10:04: A Novel

FOUR

I felt like a ghost in the green hybrid, driving slowly around Marfa in the dark. It was my first night there: Michael, the caretaker of the residency houses, who was also a painter, had picked me up at the El Paso airport that afternoon and driven me in amicable silence for three hours through the high desert until we reached the little house at 308 North Plateau Street; I remember the address (you can drag the “pegman” icon onto the Google map and walk around the neighborhood on Street View, floating above yourself like a ghost; I’m doing that in a separate window now) because I had to have my beta-blockers mailed there twice during the residency, pills I take to reduce the vigor of my heart’s contractions, and which have the paradoxical effect of causing a minor tremor in my hand. When I arrived at the house — one floor, two bedrooms, with one room converted to a writer’s studio, no internal doors — I had set down my bags and, although it was only late afternoon, gone immediately to bed, not waking until a little before midnight. I lay in the alien sheets slowly remembering where I was: having slept through most of the ride, and then what was left of the daylight, I felt as though I’d moved from Brooklyn to the Chihuahuan Desert without transition. I tried to remember the light snow that morning in New York, beads of precipitation on the oval window streaking as the plane took off. It was Thursday; had I been at home, I would have heard the sound of the poor picking glass out of the recycling set along the street for Friday morning. Here it was quiet enough that I should have heard my heart beating; I imagined it was inaudible because of the drug.

I’d planned to walk around, not drive, but the dark outside was total. I was stunned by the panoramic sky, the impossible number of stars — any remaining jet lag dissipated at the sight. The thin winter air was cool but unseasonably warm; it was probably in the forties. The sound of the garage door opening tore a hole in the night and I sensed, whether or not they were there, small animals fleeing all around me at the noise. I backed out of the garage, remotely closed it, and began to whisper through the streets, as nervous and alive as a teenager sneaking out on some kind of furtive mission in his parents’ car. I found my way downtown and circled the nineteenth-century courthouse and turned onto the town’s main commercial street; no one was out. I parked under a streetlight and walked past the dark storefronts, a mixture of small-town municipal offices, abandoned spaces, and upscale boutiques. Marfa had been an “art tourism” destination ever since Donald Judd established the Chinati Foundation in the eighties, a museum just outside of town that presents Judd’s large-scale works in permanent installation, along with work by his contemporaries. I’d heard New York artists speak of making pilgrimages, that collectors fly down for visits in their private jets, but it was difficult to picture encountering them here. An interesting building across the street attracted my attention and I crossed to take a closer look; later I would learn it was the old Marfa Wool and Mohair Building. I walked around the side of the building, along the railroad tracks, and, stepping over various desert shrubs, approached one of the side windows to look in.

At first I saw nothing through the glass, then slowly made out hulking shapes, shapes that further resolved into what looked like giant flowers of crushed metal or perpetual explosions. I cupped my hands around my eyes and held my forehead to the cool window and slowly recognized what I was seeing as a series of John Chamberlain sculptures, which are largely hewn from chrome-plated and painted steel, often the mangled bodies of cars, an art of the totaled. I’d seen a few of his sculptures in New York, had been indifferent, but they were powerful now, their colors becoming more discernible in the faint glow of some kind of security light. Maybe I liked his sculpture more when I couldn’t get close to it, had to see it from a fixed position through a pane of glass, so that I had to project myself into the encounter with its three-dimensionality. I stepped back a little and regarded his work through my own faint reflection in the window. Or maybe I like his sculpture more when I’m lurking at night among creosote bushes in the desert, nerves singing, my life in Brooklyn eighteen hours in the past, receding.

I heard the norteño music, accordion and bajo sexto, before I saw the beams of the approaching truck. Instinctively, stupidly, I dropped to one knee on the gravelly soil so as not to be seen doing whatever it was that I was doing beside the dark building. A woman in the passenger side was singing along to the radio, maybe drunkenly, her window down: “Lo diera por ti, lo diera por ti, lo diera por ti.” When the truck passed, I stood up, brushed the dust off my pants, and walked back to the car. I drove across the railroad tracks and turned right onto a larger road; there was a gas station open. I stopped, bought a four-pack of butter, tortillas, eggs, and a large can of Bustelo espresso, and then drove silently back to the house on North Plateau. Right before I turned into the garage, my headlights reflected green off the eyes of a small animal, probably a neighbor’s cat or dog, but maybe a raccoon, if they had those in Marfa. The tapetum lucidum, the “bright tapestry” behind the eyes, bounces visible light back through the retina, making the pupils glow. I remembered the red-eye effect in the photographs of my youth, the camera recording the light of its own flash, the camera inscribing itself in the image it captured. Once inside the house I heated and ate several tortillas while I waited for the coffee to percolate in the rusty stovetop espresso machine, then took the pitch-black coffee to the desk in the studio, set up my computer, and began to write.

Thus, instead of beginning my residency by rising at 6:00 a.m. and walking several miles in the early morning dark, then working until lunch, walking again, then working again until dinner, at which point I’d take a third walk — I’d outlined this strict schedule to Alex, who had nodded politely, before I left New York — I went to sleep at sunup, having finished the tortillas as the first light filtered into the kitchen. It was 5:00 p.m. when I woke and, because I’d already woken in the bed once the previous day, it felt like the morning of my second full day, not the late afternoon of the first; I was already falling out of time. I walked into the bathroom and got out my razor and looked at myself in the mirror to find much of my face was covered in dark, dried blood; for a moment I was dizzy with fear and confusion, then realized I’d had a nosebleed. My first thought was of a brain tumor, but, after calming down and consulting Google, I realized it was no doubt altitude-induced; I’d had nosebleeds as a child when we vacationed in Colorado. I washed the blood off my face with a rag but couldn’t bear, after the shock, to draw a razor across my neck.

The sun was setting by the time I sat down at the desk to start my day. I had my lunch of scrambled eggs around 1:00 a.m. on the little porch, looking carefully for the first time at the house where Creeley began to die; I kept my porch light off. The house looked identical in layout to mine and it was occupied: the resident, Michael had told me on the way in from the airport, was a Polish translator and poet of whom I’d never heard. (There was a lunch planned for the next day so all the residents could meet one another if they wished, but I’d already sent an e-mail to Michael with my regrets, explaining that I was focused on work and keeping strange hours.) There was a light on somewhere in the house, probably the studio; the rest of the windows on the street were dark.

When I was about to go back in, having stood and opened the screen door, I heard the creak and bang of the screen door on the porch across from mine, the noise setting off a chain reaction of barking dogs. I hesitated; having hesitated, and knowing I’d been seen, even in the dark, I felt a pressure to turn around and signal some kind of greeting to the other nocturnal resident, who hadn’t put his porch light on. I did turn, plate and silverware in one hand, and saw the cupped flame as he lit his cigarette, thought I could make out a beard and glasses. I stood there awkwardly for a moment and then he raised his arm and I raised mine, feeling as I went back in, and feeling ridiculous for feeling it, that I’d just waved to Creeley.

The only book I’d brought with me to the residency, knowing that the house was full of books, was the Library of America edition of Whitman, its paper so thin you could use it to roll cigarettes. I’d brought that particular volume because I was teaching a course on Whitman next fall, assuming I wasn’t on medical leave, and hadn’t read him carefully in years — and hadn’t read much of his prose at all. Those first days of the residency, days that were nights, I would sit at my desk and read Specimen Days, his bizarre memoir, for hours. Part of what makes the book bizarre is that Whitman, because he wants to stand for everyone, because he wants to be less a historical person than a marker for democratic personhood, can’t really write a memoir full of a life’s particularities. If he were to reveal the specific genesis and texture of his personality, if he presented a picture of irreducible individuality, he would lose his ability to be “Walt Whitman, a cosmos”—his “I” would belong to an empirical person rather than constituting a pronoun in which the readers of the future could participate. As a result, while he recounts a few basic facts about his life, most of the book consists of him describing natural and national histories as if they were details of his intimate biography. And many of his memories are general enough to be anyone’s memory: how he took his ease under a flowering tree or whatever. (Whitman is always “loafing,” always taking his ease, as if leisure were a condition of poetic receptivity.) As a memoir, it’s an interesting failure. Just as in the poems, he has to be nobody in particular in order to be a democratic everyman, has to empty himself out so that his poetry can be a textual commons for the future into which he projects himself. And he is always projecting himself: “I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; / I project myself — also I return — I am with you, and know how it is.”

The most riveting and disturbing and particular passages of Specimen Days are about the Civil War. What disturbed me as I read was what I perceived, rightly or wrongly, as the delight he took in the willingness of young men to die for the union whose epic bard he felt he was destined to be, and his almost sensual pleasure in the material richness of the surrounding carnage. Maybe I was projecting, but when Whitman walks the makeshift hospitals delivering to the wounded gifts of money that the rich have asked him to distribute, when he gives tobacco to those who haven’t suffered damage to the lungs or face, I thought he was in a kind of ecstasy. From the distance of my residency late in the empire of drones, his love for the young boys on both sides whose blood was to refresh the tree of liberty was hard to take. When I could no longer focus my eyes on the page, I would lie down on the hardwood floor and listen to recordings of Creeley, scores of which were available online; again and again, I played him reading “The Door” in the early sixties, static like rain on the recording, New York traffic sometimes audible in the background. And then I would listen at intervals to the one extant recording of Whitman, made by Edison: he recites four lines from “America,” a digital transfer from wax cylinder.

Days passed like this: turning in around sunrise, waking a couple of hours before sunset, my only contact with other humans the few words I exchanged with the attendant at the gas station where I continued to buy groceries, although there was an organic market in town, or with the elderly Mexican woman, Rita, whom Michael had recommended, who sold burritos out of her house. (I would drive to her house and buy a burrito soon after I woke, then reheat it for my midday meal at midnight; soon this meal was the only one I reliably took.) With the exception of one other wave on the porch when Creeley came out to smoke, I didn’t see the resident in the reflection of my house across the street, nor did I see anybody else. I had poor cell phone service and largely kept it off, exchanging some e-mails with Alex, none with Alena, and I talked to nobody from home. Before bed in the hour before sunrise I would walk the perimeter of the town, ranchland spreading out beyond it, hawks or maybe buzzards starting from the trees at the sound of my footfall on gravel. As the sun came up, I could see the white dirigible in the distance, a tethered aerostat surveillance blimp containing some kind of radar, searching for narcotraficantes passing over from northern Mexico, maybe also for immigrants, a strange helium-filled thing on the horizon that began to enter my dreams, as a version of it had long since entered Roberto’s.

Eventually a few people in town wrote me: a friend of a friend who wintered in Marfa asked if I wanted to get a drink; another resident, a novelist I’d met briefly before, asked if I wanted to go and see the Judd; I was invited, through Michael, to a party for an artist who was passing through town. I was keeping strange hours; I was working furiously; I was under the weather, having trouble adjusting to the altitude; I’d love to see you sometime in the coming weeks — I paid little attention to what excuses I deployed as I declined. Again I would find myself standing razor in hand as the sun set, and again I would decide not to shave, wondering how long it would take me to grow my neighbor’s beard, obscure my face. Again I would see a woman watering an ocotillo in her yard at dawn despite the desert cold as I took my last walk of the night, and again she’d fail to see me wave.

And I was at work, but on the wrong thing. Instead of fabricating the author’s epistolary archive, earning my advance, I was writing a poem, a weird meditative lyric in which I was sometimes Whitman, and in which the strangeness of the residency itself was the theme. Having monetized the future of my fiction, I turned my back on it, albeit to compose verse underwritten by a millionaire’s foundation. The poem, like most of my poems, and like the story I’d promised to expand, conflated fact and fiction, and it occurred to me — not for the first time, but with a new force — that part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading. I set it in Marfa, but in the extreme heat of the summer: “I am an alien here with a residency, light / alien to me, true hawks starting from the trees / at my footfall on gravel, sun-burnt from reading / Specimen Days on the small porch across / the street from where another poet died / or began dying…”

… They are dead in different ways,

these poets, but I visit them both because

a residency affords me time, not sure where

the money comes from, or what money is,

how you could set it beside a soldier’s bed

then walk out across the moonlit mall in love

with the federal, wake up refreshed and bring

tobacco to those who haven’t received

wounds in the lung or the face. Tonight

I listen to their recordings at once

in separate windows, four lines from “America”

might be recited by an actor, but the noise

of the wax cylinder is real, sounds how I

imagine engines of old boats would, while

“The Door” incorporates distress into the voice,

could be in the room. The former says

he waits for me ahead, but I doubt I’ll arrive

in time …

One morning, which was for me late at night, I’d fallen asleep with the Whitman in my lap when I was awoken by the sound of hammering on the roof above me, the first real interruption of my ghostly rhythm. Then I heard tinny music on a portable radio, voices in Spanish: men were working on the roof. There was no way I could sleep with the noise, so I decided to make coffee and walk a little — for the first time in broad daylight since I’d arrived. I left through the house’s back door and only glanced once behind me at the roof, but I made eye contact with one of the young Mexican men laboring there. I turned and waved and said — my own voice strange to me from disuse — good morning. He called another Mexican man over who said to me in English that they had to do some repairs on the houses over the next couple of days and that he hoped they weren’t making too much noise. I said they weren’t, and to let me know if they needed anything from inside, coffee or water or whatever, and then I somnambulated on — unshowered, unshaven — in the dazzling light, trying to imagine how they imagined me or the other residents in the houses they maintained, residents whose labor could be hard to tell apart from leisure, from loafing, people who kept strange hours if they kept them at all. Did the workers themselves have legal residency here, in what was for them the north, for me the extreme south?

When I returned to the house a couple of hours later the men were still at work, so I put them in the fictional summer of the poem as they hammered above me, turning the day into night:

There are men at work on the roof

when I return, too hot to do by day, wave

and am seen, an awkward exchange

in Spanish, who knows what I said, having

confused the conditional with the imperfect.

Norteño from their radio fills the house

I hope they know isn’t mine: I just write here.

Soon they move on to the house I call his

because Michael, who manages the compound,

rushed him from there to hospital in Midland

or Odessa …

When the workers had moved on to Creeley’s house and I could read — I can only read if it’s quiet, but I can write against noise — I returned, as I did almost every day, to the Civil War passages:

… he feels no need to contain his love

for the material richness of their dying, federal

body from which extremities secede, a pail

beside the bed for that purpose, almost never

mentions race, save to note there are plenty

of black soldiers, clean black women would

make wonderful nurses, while again and again

delivering money to boys with perforated organs:

“unionism,” to die with shining hair

beside fractional currency, part of writing

the greatest poem. Or is the utopian moment

loving the smell of shit and blood, brandy

as it trickles through the wound, politics of pure

sensation? When you die in the patent-office

there’s a pun on expiration, you must enter one

of the immense glass cases filled with scale

models of machines, utensils, curios. Look,

your president will be shot in a theater,

actors will be presidents, the small sums

will grow monstrous as they circulate, measure:

I have come from the future to warn you.

Awake during the day for the first time since I had arrived, I resolved to stay up and reclaim some semblance of my ordinary rhythm. When I felt too tired to write, I streamed Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc on my computer, Alena’s favorite film; it was like I was Skyping with Falconetti, whom Dreyer had kneel on stone floors in order to make the expressions of pain look real. I resolved to make plans for the next day, to visit Chinati; I looked through the various books about Judd in the house. I was going to shave and reenter time from the heat wave of the poem. Tomorrow I’d begin work on my novel.

Tomorrow I’ll see the Donald Judd

permanent installations in old hangars, but

now it’s tomorrow and I didn’t go, set out hatless

in the early afternoon, got lost and was soon

seeing floaters and spots, so returned to the house,

the interior sea green until my eyes adjusted,

I lay down for a while and dreamt I saw it.

Tonight I’ll shave, have two drinks with a friend

of a friend, but that was last week and I canceled,

claimed altitude had sickened me a little, can

we get back in touch when I’ve adjusted?

Yesterday I saw the Donald Judd in a book

they keep in the house, decided not to go until

I finished a poem I’ve since abandoned

but will eventually pick back up. What I need

is a residency within the residency, then

I could return refreshed to this one, take in Judd

with friends of friends, watch the little spots

of blood bloom on the neck, so I’ll know

I’ve shaved in time, whereas now I’m as close

to a beard as I’ve been, but not very close.

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually

not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance,

“Washes and razors for foofoos—

for me freckles and a bristling beard,”

a big part of reading him is embarrassment.

Woke up today having been shaved in a dream

by a nurse who looked like Falconetti,

my cot among the giant aluminum boxes

I still plan to see, then actually shaved and felt

that was work enough for one day, my back

to the future. The foundation is closed

Sundays and nights, of which the residency

is exclusively composed, so plan your visit

well in advance, or just circle the building

where the Chamberlain sculptures are housed,

painted and chromium plated-steel, best

viewed through your reflection in the window:

In Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc (1879)

Joan reaches her left arm out, maybe for support

in the swoon of being called, but instead

of grasping branches or leaves, her hand,

in what is for me the crucial passage, partially

dissolves. It’s carefully positioned

on the diagonal sight line of one of three

hovering, translucent angels he was attacked

for failing to reconcile with the future saint’s

realism, a “failure” the hand presents

as a breakdown of space, background

beginning to swallow her fingers, reminding me

of the photograph people fade from, the one

“Marty” uses to measure the time remaining

for the future in which we watched the movie,

only here it’s the future’s presence, not

absence that eats away at her hand: you can’t

rise from the loom so quickly that you

overturn the stool and rush toward the plane

of the picture without startling the painter, hear

voices the medium is powerless to depict

without that registering somewhere on the body.

But from our perspective, it’s precisely

where the hand ceases to signify a hand

and is paint, no longer appears to be warm

or capable, that it reaches the material

present, becomes realer than sculpture because

tentative: she is surfacing too quickly.

Now I believe I might have surfaced too quickly. I had gone more than two weeks without really speaking to anyone, a period of silence with no precedent in my life. It might also have been the longest I’d ever gone without speaking to Alex, who was, as she put it in an e-mail, respecting my distance. Finally I shaved, showered, did laundry (there were machines in the garage), and, feeling at least semihuman and diurnal, I went to look around at the Marfa Book Company, a well-regarded bookstore downtown. On the way I happened upon a coffee shop I’d never seen before. I asked for their largest iced coffee, and it was delicious; there were a few young people in the shop typing on their laptops. A basic, acute physical desire for one of the women passed through me, and was gone, as if the desire were en route to someone else.

I was sipping my coffee in the surprisingly good poetry section, full of small-press books, when a man approached me, casually said my name:

“I heard you were here — Diane and I have been waiting to run into you.” Who was Diane? He was vaguely familiar to me. Shaved head, those transparent glasses frames, in his midforties — I had seen him at art openings in New York. He might have been a friend of Alena’s. I couldn’t remember if I knew him too well to ask him to remind me of his name, and then it was too late.

“What are you doing here?”

“Chinati. And Diane has an old friend here.” He said the name of the friend as if she were famous. “We’re going to get a private look at the Judd boxes in a couple of hours and then dinner and drinks, if you’re interested.”

“I’m not a big Judd fan.”

He laughed at this. Nobody saying that in Marfa could be serious.

“I’m really exhausted,” I lied, the iced coffee having burnt off all fatigue. “I haven’t slept and think I’ll be dead tonight.”

“It’s not like you have to work in the morning,” he joked.

After all the silence, I was socially disoriented, more so for having first encountered somebody from New York out of context. Trying to figure out how to politely persist in refusing his invitation seemed to require a series of operations I could no longer recall how to perform; it was like trying to solve one of those word problems on a high school math test. “I guess I can go,” I said, not up to the challenge.

I gave him my address and they picked me up about an hour before sunset. I recognized Diane immediately (she had been introduced to me as Di), a painter who also ran a gallery whose shows I had reviewed, probably in her mid-fifties, but the man’s name still wouldn’t come to me; I hoped Diane would use it.

The Chinati Foundation was on a few hundred acres of land where there had once been a military fort. A young woman and a younger man met us in front of the office — it was Sunday, and the foundation was closed to the public. Diane introduced me to the woman, Monika, who she explained was a sculptor from Berlin, here for a few months as the Chinati artist in residence. She was tall and about as heavy as I, but stronger-looking, probably twenty-five; she had close-cropped blond hair, and I could see tattooed flames or maybe flower petals peeking above the neck of her denim jacket. The man, who looked barely twenty, was a Chinati intern in skinny jeans, his black hair arrested by some product in stylized disarray; he had the keys to the sheds where Judd’s aluminum boxes were housed.

I had never had a strong response to Judd’s work, not that I was any kind of expert. I believed in the things he wanted to get rid of — the internal compositional relations of a painting, nuances of form. His interest in modularity and industrial fabrication and his desire to overcome the distinction between art and life, an insistence on literal objects in real space — I felt I could get all those things by walking through a Costco or a Home Depot or IKEA; I’d never cared more for Judd’s “specific objects” than any of the other objects I encountered in the world, objects that were merely real. The work of his I’d seen — always in museums or small gallery installations — had left me cold, and so many of his followers celebrated his cool that I’d never questioned my initial response.

But things were different when I was an alien with a residency in the high desert entering a refashioned artillery shed that had once held German prisoners of war. German-language messages were still painted on the brick: DEN KOPF BENUTZEN IST BESSER ALS IHN VERLIEREN, read one. I asked Monika to translate: “Better to use your head than lose it,” she said. The sheds had been ruins when Judd took them over. He replaced what had been garage doors with walls of continuous squared and quartered windows, and he placed a galvanized-iron vaulted roof on top of the original flat roof, doubling the building’s height. The space was so flooded with light, and the milled aluminum so reflective — you could see the colors of the grass and sky outside the shed — that it took me a minute to see what I was seeing: three long rows of evenly spaced silver, shimmering boxes, positioned carefully in relation to the rhythm of the windows. Although all the boxes have the same exterior dimensions (41" × 51" × 72"), each interior is unique; some are internally divided in a variety of ways, some sides or tops are left open, etc., which means that, as you walk along the boxes, you might see dark volumes, or a band of dark between light-filled volumes, or, depending on your angle, no volume at all; one box is a mirror, another an abyss; all surface one moment, all depth the next. Although the material facts of the work were easy to enumerate — the intern was reciting them a little didactically, his voice echoing throughout the shed — they were obliterated by the effect. The work was set in time, changing quickly because the light was changing, the dry grasses going gold in it, and soon the sky was beginning to turn orange, tingeing the aluminum. All those windows opening onto open land, the reflective surfaces, the differently articulated interiors, some of which seemed to contain a blurry image of the landscape within them — all combined to collapse my sense of inside and outside, a power the work had never had for me in the white-cube galleries of New York. At one point I detected a moving blur on the surface of a box and I turned to the windows to see two pronghorn antelope rushing across the desert plain.

I had read or half listened to people praise these boxes before, but nobody had ever mentioned the German stenciled on the wall, or talked about how their being set in a refurbished artillery shed influenced his or her experience of the work. For me, surfacing from my silence and my Whitman, a privileged resident in the region of a militarized border, the works felt first and foremost like a memorial: a line of boxes in a military structure that once had housed prisoners from Rommel’s Afrika Korps recalled a line of coffins (I thought of Whitman visiting makeshift hospitals); the changing rhythm of the boxes’ interiors felt like a gesture toward a tragedy that was literally uncontainable, or a tragedy that, since some of the “coffins” internally reflected the landscape outside the shed, had itself come to contain the world. And yet memorial wasn’t really the right word: they didn’t seem intended to focus my memory, they didn’t feel addressed to me or any other individual. It was more like visiting Stonehenge, something I’ve never done, and encountering a structure that was clearly built by humans but inscrutable in human terms, as if the installation were waiting to be visited by an alien or god. The work was located in the immediate, physical present, registering fluctuations of presence and light, and located in the surpassing disasters of modern times, Den Kopf benutzen ist besser als ihn verlieren, but it was also tuned to an inhuman, geological duration, lava flows and sills, aluminum expanding as the planet warms. As the boxes crimsoned and darkened with the sunset, I felt all those orders of temporality — the biological, the historical, the geological — combine and interfere and then dissolve. I thought of the “impossible mirror” of Bronk’s poem.

When we left Chinati, we drove to Cochineal, a restaurant downtown that Diane preferred; she’d invited both Monika and the intern along, but they rode their bikes. We only beat them by a minute or two. I’d said next to nothing at Chinati, and, trying to make normal conversation as we waited for our drinks, I felt like a character actor trying to return to an old role. All of that vanished with the first sip of gin; I realized that the weeks I’d gone without speech or alcohol was as long a period of abstinence as I could remember having undertaken since my early teens; the second martini transformed all my accumulated circadian arrhythmia into manic energy. Without ceremony I dispatched the giant steak I had ordered, inhaled it, basically, eating most of the fat off the bone, finishing it while the others were only a bite or two into their barramundi, which left me free to focus on the wine. Here, I noticed, none of the waitstaff spoke Spanish.

The drink seemed to have a similar effect on Monika, and we talked a little frantically about the Judd, although I was embarrassed to concede how much I had been moved, and wasn’t sure about turning the conversation toward the German inscription and World War II. Her English was very good, but she seemed to deploy a limited number of words, rearranging them like modular boxes. She liked to call things “trivial” (“Flavin is a trivial artist,” a bold claim for Marfa) or “nontrivial” (“I am trying to figure out what nontrivial things sculpture can do”), and when, making fun of her own repetitiveness, she described the gorgeous sunset we’d witnessed as “nontrivial,” I found it both funny and beautiful. Whenever the intern tried to contribute to the conversation, the man whose name nobody had used talked over him, cut him off.

I don’t know what part of my largesse was due to alcohol, or to the disorienting power of the Judd, or to my sudden return to human company, but I insisted on using my “stipend” to pay for everybody’s food, even though Diane and the nameless man were almost certainly very rich. We said goodbye to the intern, who biked away, and Diane said we should all go to a gathering at her friend’s. I said I should probably go home and work on my novel, but never intended to, and soon the four of us were driving through the dark to the party. There were a few flakes of snow in the high beams, melting against the windshield, but I saw them as moths, or saw them first as one and then as the other, as if it were winter and then the midsummer of my poem.

We arrived at the same time as the intern, who must not have known if he had the authority to invite us, and when we confronted each other in the gravel driveway, he smiled with embarrassment. Before he could try to account for himself, I hugged him as if he were an old friend I was thrilled to see after an interval of years — a kind of humor totally out of character for me — and everyone laughed and was at ease. How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?

Because the house had only two low stories, I was not prepared for the vastness when Diane, without knocking, opened the door and let us in. It seemed like the giant living room we entered was an acre wide; the floor was an orange Spanish tile, with carpets and animal skins thrown here and there. All over the room were clusters of furniture, most of it black and red leather, organized around little tables; some of the furniture was art deco and some of it, for lack of a better word, southwestern. There were people, most of them younger than I, sitting and smoking and laughing in these various groupings, and some kind of country music emanating from a stereo I couldn’t locate — country music, but the singing was in French. There was a sense of incoherent opulence: a giant retablo shared space on a beige wall with a Lichtenstein painting or print. Near a vaguely familiar abstract canvas there was a large, silvery photograph of a half-naked, androgynous child facing the camera with a dead bird in its hand.

The intern broke off from us to join one of the groups and Diane led us out of the room and into the adjacent kitchen, also giant, a thousand copper pots and pans hanging from a rack above an island the size of my apartment. I was introduced to Diane’s friend, a handsome woman with silver hair, silver jewelry, and green eyes, who then introduced me to the other people drinking wine and beer around a table that had once been a door; Monika knew everyone. The people in the kitchen were considerably older than those in the living room, as if the parents had retreated to let the kids have their fun at the party — except, disrupting that image, a heavy man with long hair and a beard was dividing a small pile of cocaine with a straight razor on a silver tray. His T-shirt read: JESUS HATES YOU. Diane’s friend pointed us to the drinks.

The man asked politely if anybody would like to join him, and only one of the women at the table said in her British accent that she’d have a little for old times’ sake. The man then proceeded to separate two thin lines from the small mass of cocaine, rolled a crisp bill into a straw, and handed it to his friend. She snorted one of the lines off the tray, inhaling harder than she needed to, and tipped her head back, laughing, saying she was out of practice. The man then took the bill and, after hesitating theatrically over the small line, proceeded to inhale the entire mass of cocaine he had not divided. I stared at him wide-eyed, waiting for him to die or dissect, while everybody else at the table laughed. At this point a young woman in a cowboy hat entered from the living room, her hair down her back in a long blond braid, and asked what was so funny. “Jimmy did the pile,” Diane’s friend said. The young woman smiled in a way that made it clear that this was a thing that Jimmy did. He offered the bill around for whoever wanted the remaining small line; Monika took it.

I carried my beer back to the living room and roamed around looking at the walls. The place was bizarre. A young man and a woman were intertwined on a long burgundy leather couch talking about the pros and cons of raising chickens in their yard. Beside them on the floor a young woman in a swimsuit with a towel draped around her shoulders was texting, saying to nobody in particular, “This is why I left Austin.” The intern appeared with a bottle of white wine and glasses for the group and, seeing me milling around, introduced me to the others as one of the residents, a novelist. More of a poet, I said. They were going to go outside and smoke a joint — although it seemed they had permission to smoke indoors — and wanted to know if I wanted to join them; I said I’d tag along, which wasn’t an expression I ever used.

We exited the house into a courtyard that had a raised pool and joined some other smokers around a table next to one of those tall portable patio heaters I associated with touristy restaurants. Some of the partygoers — although this felt less like a party than a place where people were always hanging out — seemed related to Chinati, others were people who lived in town, and some were visiting, friends of Diane’s friend, whose husband, I started to infer, was a director; all of the people in the courtyard were younger than I. A woman whose curly hair I could just tell was red in the dim light handed me the joint and said, “Did you know we’re under one of the darkest skies in North America?”

It was as if, by the time I exhaled, I was already a little too high, my breathing labored, and the speed and cadence of the speech around me hard to follow. I stood up suddenly, but then decided I didn’t want to go back into the light and face the grown-ups, so I sat down again without explanation; I thought the kids were laughing at me. Monika appeared and pulled up a chair beside us; she offered me a cigarette, which I took but didn’t smoke, just rotated in my fingers. Soon more cocaine was being emptied from a plastic bag onto the table, and the woman in the towel and swimsuit was chopping it up with a credit card she’d magically produced; more than the heaters, I suspected drugs were keeping her warm. Part of me said: Do a tiny bump of cocaine and you’ll feel sober, centered, back in control, and probably a little euphoric; the better part of me said, You have a cardiac condition, don’t be an idiot, come down a little and go home. The better part of me easily won the debate: I decided not to do it, but I decided not to do it after I was already looking up from the glass top of the table, having insufflated a small line.

I passed the straw to the intern and waited for the crystalline alkaloid to sober me, and then raise me into a state of preternatural attention, obliterating whatever anxiety I had about having done it. While I waited, I watched the intern whose dinner I’d purchased do three substantial lines in quick succession; I had the vague sense he wanted to impress me. Monika told him, “Hold your horses,” by which she meant something like “take it easy”; everybody laughed at her apt misuse of the proverbial phrase.

I was laughing too — in fact I saw myself from the outside, in the third person, in a separate window, laughing in slow motion — but then, having done such a stimulant, why was I outside of myself; why was time slowing? Before I knew it, I was trying hard to hold on to that question, felt it was the last link between me and my body, but soon the question didn’t belong to me, was just another thing there in the courtyard from which my consciousness was turning away. Then I was a relation between the heaters, the sky, and the blue gleam of the pool, and then I was gone, wasn’t anything at all, the darkest sky in North America. The last vestige of my personality was my terror at my personality’s dissolution, so I clung to it desperately, climbed it like a rope ladder back into my body. Once there, I told my arm to move the cigarette to my lips, watched it do so, but had no sense of the arm or lips as mine, had no proprioception. But when I inhaled the smoke — I didn’t know how the cigarette came to be lit — I could recognize it as traveling down into my chest, which was comforting, anchoring; it was the first cigarette I’d had since they’d discovered the dilation. Only after the young woman in the bathing suit said, “K — ketamine — mainly, I thought you knew,” did I hear myself ask: “What the fuck was that?”

I had done very little, and soon I was basically back in my body and in time, although my vision, if I moved my head too quickly, would break down into frames; everybody but Monika and the intern had gone back inside. But the intern, who I believe was also confused about which drug he had ingested, was not doing so well: as I watched him he raised his arms in front of his chest as if he were bench-pressing something; his eyes were open but unseeing, his eyelids fluttering; drool was trickling out of the corner of his mouth. Monika said his name, and he managed a groan. To my surprise, she just laughed, said he’d be okay, and left the two of us alone at the table. My mouth felt rubbery, but I managed to say, “You’re going to be fine, it will pass soon,” but he didn’t seem to hear me.

We sat there for I don’t know how long. My plan was to wait for someone to come out and, when I knew the intern wasn’t alone, to say I had to go and wander home, although I wasn’t sure how far my legs could take me. I was practicing my lines in my head—“I have to leave, I have to get up early tomorrow”—when the intern vomited all over himself, not really seeming to notice that he’d done so; he’d probably had a lot to drink. Not sure what to do, I asked him if he was okay, and he mumbled something in which I heard the words Sacramento and death, or maybe debt. I managed to stand up and walked awkwardly back into the house — my coordination hadn’t fully returned — with the idea of getting one of his friends to help him.

The living room, which seemed to have doubled in size, was empty, the music off. How long had we been outside? The kitchen, where I assumed people were, was a mile away, but eventually I got there; only Monika and Diane’s nameless partner were at the table. I had the vague sense I’d surprised them in a moment of intimacy.

“Where is everybody?” I asked.

“Some people went on a moonlit bike ride,” the man said. “Most went to bed.”

“The intern is sick. And I have to go home. Can somebody help him?”

“He’ll be fine,” the man said.

“He threw up,” I said.

“Good for him,” Monika said. “It will help.” A sadist.

“I have to go home,” I repeated.

“Okay,” said the man, clearly impatient for me to leave the kitchen.

“Can you help me put the intern to bed somewhere and drive me home?” It felt as if I were speaking underwater.

“It’s a short walk.” Now I hated him.

“What is your name?”

“What?”

“What is your name? I don’t know your name. I’ve never known it.” Monika laughed awkwardly. I believe I sounded crazy.

“Paul,” he said, his confusion making it sound like a question.

“Paul,” I repeated, as if confirming it, as if fixing him to his trivial self with a pin.

“You knew that,” he said.

“I swear to you,” I said, lifting a hand to my heart, “I didn’t.” I went to the giant silver refrigerator and opened it and found two cans of lime soda. I took the dish towel that was hanging from its handle and wet it in the faucet. I stopped before I left the room. “Paul,” I said again, basically spitting it, as if the absurdity of the name were readily apparent.

The intern could move his head to look at me when I approached, a good sign. But he was near tears. “I’m freaking out, man. I saw all these things. Horrible.”

“You’re going to be okay,” I said, and opened the cans of soda and put them on the table and then wiped the intern’s face and shirt. “The worst is over. I am with you,” I quoted, “and I know how it is.” He started to cry. He was probably twenty-two years old and far from home. The whole scene was ridiculous, but his fear, and so my sympathy, were genuine.

“Do you think you can walk inside?” I asked, after drinking some of the soda, which was delicious; the intern wasn’t able to muster interest in his. He shook his head no, but I saw he was willing to try. The smell of his button-down shirt was repulsive, and I helped him get out of it, and then threw the sodden thing in the pool. With his arm around my shoulder and mine around his waist, I walked him slowly inside, a parody of Whitman, the poet-nurse, and his wounded charge.

Jimmy was in one of the chairs, looking through an art book. “What’s wrong with the kid?” he asked. In the light, the intern was horribly pale.

“He did the pile,” I said. “Is there a bedroom I can put him in?”

“Right through that door and down the stairs.”

We managed to find the door and descended some white-carpeted stairs. I turned on the light and saw a large four-poster bed; no curtains hung from the posts, it was a kind of cube, a work of modern art. I got him to the bed and lowered him into it gently and helped him get under the covers. “Now go to sleep,” I said.

“Don’t leave me.”

“You’ll fall right asleep. I have to go home,” I said.

“I saw all these things. I’m fucked up. I feel like if I shut my eyes I’m going to die.”

“You’re fine, I promise.”

“Please,” he basically sobbed. He was desperate. I lay down on my back on the soft carpet and asked him what he’d seen. We were both staring at the white ceiling.

“I was sitting there in the chair. I could feel the chair. But it wasn’t pressing against my back, it was pressing against the front of my chest. Pressing hard. But I knew it was behind me. I can’t explain. My back and chest had become the same thing. No front or back. One thing. I couldn’t breathe in, wasn’t any space. No in to breathe into. And you and everybody else started flattening too. It was like Silly Putty.”

“Silly Putty?”

“Yeah, when we would flatten it and press it against newspapers and pull it off and it would have the image. I thought of it and then that’s what you were, everybody out back, just these images of yourselves against this flattened stuff. You were putty. Worse: meat. With your image on it, talking. Distorted. And I knew I’d made that happen because I thought it. I thought it was like Silly Putty and then it was Silly Putty and then I knew that if I thought something was like something else it would become that thing. I was trying to move and I felt like I was moving but the view wouldn’t change. My vision was locked. I remember I thought, ‘Locked like a jaw.’ Lockjaw. And then my jaw was locked. And then I thought like with rabies, like rabid dogs get. Like the Guzeks’ dog they had to put down when I was a kid, and then I could feel it, the foam at my mouth. Or I couldn’t feel it, that’s wrong, I could see it. Foam pouring out of my mouth, doglike. Pink for some reason. So where was I seeing it from? And I knew before I thought it that I was going to think: It’s like I’m dead, like I’m a ghost looking at my corpse, and I was trying not to think that because I would die if I did. But then I realized that trying not to think about something is like thinking about something, know what I mean? It has the same shape. The shape of the thought fills up with the thing if you think it, or it empties if you try not to think it, but either way it’s the same shape. And when I thought that I just felt like there was no difference between anything. And then there was no difference. Because nothing is like nothing. And there wasn’t any space.”

“The drug didn’t agree with us,” I said, to say something.

“I still don’t feel like I’m here.” Another sob. “Will you just talk to me?”

“You’re right here,” I said, and reached up from the floor and touched his shoulder, forehead, and then, a little surprised at myself, I sat up and smoothed back his hair, remembering how my father would do that to me when I had a fever as a child. Whitman would have kissed him. Whitman would have taken the intern’s fear of the loss of identity as seriously as a dying soldier’s.

“Keep talking,” he said, so I lay back down and did. I began by describing my response to the Judd, but he groaned, so I fished around for a subject, and decided on the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, having watched a documentary about it on my computer a few nights before. I talked about how Hart Crane had written The Bridge in a Brooklyn Heights apartment he only learned after the fact had been occupied by the bridge’s engineer, Washington Roebling, where he’d retreated after getting decompression sickness. (I wanted to describe the men laboring in poorly lit caissons, in danger, if they surfaced too quickly, of developing nitrogen bubbles in the blood, but I thought it might disturb the intern.) When the bridge was finished, the celebration surpassed that marking the end of the Civil War, I remembered the narrator saying over still images of crowds and fireworks. That was 1883, the year that Marx died at his desk. The year that Kafka was born. I talked about Kafka for a while, about how I had only recently learned how successful the author had been as an insurance lawyer, betting on the future. I repeated the phrase “pooled risk” a few times, said how lovely it was. Then I moved on to 1986.

When the intern was asleep, breathing regularly, I kissed him on the forehead and walked back upstairs to the living room to find that various young people were lounging there again, having presumably returned from their bike ride, no sign of Monika or Paul. I asked the redhead, whose eyes I now saw were the same green as Diane’s friend’s, and whom I was not ashamed to desire, how to get to 308 North Plateau, and she told me to turn right out of the driveway, then left when I couldn’t go any farther.

Relieved to be in the cold air and increasingly sober, I felt stupid about the drugs and drama, but I was happy I’d helped the intern, felt a tenderness for him. As I walked I heard the whistle of a train and imagined my dad was on one of its decommissioned cars. I thought of the dimly gleaming boxes in the artillery sheds, and then I imagined a long train of them, each car a work of shimmering aluminum, reflecting the moonlit desert it was moving across.

When I turned onto what I hoped was North Plateau — I couldn’t see any signs — an electric car quietly passed me going the other direction. It doubled back at the corner, the headlights now illuminating the street in front of me as I walked, and pulled up slowly beside me. Creeley was driving, his posture awkward because the seat was too far forward. He stopped and rolled down the window and said hello, that he was going to see the Marfa Lights, and he asked, in touchingly formal, accented English, if I would care to honor him with my company.

Thus the author found himself, his body still a little heavy with the traces of a veterinary dissociative anesthetic, driving nine miles out on Route 67 so as to catch a glimpse of the famous “ghost lights” with a man on whom he’d overlaid the image of a phantom. After about twenty minutes in the dark, we arrived at the viewing center, a platform faintly illuminated by red lights next to a little structure with restrooms. We shivered on the platform and looked into the westward distance.

What people report, have reported for at least a hundred years, are brightly glowing spheres, the size of a basketball, that float above the ground, or sometimes high in the air. They are usually white, yellow, orange, or red, but some people have seen green and blue. They hover around shoulder-height, or move laterally at low speeds, or sometimes break suddenly in unpredictable directions. People have ascribed the Marfa Lights to ghosts, UFOs, or ignis fatuus, but researchers have suggested they are most likely the result of atmospheric reflections of automobile headlights and campfires; apparently sharp temperature gradients between cold and warm layers of air can produce those effects.

Finally, I did see something — but it was in the other direction, and there weren’t any spheres. Far in the distance to the east I saw an orange glow on the horizon and, here and there, patches of red. At first I thought it was the light of a town, but then I realized they were wildfires or preventative controlled burns. I drew the poet’s attention to them and he nodded.

The poet lit one cigarette from another. Who was I to him? I wondered. I liked to think he also saw me as a ghost, a departed Polish poet. I saw no spheres, but I loved the idea of them — the idea that our worldly light could be reflected back to us and mistaken as supernatural. I fantasized that a couple of aluminum boxes were positioned in the distance to facilitate the mysterious radiance.

Some say the glowing spheres near Route 67

are paranormal, others dismiss them as

atmospheric tricks: static, swamp gas, reflections

of headlights and small fires, but why dismiss

what misapprehension can establish, our own

illumination returned to us as alien, as sign?

They’ve built a concrete viewing platform

lit by low red lights which must appear

mysterious when seen from what it overlooks.

Tonight I see no spheres, but project myself

and then gaze back, an important trick because

the goal is to be on both sides of the poem,

shuttling between the you and I.

I thought of Whitman looking across the East River late at night before the construction of the bridge, before the city was electrified, believing he was looking across time, emptying himself out so he could be filled by readers in the future; I took him up on his repeated invitations to correspond, however trivial a correspondent I might be. I imagined the lights I did not see weren’t only the reflections of fires and headlights in the desert but also headlights from Tenth Avenue and the brilliant white magnesium of the children’s sparklers in the community garden of Boerum Hill and a little shower of embers on a fire escape in the East Village, or the gaslights of Brooklyn Heights in 1912 or 1883 or the eyeshine of an animal approaching in the dark, ruby taillights disappearing on the curve of a mountain road in a novel set in Spain. I’d been hard on Whitman during my residency, hard on his impossible dream, but standing there with Creeley after my long day and ridiculous night, looking at the ghost of ghost lights, we made, if not a pact, a kind of peace. Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures. In a few weeks, just before this book began, the poem would end:

I’ve been worse than unfair, although he was

asking for it, is still asking for it, I can hear

him asking for it through me when I speak,

despite myself, to a people that isn’t there,

or think of art as leisure that is work

in houses the undocumented build, repair.

It’s among the greatest poems and fails

because it wants to become real and can

only become prose, founding mistake

of the book from which we’ve been expelled.

And yet: look out from the platform, see

mysterious red lights move across the bridge

in a Brooklyn I may or may not return to,

phenomena no science can explain,

wheeled vehicles rushing through the dark

with their windows down, streaming music.

Permanent installation