Burroughs was right: language is a virus. Its hold over the imagination is total, its grip on the mind consuming. The only way for an artist — a creature whose sole comfort lies in the image — to free herself from it is to turn its excess into an exorcism.

It’s repetition, stuff, and nonsense, then, while each word alone claims autonomy next to the other. Write, write on, write again. Bart Simpson, who starts each episode of his life copying out phrases onto a blackboard, knows this only too well. Horn follows him — her writing instrument as blunt, her paper blackboards cartoonish — scrawling of her “paralysis” and “hope” many times over. 

Far too many, in fact, for anyone to believe that she believes in either. No word can express how this story ends, however. To ask is to concede that the virus already won.