Gristham is naming each step he takes. This way, entire monuments built in an afterthought won't spring upon history like the original recording of human laughter, which didn't land on the scene until well after these days with their distant concerns, so as to occupy us, though not distract us. Gristham is finding that if one names each step in the way parents name children, one doesn't walk much. He is having to pause every nine or ten paces to come up with another tack, until he thinks of something else, like every name he knows that starts with the letter 'L.' But this is not having the desired effect.
Or rather, the effect is one of moving in two directions at once, both continuing straight down the sidewalk and also twisting into shapes of consequence, a pile of mud thrown onto the ground, then stepped on, then dried and flaked off with care, then caught under a fingernail and hours later tasted with remorse. He had wanted to be like a building that knows it's a building, but also knows it's a misspelling. But it's never solid and concerted, constantly lending itself out until it's lost an address of its own.
In his frustration, Gristham deposits this former idea of naming in the slow generations spawned down the block, and instead slobbers out a noise at each footfall. This is either a radical re-understanding of names or an abandonment of loved ones, which he has learned are slower than his legs. But he soon feels ridiculous, and he realizes that this task was one of deliberation rather than the bottomless squabble he can't seem to shake, that the purpose was to know the space he moves through by situating a series of points, represented by the impression, however small, each foot leaves on time, dubious columns of air never coming to rest, but joining him around a table set with broken bottles to a meal of dried chewing gum.
It was something between these past two attempts, he thinks, that started the wind to blow his dusty paper sack over the river, never quite getting wet until finally, on a sudden downthrust of breeze, it's sunk farther down than wind should be able to push, pulled by a coincident suck in the river, sunk never to rise again. But Gristham's been either too windy or his river too lazy, and the sudden thrusts he's hoping for are like an unhappy child repeating everything he says, but in a child's approximation of an adult voice, oddly deep and shallow at the same time, and the worst kind of insult because of its impact despite the desperation that fostered it and the false face falsely held that it has no impact at all.
Gristham walks slowly, still making noises on each step, but quickly losing out to the knowledge making itself more apparent with each stride that he is failing, that this is what it is to have an idea, but only an idea. He has read that some people live inside one idea their whole lives, but all he wanted was to stroll through one for a few minutes. That it hasn't worked out is deadening, a mallet he can't feel anymore as it bangs his head over and over again, whose presence isn't felt on his scalp, but somewhere above his mouth, and not as a pressure but as a lack of pressure, the excavation of a hole that should never be empty.
And then he begins speaking.