Anton‘s Bark - Twelve

Chapter Ten embroils Otto even further into the unforeseen, during his second day in Vienna. By early evening he is ready to meet Marie again, and take her out on a date. His plan is to rescue the relationship he’d had with her, some twenty years before. He is sure that it is Marie he is about to meet in the lobby of his hotel, because his prophecy had always been that she would be with him in his hotel room by midnight that night. Anton however, would have been able to remind him that prophecies too, are open to misinterpretation. It is in fact, a surprise that awaits the fictitious Otto in the lobby. And yet, it is left to the real Otto to narrate what happens to Anton in the Unseen. But while the writer is trapped in a cave, the fictitious Otto finds himself trapped by a dog. He provides a detailed explanation concerning how all of this could have happened, but despite himself, the real Otto’s descriptions of Anton’s quest to escape from the cave, by chasing after a Frenchman’s shoe, can only have the effect of feeding back into what happens to his fictional self in Chapter Eleven.