It’s a beautiful Saturday morning in Brooklyn and I’m sitting on the bench outside Guerrilla Coffee, drinking tea. Across the street a mailbox is on fire.

For the last five minutes I’ve been looking at the clouds. I can never remember the names of clouds, but these are the high, wispy kind, the kind that resemble vapors. Yesterday B stood at my window and said that the clouds (the big fluffy kind) looked like the clouds on the Simpsons. I’ve been sitting here considering B’s remark. It seemed very telling when she said it, but now I don’t think so. Nature is a mirror for our minds, the same as everything else, and B’s mind is immersed in popular culture. It would be silly to expect her to look at the clouds and see buffalos, or whatever people saw in the clouds ten thousand years ago.

Also I was wrong to say that the mailbox is on fire. What’s on fire, rather, are its contents. I know this because smoke is spewing out of the mail slot. Just now a woman came out of the beauty parlor and poured a small jar of water through the slot. This didn’t appear to have any effect, most likely because the act of opening and closing the mail slot fanned the flames inside. Now she’s run back into the beauty parlor, presumably to get more water.

Ah, and now a small crowd has gathered around the smoking mailbox. They’re talking intently and shaking their heads. One man just pointed down 5th Avenue. At the culprit? Did he see who did this? I’m tempted to go over and ask, but I’d rather not give up my seat on the bench, which is comfortable and sunny.

Several times a woman has come out of Guerrilla Coffee to remark on what’s happening across the street. She’s terribly affected and keeps saying that this is a violation of our social contract. It’s true enough but it doesn’t become more true through repetition. I sense she needs an audience for her anguish. She stands in the middle of the sidewalk and looks at the sky (is she addressing the clouds?), saying what a sin this is and how only a psychopath could, etc. Then she retreats into the coffee shop.

Meanwhile, as I sit here drinking my tea, I keeping picturing all the mail at the bottom of that mailbox, all those rent checks and love letters, burning.

People say it’s different when the child is yours. But what if in my case this is untrue? Certainly that must happen. Lisa was convinced I would love having a cellphone, and then I finally got one, in no small part because of Lisa’s conviction, and immediately hated the thing, and hate it still. What if I react like this to my child? Most times I leave my cellphone at home because I don’t want to put up with answering it. You cannot do this with a child. A child cannot be left at home, cannot be set to vibrate, cannot be upgraded to a model with improved reception and a built-in camera.

People say everything changes in a way you can’t imagine, and so I try to imagine what that must be like. But of course I can’t, because you can’t imagine what you can’t imagine. You have to take the thing on faith. You have to trust that when you look into the eyes of your child, everything will change and you will change and nothing will ever be the same. But what if that doesn’t happen? What if you look and all you see are your child’s eyes looking back at you, and nothing changes except that here is your child and here are you and nothing is changing?

Last night K and I came up with a story about a parallel apartment to our own. In the story I’m the one who discovers the parallel apartment, stumbling on it through a hidden panel in our bathroom. The parallel apartment is identical to ours except for one detail: K. She’s there but she’s different. What she is, is perfect, a version of K without any of the things that drive me crazy about her. Notably it was K who thought of the second K.

The way we first conceived it, time spent in one apartment is time absent from the other. So whenever I’m cavorting in the parallel apartment with the perfect K (let us call her K2), I’m absent from the real-world apartment and the life of K1. It’s a form of cheating, particularly since I’m obliged to conceal the truth, not just from K1 but K2. I’m betraying both women at once.

Once I realized this, I changed the story to include two Michaels, one in each apartment. Now whenever I leave one apartment for the other, another Michael remains behind, which means that neither K is ever exactly betrayed.

I wondered what I would do in such a circumstance. Would I try life with K2? Would I switch to K2 permanently? Is K2 who I really want? My answer, in the end, surprised me. I wouldn’t try it, not even once.

In explaining this to K, I said that the operation would kill the patient – or really, it would obliterate the patient, replacing her a stranger. I liked this line of thought, for it made me see K’s faults in a new light: K is not K without them.

Curious, I asked K what she would do in the same circumstance. She didn’t hesitate. “Oh, I’d switch,” she said.

I roared with laughter. We both did.

Later I asked K if she would preserve any of my faults. At first she said no, but then she reconsidered.

“Something small and harmless,” she said. “As a memento.”

According to K’s friend, a Broadway composer, every musical includes a song called Me and What I Tried to Do. When K told me this, I said, “That’s not just true of shows but people.”

This reminds me that someone once said that all songs are love songs. I couldn’t remember if that someone was me, so I looked it up online. It wasn’t me.

One day, when I lose what little memory I have, I will believe I made up everything, only I won’t be able to remember any of it. This may sound like a punishment meted out by a Greek god, something like what they did to Sisyphus or Prometheus, but I actually think I’ll enjoy it. Been there, done that, whatever it was.

A conversation between my friend David and his then three-year-old son Jacob, subsequent to their visit to the aquarium:

– Dada, are you going to die?

– Why are you asking that, Jacob? Did you hear someone talking about dying?

– Well, Dr. Martin Luther King died out.

– Yes, that’s true.

– Are you going to die?

– Well, everyone dies eventually, Jacob. But you don’t have to worry about that. That’s far far in the future.

– When?

– Far far in the future.

– I don’t want you to leave me.

– I’m not going to leave you, Jacob. I’m going to be right here with you.

– Always?

– Well, yeah, always.

– (Really getting upset now) I don’t want you to die, because mama goes to work and then I’ll be all alone.

– Oh, you won’t be alone, Jacob. I’m right here with you.

– If you die, will I get another dada who talks just like you, and does things just like you?

– Jacob, you don’t have to worry about that. How about this. I promise not to die until I’m 100.

– When will you be 100?

– You just don’t have to worry, Jacob. I’ll be with you the whole time you’re a kid, and when you are an adult, too. Grandpa Joel was my dada the whole time when I was a kid, and he’s still my dada now that I’m an adult.

– Is Grandpa Joel going to die?

– Everyone dies, Jacob, but he’s not going to die for a long time.

– If he dies, I want a new Grandpa Joel.

– Sweetheart, don’t worry about it.

– Am I going to die?

– Jacob, people die when they are really really really old.

– I don’t want to die, because then I’ll have to go to a big field, and you’ll have to come back and get me and be my dada again.

– Oh, sweetheart, you’re not going to die.

– How can we not die?

– We just have to love life and stay healthy.

– If we stay healthy we’re not going to die?

– Right.

– We haven’t eaten an apple in a long time.

– Would you like me to go downstairs and get an apple? We can eat an apple now.

– No, let’s eat it after school tomorrow.

– That’s a real good idea.

– I don’t want anyone to die out. I just want Dr. Martin Luther King to die out and no one else.

– That sounds good, honey.

– Let’s watch the video now.

– Okay.

– And I want a snack.

– What do you want? Booty?

– Booty, bread sticks, and prentzels. And crackers. Just one kind of cracker.

– Okay, honey.

K and I have fallen under the spell of the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator. She’s an ENFP; I’m an INTJ. According to the literature, our types are ideal romantic partners – it has something to do with how my dominant function compliments her dominant function. (That sounds kind of hot, no?)

I’ve learned some interesting things about INTJs. We’re the rarest of the sixteen types (less than 1% of the population), the most self-confident and independent, the least likely to believe in a higher power, and the least likely to deal with stress by watching TV. Collectively we have the highest GPA. We’re known as the “free-thinkers” or “masterminds.”

Sadly we’re also a bunch of assholes. Consider the following passages lifted from the literature (I’ve simply replaced every instance of INTJ with ASSHOLE):

Fellow workers of ASSHOLES often feel as if the ASSHOLE can see right through them, and often believe that the ASSHOLE finds them wanting. This tendency of people to feel transparent in the presence of the ASSHOLE often result in relationships which have psychological distance.

By nature, ASSHOLES are independent individualists. They see their visions so clearly that they are often surprised when others do not see things the same way. ASSHOLES are strong at critiquing and as a result tend to notice the negatives. To them, a job well done should be reward enough in itself.

ASSHOLES can be unsparing of both themselves and others. Anyone considered to be “slacking,” including superiors, will lose their respect – and will generally be made aware of this.

ASSHOLES apply (often ruthlessly) the criterion “Does it work?” to everything from their own research efforts to the prevailing social norms. This in turn produces an unusual independence of mind, freeing the ASSHOLE from the constraints of authority, convention, or sentiment for its own sake. … ASSHOLES many find it useful to learn to simulate some degree of surface conformism in order to mask their inherent unconventionality.

Other people may have a difficult time understanding an ASSHOLE. They may see them as aloof and reserved. Indeed, the ASSHOLE is not overly demonstrative of their affections, and is likely to not give as much praise or positive support as others may need or desire.

ASSHOLES live in a world of their own conception. They simply ignore rules, concepts, and directives that do not suit them.

In social situations, ASSHOLES may neglect to observe small rituals designed to put others at their ease. ASSHOLES tend to have little patience and less understanding of such things as small talk and flirtation (which most types consider half the fun of a relationship).

Most people do not understand ASSHOLES and try to keep away from them.

To be fair to my type, I tried to balance these passages with others that describe how collectively appealing we are. My idea was to replace all instances of INTJ with SUPER-SEXY BRAINIAC. It failed.

There was once a gumdrop who worked as a sales rep in the candy industry. His favorite thing to say was, “Oh, sure, anything for you.” Whenever someone asked him to do something he’d say, “Oh, sure, anything for you.” Another thing he liked to say was, “Ask me if I care.” He would say this in response to nearly anything anyone said to him, even compliments or offers of assistance.

The reason he worked in the candy industry instead of simply being a piece of candy was because he didn’t have any sugar granules along one side of his body. He was bald there. What happened was, a little piece of something got into the machine while he was being manufactured. This little piece of something blocked the sugar granules from sticking to him along that side. For this reason he was removed from the conveyer belt and kept separate from the other gumdrops.

He never discussed this with anyone. Whenever someone asked him about it, he’d say, “Ask me if I care.”

As a sales rep he was required to fly to lots of candy industry conferences around the country. He hated everything about flying, but most of all he hated the giant seats he had to sit in, which were about a hundred times too big.

Whenever an airline host or hostess asked if he was okay, he’d say something like, “You wish,” or, “As if,” or sometimes, “Tell me you’re kidding.”

He spent most of his time at candy conferences looking for other candy to have sex with. Despite his disagreeable personality, he was remarkably successful, although such liaisons rarely lasted beyond a single night. Often he would wake in the morning, badly hung-over, with no clue what he had done with the jelly ring or set of wax lips asleep beside him.

Sometimes when he was having sex he would remember what it was like to be separated from the other gumdrops. While it was happening he didn’t realize what it was. The way he experienced it, something lifted him from above and suddenly he was flying through the air. He had never flown before and couldn’t believe how wonderful it felt. It was as though he could taste the air with his whole body.

Another thing he liked to say was, “Yeah, and I’m the pope.” He would say this whenever other sales reps introduced themselves to him at conferences.

“Hi, I’m so-and-so,” they’d say.

“Yeah and I’m the pope,” he’d reply. “Let’s have sex.”

It amazed him how often this worked.

The ghost of my father keeps leaving me post-its. He sticks them in my bathroom. I know they’re his because of the handwriting. I wouldn’t have known I knew my father’s handwriting but I recognized it immediately.

Each post-it includes a quote from Werner Erhard, the founder of est. It’s not clear if my father knows that I know where he’s getting these quotes from. Are ghosts capable of knowing such things? Can they read our minds?

The first post-it appeared last week. My father placed it in the middle of the bathroom mirror where I couldn’t miss seeing it. It read: You don’t have to go looking for love when it’s where you come from. Let me tell you, it was weird seeing these words in my father’s handwriting. I checked to see if the door to my apartment was locked. It was. I’m not sure why I did this because, like I say, I recognized my father’s handwriting. He has a characteristic way of writing his lowercase y’s. I think he must write them backwards, beginning with the descending stroke on the right.

The quote seemed familiar, so I looked it up online. Werner Erhard. Then I checked to see if the post-it matched the post-its I keep in my desk drawer. It did, though that didn’t actually prove anything since I use standard, yellow, two-by-two-inch post-its. There must be billions of these in the world. Also what difference does it make if my father used my post-it or one of his own?

The second post-it appeared the next day. It wasn’t on the mirror this time but along the left-edge of the bathroom cabinet. It read: Create your future from your future not your past. I recognized this as Werner Erhard without having to look it up. My father used to say it to me all the time. I always took it to mean I should forget all the shit he pulled when I was a kid.

This got me thinking about that shit, which I don’t like to do, and pretty soon I was so pissed off that I went to my desk and wrote a post-it of my own: Create your lies from your lies not from mine. I wasn’t really sure what this meant but I liked it anyway, so I stuck it on the cabinet in the same spot where I’d found his.

The next day he left me another post-it, this time on the faucet. It read: Happiness is a function of accepting what is.

My own post-it was still where I left it. Had he read it? Knowing him he probably saw it there and ignored it. On the other hand I’m not even sure ghosts can read. I tried to look this up online. Of course I realize that people write all kinds of crap online, but I was curious if anyone had written an account of ghosts reading. No one had, at least that I could find. Not that this proves anything.

I suppose the real question is whether ghosts can change. I know they change in The Sixth Sense. That’s the whole idea of the film – all the ghosts, including Bruce Willis, are in the process of accepting their deaths, although they don’t realize this. There’s proof everywhere that they’re dead but they can’t see it.

Is my father in the process of accepting his death? It doesn’t seem so. Instead it seems like he’s lecturing me, same as always. Every day there’s a new post-it. The one this morning went: In life, understanding is the booby prize. That’s Werner Erhard as well. They’re all Werner Erhard.

I stopped writing my own post-its after the one about lies. For one thing, I don’t know if my father can read them, and for another, I doubt he would even if he could. Also, what’s the point? That’s the clincher. Even if my father can read them and even if he is reading them, there’s no point.

A few days ago, though, he left a post-it that really pissed me off, coming from him. It said: Your life works to the degree you keep your agreements. The moment I read this, I rushed to my desk and scribbled two words on a fresh post-it in big block letters: DROP DEAD.

Then I remembered. He is dead. He’s dead and doesn’t know it. This made me laugh. Not because he’s dead but because I’d forgotten. I’m just like my father: neither of us can see how dead he is.

He doesn’t know. This is what Nancy answered to her own question…. He couldn’t see what she had done.

– TC Gardstein, Circuit

Oh, my little bird
I am blind as you are blind

– Jodie McCann, Elegy for My Little Bird

A WEEK AGO SUNDAY, Independence Day, at about two o’clock in the afternoon, I checked my email on my girlfriend Teresa Gardstein’s computer. When I finished checking, I closed the browser and then went to close AOL, when I noticed something odd, something that made me stop what I was doing.

Teresa had left her AOL In Box open, and near the top of the list of emails, I saw what struck me as a strange and disturbing subject line.

thinking of you…

Who besides me would write such a subject line to her?

I glanced at the “From” field. The address there began jmk@.

J, I thought. Who does Teresa know whose first name begins with J? No one but her cousin in Kentucky; however her cousin’s last name begins with G, not K, and anyway her cousin wouldn’t write such a subject line.

I scanned down the list of emails. Teresa’s In Box was peppered with emails from jmk, all of which had suggestive or semi-suggestive subject lines. For better or worse, I’ve forgotten all of these subject lines. The only one I remember is the first. Still, the others must have been similar enough to convince me to do what I did next, which was to click on thinking of you…

I had never done such a thing before, not to Teresa nor anyone. It’s not the sort of thing I do. In this case, though, I didn’t hesitate.

Teresa was in the kitchen. I was in the living room, at her desk. You can see her desk from the kitchen, although it’s at least fifty feet away, at the other end of the apartment. Teresa computer, a laptop, faces sideways in relation to the kitchen, which means you can’t really see the computer’s display from the kitchen, or at least not much of it.

jmk’s email was brief and to the point. It read, in its entirety: …as I listen to Hooverphonic.

That may seem benign enough. One can imagine such an email being written by an old friend upon stumbling on a CD you both loved in college.

thinking of you…
…as I listen to Hooverphonic.

However, the message was not benign. Not even close. Hooverphonic has a special meaning for Teresa, one that is far from benign. Hooverphonic is sex music. Teresa likes to play it when she fucks.

I started seeing with Teresa eight months ago. We met through the personals on nerve.com. Her headline read, Give me liberty or give me chocolate. In her photo she sat grinning before a luscious-looking chocolate dessert.

On our first date we ended up making out for two hours on the stoop of her former apartment in the East Village. She lost track of time and missed the last train back to Long Island where she was temporarily living with her parents. I suspected – or perhaps hoped – that she had missed the train deliberately, as a way to get me to invite her home.

I invited her home.

Since the only place to sleep in my studio apartment is my bed, I pledged to Teresa to not take advantage of the situation. In the end I honored that pledge despite the best efforts of Teresa, who had made no such vow. It was the only time I refused her.

In the morning she did something I’ll never forget. She said she wanted to try it with me, meaning try a committed relationship, and that she didn’t want to pretend otherwise or play any games. She cried as she said this.

Later, during more difficult times, she would sometimes regret her candor that morning. “I shouldn’t have let you know so soon,” she would say. Each time she said this I winced. She won my heart by being honest and vulnerable. It was the sweetest, sexiest thing I could have imagined. I said yes and never regretted it.

I read three or four of jmk’s emails.

His name is James or Jim. Both, I suppose.

In an astonishing feat of self-protection, I have forgotten what James or Jim wrote to Teresa. All I know is that the evidence was damning but not conclusive. There remained a chance, however small, that James or Jim was merely coming on to Teresa, merely trying to woo her.

Actually there’s one thing I do remember. In one of James or Jim’s emails, he said that Teresa was going to love what he planned to do to her next time. James or Jim did not say what he planned to do, but even if he had, it would not have proven that Teresa wanted him to do it, or worse, that she had permitted him to do such things in the recent past. This is despite James or Jim’s use of the words next time.

James or Jim had written at least a half dozen more emails, but I stopped after three or four. I’m not sure why I did this. The way I remember it, I was afraid of being caught. However it’s possible that I’m remembering wrongly, or more likely that I’m remembering rightly only this wasn’t the real reason I stopped.

When I closed the third or fourth email, I saw that there were checks next to the emails I had just read and that these emails were the only ones with checks.

I know a lot about email programs, but in this moment I panicked, imagining that the checks were permanent and that Teresa would see them and realize I had read her emails. I scanned the screen for a solution, but there was none to be found. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept looking. And then, mercifully, I saw it – the “Mark As Unread” button. I clicked this once for each email I had read, closed Teresa’s In Box, closed AOL, flipped down the computer screen, and sat there trying to think.

After some time, perhaps as much as five minutes, I got up and walked to the kitchen.

I’m a good actor. Acting is a kind of storytelling, and I have a gift for stories. The role I played this day, one of my most challenging, was The Man Who Doesn’t Know Anything.

In the kitchen Teresa was making tuna fish sandwiches. She wasn’t the same Teresa she’d been just a short time before. She will never be that Teresa again. It was my job to act as though I didn’t see this.

We had plans to spend the afternoon in Fort Greene Park, so I asked Teresa when she thought she’d be ready, and she said soon.

I had a plan in mind, of a sort. It was to talk with her in the park, after we ate our sandwiches. I would start by asking her about our relationship, about how she felt it was going. I wouldn’t mention the emails.

This was my entire plan. Looking back I don’t know what the point of it was. Mainly I think I was in shock.

The last time Teresa and I had discussed our relationship was six weeks prior, in late May, the night before she was to leave for a week-long Caribbean vacation. We were walking along Henry Street on our way to the promenade, and had just crossed Atlantic. I don’t remember what she said to set me off, but whatever it was, her words were more than I could bear. Turning to her I shouted, “Enough! I’ve had enough! You have no fucking idea how selfish you are!”

I tried to leave, to walk away (something I’d never done before), but Teresa grabbed my arm and pleaded with me not to go. I’d never seen a look like that on her face. She was terrified of losing me.

We talked for hours that night, wandering the streets of Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill. I told her two very hard things, things I had previously confided to just a few close friends. In a sense these two things are the same. In a sense I’ve only ever had one thing to say to her, and I’m still saying it. I said that I felt she didn’t care about me, or that if she did, she had no idea how to express it. I said that nearly all our time was focused on what she was thinking or feeling or on doing what she wanted to do.

There’s a price you pay for saying such things, just as there’s a price for feeling them. I don’t think I fully realized either price at the time. Actually I know I didn’t.

Her cab to the airport was due at five in the morning. We stayed up that night, talking quietly. At one point Teresa apologized for how she had treated me, but soon her apology devolved into a series of excuses. It was, I knew, the best she could offer, and it was in this spirit that I heard it and accepted it.

When we had sex I kept thinking that everything felt like tears. Afterwards she wanted to know why I loved her, the reasons. I listed everything I could think of, but what I wanted to say is that I loved her because I loved her, not because of any reasons. The reasons hardly mattered.

Fort Greene Park is about a mile from Teresa’s apartment. We zigzagged through Boerum Hill, turning at every corner. Teresa gabbing the entire way. Fortunately for me, she didn’t require more than an occasional acknowledgement that I was following what she was saying. Not I was actually following it. I couldn’t. I was also having difficulty speaking. I mean in the physical sense: I couldn’t get my mouth to work right. For this reason I limited my comments to just a word or two at a time.

I see.

Yes.

Really?

As we walked a strange thing began to happen. I began to forget about the emails.

When I think back I remember having difficulty speaking as we passed a playground on Pacific. Then, in my next memory, I’m in a bodega by Fort Greene Park and I’m suggesting that Teresa buy a coke in a plastic bottle rather than a can because the bottle, which has a twist-off lid, will last longer. Looking back it doesn’t appear that the man in the bodega knows about the emails.

We laid out our towels on the far side of the main hill. It was a splendid day. Fourth of July in the park. Bright sun, cool breeze.

I ate my sandwich and waited for Teresa to finish hers. When she did, I discovered again that I couldn’t speak. It wasn’t a physical problem this time; it was fear. I’m not exactly sure what I was afraid of. Was it of losing her? If that’s what it was, it was an odd fear because deep down I had to know she was already gone.

When I finally found the courage to say what I planned to say, Teresa thanked me for bringing up the subject and confessed to having trouble taking the initiative. We talked for three hours. It was the best conversation we ever had about our relationship. I understand now why this was, but at the time I found it disorienting. I kept waiting for her to be unreasonable or defensive, but she wasn’t. She said – and I think I’ll always remember this – that she felt she couldn’t commune with me. Here she meant commune in contrast to communicate, which struck me as a beautiful and sadly accurate distinction. I said I felt the same way and wondered aloud why we couldn’t commune. The answer, we decided, had to do with trust, or the lack thereof. I asked if there was a way to build trust, and she said she didn’t know. Then she told me a secret.

“I feel totally isolated and alone,” she said, crying. “I feel alone by myself and I feel alone with you.”

Moved, I thanked her for telling me this. “It gives me hope,” I said.

“Ah, but there’s so much more you don’t know.”

This may be hard to believe, but when she said this I had no idea what she could have meant. It was as though I had slipped into another world, a world with no James or Jim, a world with no emails about anyone’s plans for next time, a world with no references to Hooverphonic. I believe I spent much of the afternoon in this other world. However there were a few moments when I would slip back to the world of knowing. One such moment occurred near the beginning of the conversation. I brought up the subject of sex, saying that she didn’t seem as interested lately. I did not say, because it did not need to be said, that her relative disinterest was unprecedented. From the start, sex was at the core of our connection. It was the one place, to use her language, we could always commune. I said – and when I said this, I knew perfectly well what I was saying – that I had begun to wonder if there was someone else.

“There’s no one else,” she said.

She said this softly, and I watched her face as she said it. I didn’t see anything there.

Sometime in January I celebrated a friend’s birthday at a restaurant in Teresa’s neighborhood. After dinner I decided to walk to Teresa’s apartment and surprise her. It was a spontaneous thing. Previously we had only seen each other at arranged times. I considered calling first – I wasn’t sure if she’d be home – but then thought it would be more romantic if I took a chance and showed up at her door.

As I walked down Smith Street a terrible vision came to me, a kind of negative fantasy. I would open her door and hear the sound of her having sex with another man. Only I wouldn’t know what the sound was at first, so I would go inside to investigate.

There’s a scene like this in Kieslowski’s Decalogue. I remember being horrified by it. A man follows his wife to the apartment of another man, where he climbs onto the man’s ledge to look inside. We see him inching toward the bedroom window, all the while clutching some part of the wall to keep from falling to his death. When the camera finally pans into the room, we see his wife in ecstasy, gleefully fucking the other man.

In my vision I didn’t actually witness Teresa fuck anyone. The scene ended, mercifully, as I reached Teresa’s living room and realized what those sounds were. Still, despite being spared the worst of it, I felt sick and bewildered. I’ve never been the jealous type, I’ve never been the kind of man who tortures himself with visions of his lover cheating on him. On this night though something possessed me. I stopped a block from Teresa’s apartment and called her on my cellphone. She sounded normal – not at all like she’d just been having sex with another man. I said I was in the neighborhood and asked if I could come by, and she happily agreed. Of course the reason I called was to her give her time to get the other man out of her apartment. I knew I was being ridiculous, I knew there was no other man, but I couldn’t bear the thought of experiencing my nightmare in real life.

Later I told Teresa what had happened. She was touched. It was as though I’d given her a bouquet of roses.

“I didn’t think you got jealous,” she said.

“I don’t,” I said. “Or at least I didn’t use to.”

Although such visions never returned, there were other things.

Teresa writes stories, most of which involve sex – often casual sex or sex with multiple partners. These stories aren’t pornography; they’re serious works of fiction. It’s just that sex is usually central.

Many of the stories are based on Teresa’s own experiences. She’s always been open about this and I’ve always been supportive of her writing. After all I write stories as well – somewhat explicit stories, at times – and these too are often based on my own experiences.

Still, whenever Teresa read one of her stories to me, I would find myself becoming increasingly upset and even distraught. I tried to hide this from her, feeling that it was wrong – and not just wrong but embarrassing. But no matter how I tried I couldn’t control it. As Teresa read, my breathing would become shallow and I’d begin to feel as though my face were burning.

It didn’t occur to me until today that the many of these stories, including Teresa’s first novel, feature a protagonist, invariably an attractive and intelligent young woman, who is cheating on her boyfriend.

Leaving Fort Greene Park, Teresa and I walked south on DeKalb. At Flatbush we came to Junior’s, a landmark Brooklyn restaurant famous for its cheesecake. Since Teresa had never been there I suggested we give it a try.

Nothing of note happened during dinner. We had a nice time. I believe I spent the entire meal in the world of not knowing.

When we stepped outside again, it was dark. Our plan was to watch the fireworks from Teresa’s rooftop. We heard them begin as we hurried back.

Teresa’s roof is connected to a series of roofs that run the length of her block. We moved to the corner roof to get the best view, and there Teresa lit up a joint.

It had been my idea to watch the fireworks from Teresa’s roof. Teresa hadn’t known she had access, nor that the fireworks could be seen from this distance. Now, standing close to her, I could feel her happiness.

The pot was strong. As it took effect I felt the need to sit, so we moved to the front ledge of the roof. The ledge was about a foot high. We sat side by side with my arm wrapped around her.

Sitting there made me uneasy. Three rooftops over, a small group of people were watching the fireworks. What if one of them, for god knows what reason, decided to run over and give us a push? Or what if we simply lost our balance in reaction to the fireworks? We would fall to our deaths. I wondered what that would be like, to fall together. Would I keep my arm wrapped around her?

I said nothing of this to Teresa. Instead I asked if we could stand again, which we did.

The fireworks, doubtless augmented by the pot, were stunning. I found myself sighing in the way I sigh during sex with Teresa. And it was like sex, in a sense, each burst a small explosion of flowering pleasure. Teresa began to respond with her sighs of her own. And then it truly was like sex, with each of us finding deeper pleasure in the pleasure of the other.

When the fireworks were over, we started to kiss, and soon Teresa indicated the desire to fuck on the roof.

We’d never done anything like that before – nor even strayed from having sex in bed – but the way I looked at it was, if your incredibly sexy girlfriend wants to fuck on the roof, you fuck on the roof, no questions asked. Naturally we might be seen up there – people were standing on rooftops all over Teresa’s neighborhood – but that was part of the point. In fact while we were looking for an appropriate spot, Teresa said she hoped that others would see us and get ideas.

“I want to start a chain reaction of fucking that will spread over the entire planet,” she said.

Unfortunately there was nowhere even remotely comfortable to do it. In the end I sat on the pebbly rooftop surface with my back against a chimney and my shorts down just far enough to expose my cock. Perhaps because Teresa was stoned, she didn’t bother to remove her panties but only lowered them to her ankles. This made it difficult for her to straddle me. We gave up after a friendly but fruitless struggle. I’m not sure if I ever made it inside her.

Leaving the roof, we took the fire escape down and climbed through her kitchen window. I don’t know what Teresa did next, but I went into the living room to look for a CD to play.

I felt good. I knew that Teresa was happy and that we were going to have sex and that it would feel as intense as always and bring us closer.

Teresa’s CDs are in a tall stand arranged alphabetically. I started at the top, at the A’s, and made my way down. Because Teresa has so many Beatles CDs, I was almost a third of the way from the bottom when I finally reached Hooverphonic.

I believe I passed from one world to the other at that moment. Or perhaps I straddled the border, one foot on each side.

When Teresa walked into the living room, I held up the CD for her see.

“Is it okay if I play this?”

As I said these words, I looked directly into her face, watching.

She flinched. It was a small flinch but I caught it.

“Sure,” she said.

I put on the CD and went over to the couch. After one song Teresa asked if she could play something different.

At this point I must have drifted back to the other world, because the next thing I remember is being in bed with her and having sex. Near the end, as she was about to come, she asked me to come with her. As I did, just before it happened, I felt the compulsion to thank her. Naturally I resisted doing this, for she would have found it bizarre and possibly disturbing, but afterwards I told her about it.

“I’m glad you didn’t say anything,” she said, chuckling.

“But I felt it,” I said. “I wanted you to know.”

A bit later she mentioned being thirsty so I suggested the lemonade in the refrigerator. Earlier this day she had showed me a special type of lemonade she had bought. She picked it because of the bottle, which was tall and sleek and had the kind of complicated metal lid contraption used on old-fashioned milk bottles.

We stood naked at her kitchen counter and tried, both at once, to remove the lid. It wouldn’t budge. Finally I asked her to let me do it alone, and after much confused fiddling I realized where to push. The lid slid off with a resounding champagne-like bang. We drank a glass each, then a second. Granted I was stoned, but it was also really good lemonade. Between gulps I came up with a sexy tagline for it: The after-fuck refresh-me-up. Teresa loved this, and we took turns saying it like actors on television commercials.

When we returned to bed I told her that I wanted to write about what had happened with the lemonade, and I asked her to help me remember the tagline. She said she would. This is the last thing I remember her saying. Then I fell asleep.

I woke the next morning at eight-twenty. I know the exact time because I got up and walked around the bed to get my glasses which were resting on Teresa’s nightstand. After putting them on I glanced at the clock.

We had gone to sleep at about one. Most likely Teresa, a late sleeper, would remain in bed until at least ten. I had hoped to sleep late myself but for some reason woke early.

I stood gazing at Teresa. The sheet, wrapped around her and tucked under her body, made her look like a woman-sized candy in a blue wrapper. I studied her face. It was puffy with sleep but no less dear for that.

I walked to the living room, sat at Teresa’s computer, clicked on the Start menu, opened the control panel, and turned off the computer’s sound. The reason for the latter should be clear: I didn’t want the sound of the modem to wake Teresa.

Then I started AOL and opened Teresa’s In Box.

What’s interesting to me now is that I didn’t consciously plan any of this. I didn’t even think to do it until I woke. However the moment I woke I knew exactly what to do and went about it in calculated fashion.

I had one rule and that rule had a name: court of law. I would read Teresa’s emails to the point at which I found evidence sufficient to convict her in a court of law, were transgressions such as these considered criminal.

I started at the top of the list, at the emails I had read the previous afternoon, and worked my way down. There were several moments when I stopped to asked myself if this or that thing was sufficient, and each time I made myself continue. Court of law, I kept saying in my head. Court of law.

It turns out that Teresa was betraying me with more than one man. I don’t know the exact number; I just know that at a certain point I switched from reading James or Jim’s emails to reading Greg’s. I picked Greg because he had sent a lot of emails. Greg was also the one who gave me my evidence and for this I am grateful to him. Lord knows how many more emails I would have had to read if Greg hadn’t come through.

The clinching email was about plans. Here Greg sent Teresa a short list of nights he was available to see her. This wouldn’t have convinced anyone of anything, but at the bottom of Greg’s email I found what I had come for. It was the email that Teresa had sent to Greg, the one in which she had asked when he could see her, the one to which Greg had replied with a list of available nights.

Teresa has a characteristic way of signing her emails. This is what I noticed first. She had taken her name and appended something playful to it, so that it read something like Teresychedelic. Only it didn’t read Teresychedelic, because that’s one of the names she used with me. The one she used with Greg I don’t remember anymore – not that it matters. What matters is that it was proof, if proof indeed was needed, that Teresa had written the words above the signature.

Among those words, near the bottom of the email, just before her signature, Teresa wrote this: “I can’t wait to have your cock inside me again.”

Or maybe she wrote, “I still remember having your cock inside me.”

Or maybe she wrote something similar but different. The only thing I know for certain – and this, sadly, I would swear to on my life – is that she definitely wrote the phrase “your cock inside me.” You don’t read a phrase like that, in a context like that, and ever forget it.

I closed the email, closed Teresa’s In Box, closed AOL, and closed the computer. Unfortunately these things were far more difficult to do than usual given how much my hands were shaking.

As I had done the previous afternoon, I sat at Teresa’s desk and tried to decide what to do. It was a surprisingly easy this time, considering.

Question: Do I break up with her?
Answer: Yes. What she’s done is unforgivable.

Question: Do I wake her to tell her?
Answer: No, that could get ugly.

Moving quietly I crossed the room and got my clothes which were draped over the arm of her couch. To reduce the chance of being heard as I dressed, I carried my clothes to the kitchen. Once dressed I grabbed Teresa’s collection of handbags – she has three – and brought them into the hall outside her apartment. There I searched each bag for her keys, without success. I carried the bags back into the kitchen, and as I walked in I noticed her keys in a little dish by the front door. My keys, the ones to my apartment, the ones I had given her only two weeks after meeting her, were on a separate key ring that looped through Teresa’s larger key ring. I removed my keys and placed them in my bag. Then I slipped out of the apartment and walked with my bag to the ground floor of Teresa’s building. There I took out a notepad and pen and sat down on the stairs.

I’m a careful writer. I try hard to say what I mean. However saying what you mean means knowing what you mean, and knowing what you mean takes time, and in this case I didn’t have much time.

As corny as this sounds, I found myself thinking of the letter as a kind of spiritual test. The words I would write would be inscribed on the gravestone of our relationship. Could I find it my heart to remember her heart and to leaven the letter with kindness?

The words came slowly. When I finished a draft, I read it through from the beginning, made a few edits, and re-wrote the letter on a clean sheet. Then I walked up the stairs to Teresa’s door where I stopped for a moment and listened for sounds from inside. There were none.

I took a breath, laid my set of Teresa’s keys on her mat, and slipped the letter face-up under her door.

I arrived home at nine-fifteen. Teresa called an hour later. I didn’t answer. Instead I dialed my voicemail and deleted the message she had left. I didn’t listen to it.

Five days later I received a letter from her. This I returned unopened. I also signed up with a spam filtering service, in part so I could put Teresa’s email address on my “bad sender” list.

These were extreme measures, and there was, I confess, an element of revenge to them.

That’s the ugly side of things. The other side, also ugly in its way, is about fear. I’m afraid that if I allow her to speak, she will begin by apologizing but then manage to whittle down her apology, bit by bit, until nothing remains. I have good reason to fear this, knowing Teresa as I do, and I will not allow it.

Over the past six days as I wrote this account I thought a lot about forgiveness and healing. I’ve come to believe that healing is a kind of forgetting. We never really heal; we just move further from the moment we were hurt. Still I imagine that I will forgive Teresa in time. However I will never allow her to hurt me again; I will never give her the opportunity to make excuses for what she did.

Assuming I remember what she did.

Here is what is inscribed on the gravestone:

Teresa,

Our relationship is over and I will never see you again. You have lied to me and betrayed me in a way that is not forgivable.

As I write these words you are asleep in your bed. I looked at you one last time before leaving the room. I wanted to kiss you but was afraid that you would wake.

I would like to leave you, and to remember you, with kindness. I care for you and I want you to find happiness.

I ask that you not contact me. I do not mean this harshly but you should know that I will ignore any message you try to send.

Do you remember the words that came to me last night just as I was about to come? I say those words again, Teresa. Thank you for all you gave me.

Love,
Michael

p.s. I have taken my apartment keys. Yours are outside your door.

He says he can’t heal because he can’t feel time. By time he means the difference between himself in the past and this moment. It’s this difference he can’t feel. Time is the difference between moments.

The interesting part was coming home in a state of shock and noticing what that was like, how mixed up my thoughts were. To figure out what to do, I had to ask myself what a person in my situation should do.

Not me, a person.

This morning I played a game I often play. I thought, “You can have any woman in the world you want, but you have to decide in the next sixty seconds and the decision is permanent.” As always I ended up with a choice between two ex’s.

Who would you choose?

I’d have to pick one of my many perfect childhood babysitters. Or maybe I’d just choke. How the hell do you run through the gamut of all possible women, and commit to one, all in 60 seconds? The answer is Diane Lane. Of course if I were serious about it, I’d probably pick an ex-girlfriend too, because you gotta go with what you know. Maybe I’d pick Atlanta Danna. I don’t know. Has it been 60 seconds yet?

Recently I considered Jessica Lange. I like Jessica Lange. But how old is she now? 55? Also, not knowing Jessica Lange, it would be a crap shoot.

Plus there’s the problem of what would happen if this actually happened. Isn’t Jessica Lange living with Sam Shepard and don’t they have kids? What happens to Sam and the kids?

Jessica Lange with a time machine.

Diane Lane without the time machine.

Ah, I didn’t think of a time machine. Should be allowable. Still I don’t think I’d choose a woman I’ve never slept with. What if things don’t fit? That can be sad.

Also I don’t know who Diane Lane is.

My final choice is J in the fall of 1994, right before I broke up with her the last time. I would have picked an earlier J, circa 1988, but that one still had her lesbian phase to go through.

Please google Diane Lane right now. Good god, man. No wonder you have so much trouble playing this game.

Also, if you’re going to include readiness of the love object, the game falls apart. The whole thing involves stealing women from the present dimension and carrying them off to one in which they reside with us. If this were possible in this dimension (mutual desire, “readiness,” etc.), the game would be unnecessary.

Actually, I think the fantasy element of the game – why it begs to be played – consists of escaping the real world difficulty of commitment. If only one could be forced to stick with one’s choice of mate, rather than having to reaffirm it periodically over a lifetime, through re-observing (if not re-inventing) who they are. It’s not who you pick that’s important (which is obvious from the fact that we reset and play over and over again), but the ironic joy of making irrevocable decisions over and over again….

Songs I love I devour. I listen to them until there’s nothing left to hear, just a pile of greasy little song bones.

M emailed me last night, the first contact between us in seven months. I worked on my reply for five hours, finally sending it at four in the morning.

When I started writing I was kind. I told her that before reading her email I peed and that while peeing I repeated a little mantra to myself: “Generosity of spirit. Generosity of spirit. Generosity of spirit.”

All that got deleted.

In an early version I wrote:

Of all the things I could tell you, the thing that seems to matter most is this: I’m sorry about what’s gone down. The scene of our relationship now resembles the site of a car accident months after the cars have been towed, a few random skid marks the only evidence that something terrible happened there.

In the version I ended up sending, I deleted the first sentence, which obviously changes the meaning.

I’m not sure what happened between eleven o’clock and four in the morning. Or I do know one thing: I read her website for the first time in seven months. The thing that struck me was a piece she wrote soon after our breakup. It was about her childhood relationship with her father. As she was talking about her father, I got confused because it seemed like she was talking about me. I felt certain I must have missed a reference to my name, so I read back. There was no reference. After re-reading the passage about her father, I again felt certain that she must have switched to talking about me and had merely forgotten to say my name. However in the next paragraph she does say my name and it’s clear that she’s now comparing me to the person in the previous paragraph who really is her father.

This made me angry. I’d rather not go into why; it’s a long story, none of which matters now. What matters instead (or so I thought while peeing) is to find some way to say it’s okay, even if I would only be saying it. Generosity of spirit.

We had our own private language. One of the new pieces on her site was addressed to me in that language. It was a kind of goodbye. I cried when I read it. She always could write things that made me cry. Immediately after reading it, I wrote a response in the same language, never intending to send it. I wish now I had. This is how it ends:

But what does it all mean now? Not much. I say this not to be mean but to say it. All gone like a dream. For that’s what it feels like, like a dream I had or we both had once. Can you think of when we would try, each in our own bed, to dream in the same shade or hue of blue or red? Not once did that work. Nor could I feel it when you would kiss me in my mind how you said you planned to – on my throat, my eyes, in front of my ears, and at last my lips. Still it’s true, I want to find a way to say that we do what we can, though it is nuts, all of it, nuts and cracked, and that still the sun comes up and goes down like that ride in the park, the one that goes round and round for what seems like no time when the time has all passed and you step from the ride and are gone.

Last night I attended a friend’s birthday dinner in Central Park, at Sheep Meadow Cafe. I think I drank too much. At one point, head spinning, I went off in search of fireflies. I found a few in a dark field. Watching them I realized for the first time that they don’t flicker on and off but dive, again and again, into something dark. We see them as they surface and turn and dive back down again.

I used to claim I didn’t regret things. Maybe that was true when I said it, I don’t know; I just know I regret plenty of things today.

For example I regret breaking up with J. I mean the fourth time. I don’t regret the first, since I really had no choice that time. The second and third times were her doing, so I can hardly regret those. Although it’s true that I drove her to it the third time, so if I wanted to regret that I could.

Similarly I could regret getting together the second time. Also the third. I could even regret getting together the fourth time, but what’s the point? It’s all too easy to say you should have known better given what happened.

Still, I should have known better. I mean about the fourth time. She called and said she wanted to get back together and do it right this time. She even said she loved me. It was only the second time she ever said that. The first time was during our third relationship, and that time she didn’t actually say she loved me but that she had told her therapist she did. In response I said that her therapist knew better than to believe her. I regret that now. It was mean. All the mean things I ever said to her I regret.

Not that she ever actually loved me. In fact that was why I broke up with her the first time. It’s also why she broke up with me the second. The third time was different: that time we broke up because I didn’t love her.

Actually the third time may not count as a time at all, because all it was, was sex. Once a week we would have dinner, talk about our weeks, and fuck. To distinguish this from “going out” or “having a relationship” or “being together,” we would say we had “an arrangement” – an arrangement she ended because it prevented her from going out with or having a relationship with or being together with anyone else.

She told me this over the phone. She also said that my comment about her therapist had hurt her.

The second time she said she loved me was when she called and said she wanted to get back together. That was how the fourth time began. In response I told her that I loved her too, which I now regret because it wasn’t true.

Also, while having sex we would sometimes say we loved each other, but that was different because we were having sex. In other words, I don’t regret it.

Here are all the things I regret:

• Saying mean things to her
• Telling her I loved her
• Breaking up with her the fourth time

Everything else I’m okay with.

We kissed for the first time at the northeast corner of St. Marks and Fourth Avenue. It was raining. We had been walking in the rain for several blocks and I was standing to her left, holding her umbrella above us. We were standing so close that our arms were almost but not quite touching. The light was red. I believe she had just been explaining why she wasn’t wearing her sweater, despite the rain. It was because she wanted something dry to wear later, which seemed more important than to be warmer now. I didn’t say this at the time, but I totally respected her logic and in fact this may be why I kissed her.

She was wearing white and red sneakers which I believe are called Vans. Normally I don’t notice such things, but these sneakers were adorable. When I first saw them I remembered that on our first date she wore blocky black sneakers which I couldn’t help but find sexy. Truth is, I’m usually impervious to such things; if anything it’s a turn-off when I sense that a woman devotes too much attention to fashion. The sneakers were white with little red flowers. The red matched the red of her pants. Later she confessed that she had left her entire wardrobe in a giant pile on her bed, which may have been the hottest thing any woman has ever said to me.

The way the kiss happened was that I turned to her and started kissing her, without really thinking about it. Well, there was a bit more to it of course. Because as I moved in I definitely looked to see if I had permission to do so. Did she tilt her head in acceptance? Did she part her lips slightly? Probably she did both, although I don’t pretend to remember. In baseball this is called a bang-bang play. A player slides into second, the throw comes in, the second baseman catches it and slaps the runner with his glove, and that’s it, it’s over, bang-bang, no time for anyone to think about what’s happening. Contrast this with the kiss itself, during which I focused entirely on the fact that we were kissing, that those lips touching mine, as well as that flicker of tongue, belonged to her. This part was more like those slow-motion replays, usually in basketball, in which the announcer scribbles a bunch of lines and arrows on the screen to explain what just happened and how it relates to what previously happened and how it reflects and reveals what each team is trying at this moment to do, beneath all the lines and arrows.

I went to a party tonight. Got drunk. Danced. Left a note in a woman’s shoe. She wasn’t wearing the shoe at the time. It was under a chair. I’d seen her leave it there. With her other shoe. Even drunk I’m paying attention.

I gave her my email address. On the note. As I wrote it I made extra sure it was legible. Because it would terrible if she wanted to know my email address but couldn’t make it out. She’d think, The drunk motherfucker what the fuck does this say?

I read through the note before leaving it. I wasn’t totally sure but it seemed that the “at” symbol didn’t look enough like an “at” symbol, so I rewrote the entire note with a better “at” symbol.

I did this in the hall outside the party. It was very bright there which for some reason made me reason how drunk I was. Not reason; realize. I’m still drunk.

Now it’s the next day. I laid in bed all morning talking with her. Her name is Tess. This wasn’t her but an imaginary her. Although her name really is Tess. We didn’t talk so much as snuggle. She wore one of my t-shirts. At one point she cried but wouldn’t tell me why.

In another version (there were many) I went down on her. Then I decided it was too soon, so I wiped that out and started over.

In another version I watched her sleep. At a certain point her face became very intent, like she was struggling with a math problem.

In another version she snuck out of bed in the early morning, put on her pants, and wrote me a note sitting at the kitchen table. She thought I was asleep but I wasn’t. I could hear the sound of pen on the paper. My fear, lying there, was that she wasn’t going to leave me her number. The moment she left, I got up and looked at the note, which she had left on top of the fruit bowl.

That’s how it ends. I never got to the part where I find out what the note says.

1. Reports

Thursday

M: My idea is to give little reports. It’s now 8:19 p.m. We’re at –

W: – Dwight and Sacramento.

M: Wendy has just told me about all these terrible things involving a fire in her apartment and… what else?

W: Battery fumes.

M: Oh yeah, disgusting battery fumes.

W: White gas is going to explode in the dumpster in the garage. The entire building is going to be destroyed. We’re going to be at Yosemite when it happens.

2. Superfluous

M: It’s 8:41 and Wendy has reported, as I already knew, that the left arm of the crash test dummy dangling from her rear view mirror won’t go back into its socket.

W: It’s permanently severed.

M: She mentioned that she has a purple crash test dummy at home and that she’s thinking of… Are you thinking of just taking the arm or the whole crash test dummy?

W: No, I thought of switching them, but then I decided that that would be unfair to this one. Just because you’re missing an arm doesn’t mean the rest of you should be rejected.

M: Have you thought of transferring the purple arm onto this one?

W: Well, then you’d have a purple arm and a white body.

M: That would be interesting, don’t you think?

W: But the purple arm might not go in that socket.

M: What you could do is remove the right arm from the purple one and then they could hang together side-by-side without any superfluous arms between them. It would be romantic.

W: Not for the one who just lost an arm.

3. The Endless Night

M: It’s 10:48. We’re about sixty miles from Yosemite and we’re winding up these incredible rock-like mountains. The moonlight is extremely bright, as bright as the lights on movie sets. From where we are, it looks like a car commercial behind us. You can look down there and see the winding road we came up. At first we weren’t sure if the mountains were snow-covered or grass-covered or what they were, but it turns out that they’re rock-like mountains and that they have these sort of bushes growing in patches, so it resembles some kind of hair disease.

W: There are no other cars. It’s sort of eerie. I’m having this feeling of being up really late doing homework in New York when everyone else had gone to bed, not only in my house but everyone in the huge apartment building across the street. All the lights would have gradually gone out and there would be just a few on still, and me and Laura would be doing homework over the phone.

M: Over the phone?

W: Yeah. I remember going through half a loaf of bread once, doing homework. There was this incredible feeling of being the only person awake, and I’m sort of having that feeling now because we have the whole road to ourselves. I feel like we have all this time. The endless night.

4. Distortions

W: We each had our set-up.

M: What do you mean?

W: We each had our own camp, and my doll had her camp and Laura’s doll had her camp.

M: Were there tents or was it all imaginary?

W: No, it was all imaginary. But they were in the woods and there were bears and things. And I had this rubber knife that belonged to some other doll set (naturally, Barbie dolls don’t come with knives), which fit perfectly in her boot. So my doll used to carry a rubber knife in her boot wherever she went. To protect herself. And since they were living in the wilderness, they didn’t have any watches or any way to tell time. We had these ways of distorting the dolls for different reasons.

M: Distorting?

W: Well, they were already distorted, as you know, in their dimensions. So we had to bend their heads back, which we could do pretty easily, and we would say, “I wonder what time it is.” That was how they told the time, by looking at the sun. The other thing we used to do was squish their cheeks together and say, “I wish I could see on both sides of my head.”

M: Was the idea that they would do that when they wanted to see on both sides of their head?

W: Yeah.

M: Have you and Laura talked about this since?

W: Oh yeah. This was the same period as the Batman and Robin adventure.

M: What was the Batman and Robin adventure?

W: We would pretend that we were Batman and Robin and that we had gotten into a horrible car accident and then one of us would say, “Oh, are you alright?” and we would burst into hysterics.

5. Yellowish

Saturday

M: Last night we got into our tent and “married” our sleeping bags, only our sleeping bags weren’t quite the same length, which was awkward. Also the ground was slanted towards my side of the tent, so gravity tended to pull me towards the wall of tent, and her towards me. Plus we set up the sleeping pads in the middle of the tent, which is to say that I ended up rolling off my pad. But the biggest problem was that the short side of the combined sleeping bag was at my back and it was quite cold. After Wendy tried to move the pads and the sleeping bag while still inside the bag – an absurd and silly operation – we finally, with some annoyance, got out of the bag and switched things around so that the warmer, longer side of the sleeping bag was at my back, the direction of gravity. And then, some time during the night, we switched sides, with Wendy taking the downhill side.

W: Which turned out to be a disadvantage because you get pressed up against the edge of tent, which is really cold, and then you get terrible cramps in your legs.

M: Hey, there’s a waterfall up there.

W: There is a waterfall.

M: Yeah, it was problematic: my arm started to hurt when I was on the bad side. But we did, after a while, get a little better at it. We moved towards the middle of the tent and somehow stayed there.

W: Look, people are taking pictures of the waterfall.

M: Yeah, it’s a waterfall.

W: “Watch for rocks.”

M: So we sort of fooled around a lot. It was nice. I won’t go into details.

W: The flowers are out.

M: Five minutes back, we passed over a little bridge that crossed to the other side of the river. There was a guy there who had set up a tripod by the roadside, so Wendy and I both looked around maniacally to see what he could have been taking a picture of. But there didn’t seem to be anything spectacular there to photograph.

W: These trees are in bloom. They’re pretty, white, open flowers. Big. What are they called?

M: I don’t know.

Now we’re coming up to the waterfall.

W: It’s Bridal Veil.

M: This rock is absurd.

W: There’s another one up there.

M: I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s just weird.

W: What are those people taking pictures of? They’re looking back there, in the wrong direction.

M: How high would you say that rock is?

W: How high? The rock is –

M: – hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of feet.

W: It’s more than that.

M: Okay, two thousand feet of sheer rock.

Now we’ve got different trees, and they’re pretty. Yellow trees. Yellow leaves.

W: Look at that.

M: Yellowish.

6. Moment

[Walking sounds.]

M. We decided to get out and take a look at Bridal Veil closer up, because we realized that the road coming back is on the other side of the river, so we wouldn’t be this close again.

We just saw this lovely family: outdoorsy-looking parents, young, in their thirties, and two kids, girls. They were playing this game where they all stood in a line together and the older girl said –

W: – “Okay, everybody stand still. Okay, one, two, three, go!”

M: And then they strode together.

W: The little one couldn’t quite keep up.

M: It seemed like they were happy together and that there was no disfunctionality of any kind in that moment.

W: No, none visible.

7. Thing

M: We’re now at Bridal Veil Falls, which Wendy just said looks better from a distance. Then her sentence sort of trailed off, but I think she was going to say that it has a certain majesty from a distance, but that here, up close, it’s this loud thing with too many people around it.

8. Names

M: We’re walking on rocks in the stream. That sound you hear is the water rushing over rocks.

Wendy mentioned that the trees at the foot of the rock mountains are pretty and that perhaps they’re aspens. I pointed out that we’re not as interested in them because we don’t know what they’re called.

W: Right. We’re not interested in the rocks either.

M: Just the names.

9. Meadow

M: It’s 12:07 and we’re just getting out of the car again. We’ve come to a little meadow. A car has stopped in front of us, a Toyota, and a blond couple has gotten out. I remarked that they have the same ass. The woman put her arms around the man from behind. I said that they’re happy together.

W: Maybe they’re brother and sister.

M: I don’t think they’re brother and sister.

W: How can they have such similar hair?

M: And asses.

They’re holding hands right now.

If they’re brother and sister, it’s pretty intense.

10. Tent

M: It’s 2:30. It’s snowing now and we’ve decided to leave Yosemite; to leave the mountains, in fact. Wendy suggested Mono Lake but unfortunately it’s a five-hour drive in the wrong direction. So rather than do all that driving we’re going to head back down out of the mountains. We’re hoping for better weather.

So when we decided this, we went back to the campground, ran to where we had left our tent, threw the tarp off it and just carried the whole tent, with the sleeping bags and such still inside, back to the car. While we were in the tent I suggested making love, and although we did kiss, it didn’t happen because it seemed too cold, according to Wendy, for all-out sex. I argued that one, we didn’t need to be fully naked (technically only one part of you needs to be naked during intercourse, and even that part, for the male, can and often should be covered), and two, we would generate our own heat. Alas Wendy spoke, rather unromantically I thought, of freezing her tits off, so the idea was tabled.

11. Voice

M: It’s 4:15. We went to a cafe called Cafe where we got bowls of split pea soup and talked. It’s chilly and rainy. We talked mostly about the situation involving Wendy’s friend, Annabel, who is supposedly moving out of her boyfriend’s apartment this Saturday at a time when her boyfriend is, as I see it, likely to be there. In my blunt fashion I said that this was sure to be a disaster, although perhaps exactly the sort of disaster Annabel secretly desires.

I found myself speaking in that tone of voice I so dislike.

12. Picture

M: Wendy has stopped the car to take a picture of a dilapidated building by the roadside. She’s standing in the middle of road now, taking a picture of it from in front. I’m walking towards her. She’s standing on the yellow line. It’s raining. “Wendy, there’s a car coming,” I’m saying.

13. Monsters

Sunday

M: It’s 9:00 Sunday morning and a lot has happened. Yeah, hmm. Anyway we’re about to go down to breakfast.

W: At The Hotel [French accent] Leger.

M. I’m a little nervous about this breakfast. The woman at the desk said there’s going to be eighteen guests. Although she did make the food sound good.

W: Yeah, yogurt and fruit.

M. I’m pretty hungry and have to pee.

I took some nice pictures of Wendy after having made love and having come relatively quickly because we have to hurry down to breakfast before those monsters devour everything.

14. Cement

M: We’ve come to the cemetery in Mokelumne Hill, where we’ve seen some interesting things, including a sign that said, “No Digging.” And now here’s something even stranger: At the back of the cemetery all the grave sites are in cement.

W: All of them. In cement.

M: It’s bizarre. Also the place seems way too new for a cemetery. Wendy has suggested that the graves may have been moved from someplace else. But that still doesn’t explain why they’re made of cement.

In any case we’ve now come to a large, new-looking gravestone embossed with the images of a husband and wife: John Nelson Sandoz and Margaret May Sandoz. Margaret May isn’t dead yet, so her side of the stone still remains to be fully inscribed. It seems strange that she might come here and stare at the blank space where she is later to be memorialized. Although on the other hand this merely formalizes what all of us – Margaret May included – know. Death approaches.

15. Gone Away

M: I just realized that “Dear Mother, You Have Gone Away But Are Not Forgotten” is not necessarily a positive statement.

16. Wheels

M: We’ve come to the Kennedy Mines Tailing Wheels, which were once these four huge wheels that carried the tailings, or residue, from the mines. The one we’re looking at, which I think is number three, has collapsed; Wendy is taking pictures of it. The wheel itself is surrounded by a barbed wire fence, but we noticed a place where someone cut open part of the fence, which Wendy was able to slip through. Up the hill, looming in the background, is wheel number four, which is still intact, although it appears to be badly slanted.

17. Fence

M: After taking many pictures of the collapsed wheel, Wendy tried to wiggle though the opening in the fence, got caught, and called for help. Instead of helping her, I made her give me her camera, which I used to take photos of her trapped in the fence.

18. Freedom

W: While you were gone I imagined this piece of electronic equipment getting into the hands of some person who would then listen to your tape. And so on.

M: What do you mean, “And so on”?

W: I felt kind of sad because it would be like having someone steal one of my cameras with film in it. So I sat here and took some pictures and experienced some sense of satisfaction that I still had my pieces of electronic equipment with latent images in them, and I also felt fear that you would be separated from yours, and I wondered what that means about what you record.

M: At times I’ve been seeing us as others might see us. Like the way we were around the fallen wheel. We were present there but we were also elsewhere – in some imagined future looking back. We had all this energy on the question of what was worth documenting.

W: So in some sense losing the record would be freedom.

M: Yes, but a sad freedom.

W: I thought about that when we were joking about my apartment exploding. You pointed out that I would lose all my pictures. There’s some sick part of me that would feel liberated by that. It’s as though there’s a ball and chain effect with things you really care about. Isn’t that twisted? The things or people you care about most – like your parents, for example – trap you. Or they don’t trap you…

M: They bind you.

W: They have such power over you. It’s ironic because they’re the things you care about most and yet there’s this dark side that wants to be freed from the burden of caring.

M: We don’t have any documentation of making love. The last thing I’m thinking about then is the future. In that moment I’m right there with you. And it’s precious – it’s the present and it’s precious. I say this in contrast to how we are around the wheel. Which is not to say that what we do around the wheel is wrong.

There’s a little bird in the tree.

W: It’s a hummingbird. It sounds like a plane.

19. Shadow

W: There are people over there. They’re doing something together.

M: What do you see?

W: They’re standing together, and walking away, back down the hill.

M: What else?

W: They’re facing each other, they have their arms out together.

M: What else?

W: One’s a man and one’s a woman. She has a dress on. She has her arms out again. She keeps holding her arms up in the air. She’s dancing now. She’s throwing her legs out. She’s really happy. She’s turning around in circles. He’s just walking. She’s very happy.

M: I’ve decided not to look.

W: They’re walking on the ridge, so they’re sort of silhouetted against the sky. They have the same gait. They’re holding hands now and walking back to the car.

It’s over, they’re not there anymore. They’re in the parking lot now, experiencing the parking lot. They had they’re little joyful moment on top of the hill. It’s over, gone.

M: You didn’t take any photos.

W: No.

M: Now they’re gone.

W: That moment is gone.

M: They’re gone with it.

W: They’re getting into the car.

M: You can see them still?

W: Yeah. He’s driving. Now they’re in their car – an unpleasant place to be. He’s about to drive over the cliff. Off they go.

M: Over the cliff?

W: No, they’re coming this way. The windows are down. They’re still trying to experience it, trying to let some air in, the sun. There they go.

M: I saw the car for a second.

W: Here it comes again.

M: I see it.

W: Those two people.

M: It has a shadow.

20. Roar

Monday

M: It’s about 8:30 Monday morning. Wendy has taken the rain slicker and gone off to pee. We smoked some pot in the tent last night and then talked and then kind of passed out together. It rained during the night and it’s raining still. The rain was heavy at times, a roar in the trees.

21. Nice

M: It’s 12:50. We’re leaving this Native American museum – Chaw-See I think the tribe is called. We came because of the grinding stones, which were somewhat of a disappointment; although the museum was not done any worse than I expected. As Wendy pointed out, these grinding stones, which were just places where people came to grind down their acorns or whatever they had to grind down, were for some reason surrounded by wooden fences with signs that said, “Keep Off The Grinding Stones.” And there were also these overly wide cement paths all over the place.

On another subject: It rained all morning and is still raining. We made love, we talked. We made love, we talked. We talked some more. More talking than making love, but both were nice.

W: “Nice.”

M: Nice. Which means nothing. I asked Wendy about her orgasm and she said it was nice.

W: At least I didn’t say it was fine.

M: Passable.

She did tell me – and this I’m sure she meant as a compliment – that I’m her favorite lover.

W: I started out by saying he was the best lover in the entire world.

M: But then it was cut down to something like “best lover in the tent.” Anyway it was “nice.” She came, and I kind of thought she was coming but couldn’t totally tell. That was “nice.”

W: I forgot to tell him.

22. Question

M: Is this okay?

W: Yeah. If I can remember where I was.

M: “So many things happening – good things, hard things.”

W: That’s when I felt like I was falling. I was overwhelmed. It wasn’t like anything I’ve felt before. We said, “falling in love,” but I don’t know what I was falling into.

M. Well, that’s the nature of falling, I suppose.

W: I don’t know what happened to those feelings.

M: The bad ones?

W: Yeah, I don’t know what happened to that stuff. It kind of dissipated.

M: I remember some things coming back.

W: Things came back, yeah.

…

M: Buried by?

W: Buried. I see a mountain and I see myself underneath it.

…

M: I have these moments periodically in which it seems I can see, for just a moment, what’s really happening. I can actually see it. I can see how much of what we do is a facade. Whenever I see that I feel despondent.

W: What was it that made you feel that way?

M: Nothing in particular. Well, there were specific things, but they were innocuous things, moments. It’s when I choose to say something or do something out of the thought that this is what I should do, out of playing a part – like playing the part of falling in love with you. When I see that facade, I see it everywhere, in everything between people.

W: And then you asked me what I felt.

M: What did you feel?

W: And then I avoided the question by telling you the story of my mother.

M: Yeah, and you kept avoiding the question.

W: I’m still avoiding the question.

23. Tuna Fish

M: We’re about an hour from home and Wendy has a poem to recite.

W: This Is Just To Say, by William Carlos Williams: This is just to say that I have eaten the plums that were in the refrigerator that you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious, so sweet and so cold.

M: I think it’s they were delicious, so cold and so sweet.

W: Hey, no. I had to memorize a poem for the poetry contest. Everyone had to memorize a poem. Some kids memorized, Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright, but I memorized, This Is Just To Say.

M: A charming poem. Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright is nice too, but this is an extremely charming poem. And I’m glad to know you know a poem by William Carlos Williams.

W: That’s just the beginning.

M: That’s not just the beginning; that’s the whole poem.

W: I know. But it’s just the beginning of my extensive knowledge of the poetry of William Carlos Williams.

M: I’m impressed. Do you perhaps also know the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz?

W: Sorry, never heard of him.

M: It’s fine. He won the Nobel prize for literature, not that that means anything. I saw him once, eating a tuna fish sandwich at a soda fountain in Ann Arbor. I recognized him because of his eyebrows, but I didn’t think it was him because I couldn’t believe he would be in Ann Arbor eating a tuna fish sandwich. The next day I read in the newspaper that Czeslaw Milosz had spoken at the university.

W: Ah.

M: The article mentioned that he had smelled like tuna fish.

W: Naturally.

M: I was heartbroken because he’s one of my favorite poets and I had failed to talk to him. Would you care to hear one of his poems?

W: Yes.

M: It’s called Tuna Fish.

W: No it isn’t.

M: That’s true; it’s called Encounter. We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive, not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture. O my love, where are they, where are they going – the flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

24. Bereft

M: It’s 5:06 and we just got back. I have five messages on my answering machine.

W: I only had four, and one was for somebody I don’t know.

M: And now we’re saying good-bye. And we’re doing pretty good, we’re not too sad. Wendy’s going to go swimming and I’m going to make dinner for myself. It’s good. We had a nice time, whatever nice means.

W: And we’re going to do it again.

M: In two weeks. Pinnacles.

W: But no camera this time.

M: And no tape recorder. We talked about this in the car.

W: Just the two of us.

M: Bereft.

– Have you said anything to him?

– No.

– Are you planning to?

– No. I’m not going to talk to him anymore.

– Are you just not going to talk to him or are you going to tell him you’re not going to talk to him?

– I’m not going to talk to him.

– What are you going to say if he calls?

– Nothing. I’m going to hang up.

– What if he calls and uses a different voice?

– Why would he do that?

– Because you keep hanging up on him.

– I’ll hang up when I realize it’s him.

– What if you never realize?

– Eventually I will. Or else I’ll hang up for some other reason.

– What if he kidnaps your little girl and says he going to kill her if you don’t talk to him.

– I don’t have a little girl.

– But say you did.

– He wouldn’t do this.

– But say he did.

– I suppose I would talk to him.

– What would you say?

– I don’t know. I guess that I’m sorry it’s come to this. That I remember when we loved each other, and that I don’t know what happened to change that. That sometimes, late at night, I read our old emails. That I copied them all into one document, even the emails where we’re just making plans or something, even the ones that are forwards of things, and that there’s this tenderness there and that I haven’t forgotten that tenderness and don’t think I ever can or will. Some bullshit like that, the fucker has my kid.

>hey,
>am suddenly in Sao Paolo, where it’s summer. I
>was very close to getting bumped and receiving
>a travel voucher, which meant I would have
>showed up at your apartment again and
>temporarily fulfilled your prophesy of me
>forever trying and failing to leave you.
>
>another question about syllables. (I know, I
>know, I know: I am BAD with syllables.) when
>there’s a lonely vowel in front, like ‘alone’
>or ‘equator’, is that vowel a syllable?
>
>love,

Alone is two syllables. Equator is three. I can’t get my fucking keyboard tray to work is eleven.

I’m really glad to hear from you so soon is also eleven. As is, sorry you didn’t get that travel voucher.

Me and my godforsaken prophesying is, eerily, eleven as well.

Evidently a lot of sentences are eleven is, paradoxically, fourteen.

Love is one,

How exactly do you drown yourself? How do you prevent yourself from keeping yourself afloat when you’re there in the ocean with the ocean all around you?

I can see getting tired. I can see having your arms become so exhausted you can’t lift them anymore. But I can’t see not using them to begin with, I can’t see giving in like that.

It’s like holding your breath. At some point you’re going to breathe again, you can’t make yourself not breath.

Of course when you jump, once you jump, it’s over. You fall. But with the ocean, the ocean holds you up. It pulls you down and holds you up.

It’s the falling that scares me. It’s when you’re in the air and you know that in four or five seconds you’re going to run out of air to fall through.

What if in that moment you change your mind? What if you suddenly see that you were mistaken, that in all this time of wishing, you never understood what you were wishing for?

I imagine this happens all the time. Because how can you know for sure until you’re actually falling and it’s too late to change your mind?

Of course they’re all falling. Because there’s always a point when you pass the point of no return. From that point on, you’re falling. Even drowning is falling. Even shooting yourself.

Of course when you shoot yourself, you’re only falling for as long as it takes the bullet to leave the gun and slice through your brain. How long is that, a hundredth of a second? So it’s a kind of falling you never experience.

Unless time slows down to where you have time to think something. A single thought. Like, say, I did it.

Or more like, I – .

I

What is a thought less than I?

When you turn it around it seems impossible, the convergences and synchronicities necessary to make it happen. And yet every story, considered in reverse, forges a path back to its beginning.

Who hasn’t traced the thing like this, saying, If you hadn’t and I hadn’t (and so on, back in time), I wouldn’t be holding you now.

I’m waiting for her to call again. As I write this she’s in another city, with friends, drunk. She just called from the restroom of a Chinese restaurant to tell me this. “I’m drunk,” she said, “and I’m in love with you.” We discussed how much she’s in love with me. She characterized it as “ridiculously,” which we decided is a more extreme form than “incredibly” but less so than “insanely.” I’m in love with her as well, but we didn’t discuss the degree.

Her voice echoed the way voices echo in restrooms. She held the phone to the restroom fan so I could hear what it sounded like and also to prove, I suppose, that she was in a restroom, although really all it proved is that wherever she was, there was a whirring sound.

As we spoke some person or persons kept trying the bathroom door, so she moved to the area outside the restroom, what she called the vestibule. This seemed a too-fancy word to me (I was thinking “hall”), but since I’m in love with her and since she was drunk, I didn’t question it. At one point an elderly woman, doubtless having overheard her ramblings, stepped out of the restroom and beamed at her.

I told her that I wanted to be drunk with her, or barring that, just with her, or barring that, just drunk.

• him: just tried something dumb
• him: tried to do this w/ my eyes closed
• her: and?
• him: wanted to think that way
• him: it makes me feel closer
• him: to you
• him: in my thoughts
• her: but?
• him: but of course I couldn’t see what you were saying
• her: lol
• him: dumb
• her: the only thing that will calm me now
• her: is to touch you
• him: yes
• him: I mean
• him: I feel that too
• him: that way
• him: can I tell you a story?
• her: yes
• him: I have these friends at MIT
• him: genius types
• him: whatever
• him: but really really smart
• him: one guy does quantum computers
• him: right now these computers can only add 1 + 1
• him: it’s funny
• him: he has a giant magnet
• him: that costs $50,000
• him: it’s by his desk
• him: anyway this isn’t the story
• her: …
• him: right
• him: the story is
• him: about a different friend
• him: he showed me around the media lab
• him: ever hear of it?
• her: i’ve been there
• him: cool. when?
• her: i was the actress
• her: for a project
• her: but the guy made a pass
• her: so i quit before it was done
• him: gross
• him: whatever could have motivated him?
• her: yeah yeah
• her: did you see the birds?
• her: at the media lab?
• him: no. tell.
• her: the film of the birds?
• him: no. tell.
• her: projected on either side of a hallway
• her: and when you walked through the hallway,
• her: the birds, pigeons
• her: would fly away suddenly
• her: like you had disturbed them
• him: ah, brilliant
• her: it was
• him: this other thing was too
• him: they had a prototype of it
• him: you put your hand over these tiny wheels
• him: and another person puts their hand over another set of tiny wheels
• him: the two sets could be anywhere in the world
• him: and when you move your hand
• him: the other person can feel it
• him: it was kinda like touching hands
• her: can we buy one
• her: ?
• her: now
• her: ?
• him: we’re doing the wheels in our heads
• her: no. not good enough.
• her: i want the wheels.
• him: what about the wheels in our hearts?
• her: i want the hand wheels.
• him: fine I’ll call him tomorrow
• her: you do that
• her: you realize they could make a whole person like that?
• her: made of little wheels
• her: two people, actually
• him: not people. machines.
• her: machines
• her: i imagine lying on this person
• her: i mean machine
• her: shaped like you
• her: while you do the same
• her: under, over, whatever
• her: a machine shaped like me
• her: etc.
• him: etc?
• her: the doing of things
• her: the making and breaking
• him: it was my first thought
• her: of the world
• him: sounds bumpy tho
• her: true
• her: anyway i have a better idea
• her: it’s for when you go to sleep
• her: it’s something i want you to do
• her: will you do it?
• him: sigh
• him: yes
• her: on your back
• her: with both hands
• her: touch your
• him: sigh
• her: eyelids
• her: lips
• her: and then the place on your neck by your earlobes
• her: gently
• her: that is where i will kiss you
• him: smiling out loud
• him: sol
• her: will you do that?
• him: yes, I will
• him: for you
• him: yes
• her: don’t just say you will
• him: I so fucking will
• her: i will do it too
• him: ah
• him: I love that
• him: which ear?
• him: both?
• her: both hands
• her: both sides
• her: both eyes
• him: but how are you going to handle this?
• her: ?
• him: when it comes to kissing
• him: actual kissing
• him: gotta be one then the other
• her: one eye
• her: the other eye
• her: and so on
• him: back and forth, like reading?
• her: yes
• her: with your eyes closed
• him: yes
• her: like you tried to do
• him: yes
• her: before

Track down my childhood friend David Helinek and have him show you where the fort was. If David doesn’t remember, say it was the fort that the park guard had his horse pull down with a rope. This is where I want my ashes to go.

Sell my things and use the money to pay for the cremation. If anything remains, give it to my mom.

Remind everyone how much I loved them. Exaggerate if necessary, but make it believable.

There’s a collection of pornography on my hard drive in a folder called “reference.” Delete it.

My web projects are in folder called “web.” Make a copy and save it for when former clients need master files.

If you have a memorial, everyone who speaks must mention at least one thing they couldn’t stand about me. Make this clear up front: no one speaks without including at least one major negative. And it can’t be a bullshit negative like, He was too fucking funny. I’m not kidding about this. It’s my last request.

I want to note here for my future self to read that yes I am aware that my happiness at meeting this woman is at best one phase of feeling and that as our relationship develops, the feeling will be replaced by feelings like the ones I’ve felt with others, what is to stop it from happening?

As we were leaving I looked at the picture of us on her mantle, taken by her roommate on our second date. It touched me, our happiness then. “Look, baby,” I said, “this is when we fell in love.” At that moment I saw her again as I had in the beginning. Where has she gone? Or really, where have I?

A man in the future remembers a woman he saw as a child, before the outbreak of World War III when the human race was forced to live underground. He is chosen for an experiment in which he either goes back to the earlier time or dreams that he does, going as himself today. He meets the woman and without a word is accepted by her. I too fell in love with her. Or not with her but with these photographs of her, of the two together, their tenderness. Two pictures in particular I love, both of the woman. In the first she is prone and appears to be naked, though this is uncertain: she has her arm crossed before her. In the next photo, the next moment, she has opened her eyes and is looking at the camera, at her lover, with happiness and wonder.

I told her last night that I want to feel more happiness with her. But what I meant, I think now, was not happiness but love.

In Akerman’s film a couple lay in bed unable to sleep. Finally the man says, “What are thinking?” The woman replies, “I wish that summer were over,” and then, “We no longer love each other.”

“You’ve been thinking that a long time,” says the man.

Happiness is the possibility of happiness. It is the belief that something pleasurable is coming, or may be.

So long as I put off checking the message, it remains possible that it’s from her. But once I check it, it becomes what it is, which may not be a message from her. Until I know what it is, it can be whatever I want it to be.

I thought again of giving up everything and setting off. But where to and why? Truth is, I need other people for my dollop of happiness.

Camus does not say that we must imagine Sisyphus free, but that we must imagine him happy. Though, again, he does not say that Sisyphus is happy, but that we must imagine him so.

It’s possible that one only completely remembers or completely forgets, that there is no middle ground of half-rememberance. Still, I’m dubious. A thousand grains of rice is surely a pile, whereas five grains is not. When does a collection become a pile? At a certain point it’s definitely not a pile; at another point it definitely is. Somewhere between these points is the point at which collections become piles, but where that is, is fuzzy. It’s fuzzy because the idea of a pile is fuzzy. A surprising number of ideas are fuzzy like this: love, happiness, [more examples].

I once rode a bus into the Berkeley Hills, to the state park up there, tripping, mildly, on mushrooms. It was a resplendent day and I was the only person on the bus. With my journal open on my lap, I scribbled the sort of things I often think when tripping (“to be lost is to wish to be elsewhere,” “to be lost is to lack a story for where you are”), when I decided to address my future self, the one who would one day return to these words.

It’s been nine years now. Here’s what I wrote, using giant, child-like letters:

HELLO, MICHAEL-READING-THIS-IN-THE-FUTURE. WHY DON’T YOU GO OUTSIDE AND LOOK AT THINGS FOR A CHANGE? YOU HAVE AN INTERESTING MIND BUT WHERE DOES IT GET YOU?

A woman is sitting too close to me on the J train. There are just nine people in the car, including me and her. I think she’s crazy. She came in and sat down next to me when she could have had a whole row to herself.

With just two stops to go, I’ve decided to wait her out rather than change cars. She’s definitely crazy. When I moved my bag onto my lap, she slid closer, filling in the space. Occasionally she stamps her foot, the left one, hard.

Right now she’s looking at what I’m writing. I’m leaving out letters so she doesn’t understand. For example, the previous sentence reads, “I’m le out lts so sh ds uds.”

Several readers responded to my failed attempt to steal a duck sign by saying that stealing is wrong. Although these emails didn’t surprise me, my reaction to them did. But before I get to that, here’s a quote from one of the more forceful and articulate emails, written by Jay Perkins:

Presumably the duck sign is there for a reason, maybe so people are alerted to the presence of ducks and don’t run them over? I guess you feel it’s more important to satisfy a juvenile urge than to respect or care about the lives of defenseless animals, whose only protection on that road is said sign.

Besides which, it’s not yours to take. Taking something that doesn’t belong to you is called ‘stealing’, and whether you get caught or not, ‘stealing’ is morally reprehensible, especially for such unnecessary and idiotic reasons as yours appear to be.

From your picture, you don’t look like an eight year old, so you might try not acting/thinking like one. Grow up.

I was at Rachel’s when I read this. I had meant to check if a certain client had written and then jump in the shower, but instead I found myself mesmerized by Jay’s email. I began various responses, none of which captured my thoughts, for my thoughts kept changing.

Soon Rachel appeared and asked why I was sitting at her computer in my underwear. I showed her Jay’s email. In short order she voiced the same arguments I had previously written and deleted, and in more or less the same sequence. On each point I thought she was wrong, and told her so. What she was doing, and what I had done earlier, was scrambling for justification of her own self-serving behavior.

The most interesting part was how Rachel’s tactics mirrored my own. Evidently there are four defenses one can use in such situations:

1. Minimize the wrong
2. Attack the accuser
3. Defend your character
4. Divert the blame

Although I have little respect for the rule of law, I actually agree with Jay Perkins that stealing is wrong, particularly when one steals for “unnecessary and idiotic reasons.” And it doesn’t matter that one’s accuser is a jerk or that little harm comes from the theft or that one is fundamentally moral. It’s still wrong. When Rachel asked me to help steal the duck sign, I weighed that wrong against my desire to play hero, and decided to play hero. It was a purely selfish decision. I make such decisions all the time, and for no other reason than that I want to.

When pressed to defend my actions, I invariably resort to the four-point approach above, leaning heavily on “minimize the wrong.”

Of course I’m not just speaking about duck signs, nor only about myself. The same logic used to justify the theft of duck signs is used to justify the destruction of the planet. We do what we want, pretty much, then find reasons to justify it.

I ran into my grandfather last week in the pool hall at Mott and Houston. I was just passing by and got the urge to play. My grandfather’s been dead over a decade now. He was alone at one of the tables in back.

He looked the same as always and was smoking the same brand of cigars. I recognized the smell immediately; that’s what made me look.

Funny thing: it was my other grandfather, Abbie, who played pool. This one, Max… I never saw him play a game of any kind, not even a card game. Aren’t grandfathers supposed to play card games? All this man ever did was sit in his recliner and smoke cigars.

When I saw him I thought maybe I was wrong about him being dead. This is not as crazy as it seems, since I don’t have much contact with my father’s side of the family. It goes back to my father, who calls me once a year to say he wants to have a relationship with me. Except he doesn’t say it like that. Instead he talks in this weird lingo he picked up from The Forum, saying things like, “I want to acknowledge your willingness to put yourself out there and share your authentic truth.” I try to be nice about it – my father has feelings, the same as anyone – but it’s hard to get around the fact that my authentic truth, when it comes to him, is fuck off.

My sister is the one who keeps in touch with him, so it must have been through her that I learned that Max had died. It’s strange, though, because I don’t remember her telling me this. Or maybe it’s not so strange given that my memory is not the greatest and I hardly knew Max.

It was Abbie I knew. We were close. In fact he was the one who taught me to play pool. We’d go to a place in Roosevelt Mall and play for hours at a time.

Because of this it was confusing to see the wrong grandfather at the pool hall. And then to top it off, I had the awful feeling of wanting him to be Abbie. Because Max… Well, I don’t really know for sure, but my sister says he used to beat my father with a board or something. I don’t know how she claims to know this, but he certainly never hit me. In fact he rarely ever sat up in his recliner. Still, my sister usually knows what she’s talking about, so I suppose it probably happened.

Then I remembered something else my sister told me. Actually this was the first thing I remembered. She said that my father used to hit me as well. Just not with a board. Honestly I don’t remember what he hit me with. Anyway I can’t say for sure that it happened, except that my sister is pretty insistent about it.

So when I saw Max again, I thought about him hitting my dad and my dad hitting me, and the whole thing just put me in a shitty mood. Perhaps I overreacted, but after that I decided to leave the pool hall.

On the way out I had this crazy thought that I was going to see Abbie coming down the street. In fact I constructed this entire cornball fantasy where I run up and embrace him and tell him how much I’ve missed him. It was all so vivid that I started to sort of cry (in the pool hall, I mean), and the guy at the counter said, “You alright?” and I said, “Sure, I’m fine,” and then I got the hell out of there.

Naturally Abbie wasn’t coming down the street. I didn’t have to look to know this, but I looked anyway. He wasn’t coming.

The voice is always the same: a kind of a barely controlled rage. It doesn’t frighten me. I hear it, and know, and I’m with her again.

This most recent time she shouted, “What the fuck is your problem!” It’s always something like this. I put my arm around her, to wake her.

“I had a bad dream,” she said.

“I know. It’s okay.”

“You were there. My mom was in the basement screaming at us to get downstairs. She would always scream like that. I don’t think she had any idea. I felt embarrassed because you were there.”

I pulled her closer and fixed the blanket.

“She doesn’t know what happened,” she said. “She’s forgotten everything.”

“I have too,” I said. “It’s easier that way.”

Her cheek was resting against my chest. I felt her tilt her head back to look at me, not that she would have seen anything in the dark.

“That’s true,” she said, “you have.”

Someone brutalized my snowperson.

This happened last Sunday, during New York’s one and only snowfall this winter. As Rachel and I walked through Prospect Park, I noticed that the snow was perfect snowman snow, wet but not heavy wet. We choose a spot away from the big field, on a slight rise.

The way to make a snowman, in case you don’t know, is to roll a snowball through the snow, pushing down as you roll it. It’s slow going at first, because the ball is small and has little surface, but it gets easier once you reach a certain mass.

I decided that we were going to make the best snowman in the park, and I believe we succeeded. Except it wasn’t a snowman we built but a snowwoman. We gave her spiky twig hair and breasts with acorn tops as nipples. I was particularly proud of her breasts, one of which was slightly larger than the other, just like with non-snow women.

(Confession: it was strangely erotic to rub the breasts with my palm to smoothen them out. Does this make me a pervert?)

Rachel regretted not having a camera, but I felt that a snowperson is by its nature impermanent, so why try to capture it? However, on the way home, Rachel convinced me to return later and take photos. “You can post them on Oblivio,” she said.

Sadly, shockingly, this is what we found when we returned:

If this doesn’t look like a snowperson, it is because it’s not one anymore; it’s a crime scene. The pile of snow in the middle is what remained of her head after someone stomped on it. We found her torso elsewhere, smashed to pieces. Only her base remained intact.

I was upset. I’m still upset. Rachel and I walked through the park taking photos of other snowpersons, none of which had been harmed. Only ours.

Was it because of the breasts? Was it because we made a thing out of snow that had breasts, and so someone figured it would be fun to fuck it up?

I really think this is what happened. Or else some dipshit decided that exposed breasts on snowpersons are an affront to decency and shouldn’t have to be looked at, that little children will see breasts on snowpersons and all hell will break loose.

Anyway, fine, this happened over a week ago now and I’m trying to let it go. Non-fucking-attachment.

One more thing: her mouth. We found her mouth stuck in a tree. It had been a metal top from a can, the kind you pull off with a tab. I used the tab part to make it stay on her face. They folded the thing in half.

There’s this moment in her car where I have no choice but to say good night, because I can’t invite her in – I don’t live here, and even if I did I’m not so sure I would bother. Of course she could have invited me to her place, but the time for that was in the restaurant or soon after the restaurant, only for whatever reason she didn’t. Somehow the vibe shifted from hey-let’s-keep-this-going to hey-let’s-just-get-this-over-with-shall-we, and I don’t know why. Worse, I sense she doesn’t know either, that’s she just as confused and disappointed as I am, but that neither of us knows the other well enough to say anything about it. So now here we are in the car and she’s dropping me off and saying something about how grateful she is for my help with her resume. I say I hope it helps her land a job she loves, and then we both remark how nice the other is and how much fun the whole thing was, especially to get to know each other some, which we agree was the nicest part. I don’t lean over to kiss her cheek, nor do I offer my hand for her to shake. Instead I wave goodbye as I leave the car, rotating my hand in the same way one might jiggle the doorknob of a locked door, only I hold my hand mostly open, so it’s more like the way one might fondle a breast of a certain size, rubbing the nipple with the sweaty part of one’s palm, although in the case of a breast the motion would be slower, a breast requiring a slower, more sensuous motion than a doorknob.

All I can see is the bottom half of her legs and the top part of her left knee. Also, vaguely, some thigh.

Actually I can’t really see her legs or thigh but rather the shape they make her slacks make.

Her slacks are a brownish sort of gray – the color, as I imagine it, of an aristocrat’s horse.

I have some judgment about her shoes. They’re too fashionable: the heals too high, the fronts too square. Also I sense too much energy, just from her shoes, devoted to appearance.

She has one hand – I see this also, although it requires me to move my eyes as far as possible to the left while keeping my head entirely still, as during an eye exam – folded over the other.

Before sitting down I saw that she is beautiful.

We’re waiting for the train.

In 1999, Jaron Lanier, a leading figure in the history of Virtual Reality (he coined the term), proposed a revolutionary vehicle for archival storage: cockroaches. Lanier’s plan was to translate the contents of The New York Times Magazine into a form that could be stored in the DNA of cockroaches – eight cubic feet of cockroaches; about enough to fill the average refrigerator – which would then be released at specified locations throughout Manhattan. After about fourteen years of mating, every cockroach in Manhattan would carry the archival information.

Lanier, who was not kidding around, submitted this proposal to an international competition sponsored by the New York Times Magazine to build a time capsule that would preserve information for a thousand years. In his insanely brilliant proposal, Lanier noted that the cockroaches would be able to survive nearly all conceivable calamities, including terrorist attacks, rising oceans, and ecological catastrophe.

The archival cockroach exceeds the materials specifications: it is water tight, impervious to changes in weather, easy to locate, impossible to destroy.

Because the archival cockroach will exist in so many copies, it will be easy to read the data without altering or destroying the archive. This is the most attractive aspect of the archival cockroach. No future historical revisionist will be able to locate and destroy each copy.

I know what you’re thinking: What if other cities adopt similar archival strategies so that cockroaches imbedded with an archive of, say, the Washington Post start reproducing with the cockroaches carrying the New York Times? Wouldn’t the resulting cockroaches end up storing an unreadable mishmash of more or less interchangeable news pieces and sadistically difficult crossword puzzles?

Good point, you, but Lanier has it covered.

As significant sequence similarity is required for recombination to occur, genetic crossover between Washington Post and New York Times articles is extremely unlikely. Indeed, if crossover were to occur, an earlier instance of plagiarism or reprinting would be implicated. At any rate, as long as each article is stored with its proper reference data, it will be possible for future historians to reconstruct both archives from a sample of roaches.

Makes sense to me. Or no less sense than the idea of preserving a complete archive of the New York Times Magazine for a thousand years.

Alas, the corporate corpus reaches everywhere else, so why not inside cockroaches? If nothing else, it would provide a postmodern twist to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” Instead of becoming cockroaches, which in Kafka’s world results in shame, failure, and death, we simply transform the buggers into handy places to store old magazines.

No doubt it will happen. However, for the present, Manhattan’s cockroach population is free to party all night without fear of having its DNA used as a latter-day storage facility: Lanier’s proposal lost out to a metal sphere folded to look like a giant fortune cookie.

Bad scene in the Fulton Street station. A “police action” knocks the 4/5 train out of service at rush hour, stranding thousands. I end up in a corridor packed with commuters, many of whom are trying to make their way back to the 2/3 train, having waited in vain for the 4/5. My group, a smaller group, dreams of reaching the Brooklyn-bound J train via a stairwell on the 4/5 platform. We have time to dream too, for we’re moving at about five feet a minute, about a third of the speed, as I figure it, of a crawling baby.

Remarkably the vibe is mellow. Some scattered Jesus-Fucking-Christ’s can be heard, but overall the crowd is composed and orderly and even a bit philosophical, for a crowd. Impressive. But then this guy comes up the stairs and starts pushing through the crowd because he needs to BE SOMEWHERE, in contrast to the rest of us, who are merely loitering in the corridor, and for no other reason than that we enjoy standing groin to butt with our fellow New Yorkers.

He’s tall, perhaps six-five, and broad. Also, violent, evidently. I recognize him immediately. He’s the guy who drives like he’s playing a video game, weaving between lanes at ninety miles an hour.

“Friend,” I say, “we’re all going the same place.”

“Yeah, well, fuck you,” he says.

“Yeah, well, fuck you,” I say.

Actually I say no such thing. I say nothing. I don’t want him to smash me in the mouth.

Jesus had it easy, for He could heal people.

My step-grandfather Andy was an astoundingly stupid man, likely the stupidest person I have ever known. It is not entirely surprising, then, that Andy died in the manner he did. However Andy’s death was not merely the result of stupidity but rather stupidity combined with stubbornness, senility, and remarkably bad luck, although the latter is open to debate.

What happened was, Andy pulled into a service station to get gas but in doing so failed to park close enough to the pump for the pump to reach the gas tank. Not realizing this, he got out of his car, tried to use the pump, discovered that it didn’t reach, then got back into the car, presumably to move it closer to the pump.

Unfortunately Andy neglected to shut the driver-side door before starting the car again. This was his fatal mistake. Well, either that or his decision to drive with his left leg partly outside the vehicle. It depends how you look at it. In any case it is undoubtedly true that the location of Andy’s left leg forced him into an awkward spread-eagle position, which made it difficult to control the vehicle as he pulled forward – or rather as he careened forward, for that is what Andy did: he careened.

One can always claim that luck either is or is not on one’s side. Andy’s death is a case in point. For while it is true that he avoided hitting any oncoming motorists, it is also true that he struck a succession of parked cars. A glass-half-full person would say that Andy was lucky to kill no one but himself; however a glass-half-empty person would consider Andy’s death proof of grave misfortune. For the purposes of this account, I will stick to the facts and leave such determinations to others.

After smashing a final parked car, Andy jumped over a curb (or rather his vehicle did, for there is some question as to volition), then sped across a series of lawns, leaving toppled fences and broken ornaments in his wake.

Oddly I cannot recall what Andy finally crashed into. I suspect it was a wall of some kind. At any rate Andy was no longer inside the vehicle when this crash occurred, and thus it may not be correct to say that it was he who did the crashing.

Also I have always assumed that Andy fell out of the car by accident. Certainly this is how the story was told to me. However, it occurs to me now, as I consider the final moments of Andy’s life, that his so-called fall may in fact have been a jump. Unable to swing his left leg into the car, Andy may have decided to abandon ship, as it were, and follow the leg out.

Whatever the truth, and perhaps it is better that we cannot know, Andy died in a seemingly impossible manner: he ran himself over.

Dean and Gail are in love. Their love is of the pass-the-puke-bucket variety – my favorite kind.

Thing is, I’ve never met these people.

Dean writes textism. I like textism. Last August Dean announced in textism that he was moving to the south of France to, as he put it, “spend languid days and nights with a beautiful, ludicrously smart woman” with whom he was “deeply, irrevocably in love.” The words “ludicrously smart woman” linked to Gail’s website, openbrackets. This is how I came to know Gail, or rather her writing. (I wouldn’t pretend to know Gail, nor Dean for that matter, nor anyone, really, merely through what he or she wrote. It is not enough. Bowling. I have always said this. Bowling is the best way to know a person. Also, sex and poker. Bowling, sex, and poker: the holy trinity of knowing.)

There were sixteen days between Dean’s announcement and his actual move. He used this time to finish his final projects, sell or abandon the bulk of his possessions, and be feted by friends – events he related with bitchy and characteristic wit.

Gail, meanwhile, swooned. The day after Dean’s announcement, she posted her own brave declaration. I became a fan on the spot and read the entirety of openbrackets. Along the way I discovered an entry from July 14, “Love and the turning year,” unquestionably addressed to Dean:

Thunder

Thunder. My heart trembles.
I lift my head from my pillow and listen.
It is not a chariot.

Fu Hsuan (217-278)

I can no longer untangle my hair

I can no longer untangle my hair.
I feed on my own flesh in secret.
Do you want to measure how much I long for you?
Look at my belt, how loose it hangs.

Anonymous (Six Dynasties)

Translations by Kenneth Rexroth

On August 28, Dean posted his final To Do list. It consisted of twenty-five items, beginning with “Call bookseller” and ending with “Print last set of proofs,” and included, in the middle, the mysterious “Sell kitchen to Bev.” Gail’s list from that day was different, as befit her different circumstance:

1) Eat
2) Sleep
3) Breathe
4) Run grinning like a simpleton through a crowded airport and jump into his arms.

Oh, come on, 1 out of 4 isn’t bad…

My heart went out to Gail who had nothing to do but wait while Dean mocked Kate Winslet’s breasts and sold his kitchen to Bev. On August 24 she reported on the effects of this waiting:

Let’s see…

Found the remote control in the fridge this morning.

Promised a client that I’d do something right away. Remembered to do it three hours later.

Walked into town to post some letters. Forgot to bring the letters. Went back home, got the letters and, back in town, noticed I hadn’t put stamps on. Laughed out loud, raising concerns among villagers’ about my current mental state. Begged 9 F credit from post office.

Read the same sentence 15 times before deciding to skip to the next one.

Contemplated new chair.

Charred the brioche.

Sighed a lot.

It’s 3 am.

George Bernard Shaw observed that newspapers cannot distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. I feel like a newspaper sometimes, particularly when it comes to love. Dean and Gail posted nothing for two days. Silence. I told myself they were probably too busy fucking, etc., to attend to their readers. Which is understandable. Life is to be lived. But then I fretted that all was not well, that the build-up had been too much.

Truth is, I had fretted all along, for each had given indication, here and there, of ambivalence, of difficulties. Not with each other, but with love. Dean in particular concerned me. In his original announcement, immediately after saying that he was “deeply, irrevocably in love,” he wrote: “Still a little unclear on this happiness business.”

I take back what I said about not knowing someone through their writing. I feel I know Dean. He’s pissy and opinionated, a man who abhors half-measures. Isn’t love, the lived version, a half-measure? Sometimes I think it is. And I would venture that Dean does too, or did, previous to Gail, which would explain his uncertainty about “this happiness business.”

In their first posts post-move, each described driving through the countryside on their way from Paris to her home – now their home – in the south of France. The two descriptions formed a two-panel portrait of the experience:

Him: “Bombing at midnight across the countryside in her decrepit Ford, grinning like fools, the air hot and rich, the streets narrow.”

Her: “Up out of the city, Mediterranean midnight wrapping itself around us as we speed deep into the country. Only wide curves of dark tree-lined roads lit by high beams, fragrant air passing over us. Heat lightning flashes red revealing sudden contours of the landscape. And we’re speechless.”

Each is present in the other’s description. And the two perspectives form… I don’t know what they form, but it’s really lovely, no? the two of them in her car, and so happy, thinking, This is it, holy shit, my god, finally.

I believe that the parting is always contained in the greeting. I believe that one knows from the beginning why a relationship will fail, that the problem is plain and yet one pretends not to see it; or perhaps one admits to seeing it but downplays its significance. The flush of love, or attraction, or hope, is a powerful hallucinogen, one that makes us see things that are not there, and fail to see things that are. A relationship does not begin in earnest until the effects of this drug have worn off.

I don’t think the effects have worn off for Dean and Gail. Or perhaps my theory does not apply in their case. Time will tell. Meanwhile there are the periodic declarations. This one and this and this and this. I collect them. I don’t know these people, but I care. No doubt for personal reasons. If it can work for them, it can work for others. For me, for example. For me and Rachel.

I was being charged for collect calls I had not made, so I called the phone company to complain. After some difficulty, I was finally transfered to someone in customer service. I explained the problem in careful detail, hoping to demonstrate through the reasonableness of my tone and the clarity of my language that I was a decent person with a legitimate grievance. When I finished, the agent surprised me by saying that he would connect me to customer service (I don’t know where he worked, but clearly he didn’t work in customer service), only as I was waiting to be connected, I received a call on the other line from an operator who said that she had a collect call for me from Michael Barrish.

I said: “I can’t be getting a collect call from Michael Barrish, because I am Michael Barrish. In fact I was just on the other line with someone else from your company, making a complaint about a collect call I never made.”

“Does this mean you won’t accept the charges?”

“Well, yes, obviously.”

“Okay, I’ll tell him that,” she said, and was gone.

Switching back to the other line, the one in which I was waiting for customer service, I was greeted by the same operator, the one I had just spoken to, the one I had told that I would not accept the collect charges. She reported that my collect call could not go through because Michael Barrish would not accept the charges.

I said: “Look, I’m Michael Barrish. I’m the same person you just talked to. And I’m not trying to place a collect call; I have a complaint.”

Here she said the only thing that followed the logic of all that came before and yet trumped that logic, rendering it null and void, much like the ladder Wittgenstein speaks of at the end of Tractatus, the ladder that must climbed in order to be discarded.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll connect you to customer service.”

I’ve lived in exactly forty-two forty-four houses and apartments. I’m not entirely sure how this happened. One thing led to another until I found myself here, in Brooklyn, with forty-one forty-three places behind me.

I could say what prompted me to leave one place for another, forty-one forty-three times, but that wouldn’t really explain anything. What’s there to learn from a series of turns?

In the back flap of my address book, I keep a list of all forty-two forty-four places. The list includes the dates I lived at each, rounded off to the month. Between certain entries I’ve noted places I’ve stayed or trips I’ve taken after leaving one place and before moving to another. These have dates as well. The dates are important. I refer to the list whenever I want to know when something happened.

I feel that I’ve always been the same person, even when I lived on Tremont Street, even before my sister was born, and yet I’m suspicious of this feeling. One forgets. One creates a past that makes sense in a present that continually changes.

Maybe it’s different for different people. My sister, for one, seems to remember nearly everything, and with matter-of-fact clarity. For her the past is neatly printed and arranged into chapters, with a first-rate index and four-color photography. For me it’s an enormous room strewn knee-deep with undated papers that have long since yellowed or smeared to the point of illegibility.

Naturally I’ve forgotten when I first complied the list. Whenever it was, I remember having to call my sister to fill in several dates from my childhood.

In the last ten sixteen years I’ve added eleven thirteen more places. Each time I’ve been struck by how the last place on the list always ends with the word present, how this word keeps sinking, anchor-like, to the bottom. Of course in the final list, the one I won’t be around to update, present will be replaced with a date.

Date	Place
12/60 - 7/65	Tremont Street, Phila., PA
7/65 - 12/75	Maxwell Place, Phila., PA
1/76 - 3/76	[Dad], Valley Forge, PA
3/76 - 4/78	Maxwell Place, Phila., PA
4/78 - 7/78	[Aunt Dee & Uncle Sam], Phila., PA
7/78 - 4/79	Souder Street, Phila., PA
5/79 - 8/79	West 59th Street, New York, NY
9/79 - 4/80	[Mom & Andrea], Phila., PA
4/80 - 10/80	Kingston Street, Atlantic City, NJ
11/80	34th Street YMCA, New York, NY
11/80 - 5/81	Park Slope YMCA, Brooklyn, NY
5/81 - 10/81	East 11th Street, New York, NY
11/81	West 72nd Street, New York, NY
12/81 - 3/82	East 84th Street, New York, NY
3/82 - 5/82	E. Quad back kitchen, Ann Arbor, MI
5/82 - 7/82	East 23rd Street, New York, NY
7/82	Piedmont Avenue, Berkeley, CA
8/82	[Ken etc.], Brooklyn, NY
9/82 - 2/83	Vicente Street, Oakland, CA
2/83 - 5/83	Channing Way, Berkeley, CA
5/83 - 8/83	East 11th Street, New York, NY
9/83 - 5/84	Lawrence Street, Ann Arbor, MI
6/84 - 8/84	Packard Road, Ann Arbor, MI
9/84 - 5/85	Division Street, Ann Arbor, MI
5/85 - 9/85	Hillegass Street, Berkeley, CA
10/85 - 11/85	[Eve], Hollywood, CA
12/85	[Various friends] Ann Arbor, MI
1/86 - 5/86	Michigan Street, Ann Arbor, MI
6/86 - 7/86	Travels w/ Gary
8/86	Arch Street, Ann Arbor, MI
9/86 - 11/86	Beacon Place, Somerville, MA
11/86	Trip to Ann Arbor
12/86 - 6/87	Beacon Street, Somerville, MA
6/87 - 8/87	Route 110, Tunbridge, VT
9/87 - 11/87	Beacon Street, Somerville, MA
12/87 - 3/88	Noe Street, San Francisco, CA
3/88	Travels to L.A., Santa Fe, Chicago
4/88 - 11/88	Rossmore Avenue, Jamaica Plain, MA
12/88	Travels w/ Lisel
12/88	Oak Street, San Francisco, CA
1/89 - 3/89	Glen Avenue, Oakland, CA
3/89	Various friends in Boston area
4/89 - 5/89	McBride Street, Jamaica Plain, MA
5/89 - 6/90	Cottage Street, Cambridge, MA
6/90 - 4/91	Jay Street, Cambridge, MA
4/91 - 7/91	Bike trip
8/91	Travels w/ Monique
9/91	[Laura’s parents], Salisbury, CT
10/91 - 11/91	Travels w/ Monique & Laura
12/91	With friends in Boston area
1/92 - 10/92	Rugg Road, Allston, MA
10/92 - 11/92	Prospect Street, Cambridge, MA
11/92 - 5/93	Jay Street, Cambridge, MA
6/93	Scott Street, San Francisco, CA
7/93 - 10/93	41st Street, Oakland, CA
10/93 - 10/94	Northside Ave., Berkeley, CA
10/94 - 1/95	39th Avenue, San Francisco, CA
1/95 - 7/95	Armstrong Street, Jamaica Plain, MA
8/95 - 8/96	Fainwood Circle, Cambridge, MA
8/96 - 3/00	Harvard Street, Cambridge, MA
4/00 - 8/00	Saint Marks Place, New York, NY
8/00 - 9/02	South 5th Street, Brooklyn, NY
9/02 - 8/05	St. John’s Place, Brooklyn, NY
9/05 - present	Berkeley Place, Brooklyn, NY

Does the public really need to know the final meal requests of the last 253 death row inmates to be executed by the state of Texas? I’m all for freedom of information, but why is Texas putting this stuff online?

Certainly it’s mesmerizing – a bizarre combination of banal and lurid. When you click on an inmate’s name, you see a page scanned from his death row file, presented as a single, enormous image. These pages (many of which are poorly three-hole punched, the little holes often breaking the edge of page) contain identifying information, a pair of mug shots, and a summary of the inmate’s crimes. The summaries are horrifying, the horror enhanced by the dry-as-dirt language. For example:

Convicted in connection with the deaths of sisters Grace Purnhagen, 16, and Tiffany Purnhagen, 9, in south Montgomery County. The bodies of the two girls were found along a pipeline in the Imperial Oaks subdivision on Rayford Road. Grace’s throat had been slashed and she had been sexually assaulted with an object later found to have been a beer bottle. Tiffany had been strangled with a rope found around her neck. Grace’s former boyfriend, Delton Dowthitt, then age 16, confessed to killing both girls following his arrest in Lousiana four days later. He later recanted, saying he killed Tiffany at the order of his father, who he said had actually killed and sexually assaulted Grace. Delton led police to where his father had disposed of the knife. Police also found a bloody bottle and rope at Dowthitt’s auto sales business in Humble.

Elsewhere on the site you can access gender and racial statistics, final meal requests, and other handy death row facts. I learned a lot about lethal injections, the current execution method employed by Texas. (Previous to 1977, the state used electrocution, and before that, from 1819 to 1923, hanging.) In Texas, a lethal injection consists of three drugs:

• Sodium Thiopental (lethal dose; sedates person)
• Pancuronium Bromide (muscle relaxant; collapses diaphragm and lungs)
• Potassium Chloride (stops heartbeat)

Texas is a stickler for details: “The offender is usually pronounced dead approximately seven minutes after the lethal injection begins. Cost per execution for drugs used: $86.08.”

$86.08 for the drugs. Thank you, Texas. Elsewhere I learned that the cost per day per offender is $53.15 and that the average time on death row prior to execution is 10.58 years.

If I remember my Foucault correctly, he said that public torture restores the state’s sovereignty (which had been violated by the offense) by displaying infinite force on the body of the prisoner. Here we’re dealing not with force but disclosure. Since we no longer witness executions, all we’re left with is the paperwork. Well, that and a USA Today-like obsession with factoids:

• shortest time on death row prior to execution: Joe Gonzales, 253 days
• longest time on death row prior to execution: Excell White, 8982 days (24.6 years)
• average age of executed offenders: 39
• youngest executed offender: Jay Pinkerton, 24
• oldest executed offender: Cydell Coleman, 62

And then there’s Mike Graczyk of the Associated Press, a man who has made a career out of watching Texas death row inmates die, having witnessed 234 out of 253 executions since 1982. Thus we know what Mike will likely be doing on on November 14: He’ll be witnessing the execution of 41-year-old Jeffrey Tucker of Parker County, convicted in the July 1988 robbery and murder of 65-year-old Wilton B. Humphreys of Granbury. Texas doesn’t tell us what Tucker has requested for his final meal, but we know that the last inmate executed, Gerald Mitchell of Harris County, asked for a bag of assorted Jolly Ranchers.

Sadly, Odell Barnes, Jr. of Wichita County, executed March 1, 2000, never received his final meal. I know this because he requested justice, equality, and world peace.

On the subway tonight I read the same book I always read: The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. It’s the only book I ever read all the way through, despite only reading it on the subway. I read five to ten pages at a time, depending how far I’m going. When I finish I return to the beginning and start again.

The book’s effect on me is like music. There’s little plot; it’s simply a man’s thoughts about his two closest friends, both of whom are dead. One is Glenn Gould. The other, the loser of the title, recently committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree a hundred yards from the home of his sister.

Years ago I enjoyed reading books – novels! – but no longer. Most seem so written. Descriptions, in particular, I find intolerable. The Loser contains no descriptions, or nearly none, which is partly why I love it.

A confession: I dog-ear the pages. And since I’ve been reading the book for so long, more than half the pages have little diagonal creases. Somehow this pleases me. There’s something to be said for loving something to the point of destroying it a little.

On the subject of notes left in strange places for desirable women, twelve years ago I stood in a kitchen at a party in Chicago with my friend Mickle, who wanted desperately to leave a note for the host of the party, a woman he had known, barely, in college, and who may have, he had recently learned, admired him back then, and who now lived with a man who was possibly her boyfriend.

We were drunk and were being pressured to leave by whoever was giving us a ride.

Mickle’s note, which he had scribbled in great haste, invited the woman to attend a play he had written. Problem was, Mickle accidentally inverted the names so that the note appeared to have composed by the woman, who was inviting Mickle to see a play she had written. It was a regrettable mistake, but it was the least of Mickle’s problems. The real problem was where to leave the note so that it would be found by the woman rather than her possible boyfriend.

I was no help. Nor was Mickle, really, who in his drunken and agitated state believed this to be his one and only chance to act.

Finally, in desperation, he opened the refrigerator, surveyed its contents, and stuck the note in a tub of lowfat cream cheese. His logic: Possible boyfriends don’t eat lowfat cream cheese.

He was correct. The woman found the note, attended his play, got together with him, broke up with him (or he her; I forget), married another man, divorced him, got back together with Mickle, and now, twelve years after finding a note in her lowfat cream cheese (forgive me that I do not know how long it took her to find it, nor what she thought on finding it, nor anything, really), has agreed, at last, to marry him.

I washed my clothes with a friend at a place in Santa Cruz called Ultramat. Halfway through, a woman walked in and put her clothes in the washing machine next to mine. She was kind of frumpy, with frizzy hair and baggy pants. I found her totally irresistible. (The moment I saw her, I told my friend I wanted to pull those pants right off her.)

As we were leaving, I noticed that she had disappeared but that her clothes were still spinning in a dryer. This gave me an idea. I ran to the car, tore off part of a paper bag, and frantically scribbled a note on it. The note read:

I just wanted to tell you that you’re totally beautiful and that I really like your pants.

I signed the note, “The Guy With Round Glasses,” and added a p.s.: “Goodbye forever!”

I left the note spinning in her dryer.

That was nine years ago.

There’s a vertical crease that begins at the inside edge of my left eyebrow and extends north about three-quarters of an inch. It’s the kind of crease that forms when one furrows one’s brow. Except this crease is permanent, etched into my face by decades of furrowing. Oddly the parallel crease on the right is half as deep; evidently I furrow lopsidedly.

I didn’t notice the crease until this morning, although it must have been plain for many years.

Similarly, sometime in my early twenties, I discovered that my ears are different; that the left, lacking a fold possessed by the right, sticks out funny. It was a strange, almost shocking moment. How could I have missed such a thing for so long? How could I have failed to something that, once you see it, cannot be unseen?

I spent a long time that morning studying my face in the mirror. And then I pulled out a box of baby pictures. My ears, naturally enough, had always been this way; I just never noticed it.

What else I am failing to see?

Once, long ago, I was a bingo caller. I was fifteen at the time and got the job through a friend whose grandmother was president of the ladies club in her apartment building. The club had about fifty elderly members, most of whom, to judge from appearances, were addicted to bingo. They played in a room in the basement of their building. Every Tuesday I joined them, sitting at a table at the front of the room. For my services I received six dollars an hour plus all the fresh-baked cookies I could eat.

An important part of the job, aside from spinning a small metal bingo wheel and calling out the numbers of the resulting ball, was to confirm the winner of each round. I did this with the aid of a big flat white board that was covered with lots of small round indentations, each of which corresponded to a number on one of the bingo balls. After calling a number, I would place the ball in its proper indentation on the grid. When someone shouted “Bingo,” I would ask the player to read off her winning numbers, and as she did so, I would check the numbers against the balls on the grid. In this way I would catch a few false bingos each night. I didn’t like doing this; it’s no fun to inform a gleeful winner that she is in fact a humiliated loser. However, since many of the women followed along during the confirmation process, I knew I’d be in trouble if I ever confirmed a false number.

All of this relevant to the confession I’m about to make, which involves one of the players, a woman who would sit at a nearby table with a chair between her and the next woman. During the intermission, while I was busy with the cookies, she sat alone, eating cantaloupe out of a plastic container. Thus I dubbed her the cantaloupe woman. She appeared to be the only woman in the room without friends. I would have talked to her myself, but I really had no idea what to say to an elderly woman, aside from thanking her for her cookies.

Each week she sat there, alone, eating her cantaloupe. It was heartbreaking. And then one night I finally decided to do something about it. During the intermission I lingered past her table and memorized a row of numbers on one of her bingo cards. In a subsequent game I called out these numbers during the first eight balls or so, virtually guaranteeing her victory. And it worked: she yelled “Bingo” loud and strong. (As a precaution, I had placed the balls on the slots belonging to the numbers I had called, not the numbers on the balls. I did this in case the cantaloupe woman overlooked her bingo, in which case the game would continue and I would need to confirm another winning combination.)

Emboldened by the woman’s reaction, I falsely awarded her at least one bingo a night, and several times granted her the final game, which was worth double. I was never caught, nor did I ever sense that anyone realized that such a thing was possible. In moments of self-satisfied reverie, I fancied myself the Robin Hood of bingo callers, stealing from the rich Ladies Club members and giving to the poor cantaloupe woman.

It was the best wrong thing I’ve ever done.

I should have gone to college and gone into real estate and got myself an aquarium, that’s what I should have done.

– Jeffrey Dahmer

As part of my research for a novel-in-progress, I recently spoke with a friend, a forensic psychologist, about sexual deviancy. In the course of our conversation she said something that amazed me, which is that most serial killers are sane. As an example she cited Jeffrey Dahmer, the guy who killed and dismembered several dozen young men. (Did he also eat them? I think he may have eaten some, or parts of some.) According to my friend, Dahmer was sane, and her reasoning, the reasoning of her profession, hinged on whether Dahmer could distinguish between right and wrong. About this there can be no doubt: Dahmer went to great lengths to conceal his actions, a sure sign of a person who knows he’s done something wrong, something for which he would be punished if caught.

At first I thought my friend was talking about criminal responsibility – a more narrow concept than sanity, one that applies only within a legal context. But it soon became clear that her definition applied more generally. The key issue, she said, is whether the person possesses an accurate picture of reality. I asked her whose picture of reality can be said to be inaccurate.

“People who suffer from extreme paranoia, hallucinations, delusions,” she said. “People who believe the KGB is after them. People who think they’re god, or that god is instructing them to do things.” (Nearly every Christian saint was insane by this definition, but that’s another matter.)

Her rationale reminded of arguments I’ve had with computer tech support people about whether a particular problem is hardware- or software-related. Tech support people invariably claim that one’s problems are software-related, which means that they aren’t responsible for fixing anything, and that in fact they can’t fix anything because nothing is broken.

My friend was saying that Dahmer’s problem was software-related. Something bad had gotten into the machinery, but the machinery itself was in good working condition: Dahmer could hear what we hear and see what we see, and that’s what matters.

For what it’s worth, my friend did say that when interviewing people who’ve committed sexual crimes, she has difficulty interviewing the so-called sane ones, that it sickens her to be in the same room as them. So it’s not as though she equates sanity with morality. In fact, in her view, insanity and immorality are completely unrelated. It’s not insane to be immoral, nor is it sane to be moral.

Perhaps this is how it should be, but the fact is, Dahmer is insane. It’s insane to murder innocent people and cut them up and possibly eat them. It’s not just that these things are immoral (plenty of things are immoral without being insane; say, cheating on your taxes or your lover). It’s that it takes a truly crazy person to be that immoral.

Psychology passes the buck and in so doing becomes a tech support function for humans, one that applies only in cases in which people come to believe grossly false information about themselves or their environment.

I had so much trouble accepting this that I approached my friend again to confirm I’d gotten it right. She assured me that I had. Dahmer is sane, she said – or was sane, having long since been murdered by a fellow inmate, a convicted killer who claimed to be Christ because he was a carpenter and his mother’s name was Mary.

You know: a crazy person.

On November 18th, 1999, my great-uncle, Al Rubin, died of a heart attack while attempting to lift his wife, Dot, from their living room floor. Al was 92; Dot was 90.

Al and Dot were found lying foot-to-foot, their heads at opposite ends of the living room. Al was naked. Evidently he had been in the bathroom when Dot fell and called for help. A wooden coffee table was turned on its side, most likely toppled by Al during his fall. Dot was alive but badly disoriented.

In the hospital my mother and her sister Dee (Dot’s closest living relatives) agreed to spare Dot the news of Al’s death until she recovered. That is, assuming she recovered, for she was in critical condition, suffering from severe dehydration.

Two days later Dot was alert enough to ask for Al. Where was he? Why wasn’t he visiting her? In answer to these questions Dot was told that Al was in another part of the hospital or in another hospital altogether (I’ve heard different versions) and that he would visit when he could.

Most people wouldn’t object to the lie, but I do. I ask myself if I would want to be lied to like that, if I would want my family to conceal the death of my spouse for fear that the news would kill me. The answer is no. It’s not so much the lie that bothers me but the underlying presumption – born of love and concern – that when sufficiently old or infirm we can be stripped of the right to the truth. We treat children that way. We tell them stories to protect them. To lie to Dot was to treat her like a child.

Kant believed that no lie is ever justified and that we are obliged to tell the truth even if it means leading a murderer to his victim. I fall somewhere between Kant and my family: I would lie to the murderer but not to my great-aunt, as I believe that Dot deserves respect, and a murderer does not.

When Dot was deemed well enough to know the truth, my mother and Dee told her what had happened.

“Do you remember falling?” asked my mother. “Do you remember that Al tried to lift you?”

Dot remembered nothing. Moreover she had no idea what she was doing in the hospital. When told that Al was dead, that he had died trying to lift her, Dot showed no emotion. Dee, remembering this moment, believes that Dot never understood. I would go further and say that the thought of Al dying was not something Dot was capable of thinking. She knew what mortality was and she knew Al was mortal, but she could not complete the syllogism.

A few days later I visited Dot in the hospital. She was the same as always, though noticeably diminished. We made small talk. No mention was made of Al until Dot asked how I was doing, and I said that my heart was heavy because I missed Al.

“So what’s the weather like in Cambridge?” asked Dot.

Dot’s deflection didn’t surprise me. Over the years she and Al had refused to accept or even acknowledge their deteriorating ability to care for themselves. Despite failing health, they rejected all offers of assistance. Since neither could cook anything more involved than canned soup, they would eat dinner in restaurants, and Al would drive, to the collective horror of my family.

As painful as this was to witness, I admired it. It took great strength for Dot and Al to be so persistently stupid. I’m convinced that they survived as long as they did because they refused to face the truth. Their final years together – sad, pitiful years, but years together – were testament to the power of denial.

I’m reminded of the battle between King Arthur and the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Arthur chops off the Black Knight’s arm, but the Knight refuses to give up and claims that the wound is “but a scratch.”

“Well, what’s that, then?” asks Arthur, pointing to the severed arm on the ground.

“I’ve had worse,” grunts the Knight.

Arthur slices off the Knight’s remaining arm, and then a leg, and still the Knight is loathe to concede.

Arthur is incredulous. “What are you going to do, bleed on me?”

“I’m invincible!”

“You’re a loony.”

My great-aunt is a loony. Living in a nursing home now, she remains unable, or unwilling, to admit that her husband is dead. To hear her tell it, Al is forever indisposed, puttering in another part of the building. Recently Dee, exasperated by such remarks, reminded Dot that she had attended Al’s funeral and had watched his casket being lowered into the ground. Dee expected Dot to claim that no such funeral had taken place, but Dot had her outflanked. “That wasn’t him,” she said.

In the end King Arthur chops off the Black Knight’s remaining leg, and yet the Knight, now a legless, armless torso-plus-head, cannot admit defeat. As the King gallops off into the forest, the Knight shouts, “Running away, eh? You yellow bastard! Come back here and take what’s coming to you. I’ll bite your legs off!”