Wanda is taking laps around the room, her evening constitutional. Upon each knick-knack (we call the room "the museum") which she's collected on her nocturnal scavengings she lays an inquisitive gaze, and sometimes a bold hand, if she has discovered a fitter place for it elsewhere. By the end of this exercise every object will have been relocated at least once. I am in the big devouring chair behind a copy of Topaz's "A Psychedelic History of Brazil" - his final and most critically panned novel. My eyes read the line "... in the house on the cliff beneath an asphyxiated sky she screamed at the top of her lungs for poor lost Geoffrey, though he sat beside her on The World's Most Uncomfortable Sofa," while Wanda prates on about Farineo's failing liver, how she cannot bear to have a dead ex-lover in her life. I, who spend much more time with Farineo than with Wanda, know that he really puts it on for her benefit, a sort of maudlin cirrhosis theater. He told me about pulling at the skin of his cheeks before meeting her at the cafe, to make himself more haggard and inflamed. I do not want to listen to Wanda but nor can I stand Topaz's contrived esoterica. I had made a fetish of his God-awful prose and derived a perverted satisfaction from lauding it to the disbelief of knowing Wanda and pretentious Farineo. Farineo especially got sore, as I still refuse to read a word of his writing, telling him instead it is enough for me to lie on the mattress in my room next to his and imagine the literary atrocities I hear forming to the muffled metronome of his hysterical typewriting. I picture horses circling a cobble-stone courtyard instead of his yellow fingers with their torn and dirty nails erratically groping the keys from which the letters and numbers long ago disappeared. Because when I see those fingers I see too Wanda's skin beneath them, a younger, less destroyed Wanda, whose past relations with Farineo have given me a sour retroactive jealousy. I sit very low in the chair listening to Wanda, not reading, just mentally saying the words to myself off the page, when a feeling of non-existence, of being flattened to a dull two-dimensional domesticity in which nothing has moved for thirty years and all the colors have forgotten themselves, causes me to begin reading aloud. Wanda does not stop circling or speaking. "Geoffrey, for his own part, had learned to disappear from himself, an act that left him feeling giddy with mischief, as if he'd tiptoed from the room while his wife dusted the mantelpiece with her back to him. Outside the window, which was over the cliff, through a precipitous four-square of unclouded blue, a dog barked, impossibly. So this is Brazil, so this is Brazil, Geoffrey thought as he winged away from himself and somersaulted into the pinched winter atmosphere. From that height out over the final jut of crumbling orange rock he mentally squeezed the shrubs that acned the valley floor a mile below." Oh, it is truly awful, it makes a grim rictus of my jaw, but Wanda begins to stutter and pause, so I keep on: "Flying like this, he let fall his ego like sandbags from a hot air balloon. His childhood memories dropped away to nothing, and he went higher. He arched his back in imitation of the sun's curve. He grinned into the slapping wind. He cried, vomited, and pissed into the blue... he tumbled away from his waste. Passing through a cloud, he filled his mouth with damp cotton. Oh, boy! But there weren't enough miles in the universe to put between him and himself, and all the while he remained umbilically attached. Suddenly his name came hurtling toward him, and he looked back at the widening speck of his wife approaching through the sky. She sort of ran through the air, dipping awkwardly, straining, struggling to keep her apron out of her face..."

"I don't know where I found this dream, I mean when and where it was born in me, but I see the face of a beautiful girl, dark hair, very soft skin, but kind of a hard look, or a look of dissatisfaction long sustained, a sentiment that arrived long ago and never left, one that used to be instrumental and advantageous, that must have seemed fashionable at first, then uniquely expressive of how she genuinely felt, and finally involuntary, something only others see. Because a look is just that, it doesn't come with any solutions. But it attracts. It attracts me. This is no doubt an adolescent fantasy, but I still have it, as time goes on it becomes more and more real, more heartbreaking, because I know I will never find it, and, even worse, I believe that I have found it before, maybe several times, but I could never forgive them their reality, as if I myself were anything else...! Yes, it's all so adolescent. This girl, I find her in a small town, or a less developed, more brutal and desperate city, while I'm traveling alone, me and a car and a little money, while traveling I don't speak to anybody for days, so I walk around with hot coffee in cold hands, stand in front of gas stations or in supermarket parking lots, and all of a sudden there's this girl, bundled up a little haphazardly, she's looking at me with big eyes, but surreptitiously, mistrustful, as I look at myself, inwardly. You can't imagine how many different scenarios I've come up with in which I collide with this girl, for the slow or sudden intertwining of our lives. I think everything I've written has been an elaboration on this fantasy. It's what keeps me moving forward in time. Like a carrot dangled... it may be, it probably is a phantom carrot, or just a mirage - that's a better metaphor - a hallucination born of thirst... but at times it seems so real to me, certainly more real than any... these scenarios, let me give you an example. I pull into a strange town at dawn, gliding in on an empty tank of gas. I find a gas station just as the engine starts to fail. I pull up next to a pump, but the station's not open yet. I get out of the car and gaze across the road at a thick, impenetrable bank of trees, the forest that's been rushing by all night. It's frigid in the dawn air, my breath comes out in blooms of frost, I rub my hands together, my heart is enormous and empty, but with a tiny spark of promise, like the sky and its distant suggestion of day, struggling like it has to invent the first day, and it's been working all night in secret trying to get it right... my heart, so many times wrestled to the ground and broken, yet has to invent the first love, having worked so often in secret to get it right. Everything up until now has been rehearsal... life is a perpetual rehearsal for the next moment. This is the curtain finally rising... and, having nailed life a thousand times in my dreams, out on reality's stage, I hear the board creak under my foot, the world performs a sickening pivot, and I forget all my lines... In front of the station's locked and shuttered door I find a bundle of the day's newspapers, but my hands are so cold and chapped, I've barely begun trying to work one free from the plastic tie when I give up... this is some intimation of Truth, of The Way Things Are, and the Story of My Life... that kind of thing... but the air, the temperature, everything is too immediate and demanding of presence... quiet, open, receptive presence, full attention, that I don't follow any thought too far away from myself where I stand steeped in this elegant dawn, being unfamiliar with oneself in an unfamiliar environment is like being locked in a room with somebody who for years you've only glimpsed from afar. I feel bare before myself, and look on at me looking on at the dawn, at my car, at the road that is so awkward in its stationary aspect, after driving all night, the way you see crows sort of hopping on the grass. I get back in my car and feel enormously, infinitely tired, I think of the strain we put, in our lifetimes, on this - alas! - temporarily self-renewing structure, which after all is far less sturdy than we think, which is why we build our fortresses of... I fall asleep. And what wakes me up is a soft tapping of knuckles on glass. The window has steamed over. I can't roll it down without turning on the car, so instead I open the door. She steps away, giving me room. She has dark hair, very soft skin, but kind of a hard look... she's looking at me with big eyes, but surreptitiously..."

"But I don't know how to die. Ain' no plug to pull out. 'N no matter how bad I feel my heart don't stop beating and my eyes open in the morning." Push, by Sapphire (aka "Precious", now a motion picture)

I spent the entire day wandering, walking up and down the streets of Brooklyn in the rain, and the not-rain, and the not-quite rain. I wore my jacket and a backpack, and I walked - walked everywhere. My feet were tired and then they weren't. My legs were numb and then they weren't. The sky was always gray, with sine waves and parabolas marking the darker clouds from the light, and sometimes the rain went sideways. I had my umbrella but I rarely used it, and all the time my glasses were covered in a light mist, or with big drops, and all the time I walked - I walked. I was at the Brooklyn Heights promenade staring out over the misty waters at the Statue of Liberty, which appeared tiny from such a distance, and as if she had her back turned on us. I was at a used bookshop in Dumbo, sitting on a low couch reading Jean Genet. I was in Greenpoint, munching a doughnut from Peter Pan and wandering along the waterfront. In Williamsburg at a vintage clothing store. Down Driggs, up Bedford, down Atlantic, up Front, left at this corner, right at this, and straight on till it feels right to turn. Now I'm back home, exhausted. I prepared two veggie burgers to the sound of rain coming down hard now - finally - and ate them in the unimaginable calm and comfort of my well-lighted room. A copy of "A Thief's Journal" by Jean Genet is waiting for me on my bed. Cats are meowing in the hall.

Day well spent.

I tumble out of the dust and gloom of my apartment onto the sidewalk of Pacific Street. Make a right. The long block to Kingston Avenue is like a warming of the motor, thinking of sitting on the vinyl seats of our old capacious, ornery but reliable '77 Grand Safari station wagon, which made the journey from Massachusetts to California carrying a family of five and all their belongings - sitting in the cold of the car in the pre-dawn light as the motor turns, coughs and catches, as my father applies gentle pressure now and then to the gas pedal, and I'm envisioning the bundles of newspaper waiting for me in the next neighborhood over. I rev myself up for the day, walking down Pacific Street to Kingston, with a wary eye on the intersection, expecting any moment my bus - the B43 - to pass swiftly by, at which point I will break into a run, because I know it'll most likely be stopped at the next intersection with Atlantic Avenue, a long light, and I can sprint up ahead to the next stop, where I'll have enough time to catch my breath before it swerves to the curb to pick me up. "Good morning." "Good morning." My MetroCard slides neatly into the slot, which shoves it back out with approval, I slip it back into my right pocket - walletless - and walk slowly down the aisle to pick out an empty seat, if there is one. There is one. I lodge myself comfortably, arrange my bag, pull out a book and start reading. A half hour later, at Graham Avenue and Metropolitan, I bound lightly out the rear door and take in the brisk air, my second leaving of "home", for the bus is a sort of extension of home, as the subway never can be. I will not go underground before coffee. At Variety Cafe I greet whatever barista happens to be working. They all know my name, and I theirs, and here is my third home of the day, and me barely gone from the first. I take my coffee over to the condiments counter, jostle for space there or wait for some to free up, add soy milk and a second or two of the sugar jar tipped upside down over it - a glance around the cafe - carefully apply a lid, then carry coffee and bag out onto the bench, where I tease a cigarette from the package, squeeze out some of the tobacco onto the ground, take a sip of coffee - never smoke before that first sip - and settle myself comfortably. My mind wanders in ever widening concentric circles, or ambles down some tree-lined avenue of memory. Cigarette done, I crush it beneath my sneaker, hoist myself up off the bench and head for the subway. Down in the stale air of the station, with huge walls of warm municipal winds pushing me first this way, then that, I wait for my train to arrive. Perhaps I open my book again, if there's a place to sit. When the train pulls into the station, I align myself perfectly against the side of a door and wait for exiting passengers to clear out, then swivel round into the train car and, if I'm lucky, find a seat. There is a certain set of muscles one uses in the subway, that work diligently, involuntarily to keep you balanced. Along your ribs, the backs of your legs, and your neck. We might see them on a chart. I rock and careen through the tunnels, some automatic, pre-conscious part of my mind keeping note of the station stops, until I arrive at 14th Street, Union Square. There I rise energetically, push up against the door, and spill out into the station in search of the nearest staircase. At any staircase I know my way automatically to the uptown 4, 5 or 6 trains. Rarely do I focus on anything in particular. During the week this station is stuffed with people. I keep my gaze abstracted, approximately straight ahead, and move about with an unwonted elegance, an instinctive choreography, barely brushing against anybody, arriving at my destination with little or no memory of how I got there. The 6 train, the local, arrives first. It's always emptier, so I always have a seat, and I'm always early, so the extra station stops don't matter. I read. I do not look up. At 96th Street I step cleanly off the train and onto the platform, where there is only one exit. I rise into the clean, orderly ruckus of Lexington Avenue, having chosen a stairway that puts me on the right side of the street, and already walking toward Park Avenue, then Madison. I often wait at the traffic light at Park Avenue, gazing in either direction and the pleasing stacks of apartments, the wide, wide avenue stretching away, clinching between its two sides of traffic going in opposite directions the Metro North railroad tracks, which emerge from underground just a few blocks further uptown, and cut a seam all the way up to the Bronx. I cross Park Avenue, chin lifted high to catch the cool through mouth and nostrils. At Madison and 96th I cross, Central Park visible at the far end of the block, just on the other side of 5th Avenue, where atop a slight rise runners, walkers, bikers, joggers intermingle along some track I cannot see, though I know it encompasses the reservoir. Right on Madison. The new bagel shop is a few doors down. I enter on an exhale, almost always. "Morning boss!" "Good morning!" Sometimes I say "boss", sometimes he says it. I order a cold cut sandwich, $5.50, and smile at the girl behind the register while I wait for it to be made. Before declining her offer of a plastic bag I heft the paper-wrapped sandwich in my right hand - a good weight - today I will feed myself well. Now I return the way I came, up Madison to the intersection with 96th. Right on 96th. Still a half hour before work. I reach a bench on 5th Avenue against the stone wall that is the eastern border of Central Park. I sit down Indian-style, with my back against the slanted wall. Take out my book and another cigarette. I read and smoke like this as pedestrians go to and fro before me, buses pull up to the light, cyclists brake, a dog approaches me from the end of his leash. Now it is time for work. I walk down 5th Avenue to 93rd Street. There is the Guggenheim. A little further, but out of sight, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Left on 93rd Street. In the shadow of beautiful private homes and well-groomed trees rooted in small boxes of soil and flowers cut into the pavement. There is my bookstore. The Corner Bookstore. I fish keys out of my bag, select the right one, duck under the half-opened gate, and unlock the door...

Probably there were more, but this is all I can remember right now of What I've Read This Year:

The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The High Window, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My lovely, Raymond Chandler
The Lady In The Lake, Raymond Chandler
The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
The Winter Queen, Boris Akunin
The Light of Day, Eric Ambler
A Coffin For Dimitrios, Eric Ambler
A Meaningful Life, L. J. Davis
Our Man In Havana, Graham Greene
The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
The Interrogation, J. M. G. Le Clezio
The Stranger, Albert Camus
Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me, Javier Marias
Fever and Spear, Javier Marias
Dance and Dream, Javier Marias
Demian, Herman Hesse
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Riders in the Chariot, Patrick White
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
How I Became a Famous Novelist, Steve Hely
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
Blood River, Tim Butcher
The Forever War, Dexter Filkins
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
My Dog Tulip, J. R. Ackerley
Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
Telegrams of the Soul, Peter Altenberg

I created this list as a preface to a new endeavor, namely, "A LIST OF EVERY BOOK I READ", going no further back than the beginning of this year, but being documentation of every single book I finish reading in the future.

Fun!

I glide along the edge of myself and tumble into oblivion.

I begin with sentiment: something is right, this other thing is wrong. I feel it - my heart swells with it. But the heart must relinquish to the mind, if anything’s to get written, at least some compromise must be reached, and this is the thinnest line there is, never widening, always meandering. Words begin to suggest themselves. They go from general to specific. This requires confidence: if I begin with a general idea (“Everything is surface; nothing sounds the depths.”), a hierarchy will form, a sort of food for thought pyramid. The idea sits at the bottom. Come on, kids, 10 to 11 helpings a day of this robust stuff, these ideas. At the top are the refined sugars, the sweeteners, the words themselves. What you earn when you’ve fed sufficiently on the rest. Eat sparingly, but make it count. At the end of the day, have you gotten all your allowances? Have you rounded out? Or have you gorged on sweets, skimmed all surfaces, mistaken the make-up for the face, the paint for the wall, etc.?

I glide along the surface of myself till fingertips touch the edge of my existence and I cartwheel into the void, umbilical cords popping and hissing atmosphere into the vacuum. I wheel among the stars. A whiff of the infinite reaches me, beckons me. I yearn and yearn and yearn toward it. My will becomes universal, extends beyond the boundary of everything, so that I begin to feel drawn instead of driven by my own forces. This is religion. This is love. And the words too tumble out from underneath this blinking cursor, trailing a bridge behind them while they press further and further out into the nothingness. So I will always know the way back, but I will never know the way forward. I lay a plank before me and step on it. I lay another plank and step on that. I never see further than this, but can kneel down and penetrate the grain of the wood with a thousand minute observations.

Maybe this is the way, the anti-way. The path that extends in all directions. That makes the idea of "path" plain and stupid, like ordering bread and water at a five-star restaurant. No amount of irony and artifice can replace passion. I starve at the buffet but grow fat on appetizers. Feed not: only feast.

 

A common feeling, this, which I'm beginning to suspect is not a visitation by dark forces, but an abandonment by lighter ones, revealing the darkness inherent in me. Darkness, I know, is a loaded word - so loaded, it means nothing any more, or only hints at broad swaths of human emotion. Mine is specific. And it does connote a hindrance of vision. Everything I'm accustomed to laying eyes on now shows a different aspect, an emptiness and indifference that mirrors my own. I look at a brick wall and see my face reflected in it: blank, expressionless. And the thousand faces lying folded within me are no different. I shuffle through an unvaried inventory of emotions. Cars moving around me, people, words through the air, all is acid and pollution. I am so easily agitated - everything bothers me. I feel like a child who's been at the fairground too long, with the bombastic energy swirling around him seeming to mount and mount, the color and rowdiness amplifying, expanding, crumbling his feeble defenses. He grows tired, he wants to cry at everything, he is all of a single nerve that throbs in the absence of silence. Then, he cries just to hear himself cry, he cries without emotion, he screams and pounds his fists but his eyes remain blank, staring, unseeing.

Is it possible for him to die? No - not while he still lives. Is it possible for him to live? Not if he can't figure out the secret to dying.

All that damage without destruction is unbearable, must be borne.

Something within him has been usurped by the relentless disturbance around him, has been assimilated into the noise. His throat is dry, his lungs aflame, his eyes red-rimmed and wet. He wants to sleep. He can't. He wants to articulate his disgust. He can't.

That is the illusion given by impotent rage, that if only the world would shut up for a moment, I might give it what it has coming. The bacchanalian dissolution of American society has siphoned our spirits while we lay sleeping. There will be no comeuppance. No loosing of the voice that has atrophied in silence. Just a moth, fluttering up from our depleted mouths, stiff-winged, trailing a damp hank of cobweb, and blown to ash by the first vibration that comes racing through the air from the speaker of a television set.

At home, buried up in the air in my room in a fourth-story apartment in Brooklyn, the walls, floor and ceiling are screwed very tightly into place, insupportably tense, coiled, ready to spring. The feeling is altogether sinister, and it's mainly by virtue of Brooklyn's greater energy, which suffuses its gathered interior spaces and is only feebly combated by design and our individual trappings of comfort.

Yesterday I visited a friend out in the suburbs. She was still asleep in the bedroom, I laid out in the living room on the couch, otherwise the large, bright, clean house was empty. No sound but the hum of the air conditioner and its faint tinsel rattle. In my state of mind - relaxed, sterile, bemusedly fatalistic - I couldn't help but equate the sound to that of a life support machine, so constant and innocuous that you're only really aware of it when it's shut off. That's when it means something.

The walls there were set at the same angles, but lacked the sinister aspect, as if they'd been waiting to pounce so long they'd fallen asleep, certain that whatever prey lurked within wasn't going anywhere.

I went into the back yard, stripped down to a pair of swim trunks, and lazily pushed a long-armed vacuum around the bottom of the swimming pool. A cigarette burned steadily between my lips. The sun laid layer after layer of heat on my skin, till I wore it like a suit. I comprised a classic photograph or scene. The grass, the lawn furniture, the roof slanting down at me where I stood poolside, mimicking its angle with the arm of the vacuum, both angles ramps up to some bland, air-conditioned heaven.

Inside, though I couldn't hear it, I knew my laundry was tumbling insignificantly in the dryer.

I knew that it's possible for everything you do or own to fit into some appliance. That there will always be electrical outlets to spare. That metal and plastic can come together in such pleasing shapes, to perform such humble and humbling functions, to open and shut with soothing muted hisses and clicks. So the devil spoke to us in luxurious, velvet tones, of pleasures everlasting, the abolition of effort, the smallest price of the greatest conveniences.

I fear the devil will lose interest in us. Our souls have grown small and worthless, have depreciated infinitely in value since the rate was first established. What will happen then, when God has long since given up, and nobody is left to browse our ragged wares? We may find some use for them. We may turn them over in our hands and realize we're not quite ready to part with them, that they may be mended, joined, repurposed.

And feel relief, that we almost gave them away for so little.

I never lack for some shortcoming to excavate from the ruins of my personality. No, in this one aspect I never fall short! In fact they present themselves to me before any attempt is made to find them, like a child who does not quite understand the game of hide-and-seek, he stands directly behind the seeker, grinning wider and wider as the countdown reaches zero.

I sit down with a clean sheet of paper, a freshly uncapped pen, a cup of coffee, and as I stare out the window onto the rude and active street my hand begins writing without me. I sit down to try and write and am interrupted by my own rush of writing! I've never experienced any kind of "block", only revulsion at my habitual topics, and a deep weariness at the seemingly endless supply of soul-crises I find bobbing on the surface of the inner ocean. I've shown up in full gear and tackle for a much more difficult hunt. Equipped to chase down my own white whale, I'm a hundred yards out from the shore when my boat begins to sink under the weight of lesser prey, and I turn back.

Writing this, I feel once again truncated by near-sightedness, cut off from whatever greater game stalks further out on the soul's sunless Savannah.

ON ALTERNATE DIMENSIONS

I find the idea of alternate dimensions extremely appealing!

ON LACK

I rose very early this morning, with the sun. Before even the inanimate had risen into itself; or before that distinctly human capacity to imbue objects with a life of associations had woken in me. Everything in my room seemed free-floating, disassociated, unconcerned with me. The indifference of my surroundings was overwhelming.

I dressed myself haphazardly, as though dressing a doll one's grown tired of playing with. Sitting on the edge of my bed, bending over to tie my sneakers, I stared straight ahead like a wary little animal.

I left my room, walked down the dark windowless hallway, out the front door. I locked the front door, my entire body clenched against the noise, especially my jaw.

Down on the sidewalk the world was still very much asleep. A few cars were in motion, pulling up to stop signs or traffic lights with whispering motors, their drivers mean little silhouettes behind grimy windows. They appeared to have been driving all night, many nights, lost, long since forgotten their destinations or even the possibility of a destination.

The sky only hinted at day, had really just been swept clean of gloom for the imminent sun. I pulled a new pack of cigarettes from my pocket, walked to the trash can at the corner, and slowly, absently unwrapped the cellophane.

What the world lacks is some sort of new, uncreated matter, an undiscovered original raw material. I saw this now, looking across the street at the dusty red brick tenements, holding the cellophane in loose fingers, the air paused and sluggish, the sky webbed over with a film of sleep, the rest of the universe beyond with its endless unreconciled night.

Creation handed us a pistol loaded with blanks, walked to the other end of the room, and told us it's the real killer, knowing the only revenge we can exact is upon ourselves.

In another moment it went another way. I needn't be so infinitesimal, in fact I could be greater than the size of everything, since I possessed the power to change my seeing, if not necessarily what I saw. Infinite possibility unfurled and I populated heaven with the stars of my choosing.

I crumpled the cellophane and dropped it on top of the other trash, where it began slowly to uncrumple. It was escaping into the past, such a simple memory of original form in its one cell or idea of itself.

My looks are suggestive rather than distinct. I am constantly mistaken for other people, as if my features comprise a template upon which anyone may superimpose the memory of another. Those I have met, who have been introduced to me, often do not recognize me out of context, and almost always forget my name just as soon as it's spoken. I am indistinct, stripped of expressive identity, vague of face and body. The human element is recognized and acknowledged, but not much more. My function or behavior is remembered - the guy who tells jokes, who's written a book, who dated what's-her-name - but my essence, to which one's name is intimately attached, remains elusive. It seems that all my arduous effort at self-examination has rid me of a self, or one simplified, condensed, distilled enough to present to the world as "persona". I've pulled and tweaked at the fabric too much; its pattern has become misshapen and unrecognizable. However, I see no virtue in being encapsulated, ready for recall - just expedience. If at each social gathering I must work to re-establish my presence among acquaintances, it's only because my every social instance of self is a dynamic creation, one produced out of necessity and which cleanly disappears once I am alone again. Of course there is a vague consistency to them, it would take extreme artifice to wholly recreate yourself out of new material for each public appearance. Instead I have learned to shape an approximation of what has proven least troublesome to strangers (invisibility) and most pleasant to friends (frictionlessness). But though this outer life is effortlessly discarded, the inner one must be reconciled. Always. Its acute sense of betrayal and merciless memory for hypocrisy won't allow it to stay silent for long. I arrive home and answer to it.

A curious side effect of this condition. To appear nebulous to others is to allow them unhindered projection upon you. Are you what they want, or aren't you? So they approach cautiously but wind up right in the middle of you, as in a cloud, without catching up against anything concrete to affirm or deny their ideals. Confusion. They supply you with the desired qualities, the way a painter supplies a canvas with paint. But there's something curious about this canvas. The paint doesn't quite hold; it runs and mixes; forms warp and blend. The painter, frustrated, tosses the canvas out into the hallway, vowing never to purchase such cheap materials again.

So there are my own discarded versions of myself and those discarded by others, the incomplete and unsatisfying projects undertaken by past loves. Beneath all this and through it, whatever essence I possess develops at its own pace. It feels the tremors and shocks of all this surface activity but goes about its business mostly undisturbed, confident in its priority and longevity, from which only death will ever relieve it.

***

Ma'am, this book will not write itself!

Better my hand, if it's to be about me. I am an authority.

Funny I should begin now, at such a low point, when everything around me suggests an end to things, the death of progress, the life of a new and industrious decay.

The sun is out, yes, the globe is getting baked clean, if you listen closely the fissures spreading rapidly along its surface can be heard, caked up humanity cracking open in preparation for its infinite halving, which will leave the earth shrouded in yellow dust.

"I am so hung-over!" A female voice, presumptuously declarative. When nobody wishes to listen it is simple enough to make them hear. The statement leaves a hollow in the air above my head. Without turning around to discover the voice's origin I imagine her disappearing in an instantaneous whirlpool of matter, from which one flake of ash will fall to the floor and send up an almost invisible hairline of smoke.

Yes, I'm in a pretty bad mood.

Yesterday, walking among the sun-stunned bathers at Coney Island, I began to recite "Leaves of Grass", the Whitman poem everybody seems to have read except me. I called it "Leaves of Grass" - why not - but probably that hallowed epic does not contain such lines as I gave it:

"Fuck your noisy condition!
There is more to all this than all this"

...having hit upon the ingenious poetic technique of repeating platitudes to make the reader - listener (hearer?) - think twice about them and, discovering no outstanding quality, accept them with the humility of a child who senses rather than understands the wisdom of a greater authority.

"It is not enough simply to live
the simple life is death and living
it is not life
Ye tanned and oblong whales!
See how your blubber sizzles!"

***

STANDING IN FRONT OF A MIRROR IN A PITCH BLACK ROOM

In the presence of others, especially just one other, a "close" friend - one whose personality I sufficiently mirror or flatter - I lose myself completely. It's as if I am ripped out of myself, hurled from my position very low among the stones and soil and wriggling microbes, to a point thousands of feet above in the whistling atmosphere, where in a serene moment of non-contemplation I am transformed into a mostly smooth, mostly reflective surface. I take on, to a slightly lesser degree, and accompanied by awkward imperfections like scratches or bubbles in the glass, my friend's traits, his gestures, stock phrases, vocal pitch, energy fluctuations, etc. etc. Invariably his is a stronger personality than mine - less fractured, subdivided, circumstantial and conditional. Otherwise I would not be drawn to him.

I can never be more to a friend than a strange version of himself; not quite pleasant enough to seek out, never unpleasant enough to avoid. And versatile, like an army knife: my ambiguous presence can be fitted to any mood or purpose. I am often called on to participate in clever conversations because mine is a basically corroborative attitude. Propagation, agreement, elaboration are my primary impulses. Instead of, say, assertion of individuality (how pointless except in politics!), contrariness, upstaging, originality. Incidentally I manage to achieve originality through humor, with off-kilter elaborations on what's said or by nudging words and phrases into humorous aspects, these being always so close and obvious to me. In most social situations they are all I'm really listening for.

I become a mirror, and a mirror is nothing without anything to reflect. It's hardly even the idea of itself - a mere philosophical abstraction. It has no soul, just a cheap imitation of depth to which access is denied.

The orange and its impossible aroma are an asterisk on creation. The universe might be balled up and bounced on the end of a tennis racket. Everybody’s asleep and dreaming of getting home in time to get enough sleep. The world is soaked with rain and impotent in all attempts to ignite itself.

Since I cannot disprove my existence, I live by the grace of a flawed equation. If any real mathematician were to examine it, I'd be crossed out like the impossible outcome that I am, dependent upon some early division by zero that somehow escaped notice. It's my responsibility, then, not to insert myself into the equations of others, not to become somebody else's variable, because any calculation then performed on us will only increase the magnitude of error, the confusion of symbols, and the audacity of the solution.

It was absolutely impossible to stay inside any longer. The room was hateful. He in his room was hateful to himself. Lifting his bony arms into his field of vision he looked at them with abstraction and disgust. He’d begun to take on a loud incongruous color, a sick radiation of flesh that burnt the nerves of the complete replica of himself he kept in his mind. His imaginary self that he brought up to date with reality every now and then when he thought to do it. Often the thought would strike that it had been some time since the last update and he’d examine the curious, lapsed self and it would be laughably obsolete, set in some absurd pose or mood from the past when he’d left off shaping and analyzing it. Then he’d sort of transfer his present state into that cubicle of preservation and experimentation in his mind and find some quiet spot to sit behind a cigarette and turn his thoughts from reality (so easy) to commune with it. There were no formalities and usually just the ritual of lighting the cigarette and taking in the smoke and rolling his eyes halfway back into his head, as if to stare directly into his own mind. Sometimes he spoke aloud to it, this minutely animated snapshot, but mostly he just let it sit there and give off ideas of itself. Now he held his arms up and squirmed at their absolute humanness that, when you feel anything but human, will always disturb or disrupt. So their color which came at him like a noise entered into his mind where the pseudo-self sat waiting to be made relevant again. And from within there transformed the idea of “a sick radiation of flesh” into sub-reality, where its nerves actually “burnt” - came the image of the silently growling filament of a switched-on lightbulb - and he felt on his real skin, his immediate skin, the ghost or sympathetic reflection of this imagined pain and instantly knew that it was absolutely impossible to stay inside any longer. This all happened in a few seconds. The realization to any observer would have appeared to take the normal course and be accompanied by the usual expressions and gestures. You would have seen him lying flat on his back in bed with his arms held either rigidly or relaxedly at his side. Then you would have seen these arms initiate a seemingly spontaneous journey upward in imperfect parallel. He used no muscles below his elbows so his forearms, wrists and hands dangled off the differing limits of extension at both elbow joints. Then, suddenly, but still slowly, a short heave set the rest of his body in motion up and out of the bed, rocking for one precarious moment on the fulcrum of his tailbone as he summoned the nergy to perform the clench of his stomach and back muscles that would tip his balance in favor of sitting up.

He hadn’t eaten since… He couldn’t remember having eaten, but maybe he had - maybe he was still chewing. No. No food. No food in the house. His thoughts swam, swooped, dispersed. He was dizzy from the exertion of rising. His mind grew instantly and immensely fertile and a million tiny thoughts rushed toward it from dark recesses like sperm toward an egg. One would pierce and impregnate the permeable egg of his mind. Finally one did. It sighed into him as he gripped the edges of the bed and planted his feet gingerly but firmly on the warm linoleum floor. He wore only an old pair of boxer shorts and his ribs were a furrowed brow above the otherwise blank expression of his vitals.

The thought was this. The universe rushes into formation for a waking consciousness. Suppose this process toward consciousness could be paused, halted, and the universe frozen mid-assembly. In Grand Central Station there is a train only half arrived, half in the nasty halogen din of the platform with its expectant passengers, half buried in the darkness of the tunnel it couldn’t quite emerge from. Since the trains are operated by computers the doors cannot be opened until the computers recognize that the train has reached its mathematically precise destination and a circuit somewhere is safely closed. Meanwhile those waiting on the platform and those waiting on the train experience simultaneously a mirrored derailment of thought (or, as the case may be, lack of thought). When you raise your right hand to a mirror your reflection raises its left. So it is mentally with these hundreds of souls now awkwardly placed before each other. I was just about to get off, exit this cool stale air-conditioned environment into the humid cacophony of the station. I was just about to exit the humid cacophony of the station into the cool stale air-conditioned environment of the train car.

By the time this idea gained its loose, imperfect expression in smells, words and images, he was on his feet. The room retreated before his swaying posture, submitted to him its regular innocuous aspect, which it had dared to abandon while he lay prone. It shrank away from him, rushed back into itself l ike a servant caught masquerading in his master’s clothes.

He put on a thin white t-shirt beneath which his shoulder blades jutted and danced. The train in his mind coughed a shower of sparks from its bowels and lurched back into slow easy motion and completed its arrival to the collective relief of those waiting to arrive and those waiting to depart. In this crowd he noticed his replica self standing there looking up and away.

Had the train stayed locked in place half in half out, had the universe remained frozen half assembled, this irritating notion would have been distilled into this replica and he’d later need to address it out of context, the context perhaps irretrievably lost to memory.

Over his boxer shorts he pulled up a pair of jeans two sizes too large which he cinched into place with an old leather belt that had belonged to his father when he was a kid. He plunged into his pockets two sleepily groping hands that felt for cigarettes, keys, money, and the face of an old digital watch from which the band had long ago disintegrated. Everything was there. Everything was always there. Within a very small sphere that sometimes did not extend beyond his physical self and the clothes he wore, he was able to work chaos down to a minimum.

The road crossing into Arizona from California was blank and endless three hours before dawn. My little car gurgled along at 80 mph, its headlights taking in a meager and uniform rod of asphalt that stretched off into the bowels of the night. The dull fuzzy shoulders of mountains barely visible on either side, as if unsure whether to be mountains at all. To me it seemed like a good idea and I offered silent encouragement. At this point I was envious of anything inanimate and implacable.

Consciousness came loose in me, unhinged from linear time. Since the dash clock shorted two nights ago, driving in the dark gave me no proof of distance covered, time incremented. The effect was drug-like, as my body coursed with caffeine, singed at the edges and curled in on itself from sleep deprivation I couldn't be sure if the past few minutes had lasted an hour or had passed between breaths. I'd be able to remind myself that this was what was happening to me and so regain control or sanity for a moment, but the repeated revelation eventually grew stale, just sat in the lap of my mind like a crusty towel gone useless.

I pulled over often to urinate. The highway was lined with gravel and scrub which became shockingly real at these moments, when I crunched a few feet out into it and relieved myself. I felt small, that only a sliver of the world was at my back while the great portion of it lay before me. I pushed my vision out and out and my eyeballs were little flexing muscles pulsing with the desperate need to see, to defy the physics of light. And yet I did see more, or projected. Mountains and cactii suggested themselves sleepily, warily through the gloom. Also the dark, while it made objects seem dull or dead, itself felt like a presence very much awake and breathing and exquisitely poised atop the planet.

Stopped, I'd be struck by the pervasive growling energy of stillness, as if not moving was an act of aggression, even a deadly one. Sitting muted in my little car shuttling fast across the indifferent geography I lost myself, all sense of self. Stopped and standing on the edge of the road, the earth and air filled themselves with immediacy and probing inquisitiveness and I stood there silently, passively allowing them to sniff and encircle me. I was flung far and hard into my unmoving rigidity and made to feel as if a feat of strength and stoicism was needed to keep my skeleton beneath my skin.

I lit a cigarette and sat smoking on the hot vibrating hood of the car.

It's true what Olive said, that I don't believe in the reality of what I do or even in my own presence in the world. We'd been far drunk and I am, when drunk, very generous with the accidental poignancy in the observations of others. Especially concerning myself, me with a desperate desire for others to weigh in. By reality she must have meant consequences, since she'd been the most recent victim of my romantic arbitrariness, but I took it to mean something more far-reaching, more abstract, that I never knew I was real or thought of myself as real until I heard the cry of pain from somebody near. Pain, or ecstasy.

"That," I said, leaning with heat and lead in my skull, "is a brilliant observation. I think you're absolutely right."

"OK, so now what? Fix it."

She took a step away from me. In the other room some Neanderthal bumped the needle off Neil Young and a cold dizzying silence, like blankets thrown from naked skin, came down on us.

"I can't fix it. How do I fix it."

"Wake up."

Far behind me I felt but did not see or hear a semi truck approaching. My car beneath my thighs sort of hiccuped, flipped gears for a second and whined plaintively before dropping back down to its humble splutter.

Summertime and all I get are themes. The details scurry and evade and melt away from vision. So I wrestle a theme to the ground, put a knee to its neck and make it talk. The heart - the heart - must be made, finally, to give something up, to yield some results. Too long has it been laying fallow in its filthy cage, squawking crazily at shadows cast by no discernible forms. At variations in light made by the movement of objects and people outside its blindfold. Poor bird! Pulling at its own feathers, fouling its roost, it has no idea what degradations I spill down into its pipes where they clog and corrode the works. Summertime and an opportunity to lay it all bare in the sunlight, the whole rusted hunk set out on the pavement to bake off its rot and fumes. I’d like to take a scrub brush to it, to scrape away the grime. I’d like to find a dirty rag and polish it, to make it give back some light.

Maximum generosity of spirit, everything green light go. Understood and accepted the instant it arrives. Everything prodigal! Welcome home! Come in, come in, you have traveled far, traveled forever to get from wherever to me. Spun an infinite spiral all the way down to my magnificent me. Coffee? Tea? You look hungry. I’ll take in the facts like nomads, like tinkers and gypsies, let them bed down in my worldview and sign the guestbook. Of course the door is always open, those prodigious hinges know nothing of rust or jam, they swing loose and free and sigh in their sockets with greasy brass smiles. Hallo stranger! Here is room and board, a pillow to rest your head. The world is rotten wood and right angles but here you find a curve and substance that gives gently beneath your weight. The softest indentation registers. No splinters or cracks, just agreement between the animate and inanimate and that beautiful pliant compromise of relieved and reciprocated tension. Welcome home! I catapult into the everything/nothing summer air! Through which sound and dream travel at the speed of light and words come out of your mouth in a hot tumbling rush. Also all distance-wrought envy dissolves; you might as well be where you are because over there is just another here waiting to happen - the dormant potentiality of all place that isn’t here and all time that isn’t now. Well, let it be! Let it exist without you, at least then it stands some chance. You and your traveling burden of you, you and your moving castle of biography! A thousand interdependent mechanisms hissing and clunking and grinding round the earth.

You train the earth to know your step, to relent under your boot.