10:04: A Novel

ONE

The city had converted an elevated length of abandoned railway spur into an aerial greenway and the agent and I were walking south along it in the unseasonable warmth after an outrageously expensive celebratory meal in Chelsea that included baby octopuses the chef had literally massaged to death. We had ingested the impossibly tender things entire, the first intact head I had ever consumed, let alone of an animal that decorates its lair, has been observed at complicated play. We walked south among the dimly gleaming disused rails and carefully placed stands of sumac and smoke bush until we reached that part of the High Line where a cut has been made into the deck and wooden steps descend several layers below the structure; the lowest level is fitted with upright windows overlooking Tenth Avenue to form a kind of amphitheater where you can sit and watch the traffic. We sat and watched the traffic and I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me: the ability to perceive polarized light; a conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups; a terror localized in my extremities, bypassing the brain completely. I was saying these things out loud to the agent, who was inhaling and exhaling smoke, and we were laughing.

A few months before, the agent had e-mailed me that she believed I could get a “strong six-figure” advance based on a story of mine that had appeared in The New Yorker; all I had to do was promise to turn it into a novel. I managed to draft an earnest if indefinite proposal and soon there was a competitive auction among the major New York houses and we were eating cephalopods in what would become the opening scene. “How exactly will you expand the story?” she’d asked, far look in her eyes because she was calculating tip.

“I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously,” I should have said, “a minor tremor in my hand; I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.”

* * *

A giant octopus was painted on the wall of the room where I’d been sent the previous September for evaluation — an octopus and starfish and various gill-bearing aquatic craniate animals — for this was the pediatric wing and the sea scene was intended to calm and distract the children from needles or the small hammers testing reflex amplitude. I was there at the age of thirty-three because a doctor had discovered incidentally an entirely asymptomatic and potentially aneurysmal dilation of my aortic root that required close monitoring and probable surgical intervention and the most common explanation of such a condition at such an age is Marfan, a genetic disorder of the connective tissue that typically produces the long-limbed and flexible. When I met with a cardiologist and he suggested the evaluation I’d noted my excess proportion of body fat and conventional arm span and only slightly above average height, but he counter-noted my long, thin toes and mild double-jointedness and contended that I might well fall on the diagnostic spectrum. Most Marfanoids are diagnosed in early childhood, thus the pediatric wing.

If I had Marfan, the cardiologist had explained, the threshold of surgical intervention was lower (when the diameter of the aortic root reached 4.5 centimeters), was basically nigh (I was at 4.2 centimeters according to an MRI), because the likelihood of what they call “dissection,” a most often fatal tearing of the aorta, is higher among Marfanoids; if I did not have an underlying genetic condition, if my aorta was deemed idiopathic, I would still probably require eventual surgery, but with a more distant threshold (5 centimeters), and the possibility of much slower progression. In either case, I was now burdened with the awareness that there was a statistically significant chance the largest artery in my body would rupture at any moment — an event I visualized, however incorrectly, as a whipping hose spraying blood into my blood; before collapse a far look comes into my eyes as though, etc.

There I was at Mount Sinai Hospital underwater in a red plastic chair designed for a kindergartner, a chair that had the immediate effect of making me feel ungainly, gangly in my paper gown, and thus confirming the disorder before the team of evaluators arrived. Alex, who had accompanied me for what she called moral support but was in fact practical support, as I had proved unable to leave a doctor’s office with even the most basic recollection of whatever information had been imparted to me there, sat across from me in the lone adult chair, no doubt placed there for a parent, notebook open in her lap.

I’d been told in advance that the evaluation would be conducted by a trio of doctors that would then consult and offer its opinion, which I thought of as a verdict, but there were two things about the doctors now entering with bright smiles that I was not prepared for: they were beautiful and they were younger than I. It was fortunate Alex was present because she would not have otherwise believed me that the doctors — all of whom appeared to be originally from subcontinental Asia — were themselves ideally proportioned in their white coats, with flawlessly symmetrical, high-boned faces that, no doubt through some deft application of shadow and gloss, glowed with almost parodic health even in hospital light, a dusky gold. I looked at Alex, who raised her eyebrows back at me.

They asked me to stand and proceeded to calculate the length of my arms and the curvature of my chest and spine and the arch of my feet, to perform so many measurements according to a nosological program mysterious to me that I felt as if my limbs had multiplied. That they were younger than I constituted an unfortunate milestone beyond which medical science could no longer stand in benevolent paternal relation to my body because such doctors would now see in my pathologized corpus their own future decline and not their past immaturity. And yet in this room outfitted for children I was simultaneously infantilized by three improbably attractive women in their mid- to late twenties while from the more than literal distance of her chair Alex looked on sympathetically.

It can taste what it touches, but has poor proprioception, the brain unable to determine the position of its body in the current, particularly my arms, and the privileging of flexibility over proprioceptive inputs means it lacks stereognosis, the capacity to form a mental image of the overall shape of what I touch: it can detect local texture variations, but cannot integrate that information into a larger picture, cannot read the realistic fiction the world appears to be. What I mean is that my parts were coming to possess a terrible neurological autonomy not only spatial but temporal, my future collapsing in upon me as each contraction expanded, however infinitesimally, the overly flexible tubing of my heart. Including myself, I was older and younger than everyone in the room.

* * *

Her support was moral and practical but also self-interested in that Alex had recently proposed impregnating herself with my sperm, not, she was at immediate pains to make clear, in copula, but rather through intrauterine insemination because, as she put it, “fucking you would be bizarre.” The subject was broached at the Metropolitan Museum, which we often visited weekday afternoons, since Alex was unemployed, and I, a writer.

We had met each other in my freshman and her senior year of college in a dull class about great novels and felt an instant and mutual sympathy, but had not become best friends until we found ourselves almost neighbors in Brooklyn when I moved there a few years after graduation and we began our walks — walks through Prospect Park as light died in the lindens; walks from our neighborhood of Boerum Hill to Sunset Park, where we would watch the soft-winged kites at magic hour; nocturnal walks along the promenade with the looming intensities of Manhattan glittering across dark water. Six years of these walks on a warming planet, although walking wasn’t all we did, had rendered Alex’s presence inseparable from my sense of moving through the city, so that I intuited her beside me when she wasn’t; when I crossed a bridge in silence, I often felt it was silence shared between us, even if she was visiting her parents upstate or spending time with a boyfriend, whom I could be counted on to hate.

Maybe she broached the subject at the museum and not over coffee or the like because in the galleries as on our walks our gazes were parallel, directed in front of us at canvas and not at each other, a condition of our most intimate exchanges; we would work out our views as we coconstructed the literal view before us. We did not avoid each other’s eyes and I admired the overcast-sky quality of hers, dark epithelium and clear stroma, but we tended to fall quiet when they met. Which meant we’d eat a lunch in silence or idle talk, only for me to learn on the subsequent walk home that her mother had been diagnosed in a late stage. You might have seen us walking on Atlantic, tears streaming down her face, my arm around her shoulders, but our gazes straight ahead; or perhaps you’ve seen me during one of my own increasingly frequent lacrimal events being comforted in kind while we moved across the Brooklyn Bridge, less a couple than conjoined.

That day we were standing before Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc—Alex looks a little like this version of her — and she said, apropos of nothing: “I’m thirty-six and single.” (Thank god she had broken up with her latest, a divorced labor lawyer in his late forties who had done some work for the health clinic she’d codirected before it folded. After two glasses of wine, he invariably began regaling everyone within earshot with stories about his time undertaking suspiciously vague humanitarian labor in Guatemala; after three glasses of wine, the lawyer started in on his ex-wife’s sexual repression and general frigidity; after four or five, he began to interweave these incommensurate discourses, so that genocide and his feelings of sexual rejection achieved implied equivalence within his slurred speech. Whenever I was around, I made certain his glass was full, hastening the relationship’s demise.) “Not a day has gone by in the last six years when I haven’t wanted a kid. I’m that cliché. I want my mom to meet my child. I have seventy-five weeks of unemployment benefits and insurance plus modest savings, and while I know that means I should be more afraid to reproduce than ever, what it actually makes me feel is that there will never be a good time, that I can’t wait for professional and biological rhythms to coincide. We’re best friends. You can’t live without me. What if you donate the sperm? We could work out your level of involvement. I know it’s crazy and I want you to say yes.”

Three translucent angels hover in the top left of the painting. They have just summoned Joan, who has been working at a loom in her parents’ garden, to rescue France. One angel holds her head in her hands. Joan appears to stagger toward the viewer, reaching her left arm out, maybe for support, in the swoon of being called. Instead of grasping branches or leaves, her hand, which is carefully positioned on the sight line of one of the other angels, seems to dissolve. The museum placard says that Bastien-Lepage was attacked for his failure to reconcile the ethereality of the angels with the realism of the future saint’s body, but that “failure” is what makes it one of my favorite paintings. It’s as if the tension between the metaphysical and physical worlds, between two orders of temporality, produces a glitch in the pictorial matrix; the background swallows her fingers. Standing there that afternoon with Alex, I was reminded of the photograph Marty carries in Back to the Future, crucial movie of my youth: as Marty’s time-traveling disrupts the prehistory of his family, he and his siblings begin to fade from the snapshot. Only here it’s a presence, not an absence, that eats away at her hand: she’s being pulled into the future.

The presence of the future

The absence of the future

* * *

We were coconstructing a shoe-box diorama to accompany the book Roberto and I planned to self-publish about the scientific confusion regarding the brontosaurus: in the nineteenth century a paleontologist put the skull of a camarasaurus on an apatosaurus skeleton and believed he’d discovered a new species, so that one of the two iconic dinosaurs of my youth turns out not to have existed, a revision that, along with the demotion of Pluto from planet to plutoid, retrospectively struck hard at my childhood worldview, my remembered sense of both galactic space and geological time. Roberto was an eight-year-old in my friend Aaron’s third-grade class at a dual-language school in Sunset Park. I had asked Aaron if there was some way I could be of use to one of his charges while also smuggling in occasional Spanish practice. Roberto was intelligent and sociable, but even more susceptible to distraction than the average child, and Aaron thought our working on a series of projects after school might trick him into, or at least model for him, modes of concentration. I had no official permission to be in the school, although Aaron had asked Roberto’s mom — emphasizing that I was a published author — if she was comfortable with the prospect, and she was.

During our first session, Roberto had a nut-related allergic reaction to the granola bars I’d brought but failed to clear with Aaron and, as the boy crimsoned and wheezed, smiling all the while, I was seized with animal terror; I imagined having to open his windpipe with a pencil. Luckily, Aaron returned from his meeting in an adjacent classroom and calmed me down, explaining Roberto’s allergy was minor and the reaction would soon pass, but that I should be careful in the future; he didn’t know I was bringing a snack. The third or fourth week of tutoring, when Aaron was again out of the room, Roberto, without warning, mutinied, informing me he was going to find his friends and, since I wasn’t his teacher, I couldn’t stop him. He bolted down the hall and I walked quickly after him, cheeks burning with an embarrassment I feared any adult witnesses would confuse for a species of lechery. I eventually located him in the corner of the gym that was also the cafeteria, in a small circle of his classmates that had formed around a truly gargantuan water bug carcass, and I lured Roberto back to the classroom only by promising I’d let him play with my iPhone.

By now, the third month of tutoring, we were close friends: for snack I brought fresh fruit he never ate and Aaron had had Roberto’s mom threaten the child about disobeying me. In the initial aftermath of my diagnosis, when every few minutes I believed I was dissecting, the time I spent trying to coax Roberto into focusing on the mythology of the kraken or recently discovered prehistoric shark remains was the only time in which I was myself distracted from the potentially fatal swelling at my sinus of Valsalva.

Thus only a few days after the Marfan evaluation I was again in a child-sized chair, cutting out with those awkward elementary school scissors various dinosaurs we’d printed off the Internet onto construction paper to serve as prey or companion for the apatosaurus in the diorama, no doubt anachronistically, as we hadn’t the patience to determine which dinosaurs corresponded to what geological period, when Roberto returned to a subject that had entered his dreams since he’d watched a show on the Discovery Channel about the advent of a second ice age.

“When all the skyscrapers freeze they’re going to fall down like September eleventh,” he said in his typically cheerful tone, but more quietly, “and crush everyone.” Roberto tended to modulate not tone but volume to indicate gravity and emotion.

“Maybe if it started getting really cold the scientists would figure out a new heating system for the buildings,” I said.

“But global warming,” he said, smiling and showing the gap where he was awaiting a mature incisor, but almost whispering, a sign of genuine fear.

“I don’t think there will be another ice age,” I lied, cutting out another extinct animal.

“You don’t believe in global warming?” he asked.

I paused. “I don’t think buildings are going to fall on anybody,” I said. “Did you have another dream?”

“In my bad dream what happens is Joseph Kony is coming for me, and—”

“Joseph Kony?”

“The bad guy from Africa, from the movie.”

“What do you know about Joseph Kony?”

“I saw a YouTube about him and about how he was killing all the people in Africa.”

“Why would Joseph Kony come to Brooklyn? What’s that have to do with global warming?”

“What happens in my bad dream is the buildings all freeze up after global warming makes an ice age and the prisons crack open too and then all the killers get out through the cracks and come after us and Joseph Kony comes after us and we have to escape to San Salvador but they have helicopters and night vision and anyway we don’t have papeles so we can’t get anywhere.” He stopped cutting and put his chin on the table, then his forehead.

An increasingly frequent vertiginous sensation like a transient but thorough agnosia in which the object in my hand, this time a green pair of safety scissors, ceases to be a familiar tool and becomes an alien artifact, thereby estranging the hand itself, a condition brought on by the intuition of spatial and temporal collapse or, paradoxically, an overwhelming sense of its sudden integration, as when a Ugandan warlord appears via YouTube in an undocumented Salvadorean child’s Brooklyn-based dream of a future wrecked by dramatically changing weather patterns and an imperial juridical system that dooms him to statelessness; Roberto, like me, tended to figure the global apocalyptically.

I asked him to look at me and then promised him in two languages the only thing I could: he had nothing to fear from Joseph Kony.

After I presented Roberto to his mother, Anita, in front of the school, first asking permission to buy us both churros from a silver-haired woman wrapped in a bright red blanket, one of the many vendors who appeared whenever the school day or the after-school sessions ended, selling churros in all weather and helado in warm, beautiful children swarming them, more material vibrancy and intergenerational exchange and linguistic diversity in this brief public than I had perceived during my entire childhood in Topeka, I did not, as was my habit, begin the long walk home, but instead reentered the building, drawn there by a subtle force. The school had emptied quickly; with the exception of a custodian and a superobese security guard with whom I exchanged a ritual nod, the only remaining inhabitants were a few teachers ensconced in their rooms, applying adhesive stars or planning lessons or replacing cedar shavings in wire cages, presences I could intuit as I began wandering the halls, running a hand along the construction paper autumnalia: foliage changing its Crayola, horns of plenty, turkeys whose bodies were formed by tracing multifingered extremities.

Do you know what I mean if I say that when I reached the second floor and disposed of the wax paper, I was in Randolph Elementary School and seven, the wall hangings now letters addressed to Christa McAuliffe in exaggerated cursive, wishing her luck on the Challenger mission, which was only a couple of months in the future? I pass through Mrs. Greiner’s door and find my desk, the chair no longer small for me, Pluto among the planets in the Styrofoam mobile suspended from the ceiling. My parents are at the Menninger Clinic; my older brother is in a classroom directly above mine; Joseph Kony is just coming to prominence as the leader of a premillennialist force; my aorta may or may not be proportional; the radiator sputters in the corner because November in the past is often cold. The classroom isn’t empty, but its presences are flickering: Daniel appears at the desk beside mine, Daniel whose arms are always a patchwork of Peanuts Band-Aids and minor hematomas, who will go to the emergency room this spring for inhaling a jelly bean — on my dare — dangerously deep into his nose, who in middle school will become the first of us to smoke, but at the time is known for his habit of surreptitiously ingesting Domino sugar packets. It is sad work to build a diorama of the future with a boy you know will hang himself for whatever complex of reasons in his parents’ basement at nineteen, but that work has been assigned, Mrs. Greiner standing over us to check our progress, the synthetic coconut odor of her lotion intermingling with the smell of rubber cement. I’ll make Daniel’s effigy and he’ll make mine, but we’ll coconstruct the spacecraft, letting it dangle like a modifier from a string, perpetually disintegrating.

And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle’s takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.

Pulling us into the future

* * *

An unusually large cyclonic system with a warm core was approaching New York. The mayor took unprecedented steps: he divided the city into zones and mandated evacuations from the lower-lying ones; he announced the subway system would shut down before the storm made landfall; parts of lower Manhattan might be preemptively taken off the grid. Some speculated that the mayor, having been criticized for his slow response to a record-setting snowstorm the previous winter, was strategically overreacting, making an exaggerated show of preparedness, but his tone at the increasingly frequent press conferences seemed to express less somber authority than genuine anxiety, as if he were among those he kept imploring to stay calm.

From a million media, most of them handheld, awareness of the storm seeped into the city, entering the architecture and the stout-bodied passerines, inflecting traffic patterns and the “improved sycamores,” so called because they’re hybridized for urban living. I mean the city was becoming one organism, constituting itself in relation to a threat viewable from space, an aerial sea monster with a single centered eye around which tentacular rain bands swirled. There were myriad apps to track it, the Doppler color-coded to indicate the intensity of precipitation, the same technology they’d utilized to measure the velocity of blood flow through my arteries.

Because every conversation you overheard in line or on the street or train began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space; riding the N train to Whole Foods in Union Square, I found myself swapping surge level predictions with a Hasidic Jew and a West Indian nurse in purple scrubs. At Canal Street the three of us were joined by a teenager whose body seemed smaller than the cello case strapped to her back. She explained that the doomsday hype was designed to evacuate lower Manhattan so police could install bugs and other listening devices in every apartment. We stopped talking when a mariachi band composed of three men in their twenties, one of whom wore embroidered straight-cut muslin pants, struck up “Toda Una Vida.” It was hard to tell if they played particularly well or if we passengers were, in the glow of our increasing sociability, particularly disposed to appreciate them, or music generally. Regardless, there was an unusual quantity of pathos in the song, applause, then an unusual quantity of currency in the hat.

Emerging from the train, I found it was fully night, the air excited by foreboding and something else, something like the feel of a childhood snow day when time was emancipated from institutions, when the snow seemed like a technology for defeating time, or like defeated time itself falling from the sky, each glittering ice particle an instant gifted back from your routine. Except now the material form of excitation wasn’t ice: the air around Union Square was heavy with water in its gas phase, a tropical humidity that wasn’t native to New York, an ominous medium. In front of the Whole Foods where Alex told me to meet her — it was a preposterous idea to shop at Whole Foods, given that it was always already mobbed, but they were the sole carrier of a tea on which Alex claimed to be dependent, one of her few indulgences — a reporter bathed in tungsten light was talking to a camera about a run on flashlights, canned food, bottled water. Children were darting back and forth behind her, stopping now and then to wave.

Alex greeted me and I noted to myself a difference in her appearance, an unspecifiable radiance, but, as we began to push our way as gently as possible through the crowds, I realized the alteration was most likely in my vision, because everything remaining on the shelves also struck me as a little changed, a little charged. The relative scarcity was strange to behold: in what were typically bright aisles of superabundance, there were now large empty spaces, especially among prepackaged staples, although plenty of outrageously priced organic produce still glistened in the artificial mist. Alex had some kind of list — storm radio, hand-crank flashlight, candles, various foodstuffs; they were out of almost everything on it at this point. We didn’t care, and circulated through the vast store on the current of other shoppers, shoppers who seemed unusually polite and buoyant, despite the presence of police near the registers.

I want to say I felt stoned, did say so to Alex, who laughed and said, “Me too,” but what I meant was that the approaching storm was estranging the routine of shopping just enough to make me viscerally aware of both the miracle and insanity of the mundane economy. Finally I found something on the list, something vital: instant coffee. I held the red plastic container, one of the last three on the shelf, held it like the marvel that it was: the seeds inside the purple fruits of coffee plants had been harvested on Andean slopes and roasted and ground and soaked and then dehydrated at a factory in Medellín and vacuum-sealed and flown to JFK and then driven upstate in bulk to Pearl River for repackaging and then transported back by truck to the store where I now stood reading the label. It was as if the social relations that produced the object in my hand began to glow within it as they were threatened, stirred inside their packaging, lending it a certain aura — the majesty and murderous stupidity of that organization of time and space and fuel and labor becoming visible in the commodity itself now that planes were grounded and the highways were starting to close.

Everything will be as it is now, just a little different—nothing in me or the store had changed, except maybe my aorta, but, as the eye drew near, what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs, however briefly — in the passing commons of a train, in a container of tasteless coffee.

Alex found her tea. We got one of the last cases of bottled water — Alex wanted to carry it because I’m not supposed to lift anything heavy enough to increase intrathoracic pressure, but I wouldn’t let her — and then, since we were hungry, we went to the steaming buffets of prepared foods, on this night the least crowded part of the store, and piled high our plates with an incoherent mix of overpriced perishables: samosas, vegetarian chicken, chicken, various dishes involving quinoa, Caprese salad. We paid for these and our tea and coffee, exchanging jokes about our ill-preparedness with the teenager who checked us out, pink highlights in her black hair, then took the train back to our neighborhood, deciding by the time we got to our stop to head for Alex’s apartment.

We turned onto her street and it started to rain, but it felt as if it had already been raining on her street and we’d walked into it, parting it like a beaded curtain. I might have mistaken my intensified attention to the wind for intensifying wind. We passed the community garden and saw two girls huddled together in some furtive effort. I thought they were trying to light a cigarette, but they separated and we could see the sparklers they held, brilliant white magnesium slowly phasing into orange. A small dog yapped at the leaping sparks as they moved around the garden describing circles, laughing, maybe writing their names. I felt acutely aware that nothing slowly flashed across the sky, that no one looked down on the city from above, banking hard on the approach.

In Alex’s apartment we reheated the prepared foods on the stove while listening to the latest radio reports of the storm’s progress — it was gaining strength — and we did most of the things we were told: filled every suitable container we could find with water, unplugged various appliances, located some batteries for the radio and flashlights. I was pleased to see Alex had a substantial cache of wine, most of it probably left behind by the lawyer, and I opened the bottle of red with the label displaying the most distant year, taking pleasure in the knowledge that its value would be lost on me. I poured myself a glass in a clean jam jar and, while Alex showered one last time before we had to fill the tub, I looked at the now no longer entirely familiar photographs on her fridge: here was Alex as a child — gingham and braids — with her mom and stepdad; here I was with Alex’s little second cousin, whom she called her niece, at a party thrown last summer: I was placing a construction-paper crown on her head with mock solemnity, trick candles sparking in the cake beside her. Everything in the photograph was as it had been, only different, as if the image were newly indeterminate, flickering between temporalities. Then it wasn’t. A schedule of unemployment benefits was affixed to the fridge with an NYU School of Public Service magnet.

It was only when we sat down to eat by the light — even though we still had power — of some votive candles Alex had discovered that the danger and magnitude of the storm felt real to us, maybe because our meal had the feel of a last supper, maybe because eating together produced a sufficient sense of a household against which we could measure the threat. The radio said the storm would make landfall around 4:00 a.m.; it was about ten now and the surges were already alarmingly high. How prepared are you, the radio asked, for days without running water? The food tasted better than it was, since it might be the best we’d have for a while, and Alex finished hers, whereas we almost always switched plates late in a meal so I could eat what she’d left over. She asked me not to get drunk as I finished the bottle, at least not until we knew how bad it was going to be. You don’t want to be hung over without water, she said, gathering her brown hair into a high ponytail, and I’m not letting you drink up our supply.

Was I drinking quickly in part because I felt a little awkward about staying the night at Alex’s, something I’d done countless times before? I was just uneasy about the storm, I said to myself, as I cleared the table and did the few dishes. As was our habit, we decided to project a movie on the bedroom wall; a former employer had given her an LCD projector into which she plugged her computer. Because the Internet could go out at any minute, we selected from the few disks she owned. The Third Man looked best to me, maybe because it’s set in a ruined city, and I put it on while Alex changed into pajamas, then we got into bed together, although I remained in street clothes, storm radio and flashlight near me on the bedside table for whenever the power failed.

The shadows of the trees bending in the increasing wind outside her window moved over the projected image on the white wall, became part of the movie, as if keeping time to the zither music; how easily worlds are crossed, I said to myself, and then to Alex, who hushed me — I had a bad habit of talking over what we watched. We watched until Alex was asleep and Orson Welles was dead by a friend’s hand in Vienna and I could hear rain intensifying on the little skylight I was worried might soon be shattered by flying debris. When the movie was finished I looked through the other discs and put on Back to the Future, which I’d found at some point on Fourth Avenue in a box of discarded DVDs, but I played it without sound, so as not to wake her. I plugged earbuds into the storm radio and put one in my left ear and listened to the weather reports while Marty traveled back to 1955—the year, incidentally, nuclear power first lit up a town: Arco, Idaho, also home to the first meltdown in 1961—and then worked his way back to 1985, when I was six and the Kansas City Royals won the series, in part because a ridiculous call forced game seven, Orta clearly out at first in replays. In the movie they lack plutonium to power the time-traveling car, whereas in real life it’s seeped into the Fukushima soil; Back to the Future was ahead of its time. As I watched the silent film I began to worry about the Indian Point reactors just upriver.

Suddenly I became aware of a strange sensation: a faint echo of the radio in the unplugged ear. It took me a while to realize the downstairs neighbors were tuned to the same station. I turned to Alex and watched the colors from the movie flicker on her sleeping body, noted the gold necklace she always wore against her collarbone. I tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and then let my hand trail down her face and neck and brush across her breast and stomach in one slow motion I halfheartedly attempted to convince myself was incidental. I was returning my hand to her hair when I saw her eyes were open. It took all my will to hold her gaze as opposed to looking away and thereby conceding a transgression; there was only, it seemed, curiosity in her look, no alarm. After a few moments I reached for my jar of wine as if to suggest that, if anything unusual had happened, it was the result of intoxication; by the time I looked back at her face her eyes were closed. I put the jar back without drinking and lay beside her and stared at her for a long while and then smoothed her hair back with my palm. She reached up and took my hand, maybe in her sleep, and pressed it to her chest and held it there, whether to stop or encourage me or neither, I couldn’t tell. In that position we lay and waited for the hurricane.

At some point I drifted off into strange dreams the radio penetrated and I woke with a start, convinced I’d heard shattering glass. It was 4:43 a.m. according to my phone, the menu screen of the DVD still on the wall, so we hadn’t lost power. I focused on what the voice in my ear was saying: Irene had been downgraded before it reached landfall, moderate flooding in the Rockaways and Red Hook, the phrase “dodged a bullet” was repeated, as was “better safe than sorry.” I got up and walked to the window; it wasn’t even raining hard. The yellow of the streetlamps revealed a familiar scene; a few branches had fallen, but no trees. I went into the kitchen and drank a glass of water and glanced at the instant coffee on the counter and it was no longer a little different from itself, no longer an emissary from a world to come; there was disappointment in my relief at the failure of the storm.

I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, “Everything is fine, I’m going home now,” said it just so I could say I’d said it in case she was upset later that I’d left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn’t just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.

* * *

When we uncoupled I thought I saw Alena’s condensed breath slowing in the air, but the apartment was too warm for that; regardless, her body returned to homeostasis, it seemed, much more rapidly than mine. She rose from the mattress and smoothed the dress she’d never taken off and I gathered myself and followed her onto the fire escape and took in the lights of the taller buildings that loomed around us, all of which were haloed now. She removed a cigarette from a pack that must have already been atop a sand-filled paint can and lit it by drawing a strike-anywhere match — whose provenance was obscure to me — across the building’s brick exterior. “Oh come on,” I said, referring to her cumulative, impossible cool, and she snorted a little when she laughed, then coughed smoke, becoming real.

“The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.” —Walter Benjamin

We chatted for the length of her cigarette about the show — the opening started in an hour or two — most of my consciousness still overwhelmed by her physical proximity, every atom belonging to her as well belonged to me, all senses fused into a general supersensitivity, crushed glass sparkling in the asphalt below. After she stubbed the cigarette out against the brick, a little shower of embers, I followed her back into the apartment, which was the gallery owner’s pied-à-terre. Alena went to a bathroom without turning on a light and I listened as she pissed; she didn’t flush, wash her hands, or, in that dark, consult the mirror.

We left the apartment together, but, by the time we reached the street, Alena had explained that she’d prefer to arrive at the opening separately, as a jealous ex would be there, and she didn’t want to deal with the interrogation. I was a little stung, but, trying to mimic her nonchalance, said sure, that I’d planned to meet Sharon first at a café not far from the gallery anyway, then head over to the opening with her; we kissed goodbye.

Alena worked alongside Sharon and her husband Jon, two of my oldest New York friends, at a small production company that specialized in editing documentary film. It was a job Alena held part-time in order to support what she called her “artistic practice,” a practice Sharon had had trouble describing and about which, because of the phrase “artistic practice,” I’d had grave doubts. But it turned out Alena was serious, in spite of being hailed as a rising star by a postmedia art world that so often valorizes stupidity. Her current show, which, unable to do any of the heavy lifting, I’d watched her hang, consisted of images and a few objects she had deftly aged: she’d painted a portrait from a contemporary photograph and then somehow distressed it— I couldn’t understand her reluctant explanations of her process — so that it was networked with fine cracks, making it appear like a painting from the past. There was a painting based on an image downloaded from the Internet and then enlarged of a young woman whose eyes are lined with running shadow and upon whose face a man beyond the frame has ejaculated; she stares at the viewer as if from another century, the craquelure confusing genres and lending the image tremendous gravity; the title read: The Picture of Sasha Grey. Alena had painted several magnificent Abstract Expressionist imitations and then subjected them to her method; the Pollocks appeared compellingly unchanged, others seemed as if they’d been recovered from the rubble of MoMA after an attack or had been defrosted from a future ice age. There was a small self-portrait, also painted from a photograph, that had not been altered, had suffered no crazing, and the immediacy of its address in the context of the other work, I mean the directness of the sitter’s gaze, was so powerfully located in the present tense that it was difficult to face.

Kissing Sharon hello at the café, I felt static as my lips brushed across her cheek, as if Alena and Sharon were coming into contact through me. Sharon ordered mint tea and I ordered what I thought was a simple drip coffee that turned out to be an exorbitantly priced single-origin Chemex affair. At the tiny table beside the window looking onto Houston, we split a large slice of chocolate bread. “It’s Valrhona,” Sharon said, which meant nothing to me; Sharon had a chocolatier’s vocabulary — almost everything she ate, it seemed, involved chocolate. “Are you sleeping together yet?”

When we left the café and wandered south I could feel the trains moving underground. I could feel, at least imagined that I felt, Sharon’s pulse in her biceps, slightly faster than my own, as we walked — as we almost always walked — arm in arm. I looked up at an illuminated billboard on which nothing appeared but a violet wash, probably because a new advertisement was going up, and asked Sharon, who is color-blind, what she saw. Overhead the stars occluded by light pollution were presences like words projected through time and I was aware that water surrounded the city, and that the water moved; I was aware of the delicacy of the bridges and tunnels spanning it, and of the traffic through those arteries, as though some cortical reorganization now allowed me to take the infrastructure personally, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. Sharon saw grays and blues, and as we crossed Delancey she described a movie she wanted to make about color-blind synesthetes who report that numbers are tinged with hues they otherwise can’t perceive.

Soon we arrived at the packed gallery, where we’d planned to meet Jon, but he’d texted to say his cold had worsened. We made our way to the white wine on a table in the near corner. I saw Alena talking to two tall and handsome people across the space and I raised a hand awkwardly. She looked at me steadily while speaking to them but did not return my wave; I couldn’t decide if her shadowed eyes were expressing perfect indifference or smoldering intensity, her signature form of ambiguity. I tried to turn from Alena’s gaze to talk with Sharon as if I’d barely noticed the former’s expression, but I spilled some of the wine as I lifted it to my lips. I glanced back at Alena, who was smiling slightly.

It was impossible, as at most openings, to look at the art; indeed, the opening as a form, insofar as I understood it, was a ritual destruction of the conditions of viewing for the artifacts it was meant to celebrate. Sharon and I tried to circulate a little, and, while the afterglow was slowly diminishing, I still experienced softly colliding with so many bodies as a pleasure, not an irritation; it was as if the crowd were a single, sensate organism. I said hello to a few people I knew from art magazines for which I’d written, but soon I could tell Sharon wanted to leave, and we began to swim our way to Alena, to congratulate her and move on to a drink.

Alena and Sharon kissed hello, but Alena and I didn’t touch. I explained, trying to feign cool, that Sharon and I were going to catch up somewhere quiet, but that she should text me when things were winding down and I’d come back to help clean up. She said thanks, but she doubted she’d need help; her tone implied my offer presumed a greater degree of intimacy than our exchange of fluids warranted.

I was alarmed by the thoroughness of what I experienced as Alena’s dissimulation, felt almost gaslighted, as if our encounter on the apartment floor had never happened. Here I was, still flush from our coition, my senses and the city vibrating at one frequency, wanting nothing so much as to possess and be possessed by her again, while she looked at me with a detachment so total I felt as if I were the jealous ex she’d wanted to avoid, a bourgeois prude incapable of conceiving of the erotic outside the lexicon of property. Maybe she’d separated from me only so she could reencounter me coolly, asserting her capacity to establish insuperable distances no matter our physical proximity. On the one hand, I felt a jealous anger rising within me, a desire for her to desire me, the only kind of desire, Alex had once told me during a fight, I was able to sustain. On the other hand, I frankly admired how she appeared capable of taking or leaving me, of taking and leaving me simultaneously, found it exciting, inspiring even, as if the energy we had generated were now free to circulate more generally, charging everything a little — bodies, streetlights, mixed media.

We walked west to a bar Sharon liked. It was lit in the speakeasy fashion, dark wood and a tooled tin ceiling, no music. “Jon says she knows Krav Maga. Remember to agree on a safe-word.” It was quiet enough to hear the bartender shaking an artisanal cocktail.

“Why do you assume I’m the submissive?” The drinks involved gin and grapefruit and were served in Collins glasses.

“Because you’re a pussy.” Sharon desired to be vulgar with an earnestness that defeated vulgarity.

“I’m the one having casual sex in a stranger’s apartment with a mysterious woman who probably doesn’t care about me. You’re married.” I had officiated their wedding, first ordaining myself online.

“She cares about you, she just doesn’t attach.”

“When a male octopus ‘attacks’ in the attempt to mate, it uses its suckers to grapple with its target and insert the hectocotylus.”

“If Alena ever reproduces, it’s going to be through fission.”

“The breath-play thing,” I said with the help of my second cocktail, “makes me nervous.”

“What if you stopped worrying about protecting women from their desires?”

Now we were walking down Delancey, a gas I hoped was only steam rising from the street vent. “Maybe it’s how she grapples with and overcomes a fear of death.”

“Maybe it’s how she grapples with the threat of voicelessness.”

A passing ambulance threw red lights against us. “Or takes pleasure in making you confront the pleasure you take in those threats.”

“The flood of oxygen upon release.” We descended underground.

“A match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed,” I quoted, but it was lost in the noise of the approaching train.

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

“We helped edit a film on bonobos for the BBC; they’re our closest relative and have no concept of sexual exclusivity.”

“They say monogamy is an effect of agriculture. Paternity only started to matter with the transmission of property.”

“Get tested for HIV today,” said the poster on the D.

“But they do eat the young of other primate species.”

“So why did you get married if you don’t want kids?” We emerged onto the Manhattan Bridge; almost everyone checked e-mail, texts.

“You left without saying goodbye,” Alex’s said.

“Shine bright like a diamond,” Rihanna sang through the earbuds of the girl beside me, whose fingernails were painted with stars.

We were seated at a restaurant in Crown Heights, the penny-tile floor glowing in the candlelight. “I believe in promises. I believe in publicity.”

“I promise to pass through a series of worlds with you,” I remembered from her vows. I’d told the waiter I was only having wine, but ate half the spinach gnocchi off her plate, then paid for everything.

“She’s going to get tired of you soon,” Jon said. He was lying on the couch streaming The Wire on his laptop with two pink tissues issuing from his nostrils like a villain’s mustache in an elementary school play. The coffee table was littered with used tea bags and copies of Film Quarterly. I rummaged in their kitchen but could only find warm gin.

“Why did you set us up, then?”

“She’s smart and beautiful and nice and claims to like your poetry.”

I walked home through the park. “You have failed to reconcile the realism of my body with the ethereality of the trees,” I said to the mist. Because the park is on the flight path, the city corrals and euthanizes geese. Which mate for life, I confirmed on Wikipedia. The glow of the screen seemed to come off on my hand. I looked up and saw the clouds as craquelure.

I poured myself a large glass of water that I forgot to bring to bed. “The little shower of embers,” I texted Alena, then regretted it.

* * *

Out of Dr. Andrews’s climate-controlled office on the Upper East Side, I walked into the unseasonably warm December afternoon, turned on my phone, and checked my e-mail to find a message from Natali, a mentor and literary hero of mine, about her husband, Bernard, for me an equally important figure:

B fell in NYC and broke a vertebra in his neck. He had an operation and it went fine, and he is now out of immediate danger. But recovery is slow and I haven’t been told when he might be able to be transferred back to Providence. Starting tonight I am staying at a hotel close to Mt. Sinai Hospital with uncertain Internet access. Below is my cell phone number but I am not quite competent in receiving messages. Some seem to vanish. Love, N.

As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display. So much of the most important personal news I’d received in the last several years had come to me by smartphone while I was abroad in the city that I could plot on a map, could represent spatially, the major events, such as they were, of my early thirties. Place a thumbtack on the wall or drop a flag on Google Maps at Lincoln Center, where, beside the fountain, I took a call from Jon informing me that, for whatever complex of reasons, a friend had shot himself; mark the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, where I read the message (“Apologies for the mass e-mail…”) a close cousin sent out describing the dire condition of her newborn; waiting in line at the post office on Atlantic, the adhan issuing from the crackling speakers of the adjacent mosque, I received your wedding announcement and was shocked to be shocked, crushed, and started a frightening multiweek descent, worse for being embarrassingly clichéd; while in the bathroom of the SoHo Crate and Barrel — the finest semipublic restroom in lower Manhattan — I learned I’d been awarded a grant that would take me overseas for a summer, and so came to associate the corner of Broadway and Houston with all that transpired in Morocco; at Zuccotti Park I heard that my then-girlfriend was not — as she’d been convinced — pregnant; while buying discounted dress socks at the Century 21 Department Store across from Ground Zero, I was informed by text that a friend in Oakland had been hospitalized after the police had broken his ribs. And so on: each of these experiences of reception remained, as it were, in situ, so that whenever I returned to a zone where significant news had been received, I discovered that the news and an echo of its attendant affect still awaited me like a curtain of beads.

Neither Bernard nor Natali had ever seemed to exist in time, at least not in the same temporal medium I occupied; Bernard’s wizardly beard and otherworldly learnedness had made him appear impossibly old when I first met him my freshman year of college, and it was only when I grew older that I was able to remember him as comparatively young; he was in his late sixties when I first attended one of his classes. And yet, precisely because he seemed beyond the reach of time, I could never imagine Bernard actually aging, and therefore his bodily fragility never seemed, in any particular present, real to me; in that sense he was forever young. Natali — the only person I knew who had read as much as Bernard, perhaps more, since she was fluent in several languages, having been born in Germany and having learned French as a child before becoming a major English-language poet — always seemed the same age to me, even in memory. This condition of temporal exception was in part the effect of a level of literary accomplishment that struck me as anachronistic: each was the author of more than twenty books in several genres; each had translated as many volumes; the small press they’d founded in the early sixties had published hundreds of books and pamphlets of experimental writing. Moreover, the house they inhabited in Providence — a house so full of books that it seemed built of books — also felt exempt from time. Bernard and Natali were always working and never working, that is, they were always reading and writing when they weren’t hosting receptions for other writers; there was no division between labor and leisure; their days were not structured conventionally; the house was not subject to quotidian rhythms but to the strange duration of the literary.

All of this, I should say, initially made me intensely suspicious; they seemed too perfect, too open, pure, generous; how could they be involved with generations of authors — the offensive, the quick to take offense, the batshit crazy — without making a single enemy, unless they were secretly bland or intellectually inert or there were bodies decaying under the floorboards? The first time I was in their house I moved gingerly not only because I felt I was in a museum, terrified of breaking something, but also because I feared a trap.

As I reread Natali’s message, I scrolled through memories of my first evenings in their house as my teenage years came to an end: spilling wine on hardwood and upholstery, Bernard and Natali patiently listening to my younger self as I affected literary seriousness, my speech no doubt a patchwork of interpretive clichés and errors of fact, their telling stories the import of which would often only occur to me years later. I remembered debating and/or flirting with other students and hangers-on, other young writers from whom I was desperate to distinguish myself, getting no help in that regard from either Bernard or Natali, since they treated everyone equally, infuriating me. But the memory that returned to me most vividly as I stood on East Seventy-ninth Street was of meeting their daughter, a young woman with whom I was for a time obsessed, and of whom I still occasionally think, despite having met her only once.

A distinguished South African writer had come that night to campus to read from his new novel, so I encountered the daughter at what was an unusually crowded gathering. It was perhaps the second or third time I’d been in the house, which meant I was still nervous, skeptical. I was standing in the dining room where food and wine and glasses had been laid out on the table, admiring a collage of Bernard’s on the wall, when a woman — older than I was then, younger than I am now — identified the source of one of the collage’s elements from behind me: a sliver of a movie poster for Murnau’s Sunrise. I turned to face her and was, as they say, stunned — large gray-blue eyes, a full mouth, long and jet-black hair with a few strands of silver in it, and an immediately apparent poise and intelligence for which no catalog of features could account. Realizing that I was just staring at her, it finally occurred to me to speak, and I managed to say something about the rightness of fit between silent film and collage, mute media that depend on splicing for effect. Whatever its merit, she acted as though I’d contributed something intelligent, and electricity branched through me with her smile. I asked her if she was often at Bernard’s and Natali’s and she said, laughing, “I grew up here,” and then I understood — her knowledge of the collage, her aura of brilliance, her obvious comfort in this hallowed space — that this gorgeous woman was their daughter.

We shook hands and said our names, but I was too overwhelmed by contact with the former to catch the latter, and before I could ask her to repeat it, she was taken away from me by a man, a distinguished professor of something, who wanted to introduce her to the distinguished writer. For the rest of the evening I milled around the reception waiting for an opportunity to insinuate myself back into her company, but somehow it never came, or I never had the nerve to act. Every time I heard her laugh or succeeded in picking out her voice from the general din or saw her move gracefully through a room, my whole body started, then I felt as if I were falling, a sensation akin to the myoclonic twitch that, just as you are drifting off to sleep, wakes you violently; standing there among the first editions, I was convinced it was the shudder of fate.

I found myself before the glass cases of curios and sculptures that lined one of the dining room walls and discovered that there was a small line drawing of the daughter in a silver frame, vaguely reminiscent of Modigliani in its elongation; I wondered if Bernard had composed the little unsigned portrait. By this point I’d outlasted most of the crowd. The wine gave me the courage to have another glass of wine, which in turn gave me the courage to take one of the now-available chairs in the living room and to listen along with the others to Bernard. He was telling the story, pausing every few minutes to stir the fire he was sitting beside, of a French author who, hard up for money, had fabricated letters to himself from famous interlocutors, then attempted to sell them to a university library. I glanced at Bernard’s daughter furtively; in the firelight, she was dusky gold.

I did not say another word to her that evening. She would not, it appeared, be sleeping at the house. Soon after Bernard had finished his story — the forger was caught, but then published the letters as an epistolary novel to critical acclaim — the professor yawned to indicate his imminent departure and the daughter asked if she could have a ride. When they stood, everyone else in the living room stood, and I was fortunate enough to receive a kiss on my cheek from her, after she had kissed Bernard and Natali and one or two others goodbye. She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an excess of joy like the schoolboy that I was. I had an overwhelming sense of the world’s possibility and plentitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony; the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard doyens if it killed me; my mind and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she’d brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.

I spent the next few months going to every reception and looking for the daughter, never having the guts to ask after her directly, or, that first year, to say much of anything to Bernard and Natali, although in their presence I was growing incrementally more relaxed, and whom now, more than ever, I wanted to impress. She would often appear in my dreams, at least one of which resulted in nocturnal emission, the last time I would experience that phenomenon, although most of them were chaste, clichéd — exploring Paris hand in hand, etc. She became a present absence, the phantom I measured the actual against while taking bong hits with my roommate; I thought I saw her in passing cars, disappearing around corners, walking down a jetway at the airport when I was heading home for winter break.

Finally I asked Bernard her name, her whereabouts, probably betraying desperation, at which point he gave me a quizzical look and explained: I have no daughter. I felt the world rearrange itself around me, that there had been a death. But the woman I had met with the distinguished professor, the one who said she’d grown up in the house, the one in the drawing, etc.? He had trouble recalling whom I meant. She must have intended “grown up here” in some other sense; perhaps, it occurred to me, she meant it was the place where she’d absorbed her education. He asked me to bring him the drawing and when he saw it he explained he’d found it at a garage sale in Michigan; tears, at least in my memory, started in my eyes.

Fifteen years had elapsed between my learning they were childless — of course they were childless; the house had no traces of a nuclear family’s present or past — and my reading the message from Natali about Bernard’s fall. Now, as I called Natali’s cell phone, I again saw their daughter’s face, felt the echo of desire, wanted to call her and talk about Bernard. In those fifteen years, I’d published Natali’s and Bernard’s work in magazines I’d edited, written essays about them, visited them frequently. Only recently had I come to Providence — at Natali’s request — and been asked to become their literary executor, a great honor and responsibility, a proposal to which, after reminding them in a long and wine-soaked speech about my myriad insufficiencies, and noting my diagnosis, I agreed.

Natali picked up the phone, although “picked up” is an anachronistic phrase; she sounded the same as ever. I asked what I could do. The answer was basically nothing, though I was welcome to visit as soon as tomorrow morning. Perhaps I could bring some poems, as she was reading a little to Bernard when he wasn’t sleeping.

I took the 5 train back to Brooklyn, undercooked and ate spaghetti, and then started to pace my apartment, trying to decide what poetry to bring. Four hours later it looked as though my apartment had been ransacked or had endured a seismic event. I’d pulled dozens of books from the unfinished pine shelves, stirring up dust, and then discarded them in piles on the floor, either because the book in question was a gift from Bernard or Natali, or a book they had published, or a book they’d written, and so it seemed a failure of imagination to select it, or because I knew or feared it was a poet they didn’t like, or because the poems were too elegiac, or too long to be read to Bernard in his condition. I was growing increasingly desperate, my worry about Bernard now compounded by the ridiculous worry that bringing the wrong book would somehow invalidate their trust in me as their executor, expose me as unworthy. Added to that was the shame I began to feel when I realized that, if I were in Bernard’s position, I wouldn’t even think about literature, would just be asking for morphine and distracting myself, if possible, with reality TV, a line of thought that then led me to imagine recovering, or failing to recover, from open-heart surgery.

I lay on the floor and watched the slow rotation of the ceiling fan and found it a little difficult to breathe as all the temporal orders broke over me: Bernard and Natali were succumbing to biological time; they had asked me and my aorta to conduct their writing into the future, a future I increasingly imagined as underwater; none of the past was usable — I couldn’t find, in my apartment full of books, a single page of it to bring to the same hospital where they’d measured my limbs and, depending on insurance, might inseminate my friend.

Then out of nowhere, as if descending from the ceiling, the right poet came to me: William Bronk. I remembered how Bernard had told me he’d met Bronk just once, and neither had said much; they’d had lunch or coffee in congenial if mildly awkward silence. Bernard believed Bronk was one of the great and underappreciated poets of the second half of the twentieth century. A decade later, after Bronk’s death, Bernard had told me, he met a graduate student who had been a distant relation or family friend of Bronk’s and had gotten to know the poet in his later years. The graduate student was always talking about Bronk as if Bernard and Bronk were dear friends, as if they’d known each other since childhood, which Bernard found a little puzzling. After the fifth or sixth conversation in which the student tried to reminisce with Bernard about Bronk, about the kind of man he was, Bernard felt it necessary to explain to the student that, while he admired the poetry tremendously, he’d only met Bronk once, and briefly, that he had no sense of him as a person. The student was shocked: But he always spoke about you, he said to Bernard, about how you’d sought him out, about how well you got along, the understanding between you, etc. One of the main reasons I came here to study with you was because of your relationship. I imagine Bernard saw the world rearrange itself around the student.

Wallace Stevens, I remember Bernard telling me on another occasion, had heavily influenced two poets Bernard particularly loved: Ashbery, whom everyone rightly celebrated, and Bronk, who was largely unknown. Ashbery wrote in color, Bernard said, whereas Bronk wrote in black and white; Ashbery embraced Stevens’s lushness, whereas Bronk stripped it down, as if Stevens were being translated into a limited vocabulary. As a result, Bronk’s poetry was suspended between philosophical heft and an almost autistic linguistic simplicity, a combination that, I must say, had never really worked for me: I’d read all his books out of a sense of duty, but I was usually bored or unconvinced by the affect of profundity. But now, when I found Bronk’s selected poems on one of the shelves and opened the book at random, the power of it was all finally there, finally real for me:

MIDSUMMER

A green world, a scene of green deep

with light blues, the greens made deep

by those blues. One thinks how

in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen

(through a window, maybe) far behind the serene

sitter’s face, the serene pose, as though

in some impossible mirror, face to back,

human serenity gazed at a green world

which gazed at this face.

And see now,

here is that place, those greens

are here, deep with those blues. The air

we breathe is freshly sweet, and warm, as though

with berries. We are here. We are here.

Set this down too, as much

as if an atrocity had happened and been seen.

The earth is beautiful beyond all change.

This was what I brought to the hospital the next morning, along with some quinoa salad and dried mangoes for Natali. I just caught the elevator as the doors closed, and hit the button for the seventh floor, but the number didn’t light up. Still, the elevator started to ascend, stopping on every floor. I was the only one in the elevator and its erratic behavior was making me nervous, so I got out on the fourth floor and walked. Later I would learn that this was a Sabbath elevator — an elevator that operates automatically in order to circumvent the Jewish law requiring observers to abstain from operating electric switches on Shabbat.

Bernard looked tiny in the hospital bed, his neck in a brace, but he also seemed like himself; the first thing he said to me, his voice raspy because of damage to his larynx, was that he was sorry he hadn’t had a chance to read my novel, but he’d been detained. It smelled like a hospital room smells, like sanitizer and urine, but it was otherwise okay. A paper curtain offered privacy to or from the other patient in the room, who must have been asleep.

I entertained Natali and Bernard, trying to ignore the beeping of the machines to which he was attached, by recounting in comical terms my anxiety about what to bring, how I knew this had all been arranged as a secret test for me. When I presented them with the Bronk, I believed that Natali was touched, that it was exactly the right book, that it proved I had been listening with care all these years, but I might have imagined that response. Bernard started to retell the story about the graduate student, but it required too much effort, and he let it go. I changed the topic to their “daughter”—only now did I really feel the kinship between the stories — but Bernard didn’t seem to remember what I was talking about, even though we’d laughed about it together many times before.

Despite the bright hospital lighting, emerging onto the street felt like crossing from night into day, or from a darkened theater, a matinee, into sunlight, or, I imagined, like surfacing in a submarine — the threshold between the hospital and its outside was like a threshold between worlds, between media. Have you seen people pause in revolving doors like divers decompressing, transitioning slowly so as to prevent nitrogen bubbles from forming in the blood, or noticed the puzzled look that many people wear — I found a bench across Fifth Avenue and sat and watched — when they step onto the sidewalk, as if they’ve suddenly forgotten something important, but aren’t sure what: their keys, their phone, the particulars of their loss? Terrible to see them recall it a second later; as I observed the hospital from a safe distance, I thought back to the weeks I’d spent sleeping on the futon at Alex’s after an SUV struck a friend of hers in Chelsea, how some mornings Alex, who tended to get out of bed before she was fully awake, would be halfway to the kitchen to put on the water for her tea before she remembered that Candice was dead. (I don’t know how I knew she briefly didn’t know, or how I could tell when the fact returned to her consciousness.) If you want to pick out the devastated or soon-to-be-devastated from the stream of people leaving Mount Sinai, I decided, don’t look for frank expressions of sorrow or concern, look for people whose faces resemble those of passengers deplaning after a long flight — a blank expression as the body begins adjusting to a new time zone and ground speed.

“Ground speed”—I sat, my back to the park, waiting for the city to reabsorb me, holding my breath until the exhaust from a passing bus dissipated. The beeping of a reversing FedEx truck became Bernard’s heart monitor. I began to say the words aloud, joining the thousands of people in the city talking to themselves at that moment, repeating the phrase until ground began to sound like the past participle of grind—as if velocity could be powdered, pulverized. It made me think of instant coffee.

* * *

There were still piles of books on my apartment floor when the protester arrived the following week to use my shower. He was a few years younger than I and taller, so much taller — easily six-foot-three — that he made the building feel smaller; he had to duck so as not to hit his head on the landing as he followed me up the stairs to my third-floor apartment. Was he Marfanoid? He set his oversized climbing backpack beside the door and sat on the top stair to take his shoes off before entering although I told him it wasn’t necessary, and while he did so I could smell a variety of odors: sweat, tobacco, dog, the must of his socks. I asked him how long he had been sleeping in the park and he said a week, but that he’d been at one encampment or another across the country for more than six weeks. He’d been picked up at his door in Akron — he had been living in his parents’ basement — by a caravan of protesters he’d made contact with on craigslist, just as craigslist was being used to connect protesters with people in the city who would let them use their bathrooms. He smiled his disarming smile without interruption. Did I go to Zuccotti a lot? he asked me.

It was eight or so, the time I normally had dinner, and I asked if he was hungry, explained that I couldn’t really cook, but was going to make some sort of stir-fry, and he said sure. It was only when I got the towels that I’d washed for him out of the dryer — my apartment had a small washer-and-dryer unit in the closet — that I thought to ask, a little embarrassed by the luxury, if he wanted to wash any clothes. Definitely, he said, and I showed him how it worked; he got his backpack and emptied the clothes it contained into the washer, but wore what he had on into the bathroom.

When I started chopping vegetables I realized I wasn’t really hungry, had probably thought to cook just to have something to offer and because I wanted some activity to undertake while my bathroom was occupied. I opened a bottle of the lawyer’s wine; Alex had given me several. I put on red quinoa to boil and found some tofu in the back of the fridge that looked okay and added it to the broccoli and squash while the garlic and onions simmered in the oil. From the kitchen I could see steam escaping from the bathroom door. I put my phone into the little speaker dock and instructed it to play The Very Best of Nina Simone—I wanted to drown out any sounds he might make before showering that could embarrass us.

While I stirred the vegetables I realized with slowly dawning alarm that I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cooked by myself for another person — I could not, in fact, ever remember having done so. I’d cooked with people plenty, usually acting as a dazzlingly incompetent sous chef for Alex or Jon or other friends or family. On various occasions I’d said to a woman I was interested in, “I would invite you to dinner, but I can’t cook,” at which point I would hope she’d say, “I’m a great cook,” so I could ask her to come over and teach me; then we’d get drunk in the kitchen while I displayed what I hoped was my endearing clumsiness, never learning anything. Excepting the sandwiches I had made for Alex when she had mono — and even those I tended to buy and not prepare — I simply could not recall a single instance in which I had by myself constructed a meal, however rudimentary, for another human being. The closest memory I could summon was of scrambling eggs on Mother’s or Father’s Day as a child, but the uncelebrated parent, as well as my brother, always assisted me. Conversely, there was simply no end to the number of meals I could recall other people making for me, thousands upon thousands of meals, a quantity of food that would have to be measured in tons, dating from my mother’s milk to the present; just that week Aaron had roasted a chicken for our monthly dinner to catch up and discuss Roberto; Alena had made some kind of delicious trio of Middle Eastern salads the night before; in neither meal had I lent a hand, although I’d cursorily offered. Typically my contribution was just wine, itself the carefully aged work of others. Surely there were instances I was forgetting, but even assuming there were, they were exceedingly rare.

I would like to say my recognition of this asymmetry led me to meditate — as I added soy sauce and pepper to what was destined to be a meal of prodigious blandness — on the pleasure I was taking in cooking for my fellow man as he bathed, but I was aware at that point of no pleasure. I would like to say that, at the very least, I resolved to cook henceforth for my friends, to be a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community. I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn’s boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism. Moreover, what did it mean to say that Aaron or Alena had prepared those meals for me, when the ingredients were grown and picked and packaged and transported by others in a system of great majesty and murderous stupidity? The fact is that realizing my selfishness just led to more selfishness; that is, I felt lonely, felt sorry for myself, despite the fact that I was so often cooked for, because, as I stood there in my little kitchen stirring vegetables, stood there at the age of thirty-three, I was crushed to realize nobody depended on me for this fundamental mode of care, of nurturing, nourishing. “Don’t leave me,” Nina Simone begged in French, and, for the first time I could remember — whether or not the desire was a non sequitur — I wanted a child, wanted one badly.

Then I recoiled at the thought, wanted one not at all. So this is how it works, I said to myself, as if I’d caught an ideological mechanism in flagrante delicto: you let a young man committed to anticapitalist struggle shower in the overpriced apartment that you rent and, while making a meal you prepare to eat in common, your thoughts lead you inexorably to the desire to reproduce your own genetic material within some version of a bourgeois household, that almost caricatural transvaluation of values lubricated by wine and song. Your gesture of briefly placing a tiny part of the domestic — your bathroom — into the commons leads you to redescribe the possibility of collective politics as the private drama of the family. All of this in the time it took to prepare an Andean chenopod. What you need to do is harness the self-love you are hypostasizing as offspring, as the next generation of you, and let it branch out horizontally into the possibility of a transpersonal revolutionary subject in the present and coconstruct a world in which moments can be something other than the elements of profit.

The food was okay, but the protester kept saying it was awesome. He had put his dirty clothes back on but looked and smelled refreshed. He drank only water, but the food made him voluble, and, as his clothes banged around in the dryer, he talked to me about his travels, how more than anything else — debating everybody about everything, getting kettled and beaten by police on the Brooklyn Bridge, learning to wire generators, quitting drinking — his experiences in what he called the movement had helped him chill out, as he put it, about men. I thought he was embarking on a story of sexual awakening, but he meant something more general: instead of assuming that every male stranger past puberty was a physical and psychosocial threat, he was now open to the possibility of their decency. For as long as I can remember, he said, whenever I walk past a guy on the street or see a guy in another car or the halls of a building, what I’m thinking to myself, consciously or not, is: Can I take him, who would win the fight? Almost every man thinks that way, the protester said, and I agreed, even though my awareness of that line of thinking had diminished steadily if incrementally since I was a teen, replaced now with my awareness that a blow to my aorta could kill me. When I’d opened the door for the protester, though, and sized up his height, had my chances in a fight occurred to me? Probably. But I don’t think that way anymore, the protester said, not after so many experiences like this, referring, I supposed, to my letting him shower, sharing food.

We talked about the latest NYPD brutality for a while and then he said, You know how when you’re a kid and you go to the bathroom with other boys, I mean you’re standing side by side pissing — I was a little worried where the protester was going with this — the big thing was looking at the other kid’s dick out of curiosity, and as you got older that became more and more of an offense, could get you called a faggot or whatever, and so that stops at some point, unless you’re cruising maybe, I don’t know. But then sometime in middle school or maybe for some people it’s high school there is this kind of performance that starts when you take your dick out of your pants to piss in a urinal, you start bending at the knees just a little, or otherwise making a show as if you were lifting some kind of weight.

I was laughing because I did know what the protester was talking about, knew exactly, but had somehow never noted the widespread practice consciously. Countless instances flashed before my eyes — in locker rooms in Kansas as a kid, more recently in airports all over the country and in large restaurants, two of the only institutions where I now urinated in company, because at school I always entered a stall; many men, maybe the majority, would act, as they took themselves in hand, as if they were grasping, at the minimum, a heavy pipe, and others as though they were preparing themselves for a feat of superhuman strength, often then making a show of supporting their back with the free arm if they held their penis with one hand, or grasping their member with two hands, as if either of those postures were required by the weight. I tried to recall if I’d seen this in other countries. Regardless, we were both laughing by this point, laughing as hard as I’d laughed in a long time, because now the protester stood and started miming perfectly there in my dining room the midwestern man’s premicturition ritual display.

I saw my dad do it and my coaches and my friends and I did it basically without knowing it, had done it all my life, the protester said, catching his breath, and then the other day we were in the McDonald’s bathroom by the park where the manager lets us go and my friend Chris was just like, When are you going to quit acting like it weighs so much, man? Do you need help with that or something? And that was the first time I even realized I was doing it, realized that all these men were always doing it, and I just stopped. I mean, I know it’s not the point of Occupy, but I’m telling you that now I don’t size men up in terms of fights all the time and I don’t act like my cock weighs a ton and it does make me see the world a little differently, you know?

After we cleaned up together we walked to the train; I was meeting Alex at Lincoln Center. Before he got off at Wall Street, I told him to text me if he or a friend needed to shower again and that I was sure I’d see him at the park regardless, that I was often at the People’s Library, but I never did. It felt strange and unsettling to stay on the train as the protester got off and the doors closed, to continue uptown toward a center for the performing arts, but I never considered altering my plan.

Alex and I found each other in the relatively short line on Sixty-second Street for Christian Marclay’s The Clock. The twenty-four-hour video work was running continuously for one week. Wait times were unpredictable; we’d met in and abandoned the line twice before when the estimated wait was two hours or more; now it didn’t look so bad, probably because it was a work night. Alex and I hadn’t seen each other in a few days and could catch up while we waited side by side.

She had been to see her mother in New Paltz and, while her mom had looked unchanged since the last visit a month before — frail, but no more frail — much of her talk now was frankly about death, indiscriminate cytotoxins circulating through her. It’s not that she thinks she’s dying tomorrow or has given up on trying to live for many years, Alex said, but she clearly thinks of her remaining time as the prolongation of the illness and not its outside. Alex’s mother, a sociologist who taught at the state university in New Paltz, had raised her largely on her own; Alex’s father, who was from Martinique, was never married to her mother, and Alex had no clear memory of him. Her stepfather, also a professor at SUNY New Paltz, had been around since she was six; he was gentle, attentive, and, Alex reported, increasingly, if quietly, desperate now.

“Meanwhile,” Alex said, clearly wanting to change the subject, “I learned today that I have to get my fucking wisdom teeth removed.”

“I thought you did that as a kid.”

“I had two out but they left two on top they thought weren’t going to cause problems and now they’re ‘impacted’ and have cavities because I can’t reach them when I brush.”

“When are you going to do it?”

“Soon, before my health insurance runs out. It will still cost me at least a thousand dollars, by the way, because of how bad my dental is.”

“Shit. I’m sorry. Let me know when you schedule it and I’ll go with you. I’ll make you soup. I’ve been working on my cooking.”

“You’ll like this: the receptionist says I can either just do local anesthetic or a heavier IV thing and I’m supposed to choose which one to do. The dentist says just to do local but almost nobody I know has just done local.”

“What did you do as a kid?”

“That’s the thing — I can’t remember. I asked my mom and she said she thought I did something heavier. Apparently if you do the IV sedation it induces amnesia. That’s why so many people have trouble remembering what they did. The difference isn’t really in how much pain you experience but in whether you remember it.”

“I wouldn’t want them working on me when they know I won’t remember what they’re doing.”

“I’ll probably just do local.”

I thought about offering to pay for whatever her insurance wouldn’t cover, and worried she was leaning toward local only because it was cheaper, but I wasn’t sure if she’d appreciate the gesture, so I let it go.

I told her about the protester, hoping to cheer her up with the whole pissing-contest thing, and the line moved or seemed to move quickly; we’d waited well under an hour when we were let in. The Clock is a clock: it’s a twenty-four-hour montage of thousands of scenes from movies and a few from TV edited together so as to be shown in real time; each scene indicates the time with a shot of a timepiece or its mention in dialogue; time in and outside of the film is synchronized. Marclay and a team of assistants spent several years sifting through a century of film for possible footage for their collage. When we found our seats it was 11:37; the tension of imminent midnight was palpable, the twenty-three and a half hours of film that preceded us building inexorably to that climax. (I had wanted to arrive by 10:04 to see lightning strike the courthouse clock tower in Back to the Future, allowing Marty to return to 1985, but Alex couldn’t get a train back from her mother’s in time.) Now the actors in each scene, no matter how incongruous, struck me as united in anticipation of that threshold. Even though we had arrived only twenty-three minutes before the end of the day, we were immediately riveted. Several consecutive people on the screen were on the phone begging for stays of execution.

When the hour arrived, Orson Welles fell from the clock tower in The Stranger; Big Ben, which I would come to learn appears frequently in the video, exploded, and people in the audience applauded; some kind of zombie woman emerged from a grandfather clock and everybody laughed. But then, a minute later, a young girl awakes from a nightmare and, as she’s comforted by her father (Clark Gable as Rhett Buttler), you see Big Ben ticking away again outside their window, no sign of damage. The entire preceding twenty-four hours might have been the child’s dream, a storm that never happened, just one of many ways The Clock can be integrated into an overarching narrative. Indeed, it was a greater challenge for me to resist the will to integration than to combine the various scenes into coherent and compelling fiction, in part due to Marclay’s use of repetition: at 11:57 a young woman tries to seduce a boy; at 1:19 they reappear, sleeping in separate beds; what has passed between them? It was impossible not to speculate on what had transpired in the interval, in that length of fictional time synchronized with nonfictional duration, the beating of a compound heart.

Scores of people left the theater after midnight. We remained for exactly three hours; strangely, even though you knew you’d walk out on the film eventually, it felt disrespectful to leave in the middle of an hour. I would return at different times in subsequent days and come to love how, as you spend time with the video, you develop a sense of something like the circadian clock of genre: the hour of 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. — rumored to be the first hour Marclay had completed because there are so many scenes of people “watching the clock” in that interval — was dominated by actors leaving work; around noon you could expect an uptick in westerns, in shoot-outs; etc. Marclay had formed a supragenre that made visible our collective, unconscious sense of the rhythms of the day — when we expect to kill or fall in love or clean ourselves or eat or fuck or check our watch and yawn.

At some point in the second hour of watching with Alex, I noticed she had drifted off, and I surreptitiously checked the time on my phone. Half an hour or so later, I did it again, realizing only then that the gesture was absurd: I was looking away from a clock to a clock. I was a little embarrassed to realize how ingrained this habit of distraction was for me, but decided it revealed something important about the video that I’d forgotten it was telling me the time.

I’d heard The Clock described as the ultimate collapse of fictional time into real time, a work designed to obliterate the distance between art and life, fantasy and reality. But part of why I looked at my phone was because that distance hadn’t been collapsed for me at all; while the duration of a real minute and The Clock’s minute were mathematically indistinguishable, they were nevertheless minutes from different worlds. I watched time in The Clock, but wasn’t in it, or I was experiencing time as such, not just having experiences through it as a medium. As I made and unmade a variety of overlapping narratives out of its found footage, I felt acutely how many different days could be built out of a day, felt more possibility than determinism, the utopian glimmer of fiction. When I looked at my watch to see a unit of measure identical to the one displayed on the screen, I was indicating that a distance remained between art and the mundane. Everything will be as it is now—the room, the baby, the clothes, the minutes—just a little different.

Now I think it was while looking from The Clock to my cell phone and back again that I decided to write more fiction — something I’d promised my poet friends I wasn’t going to do — and over the next week I began to work on a story, outlining much of it in my notebook while sitting in the theater. The story would involve a series of transpositions: I would shift my medical problem to another part of the body; replace astereognosis with another disorder, displace Alex’s oral surgery. I would change names: Alex would become Liza, which she’d told me once had been her mother’s second choice; Alena would become Hannah; Sharon I’d change to Mary, Jon to Josh; Dr. Andrews to Dr. Roberts, etc. Instead of becoming a literary executor, and so confronting the tension between biological and textual mortality through that obligation, the protagonist — a version of myself; I’d call him “the author”—would be approached by a university about selling his papers. Just like the French writer in the story Bernard had recounted the night I met his daughter, “the author” would plan to fabricate his correspondence. That’s the prose I generated first, the kernel of the work, and I believed it was viable. I wrote:

The author would go back later and make sure he wasn’t overusing the signature words of the author he was imitating … He would reread the one or two matter-of-fact messages they had actually exchanged, look again at his Selected Letters.

All this was changing as the technology changed. If an author left no electronic archive, so there was no record of what e-mails you might have sent to him or her, and if you did receive some e-mails from the author in question, and so possessed the relevant address, a plausible sense of when the message might have been sent, then you could write yourself from the backdated vantage of the dead, claim to have printed it out years ago.

Here’s a message from a novelist you did in fact meet, verifiably had dinner with around some Festschrift, recounting and expanding on the talk you never had about your novel, then in an embryonic stage. Here a critic responds at length to the input on an essay you never gave. Then the debates with poets over edits you might have suggested, leading some major writers to make some major statements.

It was not only the historical moment in which the technological transition made such forgery practicable, he reasoned, but it was also the moment in which, if one got caught, the crime could largely be described as gestural, falling somewhere between performance art and political protest. Especially if one donated whatever money the library paid to, say, the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street.

The story came quickly, almost alarmingly so — I had a draft finished within a month — and I sent it to my agent, who sent it to The New Yorker, which had expressed interest to her about my writing after the unexpected critical success of my first novel. To my surprise, they wanted it, but they also wanted a major cut: to get rid of the stuff about the fabricated correspondence, the section I considered the story’s core. The editors argued it overwhelmed what was otherwise an elegant meditation on art, time, mortality, and the strange nature of literary reception. But I wasn’t going to be one of those people, I insisted to myself, who lets The New Yorker standardize his work; I wasn’t going to make a cut whose primary motivation was, on some level, the story’s marketability. Although I’d felt a small frisson when The New Yorker had accepted it — my parents would be exceedingly proud of me — and although I wanted the approximately eight thousand dollars, I also relished the opportunity to turn The New Yorker down, to be able to tell the story of my story as evidence of my vanguard credibility. I wrote a hasty and, I later realized, typo-filled message to the magazine, cc’ing my agent, explaining that I was withdrawing the piece, that the change they were demanding — I would later realize they’d never even implied it was an ultimatum — violated the integrity of my writing.

I shared the story and this backstory with Natali during one of my visits to the hospital. While Bernard slept beside us, she read it and said simply: I think they’re right about the edit. I showed it to another writer friend and he agreed. Then I showed it to my parents, who thought I was crazy; what the editors were asking for was clearly an improvement.

Finally I showed it to Alex. Her reaction to the piece in which she figured was understandably complicated — Alex wanted to be left out of my fiction — but about the fabrication question, she had no doubt: the story was better without it. Since I’d stolen the wisdom tooth trouble from her life and put it in the story, she joked, maybe I should pay what insurance wouldn’t cover with money from the magazine, assuming they’d take me back. I saw the joke as an opportunity and I begged her to let me do just that: Then I can tell myself I’m apologizing to them to help a friend, I explained, not because I’m an idiot; besides, it’s a nice crossing of reality and fiction, which is what the story is about in the first place. She was quiet for a minute and then said, “No way,” but in a manner we both knew was just a moment in the dialectic of her yes.

The next day my agent helped me word my mea culpa, no doubt back-channeling with the editors about how all of this was new to me, that I was mainly a poet unused to being edited, that my apparent impertinence was the issue of inexperience, etc. The magazine was gracious and decided to run the revised story quickly — so quickly, in fact, that, a few weeks later, I could read it in the doctor’s office while I waited for Alex to emerge from her extractions.