 'Truth'.
The once specific and now vague forces I still believe to be rallied against me, although the contour of their description has admittedly changed, and the face of this city itself has undergone strange transformation.
The great confrontation, and those of you who remember me will remember my love of confrontation, I suspected between the Mutes and Norms has not come, and the atmosphere of mutual discord and suspicion we have lived within these last few years has not subsided. One change, however, seemingly insignificant at first, but then occurring to me to have considerable ramifications, is the veneer of fear or perhaps dread that coats the face of all I meet, Mute or Norm. I have no explanation for this, not that you, having been the recipient of two instalments of my (what I now see as) delusional explanations, would have any faith in my narrative. As well, this subtle change is in aspect a phenomenon so ephemeral I can only vaguely locate it in a shiftiness of glance, a paranoid suspicion of even the most innocent offers of help (coupled however, with traditional Norm rudeness), fumbled change at the till, an awkward shuffling of papers, and most ominously, a singular pleading expression behind even the most abrupt of Norm greetings.
Three times now the streets in my neighbourhood have been shredded and rent, and with painful and suspicious slowness the solid tarmac has been replaced with shifting sand and moving slabs of concrete. Although I cannot claim this is part of some greater or more insidious plan, all my claims now having the ring of insanity to you, or more seriously of deliberate lie, I can tell you, and if the emergency news networks were delivering messages to your area you might have heard, that a large truck fell into a hole big enough to swallow a house, and the whole event was as if staged for the silently watching crowd.
The great flood, which may have been reported on the outside, that swept over this entire region with an almost malign destructiveness, would have swept the city into the northern sea but for the feeble construction of a last-minute dike, built out of mud and the derelict autos which increasingly clutter our city streets.
The arbitrary (for it cannot be interpreted in any other way) construction, the construction crane which fell into the river, the tearing up of the city traffic islands to replace their boundaries with only a slightly reduced walkway, although ostensibly mistakes, can only be evidence of both an increasing desperate populace and an infrastructure already in its final stages of deterioration.
But this is not the planned disintegration of a movement put forward and bravely executed, but rather a desperate stance against what could only be a barely perceived chaos. The ever-constant fear in which these people live their lives, here on the edge of the world would, if I were a literary man, inspire me with pathos. Instead however, I can only perceive what danger to me and mine might lie in this accumulation of dread and decay.
But if decay and despair are what is left here, and for reasons I cannot admit I must stay, then I am resolved to make my way through the increasingly cluttered streets, and act as I have been accustomed. Not that I will ignore their plight, but I once again determine their actions and despite those will not turn from what it is to be an outsider: friendly to a strange face, generous to a fault, and bearing an almost naive lack of comprehension of what can only be evil intent.

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