This post is versus James Wood

I think that Z. Smith, DFW, JSF, all those maximalist writers, are today's Kerouac's "mad to talk, mad to live" - these people are mad to write, mad to tell a story, mad to learn, mad to know; this "maximalism" stuff is the unquenchable desire not to leave anything out, because everything is important; there are 1,000 plots, there are no flat characters; everyone is important. This is literature at its most breathtaking, most realistic; this is life on paper, this is what makes me mad to read and write.

Top 15 Albums of 2010

15. High Violet (That National). Kept afloat by "Bloodbuzz Ohio" and "Lemonworld." And "Sorrow"'s harmonies.

14. This is Happening (LCD Soundsystem). Should I say this album is really poppy or really dancey? There are advantages to each. From this position...

13. tommy (Dosh). Look for: "Number 41" ft. Andrew Bird.

12. Cosmogramma (Flying Lotus). Wow. I don't know what just happened. Very...tangible.

11. Swim (Caribou). Sounds exactly like the cover looks, so an A on the album art, as well. Beautiful mix of trance, dance, and color.

10. LP4 (Ratatat) Such easy listening, yet you can still dance to it. Something about their timbre is just so delicious.

9. Wild Smile (Suckers). Finally, a mix between David Bowie and Animal Collective - just what I needed. Great hooks; lacks flow.

8. Transference (Spoon). Demos, anyone? What? Best song nom: "Who Makes Your Money."

7. The Way Out (The Books). Whoever you think you are...thank you. "Beautiful People": nominee for song of the year.

6. Age of Adz (Sufjan Stevens). This man defies the parameters of what it means to write a song. Favorite track, "Too Much;" favorite dance, the modified sprinkler.

5. Light Chasers (Cloud Cult). Still rising in the ranks. Best lyrics. ("Room Full of People in your Head," "The Exploding People.")

4. All Delighed People EP (Sufjan Stevens). I can really get into his long (and I mean LONG) works. I really believe he is one of the most original artists out there.

3. Eyelid Movies (Phantogram). This albums hits a lot of spots. Perfect mix of electronic and emotional. Female singer also a plus. SOTY nominee: "Futuristic Casket."

2. Contra (Vampire Weekend). Most exquisite/maximalist/accessible melodies, hands down. Song of the year nominees: "California English," "Horchata," "White Sky."

1. Down There (Avey Tare). I had to do it. It sounds like both swimming underwater with bottom feeders and my subconscious. Can't get enough of "Heather in the Hospital" (Is Transitional Song of the Year a category?). Other nom: "Ghost of Books."

Honorable mentions

Dr. Dog
Eminem
Josh Ritter
Yeasayer
LCD Soundsystem
Jack Jackson
Sleigh Bells
deadmau5
Holy Fuck
Four Tet

Walter, Baci, G&T, bats

But once here, her charisma could not distract him from the lurking threats of his own instability, of critical misunderstanding, of flawed taste, of his recently arrested ability to reason things out. Without warning the words of a recent review floated in front of his eyes like dust:

“Mr. Shirrey heralds the end of a long, and I mean long, trough in modern literature,” it had said. “His current trend, which I hope is indicative of his future plans, shows a rejection of the steroid-injecting, constant-motion, bloated novels his contemporaries have been vomiting up the past couple decades. In Shirrey’s work and in his distinguished editorial eye I find hope that this next generation of literary writers will not be taking the so-called ‘theme-and-idea network’ route that regularly wakes me up in cold sweat, but rather the higher road toward refined, sympathetic, high-quality, detail-filtered fiction. He understands restraint, and that is crucial to a writer’s growth…Might I say, this man is dangerously good. And he has arrived precisely when we needed him most.”

LMIV.

Jessi was right: Thad’s eyes searched her hungrily, wanting to interpret every movement as a sign that she was urging, inviting, tempting him closer; simultaneously he held the belief that she did not know he was there at all, and thus she remained, in his mind, an impenetrable, paradoxical siren, calling to him and not caring in the slightest whether he heard.

What a beauty she was, dancing there alone! Thaddeus, inches from her from torso to toe, felt ages away; she seemed alone on the dance floor and in the universe, a dancer who needed only music and herself. And again, simultaneously, he felt impossibly close to her, as if he were the only other person in her world. And it was, indeed, her world.

He saw in her both the woman he knew to be his friend, Harlow’s friend, Jessi Mühr with her fair skin and her dark paintings, her moody ways, her hidden smiles, which she sometimes bestowed on him when she thought no one was looking, though he could not possibly be sure what they meant; and he saw in her a stranger, a woman without a past, present only here, at Baci, for herself and possibly — could it be? — for him. He had seen her dance before; he had danced with her before, but it occurred to him now that her dancing was her art as well as her painting, she was breaking free; if she was not conscious of him there next to her it was because she was exploring the recesses of the universe through the portal of dance, as he had said she could, as he had said anyone could, if they chose. Ah, yes, he saw her spirit had risen past the atmosphere: the free, dovelike spirit of this woman who had so tragically argued against it, who had fought so valiantly and yet so chaotically on the side of emotion. Now she embodied the phenomenon he had described only hours earlier, that act of transcendence that requires both absolute denial and an unconditional acceptance of the self. To him it was a sign of acquiescence, of consent; where earlier she rejected him and logic, she now succumbed, she embraced, she accepted his theory and perhaps — might it be? — him.

As if he had proven his point all over again, he felt swell within him a satisfaction that is alien to the corporal pleasure of dancing, a triumph over ill reason purely intellectual, and he basked in his own success, unable, unwilling to retreat from its glamour. Immensely pleased with his powers of coercion, he immersed himself in the fruit of his philosophy, this beautiful woman dancing in front of him, the very essence, a demonstration, of transcendence, a balm to both his senses and his intellect, his body and his mind. He watched her still, pleased that she was wholeheartedly given to this state of being; she was dancing and alive with a fullness and vitality no emotion could beget, and to think (dare he think it? He dared:) that it was he who had brought her to it, like a wild, dying horse to cold water, cold, bubbling, flowing water: and she drank thirstily, naturally; like a spirit hitherto deprived of its nectar she drank.

For a moment he indulged lucidly in the memory of their discussion, that fateful discussion, his eloquence and fury, I do not wish to block out the sky! ah! To see her so heated, so passionately indisposed to his reasoning, to his offer, yet so endearingly incapable of articulating her frustration, to see her respond with such fervor (such!) was an unprecedented event (yes, he had evoked fervor in her, and something else, yes, of course); it filled him with pride and an insatiable urge to provoke her again, his profundity, her speechlessness, like stirring a flame: would she react? He basked in that lovely, cleansing memory: Is emotion neither good nor bad, indeed? What is emotion at all, then, but misfirings of the brain, so easily swayed by hormones and chaff, mere reflections of the stars, a grotesque, distorted illusion of reality, saboteur of good rhetoric and of fascination with the fantastic? What is this good and bad of which we so cavalierly speak, so sure of ourselves, as if they are but building blocks of our understanding of things, as if we cannot understand a thing not made of them?

But nothing, of course: like weather (he had said, so achingly eloquently), like falling in love, are the passing feelings of anger and melancholy and contentedness and cold and tired. Neutrality is everything; and oh, but everything is neutral; “good” and “bad” only appear in our interpretation of the events, of our feelings, which are so faultily based on our perception, a contorted lens. What a precarious thing on which to build a life — and by thus building, brick by brick, who could hope to reach the stars? No, it is because we categorize things as good and bad, as right and wrong, we seek to contain the universe in our minds, a universe as big as infinity itself, by imposing a constructed dichotomy onto it we try to force it into the minute shell of our brains, the ocean into a snail shell (and let naught few words be said on the beauty, the fragility of a snail shell, its proportions (what numbers again?), delicate because it is brittle, brittle because delicate, not unlike our minds, why, both are perfectly suited for their respective uses, but if one tries to contain the ocean into a shell, or the universe into a mind, but of course it will shatter, lose both its and the ocean's integrity, the beauty gone, and for what? for a misguided, emotion-based hypothesis); what a distorted portrait that gives our minds to think on, and thus our brains to act on! Good, bad, true, false! How silly, an illustrious folly/ like a child, indeed, like one of us. Do we not but draw a line and insist on pushing things sweatily to one side or the other, so that they bear these simple labels of black or white, thereby forbidding things to manifest their true colors? Perhaps because our minds are stubbornly (lazily?) stuck in this wretched chiaroscuro for so long, so much longer than we can remember (Too many metaphors! Too many possibilities: but please to stick with one/). Only allowing things to exist in our own system of classification, dismissing, denying anything that does not fit — how vain! Alas (thought he), how sadly we miss out on the glorious multitudinous creation by boiling everything within it down to one projected, empty characteristic or its opposite and refusing to see it on any other terms but only by the feeling it incites in us. I claim, nay I insist, I proclaim: Nothing, but nothing, is good or bad, neither death nor life nor love nor the sky; these things are simply themselves; without a human mind to impose on it such nonsense, it continues to be as it is — how freeing to allow it to be so! If a tree falls in the forest, does it bear moral implication? Are the other trees sad? But is anything in nature sad, or content, or bothered or stirred, or good or bad?

[High on the momentum of discovery, Thad’s magnificent, preposterous mind continued jubilantly:]

But that is why bad things happen so insistently to good people, causing thinkers and believers and prayers alike to cry out in indignant consternation over the metaphysical possibility of a benevolent god; that is why good things never cease to happen to the worst of people; in this new and galvanizing model of the neutral and endlessly beautiful undistorted universe, that sentence does not make but a capillary of sense! By crossing out the words that bear no meaning, one is left with the sentiment/the statement “things happen to people and things happen to people” (or if one wants to maintain that some people are inherently or deliberately good or bad (questionable at best) then one can even get away with “things happen to good people and things happen to bad people” — it matters not a scratch), which is true, but not worth saying; for those good and bad things which we perceive as blessings and atrocities are only things we feel particularly strongly about one way or the other (from another perspective we perceive (just as surely, surely) not the opposite but something completely different altogther, no? as the sun goes down from our perspective, does the earth not rotate from another's? and are those two events, from their respective perspectives, even remotely related?); we spend copious amounts of energy pushing them to one side of the dividing line we ourselves drew (which was worth saying, but not true: does it take much energy to think of things as good or bad? Is it equivalent to carting rocks, as in that (which?) circle of Hell? Perhaps not, on second thought; it is really quite natural — ah! because we are taught to do so, we are taught to expend our energy so, so it does not seem draining, but if we were taught not to, how impossibly enervating it would be in retrospect), never realizing that if only we erased the line we could spend those untapped energies creating new entities, new ideas, wings (!)—and not by building a stair to the heavens or by shuffling around objects of illusionary weight on the earth can we be free, be light, be lifted out of the confines, the cell of emotion, that pesky, damned, trickster, one-dimensional, jail cell emotion.

XXV

It was six o’clock. The doorknob turned and the lock clicked several times in each direction, until with a final tired heave, the door swung open. Lisa left the keys in the lock as she came inside and dropped her bags on the couch, deposited her coffee cup and water bottle in the kitchen sink. She briefly considered changing out of her awful high-waisted slacks into something more forgiving, but elected to start rummaging through cupboards instead.

But what was she supposed to do with her writing?

She had recently realized that all this time, she had held the assumption that just writing for herself would suffice, that it would be enough, that it would sustain her for another sixty or seventy years. And it would, as long as her imaginary audience was there, anxiously waiting, poring over every word, validating her efforts with their ravenous appreciation. Today at work, it had come to her with stunning clarity that writing in her journal, saving documents to flash drives, sometimes, rarely rereading anything, constantly adding to it but never building on it, or even revising it, was all to go to waste without them, her faithful, invisible readers.

And now that her audience had disappeared, or rather, now that she realized they had never existed, it dawned on her that she needed to establish a real audience, to reach real people, to make real, living people want to read her writing, so that she could maintain the same feeling of purpose. If she could recreate in reality this imaginary group of people who found her writing so extraordinary, then she could continue to write as she always had—obsessively, passionately, constantly, forward-looking, messy, without direction, negligently, aggressively, gently, necessarily. But it also brought about a new responsibility, a distinct change to her fanatical, unharnessed writing.

Today, out of all days, had brought her the question of what it meant to write for a real audience as opposed to an imaginary one. (Why? What was it about today that made it so different from every other workday?

(Only that today was the latest in a long and continuous progression; since that Tuesday, when she began to teach herself to be happy, she had been coming to so many new conclusions that now they just did not stop coming, using existing conclusions as premises, building on one another. Every minute, practically, she was tripping on a new, self-evident truth, something she could not believe she had not thought of before, something that was immediately apparent and relevant and brought about a tangible change in her mental atmosphere. Today’s happened to be that she had not yet addressed the practical application of her discovery that she needed to make people listen to her, since they would not listen to her of their own accord. She must be heard. But how would she go about getting them to listen? Real people—neighbors, coworkers, strangers, students, curious, bored, hopeless, inspired, tired, desperate, insipid, intelligent, capable people?

(Not by keeping her treasures hidden. Certainly not.)

She pulled out a pot and its cover and put them on the counter. While searching for the elbow macaroni, she came upon coffee filters and assessed her energy level. She glanced at the clock, and determined that any less than three fourths of a cup wouldn’t affect her sleeping schedule, and even if it did, it was worth being able to think clearly in the meantime. She poured some grounds in the filter and hazarded another guess at the amount of water; when the machine was on, she went to get the milk, saw the Velveeta, and remembered her original plan.
Publish it?

Publish what?

She turned on the tap and filled the pan with water, allowing her brain to hold a debate with itself while she tended to her dinner. She placed the cover on the pan and turned on the burner, waited for the click of the gas. She stood against the counter, arms crossed, staring at the flame and listening to the gurgling of the coffee maker.

Publish her thoughts? Like a book?

(This did not seem to be coming naturally at all.)

A series of short stories? A novel? Could it pass as is? What is it, a memoir? Could be a new genre altogether? Should she add characters to be the voices of her thoughts? Would that sound unnatural? How did she know her thoughts weren’t the same as everyone else’s? Which did she prefer: to be a voice that seemed to speak from within, or an alien perspective; would that be fascinating or boring? Would she have a better chance of publishing an assortment of past and present thoughts if they mirrored her audience’s, or if they were on a completely different plane? Do people want to read their own minds or somebody else’s? Do people ever want to read someone else’s?

The dozens of documents saved on her laptop and scribbled in various notebooks around her apartment at this instant were filled largely with her unfiltered thoughts, in whatever form they cared to take at the moment. There were stories and poems and essays and riffs on life and pieces looking for a genre. Almost anything that had crossed her mind while she had access to pen and paper had been recorded. Her brain manifested itself in words, phrases, sounds, plots, rhythm, flow, and sometimes in a discernible structure.

The tremendous task of synthesizing all her previous thoughts into a readable, digestible form that held the slightest chance of attracting another beating heart loomed over her. Was that her only choice?

Through the magnifying glass

Lisa’s framework of life and time—that is, her idea that the present is the lens of a magnifying glass—afforded her a healthy acceptance of death, a view completely free of fear. Ever since the image of the magnifying glass and the gigantic map occurred to her (which was unannounced and unforeseen, not unlike the big bang), it stuck in her mind, and she referred back to it as needed. It translated quite smoothly into the liberating idea that death is simply stepping back and seeing the entire map. She imagined details about that glorious day when she could really see what she’d been staring at. She pictured the freedom of movement she would experience after putting down the magnifying glass and stretching her fingers, her arms, her back, and standing up straight for the first time in her existence. She imagined her eyes adjusting to the picture as a whole, and the thousand tiny sparks that would race around in her mind as she comprehended connections between details and overarching themes that were too big to see at that minute level. She pictured an impressionist painting that was made of tiny little brush marks, that only form a picture when one sees it from far away. She imagined looking over both shoulders and seeing everyone she knew, also stepping back, blinking, stretching, dropping their magnifying glasses, slightly disoriented, as if they had just woken up, feeling the kinks and the range of motion of their forgotten bodies, looking around in awe at the people around them, people they knew from the map but never fathomed that they had been standing right next to them the whole time, people with whom she had wanted desperately to make a personal connection but could not because it had to be through the map; that is, it has to be through language, which obscures meaning; a connection has to bridge perspectives, to transcend—and, she was sure, these connections that she craved would be possible when she stepped back from the map and could shake someone’s hand, give them a hug and a kiss, instead of just seeing their shadowy, false tableau on the map.

Healthy? If Lisa thinks of death as a liberation, a positive thing, an “afterlife” that is really real life and the life she knows now is, to her, a preface, as misleading as a façade, why is that healthy? Not only is she remarkably unafraid of death, but sometimes she almost looks forward to it, on days when taking out the recycling seems at once too trivial and too much. On days when existence is just too heavy a burden, too expansive, she imagines that one day, one non-earthly day, she will somehow know what it was all about, why nothing is too much or too little, how the laws of energy and their fanatical economy prove true about relationships and moods as well: for every action a reaction, no motion wasted or created or destroyed, only reused, in a most sensible, traceable, necessary way. Days when she feels she has done nothing substantial at all, she remembers that if she just waits long enough, some day she will be able to step back, look over the map, and begin her real life, wherein lies real importance, knowing fully well why everything is as it is, and why she had to go through all this in the first place. Because in her mind, what you see on the map, when you see the whole thing, is a reason for living.

(What a paradox, that you can’t see the reason for living until after you’ve lived. Can that be right?)

But healthy? Is that healthy? Shouldn’t one fear the thing that happens to everyone in the world, yet no one has lived to tell of it? What is death, and does it hurt, or is it tedious, or is it nothingness, and are we punished for things we don’t know we did or for doing things we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to do?

These questions have never bothered Lisa, although she knows they exist, because almost everyone she knew was afraid of death. She had even heard some of them say they wish they could live forever. The prospect of immortality terrified Lisa. If something awful happened to her, if she became paralyzed or deaf or both, then she would just have to wait till she died, and it would all be all right. But if she were immortal and those things happened, then she would have no hope of ever walking or hearing again. Again, this was obvious to her, but she could never tell anyone because they would accuse of her being morbid. How is that morbid? To her, the idea that death is necessarily something bad is far more morbid than her idea that it might conceivably be good. To live forever would mean an infinity of wasted afternoons, tiredness, speeding tickets, not being able to think of the right word, lost things, slivers, rising gas prices, wondering, indecision, back pain, dieting, loneliness, allergies, not having enough money, feeling selfish, feeling guilty, wondering if it could have been different. When we all step back, she believed, we will see all these things as they are—as details that are so tiny they can’t be seen without a magnifying glass.

Speaking of people who write poems, sometimes Heather did

Breathe.
A person in need of..
A person in lieu of..
..Some new way to navigate the night
Something to carry over into day

Somewhere very specifically,
In fact halfway between Greenland and Taxco
at an insurance office that used to be fast food
And halfway between a lot of other places, too

Continuous is not the opposite of transient, not only

To write a poem you need only say one thing
and then let it explain itself, that is
go back and unpack any part of it, every, if you want it to go on forever
but you must be discrete about it,
not because I insist but because you already are

Seems you can write about anything now, huh? and it will
hold, keep holding
someone's attention—but first, a second is a tick of a clock for everyone but for me, it is as many moments as I am aware of, which for us the aware makes the night and a second so

damn long. As many points in a second as there are on a line, or on a dot
A sleepless night is infinitely long

—anything, it seems, in fact, even a bench outside an insurance office, open 24 hours (the bench, not the office)
Get out of bed, get cold so that you have something to want to get back to
For now, you have 19, and 72, and a million, and
uncountable seconds to sit through, thinking

A triangle of light, greenish like mold
makes grassy shadows

The bench is wooden and wet. Sit. Many others have.

So this is what it looks like from inside
(this is the light that wakes me up when it turns on at Midnight, if I’m asleep and if I haven’t turned the blinds just right)
It’s a much different light now that I don’t fight it but instead come inside it, moth-like

Yes, to survive is such a basic instinct; when it is taken care of there is not much else that is as important, so one is lost, to navigate, without direction, on a map of infinitesimal (sic) detail. And if each is as important as the next, then one might as well be on a bench as in bed

Did you know the light went off at 5?
they are trying to save green, electricity to stop the flow of energy so you can finally get a break—

Breathe.

VI.

Ah, Jessi. It looked like she had really connected with Walter, as he explained his vocation with unprecedented candidness. He was coming out of his shell; he was speaking his mind honestly to them, and Harlow didn’t get it, but Jessi did. She must have been wallowing in her element.

For the first time that night, she didn’t hear him speaking to her. And for the first time in a long time, she wasn’t thinking about herself, either.

When the strange bird-man and -woman called out to Thad and pulled him away from the table, Jessi looked up suddenly. Her anxiety over Thad’s questionable authority and his claims about the separation of emotion and life, or emotion and art, evaporated when she saw the newcomers. She’d met them before; they came to these events frequently and deferred absurdly to Thad. The man was a painter she had once worked with. The woman’s name was Laura.

What a startling—miniscule!—coincidence, that brought her out of that onerous confusion. All at once one burden was lifted, and another made haste to take its place; Errol’s dream returned to her with vivid force, effectively dissolving everything she had been mulling over before, a suffocating, unforgiving black storm cloud.

For if you remember, it was only that morning that she had been up before dawn to answer his cry for help; it had been the first time she had witnessed him behave any differently than a kindly old piglet; she had never before seen him any less than delighted, enraptured by his own dreams and by her interpretation of them. In fact, he was a person, as she now noticed for the first time since she had started working for him over three years ago, who was enchanted by life in general, and his enchantment was beautiful and contagious. She wanted desperately not to lose that.
Plunged into her memories of that morning, which had flattened themselves into the folds of her brain but now, triggered by the name Laura, came out from their hiding and commanded her full attention like guerilla shadows, she was only half-listening to the discussion around her. She registered that Harlow again began to monopolize Walter’s conversation, beguiling him with her scheming fascination with his life, and only hazily noticed that he was looking at her, Jessi, when he spoke.

It was haunting. Errol Spice, as old as the Victorian house he lived in, as dusty as the attic that served as his home and her studio, who could see the world in fantastical color by closing his eyes—Errol Spice was no longer himself. He was terrified; he was depressed; when she left him at eleven o’clock this morning, promising to come back after getting some breakfast, he had only barely calmed down. What bothered her too was his anomalous reaction to a genuinely disturbing fear: he merely shook in little vibrations, shrank back into his pillows, and asked that she stay there, and asked that she paint.

How was she supposed to paint a fictional schizophrenia? Was it even schizophrenia that he dreamed about? She had no background in mental health and only knew the word to be associated with split personalities, or something, and she wasn’t even sure about that. She had never given it a second thought. But now Errol had described something so sad and so scary that even she had begun to feel fear, just by experiencing it secondhand. She had returned to him later that day, and he had scarcely improved. She’d considered taking him to the hospital.

His reaction—so timid, so humble—what was she supposed to make of it? He couldn’t sleep, but he didn’t get out of bed. He didn’t want to leave, although his very surroundings seemed to preserve the terror. He didn’t want to talk about anything else. His first and maniacal desire, the only way he could think to allay the fear, was to have Jessi immortalize it on canvas.

Reflecting on his odd reaction made her question why he had wanted her to paint anything for him at all. What kind of strange desire was it that compelled him to search out a willing young artist, a painter who did not mind his erratic demands and schedule and pay, who could visualize his vivid dreams and apparently do them justice, somehow to his satisfaction? She had long since stopped trying to evaluate his motives. For a long time now she had only ever listened to his requests with a benign condescension and accommodated, content to not have to look for a day job and to have plenty of time and sometimes the money to paint her own visions and meet friends for drinks. But this morning it nagged her. Why does he think that my painting can alleviate his fear?

She surfaced to hear Walter say, “I’d always been writing,” and she knew he was speaking to her as well as to Harlow, expecting a proper response. She forced herself back to Baci and fabricated a reply, knowing that the path down which her thoughts were taking her would soon ensnare her, as in a dark wood, if she let it; she needed to cling to Baci as she would to a search party.

“What did you go to school for?” she asked, hoping it was a relevant question.

“History,” he said, and involuntarily she started to slip back into the woods, the darkness of a dense wilderness encroaching around the edges; again she was surrounded by Errol’s attic and Errol’s dream.

She heard him say “I wanted to know everything,” and she was reminded of something Errol had said once, was it really three years ago? that she had begun to come see him regularly; before she got used to his eccentricity, there was a brief time when she tried in vain to understand it. “Toledo?” she’d said, picturing Madrid. “I think I know what it looks like. Do you want me to base it on a certain photo? Do you have any pictures from your time there?”

“Oh, no,” said Errol, the drawn-out o sounds making his voice sound even thinner, like a drinking straw. “That’s not what it looks like at all. Last night it looked very green, but blue. Is that teal, dear?”

“I—what? I don’t know what you mean,” she said crossly, frustrated at an old man’s senility. “I can’t paint it unless I know what it looks like, and I want to stay true to your dream, so I need you to tell me.”

“You will,” he said serenely, and she almost decided then to just paint whatever the hell she wanted.

But she was still curious. “Why do you have such a specific request in mind, but you won’t give me the specifics? Do you think I can just intuit them?”

“I want it to mirror what I already know, which is what I dreamt,” he answered, “but I also want to know more, which hasn’t happened yet. I want to know everything. And that includes what you see, too.”

Utterly exasperated, Jessi fumbled around in her own head, looking for a response.

“Why?”

For a moment, she thought Errol was speechless, or asleep. Then he said, “I don’t know. Surely nothing else seems necessary. What else is there?”

“It became necessary?” Harlow asked. Jessi jumped.

“But how will my guessing at what your dreams look like, and painting them for you, help you to know everything?” she’d demanded.

Errol Spice took several deep breaths before answering. “Because what you know is part of everything. If I don’t try to see from your viewpoint, I am limiting my possibility of learning. I need your piece. Together we can begin to put the pieces together. I…I wish we had everybody’s piece. But it’s just you and me, here, and I am asking—entreating you, dear—for yours.”

“Why mine?”

With the utmost delicateness he said to her, “If you’d rather not do it, then I would hate to force you. You are quite young, I notice. I think perhaps that you’re too young to understand. Which is, of course, why I value your piece so much. It is fresh and utterly unique.”

Naturally this inflamed Jessi and she said indignantly, “Well, I’m sorry if I think differently than you do. It’s just that I don’t see how you’re making any sense.”

“Please,” he said gently, patiently. “I can’t explain it. I want…the difference between our thoughts. I want to see the gap between our thoughts so that I can start to fill it in, to start to see everything. I didn’t choose to want this. I want it, though. I want to see during the day what I see at night. Through someone else’s eyes. Someone with an eye for color and has taste and elegance. My dear, you bring such elegance. Please.”

“You didn’t choose what you wanted,” she told Walter.

He licked his lips. “I suppose I didn’t,” he answered, vaguely confused. Before she could qualify her contention she was back in Errol’s attic, and he was lying comfortably under his purple paisley quilt, surrounded by fluffy pillows, his ancient fingers poking out over the edge of the covers by his chin, pointing at his toes, like a little boy having a bedtime story read to him. He seemed distinctly unaware that next to him, the picture of tranquility, Jessi was so upset she was actually shaking.

She began to speak but then was quieted by a silent urge inside of her; it seemed any movement or noise would scare him out of his peace, which would harm or maybe even kill him, she imagined, and no matter how maddening his esoteric explanations and nonsensical requests were, she was very, disproportionately fond of him. In his presence she felt a warmth she had not felt in years. Safe—she felt safe near him, and even in her insufferable state of anxiety which he had caused, she wanted nothing that might endanger that security.

She let out a long breath, committing to ignore his comments and do her job, feelings aside.

“All right,” she said, fighting to speak evenly, “please tell me what you want, and I’ll do my very best.”

She realized he’d been humming to himself, looking up at the sloped ceiling as if a movie were playing on it, just for him. Now he stopped, and his eyes darted over to her without disturbing his head’s nesting place in the pillows.

“Ah, yes. I’m so very glad, Jessi, to hear you say that. It is a great relief to me.”

“We were in Toledo,” she reminded him.

“You are too good to me. Yes, Toledo. It was a brilliant sort of emerald blue. What an interesting color! I don’t know that it’s found in nature, you know.”

“Hm. But you saw it in your dream?”

“Mm…‘saw’ is such a strong word, don’t you think? I would hesitate.”

She made a note and renewed her recent commitment to objectivity. “Okay. What else?”

When he had described the scene, a bewitching medieval scene of learning to waltz from a baron, or something, Jessi looked back at the notes she had taken. She had a page full of floating words and arrows and cross-outs and some diagrams which meant nothing to her, a list of adjectives attempting to describe a color he may or may not have seen, and some quotes she’d recorded verbatim, with the intention of deciphering them later. “I think I have it,” she told him, “but may I ask you to repeat your instructions? Just so we’re clear?”

“My instructions,” he said, and he sounded at once like a very young child and a very old man, like a teacher and a learner at once. He was both, he was all.

She waited.

“Please paint me my dreams,” he said, and with that, was no longer interested in talking.

Harlow was hopelessly confused.

“How is that like instructions?” she asked, her voice wavering on the edge of defeat.

“I think,” said Jessi, “if I know what you’re talking about, that you have it inside of you. The desire to do what you need to do. Almost that, you don’t want…what you don’t need. It is your job to figure out how to make it happen.”

“Yes,” agreed Walter, “yes, that’s it. Self-reflection can tell you quite a bit about yourself.”

She remembered how young she was when she first met Errol, when she attempted her first painting for him, when she brought it to him sheepishly, expecting to be rebuffed, unpaid, fired immediately. He loved it.

Part of what she loved in him was his complete disregard for the concept of right versus wrong. Because he was obsessed with the idea of Everything, he could not deny one or the other, so anything she said was valid. Everything she said, it seemed, when she was suggesting something new, a new idea or interpretation, he welcomed joyfully. He celebrated. He only rejected her comments when she said something literal or constraining or regressive.

She had never been around anyone who accepted her candid ideas as openly as she did, without judgment, with a willingness to consider them, with a desire to understand them. His dreams were just as much hers as his, because he allowed her to be a part of them. He asked her to paint something she couldn’t see, and when she finally let herself, it was the freest she had ever felt.

The schizophrenia dream scared her. There were no colors. There were no sounds. There were humanoid characters, lacking any warmth or human features; they were shadows of people, shells, they were more like death than life. There were foggy, blurry landscapes that did not entice, only depressed. There were no possibilities.

Painting a dancing scene with a flamboyant duke who had a nose as thin as air and a feathery boa the color of twirling—what did that even mean? She had painted it nonetheless, because Errol had said it matter-of-factly; he had made her believe it made sense; he had made her almost see it, and that was enough to get started. He trusted her the way a child trusts his mother, to do what is right, and the way a mother trusts her child, to imagine. He entrusted his dreams to her, and the only way she could do wrong was if she refused. Painting these synesthetic reveries, these excursions into life, these adventures that ignored parts of speech and grew entirely from free association and wordplay and an all-inclusive belief in the imagination—painting these was freedom. She could get lost in the colors and forget what words meant, or she could learn what a word meant based solely on its sound. The dreams became hers, and they shared with her the absurd joy, the disregard of “true” and “false,” the embrace of the world, the promise of endless possibility, of which they were made.

“I’d feel that I’d lost contact with myself,” she heard, “I don’t know what I would do.”

“Maybe you’d feel free,” she said before thinking, and she watched the swimming colors dissolve, and in their place, a swirling, unfocused sea of red and black and skin-white.

In the middle of an interminable conversation that was decidedly not about colors and words she found herself, struggling to pretend nothing was wrong, and Walter said flatly, “Ah, maybe. Does your motivation limit you?”

“No,” she said too quickly, almost forgetting that she was not within a dream-painting. “No, I mean. Not my motivation, no. But it might be freeing to live without constraints—” (she wished they had any idea) “—because if you’re not held to them…” (realizing that she was not making sense, she struggled to redirect her sentence) “You wouldn’t feel like you’d failed if you didn’t follow them.” There. She’d escaped her own trap, by barely making a point.

What would it be like to paint the schizophrenia dream? Could she enter it the way she had learned to enter the others? Would she find herself lost, or trapped, or both, amidst a backdrop of gray skies and claustrophobic horizons? Would she lose herself in the joylessness of confusion and a changing reality, of insincerity, of emptiness? It was the opposite of their usual dreams. Before, she and Errol had used sensory perception as law, so all that mattered were the senses and the delight they brought, their blissful exploration of the impossible, their effortless negation of the intellect, and in an impossible paradox, that intellect was challenged, validated, uplifted; now, in this dream, chaos reigned, lack of sensory stimuli abounded. The senses were utterly devastated and the intellect could not stand up straight without being pushed back down by contradictions and despair. There was no joy to be found in the senses’ play because the self was not intact. In order to paint it, she would have to undertake the same process she did to paint his happier dreams: She would have to enter into it as fully as she could, so that she could understand it, and interpret it, and visualize it. She would attempt to give it order, make it make sense, so that she could give it shape and put it on canvas, so that he in turn could look at it and understand his own dream, and now she understood why he wanted her to paint.

If Errol went there in his dream, she would have to follow him there.

On Conciseness

Most novels try to only show what is necessary to convey the setting, establish the timbre, and develop the characters. David Foster Wallace includes almost everything, incuding the chemical names of the drugs they're taking, and the copyright number of the television they watch. He is the opposite of concise. The plot is buried under 1,000 pages of details. Some details are more relevant than others. But they all help tell the story in the most realistic way possible, because in real life, isn't that how it is? We are confronted with an infinity of facts and it is our job to decipher our own plot: in reality there is no detail-filter.

Jazz

There was no outward sign or warning, only the crackle of fire they both felt at the sound of the horn, and the rise of their eyes to confirm it; and the floor no longer seemed strictly horizontal, instead a fluid mass that rose and shifted to meet their feet

Whatever else happened, even if nothing came of it, it would still hold in their collective memory as fact: for a moment, at least, they both heard the same thing

Piano Lessons

I wear my flowery sandals with the one-and-three-quarter-inch heels because they’re the prettiest ones I have, and I think Jennifer will compliment me on them when she sees me. “Oh my goodness, those are pretty!” she might say, “and it turns out that they’re perfect for using the pedal. In fact, I think today we should learn how to use the pedal,” and then I’ll show her how I already know how to use the pedal, all three in fact.

Mom makes sure we have our books before she starts the car like she always does. Actually it’s a van. Once I forgot them and Jennifer had to find some other ones for me to use, but they were old and too babyish for me anyway, and Mom was mad.

“Books, girls?” she says, turning over her right shoulder.

I hold mine up for her to see. Tory, who got the front seat because she’s two years older and always gets the best of everything, says, “Right here” and looks out the window. Tory is weird.

I look out the window too, the left one. Mom turns on the car and we start to drive. Jennifer lives a half an hour away and I usually ask Mom to turn on the radio after seven minutes, when there are twenty three minutes left, because she doesn’t like to turn it on right away.

Until then I’m bored so I look down and remember that I’m wearing my prettiest sandals. “Look at those!” Jennifer might say. “How tall are those heels?” and I’ll say “One and a quarter inch,” and she’ll say something like “Wow, you’re getting so old that maybe you can start teaching me lessons soon.”

I don’t know how that would go, me teaching Jennifer lessons, because she knows how to play a lot of things I don’t. Like, she uses both hands at the same time. Also, she’s engaged.

When I’m a piano teacher I’ll tell all my students that one day they’ll be as good as me so that they won’t think they’re bad at piano or babyish. “Wow, boys and girls,” I’ll say, “you are all really something. Reeeally something!”

And I’ll make sure to tell their parents how good they are too so their parents will know and maybe say “You were very good today sweethearts, thank you” when they tuck them in at night.

It’s only been two minutes so I sit on my hands to pass the time. I stick my feet out in front of me. My shoes are prettier than Tory’s. Tory knows how to use the pedal and both hands but she also has bangs. I don’t think Jennifer likes her as much.

“Who’s going first today, girls?” asks Mom.

“Me,” I say right away. Tory went first last week.

“I don’t care,” says Tory. I can see her reflection in the mirror. She’s looking at her braces. And maybe her bangs.

Of course she doesn’t care but I do because I’m going to be the best pianist in the world and maybe someday I’ll write a song and I’ll be able to play along with a singer or something and I can sing along too. And I’ll be engaged and wear a big diamond ring and I won’t have to practice anymore because I’ll already be so good.

Four minutes! I’m bored. “Mom?”

“Yes, hon?”

“Can you please turn on the radio?”

She does. She picks a station I like. A song I know is on. I decide to sing loud so they’d both know what a good singer I am, and that I know all the words.

“Mom, would you tell Rachel to be quiet,” says Tory after the first verse, which I knew.

“Rachel, would you mind singing to yourself, please?”

I don’t sing to myself because it isn’t as fun. Instead I flip through my piano books because I want to be able to open them right away when Jennifer says “What page number are we on?”

Sometimes she asks how the week went and sometimes she asks how school’s going. I hope she asks how school’s going so I can tell her about music class today. I knew what the whole note meant and I said so and the teacher said I must be taking lessons somewhere, and I said yes, in fact I am, I’m taking piano lessons, and she said wow that’s really something she can tell she thinks I’m going to be a great musician. And she said I have an ear for music. Which I do even though that stupid recorder doesn’t make a very good sound when I play it, only a weird ugly sound. I have an ear enough to know that I don’t like recorders so it doesn’t matter that I’m not good at them.

When we finally get to Jennifer’s house exactly twenty-six minutes later I jump out of the car and run up the driveway, which is on a big hill like a castle. I’m the first to the doorstep and I ring the doorbell, just once, because it’s polite.

By the time Jennifer comes to the door Mom and Tory are waiting with me so she doesn’t know I was there first. So I tell her “I’m going first today!” just in case Tory changed her mind.

She looks so excited to see us and she lets us in and says “Hello! It is your turn to go first, isn’t it? How are you girls doing?”

Tory says “Fine” and walks past her down the hall into the other living room
where we wait when we aren’t getting a lesson. Mom talks to Jennifer for a minute about something boring and I carefully take my shoes off slowly so she’ll see. When she doesn’t I put them back on again so I can take them off again even slower this time. She’s still talking so I wait awhile and then when Mom leaves I take off my sandals again, but now Jennifer has already turned around and is arranging papers at the coffee table which is in front of the couch where she sits while I play the piano, which is off-white and not very soft, like sand. The couch, not the piano.

No time to waste! I leave the shoes by the door and rush over to the piano with my books. I arrange them very carefully on the wooden part above the keys, where music goes.

“How was practicing this week, Rachel?” she asks, writing today’s date at the top of a piece of paper. She has nice handwriting.

“Good,” I say. I sit on my hands again.

“Yeah? Did you have any problems?”

“No,” I say.

“All right. Let’s start with the one from the purple book, then. ‘Upstairs, Downstairs.’”

She didn’t ask about school! When am I going to tell her about music class? I look in the wrong book by accident and she has to say “Page fourteen” like I don’t know while I drop it and have to pick it up first and then find it in the other one.

“I know,” I tell her. Obviously.

“Okay. Let’s hear it.” She says and sits on the edge of the sand-couch so she can see my fingers from there.

I nod my head and hope I play it right.

First I have to move my butt so it’s right on the edge, but that doesn’t feel right so I move it back, and then move the book so its middle is a little to the left of the word YAMAHA and then I brush my hair aside and look at the little gold clock on the piano and then I move to the edge again. And then I put my fingers on the keys and put my foot on the pedal, just in case. I stare at the notes. “Upstairs, Downstairs.” Where do I start? This-does-not-compute. I start to tell her I’m a robot but she’s already saying “Whenever you’re ready” which means start. She’s too serious to pretend right now so I laugh inside a little before I start to play.

I know this song kind of but for some reason I can’t see the notes and my fingers bend at all the wrong times! I lean forward and squint at the page but I can’t think of what each note means. This-does-not-compute. Ha ha! I cough and wiggle again. She knows it’s just because I can’t get comfortable. Stupid hard bench.

Jennifer stands and comes to stand behind me. She smells pretty. “One note at a time, remember. You know these.” She waits. I stare at the note. “What does this say?” and she points to the first one which has a little white “C” inside it.

“C,” I say.

“Okay,” she says, nicely, “Where’s the C?”

I find the C.

“Good. The next one?” She points again.

“D.”

This is stupid because I practiced. I don’t know why I don’t know the notes and I hate this. Why did I have to wear the pretty sandals today?

“E.”

“Good.”

“F…G.” Oops.

“Don’t rush—this isn’t about playing it fast, but playing it right, okay?”

“Okay.”

“What’s the matter, sweetie?”

“Noth—there’s something in my eye. Wait a minute.”

She puts her hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, just take it one note at a time. I know you know this because we did it last week, remember? You played it without my help at all! Were you able to play it okay this week?”

No. I want to tell her I tried but I couldn’t find it or my fingers wouldn’t play it. I did try but it didn’t work.

“Did you ask your sister if she could help you?”

I shake my head again. Tory! Of course not. I didn’t want to anyway. I could only do it when Jennifer was around. I rub my eye like there’s something in it.

“I know this is getting hard, Rachel, but it’s because you’re learning new things every week. I need you to keep practicing, everyday, if you want to get better, okay? Do you understand?”

I nod. But practicing is hard, and a big hot tear comes out of my eye. I hope she can’t see it and then another one comes out after it. I stare at the picture she has of her and her boyfriend on the piano. I bet he could play it if he wanted to, or he doesn’t have to because he’s grown up. I wish I were older so I didn’t have to play “Upstairs, Downstairs.” Everybody would think I could play it if I wanted to, and I just wouldn’t ever play it because I’ll never want to.

“Okay. Let’s start over. Let’s pretend you just got here and you’re just
sitting down. That was our warm-up, so here’s the real start. Sound good?”

“Yes!” I jump up and run to the tiles that are around the door where I left my shoes under the coat rack. I put my shoes on quickly and turn around like I just walked in. “Oh hello there! Am I late for my lesson?” I say, pretending I just got here.
“What—oh, hi there, Rachel! Time for your lesson! How are you doing today?”

“Good.” I walk around in my shoes for a minute before I take them off, but she still doesn’t notice them.

“Are you ready to start your lesson?”

“Yes!” I put them by the door and run back to my seat. Now I can play it. I don’t care if she doesn’t see the shoes because they’re just shoes anyway. If she starts to talk about the pedal I’ll put them back on. I’ll say “Oh wait I’d like that very much but I can’t unless I have something tall on my feet like these shoes, oh good thing I wore them today!”

Okay. I sit farther back on the piano bench and take a deep breath. Some people say deep breaths help you relax but they don’t really help me but I sometimes do it anyway. I already know that we start on C because I already played this song but since I’m starting over I get another chance.

“Good,” she says when I play all the first line right.

The second part is slower. “F,” I say out loud so she knows. “E. D. C.”

“All right. And is that a repeat sign I see?”

I nod. When she says it like that, duh. I play it again but this time my fingers get all mixed up and I have to start over.

“Okay,” says Jennifer, “Good. I like how you took your time that time, so you knew each note before you played it. That’s very important.”

I nod. I know. She picks up a pencil and starts writing again.

“I think I’ll need to hear that again next week, though.”

I wonder if I’m getting sick. My eyes are hot again.

“But you know what? No matter how well you played that today, Rachel, and
you did fine, I would have asked you to take it another week. Do you know why?”

No. She waits for me to look up at her. She looks all excited and she’s leaning forward on the sandy couch.

“Because that’s your C scale.”

I pretend to look surprised because it looks like that’s what she’s waiting for to start talking again. She smiles because I look surprised.

“What we just played is an extremely important part of almost all piano music. I use the C scale when I play Beethoven. I still practice my C scale, it’s that important. So now that you know it, you’re going to have to play it everyday from now on. Do you see? Even the best pianist in the world still plays their C scale.”

My jaw drops like a cartoon character and I tell her that’s really something. I know she’ll like that.

She does because she smiles some more. “See? It’s very important, so let’s aim to have it perfect for next week, okay? Don’t be afraid to ask Tory for help. She learned her C scale when she was your age and I still ask her to play it for me. Sometimes by surprise.” And she winks.

Like I’d ever ask Tory for help. She’d just say no and call me weird.

“Okay. What else do we have?” She tucks her hair behind her ear like I
sometimes do. Her hair is straight and prettier than mine though.

I start flipping through my book for a second before I decide to just say it right now: “I had music class today.”

She looks up from writing on the piece of paper. “Oh yeah? How’d it go?”

“Good,” I say. “I mean, really good. We’re learning the recorder. And I knew what a whole note was.” I don’t tell her I forgot the name when Ms. Witzenstein called on me. I did know what it was, though.

“You did! That’s great!”

“Yeah. And I have an ear for music.”

“Well that’s for sure.”

“I mean Ms. W. told me that. In front of the class.”

“Congratulations, Rachel! What a compliment. Of course, it’s true.”

“Yeah.” I was hoping she’d say something about the pedal now. I waited to give her time.

She keeps looking at me but doesn’t say anything. I give her another second.

“Are you ready? What’s the next piece?” she says. “‘Alligator.’ How’s this one coming?”

I turn back to the piano. “Good. I don’t really like this one as much.” I flip through some pages.

“Aw. Well hopefully we can get rid of it today. Why don’t you warm up while I write instructions for next week, and I’ll ask you to play it for real in just a minute?”

“K.” I look at the clock. There are still fifteen minutes left. I wish I’d practiced more or were better at piano. Or I wish I was an alligator because they don’t take piano lessons and have to learn C scales.

I stare at the picture of the alligator in a pond on page twelve. Whoever drew it can’t draw. It only has three teeth.

“This one’s really hard,” I tell her.

“Do your best,” she says.

I take another deep breath and try to play it. It’s in the left hand. I know the first note but the second one is too far away so I guess.

“Whoops,” she says.

I guess again. “Whoops,” she says again.

I squint at it so she knows I’m thinking hard. This song really is hard.

“What letter name does it say?”

“G.”

“Good. And we’re in bass clef now, left hand. Where’s the G?” There. “Good. And the next note?”

“E.”

“Which is…”

“Good.”

Finally I play all the notes right and she didn’t even help me through all of them. “Great job, let’s get rid of that one” I hope she’ll say.

“Oh look, another repeat sign!” is what she does say.

I almost start crying again. I wish she wouldn’t give me these hard pieces! How am I supposed to learn a song that jumps around like that? I can feel my eyes again and that makes me feel worse so I lean forward so she won’t see. I have to do it all again.

“Slowly,” she says.

I say them out loud again so maybe she won’t notice how slow it is.

“G…E…F…”

“Whoops.”

After a minute I can’t even see the notes anymore because now everything is fuzzy and hot. I rub my eyes again so she thinks there’s something in them. My hands get wet.

“It’s okay, sweetie. You can do this.”

Thirteen minutes left but by then I’ll have to stop crying because I don’t want Mom to see me.

“Here, let me play it first,” Jennifer says, and sits next to me on the bench. She thinks she’s being nice and I guess she is but that won’t help me at all. She feels warm and I wish I could snuggle up to her and go to sleep but then I’d feel babyish.

“Listen. G, E, F, F, E, F, G. C, C, D, D, E, F, G. And, repeat.” She plays it again. It sounds good when she plays it.

“Okay? Now let’s do it together. I’ll play it up here. Ready?”

I nod and put my hand in the right place, I hope.

“One, two, three, go. G…G…there you go. E—no, we’re in bass clef, remember? Good. E, ef—what’s that note? F, whoops.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. Where’s the F? …There. G. You know G. Good. Okay, let’s do that line again. This time you say the notes.”

“G…E…F…”

“Mm-hm…mm-hm…see, you can do it. That was good. Second line.”

I say the notes out loud and only mess up once. She has to let this one go now so we can move onto “Starry Starry Night” on page thirteen, which is halfway through the book.

She gets up and moves back to the couch saying “All right, let’s hear that one again next week too, okay? I want to hear every note right the first time.”

Not listening. I turn on the bench and stretch my back by leaning really far over one side, like a cat. Cats don’t have to take piano lessons.

“Are you feeling okay, Rachel?”

I don’t look at her but I keep stretching and nod. I would’ve played them all right the first time but I’m too tired. I hope we’re done soon.

“Are you sure?”

I nod again. I wish she’d stop asking. I stretch to the other side like a cat again.

“Okay…okay, well let’s pick one more song for next week, okay? And then we’ll do our quiz and we’ll be all done. How’s that sound?”

I nod again.

She plays “Starry Starry Night” for me and says the same thing she always says, to play it slow, but I’m not excited because I’m still on stupid “Alligator” so I’m not really halfway through the book yet.

“Okay. I want you to practice every day, got it?”

I nod again. I can’t say anything because I might start crying.

“All right, five more minutes. Here’s a pencil and paper for you, so come sit by me.” I do. “Ready?...K, number one. Draw a treble clef.”

I stick my tongue out like an artist while I draw.

“Two, draw a quarter note.”

Easy. I do it really fast.

“Three, how many beats does a whole note get?” Duh.

“Four, what is my middle name?”

I giggle. She always does a funny one at the end and this time I know it because it’s my middle name too which means that we’re a lot alike like sisters.

“All right, are you all done? Are you sure? Are you posolutely, absotively sure?”

I can’t stop giggling because she knows I’m sure and I keep telling her I am but she
won’t take my paper.

“Okay, I guess you’re sure. Oh, hi, Tory! One more second, sweetie. Beautiful treble clef. Remember to keep the curly-Q on the G-line. Quarter note, very nice, whole note gets…uh-oh. How many beats does a whole note get?”

“Four,” says Tory the Snob from the door.

“Tory, that was for Rachel. Rachel, do you remember how we talked about the whole note being the heaviest, because it has the most beats?”

Duh. “Yes.”

“So how many beats is a whole note?”

“Four.”

“Good. And, Lynn. Bonus points. Nice drawing, sweetie! Okay, thanks for all your hard work today. See you after my next victim…” And she makes a cackling sound like a witch. Tory and I laugh.

I take my books and walk past my shoes down the hallway and into the second living room where we wait. Mom is reading a book on the couch.

“Hi, hon. I heard you playing—that sounded great! Did you play the whole song at the end there?”

I sit down next to her. “No, that was Jennifer.”

“Oh. Well, how’d the rest of the lesson go?”

“Good.” I don’t want to tell her how I got in trouble for not practicing.

“New songs?’

“One.”

“Very good. Let’s make sure we practice a lot this week, okay?” She goes back to her book. She keeps reading but she lets me snuggle next to her and doesn’t notice when her shirt gets wet where my face is.

1. The Elegant Universe: 8.7/10. What genre shall we assign this mind trip through space and time? Adventure, history, science fiction without the fiction, philosophy? Physicist Brian Greene hosts this journey through the topsy-turvy worlds of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, and the explanation that unites them—the controversial, multidimensional string theory. Beware not of all these science-y words—you’ll learn all of them and more, before the 3 discs of this delightfully campy masterpiece are finished with you.

2. Chocolat: 4.2/10. Despite glowing recommendations from last summer’s I Love You Man, the presence of Johnny Depp, and a really sensual cover, this lukewarm movie fails to charm on several levels. First, Depp’s character, “river rat” Roux, is a lifeless ghost of his glory days as Captain Jack Sparrow. Leading lady Juliette Binoche seems misguided and unsure of her character Vianne, and in the midst of their (yawn) “romance,” the movie strains to include the dubious subplot of church versus chocolate. Sorry, Peter Klaven—this movie is neither sweet nor satisfying.

3. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: 5/10. If you squint you eyes to make it hazy, you might actually start to think you’re dreaming. Really! This movie positively nails the associative structure, unreliable logic and visual fireworks of a vivid, long-lasting dream. If you don’t mind unresolved subplots, sizable gaps in storyline, and undertones of statutory rape, or if you really want to see Tom Waites in a “Sympathy for the Devil” type role, then sit back and let yourself get lost in someone else’s imagination. Bonus points for Johnny Depp making another excellent cameo, plus the debut of a fairly hot new actor (if you don’t know who I’m talking about, it’s the guy who’s not the midget, the old man, or Heath Ledger).

4. New Moon: Still haven’t seen it. Probably sucks.

5. It, disc 2: 10/10. Best Valentine’s DVD ever. Two and a half hours of highlights from Phish’s 2-day festival in Limestone, Maine, in 2002 = beautiful. Not to mention the unreviewed disc 1, which includes interviews with the band that truly enhance their stage presence and interpersonal chemistry that they display so effortlessly onstage. This movie has everything: trance jams, party jams, terrible vocal harmonies, jazz, electric ecstasy, mind-blowing rhythms, David Bowie…everything.

6. Fargo: still deciding/10. As stated in previous conversations, this writer simply does not understand the Coen brothers. They seem to me like inside jokes between strangers. Honestly, if someone hadn’t told me this was a great movie, I probably would have thought it was made for TV. Except for a couple great shots (namely the one where Steve Buscemi walks to his car, shot from way above), some passably funny exchanges, and the adorable-ness of Margie and her husband, this movie mostly confused and bored me. Still, I look forward to dressing up as the cat-sweater wearing, roller-banged prostitute for the upcoming Fargo-themed birthday party.

10 Minutes Off

She liked the kind of voice that didn't announce itself, a low flame licking over charcoal. What came next pierced the air like an ice pick: One hour, ladies, and where is the pianist?

The Dust

The painting took up the entire wall. It was so big, you almost didn’t notice what it was of: the painter herself, in the room it was in, being critiqued by a man in a suit.

“Is this all right?” asked Jacqueline, one foot propped on the ladder, just like in the painting.

Bobby was inspecting his own image. He stood next to himself, slightly larger, and squinted at his liking, which stood looking at Jacqueline’s, arms crossed and frowning.

“Well…I was expecting something different.”

She stepped back and stood, hand on hip, trying to take it all in. After a few moments she took the ladder and moved it six inches to the left.

“Like this?”

“Yes, that’s closer,” he said. He cupped his chin in his hand and still looked pensive. He frowned.

“I could start from scratch, you know,” she offered.

“No, don’t bother.”

“Okay. As long as you’re satisfied.”

“Are you?”

“Am I? Of course I am.”

He crossed his arms and sighed. “Well, now that that’s settled, how about we figure out how you are going to deal with the problem.”

She hooked her thumbs in her overalls and looked at him inquisitively. “The problem,” she said.

“Yes,” he said impatiently. “How are you doing to deal with it?” He began pacing in front of the painting, as if he was looking for a way out. He snooped around the edges, by the floor, along the corners. There was no give. The canvas must have been exactly the dimensions of the wall. He looked nervously behind him at the clock. It was unnerving that the clock in the painting read the same time.

Jacqueline watched him, amused. “You don’t think things are fine as they turned out?”

“Some things are, well, up in the air.”

“Well, sure.”

He looked at his watch repeatedly, distracted, and continued to poke frantically at the edge of the painting on his hands and knees.

Jacqueline tapped her foot, as if she were dealing with a stubborn child. “What do you expect me to do that couldn’t also end up making things worse?”

Bobby was crawling on the floor now, searching for a gap between the canvas and the wood. He looked up when she finished speaking, first at her and then at the painting. Suddenly his eyes widened and he began to back up slowly. Eyes sweeping left and right, he brought his hands to his head in horror and let his mouth hang upon. When he finally was able to speak, he sputtered: “Jacqueline. Where is the door?”

She continued to watch him, bemused, the beginnings of a smile betraying her composure.

“Oh,” she said finally. “I didn’t paint one.”

What it was like to listen to a woman tell me that she is in prison for attempted suicide but is fine, now, obviously

Weird. I still have no idea what is obvious about that.

Lia turned 24 this month

Lia always seems to be dancing, even when there is no music, even where there is no sound.

Act Natural

Oh, it was the worst feeling in the world—what could be more terrible?—to be the only person in the room with a secret as shameful as his. Gary stood alone as the crowd swarmed around him (is this what milling was?); some people knew each other, while others were comfortable talking to strangers; some people were comfortable keeping to themselves, while Gary was not comfortable at all. Did they know? Could they guess? Why was it that no one, ever, felt as lonely as he did? Why were they all so perfectly, happily normal?

The class took their seats, and immediately Gary knew he had picked the least desirable seat in the room. He had thought it was a safe bet, a desk halfway back on the far right side, but it was obvious as soon as everyone sat down that all the popular people had gathered on the left side, and he was as far from the epicenter of cool as he could have been without being in another room. He wished he was in another room. He sat miserably, waiting for the professor to speak so he could pretend that if only the professor weren’t speaking he would be socializing.

Finally a bearded man strolled in, several minutes late, infuriatingly carefree. He bustled with papers and his backpack hung partway open like a mouth. He discarded a pile of papers into the wastebasket and looked around for something important; he located his coffee mug on the podium and claimed it as if he had found a prize. He was supremely unconcerned that next to him, the class was rudely talking; why didn’t he yell at them for being so rude? At least maybe he could make them pair up and introduce themselves so Gary would know one person...but of course he did no such thing.

After an eternity of coffee gulps and paper rearrangements the professor stood where a professor should and announced unsteadily, “Hi, everyone.” It took a minute for the students to redirect their attention to him. How did they all become friends so quickly? Clearly it was too late for Gary to ever meet anyone—but not that it mattered, because even if someone did talk to him, he’d have to ignore them because they might find out his excruciating secret—

“Okay, let’s focus,” said the professor, sounding distracted, as if he didn’t really care whether they focused or not. “I have here some review sheets; I want to start just by assessing your knowledge of biology, it’s not a quiz, so don’t worry…”

He passed out a pile of worksheets to each row, licking his finger to peel off the right amount. Gary’s anxiety suddenly transferred to the paper the man was distributing—why am I here? I don’t know anything about biology, but I better be good at it—what if I’m not? I need to pass, I need to be the smartest one, if I’m the only loser in here I might as well be the smartest—

The review sheets finally reached Gary and he stared down at it with increasing dismay. He felt nauseated. An equation that required some knowledge of cell division swam in front of his eyes; he struggled to decipher how much each number signified, but as his alarm grew his sensibility diminished; he would never be able to read this, let alone complete it—

“Okay, just take…a few minutes,” said the professor, whose nervous mannerisms threw Gary off even more. How could he ever go to him for help? What if he already knew?

His anxiety swelled like a tidal wave until it pushed out against his skin and it couldn’t swell anymore without bursting; he thought he was going to be sick; it would all come pouring out like water, like vomit, how could he possibly explain that to anyone? Excuse me, biology makes me vomit—literally—I can’t do this, nothing is more embarrassing, I can’t do science, really, help me, please, someone tell me I don’t have to do this, I just want to act!

Practicing/Describing

It was an odd day. The light was dimming rather more uniformly than usual, like a dimmer on a dining room lamp; perhaps the recent drop in temperature (though still in the eighties) had cleared the air a bit, and made everything more visible, somehow.

Cars were passing through the intersection of Trinity and Meadow, but quite slowly, or was I moving faster than normal? On second glance, the cars were behaving quite mundanely. For some reason I, standing uncertainly on the curb, unable to time my crossing, like a fast-pitch baseball player suddenly at bat in a softball game, I was not perceiving things as usual today.

About that: no, I was not at all: in fact, since this morning I’d been seeing things, not seeing things exactly but seeing people, people I thought I knew but on second thought were complete strangers. For instance, earlier today I’d been walking on the sidewalk in the opposite direction I now walked, and I was confounded to see, at a deli across the street, a woman from my semester in India, calmly munching on bread and listening to her companion ramble on. I actually stopped walking (much to the disgust of the cyclist behind me) and stared for a full ten seconds, it must have been, before I shook myself out of it. Could it have been her? Still I wonder: the woman in question had those eyes, those same eyes as Katrina, large as planets but somehow...sagging, almost, the lower lid drooping more than lids tend to do.

And that was how today had been: me, awestruck at the uncanny resemblance so many around me bore to people I once knew; it was not just a passing resemblance, it was the details, repetitions of those nuances, dimples, snag teeth, freckles, pointy ears, those odd characteristics which, in a friend, you think are unmistakable, unrepeatable stamps of identity! Apparently two bodies can share the same mark of uniqueness.

Other than that, I reflected, today was almost entirely unnoteworthy, although the sheer multitude of double takes I’ve done might brand the day in my memory. When I reflect I often come upon the realization that I will almost certainly not remember a certain day, and what a shame that is. Unless something significant happens on a given day, it will most likely slide around the funnel of my memory, until it finally disappears into the buzz of my personal history, where only themes and generalities exist.

I suppose it’s not entirely bad, though, that not everyday is memorable. For instance, that means I can write something new every single day, and if I am cautious enough to save it, I can go back and read something I don’t remember. Ah! I can surprise myself!

I wonder, if I were to meet myself a year ago, would I be surprised at what I found myself doing?

Susanna Is in Korea

There isn't really any excuse for not writing when you say you will.

Interview with a Woman Who Recently Gave Birth, in her Living Room (The Interview, not the Birth)

I sat down on a ratty yellow couch and sank farther back than I intended to. The room was poorly lit and everything seemed to be a varying shade of brown and in considerable disrepair. Actually, when I looked closer, the room revealed itself to be an odd mix of old, uncared-for things, and nicer, but not too nice, things. A broken vase served as an ashtray on the coffee table next to a black and white photograph in a wooden frame. A rocking chair hid under a pile of papers and envelopes. The room would have been an acceptable living room if not for all the trash strewn about, and if the curtains weren’t drawn over the windows.

“Thanks for meeting with me,” I said, hoping I didn’t look too uncomfortable.

Heather sat on the other side of the couch, her feet tucked up under her tiny body, biting her thumbnail. She appeared to be trying to take up as little space as possible. She wore an enormous t-shirt and shapeless sweat pants. Would she look as young if she were wearing a more flattering outfit?

“Nn,” she offered, not looking at me. Then she seemed to remember I was there and said, “Oh.”

I waited until I was sure she was done responding.

“Is it okay if I ask you a few questions?”

She nodded. She reminded me of a child.

“How long ago did you give birth to a baby boy?”

Chewing. “Not sure.”

“Can you remember anything about when it was? Weeks, months ago?”

She shook her head.

“Okay. Do you remember what you named him?”

“Stanley.” She took me by surprise with how quickly she answered, and how softly.

“Why did you name him Stanley?”

She shrugged. “My dad.”

“It was your dad’s name?”

“No.”

I struggled to relate the two.

“It reminds me of my dad.”

“Ah. Wow. Um, what did you do after you gave birth?”

Her eyes widened so I knew she was listening.

She shook her head.

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Okay, we don’t have to. Can you tell me a little bit about Delia? What’s it like living with her?”

“Good.”

“Is she good to you?”

Heather nodded.

“I remember now,” she said.

“Remember what?”

“Stanley.”

“What about him?”

“It was seventy six days ago.”

“His birthday, you mean?”

She nodded.

“Where is he now?”

“At the hospital,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. He’s blind.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel about having given birth?”

She remained stoic for a minute and then I saw a tear form in her eye.

“Are you okay?”

She still wouldn’t look at me. Her whole face was concealed by her hand.

“Do you still think about it?”

She nodded.

“What do you think about?”

Silence.

“He probably hates me,” she said.

“Why do you say that?”

Finally she looked at me.

“Wouldn’t you?”

I was stunned.

“No, Heather,” I said. “He’s just a baby. He doesn’t understand.”

“He will.”

“It’s not too late. Do you want to see him?”

She chewed on her thumbnail and drew her legs in even tighter.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Mm.”

“Heather, I have to ask you something. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

Fiercer chewing.

“Dunno.”

“Anything at all?”

Nothing.

“A mom.”

Document1.doc

At ten forty I asked him if he knew when they were coming home, and he said he didn’t.

While I waited I sat in the kitchen and made myself toast. I ate it with cinnamon sugar. I stared at the bread while I was eating it and thought about how it was a good thing I like toast, or else I wouldn’t have anything to do while I waited.

When the toast was done I went into the living room. I couldn’t find the remote so I let the TV watch me for once.

Finally it was eleven o’clock and they still weren’t home, so I called again just to make sure, and he sounded annoyed and said it was still too early to know. I hung up.

Now that I had everything to myself and I knew I would for awhile, and the neighbors weren’t around because they both go to work at eleven o’clock, I could finally sit down and do what I wanted.

I knew how to turn on Ronny’s computer because I’d seen him do it before, though he didn’t know I knew how. I waited for the screen to wake up and thought about whether I wanted another piece of toast. If the screen isn’t awake in ten seconds I’ll go make one. One, two, three…

It woke up on five so I didn’t make toast. Instead I waited until the little hourglass was gone and then clicked “Start.” I needed to find the blank white screen. I typed in “typing” in the search box.

Nothing came up. I typed in “write.” Nothing. I typed in “words.” There it was.

My heart was beating faster than usual. Maybe it was the sugar in the cinnamon sugar, or maybe it was because I found the right part of the computer to type in. I estimated that I had at least two hours before Ronny and the others got home. I would have to type fast.

I began to type what was on my mind and realized how hard it is to write what is happening as it happens, so I moved back and wrote about the past twenty minutes or so. I feel more and more relaxed. Maybe tonight I will sleep.

The Trickster

His only role is to confuse and hurt them.
Why is he trying to mess them up?
It wasn't silly to them.
Maybe he isn't such a bad guy after all. He did set them up, but he did teach them a lesson.
Is it good for me to react?
To me, it was everybody.
Wait to be given, and then freely give.

Joel felt that school was a gigantic joke played by someone who had not yet shown his or her face. To him, it was clear that what teachers were saying and what students were tested on was of secondary importance, a red herring--but you were supposed to go along pretending it was primary. He felt that all the while his third grade teacher went on about conglomerate rocks, while his sixth grade teacher explained sentence diagramming, while Miss Hart made them rewrite their spelling tests if the words were too high above the pale blue line and Mrs. Salvatore read excerpts from Heart of Darkness, they did it all with a wink. “Here is what I’m saying,” he heard, “but listen to what I am not saying. Everyone knows today’s spoken lesson is useless and boring, and you’ll forget it after the test. But I dare you to remember something.” He had seen patterns in the eraser swipes on chalkboards and heard them in the pauses of the Pledge of Allegiance. He watched his teachers rearrange the children’s desks and sit and stare, almost defeated, at their own desks after dismissal. He had been both friendless and outrageously popular. He went along with the joke and learned to follow arbitrary rules in order to accumulate arbitrary rewards. He observed how his name looked at the top of every page he handed in and understood that the formation of identity is ongoing, flexible, a choice you repeatedly make that no one else pays that much attention to, as long as it’s there. He learned mental liberation in physical captivity, that by being forced to study something so mind-numbingly dull in such an unnecessarily uncomfortable setting, one was being trained to look inward, to explore the recesses of the universe. One would not learn the nature of reality by being told to think about the nature of reality. No, Joel’s teachers were smart enough to know that one will only begin to think about that while suffering--so, to inspire thought (that is, to teach) the nature of reality, they must incite suffering, preferably of the mildest sort. Joel thought that his grade school was really stellar.

Speaking of people who write poems, Heather had tried her hand at one once

Breathe
A person in need of..
A person in lieu of..
..Some new way to navigate the night
Something to carry me over into day

Somewhere very specifically,
In fact halfway between Greenland and Taxco
at an insurance office that clearly used to be a KFC
And halfway between a lot of other places that matter, too

Continuous is not the opposite of transient, not only

To write a poem you need only say one thing
and then let it explain itself, that is
go back and unpack any part of it, every if you want it to go on forever
but you must be discreet about it,
not because I insist but because you already are

Seems you can write about anything now, huh? and it will
Hold
Someone's attention--but first, a second is a tick of a clock for everyone but for me, as many moments as I am aware of, which for the Aware makes the night and a second so

Damn long. As many points in a second as there are on a line, or on a dot
So a sleepless night really is infinitely long

--anything, it seems, in fact, even a bench outside an insurance office, open 24 hours (the bench, not the office)
Get out of bed, get cold so that you have something to want to get back to
For now, you have 19, and 72, and a million, and
uncountable seconds to sit through, thinking

A triangle of light, greenish like mold
makes grassy shadows

The bench is wooden and wet. Sit.

So this is what it looks like from inside. (This is the light that wakes me up when it turns on at Midnight, if I'm asleep and if I haven't turned the blinds just right.) It's a much different light now that I don't fight it but come inside it, moth-like

Yes, to survive is such a basic instict; when it is taken care of there is not much else that is as important, so that one is left lost, to navigate
without direction, on a map of infinitesimal (sic) detail. And if each is as important as the next, then one might as well be on a bench as in bed

Did you know the light went off at 5? Maybe they are trying to save green electricity

Breathe.

Thaddeus was reading his poetry. It was really quite preposterous.

“O, down the river of woe and pearls
I close my wandering eye--
This from a man with a purpose,
A porpoise full of me.
Whilst pivoting and thrashing
I can’t say why for that which I am here
To present--present--presently
A polished horizon in my hand!”

This went on for awhile. Thoroughly were many listeners confused. Walter concentrated. He listened like a man poring over a love letter, looking for clues. Jessi watched him and listened, ravenously curious to know what was going on in his mind.
Harlow listened gravely. She let the lilting torrent of his oratory wash through her ears like bathwater. She had long ago found her niche in the enjoyment of her friends’ art, that by relishing an entirely different effect than the one intended, she was not responsible for the content; as a bonus, it seemed, she was often heralded for her creative interpretations. Thad never questioned her comprehension of his wordplay, and even held her up as a model of one who understood him. And maybe she did understand him best because she did not try to; she simply let him be his odd self, found what she did understand about him and praised him for that, genuinely and without judgment, and she truly found pleasure in his work.
As he concluded his performance and stepped off with feather-like grace, Harlow applauded politely and turned to the table.

“That might be one of my favorites,” she offered as a starting point. “I was so taken by how much I felt my attention--oh, I don’t know, wander away, and I started to think about other things, but those p sounds came at such sharp…random times, they were like traffic cones, or rocks in rapids. They kept my mind on course.”
“Taken,” mused Walter, “that’s a good word.”
“What did you think?” Jessi asked him.
He waited patiently for himself to begin speaking. “I felt as though I were in another dimension,” he said finally, surprising everyone with his first emotionally invested remark yet. “One where words became their meaning. It makes me sad to revert to regular language.”
Jessi paused, trying to jump to a different plane of interpretation without faltering.

“That’s really interesting,” agreed Harlow, but not too readily. “I think I agree.”
They quieted as the next performer took the stage and Thad began his long return across the room, stopping frequently by fellow pedants and poets.
“But can a whole poem be…kept on track by p sounds?” Jessi blurted out to the table, sounding petulant. She had been trying for a more eloquent challenge. More gently: “I had trouble taking it in--I mean, the water imagery was so fragmented, and if the p sounds were the rocks, then…”
“Mmm,” responded Walter, now engaged; he seemed to have found himself at last. “That’s interesting. I wonder the same thing. But maybe the answer must be yes, because in fact, the whole poem was kept on course by p sounds, and that is why the words themselves became like water, and to assign them their conventional meaning might be a mistake. Also…‘taking it in’…yes, with respect, I think the intention is to change the way you listen, almost as if there were a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way to listen--you see, instead of you taking the poem in, which you have demonstrated is very difficult, if not impossible, I think he wants the poem to take you. Which it can only do if you let go of your preconceptions of language.”
“But couldn’t any…”
“Yes,” said Harlow excitedly--
--Jessi’s mind was moving sluggishly, maddeningly sluggishly, too maddening to answer cleverly; if only she could argue that point expertly, or expand on it even marginally insightfully, but the red and black of the stage and curtain swam in her vision and the room seemed too black and complex and too heavy to wade through--
(A woman was on stage using an Etch-a-Sketch to write words she would not say aloud)
Walter seemed concerned, and moved his hands for the first time tonight, he moved them onto Jessi’s, shocking her back to attention, “Do you see what I mean? That is why I thought it was so good. Of course, that is subjective.”
Recognizing a merciful second chance: “That makes sense. No, I think you’re right. I mean--”
Again her voice failed her and her mind seemed uninterested in providing her with quick, droll remarks designed to allure. Left to her own devices she resorted to her usual reticence; yes, now she had Walter fumbling for words:
He sighed: then, “But it was strange. I was listening but I kept thinking about that painting of a woman, the one above the door, who seems to be dissolving into her surroundings--”
My painting? With horror she realized he had read it backwards--no, she had painted it backward--no, there were two ways to look at it and she had failed to notice one--how many more were there, for any of her paintings, that she had never seen?--
“What about it?” she asked calmly, twisting her hand so that their touching was more deliberate; whether he meant to hold her hands or not, there it was
Distracting, or calling attention?
Walter slowed, his fingers responded favorably to her movement and he looked down and to the side in deep thought; “I can’t say…”
Knowing full well it was the alcohol muddling her mind she abruptly rose and made her way to the bar. Behind her, Harlow moved closer and said something subtle to Walter; Thad was not back yet; Jessi would see him first.
She ordered another drink and a second time opened herself up to the room, leaning back on the bar, to establish herself as alone/independent, priding herself in her juxtaposition with the women who huddled in toward each other and tried to hide when unaccompanied. She felt a continuing shock, the after effect of Walter’s sudden physical assertion; excited but ashamed of her mental lapse, she could return the energy physically but now she must prove herself mentally before she could feel attracted to him, and oh, how she wanted to feel attracted to him--
Returning to the table she ignored Harlow’s passive attempt to stay next to Walter and edged her way back in to her original seat. “Are you going up tonight, my dear?” has asked her, indicating the stage.
“Oh no, I’m not a poet,” she replied, and unexpectedly, “I only perform for myself.”
Showing his intrigue (thus giving her the upper hand), “Mm?”

The Improbable Errol Spice

The question is, why did Jessi evade Walter’s question? And why is she never at work?

Jessi had been adopted several years ago by a rich old hatter named Errol Spice. He was a thousand years old and bedridden, but he proclaimed not to mind because the only place he wanted to be was in his dreams anyway. At first he had only commissioned her to do one painting for him, but he fell madly in love with it, so he began to commission her to do others, and then other things, until finally she had no need or time to look for another job. His pay was sporadic but robust enough to keep her interested in the beginning, and by now, she had grown used to random bursts of money interrupting long periods of poverty, and was totally indifferent to money.

His dreams, which he described to her while she took careful notes, sometimes on paper, reflected a life of flamboyant and erratic travel, so it was a surprise when she discovered he had never left the city. That did account for the vast geographical and cultural discrepancies, which she had originally attributed to the fact that they were dreams--but when she learned everything he told her came from his own mind, she took his requests, and consequently her painting, much more seriously.
She had recently begun a line of mock advertisements for him, each one carefully modeled after a dream of particular importance. So far she had completely a poster announcing a Spoken Word performance in Reykjavik, a fictional band called the Cataclysmic Foxtrot appearance in Manila, and ballroom dancing lessons in Toledo, each in their respective city’s native language. The projects required moderate research, mostly translating the wording into the proper dialect; little time was spent on learning the region’s artistic style or cultural norms, so they preserved something of Errol’s dreaminess and seemed to make the far-reaching cities of the world more similar to home. Errol Spice loved them.

He had recently developed an all-consuming preoccupation with a dream in which he had sailed to Greece:
“…which by the time I got there turned out to be only the street I grew up on…my mother alive and waiting for me to finish something for her. She wouldn’t let me come inside because she wasn’t finished cleaning yet and everything was very definitely purple for a time. And so I went to find a, a phone to call my father who was upstairs but the phones only worked in Greek so I couldn’t use them, and somehow I knew that I needed to find him, and so I went to the other houses on the street, but there were big yellow columns in the way, sort of like trees, only they were called Absolutes, and I couldn’t see around them, and so I had to climb over them. And then I was in the city of Athens with a very beautiful woman who told me she had a phone but on our way to get it we ended up in a fountain, very naked and wet…” And he proceeded to illustrate a very graphic sex scene with a woman who had promised him a phone, and the detail was overwhelming.

“What do you mean when you say everything was purple,” asked Jessi.
“Well--only in the beginning. And not visually. ‘Purple’ seemed to be very present, as if the time itself were purple, I don’t mean my house was purple or anything.”
“Okay. And the trees were called Absolutes?”
“Yes. They weren’t trees. I don’t know how I know that. But I think it’s very relevant that I could not see around them, but they were excessively tall. Excessively tall.”
“And the woman?”
“Not as tall.”
“Uh huh. What about her, though?”
“Ah, Greek, I suppose. And she had a phone somewhere, and things weren’t as purple then, instead they were…full.”
“Full?”
“Yes, things were full. Each moment seemed very…heavy. And I distinctly remember moments passing the way they do awake, but usually dream moments all happen at once. But that’s not important.”
“Of course it is. Can you tell me any more about the woman?”
“Yes, she was very…meaningful.”
“How so?”
“Ahh--yes.”
In answer to the question, Jessi herself thought she had hit jackpot in terms of landing a well-paying, interesting, flexible, and incredibly cool job. She truly liked Errol and thought she understood his vibrant and pathetic desire to give form to his dreams, or to see the world (she wasn’t sure which); she pitied him, a little, and sometimes envied him, and was glad she could help him. So why wouldn’t she tell anyone?