10:04: A Novel

THREE

I arrived at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in a cold sweat, could actually feel the urea and salts emerging from my underarms and trickling down my ribs. I had been worrying about this appointment for well over a month — ever since it had been scheduled — had worried about it so much and so vocally that Andrews had offered to medicate me; every few minutes riding the train uptown, I patted the inside pocket of my coat to confirm the presence of the pill.

The glass doors slid open to admit me and I walked through the atrium past the Starbucks kiosk to the elevators, which I took to the seventh floor. The reception area into which I emerged was unusually luxurious, more like what I imagined the office of a major executive would look like than what I’d come to expect from medical suites. The series of abstract prints on the wall — faint grids in different colors, Agnes Martin knockoffs — was merely anodyne, but the framing was museum-quality. The receptionist I approached had an easy smile I felt was a little misplaced — the smile of a woman who sold expensive jewelry, as if I were shopping for an engagement ring; there was nothing medical about it. I gave her my name and she entered it into a computer and then printed out a form she told me to take to the floor above me; “They’ll take care of you there.”

Before I pressed the up button on the elevator, I saw my reflection in the shiny metal doors and said to myself, maybe even mouthed some of the words: “Take the elevator back down and leave this building and never return; you don’t have to do this.” But of course I took the elevator up to what was a much more conventional medical floor, where lab work was done and patients were physically examined, not just consulted about options and their pricing in and out of network.

The receptionist I handed my form to was a young woman — she looked eighteen to me, though surely she was older — who could have been a swimsuit model or hired to dance in a club in the background of a music video. She was not unusually beautiful, but her proportions, visible through her black pantsuit even while she sat, were consistent with normative male fantasy. I thought it was inappropriate to cast her in this role, whoever in human resources was doing the casting, but then felt as awkward about that thought as I did about automatically taking in the dimensions of her body. I found it difficult to meet her eyes and I tried not to blush. To my knowledge, I almost never blush, almost never visibly redden from embarrassment or shame, but trying not to blush is a distinct, involuntary activity for me: pressing, for whatever reason, my tongue against the roof of my mouth, clenching my jaw, shortening my breath — which might, it has occurred to me, cause me to redden just perceptibly. I handed the receptionist the credit card; my exorbitantly priced insurance didn’t cover anything.

She gave me a second piece of paper to which she had stapled my receipt and told me to wait until I was called. I managed to look her in the eyes as I thanked her, but the knowledge in hers was terrible, as if to say: Take a good look, pervert. When I sat down, I took the pill from my pocket and was about to ingest it, but then wondered — although it would be unlike Andrews to make this kind of mistake — if it might alter the sample. I was turning it over in my fingers when a nurse called my name and asked me to follow her.

She led me to a separate room and said on its threshold that the only thing I needed to remember was to wash my hands carefully and not to touch anything that could be potentially contaminating. She handed me a small plastic container labeled with my name and various numbers and repeated slowly, as though to a man-child: Make sure your hands are very clean, or you’ll have to do it over, and then told me what to do with the container when I finished. She smiled at me without any embarrassment or awkwardness, a charity, and disappeared around the corner. I entered the room and shut the door behind me.

On the one hand I was being medicalized, pathologized, broken into my parts, each granted a terrible autonomy; on the other hand I felt trace amounts of what could only be described as excitement, reminiscent of the first time Daniel lent me, at age eleven, a Playboy; the combination made me a little nauseated.

I hung my coat on the metal coat hanger and looked around me. In the middle of the room was something like a dentist’s chair, peach-colored plastic upholstery and a strip of medical paper down its middle that the good nurse must replace between patrons, patients; I was not sitting in that chair. In front of the chair was a television with a DVD menu on the screen. Wireless headphones I resolved not to use were on top of the TV. Toward the back of the room was a sink with a dispenser of liquid soap and a little placard reminding me to wash my hands thoroughly. On the back wall was a contraption, vaguely reminiscent of one of those drive-through bank deposit boxes, where I could submit the container, transferring it to technicians on the other side of the wall, who could thereby receive it without our having to face one another. Bank, medical office, pornographic theater — it was a supra-institution. It took me a minute to realize I could hear voices through the wall, make them out clearly: a woman was talking about her daughter’s boyfriend, how he was a keeper; a man was on the phone ordering lunch in Spanish, something with white rice, black beans. If I could hear them, surely they could hear me; I resolved to use the headphones.

I went to the sink and washed my hands, then washed them again. Then I walked to the chair, took the remote control from the armrest, and started looking at the menu on the screen. The TV was hooked up to some sort of service where you could select from a huge number of movie titles organized alphabetically, but also by ethnicity: Asian Anal Adventures, Asian Persuasion, Asian Oral Fetish, etc.; Black Anal Adventures, Black Blowjobs, Black Cumshot Orgy, etc., although after the ethnically specific menu you had the option of searching compilations by activity alone: Best of whatever. The Picture of Sasha Grey flashed before me. I was surprised by the extremity of some of the videos, and surprised to see them indexed racially; I guess I had expected magazines. I was embarrassed to choose, but was not in a position to deny that audiovisual assistance would expedite the process. I looked down at the remote control to see how it worked, exactly, and then remembered: I’m not supposed to touch anything that could contaminate the sample. What could be more contaminating than this remote control, which had been in how many sullied hands?

After a few seconds of panicky deliberation, I just pressed play — which started Asian Anal Adventures, even though that’s not at all my thing; not choosing seemed less objectionable somehow than having to express a positive preference among the available categories — and put the remote control and the plastic container down and walked back to the sink and washed my hands. Then I returned to the screen and undid my jeans and was about to get the whole thing going when I realized my pants were even more potentially contaminating: I’d been on the subway for an hour; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laundered the things. I shuffled back to the sink with my pants and underwear around my ankles and began to worry about how long I was taking, if there was a time limit, if the nurse was going to knock on the door at some point and ask me how it was going or tell me it was the next patient’s turn. I did the shuffle back to the screen and hurriedly donned the headphones, but then it occurred to me: contact with the headphones was no different than contact with the remote control. I thought about putting an end to this increasingly Beckettian drama and just trying to go on, but then I imagined getting the call that the sample wasn’t usable, and so again shuffled — now wearing the headphones, now hearing the shrieks and groans of the adventurers — back to the sink to wash my hands once more. Above the sink there was mercifully no mirror.

Why, I wondered as I dispensed yet more soap, would my hands compromise the sample anyway; it’s not as though I’m going to be touching the actual sperm; surely I can just be careful not to introduce my hand in any deleterious way. At this point it was academic: I was finally in a position to proceed directly from cleansing my hands to deploying them — after basically hopping back to the console — onanistically.

It was time to perform, a performance about which I had more anxiety than any actual sexual encounter, which was why Andrews had given me Viagra, which, at that moment, I wished I’d taken. It was too late now; he said it could require hours to take effect and, besides, there was my fear, probably ridiculous, of some sort of chemical contamination. And wasn’t it bad for people with cardiac conditions; had he failed to think of that as well? Doesn’t it induce vasodilation? I felt angry, like an angry old man. But rage at Andrews wasn’t going to help my situation — his face (or his tactically inoffensive abstract painting) wasn’t the right mental image to be conjuring now.

I dreaded the prospect of abandoning the masturbatorium and having to tell the nurse after twenty minutes of self-pollution that I just couldn’t do it, but that dread was of course nothing compared to telling Alex. What would happen then? I would either have to reschedule, the pressure doubled, or back out of the whole project, straining, if not ruining, our friendship, or be forced to have them extract it through some horrible procedure, assuming that’s something they can do. For six weeks I’d talked about my performance anxiety with Jon and Sharon and Alena and they’d laughed at me, assured me I’d be fine. For several days before providing the sample, abstinence was required; during that period Alena, through a carefully calculated configuration of double entendres and supposedly incidental contact and theatrical smoking, had tried to ensure that I was, as she put it, “primed.”

And, thankfully, I was: the whole thing was over with almost comical speed, the brief experience dominated by the involuntary afterimage of the young receptionist, as the receptionist had, I believed, foreseen. The relief was profound. I dressed and delivered the sample to the other side of the wall and fled the institution as quickly as possible.

Walking west with the park in mind, I tried to imagine the process I’d begun: the lab would evaluate volume, liquefaction time, count, morphology, motility, etc., and report back to me about my viability as a donor. The fertility specialist Alex had consulted had suggested we just skip this part, that, since sperm was specially prepared for IUI, and since we had no particular reason to believe my sperm was abnormal, excepting the fact that I’d never to my knowledge impregnated anyone despite high-risk behavior, we should just proceed to IUI and see if it was successful. But I hadn’t really decided if I was prepared to be a donor or a father, especially since Alex and I were still trying to figure out how much I’d be merely the former or the latter, and this test seemed like it might help the conversation, either by ending it (if my sperm was so dysfunctional as to require male fertility treatments I wasn’t willing to do, for example, or as to render IUI unbearably protracted — it only had around a 10 percent success rate in any particular instance to begin with, given Alex’s age), or by demystifying some of the steps. Trivial as it may sound, I had been so allergic to the idea of actually delivering the sperm that I thought forcing myself to go through the semen analysis would rob that dimension of the process of its psychological significance. I didn’t want to say no to Alex just because I couldn’t face the prospect of jacking off to porn in a medical office. While I tried to figure out if I thought completing the test had actually changed any part of my thinking, I was almost struck by a downtown bus at the intersection of Sixty-eighth and Lexington.

Eventually I reached the park and walked into it only far enough to find a bench and sit down and watch the nannies, all of whom were black or brown, push around white kids in expensive strollers. I imagined trying to explain all of this to a future child, whom I pictured as Alex’s second cousin: “Your mother and I loved each other, but not in the way that makes a baby, so we went to a place where they took part of me and then put it in part of her and that made you.” That sounded okay. I pictured myself beside her bed, stroking her brown hair. “Really,” I would explain, “everyone gets help making a baby, it’s never just a mom and dad, because everybody depends on everybody else. Just think of this apartment where we are now,” I’d say — although I probably wouldn’t live in the same apartment as the child. “Where did the wood come from and the nails and the paint? Who planted the trees and cut them down and shipped the wood and built the apartment, who paid for those things and how did the workers learn their skills and where did the money come from, and so on?” I could have that conversation, I assured myself, as I watched a Boston terrier (originally bred for hunting rats in garment factories, only later bred for companionship) tree a squirrel: I’ll narrate our mode of reproduction as a version of “It takes a village.” But then my voice went on speaking to the child without my permission: “So your dad watched a video of young women whose families hailed from the world’s most populous continent get sodomized for money and emptied his sperm into a cup he paid a bunch of people to wash and shoot into your mom through a tube.”

“Wasn’t the tube cold?” I heard in Alex’s cousin’s voice.

“You’d have to ask her.”

“Why didn’t you two just make love?”

“Because that would have been bizarre.”

“Can IUI be used for gender selection?” Now she sounded like a child actress.

“Sperm can be washed or spun to increase the odds of having male or female offspring, but we didn’t do that, sweetie; we wanted it to be a surprise.”

“How much does IUI typically cost?”

“Great question. According to the rate sheet, and because they recommended some injectable medications for your mom, and because we did some ultrasounds and blood work, probably five thousand a pop.” I regretted saying, even though I hadn’t said anything, “a pop.”

“What was the annual per capita gross national income of China at the time of ejaculation?”

“Four thousand nine hundred and forty U.S. dollars, but I think that’s an unreliable measure of quality of life and I’d dispute the relevance of the fact, Camila.” I had always liked the name Camila.

“What if you have to do IVF to make me?”

“That’s more like ten thousand.”

“Average annual cost of a baby in New York?”

“Between twenty and thirty thousand a year for the first two years, but we’re going to live lightly.”

“After that?”

“I don’t know. Ask your phone.” A teenager had sat down on the bench beside me and was texting; I absorbed her into the hypothetical interrogation.

“How are you going to pay for all of this?” she asked me.

“On the strength of my New Yorker story. You’re overfocused on the money, Rose.” It was my maternal grandmother’s name.

“Is that why you’ve exchanged a modernist valorization of difficulty as a mode of resistance to the market for the fantasy of coeval readership?”

“Art has to offer something other than stylized despair.”

“Are you projecting your artistic ambition onto me?”

“So what if I am?”

“Why didn’t Mom just adopt?”

“Ask your mother. I guess because that’s equally or more ethically complicated most of the time and because, independent of culturally specific pressures, some women experience a biological demand.”

“Why reproduce if you believe the world is ending?”

“Because the world is always ending for each of us and if one begins to withdraw from the possibilities of experience, then no one would take any of the risks involved with love. And love has to be harnessed by the political. Ultimately what’s ending is a mode.”

“Can you imagine the world if and when I’m twenty? Thirty? Forty?”

I could not. I hoped my sperm was useless.

“Cutting and other forms of self-harm and parasuicidal behavior are endemic in my age group.” I pictured the teenager pulling up her sleeve, showing me the red crosshatching.

“You’re misusing endemic.”

“The average cost for a month of inpatient treatment is thirty thousand.” This observation was in Dr. Andrews’s voice.

“She will be surrounded by love and support.”

“How will you work out your level of involvement so that neither I nor Mom resents you for it?” The teen.

“As we go along.”

The conversation didn’t stop so much as recede beneath the threshold of perceptibility. Maybe to distance myself from the morning’s anxiety, I removed the blue pill from the inside pocket of my coat and tried to crush it, which I couldn’t do, but with two hands I succeeded in breaking it in half. I absentmindedly tossed the halves onto the sidewalk in front of me, at which point a nearby pigeon approached it, no doubt accustomed to being fed by tourists from this bench. What is the effect of sildenafil citrate on stout-bodied passerines? I stood and tried to shoo the bird away; it startled, but then turned back and quickly ate a half before I managed to intervene.

* * *

Two days after providing a sample of my reproductive cells for analysis, I was in the basement of the Park Slope Food Coop bagging the dried flesh of a tropical stone fruit, trying not to listen to one of my louder coworkers as she explained her decision to pull her first-grader out of a local public school and, despite the cost and the elaborate application process, place him in a well-known private one.

The Park Slope Food Coop is the oldest and largest active food cooperative in the country, as they tell you at orientation. Every able-bodied adult member works at the co-op for two hours and forty-five minutes every four weeks. In exchange you get to shop at a store with less of a markup than a normal supermarket’s; prices are kept down because labor is contributed by members; nobody is extracting profit. Most of the goods are environmentally friendly, at least comparatively, and, whenever possible, locally sourced. Alex had been a member when I moved to Brooklyn and it wasn’t too far from my apartment so I’d joined. Despite being frequently suspended for missing shifts while traveling, and despite complaining all the while about the self-righteousness of its members, its organizational idiocy, and the length of its checkout lines, I’d remained a member. Indeed, for most of the members I knew except Alex, who rarely complained about anything (“You do my complaining for me”), insulting the co-op was a mode of participation in its culture. Complaining indicated you weren’t foolish enough to believe that belonging to the co-op made you meaningfully less of a node in a capitalist network, that you understood the co-op’s population was largely made up of gentrifiers of one sort or another, and so on. If you acknowledged to a nonmember that you were part of the co-op, you then hurried to distinguish yourself from the zealots who, while probably holding investments in Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland in their 401(k)’s, looked down with a mixture of pity and rage at those who’d shop at Union Market or Key Food. Worse: The New York Times had run an exposé about certain members sending their nannies to do their shifts, although the accuracy of the reporting was disputed. The woman now holding forth about her child’s schooling was almost certainly a zealot.

And yet, although I insulted it constantly, and although my cooking was at best inept, I didn’t think the co-op was morally trivial. I liked having the money I spent on food and household goods go to an institution that made labor shared and visible and that you could usually trust to carry products that weren’t the issue of openly evil conglomerates. The produce was largely free of poison. The co-op helped run a soup kitchen. When a homeless shelter in the neighborhood burned down, “we”—at orientation they taught you to utilize the first-person plural while talking about the co-op — donated the money to rebuild it.

I worked in what was known as “food processing” on every fourth Thursday night: in the basement of the co-op, I, along with the other members of my “squad,” bagged and weighed and priced dry goods and olives; we cut and wrapped and priced a variety of cheeses, although I tended to avoid the cheese, as it required some minimum of skill. In general the work was simple: the boxes of bulk food were organized on shelves in the basement. If dried mangoes were needed upstairs, you found the ten-pound box, opened it with a box cutter, and portioned the fruit into small plastic bags you then tied and weighed on a scale that printed the individual labels. Then you took the food upstairs and restocked the shelves on the shopping floor. You were required to wear an apron and a bandanna in addition to your plastic gloves. Open-toed shoes were prohibited, but I’d never owned a pair of open-toed shoes. For better or for worse, most people were sociable and voluble, like the woman talking now — this seemed to make the shift go faster for my comrades; for me, the talk often slowed time down.

“It just wasn’t the right learning environment for Lucas. The teachers really tried and we believe in public education, but a lot of the other kids were just out of control.”

The man working on bagging chamomile tea immediately beside her felt obliged to say, “Right.”

“Obviously it’s not the kids’ fault. A lot of them are coming from homes—” The woman who was helping me bag mangoes, Noor, with whom I was friendly, tensed up a little in expectation of an offensive predicate.

“—well, they’re drinking soda and eating junk food all the time. Of course they can’t concentrate.”

“Right,” the man said, maybe relieved her sentence hadn’t taken a turn for the worse.

“They’re on some kind of chemical high. Their food is full of who knows what hormones. They can’t be expected to learn or respect other kids who are trying to learn.”

“Sure.”

It was the kind of exchange, although exchange isn’t really the word, with which I’d grown familiar, a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were — for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren’t really their fault — compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside. Your child, who had never so much as sipped a high-fructose carbonated beverage containing phosphoric acid and E150d, was a more sensitive instrument: purer, smarter, free of violence. This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism — ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc. — in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality. It allowed you to redescribe caring for your own genetic material — feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice — as altruism: it’s not just good for Lucas, it’s good for the planet. But from those who out of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children’s digestive tracts to know deep-fried, mechanically processed chicken, those who happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.

Noor interrupted my reverie of disdain: “Remind me, do you have kids?”

“No.” Noor was bagging the mangoes. I was tying, weighing, and labeling the bags.

“I couldn’t,” she said, “deal with navigating New York schools.”

How would Alex, or Alex and I, deal with it, if we reproduced? If I had enough money for private school, was I sure I wouldn’t be tempted? I was eager to change the subject. “Did you eat junk food growing up?”

“Never in the house, but with my friends — all the time.”

“What did you eat at home?” Noor was from Boston and was in graduate school now, I’d learned on our previous shift.

“Lebanese food. My dad did all the cooking.”

“He was from Lebanon?”

“Beirut. Left during the civil war.”

“And your mom?” I realized I’d been labeling the mangoes incorrectly, had entered the wrong code into the electric scale. I had to do them over.

“She was from Boston. My family on that side is Russian, Jewish, but I never knew those grandparents.”

“My girlfriend’s mom is Lebanese,” I said for some reason, perhaps to distance myself mentally from Alex and the topic of fertilization. Alena’s mother was also from Beirut, but who knew if Alena was my girlfriend. “Do you still have a lot of family in Lebanon?”

She paused. “It’s a long story. I have a kind of complicated family.”

“We have more than two hours,” I exclaimed with mock desperation, but, because Noor looked upset, or at least grave, I moved on quickly: “Nobody in my family could cook, so we—” But then she did begin to speak, both of us keeping our eyes on our work. She spoke quietly enough that we wouldn’t be overheard by the others, who were now discussing the merits of Quaker pedagogy.

My dad died three years ago from a heart attack and his family is largely still in Beirut, Noor said, although not in these words. I’ve always thought of myself as connected to them, even though I barely saw them growing up. My dad had a really strong sense of Lebanese identity and I did too. They tried to raise me bilingually. He was a very secular Muslim, as much a Marxist as anything else, and one of his parents had been Christian, but in the U.S., maybe as a reaction against all the racism and ignorance, he decided to join a mosque in Boston — really it was more of a cultural center than a mosque. I grew up going there a lot and developed a sense of difference from most of the kids I knew. In high school and then in college I was active in Middle Eastern political causes and majored in Middle Eastern studies at BU. I was involved with the BU Arab Student Association, although that could be complicated sometimes since my mom’s family was Jewish, even if not at all religious, and regardless, it was often tense with my mom because she felt I was only interested in my dad’s history, had identified with him at her expense. Anyway, about six months after my dad died, my mom started dating—dating was the word she used — an old friend of hers named Stephen, some kind of physicist at MIT, who I’d always known a little because we’d played with his kids occasionally when we were younger; he’d since been divorced. My mom told my brother and me about Stephen at dinner one night, said she knew it was going to be hard for us, but hoped we’d understand. We said we understood, although we were both weirded out, and my brother in particular was furious it was so soon, although I think he only expressed his fury to me.

I wasn’t living at home, Noor said, I was a senior in college and lived with friends, so I didn’t see Stephen very much, but my brother said Stephen was coming around all the time, and my brother and I were both pretty upset at the speed. We were both suspicious — how could we not be? — that their romance had a history, that it must have started when my dad was still alive. I told my brother that the relationship was probably just mom’s way of trying to deal with her grief, probably wasn’t serious, but every time I talked to my mom she seemed to be with Stephen. Well, about a year after my dad died I was planning to go to Egypt for three months because I’d been offered this fellowship at the American University in Cairo for recent Arab-American graduates, and I was also planning to visit Lebanon. A few days before my flight my mom called me and asked if I could meet her for lunch. It was immediately obvious to me from her tone that she was going to tell me she was remarrying, I knew it right away, and I knew she wanted to tell me in a public place because she thought it might temper my initial reaction, and then she would ask that I help her tell my brother, who was going to freak. I was surprised that I wasn’t angry, maybe in part because my parents had so clearly been estranged in the last years of their marriage, but I felt sad and a little sick and we met at some overpriced French place in the Back Bay.

At this point in Noor’s story, a voice came over the PA asking if dried mangoes were out of stock—“are we out of dried mangoes?”—or could somebody from food processing bring some up. This was unavoidably my job, no matter how reluctant I was to interrupt her narrative. I told Noor I would be right back, made a kind of pouch out of my apron that I filled with some of the small, labeled bags, and took them upstairs. As always, I was embarrassed to emerge into the semipublic space of the shopping floor with a bandanna in my hair and sporting a pastel apron. The aisles were mobbed — the co-op had fifteen thousand active members and a shopping area of six thousand square feet, not to mention a checkout system of radical, willful inefficiency — and I had to fight my way to the bulk section, where I deposited the mangoes. I didn’t get cell phone service in the basement, and now my phone vibrated in my back pocket, indicating I’d received a text, a one-word query from Alex: “Results?”

Back in the basement I saw another member had usurped my place beside Noor; he must have finished whatever he was bagging and then taken over my job. I was usually quiet and accommodating in the co-op, however critical my internal monologue, but this time I said: Excuse me, but I’d like to have my job back so I can continue my conversation with Noor. He said sure without a trace of resentment, and I resumed tying, labeling, weighing. The problem was that my butting in had drawn a few other members’ attention, and Noor wasn’t going to resume her story if they were listening. We worked in silence, which communicated to others that we knew they were listening, which further piqued their interest. An excruciating ten minutes passed in which Noor was quiet and I imagined possible conclusions to her story: Stephen turned out to be a virulent Islamophobe, and/or he worked for the FBI and tried to use her to infiltrate the BU Arab Student Association, or maybe the Lebanese part of her family had cut everybody off out of rage that her mom had plans to remarry.

When our coworkers had finally struck up their own conversations and forgotten about us, Noor picked up her narrative without my having to ask: So there we were at this French restaurant. As soon as the waiter had taken our order, Noor said to me, I said to my mom: You’re going to marry Stephen, aren’t you? and she laughed nervously and said that Stephen and she had in fact discussed marriage, that maybe that could happen someday, but that wasn’t why she had asked me to lunch, at which point I assumed that she was going to tell me she had cancer or something. But instead she said to me: Noor, your father and I made a decision when you were a baby and I’ve always wondered if it was the right decision but your father was sure and insisted that we had an agreement but since he’s died I’ve been thinking it over and now I feel that we were wrong. Your father, my mom said to me, Noor said, although not exactly in these words, was not your biological father. I got pregnant by another man but your father and I were in love and he wanted a child and so we got married, deciding that we would raise you as our child and that’s what we did and your father as you know loved you tremendously and thought of you as his own child always. There had been so much turmoil and cutoff and exile in his family I just think we wanted you to feel like you were fully our child, fully in your home. We fought a lot when you were in elementary school because I regretted not telling you, but at that point his position was that it was too late even if we had initially been wrong because you would feel betrayed and confused and it would be psychologically damaging. But in the last year I have been thinking about this constantly, Noor’s mother said to her, and thinking about my own mortality, and I just feel I have to tell you however disturbing this news might be. Also, I’ve been in therapy with someone who has helped me understand that telling you this is important for our own relationship. What I want to be clear about is that your father loved you as much as any father could love a daughter and whatever decision we made, rightly or wrongly, we made out of a sense of what would be best for you. She’d clearly memorized, Noor said to me, the last part of her speech.

“Jesus,” I said.

It gets crazier, Noor said, smiling. A waiter put a salad in front of me and I remember staring into the salad trying to take in what my mom had said as she waited for me to respond. I remember we were both sitting there in silence not eating, waiting for my response to form. I felt like I was bracing for some impact because I simply couldn’t feel anything and then my mom went on: Noor, she said, now more quietly, I imagine your first question is going to be who your biological father is — which actually was not my first question, Noor said to me — and part of why I wanted to tell you all of this, part of why it felt absolutely necessary, and part of why I’ve been so involved again, I think, with Stephen—

“Jesus,” I repeated. I was working as slowly as possible so as not to let finishing the mangoes interrupt the story again. Noor slowed down the rhythm of her work along with me, which led to her slowing down the story.

Right, Noor said to me. It’s because, my mom said, Stephen is your real dad, and then corrected herself: your biological father. I had dated him before I met your father and although it was clear to both of us that our relationship, at least our romantic relationship, wasn’t going to last, and even though we were being careful, I got pregnant and your father, I mean Nawaf — Nawaf was the name of the man I considered my father, Noor said to me, and it was horrible to hear my mom say his name, since she’d always said “your father” or “dad”—Nawaf wanted a child badly, Noor’s mother said to her, and we were falling in love and so we decided to get married and have a family. We told Stephen our plan and Stephen at that point in his life didn’t want anything to do with a child and he said he would respect our decision and that he wouldn’t ever say anything. And Stephen, as you know, eventually had his own family. It’s funny, Noor said to me, I still didn’t feel anything; I put my hands on the table on either side of my plate and I remember waiting and waiting for the impact and the only thing that happened is my hands seemed to fade.

“Fade?”

“I mean they started to pale,” Noor said, raising her gloved hands from her work as if to show me. “I had always thought of my skin as dark because my father’s skin was dark, because I took after him, because I was Arab-American, and as I sat there looking at my hands, without feeling anything, it was like I could see my skin whitening a little, felt color draining from my body, which it probably was because I was in shock, but I mean I started seeing my own body differently, starting with my hands.”

“What did you say to your mom?” I asked. Noor was olive-skinned. Did she look different to me now than earlier in our shift?

“I said that I had to go to the bathroom and just walked right out of the restaurant. It was kind of funny,” Noor laughed, “that I told her I had to go to the bathroom, since she could just see me walk right out of the front door, it wasn’t like she thought I was coming back. Anyway”—Noor’s tone shifted a little, indicating she was going to draw her story to a close—“you had asked me about my family in Lebanon — it’s complicated now because I don’t know if I can call them my family, exactly.”

“Do they know the story?” I asked.

“Not unless my dad told them, which I can’t imagine him doing. My mom doesn’t think so.”

“Did you see them when you were living in Cairo?”

“I didn’t end up going anywhere. I spiraled into a big depression and when I finally climbed out of it I applied to grad school and moved here.”

“Do you”—I wasn’t sure how to put the question—“do you still consider yourself Arab-American?”

“When I’m asked, I say that my adoptive father was Lebanese. Which I guess is true. I still believe all the things that I believed; it hasn’t changed my sense of any of the causes. But my right to care about the causes, my right to have this name and speak the language and cook the food and sing the songs and be part of the struggles or whatever — all of that has changed, is still in the process of changing, whether or not it should. Like, somebody wanted me to give a talk at Zuccotti Park about Occupy’s relation to the Arab Spring and I didn’t feel qualified, so I said no. There are a lot of people I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell because, even if they don’t want to, they’ll treat me differently—I treat me differently.”

“I can’t imagine what any of this must have felt like, must feel like,” I said. I wanted to say that it’s not the sperm donor that matters, that the real father is the man who loved and raised her, but before I could figure out how to articulate my position tactfully, I was distracted by a vision of Alex in the future, falling in love with someone, maybe moving out of the city with “our” child. Would I be thought of as the father? Just a donor? Not at all?

Since she’d fallen quiet, and I felt I should fill the silence, I opted to say something vague about the connection between storytelling and manual labor, how the latter facilitates the former, the work creating a shared perceptual pattern, but the way she nodded indicated she’d ignored me.

“A lot of the time I still feel like I’m waiting for the impact, feel the same way I felt at the restaurant. My mom and Stephen live together now, by the way. They didn’t marry. We’re all trying to work things out. What I would say is that it’s a little like — have you ever kept talking to somebody on your cell phone not realizing the call was dropped, gone on and on and then felt a little embarrassed?”

I said that I had.

“I have a friend who was really wronged by his older brother but had never confronted him about it. The details don’t matter. But one day he got the courage to do it, to confront him on the phone. He’d been building up the courage for years. And he called his brother up and he said: I just want you to listen. I don’t want you to say a word, just listen. And his brother said okay. And my friend said what it had taken him such a long time to say, was walking back and forth in his apartment and saying what had to be said, tears streaming down his face. But then when he finished talking, only when he finished talking, he realized his brother wasn’t there, that the call had been lost. He called his brother back in a panic and he said, How much of that did you hear? and his brother said: I heard you say you wanted me to listen and then we got disconnected. And my friend for whatever reason just couldn’t do it again, couldn’t repeat what he had said. My friend told me this and told me that now he felt even more confused, more alone, because he’d had this intense experience of finally confronting his brother, and that experience changed him a little, was a major event in his life, but it never really happened: he never did confront his brother because of patchy cell phone service. It happened but it didn’t happen. It’s not nothing but it never occurred. Do you know what I mean? That’s kind of what it felt like,” Noor said, “except instead of a phone call it was my whole life up until that point that had happened but never occurred.”

Although I felt Noor had been speaking for hours, only forty-five minutes of our shift had passed. As we bagged the last of the mangoes, someone came from checkout and asked if anybody had ever worked at the register; one of the cashiers had had to go home early and they needed another person. Noor said she had done checkout before and discarded her gloves and bandanna and apron and, after smiling goodbye to me, went upstairs. I spent the rest of the shift bagging dates and trying not to look at the clock.

When my shift was over I left the co-op, buying a couple of bags of mango first, and, since it was unseasonably warm, decided to take a long walk. I walked on Union Street through Park Slope and my neighborhood of Boerum Hill and through Cobble Hill and beyond the BQE until I reached Columbia Street, a walk of a couple miles. I turned right on Columbia — the water was on my left — and walked until it became Furman and then continued a mile or so until I could descend into Brooklyn Bridge Park, which, except for a few joggers and a homeless man collecting cans in a shopping cart, was empty. I found a bench and looked at the magnificent bridge’s necklace lights in the sky and reflected in the water and imagined a future surge crashing over the iron guardrail. I thought I could smell the light, syrupy scent of cottonwoods blooming prematurely, confused by a warmth too early in the year even to be described as a false spring, but that might have been a mild olfactory hallucination triggered by memory — or, I found myself thinking, a brain tumor. Across the water, a helicopter was lowering itself carefully onto the downtown heliport by South Street, a slow strobe on its tail.

I breathed in the night air that was or was not laced with anachronistic blossoms and felt the small thrill I always felt to a lesser or greater degree when I looked at Manhattan’s skyline and the innumerable illuminated windows and the liquid sapphire and ruby of traffic on the FDR Drive and the present absence of the towers. It was a thrill that only built space produced in me, never the natural world, and only when there was an incommensurability of scale — the human dimension of the windows tiny from such distance combining but not dissolving into the larger architecture of the skyline that was the expression, the material signature, of a collective person who didn’t yet exist, a still-uninhabited second person plural to whom all the arts, even in their most intimate registers, were nevertheless addressed. Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community. Bundled debt, trace amounts of antidepressants in the municipal water, the vast arterial network of traffic, changing weather patterns of increasing severity — whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline — and instead was taken in by it — was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied, my personality dissolving into a personhood so abstract that every atom belonging to me as good belonged to Noor, the fiction of the world rearranging itself around her. If there had been a way to say it without it sounding like presumptuous co-op nonsense, I would have wanted to tell her that discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred. You might have seen me sitting there on the bench that midnight, my hair matted down from the bandanna, eating an irresponsible quantity of unsulfured mango, and having, as I projected myself into the future, a mild lacrimal event.

* * *

“It’s always a projection back into the past, the idea that there was a single moment when you decided to become a writer, or the idea that a writer is in a position to know how or why she became a writer, if it makes sense to think of it as a decision at all, but that’s why the question can be interesting, because it’s a way of asking a writer to write the fiction of her origins, of asking the poet to sing the song of the origins of song, which is one of the poet’s oldest tasks. The first poet in English whose name is known learned the art of song in a dream: Bede says that a god appeared to Caedmon and told him to sing ‘the beginning of created things.’ So while I assume I was asked to talk about how I became a writer with the idea that my experience might be of some practical use to the students here, I’m afraid I have nothing to offer in that regard. But I can tell you how, from my current vantage, I have constructed the fiction about the origins of my writing, such as it is.

“In the story I’ve been telling myself lately, I became a poet, or became interested in becoming a poet, on January twenty-eighth, 1986, at the age of seven. Like most Americans who were alive at that time, I have a clear memory of watching the space shuttle Challenger disintegrate seventy-three seconds into flight. There had been, as many of you probably know, unusual excitement about this mission because one of the seven crew members was a teacher named Christa McAuliffe. She was selected from I don’t know how many applicants to be the first teacher in space, also the first civilian, part of a program called the ‘Teacher in Space Project,’ which would be canceled a few years after her death. McAuliffe was selected in part to represent ‘ordinary Americans’ and so we ordinary Americans were particularly interested in this mission. Millions of schoolchildren were being taught curricula related to the program and were looking forward to the launch. My third-grade class wrote her letters expressing our pride and wishing her luck. I remember Mrs. Greiner trying to explain the word Godspeed.

“Can I ask you, by a show of hands, to indicate if you watched the Challenger disaster live? Right. The majority of Americans who are over thirty years old today remember watching the shuttle crumble on live TV. It’s consistently noted as the dawning of our era of live disasters and simulcast wars: O. J. Simpson fleeing in the white Bronco, the towers collapsing, etc., although there had of course been other televised traumas before. I don’t have a single friend who doesn’t remember watching it as it happened — not as a replay later when you knew the shuttle was doomed, but when you expected the shuttle to disappear successfully into space and instead saw it engulfed in a giant fireball, saw the branching plumes of smoke as its components fell back to earth. I remember a moment of incomprehension, trying to imagine that what I’d witnessed was part of the plan, some kind of timed separation of one part of the shuttle from the other, and then, with a terrible sinking feeling, realizing, even as a seven-year-old, that that wasn’t possible.

“The thing is, almost nobody saw it live: 1986 was early in the history of cable news, and although CNN carried the launch live, not that many of us just happened to be watching CNN in the middle of a workday, a school day. All other major broadcast stations had cut away before the disaster. They all came back quickly with taped replays, of course. Because of the Teacher in Space Project, NASA had arranged a satellite broadcast of the mission into television sets in many schools — and that’s how I remember seeing it, as does my older brother. I remember tears in Mrs. Greiner’s eyes and the students’ initial incomprehension, some awkward laughter. But neither of us did see it: Randolph Elementary School in Topeka wasn’t part of that broadcast. So unless you were watching CNN or were in one of the special classrooms, you didn’t witness it in the present tense.

“What many of us did watch live was Ronald Reagan’s address to the country later that night. I knew everybody in my family hated Reagan, but I could tell that even my parents were moved by the speech. At the time I didn’t know that politicians’ speeches were written by other people, but I did know — because it was discussed in my favorite movie, Back to the Future, which had come out the previous year — that Reagan had been a Hollywood actor. Reagan’s speech was written by Peggy Noonan and is widely considered one of the greatest twentieth-century presidential addresses. Noonan would go on to write a bunch of memorable Republican catchphrases—‘read my lips: no new taxes’; ‘a thousand points of light’; ‘a kinder, gentler nation.’ (She would also, by the way, become a consultant for the television program The West Wing.) The speech was only four minutes long. And the ending — one of the most famous conclusions of any presidential speech — entered my body as much as my mind: We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’

“The prosody of that last part of the sentence, the way the iambs offered both a sense of climax and of closure, the way the alternating stresses lent the speech a sense of authority and dignity, of mourning and reassurance — I felt it in my chest; the sentence pulled me into the future. I had no idea what surly meant then, and it’s an awkward modifier in this phrase, since you usually see it in contexts like ‘a surly waiter,’ meaning uncivil; a ‘surly sky’ is threatening or ominous. It’s hard for me to apply it to a ‘bond,’ although I see how it does elegiac work by helping us think of the astronauts as having escaped a threat as opposed to having succumbed to one — they are in a better place now, etc. (Bede says: ‘By his verse the minds of many were often excited to despise the world.’) But the meaning of the words was nothing compared to that first experience of poetic measure — how I felt simultaneously comforted and stirred by the rhythm and knew that all across America those rhythms were working in millions of other bodies too. Let me allow the preposterousness of what I’m saying to sink in: I think I became a poet because of Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan. The way they used poetic language to integrate a terrible event and its image back into a framework of meaning, the way the transpersonality of prosody constituted a community: poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, it seemed to me.

“Had I seen a transcript of the speech, I would have seen that ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ and ‘touch the face of God’ were in quotation marks. They weren’t Reagan’s words, and they weren’t Noonan’s: they were taken from a poem by John Gillespie Magee entitled ‘High Flight.’ Magee — an American pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force — died at nineteen in a midair collision during World War II and on his gravestone near where he died in Lincolnshire the first and last lines of ‘High Flight’ are engraved: ‘Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth / Put out my hand and touched the Face of God.’ ‘High Flight’ is a very famous poem and it’s not so surprising Noonan had it on hand. It’s the official poem, whatever that means, of the Royal Canadian Air Force. It’s on a lot of stones in military cemeteries. When I learned these facts while writing a term paper in high school, I didn’t feel as though I’d been cheated: I loved the idea that a poem written by a young man weeks before his fiery death would be quoted by a speechwriter and read by a president and felt in the chests of a million American children in the wake of another aerial disaster. It showed poetry’s power to circulate among bodies and temporalities, to transcend the contingencies of its authorship.

“While preparing these remarks, I was reading up a little on Magee — by which I mean, why hide the fact, that I was reading his Wikipedia entry — when I noted a section called ‘Sources of Inspiration for High Flight.’ ‘Sources of Inspiration’ is an understatement, a euphemism; if Magee were a student of mine and showed me a poem with this number of ‘sources,’ I’d either say it was a work of collage or an act of plagiarism. The last line of ‘High Flight’—‘And touched the face of God’—also concludes a poem by a man named Cuthbert Hicks, a poem that was published three years before Magee’s in a book called Icarus: An Anthology of the Poetry of Flight. Hicks’s poem ends: ‘For I have danced the streets of heaven, / And touched the face of God.’ What’s more, Icarus contains a poem called ‘New World’ by one G.W.M. Dunn, which includes the (unfortunate) phrase ‘on laughter-silvered wings,’ which Magee stole for the second line of ‘High Flight.’ Moreover, the penultimate line of ‘High Flight’—‘The high, untrespassed sanctity of space’—sounds an awful lot like a line from a poem in Icarus by someone known by the initials C.A.F.B., ‘Dominion over Air,’ a poem that had previously been published in the RAF College Journal: ‘Across the unpierced sanctity of space.’ Reagan’s unattributed quotation provided by Noonan was taken from a poem that was cobbled together by a young poet out of an anthology of other young poets enthralled by the power of flight, which cost many of them their lives — unless someone made this all up on Wikipedia, which is possible; I didn’t have time to track down a copy of Icarus. I find this less scandalous than beautiful: a kind of palimpsestic plagiarism that moves through bodies and time, a collective song with no single origin, or whose origin has been erased — the way a star, from our earthly perspective, is often survived by its own light.

“I want to mention another way information circulated through the country in 1986 around the Challenger disaster, and I think those of you who are more or less my age will know what I’m talking about: jokes. My brother, who is three and a half years older than I, would tell me one after another as we walked to and from Randolph Elementary that winter: Did you know that Christa McAuliffe was blue-eyed? One blew left and one blew right; What were Christa McAuliffe’s last words to her husband? You feed the kids — I’ll feed the fish; What does NASA stand for? Need Another Seven Astronauts; How do they know what shampoo Christa McAuliffe used? They found her head and shoulders. And so on: the jokes seemed to come out of nowhere, or to come from everywhere at once; like cicadas emerging from underground, they were ubiquitous for a couple of months, then disappeared. Folklorists who study what they call ‘joke cycles’ track how — particularly in times of collective anxiety — certain humorous templates get recycled, often among children. When the IRA blew up a fishing boat with Admiral Mountbatten on it in 1979, the year of my birth, people told the same dandruff joke. When an actor named Vic Morrow died in a helicopter crash in 1982, there was the joke again — head and shoulders. (Procter & Gamble developed the shampoo in the 1950s.) The Challenger joke cycle, which seemed to exist without our parents knowing, was my first experience of a kind of sinister transpersonal syntax existent in the collective unconscious, a shadow language to Reagan’s official narrative processing of the national tragedy. The anonymous jokes we were told and retold were our way of dealing with the remainder of the trauma that the elegy cycle initiated by Reagan-Noonan-Magee-Hicks-Dunn-C.A.F.B. (and who knows who else) couldn’t fully integrate into our lives.

“So at the beginning of my story of origins is a false memory of a moving image. I didn’t see it live. What I saw was a televised speech that wasn’t written by anyone, but that, through its rhythmic structure, was briefly available to everyone; the next day I went to school and another powerfully unoriginal linguistic practice enveloped me, an unsanctioned ritual of call-and-response that was, however insensitively, a form of grieving. If I had to trace my origins as a poet to a specific moment, I’d locate it there, in those modes of recycling. I make no claims for ‘High Flight’ as a poem — in fact, I think it’s a terrible poem — and Ronald Reagan I consider a mass murderer. I don’t see anything formally interesting about the Challenger jokes, I can’t find anything to celebrate there; they weren’t funny even at the time. But I wonder if we can think of them as bad forms of collectivity that can serve as figures of its real possibility: prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all. Thank you.”

I thought the applause for my remarks was enthusiastic, but I might well have been mistaken, because almost none of the questions in the ensuing conversation was addressed to me; the other two writers on the panel were much better known. I sat in a modernist leather chair on the stage at Columbia’s School of the Arts, unable to see the audience clearly because of the tungsten lights, a distinguished professor of literature moderating, and mainly listened to the distinguished authors — so distinguished I’d often thought of them as dead — talk about the origins of their genius. (Would you believe me if I said that one of the distinguished authors was the same South African man I’d observed from across the room at Bernard and Natali’s fifteen years before?) There were the usual exhortations to purity — think of the novel not as your opportunity to get rich or famous but to wrestle, in your own way, with the titans of the form — exhortations poets don’t have to make, given the economic marginality of the art, an economic marginality that soon all literature will share.

But at the elegant dinner the distinguished professor had arranged for us after the panel, all the initial small talk was about money: had you heard about X’s advance, how much money Y received when her aggressively mediocre book was optioned for film, and so on. After two quick glasses of Sancerre, the distinguished male author started holding forth, periodically tugging at his salt-and-pepper beard, his signature gesture, moving from one anecdote about a famous friend or triumphant experience to another without pausing for the possibility of response, and it was clear to everyone at the table who had any experience with men and alcohol — especially men who had won international literary prizes — that he was not going to stop talking at any point in the meal. Unless he dissects, I thought. When a young Latino man tried to refill his glass of water from a pitcher, the distinguished male author snapped in Spanish, without looking at the man, that he was having sparkling water, and then switched back into English without missing a beat. The distinguished professor was sitting immediately across from the distinguished male author and seemed more than happy to receive his logorrhea; a younger woman — probably also an English professor, but too young to be distinguished — was sitting beside him, smiling bravely, realizing her evening was doomed.

I was on the other side of the table sitting across from the distinguished female author, enjoying how the crispness and lightness of the wine had a rightness of fit with the restaurant’s pear-wood paneling and bright terrazzo floors. Seated to my right was a well-dressed graduate student about my age who was plainly starstruck by the distinguished female author, perhaps the subject of his dissertation. To the distinguished female author’s left was her husband, probably also distinguished in some way, who had the look of many husbands: eyebrows perpetually raised a little in a defensive mask of polite interest, signifying boredom. I was unsure if I should say gracias or thank you to the man refilling my water glass. Even here, where a meal for seven would cost at least a thousand dollars, much of the work was done by a swift underclass of Spanish-speaking laborers. I thought of Roberto, of his terror of Joseph Kony. I tried to picture, as I looked around the restaurant, those towns in Mexico in which almost all of the able-bodied men were gone, employed now in New York’s service industry.

“I enjoyed your story in The New Yorker,” the distinguished female author said to me. It seemed that the story — which was in part the result of my dealing with the reception of my novel — had been much more widely read than the novel itself.

“Thank you,” I said. And then I said, although I had only read one of her books and it hadn’t made much of an impression on me, “I’ve long been an admirer of your work.” She smiled with only the left side of her mouth in a way that doubted the statement; I found the expression winning.

“Do you have a brain tumor?” she asked. I was impressed less with her frankness than with the fact that it appeared she’d actually read the story.

“Not that I know of.”

“Is it part of a longer work?”

“Maybe. I think I might try to make it into a novel. A novel in which the author tries to falsify his archive, tries to fabricate all these letters — mainly e-mails — from recently dead authors that he can sell to a fancy library. That idea was the origin of the story.”

“Why does he need the money? Or is the money what he wants?”

“I think it’s more a response to his own mortality — like he’s trying to time-travel, to throw his voice, now that he’s dealing with his own fragility. It starts off as a kind of fraud but I imagine he might really get into it, might really feel like he and the dead are corresponding. Like he’s a medium. But you wouldn’t know, even at the novel’s end, if he really planned to sell the letters or if he was just working on an epistolary novel of some sort. And he could meditate on all the ways that time is monetized — archival time, a lifetime, etc.” I was trying to sound excited about the project I was describing, but felt, despite the wine, dispirited: another novel about fraudulence, no matter the bruised idealism at its core.

I ordered an appetizer of charred shrimp with puntarelle, whatever that was, and seared scallops for my main course. I was told by the waiter that my choices were excellent. The distinguished female author said she’d also have the scallops, and that felt somehow like a gesture of fellowship.

The graduate student asked the distinguished female author what she was working on. “Absolutely nothing,” she said, with utter seriousness, and, after a brief interval of silence, we all laughed. Then she said to me, “Whom would he correspond with, what dead people?” The frustrated graduate student — he didn’t want to hear more about me — and the bored husband tried to make conversation. I could hear the distinguished male author droning on in the distance.

“Primarily poets, I guess. Poets I corresponded with a little — mainly for the magazine I used to edit and that the protagonist will have edited — and whose tone I know how to imitate. Robert Creeley comes to mind.”

“I used to know Creeley pretty well.” She sipped her wine. “Would you include real correspondence, too — I mean, do you have actual letters you received that you’ll insert into the fiction?”

“No,” I said. “Almost all the correspondence about the magazine was e-mail, and I had a different e-mail account for much of that time. I never printed anything. What I do have is boring, logistical.”

“I could write you a letter for it — he could falsify one from me but I could write it.”

“That would be great.” I loved the idea.

“You should really try it.” I thought she meant try to write the novel, but: “You should try to pass off letters you’ve written to an archivist. That’s how you’d know if the fiction was plausible.” I laughed.

“I’m serious. I can put you in touch with the appraiser I worked with when I thought about selling my papers to the Beinecke.”

“I don’t have the courage,” I said. Was she serious? One waiter materialized to refill our wine, another placed my appetizer before me. Puntarella was a green with dandelion-shaped leaves.

“Well, put the stuff about the shuttle in there somehow. I liked that. When you talked about the kids watching the explosion, the nervous laughter — that reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of for a long time, but that I used to think about constantly.”

“These are amazing,” I said, referring to the shrimp, which were. “You’ve got to try a bite,” I said, and she reached across the table with her fork.

“When I was in the first year many centuries ago, our teacher, Mrs. Meacham, lost her daughter.” I guessed first grade was called “first year” in Britain. “Nobody told us, of course. We had a substitute for a few days, were informed that Mrs. Meacham was mildly ill, and then there she was again, maybe a little more distant than usual, but basically unchanged. It must have been a week or two after she’d been back, we were doing recitation exercises, and she called on me to read a passage from the textbook — I remember it as a passage from the Bible, but that seems unlikely. Anyway, she called on me and I read a few lines and then she stopped me. She looked straight at me and she said, her voice frighteningly calm: ‘You look just like my daughter, Mary.’ I remember the name clearly. The class was completely silent, we’d never heard Mrs. Meacham say anything off script. Then she said, slowly: ‘My dead daughter, Mary. You look just like my daughter, who is dead.’ She said it like it was some sort of grammatical demonstration.” The graduate student was trying to listen while still facing the husband, who was talking about a recent trip to India. Our glasses were unobtrusively refilled. “We were all shocked,” she continued. “I remember looking down at my book and feeling tremendous shame, as though I’d been reprimanded. Then I looked up at Mrs. Meacham, who was staring at me, and I heard this terrible laughter.”

“Laughter?”

“My laughter. I heard it before I recognized it as issuing from my body. It was completely involuntary. It was a profoundly nervous response. For a few seconds only I was laughing, and then everybody started laughing. Everybody in the classroom erupted into loud, hysterical laughter, and Mrs. Meacham, in tears, fled the room. And as soon as she fled the room, the laughter stopped. It stopped all at once, like a disciplined orchestra that has received a sign from the conductor. And we just sat there in silence, ashamed and confused.” She took another bite of my appetizer, which I hadn’t touched while she’d been speaking.

“And then Mrs. Meacham came back into the classroom,” she said when she’d swallowed the food, chasing it with wine, “and resumed her position at the front of the class, and called on me again to read the passage. And I read the passage and the school day continued, and then the school year, as if nothing had happened. I thought of it because you mentioned both the nervous laughter and the jokes, I suppose. Children trying to process a death.”

We drank in silence for a minute and I ate the last shrimp and asked, “Do you have kids?”

“No.”

“Did you want them?” I tried to check in with myself about whether I was mistaking my mild inebriation for an easy sympathy between us.

“At times I have, but most times I haven’t.”

“You never tried?” I’d decided I didn’t care about the sympathy-and-wine calculus.

“I had a surgery to remove a fibroid when I was in my twenties and the scarring made it impossible. That used to happen more in those days.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She shrugged. “I think on balance I didn’t want kids anyway. Do you have children?”

“No, but my best friend wants me to help her get pregnant. I mean, we’re thinking of doing IUI. But”—and this was certainly only sayable because of the wine—“my sperm is a little abnormal.” The graduate student involuntarily turned and faced me.

The distinguished female author laughed, not at all unkindly, and asked, “How so?”

“Apparently, every man has a lot of abnormal sperm — sperm that are shaped wrong or something and so aren’t going to fertilize an egg. But I have more abnormal sperm than is normal, so they said it might be harder for me to get someone pregnant.”

“But not impossible.”

“No. But it could take a really long time and my friend is already thirty-six. And they might recommend going straight to IVF, which I don’t think she’d want to do.”

“So you’re off the hook? Do you want to be off the hook?”

“I don’t know. They want me to repeat the test — this one could have been off. And regardless, I think Alex — my friend — is still going to want me to try for a while. Try the IUI thing, I mean.”

“Isn’t this all terribly expensive?”

“Yeah, and Alex is between jobs. But my agent thinks I can get a big advance for a second novel. On the strength of the story. And I teach.”

“Falsifying his archive to subsidize fertility treatments; faking the past to fund the future — I love it. I’m ready to endorse it sight unseen. What else happens?”

There was one other story I knew I would tip in, a story I’d only recently heard from Alex’s stepfather. “I’m not sure how this will fit, exactly, but the protagonist had — will have had — a relationship when he was younger that I think will form an important part of his history and relate to his inclination toward fabrication. He’s in college and falls in love with this woman, Ashley, a couple of years his senior who, about six months after they first get together, comes back from the doctor in tears and tells him she’s been diagnosed with cancer.”

“That young?”

“It happens, right? Say they find it somehow during a routine examination. At first it looks like she’s going to drop out and go live with her family during treatment, but then she decides — in part because she’s in love with him, in part because her relationship with her parents is difficult — to undergo it there, at a hospital not far from campus. This is the first romantic relationship either has ever been in where one partner really has to care for the other, not just try to impress the other; it’s his first serious relationship away from home and it’s developing in the shadow of death. There’s no surgery, but then — worse — there’s radiation and chemo; he drives her to the hospital in her car for each treatment, dropping her off because, for whatever complex of reasons, she doesn’t want him there, asks that he respect the intimacy of her relationship to her oncologist, a woman with whom she feels close. He waits in the parking lot or drives around smoking, listening to music. She loses weight, hair; there is a lot of weeping and courageous resolve; he learns to cook meals rich in bioflavonoids for immune support; he leads conversations about their future in which he insists he wants kids — which he doesn’t — in order to insist on futurity in general. Imagine a year of this,” I said to the distinguished female author. “He’s a boy pretending to be a man losing his partner; he’s making occasional love to an emaciated young woman who might have a terminal condition, while their peers are eating ecstasy and going to parties or whatever; he’s ghostwriting her papers, e-mailing her professors to request extensions, and so on. And then one night, let’s say it’s New Year’s Eve, they’re watching a movie in bed, say it’s Back to the Future, and she says to him:

“‘I want to tell you something, but I want you to promise you won’t be mad.’

“‘Okay, I promise,’ he promises.

“‘I’m not sick.’

“‘What do you mean?’

“‘I don’t have cancer,’ she says.

“‘You’re in remission,’ he confirms.

“‘No, I’ve never had it,’ she says.

“‘Go to sleep, baby.’

“‘No, I’m serious — I’ve never had it. I wanted to tell you, but things got out of hand.’

“‘Hush,’ he says, a strange feeling coming over him.

“‘I’m serious,’ she says, and something in her voice asserts that she is.

“‘And you’ve been faking your treatment,’ he says sarcastically.

“‘Yes,’ she says.

“‘You get chemo for a fake diagnosis.’

“‘No, I sit in a bathroom stall.’

“‘And Dr. Sing,’ he says, forcing himself to laugh.

“‘That was the name of my doctor in Boston.’

“‘This isn’t funny, Ashley. You sound crazy. You’ve lost thirty pounds.’

“‘I make myself throw up. I have no appetite.’

“He begins to feel desperate. ‘Your hair.’

“‘I shave it. At first I pulled out patches.’

“‘The pills.’ He’s stood up. He’s standing in his underwear by the bed.”

“‘I have Zoloft. I have Ativan,’” the distinguished author said, role-playing Ashley. “‘I have large blue vitamins I put in the old bottles.’”

“Right. He doesn’t want to ask why, to concede the possibility of her lie, but: ‘Why?’”

“‘I felt alone. Confused. Like something was wrong with me.’”

“‘The lie described my life better than the truth,’” I added. “‘Until it became a kind of truth.’” I drained my drink. “‘I would have done the chemo if they’d offered it to me.’”

The distinguished female author looked at me, perhaps trying to figure out if the story was lifted from my life. “Yes,” she decided, “you should put that in the novel.”

A rectangular plate bejeweled with diver scallops was placed before each of us simultaneously. There were tiny slices of what looked like green apple, fine pieces of what was probably an exotic celery. A new wine was being served. The distinguished female author and I were now unabashedly getting drunk. As we ate, I told her the story of my visit to the masturbatorium, and I had her cracking up; we were laughing loudly enough to draw some stares from other tables. For dessert we shared a chocolate tart and each had a large Armagnac.

Outside the restaurant in the false spring air everyone shook everyone’s hand with the particular awkwardness of people who had eaten together but had not spoken. The distinguished male author said to both of us with affected gravity that he was deeply sorry he hadn’t had the chance to ask after our current projects, which he was sure were splendid. With even greater solemnity, I responded, “I’ve long admired your work”; the distinguished female author had to cough away her laughter. Then she and I embraced one another and she said to me, “Just do it all.” When I asked, “Do what?” she just repeated, “Do it all,” and we hugged one another again and then I headed south toward the subway as she and her exhausted-looking husband hailed a cab to take to the East Side. I walked past Lincoln Center, where the well dressed were filtering out of the opera, milling about the illuminated fountain. At Fifty-ninth I took the D back to Brooklyn, repeating to myself in time with the rhythm of the train: Do it all, do it all.

When I got out of the train I walked to Alex’s apartment and rang the bell, which I almost never did — normally I’d just text her that I was downstairs — and she descended to let me in. She was a little dressed up, either because she’d had a job interview earlier that day or because she’d been on a date, and she looked particularly pretty to me in her liquid satin and Venetian wool; I said hello and focused on appearing sober as we ascended the stairs. When we got inside the apartment she asked me how the event was and, instead of answering, I wrapped my arms around her and drew her against me and kissed her on the mouth and tried to find her tongue. She pushed me away hard, laughing, coughing, wiping her mouth, and said: “What the fuck are you doing? Are you drunk?” “Of course I’m drunk,” I said, and tried to approach her again, but she held out her arms to stop me. “Seriously, what are you doing?”

“I’m doing it all,” I said meaninglessly, and then I said: “I’m not going back there to jack off into a cup every month for two years. Okay, so my sperm are a little abnormal, but it doesn’t mean I can’t get you pregnant.”

“What do you mean, your sperm are abnormal?”

“It’s normal to have abnormal sperm,” I said, as if she’d insulted me, and she laughed. I sat down on the futon and beckoned for her to join me there and thought: This is going to be fine; after all, we made out a few times in college. She did come toward me, but only to pick up one of the embroidered Indian pillows from the futon, which she swung into my face. “Go to sleep, you fucking idiot, we are not having sex.” Stunned, I opened my mouth to say a lot of things — about joke cycles, the origins of poetry, correspondences — but instead I stretched out and, placing the pillow over my head, not under it, said: Good night. Later she told me I’d kept her up by trying to recite “High Flight.”

* * *

Dear Ben, I put down, I too found it a pleasure meeting you, albeit briefly, in Providence, though in such a crowd little conversation was possible. But to put a face to the name, as they say, if they still say that, and I hope there will be another occasion soon to be in each other’s company.

I deleted the “I too,” just made it “It was a pleasure,” and started a new paragraph: I remember writing William Carlos Williams in, what, 1950, and feeling the letter was very much an intrusion. I don’t mean to imply that I’m to you what Williams was to me then, only to sympathize with, to remember how I shared, the worry you expressed that reaching out might be construed as overreaching. But it isn’t, and you’re certainly not, and anyway how else is one to find one’s contemporaries, form a company? How else to locate the writers with whom one corresponds, both in the sense that we are corresponding now, and in that more general sense of some kind of achieved accord, the way we speak of a story corresponding with the facts? You no doubt know Jack Spicer’s use of that term in all its weird possibility, how he corresponded with the dead, took dictation. And of course we have Baudelaire’s sense of “Correspondances.”

The author could go back later and make sure he wasn’t overusing Creeley’s signature words. I’d reread the one or two matter-of-fact messages we had actually exchanged, would look again at his Selected Letters.

I also recall here that letter sent in my midtwenties because I was writing like you about starting a little magazine, articulating insofar as I could its “general program,” which of course involved expressing my discontent with the magazines then current. You ask if “we need another,” a good question, but I wonder how much the “we” should be its subject. Of course the magazine is a thing one hopes has its circulation, however small, has its influence, however hard to measure, but it is also the instrument through which your own sense of the possibilities of the art will be forged, tested. It seems to me now evident that the best magazines come from editors who themselves “need” the thing to exist, and out of the singularity of that need a magazine of some possible public use arises.

The card of the special collections librarian and the card of the archival appraiser she had recommended would hang above the author’s desk, a silver thumbtack in the plaster. As he worried about the growth of a tumor, as I worried about the dilation of my aorta, the letters would accumulate, expanding the story into a novel.

Attached to this e-mail are four recent poems I would be pleased, indeed, to have appear in your inaugural issue, to appear if they appeal. Their immediate occasion is a visit last summer to Lascaux …

I clicked send, transmitting the proposal to my agent, mild pain shooting through my chest, no doubt psychosomatic, and left to meet Alena at her apartment on the Lower East Side.

Along with an artist friend of hers, Peter, who also had a law degree, Alena had been working on a project—not an art project, she kept insisting — that she’d often described to me, but which I’d always largely dismissed as fantasy: she and Peter were in the process of trying to convince the largest insurer of art in the country to give them some of its “totaled” art. When a valuable painting is damaged in transit or a fire or flood, vandalized, etc., and an appraiser agrees with the owner of a work that the work cannot be satisfactorily restored, or that the cost of restoration would exceed the value of the claim, then the insurance company pays out the total value of the damaged work, which is then legally declared to have “zero value.” When Alena asked me what I thought happened to the totaled art, I told her I assumed that the damaged work was destroyed, but, as it turned out, the insurer had a giant warehouse on Long Island full of these indeterminate objects: works by artists, many of them famous, that, after suffering one kind of damage or another, were formally demoted from art to mere objecthood and banned from circulation, removed from the market, relegated to this strange limbo.

Ever since Peter — who had a friend at the insurance company — had arranged a tour of the warehouse for Alena, she was obsessed with the idea of acquiring some of these supposedly valueless works, many of which she considered to be more compelling — aesthetically or conceptually — than they had been prior to sustaining damage. Her plan, which I’d thought sounded naïve, had been to tell the insurer that she and Peter had founded a nonprofit “institute” for the study of damaged art and to encourage the company to make a donation. They wrote up a mission statement which I copyedited, informally affiliated themselves with a nonprofit arts organization run by one of Alena’s friends, dressed up like responsible adults, and got a meeting with the head of the insurance company, who, it turned out, was also a painter. They charmed her. The head of the company agreed these totaled artworks were of both aesthetic and philosophical interest and — to Alena and Peter’s surprise — was open to the idea of donating a selection for small-scale exhibition and critical discussion, assuming the details could be worked out. Peter spent a few months drafting an appropriately official-sounding agreement with the insurer (no personal details about the parties involved in the claim would be divulged, etc.) and Alena looked into various spaces where they could display the objects and host discussions about these no-longer-artworks and their implications for artists, critics, theorists. In the end, and to my shock, the insurer agreed to donate a gallery’s worth of “zero-value” art to Alena’s “institute,” and even covered the cost of shipping. That morning I’d received a text from Alena that she and Peter would like me to be the first visitor to the “Institute for Totaled Art.”

Alena buzzed me in and I climbed the four flights of stairs to her apartment. She lived in a giant rent-controlled loft in a former commercial building; an uncle was on the lease. It had one room that served as Alena’s studio and then a vast open space into which you could have fit at least two of my apartments. Sometimes Alena’s younger brother — a student at NYU — lived in the apartment with her, although he hadn’t been around in recent months. Almost all the furniture was easily movable and so the room was arranged a little differently each time I visited, which made me feel crazy; the black couch was no longer against the wall, but now the record player was; the drafting table was in a different corner; and so on. I kissed Alena and hugged Peter and sat on an empty crate and asked them where the institute was housed. You’re in it, she said, and disappeared into her studio. Shut your eyes, she yelled back to me.

I shut my eyes — whenever I shut my eyes in the city I become immediately aware of the wavelike sound of traffic — and then I heard her bare feet on the hardwood as she approached me. Put out your hands, she said, and I did. She dropped what felt like a series of porcelain balls or figurines into them. Now open them, she said: what I was holding were the pieces of a shattered Jeff Koons balloon dog sculpture, an early red one. It was wonderful to see an icon of art world commercialism and valorized stupidity shattered; it was wonderful to touch the pieces with their metallic finish, to see the hollow interior of a work of willful superficiality. It probably wasn’t originally worth that much money by art world standards — somewhere between five thousand and ten thousand dollars, between one and two IUIs, a year or two of Chinese labor — but it had been worth enough money to charge the experience of holding its ruins with a frisson of transgression. Besides, somebody would probably pay a lot of money for the remnants even if the rubble had legally been declared worthless. Alena and Peter started laughing at my stunned silence and Alena picked up one of the smaller fragments from my hand and hurled it onto the hardwood, where it shattered. “It’s worth nothing,” she basically hissed. She looked like a chthonic deity of vengeance. Not for the first time, I wondered if she was a genius.

Dazed, I walked into her studio. There was more than one gallery’s-worth of artworks stacked against the wall, laid out on the kitchen island she’d installed as a work surface, or resting on the floor. Some were by artists I recognized, most were not. Some were obviously compromised — badly torn or stained. So many of the paintings had sustained water damage that I felt as though I’d been transported into a not-so-distant future where New York was largely submerged, where you could look down from an unkempt High Line and see these paintings floating down Tenth Avenue. Why aren’t you touching anything, Alena said, you can touch them now, and she took my hand and pushed it against what either still was or had once been a painting by Jim Dine. “Since the world is ending,” Peter quoted from behind us, “why not let the children touch the paintings?”

But it was not the slashed or burnt or stained artworks that moved me the most, that made me feel that Peter and Alena were doing something profound by unearthing the living dead of art. To my surprise, many of the objects were not, at least not to my admittedly inexpert eye, damaged at all. Here was an unframed Cartier-Bresson print under a pile of other photographs on the island. I held it up to the pale light streaming in through the studio window but perceived no tears, scratches, fading, stains. I asked Peter and Alena to show me the damage, but they were equally baffled. Here was an abstract diptych by a well-known contemporary artist in what seemed to us perfect condition; Alena consulted the paperwork — heavily redacted by the insurer — and found that it was missing a panel, that it was in fact a triptych, but the two panels in her possession were uncompromised.

I sat on the makeshift daybed Alena had constructed for her studio out of cinder blocks and an old mattress — a mattress I’d checked more than once for the russet traces of bedbugs — and studied the Cartier-Bresson. It had transitioned from being a repository of immense financial value to being declared of zero value without undergoing what was to me any perceptible material transformation — it was the same, only totally different. This was a reversal of the kind of recontextualization associated with Marcel Duchamp, still — unfortunately, in my opinion — the tutelary spirit of the art world; this was the opposite of the “readymade” whereby an object of utility — a urinal, a shovel — was transformed into an object of art and an art commodity by the artist’s fiat, by his signature. It was the reversal of that process and I found it much more powerful than what it reversed because, like everyone else, I was familiar with material things that seemed to have taken on a kind of magical power as a result of a monetizable signature: that’s how branding works in the gallery system and beyond, whether for Damien Hirst or Louis Vuitton. But it was incredibly rare — I remembered the jar of instant coffee the night of the storm — to encounter an object liberated from that logic. What was the word for that liberation? Apocalypse? Utopia? I felt a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied as I held a work from which the exchange value had been extracted, an object that was otherwise unchanged. It was as if I could register in my hands a subtle but momentous transfer of weight: the twenty-one grams of the market’s soul had fled; it was no longer a commodity fetish; it was art before or after capital. Not the shattered or slashed works to which Alena thrilled, but those objects in the archive that both were and weren’t different moved me: they had been redeemed, both in the sense that the fetish had been converted back into cash, the claim paid out, but also in the messianic sense of being saved from something, saved for something. An art commodity that had been exorcised (and survived the exorcism) of the fetishism of the market was to me a utopian readymade — an object for or from a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price. I looked up at Peter and Alena, who were waiting for me to speak, but could only manage: “Wow.”

Although I knew it wouldn’t last, as I walked back to Brooklyn from Alena’s apartment across the Manhattan Bridge, everything my eye alighted on seemed totaled in the best sense: complete in extent or degree; absolute; unqualified; whole. It was still fully afternoon, but it felt like magic hour, when light appears immanent to the lit. Whenever I walked across the Manhattan Bridge, I remembered myself as having crossed the Brooklyn Bridge. This is because you can see the latter from the former, and because the latter is more beautiful. I looked back over my shoulder at lower Manhattan and saw the gleaming, rippled steel of the new Frank Gehry building, saw it as a standing wave; I looked down at the water to see a small boat slowly pass; the craquelure of its wake merged with the clouds reflected there and I briefly saw the vessel as a plane. But by the time I arrived in Brooklyn to meet Alex, I was starting to misremember crossing in the third person, as if I had somehow watched myself walking beneath the Brooklyn Bridge’s Aeolian cables.

Our world

The world to come

I wandered on Henry Street through Brooklyn Heights. Alex and I were meeting for a drink at a place just across Atlantic, although Alex wasn’t drinking. She had started a new job for which she was radically overqualified and underpaid; she was basically tutoring kids at an after-school program in Carroll Gardens, but she felt it would be best to apply for other jobs while employed and she wanted the structure and welcomed whatever money. I ordered something with bourbon and mint and a sparkling water for Alex and took our drinks to one of the wooden booths. The carefully selected ephemera on the walls dated from before the Civil War; there seemed to be a competition among hip bars to see who could travel back in time the furthest. We sipped our drinks under Edison bulb sconces.

“Are we going to talk about your very clumsy effort to seduce me?” I’d written Alex an e-mail about my semen analysis but we hadn’t really talked about my trying to do it all. She wanted us to go in and talk to the fertility specialist in detail about the results.

“I was amazed you could resist my charms — I even recited poetry.”

“I’m serious.”

“It was stupid and I’m sorry. I was, as you know, very drunk.”

“That was the problem. That’s what you should be sorry for.”

“Okay. But why?”

“Because if we’re going to try to make a baby, however we try to make one, I don’t want it to be one of the things you get to deny you wanted or deny ever happened.”

“What do you mean?”

“‘It was the only kind of first date he could bring himself to go on, the kind you could deny after the fact had been a date at all.’”

“That’s fiction and we’re not talking about a first date.”

“What about the part about smoothing my hair in the cab? The part that’s based on the night of the storm. The alcohol is a way of hedging. So that whatever happens only kind of happened.” I made myself not take a drink.

“Okay, but your whole plan only kind of involves me — my level of involvement to be determined, whether I’m a donor or a father. You’re asking me to be a flickering presence. I give reproductive cells and then the rest we figure out as we go along.”

“Yes, but that’s because it’s up to you. As I’ve said since the beginning, if you want to fully coparent, whatever that would mean, I would do that with you. I wouldn’t have asked you otherwise. I would prefer to do that with you, in fact. If you want to try to have sex as part of a reproduction strategy”—I involuntarily raised my eyebrows at the phrase “reproduction strategy”—“or whatever you want to call it, I’m open to that, too. We’d have to talk more about it. You would have to stop sleeping with Alena, at least during that time. That would be too strange.”

I drained my glass. “What, we’d be a couple? Are you proposing?”

“No. People do this. It would be like we were … amicably divorced.” We both laughed. We had no idea how it would work. But I knew how we could pay for it: I told her I’d sent off the proposal, described my plan to expand the story.

She was quiet for half a minute, then: “I don’t know.” I’d expected her to say it sounded brilliant, which was what she normally said whenever I ran a literary idea by her — an adjective she’d never applied to any of my nonliterary ideas.

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t want what we’re doing to just end up as notes for a novel.”

“Nobody is going to give me strong six figures for a poem.”

“Especially a novel about deception. And it sounds morbid to me. I feel like you don’t need to write about falsifying the past. You should be finding a way to inhabit the present.” I remembered the sensation in my chest when I’d sent off the proposal, as if that way of dilating the story was linked to the dilation of my aorta. “And anyway, you shouldn’t be writing about medical stuff.”

“Why?”

“Because you believe, even though you’ll deny it, that writing has some kind of magical power. And you’re probably crazy enough to make your fiction come true somehow.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“How often have you worried you have a brain tumor?”

“Not once,” I laughed, lying.

“Liar. Remember what happened with your novel and your mom.”

In my novel the protagonist tells people his mother is dead, when she’s alive and well. Halfway through writing the book, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and I felt, however insanely, that the novel was in part responsible, that having even a fictionalized version of myself producing bad karma around parental health was in some unspecifiable way to blame for the diagnosis. I stopped work on the novel and was resolved to trash it until my mom — who was doing perfectly well after a mastectomy and who, thankfully, hadn’t had to do chemo — convinced me over the course of a couple of months to finish the book.

“Do you know what I realized the other day,” I said, “while being interviewed by somebody from the Netherlands over Skype about that novel, which just came out in Dutch? I realized how the lie about his mom is really about my dad.”

“How?”

“Or about my dad’s mother, my grandma, whom I never met; she died when he was twenty. I don’t know if you want to hear a story about mothers and cancer right now.”

“I would like to hear the story.”

“My dad told me all of this when I flew home from Providence for Daniel’s funeral my freshman year of college. He picked me up at the airport and we started driving back to Topeka and I was so upset I could barely speak. I remember we were moving slowly because there was a light but freezing rain. The first part of the story I’d already heard: the day his mother died from breast cancer—‘cancer’ was never said in the family, but everybody knew, even the kids — he called up his girlfriend, Rachel, who was soon to become his first wife, a marriage that lasted all of a year, and before he could say anything, he realized that she was crying and that he could hear weeping, no, wailing in the background. Before he could share the news about his own mom, before he could even ask what happened, Rachel said: My father died. Rachel’s father, a well-known businessman in D.C., where my dad lived and was now in college, had been perfectly healthy, as far as anybody knew. But on the same morning my dad’s mom died after a multiyear struggle with a terrible illness, he just dropped dead at his office from a coronary.”

“That’s insane.”

“Or maybe he dissected, I don’t know. Rachel told my dad that the funeral would be in Albany, where her father was from, and that she hoped he would go up with her the next day and he said sure and hung up the phone without ever telling her about his mom. Meanwhile, my dad’s own mom wasn’t being mourned properly at all. My grandfather was either in denial or involved with someone else, but either way, my dad and his younger siblings were being served frozen dinners and left to watch Gunsmoke or whatever and there was no service planned of any sort. So my dad just said that Rachel’s dad had died and he was going to Albany for the funeral and my grandfather said, without asking any questions: Fine. He took the train to Albany with Rachel, who wept the whole time — he never talked about his mom — and they eventually arrived at the family home, where the more Jewish side of the family was constantly praying and would be sitting shiva for seven days after the burial. It was a giant house and he was given a guest room and he sat up all night staring at the ceiling with occasional bouts of weeping from other parts of the house still audible late into the night as he tried to imagine where his mother’s body was, although I might be making that detail up.” I raised my hand to get the waitress’s attention from across the bar and then raised my empty glass.

“Guess what his job was the next day at the funeral? They gave him smelling salts and he was supposed to go around and revive any of the women who passed out or got weak from weeping. My dad, at twenty, secretly mourning his mother, walking around a funeral, which his mother would not have, dry-eyed and holding some kind of chemical compound under the noses of people whose ululations were causing them to swoon. I had heard this part of the story before, although it had never struck me so powerfully as it did that night as we drove home through the sleet for Daniel’s funeral, but then my dad started to tell me the part he’d never told me before.” My drink had arrived and I tried it; it was sweeter this time. Alex expressed the intensity of her attention by not touching her water. She had an ability to hold herself so still that it became a form of gracefulness.

After the funeral, when I left the family to sit shiva in that giant house in Albany, my dad told me, I had to take a train to Penn Station and then another train to D.C. I arrived at Penn Station without incident, although it was snowing heavily, but then in Penn Station there was some kind of problem with the train, no doubt due to the weather. I remember how cold I was: I was wearing my one suit, which I’d worn to the funeral, but my winter coat didn’t go with a suit, so I’d left it at home. There was an enormous line for the D.C. train — I’d never seen a line that long for any train at Penn Station — and it took forever for me to work my way to the platform. When I reached the platform, it was chaos: crowds, shouting. It turned out that two previous trains had been canceled due to ice on the tracks or something so there were all of these people desperate to get on this one, the last train out. They had even added extra cars — I could see them and they looked archaic, like decommissioned cars from the nineteenth century — to try to accommodate the overflow of passengers. I could picture all of this as we drove to Topeka, I said to Alex, with unusual vividness, maybe because the windows were fogged up and so little of the landscape was visible to distract me. And maybe I could picture it so vividly across from Alex because of the bar’s anachronistic décor. I imagined the clock at Penn Station as my dad tried to get home, probably inserting an image from Marclay’s video. But even so, my dad said to me, by the time I reached one of the car doors where there was both a man collecting tickets and a police officer trying to keep everybody calm, I was told that the train was full, that there were simply no more seats, that I’d have to stay the night in New York and catch the first morning train.

At first, my dad said to me, his eyes fixed on that part of the highway illuminated by his high beams, the sleet turning to snow in the headlights, I felt relieved. I didn’t want to go home to the house without my mother and face the bizarre denial of my dad and my confused younger brothers around whom I kept trying to act like everything that was happening was normal. But then I started getting — I remember this surprised me — really angry, and I said to the ticket collector with such intensity that he turned and looked at me, as did a couple of the other people around us: I am getting on this train. I think I sounded like a lunatic. I’m afraid that’s not possible, son, the ticket collector said after looking me over, my dad said to me, I said to Alex, and maybe it was the fact that he said it kindly, and that he said “son,” but the next thing I knew, I burst into tears there on the platform. I mean, I really lost it, tears and snot and everything, standing there freezing in my suit, maybe still with smelling salts in my breast pocket, all the repressed emotion, all the emotion I’d been planning to share with Rachel when I’d called her the day our parents died and held in during her father’s funeral, all of it started to surface. And then I said to the conductor: Please, I said, please: my mother is dying. I have to get back. I have to get back in time, please, I kept repeating. My mother is dying. And I felt as if it were true: as if she were dying and not dead, or as if the train could take me back in time.

I drank my drink and Alex drank her water in silence for a minute and I placed my hand on the table so it was touching hers in order to communicate that I was also thinking about her mom. Then my dad was quiet in the car, nothing but the sound of the windshield wipers, as if that were the end of the story, so finally I said: And then? And then, he said, as if it were an afterthought, they let me on the train, one of the decommissioned cars, and an older woman who had overheard my outburst on the platform ended up sitting beside me. And I remember she bought me tea and cookies from the food car and I slept a big part of the ride back on her shoulder. I remember her saying every once in a while: Your mom is going to be just fine.

I finished my drink, accidentally swallowing some mint. “We were going the wrong direction, by the way.”

“What?”

“My dad drove us an hour into Missouri; he was so caught up in the story, he missed the exit for Topeka.”

“Maybe he was driving toward D.C.”

Then, voluble from the alcohol, I told her about Noor and Mrs. Meacham and she told me a story about her mother she made me swear I’d never include in anything, no matter how disguised, no matter how thoroughly I failed to describe faces or changed names.

* * *

A circuitous path leading through several museum buildings allows the visitor to trace the evolution of vertebrates, a walkable cladogram with alcoves on either side of the path displaying fossils of species that shared physical characteristics — e.g., “four limbs with movable joints surrounded by muscle” (tetrapods). I’d paid almost fifty dollars for two tickets to the American Museum of Natural History so that Roberto and I could tour the osseous remains, could track the evolution of new traits, a field trip I’d been promising him for many months and had finally proposed to his mother when I handed him off one afternoon after tutoring; she either forgot about my offer or considered it for several weeks before letting me know through Aaron which Saturdays — Sundays were taken up with church and family — were workable. I’d called her to finalize arrangements: I would meet her and Roberto at the subway stop nearest their apartment, the D on Thirty-sixth in Sunset Park, and he and I would travel together, transferring to the C at West Fourth, to the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. We’d spend several hours at the museum, assuming his attention held, then I’d take him out to lunch, mindful of his allergies, and return him to the family home in the late afternoon. Roberto’s older sister, Jasmine, was initially planning to join us — primarily, I assumed, to make Anita feel more comfortable — but, Anita explained to me when we exchanged holas at the Thirty-sixth Street stop, Jasmine had had to work an unexpected shift at the Applebee’s in Flatbush. Anita seemed a little nervous as she transferred Roberto, tremulous with excitement, to my care.

It was not until we were standing on the platform and Roberto approached its edge to point out two soot-colored rats moving among the garbage on the tracks that I consciously registered the fact that I had never been so responsible for another person, at least not a young person. I’d babysat my nephews when visiting Seattle, but always in their home, never abroad in a crumbling metropolis; I’d carried a passed-out Alex back to her dorm from a party after we’d split a horse tranquilizer in college; I’d taken Jon to the emergency room three times for injuries he’d sustained through drunken athletic idiocy or defending his or Sharon’s honor in brief and clumsy fights, etc.; but none of my peers was a flight risk or a possible kidnapping victim. With a sinking feeling I realized that, if I were Anita, I might well have declined to entrust my child to my care. But then, Aaron had vouched for me: I was a published author.

I told Roberto to step back from the platform as the train approached and as soon as we sat down I showed him the notebooks I’d brought for jotting down our observations — the notebooks had been Alex’s suggestion — and explained our goals for the day in a tone that implied we were embarking on a solemn paleontological mission that would admit of no spontaneity, let alone insubordination. Roberto was particularly excited to see the display of an allosaurus skeleton positioned over an apatosaurus’s corpse as though it were scavenging and he kept leaping up from the seat to mimic the bipedal predator’s posture — he’d seen it on the Internet — and I kept telling him to sit down.

At West Fourth we caught the C and it was crowded. At Fourteenth a crush of new passengers entered the train and bodies imposed themselves between Roberto and me. I wondered if people would have stepped between us if we were racially indistinguishable; I pushed my way back to him and took his hand. This was the first time our bodies had come into willed contact in the many months of our relationship and he looked up at me, maybe with curiosity, maybe reacting to the sweatiness of my palm; we are going to stick together at all times, I said to him, noting the desperation in my own voice. To dispel it I smiled and complimented his red Jurassic Park T-shirt and asked him to remind me what giant sauropods most likely ate. While he enumerated prehistoric flora, I was thinking: holding his hand is the only permissible physical contact; if he were to run away from me, I couldn’t grab or otherwise discipline him; if he reported any form of restraint beyond hand-holding during transit, who knows what would happen; an undocumented family wasn’t going to call the cops, but his dad might run me over in the truck Roberto was always bragging about; they might report Aaron, who had let me enter the school without observing protocol. “You’re not my teacher,” Roberto had said on more than one occasion when I’d tried to force him to focus on our book; I imagined him exclaiming it in the museum and then disappearing into the depths of the bioluminescence exhibit, never to be seen again.

By the time we reached the Eighty-first Street entrance, I was debating two strategies: either establish a draconian presence at the outset of our visit that would deter all forms of noncompliance, promising to cut short the trip at the first infraction — that there would be trouble I now considered inevitable, although it had never worried me before — and threatening to call his mom, whose cell phone number I had, maybe even evoking Joseph Kony, but then, at the end of the visit, buying him whatever he desired from the gift shop, my largesse making me appear to him retrospectively benevolent; or I’d just skip the disciplinarian stuff and bribe him at every opportunity until the time I returned him, loaded with presents and full of artificial dyes, to his family, who now seemed a country away. As Roberto and I stood in line for tickets in the packed lobby, I devoted some small portion of my brain to chatting with the boy about museum highlights, some portion to objecting to the admission price, but most of my consciousness was working its way toward the horrible realization that I simply was not competent to take a prepubescent on an educational day trip. I could feel the urea and salts emerging from my underarms as I longed for Jasmine, whom I’d never met, or for Alex, whom all kids seemed instinctively eager to obey.

We bought our tickets and walked quickly through the Space and Earth displays, past the giant Ecosphere, which interested the child not at all—“No running, Roberto”—until we reached the steps and ascended to the fourth floor, where a guard directed us to the Orientation Center, starting point of the evolutionary path. How did this happen, I wondered, still catching my breath from the stairs, how is it that a thirty-three-year-old man who appears to meet most societal norms of functionality — employed (however lightly), sexually active (however irresponsibly), socially embedded (if unmarried and childless) — is in the grip of a fear so intense as to overwhelm reason as a result of taking a sweet kid to a museum? But as we began our journey along the circuitous path and through the Hall of Vertebrate Origins, Roberto pulling me by the arm as quickly as possible through the cases of jawless fish and placoderms toward the Hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs, I had to question any account of myself as normative, mature. Thus began my second-order panic: not only was I horrified of something going wrong with Roberto, but I was horrified of being horrified, as it indicated my manifold inadequacy. I recalled the initial consultation with the fertility specialist when she’d asked about our mental health histories: while I’d had three protracted bouts of serious depression and plenty of anxiety, and while I’d had a long-term if intermittent relationship with SSRIs and benzodiazepines, there was no major mental illness in my family, and I thought of myself more as darkly ruminative and inclined to complain than as sufficiently disturbed to have implications for reproduction or parenting; Alex, who knew me as well as anyone, had obviously agreed. But now, as I heard myself command Roberto to write down every evolutionary advance the museum placards noted (“development of braincase”; “the palatal opening”; etc.), a highlight reel of my lower moments played before me.

I remembered the pavor nocturnus of my eighth year, my baffled brother trying to comfort me by offering his semiprecious baseball cards, although I was, with the exception of one frightening summer, a happy enough child. The more serious trouble started, as it often does, in college: tremors and numbness in my hands, the feeling that they belonged to someone else or were autonomous; the sense that if I did not will every breath, did not breathe manually, I would cease to breathe entirely; there among the primitive vertebrates, I experienced the echo of each symptom I recalled. Then there was splashing water on a face with which I failed to identify in the dorm, its blown pupils, or slowly coming to realize during an evening seminar on Thomas Hobbes that the irruption of hysterical laughter was my own; there was the episode of sleep paralysis and an attendant incubus hallucination so severe that I couldn’t shut my eyes without Alex’s company for several days (“Write ‘antorbital opening,’” I instructed Roberto; “write ‘three-fingered hand’”); I remembered weeping, although it never happened, as quietly as possible in a bathroom stall at a fancy restaurant in Madrid, my blood a patchwork of sertraline, tetrahydrocannabinol, clonazepam, and Rioja. All these lacrimal events and bouts of depersonalization were no doubt leading, I was then convinced, to the onset of schizophrenia. Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence. But as a dozen proprioceptive breakdowns flashed before me in the museum, there was a reversal of figure and ground: I wasn’t a balanced person who had his difficult periods; I was an erratic blind to his own psychological precariousness; I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet.

We stopped before a display explaining the development of the vertebrate jaw and, as I instructed Roberto to sketch the remains of a pterosaur in his notebook, I felt despair spread through me like contrast dye. The eight-year-old is having a fine time learning about evolution while his guide is freaking out because of all the strangers and stimulation; I was the nervous kid far from home longing for my parents, not Roberto; I was the one who kept clinging to his hand; I’d become the unreliable narrator of my first novel. Roberto tried to bolt with excitement toward the next alcove and I instinctually grabbed his arm to stop him, jerking it a little. “Ow,” he said, not hurt, but understandably disconcerted. I said I was sorry and knelt down and looked him in the eye and explained to him in Spanish, no doubt visibly pale and perspiring, that we must avoid getting separated. Then I told him, probably sounding as if I were giving orders for a suicide mission, that if we somehow did lose each other, we should meet at the Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. He smiled, but didn’t say anything; I wondered if he was embarrassed for me.

We entered the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs — a room containing some of the museum’s most impressive fossil displays — and found the apatosaurus skeleton, recently remounted to reflect new research, a placard explained, about how the dinosaur was likely to have carried itself; the tail was now aloft, no longer dragging on the ground. There was a large group of Asian children, Korean I guessed, standing around the skeleton in matching blue T-shirts, listening to their guide; Roberto couldn’t get as close as he wanted to the bones. By the time I finished asking him to sketch the tail, he had rushed off with excitement toward the allosaurus depicted feeding on a carcass. I followed him with enforced calm, stood beside him and uttered some vaguely educational instruction, and then he ran to the next arrangement of mineralized tissues and I followed. This was how we proceeded through the hall, Roberto occasionally reversing the evolutionary course by sprinting back to see a highlight — I at least had the presence of mind to take his picture on my cell phone before the giant Tyrannosaurus rex, mounted as if stalking prey — and then running back to the future to admire, say, some protoceratops skulls arranged in a growth series. As long as I keep him within sight, I told myself, everything will be fine; it’s not as though there are kidnappers lurking among the relatives of extinct mammals; most crazy people can’t afford the exorbitant admission price.

Around the time the synapsid opening evolved, I realized I had to pee. I asked Roberto if he had to go to the bathroom and he said no and darted off again. I would have to hold it; there was no way I was going to leave him unsupervised while I went, and I couldn’t imagine dragging him into the men’s room so I could piss. All over the world people were tending their children ingeniously in the midst of surpassing extremities, seeing them through tsunamis and civil wars, shielding them from American drones, but I was at a total loss as to how one could both be responsible for a child at a museum and empty one’s bladder. I followed Roberto through the Hall of Mammals and their extinct relatives, taking another picture of the boy before the brontops, who most likely subsisted on a diet of soft leaves. I caught myself shifting my weight a little from foot to foot as the cell phone made its simulated click, something I did as a child when I had to go to the bathroom, and I had an involuntary memory of wetting myself at the Topeka Zoo at four, having refused to go when I had the chance, the humiliating warmth spreading down my leg, darkening my corduroys.

By the time we stood together before the great mammoth skeleton at the end of the vertebrate cladogram — the mummified remains of a baby woolly mammoth displayed in a case beside the pedestal — I had regressed so severely that it felt like a form of devolution. Roberto calmly if clumsily sketched the great curving tusks while I tried not to wet myself and longed for a guardian. Half the men walking around the fossils seemed to have a baby strapped to their chests and I tried to reassure myself by remembering that Alex, the sanest person I knew, believed I was genetically and practically competent to be a father, to perpetuate the species. But why, exactly, had she selected me? Because we were best friends, of course — because our relationship was more durable than any marriage we could imagine, because she thought I was smart and good. I had never really doubted myself enough to doubt her reasons, but now it occurred to me with the force of revelation: She wants you to donate the sperm precisely because she doesn’t think you’d ever get it together enough to be an active father; she’s much more afraid of raising a child with an onerous father than without a father at all; she comes from a line of self-sufficient women whose partners disappear. You appeal because you’ll be sweet and avuncular and financially supportive and someone she can talk to for emotional advice, but she assumes you’re too scattered and scared to intervene dramatically in the child’s early development and daily life. She doesn’t want to do it entirely alone, but she doesn’t want to do it with a full partner; you come from great stock — Alex loved my parents — and will never go totally AWOL, but you’re also sufficiently infantile and self-involved to cede all the substantial parenting to her. She chose you for your deficiencies, not in spite of them, a new kind of mating strategy for millennial women whose priority is keeping the more disastrous fathers away, not establishing a nuclear family.

“I have to go to the bathroom, Roberto. Why don’t you come with me?”

“I don’t have to go.”

“Come with me and wait for me.” I was shifting my weight back and forth again.

“I’ll wait for you here.”

“You are coming with me. Now.”

“But—”

“Do you want something from the gift shop or not?”

As we approached the restrooms I repeated to Roberto that if he was in the exact spot I left him in when I came back out he could have a gift of his choice. I tried to joke away my worry and enlist his compliance by making it a game: see if you can stand as still as a fossil. I parked him beside the drinking fountain and went into the restroom while he positioned himself in a dinosaur pose, and when I emerged tremendously relieved two and a half minutes later I found that he was gone. Terror seized me and I had to keep myself from running back toward the galleries. As soon as I turned the corner, he leapt out at me, shrieking like a velociraptor. Before it dissipated, the fear turned to fury, and I knelt down and gripped his shoulders and all my accumulated anxiety and self-loathing issued forth in a hiss: I am going to tell your mom you’ve misbehaved; you’re not getting anything from the gift shop.

Roberto, eyes lowered, said he was just joking and hadn’t gone far and hadn’t done anything wrong. As my fury dissolved into remorse, he turned and walked away from me. For a second I feared he’d accelerate and try to lose me — he didn’t respond when I called his name — but instead he walked slowly and dejectedly to the stairs and descended to the third floor and I followed a few feet behind as he moped through the dioramas of Pacific Peoples and Plains Indians. The surrounding nineteenth-century taxidermy and painted backgrounds felt at once dated and futuristic: dated because low-tech and methodologically presumptuous and insensitive; futuristic because postapocalyptic: it was as if an alien race had tried to reconstruct the past of the wasteland upon which they’d stumbled. It reminded me of Planet of the Apes or other movies from the sixties and seventies that I’d seen as a child in the eighties — movies whose distance from the present was most acutely felt in the quaintness of the futures they projected; nothing in the world, I thought to myself, is as old as what was futuristic in the past.

On the second floor, in the strangely empty Hall of African Peoples, I stopped him and apologized, explained that I’d been worried and overreacted, pledged to give his mom a glowing report, and asked him to pick out whatever he wanted from the gift shop, where we proceeded together hand in hand; Roberto forgave me, but his excitement now was muted. I bought him a sixty-dollar T-rex puzzle because I would make strong six figures and the city would soon be underwater. I made sure the cashier removed the price tag, and I also purchased a couple of packets of astronaut ice cream, which Roberto had never tried.

We ate the freeze-dried Neapolitan stuff — a food from the future of the past, taken to space only once on Apollo 7, 1968—on a bench in front of the museum. It was an unseasonably warm day and the bizarreness and novelty of the food cracked Roberto up, restored his spirits; I broke off my chocolate and traded it for a fragment of his strawberry, which he found gross. He showed me his various drawings, which I praised, we discussed some additions to our diorama, and I told him how he’d one day be a famous paleontologist. His energy was back and it was as if I’d never caused a scene. We had a nice lunch at Shake Shack near the museum — a fast-food restaurant where the meat is carefully sourced, all the garbage compostable — and I returned him smiling and full of dinosaur factoids to Anita by four.

* * *

The baby octopuses are delivered alive from Portugal each morning and then massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease; according to the menu, they are massaged “five hundred times.” The beak is removed and the small eyes are pushed out from behind. The corpses are slowly poached and then served with a sauce composed of sake and yuzu juice. It is the restaurant’s signature dish and so plate after plate of the world’s most intelligent invertebrate infants were being conducted from kitchen to table by the handsome, agile waitstaff. There were three on the plate finally placed before us, and my agent and I, after a moment of admiration and guilty hesitation, simultaneously dipped and ingested the impossibly tender things entire.

I had arrived for what would be an outrageously expensive celebratory meal still incredulous about the amount of money a publisher was willing to pay me to dilate my story, but, after we ordered and before the octopus and flights of bluefin arrived, I had quickly signed two copies of a contract. I asked my agent to explain to me once more why anybody would pay such a sum for a book of mine, especially an unwritten one, given that my previous novel, despite an alarming level of critical acclaim, had only sold around ten thousand copies. Since my first book was published by a small press, my agent said, the larger houses were optimistic that their superior distribution and promotion could help a second book do much better than the first. Moreover, she explained, publishers pay for prestige. Even if I wrote a book that didn’t sell, these presses wanted a potential darling of the critics or someone who might win prizes; it was symbolic capital that helped maintain the reputation of the house even if most of their money was being made by teen vampire sagas or one of the handful of mainstream “literary novelists” who actually sold a ton of books. This would have made sense to me in the eighties or nineties, when the novel was more or less still a viable commodity form, but why would publishers, all of whom seemed to be perpetually reorganizing, downsizing, scrambling to survive in the postcodex world, be willing to convert real capital into the merely symbolic? “Keep in mind that your book proposal…” my agent said, and then paused thoughtfully, indicating that she was preparing to put something delicately, “your book proposal might generate more excitement among the houses than the book itself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your first book was unconventional but really well received. What they’re buying when they buy the proposal is in part the idea that your next book is going to be a little more … mainstream. I’m not saying they’ll reject what you submit, although that’s always possible; I’m saying it may have been easier to auction the idea of your next book than whatever you actually draft.”

I loved this idea: my virtual novel was worth more than my actual novel. But if they rejected it, I’d have to give the money back. And yet I planned to spend my advance in advance.

“Also, you have to remember an auction has its own momentum.”

This I understood, or at least recognized, from experience: most desire was imitative desire. If one university wanted to buy your papers, another university would want to buy them, too — consensus emerges regarding your importance. Competition produces its own object of desire; that’s why it makes sense to speak of a “competitive spirit,” a creative deity.

With my chopsticks I lifted and dipped the third and final baby octopus and tried to think as I chewed of a synonym for “tender.” Imitative desire for my virtual novel was going to fund artificial insemination and its associated costs. My actual novel everyone would thrash. After my agent’s percentage and taxes (including New York City taxes, she had reminded me), I would clear something like two hundred and seventy thousand dollars. Or Fifty-four IUIs. Or around four Hummer H2 SUVs. Or the two first editions on the market of Leaves of Grass. Or about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held. I swallowed and the majesty and murderous stupidity of it was all about me, coursing through me: the rhythm of artisanal Portuguese octopus fisheries coordinated with the rhythm of laborers’ migration and the rise and fall of art commodities and tradable futures in the dark galleries outside the restaurant and the mercury and radiation levels of the sashimi and the chests of the beautiful people in the restaurant — coordinated, or so it appeared, by money. One big joke cycle. One big totaled prosody.

“Of course, as we talked about, there are risks to taking a big advance — because if the book doesn’t sell at all, nobody’s going to want to work with you again.”

A quiet set of couples left the table beside us and almost instantly a loud set of couples took their place; the men, both around my age, both dressed in dark suits, both in great shape, were talking about a friend or colleague in common, mocking him for drunkenly spilling red wine on a priceless couch or rug; the women, eyes lined with shadow, were passing a cell phone back and forth, admiring a picture of something. I was confident my book wouldn’t sell.

“Just remember this is your opportunity to reach a much wider audience. You have to decide who you want your audience to be, who you think it is,” my agent said, and what I heard was: “Develop a clear, geometrical plot; describe faces, even those at the next table; make sure the protagonist undergoes a dramatic transformation.” What if only his aorta undergoes change, I wondered. Or his neoplasm. What if everything at the end of the book is the same, only a little different?

The sake-based cocktails were making the adjacent quartet increasingly garrulous. Investment bankers or market analysts in their twenties, whose proximity was particularly unwelcome since I was crossing my art with money more explicitly than ever, trading on my future. The first draft was due in a year.

“I think of my audience as a second person plural on the perennial verge of existence,” I wanted to say. A waiter shook the bottle to mix the sediment and turn the sake white.

“They need a highly liquid strategy,” someone at the adjacent table said.

“What happens if I give them a totally different book than the one described in the proposal?” I asked. Small plates of miso-glazed black cod were put before us. Someone refilled my glass.

“Depends. If they like it, fine. But you need to keep the New Yorker story in there, I think.”

“I can’t see my audience because of the tungsten lights.” I emptied my glass.

“Do you have other ideas?”

“They got married on Turtle Island. Fiji. Karen said she saw Jay-Z on the beach.”

“A beautiful young half-Lebanese conceptual artist and sexual athlete committed to radical Arab politics is told by her mother, who is dying of breast cancer, that she’s been lied to about her paternity: her real father turns out to be a conservative professor of Jewish studies at Harvard. Or New Paltz. Wanting her own child, she selects a Lebanese sperm donor in an effort to project into the future the past she never had.” I shook my head no. Swift, Spanish-speaking laborers took away the plates. “Or maybe something more sci-fi: an author changes into an octopus. He travels back and forth in time. On a decommissioned train.”

She excused herself to go to the bathroom and the next small blue bottle was on the table so quickly it seemed to precede my signaling to the waitress, my ordering it. I shut my eyes for a long moment. “Perfume and youth course through me, and I am their wake.” The noise was deafening now that I wasn’t talking or listening to anyone in particular. I tasted hints of pear, then peach. For a second all I heard was the desperation, the hysterical energy of passengers on a doomed liner. The rise and fall. The laughter of Mrs. Meacham’s class. My parents were dead, but I could get back to them in time. Seventy-three seconds into takeoff, my aorta dissected, producing high cirrus clouds, sign of an imminent tropical depression.

“That market’s completely underwater. Probably forever.”

I looked at my phone. “Your presence is requested at the Institute for Totaled Art,” Alena had texted.

Dessert was a yuzu frozen soufflé with poached plums. Money was a kind of poetry. The glasses of sweet wine were on the house. I was drunk enough now to down the remaining sake instead of setting it aside. The ink contains a substance that dulls the sense of smell, making the octopus more difficult to track.

“How exactly will you expand the story?” she asked, far look in her eyes because she was calculating tip.

“Like the princess in Sans Soleil, I’ll make a long list of things that quicken the heart.” We emerged from the restaurant into moving air. “And you can be on it.” The streets were wet, but it wasn’t raining now. We walked to the High Line entrance on Twenty-sixth and climbed the steps. The smell of viburnum, which either flowers in winter or had flowered prematurely, mixed with the smell of car exhaust.

“I’m going to write a novel that dissolves into a poem about how the small-scale transformations of the erotic must be harnessed by the political.” Three-fifths of my neurons were in my arms as I touched each stand of sumac carefully placed among the disused rails. Never again would I eat octopus.

“My advice, having sold some other proposals, is not to wait too long.” Now we were sitting on the wooden steps that overlook Tenth Avenue, liquid ruby and sapphire of traffic. “I mean, to get to work. The more you wait, the more the deadline looms. It can drive people crazy.” She lit a cigarette. “The residency is perfect timing. Don’t underestimate how much you can get done in those five weeks.”

I was leaving in two days. A foundation in Marfa, Texas, gives you a house, a stipend, a car. I’d accepted the offer almost a year ago, when I knew I’d be on leave from teaching, but not that I had a dilated aortic root or that there was acute demand for my abnormal sperm. I’d never done a residency or been to Texas. It was where Creeley died in the spring of 2005—they had rushed him to the nearest hospital three hours away in Odessa. My little house would be across the street from his. “I hope there will be another occasion soon to be in each other’s company,” I’d written in his voice to a version of myself.