The gland in his neck turned to stone seemingly overnight. It influenced the contents of his dream through the same process, I suppose, that made small organs solid, the same process that cast a pall over the evening’s proceedings because no one remembered to celebrate by blowing on the correct end of a trumpet. My reaction was photographed from every angle but the one that might have explained what exactly I was reacting to, why my words hung in the air for several moments like an impromptu gathering of terns. Later, he asked me if I knew someone whose name I forget now, and of course I said yes. Otherwise, everyone within earshot would have known I had arrived without a ticket, without so much as a pair of shoes. I had decided to borrow these things from the man standing outside. He didn’t seem to mind the rain or the cold too much, but he didn’t at all appreciate my tapping him on the shoulder. Leaving the moniker of the facility un-stated allows us to claim we knew what we were doing while at the same time giving us an out should the interrogation (which is coming as surely as is the Wednesday two Wednesdays from now) grow too personal. Should it immediately focus on the interior portions of our bodies where no light has shone for many years. Once, I underwent a procedure named for the Romanian physician who first suggested it in a paper, as well as the Norwegian physician who first attempted it afterward. He had some limited success, though that success was naturally overshadowed by the more numerous tragic failures that accompanied it, and by a very complex personal life. As you can imagine, the procedure is very difficult to pronounce and for this reason people usually just refer to it by a set of initials. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the history. If anything, it suggests we should probably be more vigilant in the recall of that history, and of the history of everything else we come into contact with on a daily or weekly basis. In the street, you could hear the barking of the vicious dog packs that roamed the garbage dump nearby, but this sound was hardly sufficient to distract one from the sound of classical instruments – oboes, I think, primarily -- drifting down from open windows, where, if you looked closely enough, you might discern an elegant female arm gesturing in languid accompaniment to something the arm’s owner was, no doubt, in the act of saying at that very moment. It was enough to make you wish you had learned at some point in the past how to interact with people at even the most fundamental of levels, had learned to communicate with them using something more satisfying and ultimately effective than simple guffaws and snarls. Then maybe you too could have been standing high up over the street looking down at the poor souls who wandered around beneath that window in the rain and the cold. Who had nowhere to go and very little to do once they got there. Strain the spaghetti, maybe. Make a picture with colored sand, then wipe it away again – destroy it -- before someone they loved happened by and saw it and insisted on having the thing explained to them in precise and exacting detail. The Doric columns and the piercing rays of the sun and the people milling about as if even a loose approximation of the world can’t be the world without a certain number of human beings taking up space in it. At the center or along the periphery. Which is no longer the periphery, really, once these quasi-human entities, these rough geometric stand-ins, arrive.

The debate concerning the distinction between memory and imagination went on for less than two hours and brought no more light to the subject than if we had been discussing it in a cave. The one is very like the other, according to this way of looking at things (if you can call it looking rather than feeling about in the dark, with your fingers splayed and anticipating abrasion) except in terms of the strength of the impressions made. I disagree entirely with those (like Hume) who would have the first more powerful than the second. Let’s just say they have yet to open the refrigerator door and so don’t know what is liable to be hiding in the crisper. In a similar vein, I look away the moment my hand happens to clasp the hand of someone standing directly in front of me. Not because I lack confidence. I worry about the transference of viruses through the medium of warm and stagnant air. And I can’t imagine how this averting of the gaze could possibly harm anyone in the long run, though there can be no question of its offending in the short. Also, I frequently think maybe I’ll find ten dollars on the ground, as I did once twenty years ago. The man with the flimsy van dyke beard and the habit of rolling his r’s as if he’d been born in Barcelona had just barged in late and was waving his hands about wildly above his head, but the room had all but emptied out by that point and those who remained behind, a few clumsy bikers and a woman with the letter C emblazoned on her sweater, taunted him mercilessly. You would have thought they weren’t really human beings – in the noble sense, at least, the sense preferred by apologists for the species, the thinkers and cheerleaders who had a vested interested in making us see ourselves not in the light of the sun but the light cast by unsubtle fairy tales and hymns – but creatures so far beyond the pale, so bestially cruel, as to thwart any and all efforts to classify them. I tried to hide behind the mahogany bar because I was a coward, and even though I knew right from wrong, I didn’t really want anyone else to be aware of that fact. I wanted them to aim their attention elsewhere, even if in so doing, their red-hot attention wound up burning the skin off of whoever happened to get in the way. On this day, unfortunately, it was the man with the van dyke who had just come to warn us of the presence of a grizzly bear in the vicinity. An animal known to the locals as “Venerable Augustine” and tolerated because of its reluctance to charge. The next day, who knows, it might have been a child ordered to play outside with his sister and their friends in the neighborhood until the first street lights came on. Until they heard the strains of the stand-up bass emanating from the open windows of their home and knew that all was well again, that their parents were probably dancing arm-in-arm in the dining room or the kitchen and no more apt to notice their presence now underfoot than might the entwined serpents of Hermes’ caduceus.

                          

My forearm twitched slightly before my eyes registered what it was I was looking for -- the blank place in the series. That place where the subtle gradation of shades of blue was supposed to have a gap in it. A band that would appear as nothing whatsoever – a zone devoid of all color -- if I had never before encountered that particular shade of blue in the actual world. According to the theory, as I remember it, I would have had to have gone temporarily blind around the age of thirty for this to work. Because I didn’t, I suspected some critics would claim this was sufficient enough explanation as to why my experience was contrary to what the philosophers and the psychologists and the engineers tell us was supposed to happen. That’s all well and good, but it was the fact that my unseeing, bony arm responded to the visual cue that had me staying awake, rolling about in bed past two and three o’clock in the morning, unable finally to trust my body to parse out roles to each of its individual parts in a responsible fashion. I mean, what would happen if my ears decided they should track the images even then swarming through my brain like winged insects? How would I explain my haggard appearance to the woman who had devoted half of her life to keeping people like me from running amok in the community? Her methods were crude, to be sure, involving wooden stakes and talk therapy, during which we didn’t so much talk as grunt, as lob our empty syllables in her general direction and pray that today wouldn’t be the day she came after us with a trowel. Rumors kept circulating that her legs were not real, that they had been amputated in a catastrophic accident some years previously, but any attempt to broach the subject was met with immediate hostility and then a hasty (usually, but not always, on her part) retreat in the opposite direction. Sometimes, after the sun had gone down and we were feeling safer than we had previously, we would gather outside her window and attempt to get a glimpse inside where the curtains separated slightly as a result of their tendency to bunch up naturally somewhere else. I would like to be able to go into detail concerning what we glimpsed there, but I am afraid I can’t. First, the memory has been tainted somewhat by age and the poor quality of the glass through which we were staring. Second, the innocent can only process so much information before yielding to an overwhelming and (in this instance, at any rate) irrational urge to vomit. Suffice it to say that candelabras were involved. If I remember correctly, someone kept re-arranging them on the table as if perpetually dissatisfied with the faint light given off and the restless shadows that it threw. I suggested the best remedy was to act as if we no longer believed in remedies, as if we considered them relics of a barbaric age, and we would no more pay attention to them now than if they had been etiquette handbooks written in stilted language and endorsed by thinkers and celebrities lately grown infamous for behaving in any salacious way they saw fit.        

Lean into the place obscured by shadow, turn your head to the left as if you expect to find there a long-lost cousin. The same who borrowed twenty dollars and refused to pay it back. So you haunted the street outside the bodega where he worked at all hours of the evening, reminiscing out loud. Asking strangers whether they’d be willing to stand guard while you went to the truck stop to shower. My larynx seems oversized lately, swollen from too much use. This could, of course, just be my imagination, which never seems entirely satisfied with the dreamscapes and the partial sonatas it conjures up from the raw material we all have access to. The tales told by itinerant workers, involving incest and the Liberty Bell. The poems in the anthology without a cover. I can count on one hand the number of times someone has asked me what the discolored patch of skin on my arm means and then asked my forgiveness for the intrusion. Most people seem to think my mind is at their disposal because they happen to be standing in my vicinity. I am to open it up and let them have a look around as if my head were no more than a trunk and I was attempting to smuggle it in over the border. Imagine for a moment a handful of triangles made of a material that sticks readily to felt. I suppose that material is probably felt as well, but I can’t be certain. I didn’t pay attention when that chapter was covered. Each triangle circles the other in an intricate pattern, the whole of it resembling in numerous aspects the workings of the universe itself, or at least that portion of it we find ourselves occupying at present. The movements are stiff and erratic, the triangles frequently jumping from one place to another far away without occupying any of the intervening spaces. It’s as if they don’t believe in the laws of arithmetic that wind up making all the other laws possible. Those that keep you glued to the armchair instead of floating about near the rafters, those that say when you can and can not purchase bonds from whichever agency or institution is charged with making bonds available to ordinary citizens. There’s really only so much of this we can take before we too are turned into the sorts of entities that orient themselves neither skyward nor toward the smell of clover but simply revolve around themselves indefinitely, shutting out all stimuli that arise from the environment around them. All light and every cymbal crash, every glance in your direction meant to communicate something you can’t quite put into words, but which you know the meaning of as surely as you know the meaning of a white flag flying unattended in a field full of artillery pieces. Or someone’s clearing his throat at the precise moment you have decided to speak.

The chessboard cost well over three hundred dollars and always served to remind him of a time in the past when he knew how to play, when he was actually capable of moving the pieces around with his own fingers. Now, his mind lost its way from one room to the next and when someone called his name out in passing he had to count the letters of that name on his fingers just to be certain he was the person who was supposed to respond. The match lasted two and a half hours, by which time most of those in attendance had forgotten why they had become interested in it in the first place, why they were sitting in the stands rather than at home making love to someone on the recliner. Or painting a picture with a Biblical theme. Judith and Holofernes, say. The return of the prodigal. I know the terms seem unfamiliar now, at least until you allow yourself time to study them, to let them steep in the general ambience like bits of mutton in a stew. Something cloudy and fragrant, smelling of minerals and promising to turn the evening into one you will remember but you won’t be precisely sure why. At the other end, the aisles were more or less straight and you could wander them without worrying overly about knocking items off the shelf accidentally with your elbows. Eulalie’s gaze suggested that she had been waiting, in the aisle devoted to grains and non-domestic cereals, for more than three days and if you walked on past without acknowledging her, she would just continue to wait, until you passed by again because you had forgotten something or because several weeks had come and gone, and it was time for you to reappear again after spending your time productively elsewhere. I mean, the cycle repeated because that’s what cycles do. What else can I say? I tried to lead her away by dangling a piece of fruit from a string, a pomegranate I think it was, but this ploy only ever works in the movies and we couldn’t find the camera. We kept thinking it must be directly above us, housed inside a spherical piece of plastic, but the only thing visible on the ceiling were crossbeams and the occasional motley spider web and little bits of mattress ticking gathered, no doubt, by the sparrows that kept getting trapped in there and either didn’t want to, or couldn’t figure out how to, escape. I worried that perhaps they carried disease around on their bodies and so made us all vulnerable as soon as we walked in through the front doors, our goggles pushed up onto our heads, our hands half-palsied from the excitement of coming in. Of freeing ourselves, at least momentarily, from the concept, from the category, of “out”. But Eulalie would have none of it. She said pathology is simply a product of the mind and if you let your body become accustomed, truly accustomed, to the proximity of other bodies, no matter how alien they might appear at first to your own, you will find in the end that nothing can harm you. You can live the equivalent of ten thousand years in every single minute. It will be, she said, as if those slices of time had grown tired of their meager lot in life, as if they wished to demonstrate once and for all to every larger denomination that they too were of significance and ought not to be relegated, finally, to familiar and overly sentimental phrases. To the blank spaces between Roman numerals on the face of a watch.             

First, undergarments disappeared from the dryer, mostly faded and torn articles no longer attractive, if they ever were. Whispers and suspicions arose immediately involving the man down the street who wore sunglasses even indoors, who once catalogued all the old pictures in the museum and could speak of nothing but each individual item for a year and more afterwards. When you tried to change the subject, his eyebrows met at the upper center of his face and the effect was similar to that you have probably witnessed when someone close by holds a viper by the neck. For my part, I brought my own pencils with me, afraid those provided would prove too dull or soft to allow me to calculate unperturbed for the two and a half hours it took to finish the test. Someone stood at the entrance, asking impertinent questions. To throw us off, I guess. To try to get inside our heads where he was likely to find something very like enormous containers full of raw material. Facts and dates and theories named after their French or Greek creators. Then, of course, long after she walked into the room, an afterimage hung in that exact spot as if to reinforce the idea that we are not the person trapped inside our skin so much as the memory of that person held by those who have shared small portions of their lives with us. Those who have attempted to escape our stifling presence once and for all by going to bed with the first reasonably presentable stranger who happens along, or taking up skeet shooting at the gun club on the outskirts of town. It rarely works. Somewhere along the line the past rises up again out of its filthy container and stalks about on the street, looking completely out of place like a young man with a cane. Or those blankets one places on the back of a horse so as to soak up the foam that would otherwise get trapped beneath the saddle and cause the animal harm. I spent the rest of the afternoon jotting ideas down in the margins of the book I had picked up the night before and had grown so bored of within twenty minutes, I couldn’t remember what the book was called or why I thought it might have been a good idea to read it in the first place. Something similar occurred again two weeks later when she showed up carrying a bottle of Jameson whiskey and looked at me down the slope of her nose as if I were no more than an object, a peculiar work of art, say, made entirely out of the collected, disembodied wings of innumerable insects – ordinary houseflies and dragonflies, and the miniature brown grasshoppers that materialize in the dead grass around here at the close of almost every summer.     

He borrowed the seventeen dollars from someone who looked like she had the money to spare, earrings bigger than her thumbs and encrusted with emeralds, or at least something green the way deep water is green when it hasn’t been circulating much. Under the mattress receipts kept accumulating and whenever we attempted to address the issue, someone’s feelings would inevitably get hurt. A great deal of crying and shouting and running around with sharp implements aimed in the general direction of the crier / shouter’s heart would ensue, all of which convinced him finally that silence was the solution to any of his problems that had arisen since the last solstice. Which wasn’t that long ago, really, when you thought about it. Snow still occupied the ground at the higher elevations and the wind hacked at your flesh whenever you ventured outside in search of brandy or some temporary companionship. At that time, I was in the habit of dropping the last letter of almost every word that ended in a consonant so as to impress the woman who claimed to have been born in Romania and who specialized in dishes with lots of cabbage in them. Just so you know -- none of it ever tasted like it was made with cabbage. I suppose because of her liberal use of exotic spices she brought over with her in what they used to call steamer trunks, but which we now refer to, erroneously, as luggage. She refused to let me have a look at these spices, though, refused to let me into the kitchen until after the meal was already three quarters prepared. I suspected this was her attempt to preserve a sense of mystery that was otherwise lacking in our relationship but which was crying out to be remedied the way newly-hatched owls cry out morning and night to be fed. When we listened to the sound of footsteps echoing on the pavement at night outside our windows, or the sound of someone cursing under his breath as he tried to solve a very difficult verbal riddle published in the newspaper, it reminded us that being alone was not the worst thing in the world. It was the second worst thing on a list that runs into the tens of millions. His speech on the subject was one they speak of to this day in the post office where he made it, where he delivered it with all the aplomb of a geyser. Then he didn’t so much storm out of the building as pretend he had never entered it in the first place. Later, at his desk, the Taschen edition of Degas open to one gauzy, skeletal dancer or another, he ran through all the other alternatives in his mind, all the successes and all the failures that might have overtaken him if he hadn’t been much too quick for them. If he hadn’t outdistanced them through the employment of his trademark quick wit and a thorough knowledge of the local terrain he acquired while experiencing particularly vivid dreams about this very neighborhood before he had ever even had a chance to visit it. Before he had ever once heard the conductor call it out as one of the upcoming destinations when he was still travelling about aimlessly on the train.