David Chorlton   A Surrealist’s Disappearance   Electricity has flowed through his veins since a hospital stay. The last time we spoke he described his conversations with the devil, who it turns out is highly literate and therefore dangerous. Now the operator   tells me the number I have called has been changed to a new one and that the new one is disconnected. On his letters the typewritten print is fading fast. Reading them   is like piecing fog together from a thousand fragments, trying to recreate his Carolina accent with California in the spaces between words. We used to write about our meetings   with Kafka in a Viennese café, or the time Rilke came to visit. The price of genius rose faster than he could pay. His book has burned a space   on the library shelf where I found it years ago. My emails to him fly into cyber-silence. Only the devil knows where he has gone   and the devil’s number is unlisted.

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