Nothing is going to happen here, on these pages. Or if it does, know that it isn't planned. Barely anything "happens" to me anyway; the minutia of existence cannot be called "event". They do not merit that distinction. If I focus on them it's to keep the emptiness they relieve from enveloping me totally. It's enough usually to exist in the details, to ignore the gaps or chasms between them like the white space between the letters of these typed words. Ah, but of course without this negative space the words would be indistinguishable, and so it is with my life. The emptiness gives me the means with which to silhouette myself against oblivion. For the time being I am separate from it, though eventually this ink will fade, and so too my life and everything I do with it.

***

I live with one cat and his name is Simon. Simon was the original name of Peter the apostle. He - Peter - was a fisherman, a kindred occupation to the soul of any feline. Also, Simon the apostle was nailed to the cross upside-down, as if by clerical error or flaws in that early practice. This seemed goofy to me, and Simon is a goofy cat. No discernible law governs his actions.

His fur is mostly gray, but his snout and chin and underside are all white, as well as his paws. I didn't realize he had a personality until I spent some time caring for another cat and could compare the two. Simon is a charmer; you see his little soul behind his little face. Mischievous, too. My body is covered in scratches and bites.

Simon and I are both orphans.

***
 

The irreducible facts of my existence give me great comfort.

I live in a small room in Brooklyn. In it are a narrow pressboard bookshelf crammed full with books, a twin-size bed, a black wooden desk and a small wooden chair whose joints have come loose, causing it to tilt when you sit on it. The linoleum floor is interrupted by a rectangle of rug I purchased from a street vendor in Coney Island. The corners used to curl before I nailed them down. Everything in this small collection of objects is united by its deposit of cat hair, which is impossible to be rid of for long. Simon spends a lot more time in here than I do.
 

There is a longer litany of things, which I've put together during bleak midnight hours, lying on my back in bed, eyes open wide into the darkness or else closed.

***

Every night I unplug my computer from the wall and bring it into bed with me. I write until the power runs out then return the computer to the desk and go to sleep. Lately I've been staying up long past the depletion of its battery. Now I simply return to the desk with my computer (there's only one electrical outlet in here), and write uncomfortably there, hunched over, ignoring the numb throbbing in my spine, the drying out of my eyes and the thin hiss and gurgle of hunger in my belly.

***

Insomnia.

Last night, sitting blank-brained at my desk with Simon on my lap and this document open before me, I heard two gunshots from far away. A pause, and then a third. This pause seemed more terrible than the shots themselves, it's what sparked my imagination. Two shots fired "in the heat of the moment", then one carefully aimed shot to finish the job. Cold-blooded. The deliberate pulling of the trigger to finish a life. And I would never know, could never know what had actually happened. I sat there absently wrapping my consciousness around the echo of the shots in my head, a sort of focused lack of focus, knowing the spell would be broken at the slightest movement.

I got into bed feeling miraculously tired. Thinking how my body's instincts are inverted. Any normal, healthy person would be asleep at that hour and, woken by the gunshots, would stay up until his heart stopped racing or he was able to share the event with somebody else, perhaps realizing while doing so that he was more excited than frightened, and his fear was childish and perhaps a little vain.

But I was finally overcome with weariness, as if fatigue dammed up by anxiety had finally spilled over and through. I dropped into bed and into a dreamless sleep.

***

These insomniac hours are different. At three or  four in the morning you see just how much the mind adapts to its surroundings. The world emptied of activity and noise, what does occur on this silent landscape achieves an instant and perhaps false poignancy.

My elderly upstairs neighbor sleeps restlessly and his old bed creaks. I hear his lonely shifting at night and my imagination goes very dark. Nothing at the time seems more lonely, though he himself is asleep and oblivious to my cinematic pity. I cannot keep my mind from going certain places, no more than I can kill myself by holding my breath.

What you know about a person without him knowing confers great power on you. One fact or assumption or scrap of hearsay, no matter how insignificant or doubtful, comes to dominate your conception of him.

Emerging from my apartment sometimes I run into him making slow, hobbling progress down the narrow stairwell. I wait. Pretending to fumble for the right key to lock my door I allow him to reach my landing before beginning my own descent.

"Good morning, Alejandro."

"Morning."

A rusty voice that is all throat. His throat with its pronounced and vehement Adam's apple, draped in folds of desiccated skin.

He presents you with a neat package of impressions, delivered unconsciously, as he is always focused on his own uncertain movement, a conductor closely overseeing the unreliable locomotion of his body.

He wears an enormous orthopedic shoe on his left foot. Whether from some old injury or birth defect I don't know. Only once have I seen him without it, on a blindingly hot summer day he sat sleeping on a torn, rusted and tilted fold-up chair on the sidewalk in front of the building. His left foot in its given-up saggy sock hovered fantastically above the pavement while the other - sockless and grotesque - laid on its side with the turn of his leg exposing a bare intimacy of calf and thigh from which I immediately looked away. The upper limbs of the elderly always bothered me. They strike me as extremely vulnerable. But I looked again, then away, then again and this time stared until he suddenly burped himself awake. I raced up the five flights of stairs to my apartment and struggled awhile with the key in the lock - I thought it was my nerves - before realizing I'd gone up six flights and was attempting to open Alejandro's door. The experience left me shaken.

In any weather he wears a brightly-colored heavy flannel shirt, buttoned right to the top. This and the dramatic hunch of his spine and shoulders give him a slightly more substantial look, but his face belies this illusion and you know, taking in this depleted feature, that he is as flimsy as the black nylon pants he also eternally wears.

He is constant of appearance and uncommunicative, which gives me endless cause to contrast myself and my superfluous ways. You can tell how closely and cleanly he increments his energy, what tiny allotment is left to him. I have begun to exercise a similar economy and thus find myself with a surplus each night. I am extended into these small empty hours and so allowed to hear the creak of his bed as his light husk turns over in it. I hear nothing but this creak when I wait on the landing for him to catch up with me, I hear it in his voice when he speaks, "Morning," as if his throat is a busted spring from that mattress, and I picture him in his nylon and flannel, lying flat on his back in bed, death scything elsewhere, having made some temporary pact with him in which he, Alejandro, will go without a fight when the time comes.

***

I feel compelled by a lowercase existence into capitalizing Things and Events in order to consider them with due gravity. Bringing weight to bear on any consideration now is mostly discouraged, or merely thwarted. I mean, one capital remains to us, 'I', and this focus in fact is greatly encouraged, as we are sold or admonished to purchase an infinite variety of Things to appease the 'I'. To fatten it, polish it smooth, coax it into sleep and oblivion. So many notes in a lullaby sung to the spirit.

Once you decide to shut your ears to it you experience an immediate and absolute alienation, a shunting to the fringe where you are left to starve or thrive on your own instincts, the instincts you must now acquaint yourself with and come to terms with.

In your new alienation you must build yourself up from scratch and allocate your resources with great deliberation.

Mere appetite is no real burden, its parameters are familiar and grow at a predictable rate. But spiritual hunger is a new and terrible gnaw. You don't know where to go to feed it and what to feed it when you get there. It is fickle, too, its tastes temporary and tyrannical. Here in my room I gorge it on literature and form these paragraphs at the other end of the tract. The beautiful thing is giving yourself over to it, temporarily abdicating the throne of selfhood and letting it wander through the world in your body, like a werewolf transformed by its violent hunger into a prowling nocturnal beast. You wake up in the morning with hardly any memory of feeding, but in possession of a crucial superiority to the smaller hungers and tedious repetitive feedings going on all around you.

Lowercase letters go down easy. It's the capitals that knock you in the teeth and stick in the throat.

***

I pour water from the cold tap in the kitchen into a large plastic cup with four ice cubes at the bottom. The cubes roil and crack as they rise and a sweat breaks out on the surface of the cup. The air I gently displace with my movement down the dark hallway cools my bare chest. I feel like a wide-eyed scavenging animal, a creature absently quenching its thirst while remaining alert to its own noise and the sound of a possible predator.

Back in my room I unclench and exhale through my nose onto the ice cubes as I gulp the cold liquid noisily. My breath reflected off the ice cools my closed eyelids. I sit down on the edge of my bed and stare at my right forearm where its lines dwindle into the lean function of a bony wrist.

Even Simon is asleep.

***

Lil Metafizz came to me in a dream.

She wore a semi-transparent black cloth wound all round her body in vaguely Muslim fashion, but the effect was entirely erotic. In the dream I woke up next to her in my bed and struggled quietly to remove long wisps of her weightless brown hair from my face. It seemed as if there were no head at all, just this soft tangle my fingers slipped through frictionlessly until she too awoke and turned to me and smiled. She said my name. She grabbed me around the waist and pulled me right up against her body, which communicated an incredible warmth to my torso and groin. When her tongue slipped into my mouth I had to stifle a groan that seemed to rise up out of my childhood like some long imprisoned demon set free. I dissolved into her. We stopped kissing and she pulled her face back just a bit but did not release her grip on me and we stayed forcefully close like that. My body was overheating and I noticed then how wet the pillow and sheets were with my sweat.

She did not tell me her name but I knew it immediately on waking. It echoed into my waking consciousness: "Lil Metafizz."

I had rolled right up to the radiator in my sleep and now I pushed frantically away from it as it hissed and sputtered, which immediately replaced my memory of the sound of her voice and afterward I could not conjure it except as this feeble asthmatic whine.

***

My dream of Lil Metafizz left me feeling peculiar. I got out of bed and scratched absently at my stomach while Simon stretched, shook out his hind legs as if they'd gotten wet, and ambled over stumblingly to run his body back and forth across my bare shins. I felt I should make a deliberate attempt to remember her face as it had appeared so close to me, but it wasn't necessary. As had never happened to me before, this image remained strong and unfading even as my morning routine edged me further and further from the immediacy of the dream. In the shower. Before the computer reading last night's writing. In the kitchen washing my red plastic cup and down the stairwell and out onto the sidewalk and barreling underneath the city on the crowded C train.

***

I spent that entire day activated. Nerves growling and snapping with aggressive, voracious receptivity. Ideas and essences came to me fully formed and slotted neatly into the day's temporary worldview. Temporary, yes, but delicious. The light crystalline structure of it sat comfortably in my head. Wandering, I felt none of the usual affliction of incongruity. Compatibility is a gift rarely given to me, and I'm not of a temperament to create my own. Actually I've always considered alienation the true gift, at least it's always proved more fruitful to me. But, I suppose, like anyone resigned to what he perceives to be his fate, I'd learned to rearrange the rest of the world in my head to make it seem as though mine was the best possible hand to be dealt. Spend enough time with these bum cards close to your chest and soon the rest of the deck is forgotten. It's the only way to get anything done.