Scenes of My Defeat

I Don't Remember Reading Lydia Davis But Probably Have. I Liked "Thyroid Diary" But Was Uncomfortable With the High Level of Autobiography In It

2009-12-17T12:55:00.000-08:00

I was watching a live chat with Lydia Davis and I wanted to ask her who or whom she most admires and tries not to mimic in her work, but then I felt stupid for asking that, it could be mildly irritating to her—surely she is at a place with cows outside her window where she only ever imitates herself anymore — and even saying that is sort of hamhanded and accusatory, isn’t it?—and then I wanted to know what amount of her writing goes unfinished, so I asked but I used an analogy I knew she would like. And she did like it, and didn’t really answer my question in a satisfactory way without me asking for, you know, a specific numeric ratio. Something more concrete.

Lydia Davis: 30% of my writing gets published. 70% goes into the rag & bone shop.

How many questions will be asked? I wondered. Will any question-asker be allowed to ask additional questions? And then I calmed myself and sat back and watched the questions of others, probably all of them unpublished writers with their jealousies holstered, graduate students just hoping to pick up a tip or maybe kiss a hem, and her gentle and self-deprecating advice, each question and answer arriving with a little sound like a pill bottle being shaken, and knowing or maybe hoping or maybe fearing that she either scrutinized every single word and knew that it was brilliant before she hit the return button or whatever – this format ought to be her forte— or she didn’t do that, but I sent another question:

Jerry Case: What is the best (a) letter in the alphabet and why; (b) way to keep squirrels out of bird feeders.

For a little while, I watched for my question to be published, and then I felt bad. It was one of those days where I felt I messed everything up, that I wasn’t capable of maintaining a relationship, even one as easy as being a respectful, diligent participant in an online chat. Why do I mess everything up? I asked myself for the third or fourth time that day. I closed my laptop computer and realized I am not the star of anyone’s movie, not even my own. Still, I realized that the very existence of Lydia Davis gave me permission to write this, so I opened my computer back up and did.

When I finished writing, I thought the previous paragraph was a typically bad ending, like the story just stops abruptly, like I gave up on it, too. No focus, no perseverance.. Typical. So I pretended that I reopened the chat window, and the chat had finished, but the transcript was still there. It ended with a long string of questions from Lydia Davis that went unanswered. It was poignant.

Lydia Davis: Jerry?
Lydia Davis: Jerry?

Lydia Davis: Are you there?

Lydia Davis: Jerry?

This chat has ended.

I love you, Mary HK Choi

2009-11-10T10:24:00.000-08:00

I like a gin and tonic now and again, and between you and me, I have to tell you that the cocktail drives my wife… well, it drives her into my arms in fits of amorous affection, cooing and giggling like a schoolgirl, ticklish with pleasure, tinkling her glass and making eyes and saying things like “how ‘bout another, big guy?” And how can a big guy refuse an offer like that? I walk up from the sunken living room with the green shag carpet and the white sofa, and I duck my head as I cross the living room, and I stoop down to peer into the freezer to see if there aren’t a few more ice cubes in the tray, and I extract a lime from the fruit drawer and I cut a wedge of that, and mix with the soda water etc. etc.

“Thanks, big guy,” she says, or something like that, and jumps back into my lap. Sometimes when she gets sleepy, she likes to cuddle up in one of my breast pockets, her tiny ears no bigger than a mouse’s.

Sometimes I have this fantasy that our house is inside another house. Like the smallest Matroshka Doll. Our house is the last one, though, it won’t open. There are no other houses inside our house. And when I walk out that front door, as I know I will someday, after the illness, there will be this great expanse of green carpet, shag. Just over the horizon, a huge white sofa will loom. On it, will be a much bigger guy, holding a beautiful little woman, still pretty small, about my actual size actually. And this larger house containing my house will also have its windows semi-permanently shaded with that special contact paper they send over from the clinical supply store, but this will be massive sheets of it, bigger than anyone ever imagined possible, and I will be filled with awe and wonder. How do they make such huge sheets of contact paper? What kind of a factory can produce that? There is so much I don’t know about, sometimes it’s just astonishing.

I must be very careful to wait until that Bigger Guy and his beautiful little wife with the ears like shell macaroni leave the room so they don’t see me and get frightened. What would they think? “My God,” says the Bigger Guy. “There’s actually someone living in that toy house inside our house! A little tiny Big Guy! I wonder if he, too, has a miniature wife who can sleep in his breast pocket?” And then I imagine things would get very tense as he approached our house, set down his gin and tonic, got down on his knees, and peered through the front door, tried to poke his fingers through the shaded windows, or shook the place like a Christmas present, sending us flying in different directions, our drinks and ice cubes tumbling around us.

No, if I could sort of crawl like a soldier across that vast plain of shag carpeting, like a bone dry swamp, weirdly green, each stem a braided rope of translucent nylon, and somehow shimmy up the towering stairs. They’re like two river bluffs, but with a wall of thick green ropes to sink my fingers into, and I reach the plateau of the living room, then I make a dash for the front door, but then I’m not sure at all how I’d get outside, and what would I find beyond that door anyway? Probably a plain of white lineoleum as far as my eyes could see, and the gin and tonic in my hand, which I somehow managed not to spill in the arduous trek to get here, would seem like a tiny dew drop to whatever Biggest Guy inhabited this third outer house. Motes of dust would seem like boulders, but there would be so few of them, because the Biggest Guy’s little wife would, like the other two, be an amazing and conscientious and obsessive housecleaner, one of the upsides of the illness. And but this Biggest House, it looks as if they simply cannot make sheets of clinical contact paper to fit windows this big, it would be like trying to wallpaper the sky, and there are shafts of sunlight that seem like search beams and they hurt my eyes and my skin and make me feel like an ant under a magnifying glass.

I feel something stir in my breast pocket. My god, I brought her along, my beautiful little lady. She is still asleep in there, curled up sweetly, her drink spilled and leaving a little blot like ink on the outside of my shirt over my left breast. I cannot believe she didn’t wake up with all the jostling, and I am filled to my very core with adoration for that little lady and even for her illness, and I am suddenly filled with fear for her, a strong sense of pending doom. Why had I been so stupid and foolish? Why hadn’t I left her back in our little house? In her fragile state, and her diminished size and all, and exposure to direct sunlight and who knew what else in this Biggest House – which was no house at all, not in any meaningful sense, when the walls were over the horizon, and the ceiling extended over the edge of the horizon too, and beams of light from some unseen source, the gigantic unshaded windows, laid on the linoleum floor like channels of burning acid, and boulders hung weirdly in the air, seemingly lit from within, and falling slowly to the glossy floor around us like weather balloons.

I rush back inside the Bigger House. I hear no sign of the Bigger Guy nor his little wife. Maybe they have climbed up the colossal set of stairs to the curtained bedroom I know must be above us, if their house corresponds to our house according to the requirements of symmetry, and holding one hand over my chest, gently, softly, to keep her from jostling and waking, I climb hand under hand down the carpeted stairs, digging the toes of my wingtips into the carpet. I get to the bottom and start running as best as I can, sort of hacking my way through the waist-high green shag with my free hand. And its very tiring, I’m out of breath and my heart is racing, and I can feel sweat dripping down my sides on the inside of my dress shirt inside my Harris Tweed, I wouldn’t have ventured out so overdressed in this heat, but it didn’t seem hot until you were desperately running for your life. I can see the door of our house, it’s open the way I left it, and I’m not really jogging now but walking as fast as I can, picking my way through the carpet. And before I even understand what has happened, I’ve fallen down on my hands and knees, my drink has spilled and I can’t find the glass in this damn carpet, and I feel her begin to stir in my shirt pocket, and I look behind me, and it looks as though I’ve tripped over the enormous back of an earring, the size of an industrial flange. Much too big for the little lady, and I feel a panic attack coming, and never mind the empty highball glass, forget about it, or maybe I’ll come and get it later after we’ve rested back inside our comfortable house. I get up and start running again, and finally make the steps to our porch, duck inside, and slam the door behind me. Thank God we made it back.

The feeling was bizarre. Now I felt like a giant in the house I just left, though it’s my house – our house. Everything suddenly shrunk to size. The bluffs I’d just climbed down were now just shallow steps down into the sunken living room. The thicket I’d just crossed was now just emerald green wall-to-wall carpet, in great shape but sort of dated. It gave me a sense of vertigo. I needed a fresh drink. The thought occurred to me to look for the earring back, but I pushed the thought out of my mind, and loosened my collar and tie. A good sit down, that’s what I needed. I crossed the carpet, and nearly tripped again. Something in the middle of the floor. It was a child’s toy, made of garish-colored plastic or pressed paper. I thought we’d gotten rid of everything. I didn’t remember this one, nor understand how you’d play with it. The door wouldn’t open, and the windows were not real, they were painted on the surface. I picked the house up and held it in my hands, and then I shook it. There was something inside. Just one something, making a singular rattle, the way you know it’s just one thing, not two or three things or a bunch of things. Just one thing. I set the toy down and patted my shirt pocket, reassured to find my best fountain pen there. But it had leaked a little ink, leaving a blot that looked like dry blood.

Flexibility

2009-09-24T07:23:00.000-07:00

"Be like a knee. A knee is flexible, it bends. Well, it bends in one direction at least. It does not break, unless a mallet is used, but that's beside the point. OK, be like a tree, which is flexible. It bends in a strong wind but does not break. A wind from any direction pretty much. Eventually though it gets uprooted and crushes the clown bus, and red wigs go rolling like tumbleweeds down the street and a small dirty boy who has never had anything except empty tin cans and scraps of tin foil with burned cheese, picks up one of these rolling clown wigs, puts it on and gets head lice and afterward scratches his scalp until it bleeds and oozes but no one lives on Gannon Street anymore anyway, what with the violence of that storm, and the tragedy of the clown troupe, and the eventual breaking point of even a very flexible, young, soft wood sapling like dogwood or something like that."

No one in the room laughed at this. Big Hans was doing his best, which was not bad for someone who spoke English as a second language. It was very impressionistic. It would look great on film. The producers knew this but they wanted to torture Big Hans simply because he'd insinuated himself into their whole, you know, creative process. They talked about him in low voices when they washed their hands in the toilet. A more sensitive person would have figured it out, would have felt unwelcome a long time ago. They hated him, but now they liked having someone around to hate. It gave them something to sadistic to do.

Where did he come from? Someone's friend. A caterer? A prostitute? He definitely was not a SAG member. They finally wore out and cast him in a role. "Here's the setup," they said when he'd been sent away on some crappy errand. Big Hans would push a sandwich cart, but instead of sandwiches, it would have a lot of phallic fruits and vegetables. Big laugh! Long bananas curved like a soft-on. Straight, oversized cucumbers. Ha ha ha! Carrots carefully sculpted to look like they had a dickhead on the fat part, the end or whatever, where the greens used to be. Hand-selected winter squash that looked like a long fat dong with a ball sack at the base of it. So Big Hans pushes this cart into a meeting -- an actual writers meeting or whatever. Yes, this is one of those meta-humor pieces where the actors and writers and producers are playing themselves, pretending to do a read through of some new script. And Big Hans, he's wearing a ridiculous caterer's outfit, a white double-breasted jacket, houndstooth pants, a high hat. Look how sheepish he is! He doesn't even know he's on camera! What, they don't have television or movies in Bergen? He's so naive, it's almost perfect. This is going to be great.

Big Hans rolls the cart into the meeting and everyone stops talking. They look at him. He looks back at them. He nods down at the cart. The executive producer ambles over to the cart, and looks under a couple of silver domes, whatever those stupid fucking things are called in fancy hotels. "What is this?" he screams at Big Hans. Big Hans cringes. He doesn't know! It's whatever they put under there for him to push into this room. They told him not to look! The executive producer is pushing the cart on wheels back against Big Hans. Big Hans is getting pushed back up against a wall with some sort of framed award. As his head and back get pushed up against the wall, the framed picture falls to the floor and breaks. Big laughs! The executive producer is continuing to push the cart very hard, putting all his weight into it, leaning. Big Hans looks scared, his mouth makes a big O. The executive producer very carefully reaches with one hand down and finds a yellow zucchini with spots like moles and a slight curve to the left. Big Hans thinks he's in very big trouble! Why are his friends treating him like this? Who is the man with the video camera, and why isn;t he helping? Everyone is laughing! Laughing at him! But this is a comedy show, so it will be very good! It hurts, the cart is really pushing hard against his pubic bone, he's standing on his tiptoes, the pain the pain. Tears are welling up in his eyes, either from the physical pain or the emotional trauma. The executive producer is starting to put the zucchini into Big Hans's mouth, ha ha ha ha! The whole room has exploded with laughter and penis jokes, this is going to be fucking hilarious! A look of terror suddenly comes over Big Hans's face. He yells something in Norwegian, the Norwegian or something word for "holy shit." Heilige Scheisse! And then some more very quickly spoken words, but the the tone is "Dude, you are so not my friend anymore!" There is a meat cleaver in his hand, it was in the framed award picture. That's weird! But it was from some cooking show on the network. Big Hans takes a swing at the zucchini that is being forced into his mouth. He cuts it nicely in half, the mouth-end falling onto the silver dome or whatever, then bouncing down to the floor. The executive producer is surpised, and he withdraws the cleanly cut zucchini to take a look at it. But Big Hans wants to cut the zucchini one more time, to make it even smalled. He swings the cleaver, and severs all four of the executive producers fingers, they patter down onto the cart of penis vegetables and fruits. Then there is a big gout of blood, and the pressure to the catering cart is released, and Big Hans slumps to the floor while everyone else in the room is in shock at seeing the passed out executive producer. Girls hold their hands over their mouths. Then Big Hans starts to giggle, and this turns into a guffaw, and finally a rolling thunderous Norwegian or whatever laugh. "That was really funny!" he says again and again, tears streaming down his face. "Reallly really funny, you guys! The penis cart! Ha ha ha ha."

Our Disagreement

2009-09-03T05:48:00.000-07:00

We had a conflict on our hands. He'd committed an act that we despised. He didn't see what was wrong with that act. He hated us for hating it. We urged him to go defile himself. He responded with a similar oath at us. There were hand gestures. "Let's settle this like men," he said. "Like you'd even know," we said. He gaped at us, not understanding. "What to do," we added, to aid him in understanding. "To settle it. Like men." He took a swing at us. We ducked and bit him on the ankle. He called us something malignant, but our teeth remained clenched around his ankle. He tried to kick us off, but we were much too heavy for him. He yelped with pain and fell down, and then with his free foot, pushed our head away. The legs are very powerful levers, the strongest muscles in the body. He cursed our name. "And another thing," he said. "What's with the royal 'we'?" We couldn't take the time right now to explain that it was an opportunity to stop using the first person all the time, which is very tiring. We lunged at his throat, but he moved deftly away. We tried a new tack. We asked him what he'd been thinking when he committed the vile act to which we objected. "What were you thinking?" we asked. It was, he said, none of our business. Why did we have to go poking our noses where they didn't belong? We replied that we were not aware that he was the one who determined where noses belonged, and whose belonged where. "We are the sole determinants of where our noses are poked and where they are not poked." He guffawed and sneered. "Again with the royal we. We we we. All the way home." Somehow he made a move that was too fast to perceive and he was grinding our face into the floor material. "School starts pretty soon," we said into the floor material. "Who do you think you'll get for a teacher?" He accused us of trying to change the subject, while he increased the pressure. Our cheekbones were getting rug-burned. "We've been out of school for 25 years, you moron," he said, switching hands. "Now who's using the royal we," we said, but the words were lost in the carpet. We privately vowed to never come to another reunion.

Gary

2009-09-02T05:36:00.000-07:00

I'm so sorry! Gary, get down! We've had him fixed and everything, but ever since he was housebroken he's been a humper. Gary. GARY! I can't tell you how embarassing it is. Oh, gosh. Now you've spilled your drink. Let me help you with that. I'm telling you, I can't take him anywhere. At the park, he runs right up to the nearest dogwalker and off he goes, like a little piston engine, hump hump hump!

The other day, we were walking to the little bodega at 42nd and Nicollet? And we saw Mrs. Wurl, you remember her? Kind old Mrs. Wurl who lost her husband last year? Well Gary sniffs her hand, and then jumps up on her back, knocking her down, and he starts humping her head!

GARY, stop humping EVELYN NOW! You go LAY DOWN ON YOUR BED, Gary! Good boy.

I don't know what I'm going to do, honestly. I can't live like this! Between you and me, I think I might need to get a divorce.

Shore Leave

2009-08-31T04:22:00.000-07:00

Scene: A map of Lake Superior. The south shore and the north shore are arguing like two lips on the same face. The north shore has a fake German accent. The south shore has a fake Italian accent.

I am the south shore. Better shore! Bellisima! The south shore trembles as it speaks.

You are NOT zee better shore. You are all like southern und sandy.

Children play on a sandy beach. A black waiter carries a mint julip on a silver tray. A white man in a straw derby says, "Thanks boy." To the kids: "Y'all enjoying the water?"

Yeah but the north shore, what are you? All igneous. Pointy granite. No barefeet. And your water is much too cold for the swimming in.

A man walks barefoot across a rocky ledge, as if on hot coals. A scientific chart of male genitalia shows a scrotum shrinking and then disappearing with a little "POP!"

Who wants to swim anyway? In your little hosen.

Not hosen. Bathing suits. Why can't you just learn to relax? With you it's all spashing waves and iron ore, 24/7.

Ach. You are so shiftless and unproductive. Why can't I have a better southern shore? One that's more northern?

You don't know how to enjoy life. You are a sad, lonely shoreline.

Whatever. The north shore is more manly and rugged. I sink ships! You are lazy and tan, and all pinching the women's bottoms.

The State of California enters the picture.

California is handsome like Fred Jones from Scooby Doo.

Dudes, I'm gonna need your water. We've got fires and golf courses that need a lot of aqua. Thanks a lot!

A hose comes out of Los Angeles and sucks all the water out of Lake Superior. The north shore collapses onto the south shore.

Ach, get a way from me. You are oily and smell like coconut.

Lake Michigan? A little help over here?

Lake Michigan, hanging like a flaccid penis, begins to rise to an erect position. When it reaches Duluth, it refills Lake Superior.

Borrowed Toothpaste

2009-08-25T06:10:00.000-07:00

Jerry Case has little teeth. There is a product: Little Toothpaste. Jerry orders it online. Jerry and Corey are on a fishing trip. The tent is up, the sun is going down, and they're getting ready for bed. Corey forgot his Leprechaun Toothpaste. In his beautiful, lilting, eventually irritating brogue, he asks Jerry if he can borrow some of Jerry's toothpaste. "Just a wee bit, for a didnae bring me own," he says. Jerry replies grumpily: "What the hell good is your magic if a) you need to brush your teeth or b) you cannot magically poof some lepre-paste into existence magically?" Corey says, "That's redundant, mate."

Informational filmstrip: Many witches, warlocks, wizards, seraphim, cherabim, and imps have terrible teeth. Merlin had dentures from an early age. Look at this photo of Harry Potter, and notice the heavy layer of plaque on his bicuspids. He's still young. In another 100 years, those will need to come out. Even Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, had terrible breath because she never flossed, resulting inevitably in an epic case of gingivitis.

"This is Little Toothpaste. It's specialized and it's expensive," says Jerry testily. "What a coincidence," says Corey, "for aye hae little teeth as well!" Jerry frowns. "You are a leprechaun. You have children's teeth, not little teeth." Corey is trying to grab Jerry's toothpaste. Jerry is holding it over his head as Corey jumps for it. "Give it me! Give it me!" he says. Each time he jumps he makes a little cloud of glitter and rainbows.

Suddenly a unicorn gallups through the campsite and impales both Jerry and Corey on its long horn. It smiles, showing a bright row of little teeth that gleem blindingly.

Boner Pants (Patent Pending)

2009-08-22T04:41:00.000-07:00

When a man or boy sits down, his pants will often bunch up in the crotch, giving the distinct impression that he's got an erection. At school. Or in an important meeting with clients.

[Fig. No. 1]

This can be quite embarrassing, even if other boys and men don't jeer at him, or if attractive girls don't look at him with horror, such as the executive vice president of D'ouche Inc. LLP.

[Fig. No. 2]

This invention, patent pending, is a low-cost, data-rich solution.

[Fig. No. 3]

The small red flag hangs down loosely and unobtrusively from the fly of this man's dress slacks.

[Fig. No. 4]

But when he sits down at his desk or in a conference room or on the stage of a major corporate presentation, the flag system is activated.

[Fig. No. 5]

The flag goes up, displaying its data-rich information: "NOT A BONER." This information is rapidly communicated to all concerned persons in the immediate vicinity, reassuring them that the man or boy is not in any way aroused.

[Fig. No. 6]

Skeptics and patent lawyers may well ask whether the system is failsafe. What happens when the man or boy does, in fact, have a boner.

[Fig. No. 7]

Simple! Our BONER TRUSS, patent pending, redirects an actual erection. Other flags can quickly be deployed with messages that comfort and distract.

[Fig. No. 8]

Such as "NICE DAY, HUH?" and "TRY THE PILAF." A resourceful man or boy could also deploy this as advertising space, turning his involuntary erections into an opportunity to "capture eyeballs" and make money.

[Fig. No.9]

Such as this delightful endorsement for the Sears Christmas layaway program.

[Fig. No.10]

Diabetic

2009-08-18T05:52:00.000-07:00

A leprechaun in an orange unitard drives a moped. It is all wound out, making a high pitched whine as the leprechaun bends low for speed.

Mods on Vespas pull alongside and make fun of him. They force him off the road, and he explodes with glitter and a rainbow.

A group of yuppies on Honda Gold Wings pull alongside the mods, and make rude/dismissive gestures. They force the mods off the road, and they explode with loud guitar twangs, sunglasses and skinny ties flying everywhere.

A group of Hell’s Angels pulls alongside the yuppies. They throw chains and shoot machine guns at the yuppies, their heads fly off inside helmets with integrated headphones. Their abandoned Gold Wings drive off a cliff.

The Space Shuttle comes down and shoots lasers at the Hell’s Angels, frying a number of them. Then it squashes the last ones by landing on the highway.

The leprechaun pulls his moped into a Circle K. Mean Mean Randy starts to harass him. “Nice suit, dude!” He pushes the leprechaun down. Little shamrocks twinkle in the leprechaun’s eyes. Luther intervenes. “Leave Corey alone. He’s diabetic.” Corey goes inside. “Hey Corey, same as usual?” says a kid behind the counter. He makes him a blue slushy. Corey flips him a gold coin. “Dude, I can’t take those anymore. My manager.”

A crane-arm machine is poised over a stuffed animal. A gold coin is inserted in the panel, and it gets jammed. A fist pounds on the panel.

Corey digs in a pocket somewhere in his unitard, and finds a crumpled bill. A shot of insulin goes into his belly. He sucks up the entire slushy. The spoon-straw gets every last drop from the corners of the bottom of the cup, making a loud slurping sound. Little lightning bolts of pain flash on Corey’s forehead.

Corey, Luther, and Mean Randy are drinking pina coladas in a hot tub. Corey is still wearing his orange unitard. Trance music thumps. In a paneled rumpus room, there is a spread of food: cocktail wieners arranged in a Mogen David, Chex party mix, and a punchbowl full of gold coins at the end of a rainbow.

“Oh my God, did that Chex party mix have gluten in it?” cries Mean Randy. The hot tub erupts like a volcano, sending Corey, Luther, and Randy into the atmosphere. The Space Shuttle opens its shuttle bay doors and picks them up. It acclerates away, leaving a rainbow and glitter in its wake.

The Man In Pressed Jeans

2009-08-14T06:06:00.001-07:00

This is the man who always wears a suit. His name is William, don't call him Bill or Will. William is a middlemanagement type. He gets paid tons of moolah to do pretty much nothing, but he has to do it like 120 hours per week. That's why he makes the big bucks. William looks smart in an ever-revolving wardrobe of suits. But William looks terrible in casual clothes. Here is his closet. There are 52 suits, and 3 vests. There are 12 dress shirts and five pairs of loafers. But on the far right side of the closet here, you can see that he has one pair of very clean running shoes. And folded neatly over this hanger is a pair of denim blue jeans, pre-faded. There is a nice crisp line down the center of each pant leg. On a hanger next to these dry-cleaned jeans is a knit shirt with the logo of his company, D'Ouche Inc. LLC. Next to that, apparently, are a pair of boy's lederhosen.

William, take a moment to put these casual clothes on. Come on, man! Unwind a little bit! You're off the clock! William is checkingh his fucking BlackBerry. William!WILLIAM. Good. OK, now go ahead and go into the bathroom, and get casual. I'll turn around.

William, casual does not equal naked. Nude eequals naked. Brainteaser: You go to the office on a Thursday. You see a memo on your fucking BlackBerry from H.R. It says REMEMBER, everyone! TMRW IS CASUAL FRDAY! You work your 16 hour day and get home exahausted. You hang your tie up on the chair that means GO TO DRY CLEANER, along with your pants, your jacket, your dress shirt--that goes into the dress shirt garbage. Now you are ready for bed. In the morning, what do you put on before you go to work. Do you put NOTHING on? NO! No! No! Do you go to work showing your penis? NO!

So William, when I said I'll turn around and you go get casual, that does not mean NAKED to me or to anyone else. It means that far side of your closet, the jeans, the knit shirt, the running shoes. Try again.

OK, good. Now see how there is a crease down the center of your jeans? These have been either ironed, or drycleaned, or both. That is BAD. It is not casual, in any way. NO ONE irons or drycleans their jeans. If they are new, then do not wear them. Yes, it's a difficult cycle to break into: How do you wear jeans that are not new when they have to be new before you can wear them? That's why I'm here. You can actually wash those jeans first. NOT DRY CLEAN. Wash them in a standard appliance in your basement, or at a local laundromat. This will make them look casual instead of formal.

Now look at the shirt you';re wearing. It is more casual than a dress shirt and tie, for sure. You're right about that. But it has your company logo on it, D'Ouche Inc. LLC. That makes it seem like you got it for free or for being employee of the month, neither of which is casual. That's just really sad. Plus, knit shirts are kind of not that popular anymore. Lose the shirt, go with a tee shirt of some kind. It should say something mildly offensive, or advertise a product that you enjoy that only cool people know about.

Those running shoes? William, they suck. No one wears running shoes except runners, and even some of them are so embarassed that they run barefooted.

But let's work with what we've got here. You are standing like you're wearing a suit. Look in this mirror. It magically reflects you wearing a suit! And you have exactly the same posture! When you stand in that posture, no matter what you're wearing, the world sees a man in a suit who is trying to look casual, but he can't do it. You're like a guy trying to look like he enjoys eating beets, but who has never eaten vegetables his whole life. This is going to take some practice, but there are some easy tips. Scratch you butt or your belly once in a while. Mess up your hair. Spill some junk down the front of you. Get a large dog that sheds a lot. I don;t know, JUST DO SOMETHING NORMAL for a while. Worry about the stock market. Pretend you don't know where your next meal is coming from.

My God, William. There MUST be some way to make you look as if you've worn jeans before! Let him shine, the little boy that must have enjoyed wearing those little lederhosen! Let me see the little lederhosen boy! William, I want to see the little lederhosen boy!

William is on his knees pulling something out from under the bed. It's a boy with his mouth and wrists and ankles duct-taped. He is wearing the lederhosen.

Bad William!

Impact Drill

2009-08-11T05:20:00.000-07:00

"You need an impact drill for that!"
"I've used an impact drill for years."
"My father had an impact drill. Man, I'd still be trying to do what I was trying to do without my dad's impact drill."
"That would look pretty silly! A grown man still working on a boy's project! With other, inferior tools!"
"Imagine that! I'd just come back from my father's funeral. I'd go out to the garage and keep on working, the kid's project still not done. And my father's tool chest, back there in our old garage. Quietly cradling that impact drill. Birds calling in the nearby trees. A cricket trilling."
"People at the wake would say what a great man your father was, and how he had so many useful tools out in the garage — tools that were never lent because no one ever asked."
"But that is not what happened!"
"No, your dad gave you access to that impact drill."
"Along with a full assortment of useful bits!"
"Yes, access to both the drill and the bits! You can't have one without the other!"
"No! An impact drill without a bit would leave me right where I started!
"And right where you ended! Still working on a kid's project to this day!"
"Only maybe even dumber! Standing there like an idiot, holding a drill with no bit! 30 years later! Ha ha ha!"
"Yes. Just one drill bit away from finishing that kid's project for all those years!"
"My father was a generous man. A well-equipped, generous man."
"Even when you stood in his light?"
"Well, he did get a little angry, and knock on my head like it was a door to an empty house. 'Anyone IN THERE?!' he'd cry out."
"And there WAS someone in there! You! A young, vulnerable man wishing to emulate his well-equipped, generous father!"
"Yes, I was in there. Sometimes cowering under a bathroom fixture, but I was in there."
"In case he threw something!"
"Right. Since once he threw a ball-peen hammer across the room, due to a stubborn bolt or pawl or set pin or lock ring, or a slide cylinder stuck in place through disuse and no lube."
"It could happen to anyone!"
"Projects that do not progress can be extremely frustrating!"
"Make you feel useless! Like the universe is aligned against you! Like physical reality is your enemy! Like the laws of nature are unjust!"
"My father's impact drill was a great comfort to me."
"In many, many projects! Even the ones that did not progress!"
"That is true. On the whole, I was never disappointed with that impact drill."
"And you still have it! Have it right there in your garage, cradled quietly in your tool box!"
"My son will soon start his projects. And I only hope to be the well-equipped, generous, somewhat patient man my father was! And when the time comes, impart my impact drill to him, saying something like, 'THIS WAS MY FATHER'S impact drill."
"And when the time comes for your son to remember you, pass along the tool to his son etc. etc...."
"I hope that he aspires to the same generosity, preparedness, and nominal patience."
"A family legacy!"
"Yes! The kind of thing that gets mentioned at memorial services, interments, spreading of ashes, and so on!"
"What a generous man with good tools!"
"A place for every tool, every tool in its place!"
"A well equipped, organized man!"
"A man who didn't like someone standing in his light!"
"But who showed some restraint, most of the time!"
"A man with his passions! That occasionally erupted!"
"In a garage that needed sweeping!"
"Yes! Yes! Yes."

Boob Yo Yo's

2009-08-07T06:47:00.001-07:00

A man sees a beautiful woman across the room. She is drinking a cocktail. He is drinking a cocktail. He smiles at her. She smiles coyly back at him. He sips from his cocktail and it dribbles down his chin. He holds his hand up to his mouth and mouths the word OOPS. She laughs and her breasts bounce. Inside her dress, there are yo-yos that descend from each breast. They go up and down, up and down. The woman is now dancing with the man on a disco stage. She performs a kick-ball-change. Inside her dress, one yo-yo walks the dog while the other one goes around the world. The couple leaves the disco, holding hands. They are in her bedroom, and it's too dark to see anything, and there is heavy breathing. Later, the man quietly picks up his pennyloafers and his underwear and his other piled-up clothes and leaves. The yo yos are unspun, their strings tangled. A miniature cigarette butt has been stubbed out on the woman's skin.

A child types happily on a laptop computer. The computer growls at the child. The child laughs. The computer growls again. The child laughs. The child begins to type something else on the computer. The lid suddenly clamps shut on the child's hands. The child screams and cries. A nice man in a suit says, "Don't let this happen to your child." He demonstrates a triangle of plastic with suction cups on two sides. The triangle can be installed on a laptop computer to prevent the lid from shutting on a child's hands. The plastic triangle is now installed, and the child is happy typing on the computer again. The child must reach around the triangle to hit the return key, but this doesn't bother him. The computer growls. The child laughs. The computer growls again. The child laughs again. The plastic triangle begins to bend, then it snaps. The child screams and cries. Another man in a suit says, "Don't let this happen to your child." The child is sitting at a regular desktop computer, with casts on both hands. Next to that child is another child, working on a laptop. She is wearing hockey gloves. She periodically punches the screen, hard.

There Is Very Little Dog Food Left In the Container, Part 1

2009-07-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

I was looking for a shortcut, because I was running late. It was a part of town that was blasted. Empty buildings looked charred, weeds grew out of cracks like cocktail spears, my God I couldn't be late again, I could smell my own oniony breath. I jumped through the half window of a building that was gone into a basement half-filled with concrete chunks. Two men in leather jackets --some kind of club? -- rushed past, and leaned into the windows, looking for someone, possibly me. What did they want? I saw the gleam of black guns in their hands. Guns! Like Uzis and sawed off shotguns with a handle where the stock would be. They just looked like guns that would make ragged, raw tears in your skin, not surgical little holes.

I got across the hole and jumped out of the basement, and I started running down a dirt road and there were palm trees and yucca along this road, and then all a sudden, a man with dark hair and what you'd call a swarthy complexion stepped out of the brush with his Uzi aimed at me, and he was smiling, but it was not a brutal or cruel or twixxed smile. It was a friendly smile. Did it really make him happy to know I'd be dead in just a few moments? The psychopathology fascinated me. But no. He looked down and realized he was pointing his gun at me and he was very embarrassed. No no no no, he said. Not. Not! He swung the gun over his shoulder on like a guitar strap so that it hung on his back now. He reached out something to me, and it turned out to be jasmine massage oil -- a full bottle, but it had leaked to stain the paper label a little bit -- and a deck of Bicycle brand playing cards. You have to accept gifts like this even if they charge you for them later. I bowed and mouthed thank you thank you. I don't know why I didn't just say it out loud. Surely everyone understood those words no matter what language they spoke: Hello. Coca-Cola. Okay. Fuck you. Please. Thank you. I turned to walk away. The swarthy guy yelled after me. Hey! I turned around and walked back to him with a question mark on my face. He handed me a square-barrelled pistol. I shifted the cards and oil into one hand, took the pistol, and stuck it in my pants.

I was late to the dentist, and my breath smelled bad, and when I came into the waiting room holding a pistol, everyone screamed. I forgot I was holding it. It had gotten sweaty and uncomfortable in my pants, and when I jogged the last two or three miles, the weight of it was making my pants fall down. So I had the gun in one hand, and the deck of cards and the massage oil in the other hand. No! I said. No no no. There was a man with a rag tied around his head like olden times, he was cowering behind an issue of Field & Stream. There was a mother and child waiting for prophylactic sealant, they were hiding behind an upturned coffeetable. The receptionist who didn't bother wearing scrubs, but a sassy sweater; Can I help you? she said peevishly. Is it possible to brush my teeth first? I said. Hold your horses, she said. Do you have an appointment? I was very embarrassed. Yes, of course. Sorry. Jerry Case, 9:30 for Dr. Ramsey. You're 35 minutes late, she said. Yes, well. I'm sorry. I laid the pistol, the oil, and the cards on the counter in front of her, and she was unimpressed. You don't have a brush on file here, she said. But we can get one started for you. She opened a drawer and took out a new toothbrush sealed in a plastic tube. She wrote some sort of code on the white end of it, and then typed that code into her computer. She reached the tube over the counter and pointed to a doorway that said TOOTHBRUSHES ON FILE. I took the brush and went into the toothbrushing room, a long well-let room with a huge mirror and dozens of sinks and opposite the mirror, a bank of tiny little shelves, each cubby hole just big enough to fit a toothbrush tube, each tube with a strange code written on it similar to mine: U842. The mirror was basically clean, except at one station there were white flecks where someone had already brushed his teeth today.

The Bird

2009-07-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

They all put their shoes in zip-lock bags. A man had cut his pants in half. Didn't he notice? Everyone laughed at him, and he laughed too, looking a bit sheepish. One buttock jiggled. Then he got a serious red look on his face and he flew the bird from a stiff arm, pointing it around the circle in each person's face. His lips were tight, and his other fist held up his half-pants. The bird swept around the circle. Suddenly, the man laughed again. His face crunched up like a pop can, and his laughing degraded into weeping. "None of you are sensitive enough!" he said, ropes of snot coming out of his nostrils. "You all lack subtlety. You're not fully realized." Everyone stared at him, and then they looked around at each other. They each understood then that there was no back story. None of them had been distinguished or defined individually. They were just a faceless, sexless group. Men in unbuttoned dress shirts, women in skirts or slacks, everyone standing around in their socks or their nylons. The man in the half-pants had created quite a spectacle! Then he'd flipped them all off. Finally, he'd accused them of being unrealized. And he was right! At each blow, he seemed a little less crazy and a little more sagacious. Even his belt had been cut in half. Its loose ends dangled uselessly from the belt loops.

Dissimilar Things

2009-06-23T06:33:00.000-07:00

"Punched him so hard his legs turned into trombones." --The Mighty Boosh

I ran so fast that my ears reversed.--Jerry Case

Samson put his peelings around the corner, and the corner-keeper was displeased. "Are you trying to make a move on me?" he said. "Because I so hope you're not."--Terwilliger IV

All the similar things can be stored together or aggregated, like eggs. Or they can be separated, and put at a great distance from each other. "What is this doing here?" asks a Plan Man. He foresees a future of similar things stored together, adjacent to each other. That will leave lots of empty space in the great distance. He chins down and polishes his badge with a white hankie.

A Disruptive Force enters the area. His name is Rudy, and he is good at separating similar things. He often separates things from their own constituent parts, turning them into mostly useless smaller things, sharp-edged polygons.

The Plan Man approaches. "Hello, young fellow!" Rudy eyes the badge suspiciously. The Plan Man wears a silly thin-lipped rictus, his eyebrows are cocked up, he's holding his baton behind his back with both hands. He even rolls up on the balls of his feet, which are wearing black shoes.

"What are your plans for me?" asks Rudy.

"I am waiting to see whether you behave predictably or unpredictably," is the reply. "And that will inform the shaping of a plan for you." Rudy considers this, and does nothing else for a long time. They look at each other. Time passes. "Now what is your plan for me?" asks Rudy.

"There has been no change in the plan status," is the reply. "You have not behaved in a conclusive manner."

"You mean you are not yet able to infer from my actions what plan should be formed?" asks Rudy.

The Plan Man is irritated, like an official person with specialized knowledge that is now useless. Then a Natural Event occurs which causes disorder. The main consequence of which is disheveling the hair, and this irritates the P.M. too. Little things are slightly out of place now. Rudy smirks knowingly, because he is aware that the Plan Man is working against long odds, on the wrong side. He picks up a nearby stick and disaggregates it boldly.

That is the conflict here, the dramatic tension. Rudy, doing nothing, is a part of the anti-Plan agenda, and so is the Natural Event. Breaking the stick is a symbolic though unnecessary statement -- gilding the lily, frankly. The Plan Man pursues a venerable but by no means universal compulsion to aggregate similar things, operating on an assumption that empty space is itself a worthwhile aggregate, which in any case is emotionally soothing to persons of the P.M. sensibility. It's true that his badge catches the light just so, and twinkles delightfully when it reflects, say, the flickering candle of an unintentionally romantic dinner when there is a power outage. Or the red and blue strobes of an emergency vehicle on its way to some domestic catastrophe.

The verbal portion of the test is now complete.

Little Balls

2009-06-23T06:03:00.000-07:00

In this area, there were colored balls big as your mouth. We had not been in this area before, looking for energy and entertainment. Some of the colored balls had been there a long time; their colors were faded. Others were newer and had long streamers reaching away. Phil said he'd seen a guy once with a ball, just going around with it wherever he went. "Black with a white dot," he said. "It got your attention." We pressed him. Who? When? It came out that it was one of those friend-of-a-friend things. Not witnessed first hand.

After a long silence, Little Peter said a member of his family had been "taken away" by a white ball. Taken away? What did that even mean? And which family member, surely he knew? Little Peter clamped his mouth shut and googled his eyes, wishing he'd never said anything. We assumed he was making it all up.

Cherise said, "They look good." Not the word we'd use for it. Interesting maybe. Certainly they looked out of place, not like the other things you saw in this area. Fauna. Flora. That kind of thing. The terrain. Some of these balls were hard to see, some were like eyes staring back at you. Some were big, some were small. They all had the same features though: the ball part, then a long thin curved tail, and on top--what seemed like the top--the hair part.

Suddenly there was a terrible shadow, like a cloud. We'd seen these before in other areas. But then something we'd never seen: One of the balls descending to the ground, looking alive. It gave little starts, it had a streamer longer than any other ball we'd seen. And on its tail there was something very familiar: energy and entertainment. Before we could say anything, Little Peter went over to check it out and to take the E&E, and when he took it--Gosh! We'd never seen him move so fast away from us, running so fast, like he was trying to escape us forever. "But did you see the look in his eye?" said Cherise. "It was like he was frightened." Martin finally spoke up. "Like not under his own power."

We wondered what kind of energy and entertainment that had been. We wanted to try some ourselves. We were concerned about Little Peter. We looked at all of the lifeless balls around us, looking for more clues, more E&E. The terrible shadow moved away.

Butter

2009-06-02T05:13:00.000-07:00

"God I hate this noveau cooking," the companion said, and then I was trying to think of something conciliatory to say because I like noveau cooking -- at least some of it, not all of it, to be sure -- but I wanted to be agreeable. "Yes, it's about one thing..." I said leadingly, but the companion was disinterested as he swirled his wine. "Butter," I said. "Oh, I know!" he said, suddenly animated. "Everything is swimming in butter! Who doesn't like butter?" This left me to consider whether the companion was admitting to being the one person who does not like things swimming in butter, though his statement made it clear that it was precisely the butter that made noveau food good, made people really like it. I reflected on the way the companion swirled his wine in its big snifter and, holding the glass up to his face, tried almost to touch the tipping wine with his nose, which was smallish and upturned a bit at the end. I reflected on his velvet lapels and the silk cravat that he wore, and the pencil-thin moustache. "You don't like butter?" I said, not unkindly. "Wouldn't know," he said, dismissively. "Never had it." This was vexing. A grown man, never had butter! Was it a heart condition? A genetic predisposition to constricted blood vessels, known about since before he'd been weened? An obsessive concern with cholesterol? Or perhaps he was playing some trick on me, defining in some private way butter as something other than what I knew butter to be. Perhaps he thought of butter as, for example, something cheap, common, and store-bought, whereas real butter-- called something else, naturally-- was prepared carefully and diligently by special masters of the art in small batches for private customers. Perhaps he'd been raised in circumstances of extreme privilege and insularity that would mean he'd never been exposed to the sort of butter everyone buys at the grocery store in one-pound bricks, sometimes divided into paper-wrapped quarters. It was hard to speculate. I watched him carefully. He set down his glass and, with a long elegant hand, withdrew a white silk scarf from a slit in his wasitcoat. With the other hand, he removed his pince-nez delicately, held it to his mouth and exhaled on each lens, then with a flourish of the silk scarf, cleaned the lenses. I slammed both fists down on the table, and the tablesettings jumped. Porcelain cups leaped in their saucers, a soup spoon turned over, a tidal wave ran to the rim of the companion's wine snifter. He appeared not to notice. "My father was president of the Westby Coop Creamery!" I yelled. "Not a day in his life passed that he didn't reach over to the butter keeper with his butter knife, and pop a small filet of butter right into his mouth! Not a single day, and he -- a simple diary farmer -- lived for nine decades!" The companion finally turned his eyes away from the pince-nez, sniffed, and worked his mouth as if preparing to say something. "Longevity," he finally said, "is for some considered to be a curse." With long fingers he stuffed the silk back into the slit of his vest. But this in no way addressed the question of the butter! Or rather, it implied that butter, if it had indeed prolonged the life of my beloved, hardworking, manure-spattered father with a small gift for the management of non-profit agrarian cooperatives, a people person-- that butter was somehow to blame for the negative outcome of a long, productive life. Outrageous! What he seemed to be saying was, to my mind, surreal and I told him so. "What you seem be saying is outrageous and surreal!" The companion made a gesture to the waiter or perhaps the sommolier, a two fingers lifted and scissoring the air next to his temple. Did he mean that the longevity of some people is a curse to the rest of us? Or that longevity is a curse to those who would rather die before they'd become an inconvenience to themselves? The waiter or sommolier came over to our table without a word, and bowed from the waist. "Please bring this man some butter," said my companion. "Just a small dish, no ice. Thank you, garcon." Now he was ordering for me! And not an entree or an appetizer, nor a soup, nor a gratin. Butter! A simple condiment, a spread! This was insult added to injury, and I would not tolerate such impudence from the companion.

Repurposed

2009-05-27T04:54:00.000-07:00

This whole place could be climbed, they built it that way when the camp was going to be a climbing camp, sprayed everything with synthetic rock material like a sugar or salt coating, before the liability became an issue, which it became before the program ever got off the ground. Even the central pottery barn, with drying racks, and the long row of cloisters with outlets for electric wheels, where other various junk had been deposited--a new bike tire, a forgotten windbreaker-- because the pottery program hadn't worked out well either because exploding raku was also an insurance "outlier" (as the lawyer said with a stupid grin on a face that couldn't be shaved too often). There were paved paths and there were unpaved paths, and someone who I really admired would bring back Wonders of Nature like a big wild turkey feather that city slickers thought was an eagle feather, or a broken blue egg shell that had looked like a hole in the earth, or a clump of fur from a squirrel's gray tail. So I grabbed a walking stick from a bundle of them by the big swinging doors, and took a sunny grass path that was being swallowed by broad-leafed summer foilage, and the shock of recognition! There was the huge obelisk, or basilisk or whatever we used to call it, five or six stories high, lumpy and organic looking like a strange actual rock formation or a lizard standing on its hind feet, made out of something that got sprayed and hardened. There were cave like windows, asymetric, at each level, and the only way in was from the base, which was designed to look like an institutional kitchen, with huge gas stoves and ovens and preparation counters, but the way up to the second story was through the exhaust hood, using handholds that looked like hanging pots, hanging pans, a ladle, a slotted spoon. It was a long fall down onto authentic terra cotta tiles! I'd always wanted to climb the obelisk, but never got past the threat of a painful fall onto gas burners. I looked for a wonder of nature to bring back, but I found nothing. I went back to the pottery barn, because the party was starting soon over at the adjoining dormitories, modern and clean like a hotel, with many identical rooms and liquor. I left a can of warm beer inside the door of the pinball machine, and now it was locked. I could do without it, and I put the walking stick back with the others.

What Do You Say Old Chap?

2009-05-12T04:45:00.000-07:00

The industrialist had franchised a respected brand name, and on the recommendation of a mutual friend who was a retired polar explorer now on the Antarctic ice-shelf lecture circuit, chasing that little French fucker Leclair who'd taken all the Tlingit bribe money and bought who knew what, probably a few hundred cases of Barbados rum, and now was out ahead of him hitting all the major Ivy Leagues and many of the non-denominational mega-churches with the same message, the same woeful pitch for donations, but with that delightful French accent and his red nose not from the blast of minus 100 degrees fahrenheit but from 100 proof booze, and bedding lithe coeds and randy MILFs all along the way. Anyway, the polar explorer had recommended that the industrialist contact mutual friend Jerry Case, the cousin incidentally of a minor escaped poet.

"Daniel recommended I contact you."

"?"

"I have franchised a respected brand name, and wish to extend an invitation to you to contribute to my franchise."

"?"

Jerry Case wondered about their mutual friend. Had he lost his mind? Stepped over one too many sastrugi? Was his brain shot-peened by pellet ice, the cognitive eqiuivalent of snow blindness? He imagined Daniel, brave explorer, speaking in his wool underwear and fleece jacket with officious expeditionary patches on his shoulders instead of epaulettes, standing at a dais with his powerpoint clicker held out awkwardly like a deck of cards to have his tent-mate cut the deck.

"Your invitation is a kind and gracious one, but your world is foreign and unwelcome to me," said Jerry Case. "Although it would be tits to get paid the kind of ching you industrialists make."

"That is a common misperception," quoth the Industrialist, his name something like J.P. Samuelson or William R. Boyd, a big name but an all too forgettable name, until such time as it took the masthead of some life-sustaining philanthropic enterprise that kept a half dozen artists from the brink of starvation, or perhaps a gallery or a viewing room at a regional arts center, memorialized in a nice bronze plaque and enunciated clumsily by non-profit marketing and PR professionals, i.e. "Yes, The Enigma and the Ass will be showing this afternoon in the William R. Boyd viewing room" rather than just, you know, the viewing room on the second floor.

The Industrialist continued: "With great reward comes great risk. Many industrialists such as myself must dwell in the shadow of debt, on the short side of the fulcrum in hugely leveraged financial situations, not to mention the personal/professional doubts that may trouble the more sensitive soul, while we're waiting -- to mix metaphors a bit here -- for our ship to come in. I myself have declared bankruptcy thrice! And yet each time, granted protection from various rapacious creditors by the regulatory zealots who would normally be my sworn enemy, I 'bounced back' (as the proletariat would say in their simple but concise idiom). Through the agency of personal ingenuity -- some might even go so far as to say ingeniousness, but that is not for me to judge, that is for history to say, Clio the queen of the muses-- and perseverance, I was able to recover lost fortunes, to restore my good name, to insure that generations of Boyds henceforth will enjoy a life of unfiltered luxury and unalloyed freedom from want without ever having to lift a finger, not single finger. They'll reflect on their own good luck to have been born a Boyd and they'll say, 'God Bless William R. Boyd the first for insuring through his industrial activities that our family would never have to make another contribution to industry or commerce or the general welfare of mankind again, or to the Gross Domestic Product, that in one generation — in but one man! — the Boyd family fulfilled its worldy purpose and was paid in full at that time by a Just God who wished for subsequent generations to do nothing more than sample the pleasures of unhurried global travel, gourmet meals, artisan furniture, vacation homes in prestigious destinations, first showings of blockbuster Hollywood movies, social meetings with other people of power and influence such as politicians trading favors for campaign donations, a delightful and priceless collection of German impressionist paintings, etc."

Here, the industrialist paused for a breath with belly heaving, his lips looking a little dry, and he searched Jerry Case's face for a reaction, but Case was implaccable, inscrutable, emotionally blank like a cue ball.

"What do you say then, old chap?" He patted his breast pockets, looking for a flask or a cigar or some other objet d' bourgeoisie.

"New money," said Jerry Case, "is such a vulgar thing."

Something fell on the parquet floor with a metallic tinkle. It was a key! A crowd materialized out of nowhere and formed a kind of scrum around the key, shoulder was set against shoulder, jaws were flexed, each person trying to leverage his or her body weight to its best advantage. A man with a high forehead bit Jerry's wrist. A barrel-chested woman pulled his hair. Though he was pinned from all sides, he felt less resistance to his right, where a prepubescent boy was lightly grinding his head into Jerry's kidney region. Jerry pushed the boy's head down as if it were a ball floating on the surface of a pool, and both of them were flushed out the bottom of the scrum, and in the event, Jerry Case nicked the silver key and whizzed across the floor through a thicket of legs, some of them exposed and hairy, others tubed in capri pants or sheathed in a light wool skirt, several pairs of high quality dress slacks. Every foot wore a Nike turf cleat.

The industrialist was now sitting on a nylon folding chair, with black tubular legs that formed a three dimensional polygon beneath him, its quiver laying nearby on the parquet. A huge cigar smoldered between the industrialists fat fingers that were stacked on the top of a hardwood cane and he sat forward in anticipation. They were fine hands, with a single tasteful ring, the hands of someone who tested the soup.

"That key," said Boyd, "is worth a lot of money."

"What does it unlock?" asked Jerry Case, peevishly.

"Or lock," said Boyd.

"?"

"A key unlocks and locks," clarified Boyd helpfully. "Curious that you should prefer to ask what it unlocks," said Boyd, acting like a man who had all the time in the world. "Assuming that wherever it goes, the device or thing or dingus which it activates, is presently locked. Curious. Your German lineage, no doubt, announcing itself almost genetically. You Germans and your locked doors!"

"What is it to? I am Irish," said Jerry Case.

"That key is less than a nanosecond old," said the industrialist, ignoring Jerry Case's question. "How is that possible? You've been here in my map room for almost an hour, spouting your insouciant twaddle about the working classes and wage disparity and disingenuous philanthropic tax shelters. Yes, spouting it! Like a great geyser of nonsense! During these—" and here, Boyd extracted a ridiculous pocketwatch on a gold chain from his waistcoat, who even wore a waistcoat these days? And a pocketwatch? The man probably had a personal hatter blocking his felt derbys in the cloakroom as they spoke!—"fifty three minutes, that key was in my pocket, in my possession. It could not simply materialize out of nothing, Third Law of Thermodynamics! And yet, were you to study the etiology of that key, you would find that at the molecular level it is just a nanosecond old." He sniffed, shifted his weight to his right buttock, extracted a fine linen handkerchief — a handkerchief!—from his left rear pocket, and touched it to his nose, a great prow of a beezer with the texture of a dill pickle.

In Absentia, Final

2009-05-12T04:24:00.000-07:00

Within 100 years a religion was formed due to the texts that were written by those who had known K—and then been redeemed by his absence in their lives, and these texts were kept by Stephanie and she became known as St. Stephanie, because she had been in direct contact with K—, indeed had been married to him and had therefore suffered for many years in his presence, but there could be no absence -- no redeeming, purifying absence without a previous presence. They mortified themselves in empty houses on ritual carpets. Rat poison was a sacrament, not to be ingested but to be sprinkled on the left sleeve of vestments that were embroidered with the word "Jackie." Once a year, on an arbitrarily selected spring day that coincided roughly with Passover and Easter, a ritual letter opener was stabbed into a close-grained walnut dinner table, recreating the anger felt by the author, me, when my wife received and responded to K—'s solicitation with what turned out to be one of the Book's most delightful chapters.

And though the general public at coffee shops all over the globe may not be aware of it, their lives are blessed by the absence of K—, and their faith in him has no bearing on his absolute and pure non-existence in their lives.

Mile High Club

2009-05-11T04:51:00.000-07:00

The stewardess wore black zipper boots! Her long blond hair was clean as a whistle, and strands went seeking against the velvet gashes on her black lapels. The man in the plane ducked his head out into the walking aisle to watch her good-sized butt juggling with itself down the aisle, and then her breasts on the way back. How he objectifed her! Not as badly as he used to do, though, because now he could imagine her little pile of dirty clothes, socks with black heels, shirts with ring around the collar. He could imagine her bathtub with little swirls of wet hair. But that was making her into even more of an object! Making her into an assembly of smaller objects! Detached hair, dirty underwear, a hanging stink in the bathroom! Perhaps she was a disorganized person who loved, insanely admired, small domestic animals. Perhaps she was a person who kept all of her bills filed for seven years, and used her employee benefits to fly to a new country every summer. Perhaps, like Aunt Jean, she'd recovered from some terrible terminal disease and read a full mystery novel cover to cover each day except Sunday when she read two, and had discovered a taste for vodka gimlets. Perhaps she was a rehabilitated petty thief who through her community service and repaid debt to society had discovered a passion for service. He was in the tiny airplane bathroom, a space that realized the full potential of the british idiom "water closet." But he could not find the flusher. Did people really try to fuck in here? Mile-high club? How would you do it? Where did you push the flush button? There were buttons and handles and placards on all the walls but none of them made sense to him. Some yielded to his touch, others did not, but none of them flushed the toilet, none of them opened the little door in the hole of the toilet and released the expected jet of water and air. He pressed everything he could press. Still there was his business in the bottom of the toilet bowl. He looked at his face in the mirror. It was reddening, because he could sense that there were other people, maybe even the stewardess, waiting outside the door, a growing line of fidgetting people and not-fidgetting people. What was taking that non-descript balding man so long? What kind of mess was he making in there? What were the pros and cons of just going back to their seats and holding it until their arrival gate? He heard a knock on the door. It was the saccharine voice of the blonde stewardess. Sir? Are you OK in there? Sir? She watched me! Go in here! He said to himself in the mirror, quietly, at a volume he thought couldn't be heard through the thin door. He said, "Fine fine" in what seemed to him like a normal casual voice, but how could that seem casual? Being asked on a full flight through a locked door if he was "OK in there"?

One of the buttons he pushed changed things a little bit. The stewardess was now wearing sensible pumps, and the restroom was in first class, which added yet another embarassment because coach passengers had been warned not to use this restroom to "avoid clogging in the aisles" but really because they'd not paid enough to receive this privilege, and now he had a full head of hair and he was really quite an attractive man, and the stewardess approached him and he thought for sure he was in for a scolding for emerging from the first class restroom, but she was solicitous and said was he looking for another initiate into the mile high club, she actually said "initiate," so it was some kind of systematized thing, a scenario, and he suddenly wanted her very badly but he couldn't open his mouth now, it wouldn't work, and he didn't know whether the toilet -- the one he'd used, wherever it was -- had ever flushed.

Unemployed

2009-04-25T05:37:00.000-07:00

Frank dug a hole in the yard with his bare hands and Rudy just sat there on one of his round sides. "Aha!" said Frank. He found the buried thing. "This was buried, now it ain't!" The buried thing said "BOX O' MEMORIES" and was padlocked. It turned out to be an episode where Frank was questioned by a Federal Agent and Frank had lied. "I was never in that building!" he said. Agent Steve Benson knew he was lying but could not prove it. Rudy frowned. Rudy had done the time in a canister with two other guys. Had grown fuzzy and unkempt, a dark stain developed on one side. The Kite Shop was never even his idea. "I can't deny it," he said. "I knew it!" shouted Agent Steve Benson, aroused by Rudy's confession. "And Frank was with you!" But Rudy asserted his right to remain silent etc. and was thereafter inserted into the canister. Now Frank wanted a Federal job. Naturally, the old issue came up. Rudy was incredulous. "You're kidding, right? After all the shit you— we pulled?" Frank picked Rudy up and threw him far, far away, bouncing down the alley and out of sight. He thought a recommendation from Rudy would probably subvert his chances anyway. Also, he needed to erase all email.

Clamshell

2009-04-23T06:18:00.000-07:00

That kid snores! Snores so loudly ya can't sleep in the same room. You go sleep in your own room, boy! He sleeps hard. He's too heavy to move now, I throw my back out.

The cat screamed for some reason, and I was like a bolt. All like what? Like WTF, Pitty Pat? 4:31 AM? At the foot of the bed? Where the sheets get bunched? So that's when I hear the boy. Snoring snoring. Shit!

So in a little plastic clamshell, I got orange foam ear plugs. They're black and sticky on the end that goes deepest into my earholes. They could be washed, but I haven't, except accidentally in the pocket of some jeans, which is how I found out they could be. Ya roll them like boogers until they're skinny enough to fit in there. Ya push them in, and you can feel them expand inside and the noise of everything slowly gets turned down to almost nothing. You can hear your own heartbeat, if you're dehydrated, which is no good.

The boy used to kick too. Like a pony. That's when I started going to his bed. Vacated. Small, but if I bent my knees up just a little, I could fit. That and the 18 stuffed animals there. He don't kick anymore, but still with the snoring! He snored the minute he was born. Laying there bloody and blue against her sweaty chest. Little whistling sound. The nurse was freaked and said, "We'll have to keep an eye on that."

I put the plugs in. When I clench my teeth I can hear a sound like the ocean in a shell. I don;t clench my teeth; I let my mouth fall open. I put them in and go to his bed. I put them in not because of his snoring, he's on the other side of the house now, but because in his room are the guinea pigs, and those little fuckers wake up at 5 AM and start chewing on the bars of their cage. Makes me crazy.

"Why?" she asks me in the morning, reaching out to grab the elastic of my underwear. Because at least the guinea pigs can't kick me. Their legs aren't long enough.

"Not yet," she said.

Strong Words: The Bridge of My Broken Address

2009-04-20T04:53:00.000-07:00

Under the bridge there were a lot of broken 152s. That was the street I grew up on. I picture a concrete surface and me, planted there, growing up in increments. Time-lapse photography. Flickering seasons. Jerking facial expressions. 152 is not the street. The number on the street. That was the address of the house on the street where I grew up -- time-lapse photography-- so I was predisposed to see some kind of deeper meaning in the situation. I could roll right over those 152s with my bike. Would a tire be punctured? The man who distributes the 152s gets them from the small business or agency that manufactures 152s, and the truck that was carrying the 152s on the overpass I have just underpassed, had a terrific accident. I did not hear nor see this accident, but I discovered it right after it occurred. I could see the white roof of the tipped-over trailer, the gap where the roof and one of the walls had separated, where the 152s had poured out like a deck of cards and spilled over the concrete barriers at the edge of the bridge. I picture a benign government conspiracy in a big bright room with low-pile carpet, dozens of people, convicts maybe, stamping out 152s like license plates. A map on the wall with the approach route, a big red X where the spill was to occur, a dotted line representing my trajectory and the point of convergence.

Perhaps, I thought, the bridge at Oak Street would disgorge an avalanche of 56001s.

Genuine, unimpeachable confidence in life always comes down to one thing: good tires, recently purchased.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1) What is he saying? Where is he going with this?
2) I hope he doesn't have a puncture!
3) You're just saying that to create narrative tension.
4) Is the truck "bleeding" the author's history?
5) Why are mothers sometimes hated (strong word) or at least resented?
6) What sizes are available and at what prices?
7) They certainly have taken precautions with that bird feeder!
8) Literally just sitting there twitching, as if pondering a question with no answer, or some sort of inner-ear disturbance.

Bad Actor

2009-03-25T05:12:00.000-07:00

The actor who played me in various amusing episodes has died. He bestrode the stage like a Colossus, and gave my life a dignity in art that it has never had in real life. I was not his most challenging role. No, indeed! In his long and decorated career, he played Hamlet at the Globe Theater, Cyrano at the Guthrie Theather, and Oliver "Daddy" Warbucks in the original Broadway production of Annie, as well as Frank in a number of regional and summer-stock productions of Streetcar. To play me was, some wag said, a real step down. Beneath his dignity. A sign of the declension of an an otherwise exemplary career on stage and screen. But I think it took real subtlety to play a mediocre life lived almost entirely in drab office buildings, cramped rooms, unclean kitchens and bathrooms, almost wordless, stoic, interiorized, a life during which nothing much happened except -- as he so brilliantly portrayed in the stage adaptation of Not Again -- bills arrived at the door and the dog went rabid for the mail carrier and in the end, he just gave up on trying to discipline the dog. Good dog!

One especially challenging episode of my life provided the opportunity for what I take to be the man's most triumphant as-me moment. The way he mixed simple rancor and disdain for strangers with pure terror in A Brief Dalliance with Pointless Misdemeanors was unnerving for me, and compelling ( I think) for audiences that happened to see it. As he waited at gas stations for people to start the pump and then go inside to use the restroom or buy a cup of coffee or browse pornographic hot rod magazines, and then as he pulled up adjacent to their car so he could covertly dispense gas from their pump into his -- my -- Mercedes, just a gallon or two at a time before inserting the nozzle back in the other car, as he kept a wary watch on the EXIT ONLY door, he affected a cheek twitch just below his left eye, and a cord of oiled hair fopped down on his forehead. Though in my recollection my left eye never twitched in this way, and I part my hair on the right side owing to a stubborn cowlick, I have to admit that these improvisations provided the perfect touch, capturing in his countenance the volatile mixture of emotions that provoked this kind of petty criminal behavior at this time in my life.

They say we are all the star of our own movies, but that's wrong, because he was the star of my movie. I once stole one of my father's scrub suits to wear at Halloween or some other masquerade, but people took me to be a real doctor like my dad, so for the sake of unearned but intoxicating respect I wore those scrubs around all the time until they wore out, the hem of the pants dirty and dragging under my heels, the shirt --formless to begin with -- now hanging like a mu-mu on a starved hermit. "Trapper John, MD!" yelled one of my so-called friends whenever he saw me in the street or at the brothel. I ignored him. Another so-called friend, whenever he was in earshot, said "Wait a minute!" conspiratorially, just the way (I'm told) Jack Klugman did to his forebearing Asian-American forensic assistant Sam on Quincy. I suffered these barbs not all that well. I would flush a bit, and little jets of blue-black smoke shot out of my reddened ears, small cartoonish lightning bolts would appear in the air above my pate. All of this -- the repressed irritation, the stoic self-importance, the thinly veiled craving for respect without doing or being anything respectful, the odd, cartoonish visual representations of emotion and pain -- somehow the man played me better than I could ever do, and in the months and years that followed, he would wag his cocktail glass and tinkle the ice and say, "I'm not a real doctor, but I played the son of one on television," and the light would flare and wink off one of his capped incisors and everyone would get a good laugh, me included, how could I hold a grudge against the greatest actor of our time? Of my time?

I had almost forgotten that desperate day back in, well in March, when I was desperate for nondiscretionary beer money, I took a call from a temp agency. A honking lady came honking on the phone, she said, "You're Lady Liberty. You can do Lady Liberty, right?" And I thought for sure it was a joke of some kind so I held the receiver out and looked at it and pressed the little Santa Clause key that gives me caller ID, and it was definitely the temp agency. I said, "Location?" and she said "Walking distance," and that gave me the creeps thinking that the honking lady was watching me from somewhere nearby, even though in my rational mind I knew she had my address right there on her screen, probably had the walking route all highlighted in a thick green worm from point (A) my place down to point (B) something called Liberty Tax Service, a mere 10 blocks away. But 10 blocks is 10 blocks. It wouldn't be a problem for the Greatest Actor of My Time, but for me -- I was a heavy smoker back then, and a bad actor. Two packs of Camels a day, plus one pack of Merit Ultralights, which I thought of as kinda filling the gaps between real cigarettes the way you might order a light beer between shots of whiskey. And for the in-between-in-between moments, I ate butterscotchies. Hence the weight.

So I washed my braids in the tub and headed out to Liberty Tax Service stopping every other block for a smoke, but aware of a schedule, so just crushing out the cigarette against a banana skin or a bean tin after that initial long drag off the butane lighter with the seahorse engraved on it, then about halfway switching to nicotine gum and already feeling better about myself. I was going to be Lady Liberty, one of the most heart-string-tuggingly potent symbols of the industrial and post-industrial period, true egalitarianism, secular liberal humanism, open borders, tolerance for all races/religions/creeds, awesomely accurate and affordable tax preparation. And I had given up smoking, for about 4 blocks. But they were long city blocks. There on the corner of French Avenue and Fry Street was a sandwich board right in the middle of the sidewalk, pinning some garbage down against a light Southerly wind, ketchup packets, an old Funyon, and I saw her there. Already there. Another Lady Liberty. I ducked into the Red Wagon and ordered a cafe latte, "you mean a pushy woman's drink," said the boyish barrista conspiratorially with a wink. "No," I said, trying to keep an eye on my rival, "Just a latte." No time for such low humor at the expense of a besieged demographic.

Sitting on the nosecone of a coin-op rocket, I had a clear view of him. He was standing outside a polyvinyl bus shelter with advertisments encased in the walls for Enjoy Cancun! and a new cellular telephone company with a neologistic name like TechTone or ViewCast or something smashed together like that. The other Lady Liberty wore a long shimmering turquoise poncho. On his/her head, he wore a foam rubber tiara with shooting-out rays. Anachronistically, he also wore a dark pair of wrap-around sunglasses, though it was cloudy as tubwater. In his hand, he held a turquoise torch that looked like a huge soft-serve ice cream cone. When the lights were red coming across Fry Street -- a much busier trunk -- he waved his arms manically, like a person trying to get your attention because EMERGENCY! Then when he apparently got a driver to look at him, he made a bucket-emptying motion, at the sandwichboard for Liberty Tax Service. When the light turned green on Fry Street, he suddenly looked exhausted and immediately stopped waving and went into the bus stop and set the cone down on the bench in there, and took off the tiara, and under the tiara was a blue Milwaukee Brewer's cap. Then when the light changed again, I had to hand it to him, he really became Lady Liberty again, embodied her, frantically beckoning the masses, huddled in their cars, to... to what? Stop and park and come inside the one-room office of Liberty Tax Service? And then what? Not my problem, I guess. Not our problem. Just advertising, of a low-grade, actual-humans-in-costume streetcorner kind. But there was this mix-up to be resolved. Who was supposed to be Lady Liberty? Me, or the guy out there? I opened my clamshell mobile phone and dialed the temp agency and asked the honky lady WTF? She said she had no idea, why not ask the other Lady WTF, and I watched as the light turned green and Lady Liberty suddenly switched off and became just this pudgy looking dude in a Brewer's cap, his tiara and torch stacked on the bench next to him, reaching inside the green poncho to extract a cigarette. A white-faced woman with red spots arrived at the corner, her purse hanging from the crook of her elbow. Her hair had just been washed. She gave Lady Liberty a sour look and then stood to wait for her bus outside the polyvinyl enclosure. Lady Liberty said something to her. She turned, shook her head, and then turned back to face me. She had a little smile or rictus that seemed to say can you believe this shit? I wanted to know what Lady Liberty had said to her. Had he said something lewd? Offered a cigarette? Made some self-deprecating remark about his silly costume, the crappy temp job he'd tried to steal from me? I was getting mad. He was confusing the audience and violating the fourth wall and getting all decentered. Some crappy kid put a coin into the rocket, and it began bucking me slowly, making a grinding noise against my heft, but oscillating me enough to spill my latte onto my jodphurs. "BEAT IT SHRIMP!" I said to the kid, but he just stood there looking at me with hate in his eyes. Hate for the fat. "When I see a naughty child I lay on them until the naughtiness spurts out of their buttholes," I said in a stage whisper, and the kid ran away. The latte spillage cooled on my riding pants, and I looked back out at Lady Liberty who was back on the corner doing a sort of semaphore thing now, making the letter L with his outstretched arms and then reversing the L, then making like a member of ground crew trying to direct a plane to its gate, both arms making symmetrical karate chops in the air, defining a lane aimed at the sandwich board. Now was the time. Time to take on Lady Liberty.

I set my latte on a table, bowed to the barrista, and left the Red Wagon and crossed over the street making a beeline for LL, and when he saw me coming he looked around nervously with his arms hanging limp beneath the shimmering poncho. When I reached the curb, he held the foam cone out as if to block my face from his view, or maybe as a feinting threat to hit me with it. "Oy," I said. "This is my job." He thought I was a crazy person, but a crazy person with a significant weight advantage, I could see by the way he looked at me like a carnival barker. I wondered how the great actor would play me in this scene, but only for a moment. No time for distractions or reveries!

After a few more verbal spars that were comical in their incongruence, Lady Liberty and I came to an understanding. The first Lady Liberty was actually Glen Starkey, the sole proprietor of Liberty Tax Services. He'd been forced to play the role because the temp -- me -- was, uh, apparently detained by unforeseen circumstances. I looked at his mouth when he said this. The cold spot on my jodpuhrs pulsed. He reconsidered. Or rather, he said, he'd been anxious to try out the new Lady Liberty duds, especially the shimmering robe made to look like oxidized copper, as well as the tiara and the torch, which were cheap almost cartoonish simulacra of the real thing, no doubt about it. And that white woman with red spots, he'd asked her if she was from the temp agency, and without the context of his own private thoughts and concerns and workaday data points, had thought he was crazy. "Touched," he said she said. "Soft as church music," he said she said. He was gaining the upper hand.

Through various other colloquies, additional information was communicated to me. The hours of the job and the frequency of breaks -- not nearly as frequently as he himself had taken, I noticed, and though no longer a smoker (six blocks since my last Merit ultralight, eight blocks since a Marlboro!) I quietly resented this, but recognize that he was the guy figuratively speaking that would be signing the checks, actually signing the checks that went to the temp agency that were then skimmed for fees and taxes and overhead and executive bonuses and otherwise deeply discounted before being reissued on temp agency template as a anemic stipend to me-- sunglasses OK as long as they did not negatively impact the public image of Liberty Tax Services, its owner/operator, his family, landlord, or lien holders thereof -- etc.

I could not see the great actor playing out this subtle and sometimes surreal episode. Not that it would be an especially challenging role. After all, you could still find heavy canvas riding pants at the army-navy surplus, there were pursuasive fat suits and convincing cosmetic blemishes, and today they had some excellent herbal alternatives to tobacco cigarettes that the few actors could smoke who were asked to play controversial, antagonistic smoking roles. I would have liked to see him play this role, but he died before he got the chance. I am recording it here in case another actor comes along. Perhaps the world's second greatest actor, now moved up into the first position, would be interested in this challenging, degrading, and not especially rewarding role.

In Absentia, Part 12

2009-03-25T05:11:00.000-07:00

Here is the scene of the accident: The boy with a toy in the back seat, the seat was the surface of the moon, the toy was an Apollo 13 service module that he'd built himself and painted with Testor's and getting a little high from the model glue too, and he'd taken special care in painting the damaged quarter panels where the oxygen cell had exploded. The instructions and the parts of the model were all pre-explosion, but the boy'd taken the initiative and studying the few photographs taken of the module after separation, as it slow-boated off into the profoundly empty vacuum of the solar system -- "Does God live in space?" he'd asked his father, "Yes," he'd said -- he'd nicely reproduced the damage to the quarter panels, soot-blackened, pitted, even melting some of the internal parts with a Bic lighter until his thumb was practically cauterized by the flame. The problem, he'd thought, with many of the cheaper models was that they excluded parts that would be internal and hidden from view and inaccessible after assembly. A hot rod chassis with nothing under the unopenable hood except maybe an air filter and an rudimentary engine block, none of the vacuum hoses or the plug wires, or a Sopwith Camel with no cockpit instruments locked inside a dome of plastic that didn't hinge open. His mom and dad were in the front seat silent jostling a bit with the uneven road that seemed to be laid down in long plates of concrete that'd gone a bit cattywampus -- a word his grandfather taught him -- buckled slightly, and they bounced a bit in their seats loosely, relaxed, like rag dolls, almost asleep without muscle tone, and if a person -- if all persons have a premonition of their own deaths but just never have a chance to speak about it except in rare cases of blurting it out or confiding it to their diaries, just never quite brave enough to recognize and admit they know in the core of their being that this is it, this would be that moment, but the boy has the capsule rotating calmly on its own axis, imagining the passing street lights glint like unfiltered sunlight off the bow -- did a control module have a bow? a stern? -- and a dented, empty can of Pepsi keeps rolling out from under Dad's seat, the boy toes it back under with some frustration now, deeper, as deep as it will go under there with windshield scraper and lock deicer and a few small coins, and Apollo 13 has radioed back the famous problematic words, and the crew is engaged, unseen, in heroics inside the model. The boy doesn't see his father's head nodding and snapping back, doesn't see him google his eyes and stretch his mouth and sit up straight as a bolt and then lean into the steering wheel as if to get a closer look at the road.

His fist is the command module that will successfully reenter the atmosphere and splashdown, it goes like this (making no sound in space) and separation is complete, and the service module held in his hand drifts toward the passenger window slow as a cloud, and there is a strange muffled whining coming through the floor, and the stars if you could see them are wheeling to the South, accelerating as the vehicle leaves its trajectory, its defined path wheeling away to the North, and then the car's almost silent, almost graceful revolution on its own axis, overhead streetlamps like the heads of snakes scrolling across the windshield, is suddenly interrupted as the wheels on the passenger side, now parallel, catch dry pavement and are instantly derimmed while providing rotational purchase, sending the vehicle over and over and over violently, rounding the steel and glass and polyvinyl corners of the state-owned automobile as if it were a snowblock rolled on sandpaper. The boy in the moment remembers unbounded by time a fever dream that included this precise sound, a catastrophic rhythm of what he thought were the floors of a skyscraper falling in on themselves one floor at a time though he had feigned the fever at first, holding the glass thermomemtor against the radiator in his room, he really did get quite sick and his mother held his head against her chest and patted his hair and said, "My boy, my dear boy, my dear dear boy" and he felt a hot tear fall onto the crown of his head, in the center of the whorl of his hair where there was a white spot of scalp.

The car, its crushed remains, have come full stop at the end of a long wake of glass fragments, paint chips, white glacial scrapings, red and orange plastic shards, a chromed bumper bent into a W. Silence except for a jet of air or liquid from somewhere. No warm lights, no tearful reunion, no life replay, no disembodied awareness or ghostly hijinks above the scene like a thin fog. Nothing for them. Singular, undivided, black nothing. They have spontaneously ceased to exist.

A strange, artificially damaged space capsule, its quarter panel torn away with delicate brush strokes of soot or stardust, rolls down the margin of grass at the edge of the breakdown lane.

Revenge of the Dead

2009-03-19T14:00:00.000-07:00

Katie was a nasal tenured professor with her best work behind her by a decade. Her career had devolved into teaching Freshman comp and placing the occasional unreported essay -- a rant really, easy as vandalizing a public restroom -- in a free weekly newspaper. She resented anyone who did the things she used to do better and more relevantly than she did. She put nasty words into other people's mouth, like her sister's -- who was dying of HIV and couldn't protest anyway -- to deflect even an oxidized kind of sympathy, ensuring that there was pretty much nothing to like about her. She was a corrosive disembodied intelligence.

James always said "Yeah yeah yeah" or "No no no" and occasionally "blah blah blah" or in less articulate moments "nya nya nya nya nya." He too was an expert on things he essentially loathed, protesting "Maybe it's just me" and also disingenuously leading conversation by saying things like, "Let me just say, because I wanted to ask you" and etc. He was a man frustrated by his success in things he was indifferent to, while the things he cared about weren't valued by anyone else, but would rather not give up the comforts of his dispassionate achievements.

Troy, younger than the other two by 15 years, was a pretentious post-grad stutterer with a stoner voice who had a genuine admiration for worthy things, couldn't hold his own in a room with Katie and James.

They talked in an insulated room, with a recording device and a transmission device. Both devices picked up their conversation about "willful bedevilment" and "betrayal."

"This is brilliant, the fireworks are intense, but don't you just think that in the end its a terrible mess?" said Katie.

"Yeah yeah. Maybe I'm not the ideal person to ask," said James, "but I just found it almost unbearably bleak, and it's not really my thing. But because I wanted to ask you guys—"

"I'm not sure I'd — well I might make a little quibble with that," said Troy, his voice thickened by catarrh. "I, uh — yeah."

"My sister said that this is just such a guy thing. A woman would never do anything like this."

"No no no. I totally agree with that," said James, maintaining his solicitousness at all costs, even at the expense of constructive disagreement.

A hose -- surgical tubing -- eased into the room in a crack between two tiles in the suspended ceiling. The hose stopped easing into the room. The length of it wormed back through the wires and irrigating pipes and through a recently drilled hole in the wallboard like a navel full of pink lint and from there disappeared into the wall and descended three stories and then reemerged in an alley from the exterior brick wall of the NYC office building, a cut-rate low rise not far from Cooper Square, and into the window of an idling 1975 Chevrolet Malibu. The hose hung inside the cracked window, its terminus looking down like a single dead eye into the lap of a very thin man with whiskers sitting in the back seat of the Malibu. His head was flagged with a red bandanna and he squeezed a graflex bong between his thighs as he loaded the bowl with high grade resinous weed. The bong had a sticker affixed to the draw tube that asked "What would Danzig do?" and another on the side facing the bong-operator that said "Guns don't kill people. People with moustaches kill people." The man finished loading the bong, replaced his ziploc bag in the breast pocket of a heavy woolrich shirt -- he was always cold these days -- then patted his jeans in an effort to find a lighter -- a green plastic Bic lighter with a white base and a just-visible leveling line of butane a centimeter down its neck -- when he suddenly stopped patting and held his hands out flat and steady like a cartoon character poised to make a single-frame getaway but instead leaned over on one butt cheek and farted, a quick dry report. He made preparing movements and gestures that suggested there was more coming. He set the unlit bong carefully down on the floor mat of the adjacent seat, and then grabbed the end of the surgical tube and pushed it down the ass crack of his jeans and let go of another impatient fart, this one a lot longer and looser and resonant, his face in a rictus of bearing down. He sat back in his seat, and adjusted his headphones and dug his ass into the seat the way you do when you're trying to scratch an itch on your asshole no-handed. Katie was yammering on and on about something about "Anyone who has ever taught literature before" -- another painful plea for respect and attention from a world that had not yet yielded enough gratitude to her, and was looking like it might never yield it, and James was making little grunts of assent and support and Troy was snorting back what sounded like an almost life-threatening volume of snot and doing something soundless about it, like swallowing it, and the man in the bandanna didn't want to think about that because it almost made him gag, thinking about people who snorted all that snot and then didn't somehow expel it, hawking a massive loogie, say, clearing their throats with a scraping constricted guttural exhalation that was exactly the same sound they made when they were kids shooting fake guns, ka-pow, yes, and ka-pewww designating ricocheted bullets, but more of a jetting sound in later years like pcccccccccccch and finally a pallet of all three sounds and more, to sonically reproduce a complex urban environment where hundreds of rounds of bullets might glance off the pavement, or an I-beam, through a window with a hollow sound, or the center of a human skull with a melon-dropping kind of thud, excluding the report of the cartridge itself. "Never heard it coming," said the bandanna man to himself with a giggle, thinking about gunshot victims, bullets breaking the sound barrier true, but also thinking about the stench of his methane fart rising up the tube, up through the innards of the building and then seeping silently into the soundproof meeting room. And with the surgical hose still down the crack of his ass, he lifted the bong from the floor mat next to him, and having located the lighter, expertly lit and drew upon the bong and a gurgling sound followed, and the chamber of the graflex tube roiled with heavy smoke, and then he released his thumb from the carb expertly, with sensitivity and muscle memory as if it were a tone hole on a huge alto recorder, and he an expert player. and the smoke was released into his lungs, leaving the blue-tinted tube perfectly clear. He held the smoke in his lungs and stifled a series of spasms that would have expelled the smoke, making a sound like Ngh with each spasm, during which time he realized or remembered -- not reliably, really -- but thought he recalled from somewhere that methane gas was heavier than air and would not rise up the surgical tube. Was probably lingering at the ass-end of the downturned tube, would not on its own rise up the three stories to the conference room. So he carefully withdrew the surgical tubing from the ass crack of his jeans, making sure that its empty eye was pointed downward, not leaking any of its valuable inert contents and then he tilted his head back and practicing his embouchure, then put his lips to the tube and blew in a long steady breath, releasing the impoverished marijuana smoke into the tube and pushing ahead of it the flatulence from --what had he eaten? He hardly remembered, it had been a long time since his last meal. A burrito? A half box of Girl Scouts Thin Mints? A gas station bag of Dill Pickle-flavored sunflower seeds, the remainders of which were scattered around the interior of the Malibu, and indeed the exterior too, long dried trails of saliva and salt and artificial dill pickle flavoring. Then he grabbed a roll of silver duct tape from the front seat, got out of the car and redirected the surgical tube to the shuddering exhaust pipe of the Malibu. He kneeled down in the wet alley and unwound duct tape around the end of the exhaust pipe and funneled it down around the surgical tube, and it shook at the same frquency now as the idling automobile.

"Eww," said Katie over the headphones. There was an accusing silence. They all smelled it. "Eww, she said again. "Yeah yeah," said James. "Did you...?"
N-n-no man," giggled Troy. "Not me, man. Eww. Maybe its the vents."
And following the methane release from the tube in the ceiling tiles, there was a thin ghost of weak marijuana smoke. "That's better," said Troy. "That's a lot better."
He heard someone yawn, then the other two.

In Absentia, Part 11

2009-03-06T06:45:00.000-08:00

K—'s mind continued in its state of blissful blankness as he stood and crossed the street without looking in either direction, the steaming cup of coffee left behind him now like a remote device left on another planet next to the gay bus-stop bench and he dropped through a natural break in the traffic and stepping up on the opposite curb almost involuntarily, one slippered foot placed neatly in the space between a burst ketchup packet and a freshish mound of dog turds, seemingly on autopilot but a word had started to form in his mind, third, and by the time he'd shambled up to the door of his house, his original house which had been locked and left by Stephanie moments ago, and reached into his pocket and miraculously found a single key, his key, and slid it into the barrel of the lock, a second word had formed and hitched itself to the first word third times and as he tried the lock and it stuck, was always a sticky lock but he was too cheap too cheap to replace it and in the former lifetime used to lie awake at night wondering how many previous owners had keys that still worked to open the locks of the doors of his house, and what percentage of those former owners might now be homicidal killers or mobsters with walled-up treasure or just in need of a good place to drop a body, but now when the lock stuck K— just relied on muscle memory and tried the subtle wrist drop and the wiggle, as if trying to round out the flat sides of the point of a crayon, and the old tricks didn't work either and so K— merely left the key in the barrel and turned and shuffed across the soggy, decimated lawn to the open basement door of Don and Maggie's empty house, and he found the place in the living room where he'd been lying, and now for the first time he saw the small yellow wedge-shaped box that was disgorging the rat poison, and a black garbage bag that was disgorging a few items of clothing, and he lied back down on the floor and clasped his hands on his belly and looked up at the ceiling and scanned across to the curtainless window and he saw blue sky and clouds moving like barges third times a charm and his mind unlocked a place he'd been to twice before, an empty place. Where his mind did nothing but receive one signal, a continuous barely modulating signal of empty sky and empty house and empty universe and it would be terrifying except the signal-receiver was an empty self, and instead it was deeply oddly comforting, emptiness recognizing emptiness, a null signal received by a null receiver, a long draught of a kind of perfection. Until the Dead Woman came barging in with a spectral sack of ghost groceries, a sealed cylinder of translucent oat meal dropping onto the floor soundlessly, its bewigged Quakerman grinning idiotically at him.

The first time: when he was six years old at Washington Elementary School, K— had a deaf friend named Ben who wore in a white harness a hearing aid on his chest that looked like a paddlelock, with a flesh-toned cord that ran up to a flesh-toned earpiece. K— wanted one too, and went looking for a spare lock. It was the first sign of a hypochondriac obsession with casts, slings, crutches, glasses, braces, bandages, splints, and later, catchers masks, goalie's pads -- clothing, accessories, habilments that singled you out as injured or injury-prone, on defense. Special teams. And the milkman Cliff, he was terribly friendly. He later died of cancer, but one day drove him home from school in his step van when K— was running a fever. You could see Cliff through the open door, driving around, standing in his white pants. And when K— got home he lied down in the concrete driveway and looked up into the empty sky and his mind was empty too, completely empty, silent, still. It stayed that way for a long time, suspended, inertial, like something in space. He didn't realize then that it was a place, and that the door to it would afterward be locked for a while. His mother came outside and had a cow.

The second time: A month before their wedding, K— and Stephanie were shopping for shoes, the perfect shoes, what seemed to be the Holy Grail in their connubial quest, and K—was on the verge of refusing to undertake yet another fruitless excursion, the interminable conversation about pumps, mules, heels, straps, color and finish, cost and construction, a catarac of bewildering detail that pretty much did nothing except remind him how inadequate his powers of empathy would be to the task of being successfully hitched til death do us part to the woman he felt he understood better than most, but really not much at all. But he succumbed to the pressure, rose to the occasion, tried to man himself for what was billed as a last ditch effort, a campaign to the heart of darkness, the River Hills Mall, which was situated on a flat waterless tract of exurban land, and the escalators were too slow for her and she skipped down them two at a time and K— was having a hard time keeping up with her and midway down the escalator from the food court to a sort of Potemkin village of candy stores and shirt shacks and hermit crab kiosks, his loafer turned over and took the foot with it and K— felt his ankle splay and actually a muffled crack like a green corn stalk, and there'd been quite a scene and widespread public astonishment and approval of the fact that River Hills Mall kept a paramedic on duty at all times, rather like a ski area with its unseen armies of ski patrols with air splints and neck stabilizers and runnerless sledges. And after the surgeries and consultations and application of a fiberglass cast he just laid on the futon couch with his bottle of Percoset and rested his empty head on a throw pillow with a green-on-green floral pattern and looked out the picture window, looking up beyond the roofline of the neighboring house, apparently at a summer sky, the occasional cloud easing into the frame slow as clock hands, this time though subconsciously aware of 1) a sort of homecoming sense, deja vu anchored in real locatable pre-experience, i.e. lieing in his driveway after getting dropped off by the pre-metastatic milkman Cliff, staring into the vast emptiness of space enclosed by a blue atmospheric bubble, gazing into nothingness or really more like being gazed into by nothingness in the long minute before screendoor slam and the verbal tongue lashing of his imperious, hardcharging Ma; and 2) the fact that this was a drug-induced sort of mental moulting, that a heavy narcotic could reproduce this sense of peaceful vacancy, a here-and-nowness that he hadn't experienced for thirty years, and how he had willfully gathered to himself all sorts of complex and confusing ideas, responsibilities, worries, expectations, ramifications, had occupied his brain at every opportunity with more resentments and jealousies and grocery lists and ten-year plans and three-month reviews and personal grudges and self-evaluations. All that shit just slid away, shot through by one or two pills -- say 500 milligrams -- of Oxycodone. It was delightful and simple and breathtakingly dangerous. Childhood captured in a pill. Days of seriously thinking how cool it would be to be a dog, just sleeping eating and shitting, the occasional backyard squirrel drama, a tennis ball, no duties, no responsibilities, except for the no color vision thing. That would suck, seeing only black and white -- what did his friend Ben say to him in malformed but scientifically sophisticated words? No cones and rods in their eyeballs? Just rods? Just cones? Anyway, no color vision being the single drawback of being a dog in the mind of an eight year old boy, but then puberty hits like electrocution, you check yourself in the mirror every day, and there's only one pair of pants you're really very happy with, stand in the shower counting pubic hairs, you don't even notice it's the first time you cared, and it's all freaking downhill from there, life crashes in on you for decades, mortgages, canned vegetables, meetings, FICA witholding, your best friend's mom's tits, and so on, until you break your ankle in a stupid suburban mall and they jack you up on a powerful, really quite incredible painkiller, and you take it, and the only heavy machinery you're operating is the black framed futon couch that will, within the next ten years, be seen on curbsides all over the city, reassuring you retorspectively that the reason it was so reasonably priced was because everyone was buying one, and you are no different than literally the average person, and it reinforces the view of yourself that you are mediocre -- and it's an idea that grows on you until it fits like an old barn coat you could never give up. K— might have dozed off for hours. Days. The sky was dark now, socked in by seamless cloud cover, a lot like his cobbed head.

Third: Now. His eye wandered from the sky to the wall, past a few punctures where pictures had been hung over squares of more vivid wallpaper, and it --the one eye -- focused on a single green kibble of rat poison. It was a tiny, perfect cylinder, green as a glacial lake, poised on a single thread of nylon that flared from the cratered surface of the floor, almost as if suspended in space.

In Absentia, Part 10

2009-03-04T04:36:00.000-08:00

K— walked to the cafe. He had a thin beard and his clothes were rumpled from sleeping on the floor of the empty house for many days. He didn't even look up at his house as he walked by on the sidewalk, it was dry now, and the smell of clay came out of the ground where the snow had melted and the brown grass folded over, and Stephanie his straight-haired, blond, steely-eyed wife did not see him pass because she was busy doing something industrious and fulfilling and profitable. K— felt bored through, hollowed out. A child coming down the sidewalk from the other direction saw him and crossed the street. A person coming out of a townhouse with a small box stopped and went back inside as if she had forgotten something. The moon turned its back in the blue sky. The snow was gone and the turf was softening, but there were patches of ice on the sidewalk, like lenses into a darker world.

When K— got to the cafe, it was closed. Renovations, a sign said. He leaned his head against the glass and left an oily forehead print there, a vague smear. He stared at a space that was nowhere, somewhere in the middle distance between what he could see up close and what he could see farther back. It was a gray color, like a television between commercials or a sink of dishwater. He stood back and looked at his face reflected in the window. The reflection was vague.

He walked down the block to another cafe, one he'd only been in once or twice before, more of a kids' hangout, a bar with a stage and bands and a night scene. He went inside and waited in a short queue and ordered a coffee. He dug in his pants, but he only had some small coins. The barrista, a defiant looking boy with tattoos on his neck and wrists, watched him and then pushed the cup across the counter. "Keep it pops." Unexpected kindness. But as K— was walking away with the steaming paper cup, almost too hot to hold, the boy called after him. "But don't come in here again pops."

The words. K— felt suddenly disoriented, unanchored, skimming across the pitching deck, suddenly pitching quite violently, the pitching deck of someone else's -- everyone else's -- life and a cascade of impressions, most of them negative, came over him as he looked down at his wrinkled and stained slacks, the rat poison kibbles and wooly pills on a sweater he didn't recognize with embroidery on the chest --JACKIE-- over a miniature set of crossed golf clubs or hockey sticks or maybe even squash racquets turned at an oblique angle, each letter and club connected by a single silver thread, and he sat down on the curb outside the cafe, next to a bus-stop bench that was made out of poured concrete and rough painted boards and its back was a sign advertising a scrubbed real estate agent with hairplugs and an open collar who was obviously gay and the caption "COME OUT AND SEE MY HOUSES," and K— was drawn again to reflective surfaces, but the newspaper box next to him on the curb, chained to a signpost with a small rectangular sign high above like a radar dish or a solar panel for something specialized, had a plastic window that was cataracted with age, and had been scribbled over with massive industrial markers, scratched with the ends of house keys, and god knows what else had been deposited there, spit, boogers, waffle prints from the bottoms of heavy boots on the feet of impulsive or angry or idle young men, but he could not see anything of his face except an ear in one of the shiny, slightly less ravaged corners of the window, but the newspaper inside he could see and read almost preternaturally, not read on the surface, but see through to the code, could actually decipher pica-by-pica, could judge the point size and weight of the headline and the hairlines and the jumps -- the hed was huge, much too big for a lede on an average news day -- could estimate a character count, could scan the teasers, sidebars, deep captions, all impulsively. Compulsively. From a previous lifetime. He wondered what other thoughts or memories were crowded out or overwritten to make room for this professional argot that was now worthless, as pointless as, say, the fragmented theme from Gilligan's Island rather than the ecclesiastical Latin he'd once studied and passed and now couldn't even parse the latin motto on the crest on this golf-club sweater --someone named Jackie, man or woman? -- he was wearing inexplicably.

MAYOR DIES IN CRASH
Wife and son also meet tragic end

Late last night, in travel conditions the DOV described as treacherous, Mayor John "Jack" Vogelfanger and his family crashed in their station wagon, killing everyone inside. No other vehicles were involved in the accident. The mayor and his family were traveling at an estimated 65 MPH when witnesses saw the car slide sideways and then suddenly pitch and roll on the Southbound lane of Interstate 35 near Tracy, rolling several times before coming to a stop against a barricade.

Vogelfanger was a first-term mayor who'd risen from the ashes of a career in investing, in which he said he'd "lost billions" of his clients' funds during the Recession. During the Recovery, Vogelfanger claimed he'd vowed to himself to "make it up to them by going into public service and trying to scratch every red cent back for them, if not in cash than in sweat and blood." CONTINUED ON PAGE A3

A whole family wiped out in a moment, thought K—. That was all he thought, before his mind went blank. But who would go into their home, left the way it was left, with dirty dishes in the sink? Where there was an oatmeal pan with a skin of starch around the sides? Bowls with bloated cereal floating on the surface? Chairs with shirts thrown like pelts over their backs, to be bagged and tried on again over the clothes of strangers standing in the aisles at the Salvation Army? Bills and solicitations for oil changes? Toothpaste dried on a spigot? A spray across the mirror? Rooms poised, like they were on their knees arms spread, for a small kinetic boy who bounced, kicked, shot, threw balls of all kinds everywhere he went, broke windows, shot-peened the wood work, gouged letters into wallboard? Laptop computers asleep under showers of meteors or wheeling auroras? The tawdry things hidden in drawers, the affairs consummated and unconsummated, a nerve removed from the network, leaving raw severed ends screaming and reporting back all along the line?

Finished Business: For DFW @ Wiggle Room

2009-03-03T05:13:00.000-08:00

I wanted to be a calculator not an optimizer. Intaking, just intaking. "Tits!" said Clive, also a calculator, when asked @ coffee. "Optimizers blow!" said Clive. It was punny, and a slight poke at me because I've had this runny nose all week. We high-fived, like a team. Like brothers, Clive and me. But he washed his hands a lot, and he fucked with my inputs, either for fun or to be mean. I forgave him.

I was working on gluten free bread. He was working on the peelability of navel oranges. He was funny. He could have been an optimizer, because people did like him, even if he fucked with them. Once he held his hand out to our own optimizer, Glen, like to high-five him, and then he pulled his hand away just in time and said, "Psych!" Pretty sure our inputs were doubled after that as a punitive measure that Glen claimed was "per protocol." Fucking lame. Glen had a jaunty flop of hair that pretty much stayed in place, and he wore a tiny button on his trench coat that said Hüsker Dü. "Penal colony!" said Clive, not even looking up from his personal digital assistant that week, almost Touretically, whenever Glen went past on his way to Relief.

QAs were the worst. Like Optimized Optimizers. When they came around, you were in for the shit. "Worse than an IRS anal probe!" said Clive, right to the face of one them, a girl with huge boobs in a black turtleneck, actually he said it right to her chest, like speaking into a microphone, or two stereo microphones, or trying to talk to someone with eyes set wide apart. Which one to look at? Funny thing is they ended up dating. Clio was about six inches taller than Clive. "Clementine. Clara. Chloris. Clinton." I needled him about what their kids could be named, but I ran out of CL names. "Clappy." He punched me on the shoulder. "Fuck yourself, Jimmy." He said it good naturedly. "And wipe your damn nose." Like we were on a team. He told me all about the sex they supposedly had. Loudly, in Relief. I mean the telling, not the sexing. It was like a suicide time bomb for their relationship. "I mean for God's sake, Clio is QA you dipshit. You didn't think it would come back to her?"

There was a scene. Clio came in like it was official duty, she had a non-protocol outside latte in a paper cup, a really tall one, tall like her. In those moments before what happened happened, I imagined her tall form like it was a hollow tube, a graduated cylinder, and I imagined her sort of filling up with mocha-colored liquid. A miniscus of steamed milk on top, slowly rising up inside the hollow shell of her neck. She didn't care if I heard. She didn't care if the whole office heard. "You look hot today, Clive" she said. He gave her a look that said go-time? "I can make you hotter." And Clive's eyebrows definitely said go-time! You and me! Right here? And Clio took the lid off her latte and poured it over Clive's head, scalding his scalp, and -- later he said -- really double-scalding it, because it made his hair really hot and that kept scalding his head after the initial scalding, so like hair was a real liability when you're getting a hot liquid poured over your head by an angry lover.

I died. The milk in the fridge in Relief had gone bad or had Chinese derivatives that were toxic or whatever and whether other people died I don't know because I was one of the first, and this was really pretty pathetic since it was supposed to be the old and infirm or the very young -- people with compromised systems, which mine apparently was, by that rhinovirus that had been plaguing me for weeks. It was like having a weak, slow dude chipping away for weeks at the wall of my immunity, and then this Chinese bulldozer comes through and takes out the wall entirely.
Clive and Clio came to see me in the hospital. Clive clamped his mouth shut. He'd been promoted to Optimizer. Clio cried a little bit, even though we barely knew each other. "It's just sad," she kept saying. Like a dog you see runover on the shoulder. Someone's dog. I knew what she meant, times ten. It was sad. Fucking sad. My life, over. My life. All the shit I wanted to do besides quantifiying the penetration of gluten-free bread in non-celiac populations. All the shit I wanted to do outside calculations, man. Like sail a boat in blue water. Like... whatever. Stuff. Life. Live. This was fucking lame, and everyone knew it in the room.

And when you die you don't really see your life flash in front of you, or at least I didn't, but you know what killed you, or you figure it out. Like when you feel pukey from something you ate, when you think of that thing, and then you can never eat it again. Only in this case it's like, well, Life made me sick and I'm not going to eat it again. But that's not it either. Imagine the thing you love the most. Say canned meat ravioli. It might not be good for you, it might make you fat, it might be made by child labor in a lawless banana republic, but it fucking tastes awesome. Then you get sick from it and you can't eat it anymore. But you want to go on eating it, you'd eat it again, even though you know it will kill you. It's the only thing you ever ate, the only thing you ever had.

The last thing. Glen's button. Right after I started in caluclations. Clive looked at it really close once, end of the day, out in the ramp. And pretended he didn't know what it was. Who screwed you? Glen quickly corrected him. Who screwed you! Clive repeated the rest of that week. I laughed. Who screwed you? Ha ha ha. Who screwed you?

In Absentia, Part 9

2009-02-27T04:33:00.000-08:00

The nurse in scrubs said, "John Vogel?"

She said it like a proposal. Jack stood and motioned to James, who was fiddling tentatively with a dirty plastic toy, using his left hand. They followed into the winding guts of the clinic, white walls with windows onto turquoise waters in Greece, an alpine chalet, a kitten in a basket. In the hallway the nurse, saying "honey" a lot, weighed James and checked his height and scratched the results on a sheet of thin cardboard and then showed the father and son to a small examination room. More bad magazines, Parade of Homes, someone's dogeared old friend. The floor here was no longer carpeted. Clean tiles, neither white nor black, a color that would show anything -- a lost toenail, a drop of blood, a blot of mucous. They sat for a while waiting. Jack looked around the room. Another window was set into the ceiling above the vinyl examination table. It showed a wooden boat with peeling paint on a Caribbean beach. A dark-skinned man with black whiskers leaned against the boat, repairing a net. The angles of the leaning man and the beached boat and the horizon line and the ceiling tiles were confused. They didn't come together unless you were lying apparently on your back on the exam table, thought Jack. The doctor came into the room. He was a man wearing a tie in a very loose collar, as if he'd lost a lot of weight lately. He had kind eyes and clear skin and gave the impression of being a man who was normally very busy but had made an exception for a special patient. He looked at the boys wrist, squeezed it in locations that were precise for no outward or obvious reason, watched for the inevitable grimace of pain, explained that they'd need to X-ray both left and right hands because at this age you could easily mistake growth plates for hairline fractures, so what might look like a fracture would be mirrored on the other wrist, and would be perfectly normal, and Jack held his tongue because he was tempted to ask the busy but sympathetic man what made them think — assume, really — that the wrists of his son, who was almost idiot savantishly a right-hander, would develop in mirror image, because he assumed that you didn't ask questions like that of a science that was based in statistical probability on the one hand (as it were) and on long anecdotal personal experience on the other hand (as it were), everyone's heard the horror stories of long long uncompensated torturous residencies etc. etc. And what if both wrists were broken?

So the doctor left in his loose shirt, explained that they'd take the pictures right there in their own radiology lab since James made the age cutoff which was like 6 or 7, made a quick internal call on the phone to confirm with some front-of-the-office admin, develop them, then he'd bring them back for a quick look and consult, and father and son sat there for a while longer. Jack thought to himself, I will not touch that Parade of Homes, there is no way I'm going to pick up that rag, whatever the top 25 ideas for rearranging a room are, can you imagine how many sick children and nose-wiping parents have pawed over that thing? Making a basically worthless piece of extended advertorial into something truly, physically threatening — malignant?

Finally the nurse. Jack got up to follow his son out to wherever the X-Ray room was, but the nurse clucked and shook her head and said, "You can just wait here." Jack and James looked at each other. James was not a fragile boy; he'd buck up, stiff-upper-lip it. But Jack knew inside he was a an emotional wreck waiting to happen, merely looking for enough floorspace and a sufficient decrease in local air pressure. Jack gave his son a thumbs up and a 100-watt smile that could not have been reassuring, could only be seen as a spot light on his shame. Nothing to worry about, I'll see you in two shakes, Jack tried to communicate to the boy telepathically as he was led away by the shoulder and the rotund, imperious nurse in scrubs the color of Smurfs. The door stood open. Jack sat down and looked again at that stupid magazine, reached out and threw it into the wall-mounted garbage can that had a white plastic bin liner that was entirely empty, ballooned out by the trapped air between itself and the plastic bin, and noticed the paper halves, printed in pale blue ink with something — a brand name, apparently — unpronounceable to the layperson's tongue, some sort of sterile packaging now peeled like a rind and no longer of course sterile at all, not in the strict microbial definition. He went to the sink and washed his hands.

Jack considered the solicitousness of the G.P. Good clergymen and doctors shared a quality. They made you feel like the most important member of the congregation, of the sniffling, side-aching population. Made you feel like you were inner circle, if not financially or intellectually then emotionally. He glanced at the clock. Already it had been five minutes. The nurse had made it sound like it would be just a moment. It was disappointing but also liberating to realize that this was a trick they had, making everyone feel crucial, and of course no one was special at all if everyone was special. Fifteen minutes. Were they having a problem? Had James finally freaked out about going solo? Then why were;t they back here yet? But this realization that you really weren't special at all, that you'd been seduced by their charisma, it made it easier to stop paying your dues, to let your membership lapse, to go ahead and feel unguilty, to disappear into the mass of non-paying non-members. He looked at the clock. Twenty minutes. What the? Jack got up, sat down again, felt a wave of nausea. He imagined there was a statistic somewhere that said how many children, compiled by gender, were abducted from clinics and hospitals, not the larger slice of newborns being reappropriated by disgruntled ex-husbands or -boyfriends, and somehow therefore to him a more benign domestic misunderstanding, an unfortunate squabble, sure, but no question of love, shelter, proper care, natural protective impulses (if litigious in the extreme) of biological parents, and not the occasional crackpot woman with barren womb or heartbreaken by miscarriage, whatever, but the thinner slice of post-toddling children, trusting children, sweet innocent children without any clue in the world how to defy a kind stranger, an adult liar, a predator.

He got up and stepped out into the hall, looked both directions. His palms were sweating, and his chest tightening as he felt himself becoming one of those statistics, becoming a man with a story no one wants to hear. A nurse in navy blue scrubs walked by, smiled, nodded. Jack held his tongue, though he wanted to know where the X-Ray room was. It had been 40 minutes. It would all be OK, right? Everything would be OK. Breathe. It was a misunderstanding. His expectations had somehow been set entirely wrong, it was normal to take a long time with a small beautiful boy with a sprained wrist, there was an age limit for a reason, they maybe were trying to force some sort of protocol or device or armature onto a patient to whom it was ill-fitted, but they were all being good sports about it and giving it yet another try, and — my God, it's been a fucking hour! — and Jack finally was pissed and strode with some conviction into the hallway started one way, toward the lobby and then back again, sensing the X-Ray room was deeper into the bowels of the building. Empty exam rooms, nobody around. At another desk or nurses station -- odd, how many reception areas were really needed for such a small clinic? It seemed incongruous, like a second kitchen of equal size and capacity at the other end of a hallway adjoining its twin, when there weren't enough people to populate the first, on either side of the desk -- when he saw a third maroon-colored scrub suit and the woman it contained kneeling down to a garbage can under the station's kidney-shaped countertop. "Where's the X-Ray room?" The nurse began to answer, "It's down—" Jack interrupted her, no longer cared about checking himself, "My son. He's only seven. He's been in there for an hour." The nurse, cliuding for a moment with alarm, stood up and slotted into the hallway ahead of him, towing him back to the X-Ray room. "Door's closed," she said. "Can't open it until they're finished." They — someone was still in there. He must have looked disoriented, emotionally fragile, bug-eyed. "It can take a while," the maroon nurse or trash collector said with a smile that wasn't unkind. She wore no rings, but that was true of a lot of people who had to pull rubber gloves on and off all day. Jack went back to the exam room, tamping down the gorge of his despair, trying literally to keep his shit together.

Finally, finally, they came back, the boy and the rotund nurse, who probably smoked though she covered it well with breath mints and industrial anti-septic medical-grade softsoap that gave off a basic smell like witch hazel or something, the boy with a look of relief on his face that must have been a pale reflection of the brighter sun of Jack's relieved face, trying not to make a big deal out of it after all, tussled the boy's hair playfully, said something inane like "thataboy," and in the following quarter of an hour learned that growth plates do look a lot like fracture lines and X-Rays of both wrists are mirrors images and can therefore be used to disabuse the kind G.P. -- though he'll still send along to a specialist, if you don't hear back, no news is good news -- of the idea that it was anything more than a pretty painful but nonetheless invisible sprain of soft tissue, and nothing to worry about in terms of a cast or a splint or a dramatic resetting scene or any of that.

The quality of making people feel special. It occurred to Jack on the way out, back through the lobby, past the dirty plastic toys: It went to seed in the hands of a politician, he thought sourly. Or, say, a failed investment broker. Or one in the process of failing.

In Absentia, Part 8

2009-02-25T05:24:00.000-08:00

The old CRT television, bolted down to the pulpwood furniture, blasted gutteral nonsense. Don was mesmerized by the schlosses and heims and vieles, the thick fricatives and glottal stops rang on his ears without registering any meaning, like the incomprehensible sounds of an animal. He looked down at the man lying on the dirty low-pile carpet. His skin was black as a telephone, and plastic looking too. He wondered if a dead African, even a very dark Nigerian, would get pale. He'd heard somewhere blacks were born white, and many new black fathers suffered a shock. The man's teeth were very white, and his eyes too. Set in his wide face, they coould have been the headlights of a car in a tunnel. The anger and shame were gone. The work was finished. It was never an act of revenge, more like an act of redemption. To delete everything that had come before. Now Don felt like he was looking at a blank screen, waiting for everything to reboot. The USB cord was still knotted at the man's neck and pressing deep into the flesh.

"We had cords like that all over the bedroom," said Don out loud, to no one. To the dead man. "Bedside lamps, clock radios, heating pads, phones. Later on, the respirators, the digital IV drips, the monitors. They ran along the baseboards, and around the coping at the ceiling, they came in through holes in the walls. I hated the way they twined around each other, whenever you tried to move something. Spaghetti. It was like their natural state, the way they always wanted to return to a tangled mess.

I remember lying next to Maggie. 'I feel a draft,' she said. She said it all the time. 'Yes,' I said. 'But the windows are good. The curtains are down. The heat is up.' She was in pain. She snapped at me. 'So you're blaming me?' I couldn't really answer that. I just pulled the blankets up a bit and tried to smooth her hair, but she turned away. And then I felt the draft too. It was coming through the wall, and right through the headboard. And I know it sounds crazy, but that wind blew right through me too, an otherworldly wind, and I went with it, through the footboard, across the carpet, through my underwear drawer, and on out the other wall, across an expanse of grass and cement and through another wall, well insulated with glass fiber, and I was trapped there for a time, and I heard the sound of two people in a room not speaking with each other. Two people who weren't saying what needed to be said, and that went on for a long time."

Don pushed at the dead man's shoe with the toe of his boot. It scooted along the carpet past his unclenched hand, where there was a bent spoon. It reminded him of more.

"Once, I was having a beer with Jack at their place. The girls were out in the living room tittering about something. Jack was emptying the diswasher. It was weird, because he took the whole silverware cage out of the machine and set it on the counter next to the drawer for silverware, then he moved each piece of silver into its slot in the drawer. I've worked in a few institutional kitchens, and I knew how to do it fast. You grabbed huge handfuls of silver and threw them in the drawer and sorted as you went. Or you poured out the whole rack onto a counter, and you moved fast. But Jack had these dainty hands. He put silver away like a nurse working at an autoclave. Each piece so delicate. And then about a month later, I noticed Maggie started doing the same thing, taking the whole silverware rack out of the dishwasher. What a silly waste of time."

Don looked down at the dead man again, tried to imagine that there were people somewhere who would miss him, who would never be the same. But he couldn't do it. He spoke out loud once more, over the volume of a woman's reedy voice on the television that kept murmuring Fernsehen aus Berlin, das Hauptstadtfernsehen. "I'm afraid the world is a better place without you, Said." He bent down and took the man's wristwatch off, a cheap knockoff. "Or whatever your real name was," strapped it on his own wrist, stood and held it out in front of him to get a good look. Then Don left the hotel room, with nothing in the world except a plane ticket.

In Absentia, Part 8

2009-02-18T06:14:00.001-08:00

Don ordered a watch online. It was nice. MSRP of $2,000. He'd paid $45 for it. The brand seemed vaguely familiar, certainly reputable, but not one of the big names. In the photos, it looked hefty and silver with a bracelet. It had several dials on it, and some sort of fancy Swiss guts. The photos covered all the angles, and you could zoom in on the watch very close so that you could look at the crenelations on the winder, for example, pixel by pixel. Don was feeling good about this.

He had a lot of things in the house, in fact spilling into the yard and the garage and the storage shed, that were the result of some deep discount , or an online auction, or a second-hand store, or an estate sale. He sent his credit card number and printed the confirmation and receipt for his order. A week later, the watch still hadn't arrived. Don thought there must have been a mix-up. He steered his finger-blackened mouse back to the bookmarked page and found the seller's email address. He wrote a note, pecking out each letter with the knotted fingers of a man who made his living hanging doors and windows.

Hi,

I'm the guy who won the auction for the ALF watch. Do you have a tracking number for the shipment? Thanks, Don

The email bounced back immediatly. FATAL ERROR. NON-EXISTENT DOMAIN. Don rifled through the papers, the important ones, that he tried to stick under the old dot-matix printer. He found the receipt and confirmation. He checked the URL. "HTTP:" It had been posted from a non-secured website. Leaning close to the screen, he steered his mouse to his bookmarks and went to his bank, typing in his username and password, MAGGIE51, and saw that his checking balance was negative. Opening the account, he saw a long line of $200 withdrawls from the same source. More than $5,000 had been tapped out of his account, and it looked like there was now a charge against their equity line. Don scrolled to the bottom of the page and clicked through several pages looking for a customer service phone number. Finding it, he picked up the phone and dialed. An automated voice answered and provided a menu. He selected the number for reporting fraudulent activity. All of the customer services representatives were busy. His business was appreciated, and the bank understood that his time was valuable, and assured him that calls were being answered in the order in which they had been received. Don wondered how it could be otherwise. He hit the little refresh widget on his browser. "GODAMMIT!" he said. There was a new $50,000 charge against their equity line. He thought he must be imagining it, and tried to go back to the previous screen. ERROR.

In Absentia, Part 7

2009-02-17T07:41:00.000-08:00

Everyone and everything seemed to thrive in small ways in the absence of K— while he squatted in the dead woman's house. K—'s wife asked people to use her first name, Stephanie. Their house — Stephanie's house — felt more in control and manageable. The snow outside melted. With many of his things boxed and put in the garage, there was more breathing space. More negative space, she said out loud. They were words he'd used for years when he critiqued a page in a magazine or a newspaper. "Too many words! Too many pictures! This needs more negative space."

***

I'm not typically a jealous man, so I wouldn't normally have cared that much, but we'd been going through a rough patch. Both working too many hours. Domestic chores were a burden and we snapped at each other about stupid little stuff. Dirty dishes or discarded clothing. Small indignities and oversights got amplified and became silent resentments. I usually came home first, and grabbed the mail from the box at the door of their apartment. I took the mail to the dining room table, where I left a silver letter opener, and starting from the back of the envelopes, worked the tip of the opener under the flap. I never looked at the front of the envelopes. I could tell the junk mail from personal mail just by the quality of the paper, could feel with the tips of my fingers the plastic window on the front of a bill, could tell by the cheap bleached paper and the thickness of that other envelope that it contained our monthly banking statements. We spent a lot of money because we made a lot of money. Monique was an anchor on a cable network. I was the director of a well-funded non-profit, making me feel both guilty and self-righteous; self-righteous, because it was the non-profit sector, guilty and self-conscious because I made loads more money than my coworkers and colleagues. It made me a bit of a crank, I suppose, and my fund-raising skills were flagging ever since the Recession, and this added additional negative pressure every day, which I suppose I couldn't resist deflecting to Monique. I sometimes looked in the bathroom mirror and held my finger up to my temple in the shape of a pistol, and dropped the thumb like a hammer, making a pccchhhh sound in my throat, and once I even pretended to collapse to the floor, and slipped on the wet tiles as I did it, and hit my head against the porcelain bath tub, and was knocked unconscious with a gash over my left eye, and the blood on the white tiles was red like a splash of thick, sweet desert wine, nothing a normal person would want in their mouth, much too sweet, almost a reduction, and when I came back to consciousness my head ached so hard that my vision was blurred and for a moment I thought I might have really shot himself with my finger, and thought I smelled cordite in the air, or burned liver, but then figured it was a hallucination from the pounding headache I'd given himself.

So the envelope I opened was in Monique's hand, and before I read the first line I turned the envelope over and it was in someone else's writing addressed to someone else, a name I vaguely recalled: K—.

"I have thought a lot about that kiss. You know the one, on Market Street in 19--. Your mouth tasted like a strawberry dipped in honey, against a backdrop of curry. I was wearing a thin skirt, and I felt you get hard against my leg almost immediately. I'm glad it didn't go farther than that. It was late. We were both drunk. The message you left afterward -- that it could never happen again, that you were happily married, etc. -- well, it depressed me. It was saying the obvious. It was, I don't know, so petty bourgeois. That's not the right phrase at all, but it's the right emotional subtext. It was saying something that did not need to be said to me but something you needed to say to yourself. I found that sad.

I have all the computers from those years. The keys stick, the monitors are burnt out. But I took out their hard drives. Yes, I know how to do that. I ordered little stainless steel boxes for them that convert them into external hard drives that can be plugged into any other computer. Even though the operating systems have all changed, I can look at old text files, mail.

I confess that I have, once or twice, thought about you and wondered where you are, and I've scrolled through our correspondence. It's full of quippy, funny things we wrote to each other, insinuations. Sometimes when I read things like this, I am astonished. They seem written by someone else, and never read before by me or you. I remember at dinner that night, you spoke about how editors and writers were forever trying to seduce each other, that their relationship bore a lot of resemblance to a typical romance... courting, flattery, expectations, disappointments, forgiveness. Intellectual parry and riposte. We had a very intriguing professional seduction. We had that in those days, and of course it all ended with that kiss and -- forgive me for saying it -- your spontaneous hard-on. And I don't believe we've spoken or written a word since then. So imagine my surprise to get your letter.

I've thought about contacting you again over the years, but not seriously. In part because of how it ended, yes, but more because of what happened afterward. Remember what you said to me? After the kiss? "You are being followed by a star." I asked you what that mean. "Your life --," you said, jamming your hands into your pockets. The streetlight buzzed. "You've got a charmed life." And you were right. I've had nothing but professional breaks since then. I've worked very hard, sure, but I've been very lucky too. There have been other "seductions," but that's no different than anyone else. Things have just worked out very well for me. And the truth is, I'm glad I kissed you and you said that, trying desperately to hide your erection on that San Francisco street. I can't help feeling that you gave me something there, and I didn't want to risk losing it by calling you or writing to you over the years.

And now I feel as though I've cleared my conscience and discharged a debt to you, and now I guess I'll have to live by my wits alone. I'm sorry to hear that you're unemployed now, but I'm sure you'll land on your feet. Please think well of me and forgive me. --Monique

I dropped the note on the table. It had run to five pages and the envelope had been returned with a purple stamp "Insufficient Funds." What a stupid, self-involved, overwritten letter! I stabbed the letter opener into the solid walnut table.

And Then I Forced Myself

2009-02-12T04:36:00.001-08:00

One of the clowns fell off the horse and landed in the middle of the lane. The horse behind stepped on her face. She grimaced. A semi coming down the interstate at full speed downshifted and centered itself over her. Her baggy clothes were wind blasted, but inside she stayed very still. The next truck downshifted too late, did not see her. The nine wheels on the left side of the truck were centered on her body. I forced myself.

***

I was in a children's log cabin. It tipped over onto its triangular roof. Someone or something was rolling the house, trying to spin it like a top. Each time it rolled and lurched and fell onto a flat face, the wood screamed and splintered. I wedged myself into a corner. I forced myself.

***

Two parallel bunk beds in a small room. A fire place with a dim light bulb in it. Something malevolent in the room, about to happen. I try to wake up an unknown person in the top bunk. He or she rolls over on top of me in a gauzy cotton counterpane. Something grabs my ass, hard, a pinching fistful. I forced myself.

Scherzo: A Business Trip to Arid, Oil-Producing Lands Featuring Potential Lap Dances

2009-02-09T05:13:00.000-08:00

The men — there were no women allowed — all drank flasks in their white and off-white rooms — alcohol was not allowed — and got ready ("gussied," said the guy from the South) for dinner in the complex. They made small groups in the hallway, even there everything looked really nice. Not fancy but expensive. Good clean carpet. Heavy gloss paint. Solid brass fixtures. Done right. They made their way to the dining hall and the presentation. It had been a hot day outside the plate glass windows. They had not gone outside at all, but still felt like they had, after the friendly but pointed business talks, negotiations, how-dee-doo. Now they were in casual shirts and clean slacks — no jeans! — and even good sandals, because "Them A-rabs whhhere this shit all the tom," said the guy from the South pointing at his feet, which were inserted into new brown hurachis he'd just taken out of a box that said "heche en Mexico" which also contained a fifth of El Jamino tequila, some of which he'd transferred to a large paper coffee cup that had something Arabic scribbled on it and rudimentary pyramids and a lid and a thermal cuff. The IT guy from Minneapolis hung back. The sales guy from Dallas bugged the shit out of him, true, but mostly just scared him. Got up in his face, invaded his personal operating environment which he preferred to be clean and uncluttered and free of Southerners. In the dining hall, the sheiks had changed into casual robes and kafias, which were — to the eyes of the Wsterners — of exactly the same quality and kind as their more formal sheik-wear, and they continued to wear their dark sunglasses and generally to project an unreal, stereotypical sort of sheik persona. The IT guy noticed this and wondered if it was all just a put on. He felt his brain slip a little bit — it had been doing this sometimes lately, maybe it was the strong Arabic coffee, maybe it was the dosage he'd been on of the other stuff— he felt his brain slip a gear and for a moment and question the basic reality of everything. It all seemed two-dimensional, fungible, ridiculous, deplorable, destroyable. At moments like that he thought nothingness would be a great relief; somethingness was too much to bear, and the silly Arab businessmen in their red and black kafias, the "sheiks" if that's what they really were, and their huge blue-blocker glasses like personal windshielfs for your head, and their neatly trimmed beards and their — well, frankly their schnozzes, great hooked beaks, beautiful like the prows of ocean-worthy ships, schnozzolas! — nothing racist about it, they couldn't possibly be real, he wanted to look for the seams along the cheeks, the skin-toned putty, and there seemed to be like a sheen under those beards, possibly some exposed gum arabic, and through the folds in their linen skirts and robes and stoles, a glancing image of — Fruit of the Loom! — Oh! Life is but a dream. That's how the IT guy extracted himself from these new existential crises. Life is but a dream!

But it was no dream. "If you are lucky, you will be immediately deported. If you are not lucky, you will be jailed and tried, and possibly have your offending hand removed." As in chopped off. They were taking a risk drinking alcohol right under their noses. But the IT guy couldn't shake this feeling of unreality, so he didn't make a scene or a fuss, and then they were seated at white formica tables — not as nice as you might have expected, a bit of a lapse in good taste, it's how you knew you were actually in a foreign country, no matter how much money they had, they lacked a consistent commitment to a single value set — that's how the CMO had put it, normally a guy who seemed incapable of a conversation without reference to a spreadsheet or access to a ten-key, but who was secretly — it turned out — a fan of literature, of aesthetic philosophy, of cultural paradigms, so naturally he was kind of flowering personally on this trip that threw the team into such a bizarre set of circumstances — and he was right: The dining hall tables were tippy and cheap, no better than you'd find in a national chain of restaurants back home, though the chairs were of the very highest buffet grade.

The sales guy from Dallas — unbelievable! — had turned his chair out from the table to face the little platform, and he had transferred his tequila from the Arab-themed coffee cup to a ketchup squeeze bottle, so that now it contained a thin pinkish liquid, El Jamino mixed with Heinz, that he was jetting into his mouth occasionally as he slouched in his chair with his fat legs splayed in tight slacks, highwatered about white jogging socks in the hurachis, and the IT guy from Minneapolis still feeling a bit untethered from reality could picture — really vividly picture — the sales guy with his hand chopped off, like a firehose spewing blood and meat and smaller hoses of artery, vein, nerve, dazzling white gristle.

"Your attention please," said one of the sheiks. "The show will begin." He clapped once. The team all turned their chairs to face the stage. There were cups of different kinds all over the place. Surely the sheiks had noticed this and were turning a blind eye. A thin woman in a long black burka and hijab came into the room, almost as if she were going to take our orders. The whole outfit came off like a curtain from unseen hinges or trick seams and she was naked, beautiful, her skin was bronze, her breasts shaped like soft-serve ice cream cones, her pubic hair trimmed in a sort of black runway -- what the IT guy had, as a boy with girlie mags uner his nattress, once called a "Bobby Orr" -- the sales guy from Dallas, all the sales guys in fact, leered and hooted, someone even whistled with his fingers in his mouth. The woman smiled devlishly and looked at each man with her dewey brown eyes as her hips swayed to some unheard music, her broad shoulders shimmied and she set her feet one in front of the other the way a pony in a circus might, and her hands made graceful filigrees in the air, and it was all very erotic, until she grabbed one of the buffet chairs and took it up on the little stage, and set it down backwards and then somehow hoisted herself in such a way that only her legs and hips were visible above the back of the chair, and she made a perfect plateau of her outstretched legs, and then the two halves of the joint betweeen her legs moved in opposite directions, like continents moving against each other. The room was silent. Even the salesman from Dallas sat open mouthed with his hands on his splayed knees like an umpire waiting for the pitch but frozen, in the middle of saying something, in a still photograph.

In Absentia, Part 6

2009-02-05T04:37:00.000-08:00

The dead woman wouldn't stop talking. "They say your whole life passes in front of your eyes, but it ain't true," she said. "Only the parts that killed you." There was a long, tentative pause. The potential for sweet silence. "At least for me." Sun slanted through the windows. It's not legal to sell a house without window treatments, thought K—. His mind was wandering. Death didn't interest him in that way; not as some sort of transition to something else, a lock-in at some cosmic amusement park where the brain and soul traveled on, unhitched from the body, bright lights, etc. Death to him was just a permanent, ineffable end. Absolute absence. The end papers of (in his case) a mediocre book. Why speculate about sequels? Why obsess about the motivations and ramifications of characters who never actually existed, as if they were anything more than the flawed inventions of a flawed inventor, brought to a more or less convincing end? Why wonder where the sun went when it set?

But the dead woman went on, oblivious. "It was through school, of course," she said. "I taught his boy. Such a sweet boy, his hair always a mess, his shirts on backwards. But smart. Gifted, I suppose. I remember that first conference. She came, but not Jack. He never came to conferences. We hit it off straight away. She wore beautiful clothes, clothes like I always wanted, but wouldn't even know where to look. Fine wool sweaters, I suppose. Boutique skirts. Leather shoes. You'd think she made me feel bad in my bumpers and jeans, my smock. But these things were like my teacher's uniform, though I never wore anything else much. Not until Jack bought me things." K— opened his eyes and turned his head. His cheek felt scratchy against the ugly gray carpet. A kibble of rat poison was perched on the carpet twelve inches away. It looked like a space capsule. "Don never bought me nothing," said the dead woman. K— wondered whether she'd always been a poorly spoken teacher, or whether she'd lost her job and her grammar had thereafter degraded, or if it was an effect of death, one of the things that was stripped from you before you knew you were a restless soul not yet ready to pass over, due to unfinished business. Or however Agnes had phrased it.

"A broken heart," said Maggie. "Is what got me. What's a broken heart? Does it break when you fall in love? Or when you fall out of love? Or when the man you love stops loving you? It's confusing, and I still ain't figured it out." K— gritted his teeth. This was getting maudlin and grammatically ridiculous. "So maybe that's the wrong metaphor." Relief. "Anyways, I think I broke my own heart. Don was a good man. He and Jack, they were real pals, drank beer, needled each other the way men do when they're fond of each other. Di and me—" Another pause. Di and I, thought K—, but he was less annoyed because the dead woman's voice was soothing and now she'd started something and he wanted to know what it was. "Di and me got along famously, too. We'd call every night. We had cocktail parties. We got the kids together, and they got along fine too. Patrick and James were thick as thieves!" The School for Bad Grammar, Mixed Metaphors and Obsolete Cliches, thought K—, smiling in spite of himself. Do go on. The dead woman stopped for a long time. "Yes, thick as thieves." She sniffed, wherever she was. She looked out a window at the con trail of a very high airplane, wherever she was. "I lied. Jack never bought me nothing and neither did Don. I did my own shopping, much as he hated that." The house made the sounds of an empty house for a long time. K— might have drifted off. He'd turned on his side to relieve pressure on his spine and shoulder blades. His hands were folded as if in prayer under one cheek and slick with drool, like a child in a his bed. The kibble of rat poison was now stuck to the cuff of his shirt. "I was in grave moral danger," Maggie was saying. "Grave grave moral danger, and all I'd done was called him— I mean Jack — and left him a message. At least it was at his office. Di wouldn't hear it unless he told her. And then how could I explain to them all? That I was desperately lonely? And that I lacked the social graces? And that it was — God help me what a terrible cliche— a desperate cry for help? See none of that would matter. And my whole life would fall to pieces. Don and Patrick, Jack and Di and James. Exploded. Everyone blown to bits, sent in all directions. A pretty picture torn up, burned up. Because of one stupid phone call after a few cocktails. What had I done? I looked into the abyss of my own heart, and I saw that I'd broken it. That it had been cracked for a long time, and I'd driven a wedge into it. Broke it in two, and there was nothing in the space between those two pieces. Wanting to be two people, have two lives, but instead there was nothing. The space between two atoms. It killed me, inside anyway." K— shivered.

"Though of course I lived on for many years. Until the goddamn ovarian cancer." The dead woman chuckled. "The F.O.C. Don called it. He had a different word for it, right up to the day of the passing, there beside me."

"Don never knew. But I did."

In Absentia, Part 5

2009-02-02T04:58:00.000-08:00

The brief absence of K— was a small blessing, a stroke of collective good luck. It was an event like a full moon or an aurora, something that had a small, almost imperceptible influence on a great number of people. A positive influence. His wife was worried, of course, about where he might be, but life seemed to have a hit a smooth patch of pavement at the moment he'd walked out the door with the hammer and the other things, and she couldn't help thinking it was cause and effect. There was exactly enough romaine lettuce for one salad. All the clothes came out of the dryer completely dry and clean. A pleasant telephone conversation with an old friend. An unexpected discount in utility charges. A cardinal in a tree outside the bedroom window. A full tank of gas when she went driving.

Spring was coming, she thought, the light was changing, so she might as well pack away some of K—'s winter things. She gathered hats and gloves and scarves and a down vest he never wore and boxed these things and put them in the basement. His winter coat was all the was left in the closet, hanging there like an animal skin. She had a salad for lunch, washed her bowl, then thought twice about the box and moved it to the detached garage without remorse. The driveway was wet. A boy walking by smiled and said hello. He had a gadget slung over one shoulder that looked like a canteen. "Need help with that?" K—'s wife blushed and declined.

The canteen on a thin strap felt heavy at the boy's side. He'd measured the ambient noise at K—'s cafe, and it showed a dramatic and sustained increase in the days after K—'s disappearance. The needles on the device shivered and swooped and reset like something nervous feeding in the twilight. It was busier and its patrons were more outgoing, speaking more freely and animatedly with strangers, sharing tables and borrowing sections of the newspaper. The volume of the cafe had increased 18 percent. The acoustics student focused on things or influences that might have been introduced in the previous three days. He'd not yet struck on the idea of things or influences that might have been removed in the previous three days.

In Absentia, Part 4

2009-01-29T06:34:00.000-08:00

The unopened, returned envelopes piled up. K—'s wife continued to put them in their own small basket at the writing desk. They were strange. She recognized the small irregular handwriting. The return address and the mailing address were the same, written in the same hand, K—'s. Why had he mailed himself 20 or 30 letters? Where had he mailed them from? It occurred to her that he'd wasted money on the postage. Even if he'd wished for his own mysterious reasons to send letters to himself through the mail system, have them handled by men and women in uniforms, run through automatic sorting machines, printed with cryptic bar codes; even then, he could have gotten away without stamps, since the postal service would return the letters for insufficient postage. Probably. She wondered: Did the discretion of the mail carrier go so far as to prevent him from looking at both the mailing address and the return address, duty and propriety circumscribing even his field of vision, preventing him from wondering what sort of fraud this might represent? But with a valid stamp, there was no official reason the postal service could decline to deliver the non-sensical mail, she could see the logic in that, or rather she could sense K—'s logic in that.

K— had not come home after he left the house with a hammer and some other things. How many days had it been? Two or three. He had not been wearing a jacket. He could not have gotten very far. Yet he was not back. It had been a long time. K—'s wife knew she should call someone. Her mother? The police? But she felt immoveable, impossible to set into motion. It wasn't a heavy feeling, on the contrary. It was a weightless feeling, like floating in space without any forces acting upon her, without even the lightest touch or breath of air to change her position.

The mail arrived, she heard the box open and spring shut again. Dogs inside houses barked up and down the street. At that moment, she realized what the letters meant. He was writing again, trying to drum up freelance work. These were the self-addressed, stamped envelopes she'd seen many years ago when he'd struggled to place articles with magazines and newspapers, had even tried to hawk a small collection of essays. It had seemed cruel to her: there were only rejections in these self-addressed letters. When they occasionally accepted manuscripts, publishers paid for the postage and the envelope and the stationary, so that a rejection extracted a double toll, self-administered. But that had been years ago. She surprised herself, her slipping memory of the things he'd done, the person he'd been. It was like she was remembering an admirable character in a story or a book that she'd read decades ago, rather than a man — her husband — whom she'd not seen for two days. She loved that character in that book and felt a great tenderness for him and she stayed away from the telephone.

She went back to the basket with the unopened envelopes. She was wrong. They were addressed to other people. Some she knew, some she recognized, others a mystery to her. Why had she thought they were self-addressed? Only because they were in K—'s hand? Is that why her eyes had tricked her, or perhaps her memory? The handwriting of others was scrawled across the front, some in thick marker others in a thin elegant looping hand, still others in blocky printed letters saying "return to sender" or "not at this address," and in one odd case simply "unknown."

In Absentia, Part 3

2009-01-21T05:10:00.000-08:00

The door opened to a dirt floor in a crawl space with low ceilings and joists. It was empty. K— felt not a presence but an absence, just as palpable and foreboding. There was something bad in there. He was inclined to leave, to tack the door shut so that it would stay shut as he intended. But whoever was inside attracted him involuntarily like air into a vacuum, and he thought it possible — though unlikely — that this room might lead to another unlocked door and another room and so on, until he'd reached the heart of the house, the kitchen, and turned off that foul green light and if he was trespassing then it was for a good cause even if it was trivial and selfish. K— tried the door inside the crawl space. It was open, and led into an unfinished basement divided into unwalled rooms that had once been filled with things that were now gone. A washer and drier sat there open mouthed, divided by a plastic sink on legs. K— saw the steps and climbed them. Another door. This one would surely be locked. It wasn't. Here then was the kitchen. The lights buzzed behind a sheet of faceted plastic in the ceiling. Bad linoleum floors and formica counters, mismatched cabinets, a ludicrous stainless steel hose and shower head for rinsing large quantities of dishes. Everything here was immoveable; what could be removed had been removed, and some things that had been intended as permanent fixtures were gone too, leaving a cavity of unpainted wood or preserved lino, and even some of the walls had never been painted. They had gray paper and black lesions where the heads of screws were sunk in irregular intervals. K— stood and took this all in. It was strange here where no one lived, where all the things that marked a mundane life had been carried off, just an elaborate shell that had held food, and the appliances and utilities for preparing it, eating it, cleaning up after it, and then the bathroom, an ingenious place to eliminate waste from it, a closed system, a circuit without a charge, an empty set, a dead telephone. But something lingered. Maybe it was nothing more than the flourescent lights. K— checked the doorway to the foyer, but there were no switches. He crossed the kitchen and checked the threshold there, but there were no switches. He went to the front door, but there were no switches. An oddity, this home with electricity but no switches. K— thought he might locate the circuit box. But instead he went into the living room and laid down on the stained gray carpet. He put his hands under his head, closed his eyes, and listened very hard to the sound of the empty house that was not quite empty. The house of a person who had moved away and then died, a thing slowly withdrawing. Slowly withdrawing into extinction.

In Absentia, Part 2

2009-01-15T05:18:00.000-08:00

One letter, however was not returned. The letter that was not returned was opened by the husband of a woman K— had once worked with, a woman who had grabbed him by the lapels once and kissed him, saying "Let's just get this over with." She'd become very successful in the years afterward.

Walking home after a full day of letter-writing and newspaper-reading, K— saw that someone had spraypainted the snow. In the blanket of snow covering the small yard in front of their house, there was a red line. The spraypaint had melted a small channel in the surface of the snow like a finger through foam, and the paint congealed there. The line crossed the yard and resumed on the other side of the walk up to K—'s door, then continued to the neighboring house. At the end of the painted line there was a red flag on a small wire. The neighboring house had been empty for some time.

K— went inside and greeted his wife, and she greeted him. He saw the opened mail and the unopened mail in their separate baskets. He set his things down and did the things he did. After a time, he climbed the stairs to use the bathroom. Standing at the toilet he looked out the window at the neighboring house. Now there was a for sale sign adjacent to the little red flag. "Bank Owned," it said, a huge wooden plaque mounted to a thick square post. K— considered but did not know 1) how the post had been sunk into frozen soil and 2) how the sign had been erected in the short quiet time between his return home and his urinating, during the time he was doing the things he normally did, the small gestures and routiness -- hanging his coat on the bannister, loosening his tie, putting his newspaper in a paper bag at the back door, checking his watch against the clock on the wall and the LED on the microwave, glancing out into the backkyard at the large circular thermometer that seemed to be stuck at 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the smaller celsius graduations too hard to read.

K— flushed the toilet and turned to look fully out the window, to consider the neighboring house. The owner had left without saying goodbye, had virtually disappeared. Had walked away from the house with his wife. Later, K—'s wife had told him, the wife died. The house was in disrepair, paint flaking off the siding, birds nesting in the eaves. There was a light left on in the kitchen, a sick green flourescence that came through the uncurtained windows. Looking into the neighboring house's backyard, K— could see the forms of junk left there under the snow. The shape of an overturned wheelbarrow like a drifted hummock. A cake-like shape that was an old spare tire. A jumble of small shapes like animals huddling for warmth--that was an old computer monitor and printer and some anti-freeze bottles near the basement door. K— was surprised that he hadn't seen it before: the basement door was gaping slightly. For several days thereafter, each time K— used the toilet, he checked on the basement door, and each day it was gaping more or gaping less, the wedge of darkness behind the door growing more acute, then obtuse on an especially wide-open day. It couldn't be an intruder or an animal, because the only tracks in the snow looked like the dot-dash-dot patterings of urban rabbits, or the solid meanderings of squirrels, none of them going decisively down the stairwell to the door. Birds though. They might have been going in there.

Standing at the toilet, K— saw the door was barely cracked open. It was obviously being buffeted by the wind. Nothing inside the house or outside the house was affecting the door. It was merely ajar, and on a windless day it might stay exactly the same. On a breezy day, it might open and close dozens of times, if anyone were standing there to watch. K— made up his mind to go over there to the basement door, and shut it as best as he could, maybe bring along a hammer or an electric screwdriver and shut up that door. He'd read in the newspaper that all the foreclosed homes were being targeted by scrappers who broke in and removed copper pipes and wiring and sold it fat the scrap yard, and the less scrupulous ones -- the desperate drug addicts, for example -- were often breaking gas lines, and this was a tremendous fire hazard. Three or four vacant homes had exploded in other parts of the city. This was the article that had caught his eye before, and this information was now motivating his decision. He went and got his tools, and put on his boots. But his decision and his intention waivered when he stood there at the neighboring house, at the bottom of the steps to the basement door, for now the door stood open at what appeared to be the limits of its hinges. Wide open, giving a full view of the interior. His own tracks appeared to be the only boots in the snow, but he turned and looked, and went over his steps and created too many tracks of his own. He felt a spring of fear in his abdomen and craned his neck to look inside without stepping closer.

In Absentia, Part 1

2009-01-14T04:32:00.000-08:00

K— is a man who is appreciated most, if he is appreciated at all, in his absence. As the editor of a newspaper, most of his employees and co-workers were indifferent to him. When he was fired, little was said. No one stayed in touch with K—, and the publisher made offhanded negative remarks about him if his name came up in conversation. There were, after all, people who had benefited from the largesse of K—, though they were just looking after themselves. They called once or twice after K— was sacked, and were put through to the publisher. The publisher was predisposed to dislike and dismiss anyone who'd worked for K—. Of course, they missed the few assignments they'd been given, the few dollars they'd derived from him, but nothing more. It was as if he'd merely been a bookmark for them, a small bill, easily replaced. If not replaced, then the book itself was merely a distraction, not worth finishing.

K— and his wife were strangers to each other. Each day when K— left for the office, even after he'd been fired, and went to a nearby coffee shop to furtively read his old newspaper, K—'s wife would sigh with relief as she rinsed the dishes. Now she could brew a pot of Earl Grey, the scent of which delighted her. It was a delight she preferred in privacy. K—'s presence was a burden that deflated her; his leaving the house had the effect of reinflating her, though she could not say why, and would not speak ill of him.

At the coffeeshop, the only vacant chairs and tables were nearest to K—. Strangers with no complaint were repelled by the man, though he was normal to all appearances, maybe even handsome as the neutrality of his life embittered his face and threw its boyish features into relief. A small boy with a squirt gun shot K— in the back. K— felt the patter of water and turned to look and smile at the boy. The boy did not smile back. K— looked up at the boy's mother, an attractive woman with very clean hair. She had the same blank, murderous stare as her son. She towed the boy away and sat on a magazine rack at the far side of the shop. She did not watch K— or give him any more notice.

Each day thereafter, K— walked to the coffee shop. More often than not, he sat in a different vacant chair, perhaps a couch or a tattered arm chair. Each day, there was a slow, almost imperceptible clearing of the area nearest K—, as if he were emitting a bad smell or sound, though he wasn't. Neither was he dressed in a strange way, nor was his hair odd. His socks were normal and matched. When he wore brown shoes he wore a brown belt, and black with black. He was neither stylish nor unstylish. He did not exude any sort of natural charisma that would explain the berth he was given; he was not like the sun burning through a fog. Nor was he like a drop of oil on a surface of water. Nor was he like a predator amongst his prey. He was just K—, a man who was slightly more repellent than most, for no apparent reason.

K— grew bored with his daily routine of reading his old paper at the coffee shop, and bringing along his briefcase, carrying on the charade for no one. It was not as if he were deceiving his wife or even himself each morning when he left at precisely the same time he'd always left. It's just what he did, though it was not enough anymore. He took out a pad of paper and wrote. He wrote a simple letter over and over again, each time tearing off the sheet and folding it in thirds, then putting it in an envelope.

Dear So and So,

How are you? It's been many years since we've socialized or worked together or transacted some sort of business, or otherwise interacted. I earnestly hope you've been well and thrived during this time. For myself, I am unemployed. It's nothing, don't give it another thought. I beg you one small favor. Please write to me at the address below and give me the news of your life, anything of note that has passed since we last saw each other. This is for a professional project, and I would be grateful for any help you can offer in this respect.

With kindest regards,

K—

But when the recipients of this letter saw the return address on the envelope, they could not bear to open the letter, either because they did not recognize K—'s name and assumed it was junk mail ingeniously disguised as a personal, handwritten letter. Or because the letter itself, the envelope carried a residue of the same mysterious, benign taint that marked K—. The bolder recipients of this letter held the envelope by the edges and wrote "wrong address" or "return to sender" across the front, and put it back in the mailbox. Mail carriers took little notice of this, and dutifully returned the envelopes to K—'s home. The mail arrived there mid-day. When K—'s wife heard the clack of the mailbox, she wiped her hands on her dress or smock or jeans and went to the foyer of their house and collected these letters and the rest of the mail. She opened their mail -- bills and commercial solicitations, mostly -- and collected the returned letters in a small wicker basket without opening them.

Big Tits and Avocados

2009-01-13T11:05:00.000-08:00

On the plane, I repeated the question: What do I do? The usual spiel: I'm a speculator and I bought a goddamn avocado farm. Knew nothing about it, had a great bowl of guacamole at the local taqueria, saw a future. So I bought avocados. An orchard, I guess you'd call it. Down in South Carolina, where I have never been. I make good money. Enough to send Kelly to college. A state school, mind you, but a decent one. I had hopes of an Ivy League, but she was a goddamn good swimmer and wanted go to a Division I school and what could I say? Then after the accident, she had some sort of sorority she was involved with, all of her little suburban friends and their toga parties or whatever. Never understood what they call "the Greek system." Far as I know, the "Greek system" involved a helluva lot of pederasty. I am worried about her tits. They're large. I know what boys at state universities think of large tits. I don't want boys at state universities pawing my daughters tits. I can't stop them, and I can't stop her, of course. I just don't want it. So I try not to think about it. BOYS FROM STATE UNIVERSITIES: HANDS OFF KELLY'S TITS. That's the best I can do anymore: issue a goddamn statement. There was a time when I could turn a state university boy into spare state-university-boy parts. Now I've got my goddamn hands full with this machine to carry around like a goddamn suitcase everywhere I go. Like an astronaut walking down catwalks, boarding an idling rocket, jets of exhaust going off around me. It's the hissing in my inner ear; now I'm going deaf from the battery warning alerts when I'm toggled to mobile. Kelly calls. She says she's in love. I'm not sure I've ever heard these words from her. Not sure I've heard them from anyone, actually, outside of the movies. Sheila and I, we may as well have been an arranged marriage. And that's goddamn fine with me. Our culture, society, whatever. It's been ripped apart with the idiotic idea of "true love." What a crock of horse shit. The whole idea ruins generations of people who can't possibly live up to the expectations of that "soul mate" B.S. True Love is taking turns changing the shitty diapers, while your eyes water and you retch into the back of your wrist. True Love is someone cleans the goddamn kitchen each night, black leaves of sopping cooked spinach clogging the drain. True Love is knowing when to hold your tongue when you've been drinking scotch since 3 PM. True Love is sticking to a goddamn budget, even when avocado futures are going through the goddamn ceiling, and there's no end in sight to the money train. Especially when avocado futures are going through the ceiling. Now I have a strong paternal love for my big-busted daughter, and I damn near had what my mother, informed by personal experience, used to call a nervous breakdown when I got the call after the accident. "What kind of a thing is that to say to me?" I screamed into the phone at the doctor, the police, whoever. The voice of authority there, on the other end of the line. "Fifty percent chance?" They were making my daughter's life sound like the weather. Like a slight chance of rain. I could have flown out there, dropped the machine and wrung their necks while I had enough reserves to do it, happily passing into unconsciousness knowing that I'd crushed his Adam's Apple with my bare hands. But it wouldn't have made me feel any better. Just like it didn't make me feel any better that the driver, that stupid bitch from where -- Chicago? -- had died. Didn't make me feel any better, thinking of her father sitting in his ass-infused office chair reaching for the scotch in his bottom desk drawer, tucked among the tuition statements and co-signed credit card statements and all the rest of his shit. Maybe she didn't have a father. A man to teach her how to drive. Women shouldn't drive. It's become a channel for their rage, how they drive. Men have evolved beyond that now. We became better. But women got worse. Now we're the fairer sex, at least as regards driving. Sheila agrees with me. I won't ride in a car with her now, not generally. The road rage is palpable. She'll get us both killed. Her head of silver hair trembling visibly. It's a form of selfishness, the idea that the world owes you fair, safe passage on your own terms. At your own speed, in your own time. Men -- we've been to war. At least my generation. We know what a defensive posture is. Assume no one can see you. And those who can see you want to kill you. So who is the love interest? I try to be supportive. I can't hear Kelly very well. I'm just glad she's alive, even now, after her fused bones, no more swimming, the huge tits. The whole accident gave her a new kind of arrogance, I mean it made her feel more proprietary about life -- her life -- belonging to her, I guess. Her decisions. Her friends. Her goddamn life. And she's right. If she'd just... well, humor me. Tell me she doesn't allow the hands of state university boys to fondle those astonishingly large breasts. Not explicit like that, though. Something more subtle, genteel, the way a girl should talk to her dad and make him feel... I don't know, reassured. Reassured that she won't end up with some knuckledragger who can't think beyond big tits and avocados. The love interest turns out to, according to Kelly, show some promise. A philosophy major ready to transfer already after just one semester. To an Ivy League. Proving to his parents that he's worthy of something more than this shitty party school known best for its swim team and its aviation program. Has real goals, wants to work with people -- names I don't recognize, how the hell is an avocado farmer supposed to be current on epistemology and theodicy and God knows what else? To know what the experts say and where they work and how much they publish? I'm glad they do whatever they do. It's the mark of a civilized nation. We can afford the luxury of high-mindedness. It's proof -- and we need plenty of it -- that we've managed to drag ourselves out of the peptidal mud of evolution, that we're better than animals, that we're more than just big knockers and delicious guacamole. When can I meet this kid? Not like it's a requirement, God knows Kelly will do whatever she wants. Fuck whomever she wants, to be coarse about it. She's bringing him home for Thanksgiving, if that's OK. Will I buy them both a plane ticket? Why not. I've got the money and budgets are for spouses, not children. She's not spoiled, in spite of all the avocado money. They're here now. Sheila, imperious, prepared the whole spread. Ready upon arrival. I've set down the machine -- it's beeping incessantly, I'll have to sit down and plug in, batteries are beyond recharging now. Here in my favorite armchair, highball of Antiquary nice and neat. I have to stand to shake his hand. Good looking kid. In Harris Tweeds! Young scholar, philosopher. Kelly slips away to the kitchen. "Listen," I say leveling with him. We're both sitting. He's nervous, palms rubbing his knees as if they were my daughter's breasts. "You seem like a good kid, and I'm glad you're transferring out of that godawful school." He nods. "But keep your hands off my daughter's tits, understand?" He laughs nervously, he thinks I'm joking, maybe I am. He absent-mindedly reaches for my glass of scotch and slugs it down. Good kid. He sets the glass down, realizes what he's done, awkwardly stands up and says he needs to wash his hands, I stand too and point out the bathroom to him. One of his wingtips catches the cord to the machine and yanks it out of the wall. I just sit down in my chair and look at the machine as it wheezes down to silence. I suddenly feel goddamn sleepy. Goddamn tired. It feels good. I raise the glass to my lips but never feel the drop of scotch hit my tongue.

The One-Year Release of Charles O. Amdahl

2009-01-11T09:16:00.000-08:00

A plane rises on the exact asymptote of the electrical line across my backyard. It could be a drop of water moving along through capillary action, but it isn't. It's a large metal tube far away, driven by three or four rockets; inside there are businessmen and business women, small children, cloth upholstery, solicitous professionals, families on their way to vacation, muted terror. I am sitting here. They are sitting there. In 17 other cities, there are men doing what I am doing: sitting here struggling with words, trying desperately to slake some sort of thirst, feed some kind of hunger that is not in the stomach but is the cause of the stomach. Each of the other 17 see planes that closely resemble my plane, and carry a similar group of people doing similar things, moving along electrical lines hanging across backyards and garages. A squirrel is pushing snow like a little plow across my garage roof, below the draping electrical line. A sparrow stamps flakes away from the bird feeder. I feel nauseated. This moment never existed until I killed it with gun-shaped words. I am killing a world that never existed. I threw up in my little garbage can with torn envelopes and ATM receipts, a single dried-up apple core. Life goes on like a radio no one is listening to in a far away room, or right inside the ear, but no where in between.

What I Am Doing, part 1

2009-01-09T11:06:00.000-08:00

I am sitting here gauging consumer sentiment. I am taking statements from one informed citizen, a misinformed alien and three tax evaders. From these statements I will extrapolate everything: the price of tea in China, the quality and disposition of each unique weekday to a domestic pet, what the globe looked like to Hondius in 1627, the length and strength of chains, carbon dating, and so on. I am calculating a fair price and an ideal temperature. I am farting. I am no longer farting. I am tentatively testing the air with my nose. I am holding my breath. I am thinking: What you smell goes into you. Or back into you, in some cases. I am vexed by the model names of many automobiles. Where was I? Yes, taking the statements. The informed citizen believes strongly in the socail institution of the Public School as well as the power of strong drink. The informed citizen wonders about the origin of "that godawful smell." The misinformed alien makes gestures suggesting that there were no motorcycles or automobiles in 1627. The three tax evaders agree that Tuesdays seem orange and Thursdays seem green. I need a short rest before proceeding, and will therefore do nothing for a presently unknown length of time.

Enclosure: Resume to Enrique Vila-Matas

2009-01-08T04:31:00.001-08:00

Sir,

I am well credentialed as a Bartleby. I have a strong impulse not to write, and there is a complementary, widespread impulse in the general populace not to read what I have not written. It's true that I fight a daily battle; whole novels wish to be written by me, articles of popular journalism, librettos, poesy. I do not write these, I cannot write these. Even if I tried. Having remained unpublished, in fact, qualifies me as a special order of Bartleby -- a wholly anonymous, private one who is of no interest to anyone, even catalogers of people, such as yourself, who do not write. No one reads what I have regretfully written (in moments of weakness) for the simple reason that no one knows it exists, and if they do know it exists, it is a matter of utter indifference to them. I once gave this address to a beautiful woman who bummed a cigarette from me at the marriage of a mutual friend. Then I took the site down for a long time to make sure she would not read it.

I do not wish to speak with others, except if it entertains me or soothes my nerves or relieves some subconscious annoyance.

Most people do not write, but of course this does not make them Bartleby. It just makes them regular people. People who move in wide circles and smile in a friendly way and make new friends at the grocery store and chit-chat with the mail carrier, and bum cigarettes.

There is no way to know for sure, of course, but I am certain nonetheless that I am held in lower esteem than average; I have a slightly negative effect on people I come into contact with. We are each, as they say, the star of our own movie. Naturally, I am not the star of anyone else's movie, but neither am I a supporting cast member. I sometimes feel like an understudy in my own movie, or that I am the star of a movie that is very badly printed on old and damaged film stock. But what am I saying? I loathe movies, films. They represent a certain kind of passivity -- a receptive, greedy, open-mouthed kind of vacancy. Not the noble vacancy, the active negation of the world that distinguishes Bartleby.

The Jews say the highest mitzvot is an anonymous gift given anonymously. I do not write, and the world is not aware of me not writing, and that will be a gift that — well, I can't avoid saying it will be a gift that keeps giving.

I've said too much. In the attached document, you may review my lack of experience and longstanding silence on these matters and more. Or less, depending on how you look at it.

Microloans

2009-01-06T13:41:00.000-08:00

The worst part was hauling out the particle board desk, that was a heavy fucker, and I could feel I don’t know vertebrae in my back sort of popping and grinding, or intercostals cramping, a crick developing in my neck. At least I could have found an old skateboard in the Barrel of Fun, or stolen the neighbor’s kid’s dented toy wagon. Somewhere the weightlifting belt, the back supports that used to be a thick band of full-grain leather, holes big as a drill bit and a big metal buckle, but today they’re kevlar reinforced black Velcro with incorporated suspenders, how the widespread use of these things has weakened the backs of the working class to such a degree that the solidarity of labor unions has eroded, fraternal back-slapping has become a painful and nearly obsolete gesture, money otherwise intended for retirement is being squandered on ridiculous desk chairs with no back and upholstered knee-pads, or huge comic rubber balls that are supposed to be good for your “core.”

Well, anyway I could have used one of those Velcro belts maybe, just this once, worn discretely under the carapace of my best set of wings, the red pair with gold medial coverts and the maroon underwings, beautiful, enviable, even Jose wished they were his, which is saying something since fish are his thing, great glittering skinsuits with various dorsal and ventral flanges, some with actual Lucite scales, others with common sequins, I think it was what he called his gar outfit that he’d be wearing later that day in the park when he attacks me, spearing at me with some sort of papier mache proboscis-helmet strapped under his chin.

But so I get my desk set up there in the park, along the shared-use path, hang my sign on one of those galvanized Frisbee-golf baskets. These days I don’t have a lot of cash to work with here, but I did strip out the last of the copper pipes from the house down on the corner, and I was preapproved on an Am-Ex with no interest on balance transfers, and a low-cap cash advance, I’m thinking I could try that at the ATM on the corner if I find more than one super-worthy candidate, as I have been lately.

So the application process is like tell me what you’d do with a micro-loan or a micro-grant, write it down here on the application on this clipboard, how you’d get your project started with that sort of seed money, and then how you’d acknowledge WIND UNDER WINGS DOT ORG with whatever success you might have, or also how you might discretely not mention us in any really terrible failure or scandalous public incident involving the police.

I mean it’s not a lot of money, but it’s something. An example of something we’d say no to would be a guy wanting to start an Exchange Traded Fund or make a payment on a Cooper Mini. An example of something we’d say yes to would be a guy wanting to buy a sandwich, to give him the energy to invent something really useful or at least interesting and sort of fulfilling his human potential, or just making it through the day to see his beautiful wife and children for what they are, a blessing. Sometimes a sandwich will do that for you, you can’t just sit on a bench and be hungry and recently laid off and be able to think Big Thoughts, which you’d think would come easy when all you have is time – this is what D.B. said in his application, and it’s so true! – but the human brain really does use a lot of energy, needs a lot of fuel, so that’s really a perfect sort of micro-loan for us to extend in this sort of difficult environment.

A secondary example of what we fund is a little harder to describe, because it’s something we have to recognize in your eyes, something you don’t know about yourself – and that is more like a missing feeling that someone cares about you, that you are a meritorious person insufficiently acknowledged, that a modest honorarium makes you feel somehow integral, and hopefully you will always carry this around inscribed on your heart’s resume, like a bauble from an admirer.

It’s sad and unfortunate that we cannot fund every applicant, but we do disburse our entire fund every day to the most worthy applicants, and one should not get too hung up about not getting a WIND UNDER WINGS micro-loan or grant, because there are other similar programs, such as the G.I.L.L.S. program, operated by its director Mr. Jose Cameron, right over there by the lazy river.

Getting Violent, Part 1 of 1.25

2009-01-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

I don’t want this story to get violent but some violent men are coming over so I bought a gun and a clip of bullets that clicks into the handle, the stock I guess you call it, and I’ve put all my clothes in the hotel dresser, I could hide the gun in there, but that is surely the first place anyone would look. I think I’ll put it in my pants, in the small of my back like I’ve seen on cop shows, I have my nice tweed jacket to wear over everything. But when I am out I do not want to get “frisked,” what kind of an animal would they think I was? Suddenly I worried myself with the girls in the room. The gun wasn’t even on safety, and why did I put the clip in, and here I am flashing the thing around the room without a care in the world.

There is a knock on the hotel room door. It is one of the potentially violent men. He’s wearing a green knit shirt, and his face looks hard. His hair is very thin, fine, dishwater blond. He’s here about the business, the business at hand. His companion is coming too, so no funny stuff. My back is to him and I keep my body between him and the parts of the gun that I have just buried under several pairs of socks and a red fleece shirt. The girls are my friends, my adult friends. I mean, they are my adult daughters and we are more like friends these days. I have not parented them for decades. They have their thing. We’re visiting, having fun, taking in the sights. We’re needling each other with old embarrassments. Not now, though. Now it’s the business with the men.

The man in the green knit shirt has made himself comfortable in the desk chair. He’s grabbed the remote and turned on the TV. His hard face just sits there wearing a rictus of boredom. He is waiting, we are all waiting, for his companion. I try to imagine what his companion will look like. Either a contrasting look – tall, thin, morose looking – or a similar look. What if he showed up in an identical green knit shirt? It would make me wonder if it was an absurd coincidence, or if these two grown men, potentially violent, always wore the same thing, like a uniform for men who do what they do, as a signal to general populace, sure, who wouldn’t notice these guys in outdated identical shirts, but also for people who do what they do, or have dealing with such people, to recognize this outward sign. The guys in the green knit shirts. It is clear to me that we are not waiting for the man’s superior. He is not sitting their clicking through the channels because he’s waiting for instructions. He is here to carry out his own will, whatever that is, and he’s waiting for an accomplice or an assistant. A sidekick.

There is another knock at the door. I open it, and there is the other potentially violent man, but the potential seems lower with this one. My first guess is correct. He is thin and pale and has a slouch and an over-bite. He’s wearing a grey sweater, but underneath that, what is clearly a blue knit shirt. The two men look at each other and say nothing. There is some unspoken message being passed between them, maybe something about the shirts, maybe something about the business. Maybe they are non-verbally arguing about who will frisk me, if they intend to do that. The man in the sweater looks physically meek, but he swears like a drunk sailor. He forms his fricatives with his whole mouth and lips, combining the f sound with a general huffing h sound: Fffhuck!

We have a delicate negotiation to work through, but there should be no need for violence.

Scherzo #9: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2009-01-05T10:03:00.000-08:00

I was driving around a British roadster or perhaps a barchetta with the top down. The city was crowded. Each intersection had a gaggle of people in the crosswalk. My feet were too large or my shoes too clumsy; I wasn’t covering the pedals of the car well. The roadster kept creeping into the sidewalk. It jumped at a man in an Irish sweater. He had long blond hair and a fleshy, tanned face. “I’m walking here!” he said. “I’m sorry,” I said. “The clutch is slipping.” It was a lie. Finally the light turned. I wanted to turn left. A round-faced Chinese man was in the crosswalk of that street, wearing a striped shirt. I slowed and waited for him, then I floored it for a couple of blocks, winding up through the gears. Then I had to wait at a couple more lights. The man in the Irish sweater was there in front of me again. Again my feet were not fully on the pedals. I could feel the clutch pedal slipping off the side of my left boot. With my right boot I stepped hard on the brake pedal, but I didn’t want to kill the engine. “Dude,” the sweater guy said, exasperated. “You’re killing me here. CROSSWALK.” He jabbed his hand like a fin at the ground then made a slicing motion, as if he were bowling down a lane. I shrugged and said, “Clutch” in a helpless voice. He came around the hood of the roadster and opened the passenger door and sat down and swung his legs into the car. He was wearing stonewashed jeans and cowboy boots out of some exotic, tiled animal skin. “OK,” he said. “Let’s go.” We went. He directed me up onto the sidewalk and I wanted to show him what I could do, what the car could do. The engine screamed as we accelerated around blind corners. The wheels hissed and spit like something feral. We drove through a circuit of banked sidewalks, bike paths, and tramways for official use only. In some places, our route was drifted over with some sort of white foam, possibly shaving cream from a famous automobile commercial or stunt. The man in the sweater made little grunts and gestures of approval, and reached out to point at any turns he wished me to make.

Idea: An open letter to TMcC

2009-01-05T09:37:00.000-08:00

I was in a small river-town in the southern part of a northern state.

There was very little civic identity here, a neutral space as you'd say, other than the fact that it was the city I'd grown up in. It was very cold, and I needed my hands to be covered or otherwise occupied, driving to the hotel. I put Remainder into a jacket pocket not large enough to contain all of it, then I drove to the hotel. But a rack on the roof of the car prevented me from parking in the hotel's parking ramp. I had to park on the street in front of the hotel. It was drifted with snow at the margins, and in the road there was a thick dirty slush. I couldn't believe my luck.

I got out of the car and looked for a sign that would tell me whether I could park in this place or not. There were no signs. This made me suspicious. Standing in the middle of the slushy street, I could see a sign on the other side of the that indicated days and times that were acceptable, so I got back in the car and made a U-turn. Satisfied, I surveyed the scene and walked back into the hotel, taking subconscious note of some sort of magazine or pamphlet that lay in the muck. I went to my room and opened a bottle of wine, and settled in to read my book. It was gone.

I retraced my steps, and found Remainder in the middle of the road, waving against a light breeze. It had been run over, probably by me. I took it back to my room and ran the hair dryer over it for a very long time, sipping my wine sitting on the toilet. It was really good.

It gave me an idea: Car companies should sell automobiles pre-degraded, artfully dented and scratched by professional autofinishers, and publishers should develop a line of physically distressed novels. This is an idea that I freely contribute to your suspicious activities.

Organ recital

2008-12-16T16:28:00.000-08:00

I don't wish to (adjusts the spaceheater) oh I can't remember now (feels bladder is at capacity)... oh fuck. I don't know anything. It's terrible, this piece of knowledge. I don't know anything. Which is much worse than knowing nothing, believe me. I had a dream. My body parts, my organs, all had something to say. My liver said, "Each night I cry myself to sleep alone." We all had a good laugh about that. I laughed in my sleep! It was a rare to find something funny to say about my drinking problem. Then my hair, now very long and neglected, made some comment about being able pretty soon to string a violin bow. In my dream I got a transgressive thrill from running my fingers down a long hank of hair, it felt sticky as if it had been rosined. My kidneys sang a little round, a variation of "Row Row Your Boat." All my other organs, even my self, appreciated this and found it very clever. My penis, I noticed, was very quiet the whole time. For once, I thought, rather uncharitably. My lungs wheezed with mirth, especially when the liver told his joke. My skin told a story that made itself crawl, and then my feet told a story that made them itch. My brain, being asleep, was constantly in the changing room putting on an elaborate new costume, each of which unfailingly astonished me. My intestines got a bit wrapped up in things, and my stomach did rudimentary acrobatics with some real elan, but soured a bit toward the end.

Temporary Autonomous Zone #2

2008-12-08T08:18:00.000-08:00

Part of me wanted to see if the funny feeling had gone away. For the second day in a row we went to the FUN center. Parking was terrible. There were silver and red cars everywhere, on all sides of the brick edifice. Parking extended out into the city streets. There were metal signs with sharp edges that displayed some inscrutable parking system. On one side of the FUN center, a massive rectangular lot went out to the horizon in right angles. On another side, there was a single row of Employee cars shooting off into a grove of softwoods. On yet another side, there were thousands of cars parked in concentric circles. Some low clouds hurried off together, away from the sun, as if running to someone’s assistance.

William and I drove around the FUN center twice, I think, row after row of silver, red, and sand-colored cars. The whole layout became familiar to me. I knew how to get through the rectangular lot, and then the circular lot, and I knew where to find the openings in the employee row with the black cars. But there was something forbidding and wrong about the place.

***

In the administrative offices, Buzz was cleaning all of the computers and printers. He smiled, but always with that twitch under one eye, for as long as I’d known him. It seemed like night but that was because there were no windows. He had a trash can full of tiny Styrofoam balls, the insides of a bean bag chair. He dumped this stuff into the works of each machine. He turned each one on, you could hear the internal fans revving up. And the foam balls confetti’ed around in there.

“It cleans the insides,” Buzz said.

“Of what?” asked William, dear boy.

“Of these office machines.”

“Why do they need cleaning?”

“It’s very salty in there.”

“Salty?” Williams eyebrows stretched.

“But you wouldn’t want to eat it.”

“Why?”

I wondered how you would separate the salt from the little Styrofoam balls.

“It’s from sweat. Human sweat.”

***

In the parking lot, there were five guys in green, blue, blue, red and orange swimming trunks and one handsome woman in a yellow miniskirt and a halter top. She was a mechanic, good with her hands. Better than most of the men and boys. She had boxes of tools, and she didn’t shrink from tawdry conversations. She had an old gold conversion van. One of the guys dubbed it the “Brain Pleaser,” and the other four unanimously approved with nods, and giggles, and high fives. They were geeks who would have to explain the weak pun of brain pleaser versus brain teaser to anyone outside the circle. The van had a bumpersticker that said “Avant Turd.” A boy in orange trunks looked at a piece of paper in his hand. It had my name on it.

***

Inside the FUN center, there was a style. Kids wore huge, cartoonish top hats with floppy brims. Paisley and brocade. The shape of mushrooms, big as a garbage can. William and I were in the bleachers in section 4AAA. They were very steep, as steep as the pyramids in Egypt, which you don’t really want to be climbing up and down. It seemed like there were people under your feet. The watershow was sparsely attended, but there were the top hats here and there. It was a new thing, and some dads didn’t like it. There might be a random angry voice from a man in a sleeveless t-shirt: “Take off that hat.” And “You’re blocking the view.” And “Down in front.” Even with the steep rake of the bleachers, those fabric hats were in the way, and you could only see portions of the turquoise pool with its happy turquoise waters and the turquoise water show. I felt someone watching us, always watching us, but who? Where?

***

We were trying to get back to the locker room. There were people everywhere, kids in top hats. The gigantic wading pool was a strange, amorphous shape with deck chairs and lounges everywhere. I could see the doors to the locker room across the pool, next to a window for tacos and hot dogs and pop. I took William’s hand. “Come on,” I said. “We’ll cut across the pool.” William was tired, ready to go. The water was warm, almost too warm. The water got gradually deeper, from ankle to knee. When we got to the deepest part of the pool, a geek in orange shorts splashed through the water and jumped on my back. I let go of William’s hand and tried to get the teenager’s hands and arms off of me. I pried apart his fingers, but as soon as he’d released me, he grabbed at my trunks, and tried to pull them down. My trunks were loosely tied, and they were coming down easily. I choked the teenager’s neck and I held him underwater. It was a relatively easy job. And even though he let go of my shorts, he didn’t seem to mind being dunked under water like that, didn’t offer a lot of resistance, didn’t seem to care.

***

It was getting dark out when we left the locker room and hit the hallway. I was a bit turned around and couldn’t tell which side of the building we were on, which parking lot we were near. There were heavy doors with signs attached to them that you couldn’t read until you were outside. William and I went out the nearest doors. “It’ll be easier to get our bearings outside,” I said. We were at the loading dock and dumpster section of the building, the socket of the FUN center where it received its vitals and expelled its waste. It was some kind of employee entrance, but consumers were free to use it as well. The doors were steel, and they locked behind you when you left. The signs said the receiving hours in an industrial font. In the FUN font, for consumers, it said “20 tokens required to re-enter. 10 tokens required for parking. Thank you.” We hadn’t needed tokens before, so I did not feel this sign applied to us. Buzz had taken care of our passes and whatever other arrangements were needed. The lot in front of us was the long single row of black employee cars. A lot of them were gone now. The row looked like a comb with a bunch of teeth missing. I had a good idea which way to go. We went around the building counterclockwise, through the circular lot, over a grass median, and into the rectangular lot. A car with a flashing yellow light came down a row. It had a spotlight outside the driver’s window that hung down in disuse. The car sped up when it saw us, coming up very fast. The window was rolling down. The driver with a crewcut was about to speak to us. Something buzzed in his earpiece, because his hand shot up to his ear and he listened to orders. He forced a smile and waved. The window rolled back up and the car went back up another row.

We finally found our green sedan. It was hot inside, and smelled like dry food. There were a few other cars at the exit we selected. Each one stopped for a long time at a security booth. Hands and arms extended out of windows in both directions. Then the next car would move up. When we got to the booth, the guy in the FUN center uniform just waved us through without even looking at us. William was already asleep in his car seat.

Opening

2008-04-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

I hadn't had a cigarette in years. But there were attractive people at the art opening, saying funny things. They wore nice clothes. Most of them weren't wearing bike shorts under their pants like me.

It was the first day of spring. There was kegged beer. There was bottled wine. There was some Irish whiskey. I asked a friend for a cigarette. He gave me a funny look, then nodded and held out his pack.

"Where have you been?" he asked.
"I was in Mexico for a week."
"Nice."
"Yeah. No biking. I did a lot of snorkeling. Ate a lot of burritos. I feel like the food is still attacking my stomach. And I picked up some kind of maritime rhinovirus." It was true. My stomach had a cramp that wouldn't go away. And my chest felt like a suitcase half full of dirty clothes.

He lent me his brass Zippo. There is nothing better than lighting a fresh cigarette with a Zippo. That first puff, not too deeply -- but definitely a penetrating inhale. It tasted great. I was feeling happy, buzzed.

A beautiful woman stood nearby, talking to her friends. I couldn't help looking at her. She had perfect blond hair and little ears that looked like whirlpools. She turned to me and looked deep into my eyes. "Do you have a cigarette for me?" she said. "I'll give you a kiss."

I said, "Yes!" and I turned to find my old friend with the cigarettes, but he was gone. He was probably in the alley between the art gallery and my office. I stepped out on the loading dock, and took another drag -- too long -- on the cigarette. I was suddenly seized by panic, at the base of my abdomen. My bowels were moving involuntarily. I couldn't believe it.

I goose-stepped as fast as I could across the alley, swiped my keycard. I clenched as hard as I could, but it was already too late to get out of my cycling shorts.

Under There

2007-12-20T04:59:00.001-08:00

We rented a canoe. The river was supposedly still full of Muskies. You have to be an idiot to fish for Muskies. Everyone in her family except her dad fished for Muskies. He had a level head on his shoulders. Fishing for Muskies took long patient hours of squinting into the sun, trolling, the air thick with the sweet smell of gas mixed with oil and the constant gurgle of the outboard. You could go years without a bite.

Her purple mohawk swayed with each paddle stroke. Light glinted off the 12 earrings on her windward ear. They were on the flowage, so paddling wasn't strictly necessary. I liked to watch the bottom of the river glide past, where there were little explosions that interrupted the smooth sandy floor. A lost cinder block. An ancient beer can perfectly preserved. The ghost of a panfish holding position.

When little, toe bite.

Flooded farm.

Sailing.

Everet and the gopher muskie.

Dream Fragment From Real Life #1

2007-11-27T18:13:00.000-08:00

The party was, as usual, led by the men in orange coveralls. "Tito" had a natural charisma and moderation. A natural leader without any obvious flaws. He was a straight talker, and a practiced drinker. A non-smoker. He stayed in control, even when the situation required him to behave as if he'd lost control.

He'd finally opened the bike shop everyone expected him to open, at the site of his storefront apartment. It was like he'd spent most of his adulthood, even while he was a professional cyclist and a product representative and running around on the circuit, preparing for the eventuality. This plan even transcended generations. His father had been a city cop just so that his son would have inexplicably smooth relations with the police 20 years later, when he threw unauthorized parties and rallies in the alley behind the shop, when he had kegs of beer inside.

But "Tito" and "Harley" were leading the small troupe down the shoulder of a rural road. The hills rolled and pulsed with gold colored grass. They'd decided to pull up stakes, leave the city, set up a country residence. Or perhaps keep the city place and establish a kind of outpost. A long, twisting line of cyclists followed them on the shoulder of a grey highway, they were mostly black, crawling at a slow pace. Tito stopped frequnetly and, making grand sweeping gestures, orchestrated the caravan. His nimbus of black curls bounced pertly.

Somehow, I got off the road onto a path that fizzled out. It was in a wheat field on a hill. I couldnt see the road on the crest of the hill above me, and I couldn't see the intervening acres between me and a dry creek bed hundreds of feet below. There might have ben a bluff below, but I doubt it. As light failed, I took out a silver flashlight and swept its beam here and there, across the screen of my imagination, looking for Tito's new place.

Cold Feet, Part 1

2007-11-27T14:33:00.000-08:00

His feet were cold, very cold. He knew what to expect when he got inside. They would begin to thaw. Before the crystals that had formed in the flesh of his toes would soften, his nerves would come back online. He would feel the ice crystals like a thousand microscopic knives stabbing cell walls. Ahh ahh ohh ohh ohh, he'd say. He'd rock back and forth on his butt in his seat. A deep nausea would radiate from the pit of his stomach to the crown of his head, and he'd have trouble focusing on anything else until the moment had passed.

He was a sloppy young man. His girlfriend needled him. "Why don't you wear nicer clothes?" But he couldn't. Nicer clothes made him feel foolish, as if he were the only person at a party who thought it was a costume party. He did not like to wear shirts with collars, although he had a long neck -- longer than most men, almost effeminate.

She took him shopping. "I hate shopping," he said. "You're not shopping, I am," she said. He trailed behind like reluctant child, as she took shirts and pants and sweaters off of hanger racks and folded them over her arm in growing burrito of cotten, linen, wool. She took him to the changing room. "Try these on," she said.

"Which ones?"

"All of them," she said. She started to walk away, then had a ssecond though and turned on her heel and came back. "Not all at once," she said. "One item at a time."

He set the pile of doubled-over clothes on the little wooden shelf that was meant to be a bench. He stepcrushed the heels of each sneaker with the toe of the other and kicked them off. He unbuckled his belt, and looked at himself in the full-length mirror next to the louvred door. He could see women's shoes walking past under the door, the crowns of heads with hair brushed back into a bun or a ponytail above the door. He felt like a man about to be standing naked in a rain barrel, like in the cartoons when you were so poor or debauched that you had to wear a barrel on suspenders, too down to even have a shoe or a holey sock.

"Are you still in there?" she said, impatient but not unkind. "Hurry up! I want to see you in some new duds."

He stood there in his boxer shorts, the elastic tired, the fly torn a bit at the base.

She was together. She kept her side of the room tidy and neat. She used to harrass him about keeping his side clean, too. Then she went through a period where she would clean up his things, and this horrified both of them. His dresser top was crowded with old ATM receipts, small change, a straw cowboy hat, matchbooks, and a "collection" of key cards from hotels he'd stayed at, mostly on business trips.

Does it surprise you to learn that he took business trips? He was a boy in street clothes-- he still thought of himself as a 20-something inside, in his mind's eye, though he was twice that age -- who'd found himself in a strange succession of increasingly powerful and prestigious corporate positions. He'd never been comfortable in that world, but never had the imagination or the power of will to do something else. And the fact of the matter was that he was very good at the things he was good at, and this far outweighed -- in his employers minds -- the many things he was bad at, not least of which was personal hygiene, organization, and many other shibboleths of adult living.

"You don;t seriously collect those things?" she said to him more than once. When they were on a vacation in Wisconsin, he'd secretly put all the key cards -- three or four of them, after the first pair had been demagnetized in his pocket by his BlackBerry -- in his pocket, but she saw him. "Aren;t you going to leave those? You can;t take those!" she said.

"You don't seriously believe they need these back, do you?" he said. "Have you ever been issued a key card that was used? That wasn't shiny and new?" She thought for a moment. It always suprised her when he'd somehow managed to catch a mundane detail that she'd missed. To her, he seemed always to have his "head in the clouds"-- not in a bad way, just that he concentrated on big, abstract ideas, the kinds of ideas for which he was well paid and tolerated at work. For a moment, she looked at him like he was a machine with an unknown power source. "Why do you want those things?" she persisted. "They're so tacky."

"They remind me where I've been," he said. Places and people, he thought to himself. There were rooms in cities in circumstances that were locked up inside -- not because they were sordid or slalacious or corrupt (though some of them maybe were, occasionally, but nothing spectacular really)-- but because we are each alone ultimately, just as we each must sleep each night and go into a private place no one else can ever know except through the flimsy little keycard of memory, words.

He was more alone than most, because he didn't like to talk very much, unless wine had loosened his tongue. Then he was quite a talker, but not in a mean or despicable way. After a couple glasses of Shiraz, he might blather on about French bicycles or moon exploration ("Why haven;t we gone back? Because there is nothing there!") and that kind of thing. He always felt foolsh afterward, and didn't remember the direction of the conversation, except in bursts of what seemed to him petty truisms that at the time somehow dazzled him.

Scherzo #8: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2007-11-23T19:26:00.000-08:00

The goalie was fresh, smart, lucky. Felt like he was mostly the victim of politics, though he was on the small side. A good skater. Well liked. All goalies are liked by their teammates, they are understood to be martyrs, the only purely defensive members of a hockey team. The rest feel protective of a goalie, they are openly and sometimes disingenuously supportive. When a goalie fails, he does not have to be told he has failed. His ego and self-confidence are understood to be fragile things. You do not jeer at your own goalie, or question his committment or skills -- not openly.

He was trying out for a new team. It should have been a clean slate. But a clean slate is still a disadvantage. He brought no reputation with him, no special reason for extra consideration.

The new coach was an infamous Christian, prayed before games, forbade spitting and swearing and covetousness on the bench. It was a remarkably clean locker-room when the varsioty squad was suiting up.

An early September practice. The goalie was unstrapping his pads, sitting in the sweet stink of his sweat and leather. A defenseman had just finished telling a story about getting caught by the coach, he'd been on his cell phone talking dirty with his girlfriend.

The goalie was apalled. He said he'd been raised, too, in a strict Lutheran home. He'd sworn once at the age of nine. His brothers were playing football in the sidelot, and they were picking on him cruelly; they'd throw the ball to him and then mercilessly gang up on him, tackle, dogpile.

He escaped from this brutal beating and ran with the ball down the length of the lot, putting 10 yards, 20 yards between him and them. As he looked back in ephemeral triumph, he stepped into a hole in the yard and fell ass over tea-kettle. His brothers all stopped pursuing him and doubled over in mirthful laughter. It was too much for a nine-year-old's heart, his soul, his pride. FUCK! he yelled, at the top of his voice, and it echoed down the block, off of ancient elms and hackberries.

Just then the coah came into the lockerroom, having heard the ejaculation. "Was that you?" he asked the goalie. He nodded, sheepishly. The coach said nothing, then turned and left.

He finished his story, though the defenseman and the whole JV squad sat in horrified silence. "My mother heard this, and she stormed out of the house, grabbed me by the ear, and hauled me inside where she washed my mouth out with soap," said the goalie.

He never swore again until now.

Scherzo #7: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2007-11-14T03:54:00.000-08:00

The thick coffee was produced by Karna, a curious name with vulgar implications, sort of like "Lyra," the name of a child in his school, but also the corrupted currency of Italy before the European Union. This coffee he then carried across the reeking alley through the keycarded door which sat between grease dumpsters and a bin filled to the top with empty wine bottles each spouting a crooked and edge-crumbled cork like a little hat perched rakishly on the head of a drunk. Why do waiters recork empty wine bottles? He passed the tech team and sat down at his desk and surveyed the long shadow of the morning stretching across the wooden and brick cavern with its wheeled separators of corrugated plastic, its scarred floor like the flesh of a bruised pair, its undertsated Victorian graffiti mauled into the thick beams and columns. He kicked away the green rubber ball that someone in the office sat upon clownishly, in all seriousness claiming it "strengthened her core," though he doubted whether anyone in the entire company had much of a "core," as far as he could tell. He checked his email. The dollar was tanking against the Euro. The school headmaster wrote to say that there was a case of headlice and all children would be inspected in the morning; failure to pass this inspection would require an immediate non-disciplinary suspension until such time as so on and so forth. A note from his wife that it was, in fact, the girl Lyra. He opened his personal blog and began to write about recorked empty wine bottles. His blog had a readership of about 300 "unique visitors," though of course this was an oxymnoron since one among 300 is, by definition, not unique. Rather the better word was "discrete visitors." Or even "discreet," since his only method of discovering their identity was to analyze the server tracking software, and even then, his visitors stayed discreet, hidden behind long strings of triple-digit IP address and clumsy domain names intended to be cute or memorable but were in reality acts of minor vandalism to the language, and an affront to a grammarian or a thoughtful sommalier. He checked a slacious heading of the server software labelled "Who's On Now." There was only one reader currently looking at his blog. He did not recognize the IP address, but parenthetically it indicated that it was someone in his own company, in this very room, a person on the tech team who seemed to be monitoring him at this very moment. The warm cup of coffee turned on its side and pooled around the base of his computer as an intense wave of shame and guilt came over him and he imulsively reached out and unplugged his computer.

Scherzo #6: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2007-11-08T16:23:00.000-08:00

A woman owed me money. I felt bad about it, wished to forgive the loan. I knew Sylvia had nothing, and I knew it would shame her to say out loud that I forgave the loan. So I sent her discreet, honorable invoices, charging no interest. I avoided her in public, though our city was small, and the circuits of our daily travels intersected in many places. I preferred to believe that this helped her preserve her dignity; she was very proud.

I'd expected never to see her again, had pledged to let the issue drop entirely. However, one day I saw her at the doors of the bank, speaking with another man of my acquaintance, another landlord. She had moved from my property some time before, telling me in a note that she wished for an apartment with more light, a fireplace with a real hearth. I acknowledged the shortcomings of my place and released her from our contract. It would require me to borrow money, because she owed six months of back rent, but I was glad to do it. To this note and all others, I received no reply.

So when I saw her outside the bank, I felt terribly ashamed of myself. She stood there proudly gesturing to the other landlord -- a man notorious for his inflexibility and parsimony. Sylvia spoke with great passion, though I did not hear what she said, nor did I wish to know the topic of their private conversation.

Truly, I would have turned and walked away and hoped she'd not seen me, but I was late for a very pressing meeting with my banker. He was an understanding but firm man, and he was very concerned about my tardy loan repayments. You can imagine, then, that I was taken aback to hear him threaten to take legal action, in spite of my good-faith efforts to meet his terms.

I really had no choice but to plunge head first into my shame, to walk past her and her companion at the door of the bank -- the only entrance to the meeting at which I was expected and upon which hung my entire future and reputation as a responsible and upstanding businessman.

She saw me, and before I could look away, she caught my eye and her gaze passed into me, through me. It might have been hate or disgust. It might have been pity or fear. I did not wish to speak to her at all, but it seemed absurd to pretend that I was not there, that I did not know her after everything that had gone between us, and she spoke first. "Hello," she said, not unkindly, though it was as distasteful to her as it was to me. I nodded, murmured "Hi," and quickly ducked into the bank, my shame burning on my cheeks and devastating.

Scherzo #5: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2007-11-06T21:42:00.000-08:00

I used to be an ice climber, and I fell and shattered one of my ankles. They had to put screws and plates into it. The screws were these high-tech titanium things, basically like surgical tools. They had been in someone else's leg or arm before. And I started having these strange dreams and memories that were not my own. I found out that there is a medical name for this -- having someone else's memories and dreams when you get a transplant. It's like memory actually does live in certain parts of your flesh, not just in your brain, or in your heart.

Scherzo #4: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2007-10-20T03:42:00.000-07:00

Mi madre -- my mother, when I was a little girl. We were in our highrise apartment in Sao Paulo. I was watching "Good Times" dubbed into Portugese, but the show ended in time for dinner, when mother came in. She'd put the rice and stew on, the flatbread was in the oven. Taking a short break from dinner. She switched the channels to some sort of variety show, and it was Julio Iglesias. My mother, she loved Julio -- and I did too. Enrique, he is supergay. I mean, he is gay but too good to admit being gay, so supergay. This is what I mean. And so my mother and I, we sort of sit there and swoon to Julio, and my mother has this faraway look in her eye, and I sort of have this electrical feeling in my chest, my heart, and it feels like it is cracking a little bit. Under the influence of my mother's larger cracking heart, a chain reaction. And then the fire alarms went off, and at the same moment a rolling cloud of white smoke rushed across the ceiling. "The dinner!" cried my mother, and she clamored off the couch and ran to the kitchen with her hair flying.

Scherzo #3: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2007-10-20T03:29:00.001-07:00

I was walking behind them about ten paces. They were talking between themselves about some higher issue, probably not directly impugning me. Some semi-confidential senior management deal. He steered himself from his widest point -- his belt line -- which was contained in an expensive but misfitted dress-shirt. Her red high heels laddered along, like a pair of checkers destroying the gameboard in tandem. They gestured with their hands out in front of him. They rounded a sharp corner that was protected by a credenza with a fake floral arrangement, a sort of isthmus of bad blond wood that clashed with the earthtone carpet, and forced them to go wide around the corner. I came around, and reestablished visual contact. On a broad expanse of featureless carpet, they were both getting up off of the floor, and so deeply engaged in their conversation that they hadn't apparently noticed that they'd tumbled together in a heap. She'd broken a heel and his shirttails jigged behind him, but they continued their little "offline" as if nothing had happened, her with a little stuttering limp. I picked up the heel and looked at it.

Scherzo #2: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2007-10-16T03:06:00.000-07:00

Dale worked at the counter, the morning shift. The hotel still used regular keys, not keycards. "Wow, look at that!" said jocular men in casual shirts as they checked in. "A real key!" Dale chuckled, though he heard it at least ten times a day. "Some of our newer units use swipe cards," he'd add, usefully. Martina, the Russian, stood nearby looking skeptical. Her team all spoke Russian, maybe a word of English -- "Hyello," they would say shyly to guests they met in the hallway, standing at their carts with downturned eyes.

Someone had urinated on a guest's car last night. The hotel was tucked into the hillside between the highway and the crashing sea. A steep driveway wormed down 500 feet. The guest, a thin athletic looking fellow in a bright fleece jacket, came in the front door of the lodge. "Someone pissed on my car!" he cried, indignantly.

Dale affected a look of shock and disgust. "Let's have a look!" he said, not really thinking through consequences, ramifications-- just reflexively sympathetic to paying customers.

Outside in the parking lot, a small green SUV was parked at the end of a row. It had two sea kayaks mounted on a dedicated roof-top rack, its special armatures and straps looking expensive. The car was coated with a very fine dust from the driveway approach. And along the passenger side, at the level where the windows went into the body of the doors, there was a long dripping squirt of some sort of liquid, bumper to bumper. It was still wet on the passenger door handle.

"How do you know it's--" Dale couldn't think of a delicate way to say it.

"Smell it," said the guest.

Dale leaned over and sniffed at the door handle where a drop dangled like a little river pearl, and caught the whole sun and sky. It smelled ammoniac, strongly so. Someone -- or something -- had definitely pissed on the guest's car. The more Dale thought about it, the more he believed it could not have been, say, a buck in rut or a territorial bear. It seemed too controlled and directed to be anything but malevolent, human.

True, he had no firm idea about the behavior of animals in the wild, how they marked their territory or how they responded to strange-smelling machines that might be parked in the middle of their normal circuits. But he had a good idea how the local humans responded.

While the guest examined the driver's side, Dale stood upright and held his hand at his fly, as if he were pointing his penis at the car, trying to gauge height, distance, speed. He shuffled sideways, down the length of the car. He caught a glimpse of Martina, looking down from a window in the third-story hallway, and quickly dropped his hand to his side.

The Mess, Part 8

2007-10-15T03:58:00.000-07:00

Though there were some pictures of her on the web -- mostly in the background of messenger events, races, parties with her sad smile and her bottomless gray eyes -- he found no evidence that she'd ever posted anything herself online. The more he learned about her, the more she seemed a cipher.

It was hard to believe that a person her age could be so thoroughly even systematically offline. It seemed to him that you'd have to make a conscious effort to avoid computers and connections, never browse the web, never indulge the impulse to respond to an incendiary or ignorant remark, never leave a track. Like standing in the sedge, separated from the ocean by a narrow spit of sand, but never setting foot out of the protective cover of the grass. One vast anonymity and another, separated by an uncomfortable exposure, the depressions of feet, the trails of surf-running birds, strange craters from the aspirations of a mollusk.

He sent her an email.

"I dont know if you're ever online or check your email. That whole cycling forum thing was a bit of a joke, sorry if you found it offensive. I'm old and lame and I don't understand these things. I do, however, have a genuine lust for your Bianchi."

He his send without any real hope of hearing back from her.

He'd put it out of his mind when, ten days later, he saw her address in his inbox. sand1003@gmail.com

"You're right," she wrote simply, "I'm not much for online chatting. Bye, Sandy."

What did it mean?

The Mess, part 7

2007-10-12T04:41:00.000-07:00

"You are either irresponsible or cruel," he said.

"Why?" said Sandy.

"Because you haven't told me anything. You've neither accepted nor rejected my emails. You secretly follow me on your bike, and then you never return my notes. It's maddening."

"I don't know what to say. I don't check my email that often."

"You say that, but I don't believe you. How can a person who is getting a steady stream of flattery, of gentle hellos from a stranger -- how can you not check your email more often?"

"I don't have a computer," she said. "I told you that."

"Everybody has a computer. And there are computers everywhere you go. Aren't you curious?"

She said nothing. Her eyes welled with tears. Her cheeks were the color of the setting sun.

"I think you're incredibly loyal and private. You carry a great weight around, and I'm not talking about the accident," he said.

She looked up sharply.

"Yeah, I know. This is bigger than that. Accidents mean nothing, signify nothing. But people won't let you forget that. I mean people like me, in these sorts of twilight relationships, aquaintances."

Uncomfortable silence.

"It goes back further than that, to before that. But the accident amplified something even sadder."

She looked at him wondering what.

"You lost yourself, and what you do selfishly, you do secretly. Look, I feel like I've really sort of put myself out there. I've given you -- well, I've just exposed myself. I know you didn't ask for it, and it's not fair of me to expect anything back from you. Except, maybe, just -- maybe put me out of my misery," he said. He didn't want it to sound like he was begging. But he did. "Understand, by not doing anything -- that can hurt other people, too."

A long black thread of cordura hung off her bag. He compulsively reached out to pinch it off, she didn't flinch or back away. Neither did she move toward him.

Her radio crackled and squealed. "I've got to go." She edged her butt back on the seat, set her eyes on the road, needled her orange Bianchi through a line of cars, and was gone, trailing a thread that was the only reliable way to find her or reach her.

Scherzo #1: Stories to Circumvent Spam Filters

2007-10-11T04:07:00.000-07:00

Jem Casey steps out on his front porch in his stockings. A pool of cold meltwater, unseen, begins to soak into his left sock. He pushes open the screen door. It sticks, swollen with humidity. He hears small internal cracks, wood fibers parting, somewhere inside the door as he sets his shoulder to it. His newspaper is a few steps down on the sidewalk, wrapped in a knotted plastic bag that will need to be torn open after a few fumbling moments trying to unknot it. He tries to walk in the dry spots of his socks, around the ball of his left foot. He stoops to pick up the newspaper and catches a whiff of urine. A pigeon in the eves deposits a large coin of shit on his arm as he stands up and goes back inside, now flat-footed. The screen door does not completely shut , but sticks against the patio step. It stands open. A neighborhood dog, called Friday, passes on the boulevard, stopping to urinate on a clutch of coneflowers. Seeing the open door, he approaches and enters the porch. Friday locates Jem Casey's lunch bag and tears it open, extracting the contents and leaving them scattered on the floor. Inside the phone rings. It is Jem's superior at the thingamig plant. There are hundreds of thousands of thingmajigs on order, but only several tens of thousands of thingamajigs in inventory. This has Jem's superior's blood on the boil, and he demands that Jem share his anxiety about the situation, and his enthusiasm to correct it by calling all thingamajig suppliers and vendors, all support staff, by "rallying the troops," as his superior says, "all hands on deck kinda thing, kinda sitatuon." Jem does share his superior's anxiety. He has a home-full of delightful and delectable tokens of his previous labor, many of which were purchased as a sort of palliative to his hard work in the thingamajig industry. He works hard to be able to afford these, and when he stops to think about it, he sees each little token as a converted thingamajig: That smooth and sensuous roll-top desk? Several hundred thingamajigs. The elderly retirever whimpering in sweet squirrel-chasing dreams on her pillow? Dozens of thingmajigs, probably a single shipment to a small-town dealership bought on provisional conditions and a one-time renewable purchase order on favorable satisfaction of terms. Throw in the pillow as a freebie. Jem is still on the phone with his superior. It is an old argument, but a good one: "Since we converted," he says, "to this on-demand structure, this razor-thin, seat-of-the-pants inventory management system, our primary duty is to manage expectations. Expectations!" he cries enthusiastically. He reaches down and worried his left sock off of his foot, and vaguely considers the bald spot on his shin, where the cuff of his several hundred identical black socks meet his leg, six inches above his black or brown wingtips, or say his white weekend topsiders which he now views as a mistake, should have been the navy blues, whites are too -- well, ostentatious. "What expectations?" his superior barks back. Jem holds the phone an inch away from his right ear. "The only expectation you need to consider is the expectation of collecting unemployment next week, if you don't uncork the dike of production and get me those hundreds of thousands of thingamajigs that whoever has ordered to go to wherever as soon as humanly possible. Got that, Casey?" Jem Casey considers whether a dike can be uncorked, if that's a mixed metaphor, and whether his superior has avocational literary ambitions as he himself does. But he finds that his life managing the production and shipment, the planning and execution of thingamajig operations to be a significant impediment to and distraction from these ambitions, and yet he tells himself: he could not have one without the other. Thingamjigs did not make his life whole. Neither did literature. One fed the spirit, the other fed the gaping maw of necessity, with its subdirectories of appetite and desire, and their graduated fee schedules. "Next week" is an especially painful threat. He is looking forward to the annual thingamjig trade show in Miami, where he can make a few pointed appearances in locations at which his superior would expect to see him (expectations!), and otherwise spend most of the time at his minibar, with his laptop computer, yes occasionally tracking production and delivery and the pogoing bars, the great pie wedges of pink and purple inventory, components, shipping containers, efficiency quotients -- but also here and there a minimalist poem about that woman with tears in her eyes at the lotto machine in the lobby, or about the half-smoked cigarette smoldering in the gutter dropped as if by a thingamagic conference registrant who had simply vanished into -- well, not thin air, but really rather thick air, what with the cigarette smoke and the windless air inversion on South Beach, and the generally sad state of smoggy-producing things and the smog-saturated world in which they moved.

The Mess, Part 6

2007-10-11T03:26:00.000-07:00

"Gotta be Sandy."

"Yeah, sounds like her bike."

The forum response was fast -- before he'd even gotten home, south of the lakes. He judged from his watch, before he'd even left Second Street.

So now he had a name. There was more.

"BF isn't going to like this too much." (BF? "Boyfriend." Boilerplate texting.)

"Pretty creepy," wrote another forum member.

Staring at his laptop screen, he was peeved at how quickly the cyclists were turning on him, where he'd developed a reputation for witty and humane remarks -- a shadowy member who chose his battles randomly but wisely, and kept a sharp dagger in his velvet vest pocket. He saved it for the bellicose and the self-important, the dividers rather than the uniters. It was, in truth, a flaw in his nature as he saw it: Incapable of a rigorous adversarial persona, he had a habit of pulling his punches when they really needed to land hard and clean. He felt, as he grew older, less and less sure of himself; he questioned the solid footing of previous assumptions and enthusiasms. Even as his identity solidified around the facts of his life, he was less convinced every day. His memory failed more often, and his mind seized upon bad logic and fallacious assumptions, and he expected to be wrong much more often than in his youth, and he expected to be reminded of this by the people around him, and to accept it without protest. Perhaps the tradeoff was gaining some equanimity, a measure of acceptance, peace. But so now this was doubly troubling and electrifying: he felt himself slipping into a familiar obsessive pattern from decades ago, a kind of massive juvenile crush, and infatuation with -- what? Lost youth? Unattainable beauty? An ephemeral, fleeting muse?

Where the city cycling members before made vague gestures of curiousity about his actual identity, now they were defensive, protective. They had drawn up sides, and he was on the other side, and he was alone. He felt a fragile ecology begin to unravel around him. He was on the verge of excommunication.

Who was Sandy?

How I Died, Part 7

2007-10-11T03:05:00.000-07:00

Men in bombers, men in fighters. They are such fragile little Gods, piloting their huge heavy ships. They get shot down, and it's a wonder any of them ever survive, and then go back for more. Like a carton of milk bottles dropped down a flight of stairs, a wreckage of wet cardboard and heavy shards and a pool of milk dilating to the low spots in the floor, but one or two bottles miraculously unbroken.

The whole infinite sky would be on their side, but they fly around in deadly little storm clouds of flak, because they go in formation hunting for each other with their lusty orders.

The Mess, Part 5

2007-10-10T03:57:00.000-07:00

The bicycle subculture metastasized throughout the city. A forum on the internet was built, nicknames were self-selected, stickers and tee-shirts were printed, an underground developed. The culture at large began to use its secret handshakes and passwords.

The lawyer, slacking in his office on Second Avenue, browsed the forum. There were photo galleries of bikes, discussions around political advocacy for bike paths and parking racks. There were impromptu group rides being announced, races organized, advice sought and dispensed. And the forum's most popular area was dedicated to members who had seen and recognized other members, but hadn't put a nickname and a face together -- cyclists who saw other cyclists and recognized from all the usual signs, the vintage lugged bike frame, the painted rims, the stickers on the top-tube, the sling of a messenger bag, the bullhorn handlebars, the upturned bill of a cap, the mannered position on the bike, the nod and fingerwave; they recognized members of their tribe and, perhaps too shy or hurried to make the connection in person on the road, they looked for each other on the forum, triangulating common friends, exchanging niceties.

He lurked for a few days, trying to discern if she was a member, if she posted comments to the forum, or if she was a known entity there. He found nothing. He began posting comments on various topics, steering clear of the "saw you" forum

Late one night at the office, working late, he hit the bookmark for the city cycling forum and, on a whim created an entry. "Seen on Second: orange Bianchi girl, no spokecards, no brakes, no helmet, mess bag that could hold a small child. I think I love you!" He reviewed this and posted it to the forum, packed his laptop into his bag, and rolled his bike out of the office.

Waiting at the lights at Main, and straddling the crosswalk, he could see down the length of second. When the lights changed, he stood on the pedals and slipped between cars, like water through rocks. Nearing the next intersection, a cyclist coming across turned in front of him without looking back. It was her, and his heart bounced like a ball thrown at a corner where floor meets wall. He instantly recognized the long mane of black hair tied back loosely with a rubber band, the white helmet perched rakishly and uselessly on the left half of her head, the straps dangling unbuckled.

Her huge black messenger bag.

His cheeks incandescent.

When the lane opened up, and the light ahead yellowed, she slowed. He stood on the pedals again and passed her without a glance or a comment, the local custom. He gave her space -- it wasn't a mean or challenging pass, but it was an indifferent one. He immediately regretted it. He took the next left, and another and then another to retrace the route and to catch another glimpse of her, to screw up his courage to -- he didn't know what. But she was gone.

How I Died, Part 6

2007-10-10T03:52:00.000-07:00

I force myself out of bed early, like I did when I was a boy, so I can milk the cows of my imagination. My grandfather would scold me, send me out of the barn and back to the house. "You're a growing boy, you need more shut-eye," he said. My pride was hurt. I thought he needed my help when I stayed on the farm. I wanted him to need my help, which of course he did not, 50 weeks out of the year when I was back at home.

The Mess, Part 4

2007-10-09T03:48:00.000-07:00

At first, he didn't really know anything about her, just that she was a working messenger, with her huge filthy bag and her elegant bicycle, her eyes dedicated to the street, to far off intersections, blind alleys. Her track bike had no brakes nor gears, the whole drive-train from wheel to pedal was fixed, without a freewheel to allow for coasting. It had no arteries of cable. To stop, she had to slow the pedals, the power of her legs braking the fixed gear as if it were a huge flywheel. In a pinch, she could lock her legs and skid to a stop. More often, though, she read the street blocks in advance, as if she were constantly skipping ahead a few pages in her story, and she slowed her bike in what seemed like strange random places, but which turned out to be prescient, as a bus came belching through a yellow light, or a black roadster, slipping beneath a line of parked cars, accelerated right on red. She had an almost clairvoyant, catlike view of events not yet occurred.

There was a secret society not only of messengers, but of people who emulated them, affected their style with old dress pants cut off below the knees, with expansive shoulder bags, brakeless bikes, oddly amputated and untaped handlebars. There were only about 20 messengers in the city, their ranks having been decimated by email and FTP, and their routes reduced to the most Luddite industries of all, the legal system and the insurance companies, who still took original copies seriously the way priests were the only people who still thought about the Host literally, but of course they had a corner on their own market.

There were so few messenger left, in fact, that there was barely a voice of protest when their "culture" had been co-opted and exploited by packs of roving young adults on their rounds to night classes, to dead-end jobs, to dates with new people, to art shows and dinners and films and lectures and bookstores and coffeeshops. It was funny, ironic that half the city's young adult population idealized the dirty and thankless work of a bike messenger. They were like rock stars who would never be rich, whose art was nothing more than a loose amalgam of sloppy, utilitarian style, whose jobs were on the verge of obsolescence, since anything they could carry could in the foreseeable future be electronically transferred for free. They were the anti-heroes of the cityscape that had long since been abandoned to the automobile, and now that the automobile had almost killed the city, the internet created infinite routes to infinite destinations, the bottlenecked packets few and far between and easily rerouted.

The messengers themselves lived in wary suspicion or in day-to-day denial. A few of them spent idle moments in coffeeshops working on secret websites, connecting with messengers in other cities, arranging tours and visits, mess-only alleycats, unofficial, unendorsed, unregulated races with cash purses. At least at the national level, as unreliably connected as they were, they had their shibboleths and secret handshakes, their subtle chin thrusts and finger waves.

And in the city, even though they worked for four or five different companies, they were attached to each other by the dispatch radios, the streets, the walks, the easiest routes, the cafes where they tolerated longterm loiterers who bought a small coffee maybe once a day. They knew the cafes and the lobbies where they could find free internet access, and they knew the same panhandlers by location and description, if not by name. They saw the same furtive affairs taking place behind fountains, the same rotating cast of characters dealing drugs and sex in their various precincts. Though they did not necessarily ackowldge them, they each compared notes on the coterie of wannabes, "posengers," and benign stalkers -- their unwanted, ersatz entourage of messenger groupies.

If a person wanted a superlegal sub-rosa network of street knowledge, they could do worse than infiltrate the ranks of messengers with their radio codes and cell phone numbers and their highly tuned peripheral vision.

How I Died, Part 5

2007-10-09T03:30:00.000-07:00

In the movie of these events, everyone wanted to play the lead role, including my unborn daughter. Who as a pubescent girl was wading in an institutional swimming pool when a thin ribbon of blood twisted and reached and searched out of her, and began to form a scarlet cloud, a sort of sustaining but stillborn dream.

The self-conscious smile -- the smile of the lascivious motorcycle passenger -- did not fit her face. And so my unborn daughter, dying, gave birth.

She was mortified to reach the end of girlishness, in a sterilized pool, alone among unknown and cruel people.

The Mess, Part 3

2007-10-08T18:08:00.000-07:00

Looking back, it was hard to know when he'd first seen her. It had really only been a matter of time, but he didn't notice artifacts and events until they'd entered a recurrence phase, and by the time he noticed them, he had no way of guaging how long it had been going on. He rode past clowns in whiteface outside a Brazilian churascarria, in black jadpuhrs and gay sagging leather boots; it took him several days to remark their ridiculous costume. He sat through a Felinni film, and had to be prodded afterward by his date to remember strange parts that were intended to be a prod in themselves.

So it had been some time in the winter, when there were few bicycles in the city, when the streets were rimed with salt, and framed by crooked lines of scorched, dimpled snow.

She'd carried more weight then. He had too. Winter weight. But she was much younger, and wore a sort of fleshy youth, a residue of latebreaking puberty. His extra pounds - a spare tire around the waist -- a symptom of early onset middle age. Toward the end, though, he caught a glimpse of one of her calves emerging from her capris as she pedaled away on an errand, and it was heartbreakingly elegant, the calf of a competitive ballroom dancer, the stem of a showy orchid at the base of a common daisy. He'd wasted a bit too, or rather cut down to what he'd weighed when he was her age -- even less.

So he saw her, noticed her small powerful body working elegantly on her tiny Italian bike on city streets where no cyclist would ride for pleasure or easy transit. Then he began seeing her everywhere, he saw her bike locked here and there, he saw her out the corner of his eye when he stepped out on the street.

But even in a head-on passing, she made no eye contact, seemed to watch the road in front of her wheel, had her eye on everything and nothing.

How I Died, Part 4

2007-10-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

I lied there on my right shoulder, unable to lie on my left. The woman in my bed lied to my left. It had been weeks since she touched me. Maybe months.

It had been an experiment. How long? I had no idea, no intention of testing my own limits. I thought I was testing her limits. But here we were.

I thought I could maybe go forever without having another person reach out to touch me, to spontaneously touch a shoulder, squeeze a hand -- a hug, a pat, a few fingers describing a cheek bone.

I'd lost. I went down in great flames of shame.

She'd won. But what really pushed my nose deeply into it was that she had no idea the game was on.

Because when I lost, when I finally cracked in the dark last night, I lay there with heat in my cheeks.

"I have to tell you something," I said. "I cannot live without being touched. I need physical affection like food or water. I'm sorry. I am weaker than I expected."

She said, "Let's switch sides."

We did. I was on my right shoulder now, and she was on my right. Our breath met and mingled. She hung her wrist on my left hip. I felt hope rising, and we fell asleep.

The next day, we had a long drive with the children in the mini-van. In the denuded exurbs, on a split highway, there was a skinny, hatchet-faced man on a Harley, with a woman in stone-washed jeans clinging to his shoulders. His chin jutted forward, his license plate said "Step 3." The wind made strange standing waves in his cheeks and on the flesh of her arms.

We were caught together at several lights.

One of the children exclaimed, "Every time we stop, she is giving him a massage." I looked over, and she was. Rubbing the wings of flesh beneath his shoulder blades and under his arms. She looked around at the other cars, a Mona Lisa smirk like an exhibitionist.

When the light turned green, and we began to pull away, she reached over and held my hand. Something in my cheek twitched compulsively.

The Mess, Part 2

2007-10-02T15:19:00.001-07:00

Two bikes in the rain.

An orange, blue, and white Bianchi wheel-locked and leaning on a flowerpot. Alone.

A red, white, and black Masi tree-locked. Alone.

They face each other, twenty meters apart. Rainslicked and silent. Alone under yellowing Linden trees.

A man peaks out of windows.

Tuesday Morning 3 AM

2007-10-02T04:06:00.001-07:00

These five recurring events are, at times, maddening. At other times, when I stand beside myself, they are endearing. They are things that leave imprints on me, like a rubber band on the wrist, or bedsheets on a cheek.

First, there is the one cat, who must get between the shade and the window in order to check on the pigeons in the eves. The curtain, weighted as it is by an iron bar, bangs gently on the stiles of the window.

Second, there is the curtain itself, which at bedtime could be let out six inches less to prevent this from happening, but the woman with whom I share this bed is relentlessly thorough, and also an imperturbably sound sleeper.

Third, the banging of the shade against the window sets the pigeons cooing and clucking and defecating down past the window onto the front stoop.

Fourth, the other cat, an old tabby, sets up a mighty and inexplicable and unrequitable yowl, like a police car dopplering around the rooms with no one to apprehend.

Fifth, the dog, an old labrador, wakes up with a bladder weakened by age and a lifetime of overdrinking, along with a hacking cough. No other dog I have ever encountered burps like this one.

Finally, there is nothing to do but get up at 3:30 AM, reel in the window shade, shush the cats, wave away the doves, and step down creaking and groaning stairs to put the old dog outside. I feel a bit like a farmer doing his chores and running his errands before breakfast.

There is comfort and insanity in life's Tourettic little routines.

How I Died, Part 3

2007-09-30T01:07:00.000-07:00

To whom it may concern,

I could not agree more. Your complaint has been received and registered, and what's more, it has been taken to heart (in a somewhat metaphorical sense, since I am actually and officially dead.)

I am not sure what I was thinking while I was still alive and writing. As my soul has now more or less dissipated into nothingness, I am at a loss. It gives me great embarrassment to tell you that my memory fails even worse than when I was alive. The fact that consciousness seemed to linger for those few moments after being runover by the bus -- well, it could have been a sort of biological artifact of the caffeine. If I'd got off coffee like she'd been telling me to do for years, perhaps it all would have ended with the final curtain. Believe me when I tell you that would have been far preferable to spending my last few nanoseconds considering the employment section of the paper, or preparing to answer angry letters from accidental readers of my obscure and now officially terminated memoirs, reflections, essays, anecdotes.

If I were still a legal identity, I might have cause to offer a counter-complaint. What were you doing reading my private reflections and thoughts, my inmost expressions of desire, angst? Who invited you into my sordid little narrative? Not that I care that much. As a cohesive and coherent being, I might have been flattered that you -- a complete stranger -- had stumbled upon my humble little narrative, but you know, I mean, who the hell asked you? Now that I no longer exist, and the pathetic details of my existence are forgotten even by the people with whom I was most intimate, why can't you just let it go?

The Mess, Part 1

2007-09-29T23:45:00.000-07:00

The moment the email came through, he had a sick feeling, like he'd had too much coffee, like a panic attack. Maybe he was stalking her; by all outward appearances he was. He knew where she lived, though he'd only driven by once or twice. He had a large photograph of her, printed on the company color laser-jet, on the back of his door; he'd found the photo online, posted by a photographer at some messenger event.

Who was she? He knew her, or rather he had a vague idea of who she was and where to find her. Though he could easily have called up the messenger service and abused his position of power, his discretionary spending account, hell even his legit postage account, he did not do this. There was a line he would not cross; maybe it was merely because he didn't have the spine for it; maybe the affairs he'd already had and botched and carried around inside like bone chips in his elbow, or like sand in his shoes -- maybe these prevented him from stepping over the line, picking up the phone. It was out of the question now. Someone thought he was stalking her. He preferred to stand there, looking down, a tingling in his wrists.

Jesus Syndrome. He named it when he was a boy, suffering from fear of heights. He associated the tingling in his wrists with the stigmata -- where the nails passed through Jesus's arms. He fancied that Jesus had been afraid of heights, his crucifixion on Golgotha had an untold tortuous facet, an element of psychological cruelty unrecorded in the Gospels. When as an adult he heard about Christ Complex, he'd long since stopped believing. But his wrists still tingled, looking out his windows, scanning the streets for her.

How beautiful women handle email

2007-09-28T18:34:00.000-07:00

They don't really handle it well. They are wary. They keep their distance.

Beautiful women on email do not wish to appear vulnerable. They would prefer to watch from a safe place. They enjoy receiving admiring email, and they are not as concerned about "crazy, obsessive, stalker-like behavior" as you might believe.

They wish to receive, but they do not wish to give. I know this, because I track them carefully with my tracking software. I can speculate about what they are thinking by how they visit the website, their enter pages, their out-clicks, their exit pages, their domains.

They masturbate more frequently when they know they have secret admirers. They imagine that their anonymous correspondents are brilliant though flawed Adonises who only need to meet the right woman -- naturally, that woman is them. But it is a slow and very fragile process; the men that they turn into their "projects" can be explosive and capricious. Beautiful women must withhold something of value until very, very late in the game.

Beautiful women on email are selfish, and therefore they are motivated by guilt. They can subsist on very little attention from any specific person for very long periods of time. They equate long delays in correspondence with loyalty. They do not wish to be taken advantage of.

Beautiful women wash their hands a lot.

How I Died, Part 2

2007-09-27T13:20:00.000-07:00

So having brewed my very strong pot of coffee, I picked up the telephone and dialed. Too slowly. Had to hang up and redial twice. I wonder if it would work to use the redial function cumulatively. Put three numbers in, hang up, hit redial, add the next two digits, repeat. Until all seven digits, or all ten digits in most urban locations today, had been entered into the memory of the telephone and thus encoded and executed and connecting me to the general practitioner's receptionist, for my own memory card is scorched and fragmented and, astonishingly, cannot seem to seize upon more than a few digits at a time. I am at a point where I constantly question my own recall of simple numbers such as my SSN, or my office telephone, and the fact that this sort of data is frequently requested and provided through automated systems makes it a rare occasion indeed where I need to manually input the digits, and therefore my own recall, apparently dependent on regular mental recall and the exercise of certain internal electrical circuits, is shrinking to a one-dimensional point, like the cliched bogeyman of old-fashioned cathode-ray televisions when switched off.

Anyway, so I made the appointment. The last time I'd seen the GP, I was having heart palpitations -- skipped beats, irregular beats. "There are three causes of this that can be managed very easily," he said. I knew what they were before he said them. Stress, lack of sleep, and caffeine. I had all three in aces. Would it be necessary to wear a heart monitor, and have, in some windowless laboratory somewhere in a cinderblock building in some nameless suburb, the sine waves, the peaks, the valleys of my heart beat scratched out on paper stretched between two rolls of creamy gridded paper, like the scrolls of an old-fashioned player piano, cranked up but with a skipping stylus and a sticky flywheel and a sort of lurching arrythmic wheeziness that seemed on the verge of stopping but coughed into life again? No, that would not be necessary, we'd agreed. First start with the stress, the sleep, the caffeine. See if we can get it under control with these easy steps. THere is, of course, a much more serious -- but rare -- condition that can result in blood clotting, aneurysms, stroke, heart attack. Too rare. Not likely the case. I wouldn't worry too much. It sounds like this will be totally manageable.

And later that morning, having drunk my second pot of coffee, I drove to the office and parked a certain distance from it, and got out to cross a very busy street, and not paying much attention, I was runover by a bus and killed instantly. In the moments immediately after my death, my soul was startled and released and sort of hanging around like a loiterer without the imagination to think of anywhere else to go other than where I'd always been. In that moment, my last sort of conscious moment that I associate with still being me, as a sort of unified identity, the last thing I remember was thinking about how earlier that morning I'd spent some time idly looking at job listings. In those last few moments before the final dissipation of my soul, I wondered how many minutes or hours or even days, cumulatively speaking, I'd spent in my life looking at job listings, and this was a vaguely disappointing, petty way to spend these last few moments as a conscious individual being as I was absorbed back into the totality of non-being, God's lightless recycle bin.

Manuscript ends. The author was found at his keyboard, dead from an overdose of caffeine, a rare though entirely possible phenomenon, recorded in the medical literature.

Dear Sirs,

I find this ending disgusting, trite, and disingenuous. Please notify the writer, or the writer's next of kin, that this is unacceptable. If I'd paid money to read such twaddle, I'd now demand a full refund. As it is, I shall never get these few precious minutes back. I have paid you my attention, and it is my considered opinion that you have ill compensated me. You -- or your kinsman -- have squandered my valuable time, and only because you may now be grieving, and because I am not a cruel person, I shall forego any further action, but I do hereby warn you and your various agents and representatives to forego any such publication activities as this in future, when I may feel considerably less generous and humanistic and so on. Please devote yourselves to more conscientious and charitable work. I hear the listings are chock-a-block with opportunities for the able-bodied and the idle.

How I Died, Part 1

2007-09-27T06:00:00.000-07:00

I was under the impression that there were no real bones to break, just cartilage and ligaments and all. You were saying it could not have been third degree like yours was, and you said you'd never do dips again, and that was fine by you, and you showed us all--once again-- the assymetry of your shoulders. You said it might have been second or third degree, although you agreed that it should not hurt like this now. I don't know. It's been a month now. She keeps telling me to make an appointment. I don't know why I won't do it. I think I believe they will tell me nothing I don't already know. "There is nothing to do except try to isolate it, don't use it, let it heal. We could put you in a sling, but it wouldn't do much." That's me speculating about what they would say. Surely they'd throw some language at me. Maybe offer to prescribe some sort of low-key anti-inflammatory. Nothing better than ibuprofen, probably. Or they might suggest a radical surgical procedure to re-establish torn connections, parted flesh, white cords with acronymic names. First though there would be an inane conversation with the GP about what happened and when and a referral, and I am sometimes pleasantly surprised at the breadth of anatomical knowledge that a GP has, about all the little syndromes and infestations and abrasions and conditions. The way he could palpate. His awareness and gentle skepticism of "alternative" treatments, remedies. I actually kind of like him, but in no way feel a great need to waste his time or my time in getting a referral to either a radiologist or some sort of orthopod, and going through this whole endless handshaking process of forced smiles and light banter and trying to minimize the sense of need or urgency, but while still trying to be precise about the problem, because we all know that I've surmounted a formidable personal barrier in even being here, since I seem to know everything about everything, and can't be told something I don't already know.

So I brew some coffee in a press pot, and that's the way to make it strongest. A barista responded to my story about you, how you took a job at a cafe when you were in Seattle, and how you'd drink bloody marys on your lunch break, and how on a quiet afternoon shift, you challenged the other barista to an espresso drinking contest, and how you drank 15 shots of espresso, and how you did not sleep for five days, and how you felt like complete shit, and how you didn;t touch coffee again for 10 years, but of course you stuck with bloody marys that whole time. And this new barista was sort of dismissive and said. "There isn't that much caffeine in espresso, the steam passes through the grounds so fast. Now if he'd tried it with cold press, he'd probably be dead." I didn't really know how to reply to this; it's like telling someone a joke they've heard before, but they wait till you've finished, then tell you "I've heard that one before. It's not that funny."

What facial hair says about the facially hairy

2007-09-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

This is how I got started on this thought:

My head is pretty much empty, except for a performance by Annie Lennox on SNL from about 10 years ago. It was powerful and evocative, I had that involuntary swallowing thing going on, the choking-back-tears thing. Lennox was way ahead of the curve on that whole neo-Victorian/steampunk thing. I have thought about writing the brief and ephemeral histories of great style mavens. How three or four years ago, Scott Dolan -- an obscure but brilliant artist in Brooklyn -- was wearing a huge, improbable, full-face beard. He looked like a mountaineer or a homeless person. It did not suit his boyish face, but you wouldn't know that unless you saw him pre-beard. Also, you would not think it possible for him to grow such a natty thing to such an impressive length. But he did. It lasted for one annual visit, then it was gone, and he had twins, and he entered a long period of radio silence. But now, today, here in the backwaters of midwestern America, there are dozens of young men wearing these ridiculous, lush beards on their faces, wearing ratty polemical or ironical tee shirts, dirty trousers, smoking cigarettes. The beard is the thing.

I believe that a beard tells the world that you enjoy giving oral sex, and all these beards on young men are surely false advertising.

There is too much similarity between coarse facial hair and coarse pubic hair. The equivalence is obvious and direct.

For example, I wear a little goatee under my lip to amplify and advertise my own love of cunnilingus. If you wish, you may also infer from my well-trimmed beard that I like my lover's pubic hair the same way: trimmed just so, never unruly, always under the direction of an able and conscientious gardner -- rather like a French garden that is constantly tampered with, not an unkempt and overgrown English garden.

This would not really be true though, because I enjoy this intimate kiss with our without the presence of hair.

I was trying to think of a word that describes the little tap you give a balloon to keep it in the air --especially a helium ballon that has started to loose its lift and hangs forlornly half way up to the ceiling. What is that word?

[bink]

That is what I am trying to do with this little aside on hirsute oral sex.

I give my heart away every day

2007-05-11T14:24:00.000-07:00

When you see me on the road:

A number of bumble bees made the acquaintance of my lips and front teeth. One bug made it, incredibly, to the back of my throat, direct.

There is an insoluable oil in the bodies of many bugs.

It stays permanently on your tonsils, no matter how much retching you do. (It's the same greasy substance that accumulates on car windshields.)

Until cold beer starts to work on it, or your memory.

I finally washed the chainring grease off my calf so it wouldn't get on your fresh sheets, and I put the dishes away, oh fixie girl. Goodbye.

My Biography

2007-05-09T01:10:00.000-07:00

I am reading a book about my life, and while I am gaining insights into my motivations and fears, my joys and my secrets, I am not sure it is worth reading. I could be reading something else.

This book is one big deja vu. Been there, done that.

It's cool to get a third-person narrator working on my case, but I'm not sure I like where this is going. The plot is a cliche, the ending is inevitable, the narrative arc is boring.

What this book needs is a sudden violent shift out of genre. The protaganist suddenly, organically has revelations and gains new powers. His life suddenly stops being driven by base appetites and desires; he no longer wastes his time on trivialities and vanities. He is no longer the prisoner of his own nature and experiences. His whole life suddenly takes on the numinous sheen of a vacation or a visit from a lover or a bicycle ride in Paris.

I know why, as a child, I sucked on my father's pipe. My mother did not nurse me. I know why, as a child, I had nightmares... a cottage in the woods at the foot of a great cliff is inexplicably crushed, over and over again, by the collapse of a skyscraper, each floor falling in on itself like a falling cake. I push my parents' bedroom door open, and unable to put words to this bizarre nightmare, I lie: I say that I have dreamed that a giant has come to dismember me.

My mother stirs and rummages through the closet where she keeps bedsheets, a heating pad, and a small tray of medicine and bandages. Also a thermometer. She puts it in my mouth a lays down on the bed again, to wait. She falls asleep again. Not wishing to be accused of lying, I quietly tip toe down the hallway, to the radiator. I press the silvered tip of the thermometer onto the hissing radiator.

The thermometer pops in my hand, a bead of mercury disappears onto the carpet. I hurry back to my parents' bedroom and try to hide the thermometer. My mother wakes up and asks for it. I start to sob. She sees that it's broken, and she panics. Did I swallow the mercury? What happened, am I OK?

I lie again: the thermometer broke somehow, but it was not in my mouth. A lie of omission.

Fetish Part 2

2007-05-09T01:00:00.000-07:00

Coast is clear.

So my nameless friend at the cafe--I think it might be Patsy, but I had a dream that it was Nancy Difossi--works three nights a week. I get into quite a nervous snit now, on the days when I see her car parked outside.

She has a womanly figure, and thin lips that come to a bit of a point. Her skin is clear and honey-colored, and I think her hair might be red. She has broad shoulders and a full bottom and she usually wears jeans and some sort of a blousy shirt in brown or black or faded green. She is from New Orleans, she has a Louisiana plate on the back of her black Honda, and a fake red poppy like you get from street vets on the shelf in the rear window. She speaks in a lazy, humid way, and this makes me wish to speak to her more, but I seem to do most of the talking. Still, in just a few words, she told me she was an artist and that she didn't expect to return to New Orleans because it was just too expensive to live there, and Katrina had probably made it worse by wiping out all the low-rent places where artists were accustomed to renting. I noticed she was reading a book by MK-- a book I'd recently read and enjoyed, and she said she'd just started it, but that it reminded her of her hometown, and she was feeling nostaligic about it, and I asked where was her hometown, and that started the conversation.

That day as I was leaving, I glanced back into the shop through the big plate glass window, and she quickly ducked out of the frame. I knew she'd been watching me leave, and this somehow gave a lift to my day, to several of my days, so that I didn't feel like I had to make an appearance the next time I saw her car on the street when I knew she was working.

Fetish Part 2

2007-04-09T21:25:00.000-07:00

I cannot publish "Fetish Part 2" until the coast is clear. Will you let me know when the coast is clear?

Excuses

2007-04-09T21:09:00.000-07:00

I have been traveling. I am shy and unassertive. I am nervous. I cannot approach strangers, nor appear to be vulnerable, nor in need of anything. I must pretend I know the language. I must pretend that I am not in pain. I am perceived to be aloof, but I am barely holding it together. My liver feels poisoned and I am not doing much about it, although I try to limit my caffeine intake. My dreams are bizarre and inexplicable, when I can remember them. I feel like I've been around for about half as many years as I've actually been around. I feel as if I haven't learned neaarly as much as I should have by now. I haven't amounted to much, though I've paid a lot of taxes. I somehow manage to fall in love once or twice a day, but always one at a time. I do not have any change. I forgot. I can;t show my face there. I lost the directions. I overslept. I was reading a good book. I should be more patient. I cannot be as generous as I'd like to be. I do not accept telephone solicitations. My calendar was lost. Cats do not like me, goldfish appear to be indifferent. I was watching the commercials. I wasn't listening. My ears were underwater. I was checking my messages. I got a flat tire. I never got a receipt. I have a head cold. I did something to my knee. I didn't get around to it. I love you. I was thinking about you. There was nothing I could do. I didn't know your name. I went to the same place every other day for a month. I found your card. I was sure you left it there for me. I googled you. You made it obvious. I'm not sure I'm doing the right thing, which runs against my nature. I have a developing ulcer. I begin a lot of sentences with "I." I feel bad about that. Let me rephrase that: that makes me feel bad. The medicine I've been using for 20 years doesn't seem to work anymore, but thank god I gave up smoking.

Fetish

2007-03-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I shake a woman's hand, I think about where her hand has been, and knowing where my hand has been, I am both repelled and aroused. When a beautiful woman poured me a cup of tea at the cafe, I took it from her and my hand was shaking. I put my lips where her hands had been, feeling a transgressive charge. She took my money, but she was indifferent to it. She handles other peoples' money all day, takes some of it home. Perhaps some of it is mine (I always leave a tip). In fact, I have given her hundreds of dollars now over the past year, and I'm not sure why I don't just make coffee or brew tea at home. I guess I am paying a very small amount of money each day for my innocuous fetish. Now she is reading over my shoulder at the cafe, and I fear I'm found out, and she'll start wearing those blue latex gloves when she sees me coming down the block. It wouldn't be the worst thing. It's not a lot of money, but it is probably wasted, all things considered, on an ephemeral vice. I am not a creep about it. I'm a nice guy.

But let me ask you this: When you smell something, do its molecules enter into you? Is there something substantive from that dead raccoon on the road entering bodily into me? Are the molecules of her perfume entering my flesh? Is that why I hold my breath downwind of the roadkill, and why I breathe as deeply as I can--almost to the point of hyperventilating--when I am in the cafe?

Trouble, Part 1

2007-02-21T08:45:00.000-08:00

He had a secret parking space that was free. But it was halfway across the downtown district. Still, it was big enough to accomodate his old minivan. Not a car he drove that often. But when he did, he loaded an old bike into the back. Then he parked in the sun and on the wet street, and he unloaded the bike, and off he pedaled, through the scrap-metal district.

It reminded him of the old days commuting to Manhattan from upstate. Woke up early, on the clock, drove over the bridge 30 miles to Rhinecliff, parked, waited for the AmTrak in the station a strange amalgam of classic tuetonic wood, tile, and corrugated beige lean-to, flashed his $400 monthly pass, rode an hour and a half to Penn Station, walked 20 minutes to the office, somewhere along the way picking up the Post but never the Times. If he'd cracked his window to hear the protests down below the UN, and he'd forgotten to close it again at night, he'd return to an office that had a thin coating of ash everywhere. Random city ash that settled in the night.

The commute was exhausting. He should have been able to work on the train on the way back home again, but instead he drank canned beer, watched DVDs on his laptop. He had always been a passionate apologist for Am-Trak, was now willing to be an evangelist, just as soon as he was no longer a beneficiary of its long demise; even the non-stop express on a Monday morning was half-empty, its generous seats appointed with electrical outlets, its vast windows giving out to Hudson School views. On the rare occasions when someone had to relinquish an adjoining seat, taking away a briefcase or a folded newspaper, there was a dark cloud in the aisle.

The situation is

2007-01-29T20:47:00.000-08:00

I'm not talking about that. That is not something that I want to go into. He never should have said those things, but I cannot control him. He is oblivious. He has no idea. But he certainly has been spreading some shit around. People aren't answering my calls. People are disrespecting me. Because of him. What did I ever do to him, but give my best? I wake up honestly at four a.m. with cardiac arrythmia.

Regifting of the Magi, Part 6

2007-01-17T19:43:00.000-08:00

He tracked his father down in Pacific Palisades. He was stoned in a small four-square house with an antique glass door. He had dirty long blond hair and a tangled beard that could not hide wet lips. The drive came into town at night, through a pass that had been exploded out of limestone or some other sedentary rock. On the walls someone had spraypainted along natural faults in the stone the outline of a sperm whale with its block head full of fish oil. He wasn't sure if he was seeing it; he wasn't the first. Hence the spraypaint. In the morning, his father didn't recognize him. But it worked out. The reunion was ephemeral but it was good, like any other intercourse his father had, it seemed. There was one authentic gesture, a sort of piercing of the bubble of stupefied hippiedom: His father reached down his Gretsch 12-string, a beautiful instrument, full-voiced, like a chorus of guitars. Its body gleamed in the cracklature, its rosewood fretboard looked like velvet, its inlays handset and flawed invaluably. "Here you go, dude," said his father. Other than life itself, it was the only thing his father ever gave him. He should have been moved.

Regifting of the Magi, Part 5

2007-01-15T18:22:00.000-08:00

He longed for his father 1,200 miles away.

Regifting of the Magi, Part 4

2007-01-10T21:42:00.000-08:00

He became my friend.

And he had two other friends, and we all shared similar tastes and interests. Even though he had a girlfriend--a much older woman who was a sort of legend and fixture, a local pioneer of the punk rock movement, a sort of sexy bitchy person with burnt-out blond hair and strong eyebrows and loud opinions and a boozy sort of swagger but a streak of prudishness that maintained her status, and everyone who listened to the stuident radio station knew who she was, or would very soon.

Anyway, we all liked to get stoned together. Once, we smoked a bunch of pot and went to the sandwich shop. We convinced the woman working behind the counter to sell us the pan of drippings from beneath the cutting board. It was a pile of sliced lettuce, bologna ends, shredded cheese, bread plugs, drippings of salsa and oil and thousand island dressing. It was delicious. We went to the hobby store and bought plastic models of world war II fighter planes and we built them with great focus, interest, and energy.

Another time, we smoked a tremendous amount of marijuana at one oof the guys' apartments. We were hungry, and we decided we would order a pizza. In our stupefied state, someone realized that one pizza would not be nearly enough for the three of us. A solution was quickly hit upon: We would order another pizza from another restaurant. This would be doubly interesting and funny, because we could watch it like a sort of horse race. Ideally, both pizzas would arrive at the same time, and the confused competing pizza guys would stand there looking at each other. (Do pizza guys talk to each other when their on the job, or are they fiercly competitive? Do they ignore the other pizza guy until they are "off the clock," when they can sit around and have a beer and swap war stories?)

My friend's girlfriend had a friend who was very attractive. I wished to date her. She was outwardly a plain person. She did not wear flamboyant punk-rock clothes. She dressed conservatively. I think she had a respectable job. But she was one of those people who exudes a sort of constant sexual vibe. I would have enjoyed getting to know her better, but I believe she thought I looked very young and somewhat effeminate. And she'd had three abortions by the time she was thirty, and I was still a virgin. We could never really connect in a meaningful way. I guess we didn't have a lot in common. That sort of sucked at the time.

Company Meeting Part 1

2007-01-08T12:46:00.000-08:00

The people of the company converged on the hotel. It sat on a barren hill, under thin sunshine. The building appeared to be abandoned. The head of field marketing showed each of us to our rooms. They were brightly lit with low natural light, the sun barely rising to the top of the windowframes here in these northern reaches. The field marketing guy tried to act like nothing was unusual. He amplified what he thought were the strong points of the accomodations, even when we could see that many of the floors had collapsed, especially in the closets. Thin pieces of native fabric were laid over these holes and soft spots, and the center of each piece of fabric bled through with unpleasant looking stains of red soil or rusty water. Walls and floors did not meet at expected angles, there were black cracks here and there. The coworkers fell into camps--there were the optimistic sales folks who always wished to look on the bright side. There were the misanthropic pessismists from customer service for whom nothing was ever good enough; for them, this was a quiet outrage. They plotted in rasping whispers down hallways and in the wreckage of a large service closet.

The head of field marketing took me to my room. He opened the door and said something solicitious about the best rooms being reserved for certain executives who had performed well during the last quarter. His hand surveyed the room. There was a small cot with a child's pillow. The floor was bare concrete, except for a rug made from braided rags. It curled and frayed in the center of the room. A clear plastic shower curtain hung between the main room and what must have been the bathroom or maybe a coat closet. He reached in and swept the curtain across its blistered chrome rod, and his hand must have hit a switch on the wall. It was some sort of alarm, and a single nozzle high on the wall began to emit a bright red powder. It was some sort of flame retardant. The head of field marketing tried to remain calm, tried to assure me that this sort of thing happened all the time and you had "to simply let it run its course, it'll be fine." He backed out of the room and tried to close the door after him, but I jammed a foot in the door before he could close it and I followed him out into the hallway.

The CEO was just coming down the hallway with the COO and the CMO, followed by the CFO. THe CEO was talking animatedly with the COO, gesticulating widely and looking a little concerned. When he saw me he looked up and smiled and said hello warmly. Just then, some sort of a pipe burst above us, but there was no pressure in the line; a small trickle of watery fluid dripped down on the CEO's neck just below his jawline. It scalded the sensitive skin there, and the CEO reacted with a tight rictus, and he acted as if it paralyzed his neck, because when he turned his head now, his shoulders turned with it.

Later, I walked through the lobby where long curls of wallpaper hung down onto dust-covered sofas and easy chairs, end-tables and old rotary telephones. Many coworkers were milling about, coming or going, talking into cell phones. There were ejaculations of surprise as pieces of plaster rained down from the ceiling, the result of someone walking on some upper level of the hotel. I was expressing disbelief, saying something uncharitable about senior management. How could they let this happen? My voice boomed in the crumbling lobby. My party passed a small group of people huddled around the CEO. He'd heard me speaking. "Jerry, it's not like that," he said in an apologetic tone. It made me feel guilty for shooting my mouth off.

Regifting of the Magi, Part 3

2007-01-06T23:28:00.000-08:00

In the foyer of the library, there was a ramp for wheelchairs. Great windows with paladian arches framed the green lawns and elms trees along University Avenue. I sat on a bench and reread my notes, several sheets detailing the records and cassettes in my collection. Someone came in the doors, approached. He stopped in front of me. He was looking at my pants, a pair of worn jeans on which I'd written the names of bands I liked. He read some of these out loud approvingly. "You like The Jam?" he said. "You know the Jam?" I said.

His mother was a graduate student in psychology. He had not yet decided on a major. His father was estranged, a man adrift somewhere in Northern California, an inventor and poet, a bohemian and a night passenger, a person who loves everyone but cannot embrace his own accidental children.

Regifting of the Magi, Part 2

2006-12-24T07:10:00.000-08:00

In those days, you recognized your people by what they wore. In North Dakota, very few people wore my uniform: stovepipe jeans with ripped out knees or baggy twead pants; I had an Oxford shirt splashed with red food color; an army duster with a target patch in the back; beatle boots or black Chuck Taylors. Tee shirts representing obscure punk rock bands and clubs, nihilistic slogans. Everyone else wore acid-washed jeans and sweatshirts, loafers with tassles, or white leather basketball shoes. I was the only male I knew who wore an earring, and one instructor told me I was not welcome in his class if I wore it.

I discovered a student radio station that had a late night show. It spoke to me in my secret language. I realized there was at least one other person in the area who was in the club, and as I listened on Sunday nights, it became clear that the secret society extended beyond the radio host and myself: Others called in with requests that betrayed the fact that the code had found other local carriers. Still, this society was invisible to me.

The student radio station was run out of an office in the grand old library—a library built on the prairie wastes as a kind of statement of Civilizing Influence. Though they were poor dirt farmers, North Dakota pioneers feared God and read books, or at least recognized the value of these things in the broader world. They were probably sensitive to being seen as heathens or ignormuses. It is probably the single greatest motivating factor in American history: No one wishes to look stupid or poor or humble or, when it came down to it, a people without a history. You could reinvent yourself in America, but you had to start somewhere. The people that already occupied the "new world," the lakota, ojibwe, cree—were people without history, without books, without buildings. Their histories were mythologies with no grounding in time or space, and certainly no permanent location. It may have seemed a bit frivolous to skim their hardscrabble life for the funds it would take to build a gothic library at the heart of their nascent college. But it was the most important statement of all: We are here to stay and we matter.

Regifting of the Magi, Part 1

2006-12-23T19:58:00.000-08:00

The high school I went to was strong in the sciences. If you were a good student, you took complex math courses, physics, chemistry. I should have taken the humanities courses, but my parents pressured me to take the science courses. I was lucky to get a D in Functions and Matrices, a course I had no business taking. So anyway, when I wanted to go to college, my parents would not help me financially. My grandmother agreed to pay my tuition freshman year. I was sent to a state university in North Dakota, a long way from anywhere or anything. It felt a little like punishment.

I had trouble meeting people with whom I shared anything in common. The first friend I made was a gay male model from Winnepeg. I'd never met an openly gay man before. David was flirtatious with me, though I didn't understand that for a while. We drank some sort of creme liquer or champagne, and we liked to hang out in cemeteries and talk about existential literature and modern politics. He liked good music, and he respected my taste. His father was a low-ranking federal official in Canada. His job was to buy right-of-way from Canadian farmers when the government wished to expand highways. Once when we drove to Winnepeg together, he pointed out a long series of flourescent orange surveyor's flags running along the highway on the other side of the drainage ditch. "My father bought all that land there," he said. His childhood home was a dumpy little rambler on a street with very few trees. His parents were kind and quiet, they seemed a bit shellshocked, especially when David'sloud and boozy girlfriend, Annette, came over. She wore her hair in aviolent lopsided sort of bob, with streaks of black and platinum. She wore dark sweaters with assymetric collars and sleeves. She had no waist, and she was barrel chested, and she guffawed immodestly, like a drunk sailor. She called herself a "fag hag" and she had a nose like a very small potato.

I slept on the floor in the basement. Annette apparently slept somewhere else in the house, for in the night she more or less forced herself on me. It was dark and she smelled like watermelon. Her mouth cover my mouth as she climbed on top of me and gyrated in a herky jerky way that reminded me of the way people dance. I knew the first thing she said to anyone afterward would be to brag to David that she had bedded me. He never said a word about it. I got the distinct impression that he was jealous, that he hated Annette as much as he loved her.

About the Board of Directors, Part 10

2006-12-23T14:56:00.000-08:00

The boys laid under the bed on a carpet of grass that needed mowing, which receeded to the back of the suite, where a sliding door opened onto a veranda. The sun shined out there and it looked like a ground level suite, although I thought I'd gotten out on the second floor. Monique joined me and walked with me through the room, her pedicured feet kneeding the deep grass as she walked catlike. I caught a glimpse of myself in a floor-to-ceiling mirror in my ridiculous seersucker suit. I looked frightened and stiff and completely under the control of Monique Karling. She appeared to be controling me or manipulaitng me or at the very least condescending to me. I felt her arm come over my shoulder, and I felt her breath in my ear, and she said something strange to me. "Which pocket do you keep your cell phone in?" and her hand dropped from my shoulder, and penetrated the space under my arm and lightly glided down past the unflappered suit coat pockets, and searched across the top of my right thigh where it lighted on some small bills and change, my keycard. She sort of quarter stepped behind me now and reached down my left side with her left hand, and here she quickly found the bulge of my cell phone in my left pocket. Not like it was clairvoyant or anything, but I wondered: "How did you know?" She said when I left her room the previous night, I'd inadvertently dialed her private cell phone number, that I must have bumped the keypad in a way that it automaitcally dialed, and she said she'd listened to all of my activities from last night until early this morning when, at some point, I'd used my cell phone to call my editor.

About the Board of Directors, Part 9

2006-12-11T20:44:00.000-08:00

I got back to my room and took my jacket off, threw it on the bed. There was a large flat-screen television mounted on the wall. It was playing CNN. It made me feel more comfortable to come back to a room with some life in it. I went over to my laptop computer, which was sitting on an oversized oak desk. I closed it and listened to the hard drive spin up and then spin down. I took my clothes off and laid down on one of the beds. It, like Monique Karling's bed, had far too many pillows, and there were too many bedclothes, a heavy quilted floral bedspread that was comfortable neither on top nor beneath it. I must have pushed the yellow hotel information button on the remote control, because the television diplayed a menu with innumerable options, activities, fee schedules, descriptions of goods and services, area attractions and special promotions, seasonal events and the like. I clicked to the adult channel and watched the previews, but I was as careful as a child in church with the remote; I did not want my hotel receipt to reflect the purchase of an adult movie--not any movie at all, because that would be obvious to everyone back at the office.

In the morning, I hoped to meet Monique again, though we did not have another appointment. I took the elevator down to her floor, and padded through the hallway. When I reached her door, I could see that there was a "do not disturb" sign hung on the lever of the door. I felt conflicted. My duty ran against my nature: I should knock anyway, and make an effort. I supposed I'd never get the story--or some elusive element of the story--if I didn't push against my own sense of propriety, of my own personal shortcomings and reservations. Somehow the story could never be anything especially remarkable if I didn't myself get into an uncomfortable place, or so I supposed.

Carefully staged and controlled interactions. All-powerful publicists working behind the scenes, trading favors, observing hidden agendas and pecking orders, the machinations of favor and access. Even Monique Karling, a furtive and unknown player in the obscure world of international art movements; even she seemed to have a kind of entourage and staff of "handlers," professional sycophants who perhaps indulged her reckless egotism but also kept the books balanced and the important calls answered and the lips sealed and made a minimal effort to sustain the self-interests of their charge by selectively observing professional courtesies at moments when their client's stock was highest and when it was wise to sell sell sell.

Anyway, just as I was about to rap a knuckle on Monique's door, it opened. And there she stood in a hotel robe, her hair somewhat matted, her eyes radiant somehow in spite of all the Heineken and Bud Light and the late hours and the promenade of giggolos. "Hi," she said, and I felt there was a sign of hope in it, some extract of optimism I could savor from it. Was this th signj I was lookign for, that we'd connected on a deeper level, that we might get past the soundbites and the same old safe material she'd rehashed a dozen times with reporters and writers who'd come before me? "Come in, " she said. "Would you like a bloody mary? Eggs Benedict?" Two boys were passed out arm-in-arm on one of the beds. They looked like cherubs. A bald head was just visible on the floor under the other bad, it was face down. It seem vaguely possible that everyone in the room other than Monique Karling was dead.

The Best of Recent Memory

2006-12-10T22:02:00.000-08:00

These are the things that are high on my list:

Swobo woolens. Hell, any woolens.

Canon digital SLR, the new Rebel. Great camera.

Tinkyada pasta. Brown rice pasta does NOT have to be chewy. Gotta rinse it a bunch, though. It does get starchy on the outside.

Rivendell bike catalogs. But they are getting lazy and repeating a lot of articles from the Reader.

The New Yorker. Getting back into it. Obituary on George W.S. Trow, 12/11/06 by Rik Hertzberg, especially moving. When Wm. Shawn edited the magazine for so long, it became possible for the editor and writer to reach a place of trust that produced "In the Context of No-Context." Which, ironically, reads terribly whe you read excerpts out of context.

Cheap reading glasses bought at the hardware store. Do I need them? Probably not. Do I like them? Yes. I heard the optometrist say that a child's eyes can get tired when she is learning to read. That a minor prescription for magnifiers can help. I am like that child. In more ways than just hte readining glasses thing, of course, but that's what I'm talking about here.

Box of Hardy's Shiraz wine. Rumor is that it's easier to drink that full allocation of one bottle of wine per day. Probably this is true. Empty bottles don't stand accusingly on the kitchen countertop anymore. Still, it's great wine at a great price. I confess that part of me enjoys that masochistic feeling of standing in the check-out line proudly and brazenly with my boxed wine. First, I am an early adapter: All y'all gonna be drinking this shizzle in a few years, and you won't remember the derelict cyclist standing in line with this stuff months ago. Second, box-wine technology has come a long way. If I could manage to make a box of Hardy's last a month or more, it would be just fine in its littl ehermetically sealed foil bag in there. (I did this once this summer with a box that was just about to go bad... it had gotten sugary. It was undrinkable, really, but I kept it around to make sangria. It stayed at the same state of undrinkableness--never turned to vinegar--in more than six weeks.)

The fireplace. A face cord of very tightly grained oak. Small curls of birch bark for aroma.

Against the Day, by THomas Pynchon. I think it's his most readable book yet. I have given up on Shteyngart's "Absurdistan," although today's NYTimes Book Review mentions it again (as one of the top 10 books of the year, WTF?!!) and this time makes allusions to its "especially poignant or moving conclusion" so I suppose I have to finish the goddamn thing. Am slightly maddened by this. So....

Things I am tolerating, barely, for various reasons:

Aforementioned overrated novel from Russian emigre wunderkind who has basically filled three hundred pages with as many variations on obesity jokes as two cultures and languages can support.

Pioneer Inno XM satellite radio. This is the worst technology ever devised, but it is the only way to get nightly repeats of Joe Frank, the most brilliant radio personality in the history of frequency mod3ulation.

Yellow labrador retirever. I have never seen an animal make so much crap on a daily basis. How does she do it?

Squirrels and the birdfeeder. I am not an angry, vengeful man. I could be, though.

Saw "Grey Gardens" with the wife recently. Have to agree with first NYTimes reviewer, widely reputiated in hindsight now, that it was one long exercise in class voyeurism and sordid exploitation of th ementally ill. Yes, a few moments of beauty. A broken clock is right twice a day.

Holiday parties. Good to see old friends. Bad to see old enemies. Too much strong drink.

Unseasonably warm weather. Disorienting. I prefer the cold and the snow, seriously. Got yelled at for ice skating on the melting ice over at the park. That is simply outrageous.