"Sergio Chejfec is an admirable writer." —Patti Smith “Could anyone possibly believe that writing doesn’t exist? It would be like denying the existence of rain.� The perfect green notebook forms the basis for Sergio Chejfec’s work, collecting writing, and allowing it to exist in a state of permanent possibility, or, as he says, “The written word is also capable of waiting for the next opportunity to appear and to continue to reveal itself by and for itself.�  This same notebook is also the jumping off point for this essay, which considers the dimensions of the act of writing (legibility, annotation, facsimile, inscription, typewriter versus word processor versus pen) as a way of thinking, as a record of relative degrees of permanence, and as a performance. From Kafka through Borges, Nabokov, Levrero, Walser, the implications of how we write take on meaning as well worth considering as what we write. This is a love letter to the act of writing as practice, bearing down on all the ways it happens (cleaning typewriter keys, the inevitable drying out of the bottle of wite-out, the difference between Word Perfect and Word) to open up all the ways in which “when we express our thought, it changes.� 

When he reads about a mysterious explosion, the narrator's thoughts turn to his disappeared childhood friend, M, who was abducted during a spasm of political violence in Buenos Aires in the early 1970s. He convinces himself that M must have died in this explosion, and he begins to tell the story of their friendship through a series interconnected vignettes.

Opening with the presently shut-in narrator reminiscing about a past relationship with Delia, a young factory worker, "The Dark" employs Chejfec's signature style with an emphasis on the geography and motion of the mind, to recount the time the narrator spent with this multifaceted, yet somewhat absent, woman. "The Dark" is the most captivating example of Chejfec's unique narrative approach.