I nodded.
With the hooks?
They are no longer hooks.
What are they?
I told him.
That’s festive. You taking anything for that?
No.
You want something?
No.
You want to hold an event?
No.
Well, we’ll hold one anyway.
It took some organizing. Most of which, John explained, would involve rounding up a base of participants upon which the body of the event could be built. I told him about a couple of recent acquaintances, ones who hadn’t vanished. I also told him about the downstairs neighbor. I don’t know why I did this, and sometimes still feel guilty about it. But at any rate, having greeted my dismal offering with great esprit de corps, he said I could leave it all, a few details excepted, to him. He started with the downstairs neighbor and was gone for some time. This is when I heard the sounds. Did you see the neighbor? I asked when he returned, and he said, that neighbor is not coming. Then he tried in the direction of my acquaintances and, an hour or so later, said that the acquaintances, if he had, in fact, gotten hold of the right ones, would very likely, and probably in company, attend. He then set off to recruit some more.
I set off for the park.
As I have already stated, it was late autumn, but this day in late autumn it was not overly cold, and we had agreed to meet where we had always met, even though there was no longer any outdoor café, just a couple of greenish metal chairs set against the base of a chestnut tree.
Hello.
Hello.
She stood a moment. She touched my face. We sat.
It was, in fact, a little too cold, after all, with the wind, to be just sitting there, so we got up and walked around the park.
I do not know what it is about habit in those situations that builds up some sort of a diminishing effect as regards the world, so that, slowly and steadily, given that common and accustomed locus of circumstance, and a certain measure of complicity, the world’s effects on one’s person are lessened. I heard once that both actors and soldiers experience a similar phenomenon when they are playing their respective parts. We were most assuredly playing our parts. I can’t stress enough how alone in each other’s presence we had already come to be.
We were not so alone, however, walking, as the walking together business was new.
Although the park with its light wind and scattered crowds and bursts of pigeons was lovely.
My friend is in town, I said.
Really? she said, so is mine.
We exchanged names of friends.
That’s funny, she said.
She laughed.
She had a beautiful laugh, just beautiful, like that.
John and her friend Deau later met at the event and stood in the corner, in the kitchen I think, talking together for a long time. I think, if I remember correctly, John spilled some wine on Deau, or was it the other way around?
As I say, it was funny, somehow, the name business, and the fact of the effect on me of her laugh.
Later, in another city, a city on the coast, we walked together down a sloping street toward a harbor, and, this is why I even mention it, she laughed again.
That was because of a pair of monkeys.
So.
She asked me if I was ready to meet her friend and to see her apartment, and I said, yes.
We had, now, definitively it seemed, reached the period of the end of the warm weather and the beginning of the cold, and it would be some time, if ever, before we could comfortably recommence our meetings in the park. This is what I thought as we walked along and talked about various words and objects, though also, and I suppose this was a function of the changes that were in the process right those seconds of occurring, about other things.
She was asking me was I interested.
In what? I said.
She told me what it was.
I said I was, then I didn’t say anything for a moment, then I said, yes, definitely.
At times, you see, after I was no longer hearing it, I was still hearing it—I am still hearing it—her voice, in a slight but quite crystalline echo, perfectly. This was distracting, and, when it was happening, often caused her to wonder aloud about what I was thinking.
We had not yet developed a vocabulary that could accommodate, in this line, any kind of elaboration.
I’m not quite sure, I would say.
And she wouldn’t say anything.
Then we arrived at her apartment. I have already mentioned the impossible number of shelves that coexisted in those few rooms. It was a dizzying spectacle, one no doubt exacerbated by the number of objects those shelves supported. Obviously, the number of objects, of which there were many, many per shelf, must, in real terms, have far exceeded the number of shelves, but in my mind, strangely it does not. In my mind, strangely, there are more shelves than objects, and, accurate or not, this was the case right from the start.
Deau was not there. She had left a note. In which, in a large, round hand, she explained that she had just popped out. I have never been able to subtract that large, round “popped” from my impression of Deau, though I admit I haven’t tried.
Her apartment. There was the stapler, in its place, and there was a shiny bright hole puncher, much like the one belonging to my downstairs neighbor, and there was an electric pencil sharpener, not plugged in, and there was a pyramid composed of twenty perfectly white rectangular erasers. In the kitchen, on one of the shelves that had not yet been filled but that would soon be, sat the ricer, next to a small blue colander, next to a short stack of red condiment dishes, next to a white crock pot, slightly cracked at the rim, next to a large green bowl.
More.
There was a lot more.
I told her I was impressed by the number of objects she had accumulated.
She told me to come over to the bed.
Eventually, Deau popped back in.
It was a very large apartment and despite the proliferation of shelves and objects we all, once the two of us had dressed, sat at a great distance from each other.
Hello, Deau called across the room to me.
Hello, I called back.
One of my unpleasant dreams involves the inadequacy of my voice to carry across even short distances, and while perhaps you wouldn’t think that was much of a dream, I can assure you that it is quite effective.
I forget at which point we moved our chairs closer and had drinks.
Doing so was Deau’s suggestion.
This is slightly stupid, she said.
Deau, coincidentally, was about to begin a tour of some kind, and she was going to begin it in the next place she went, this first place being a preliminary stop, connected to, but not a part of, she said, her tour. I told her that my friend, John, was also on a tour, but that he had long since gotten it started, and that this was by no means a preliminary stop, and that it seemed to be doing him worlds of good.
Who is your friend John? said Deau.
I looked at her.
She looked a little like her handwriting.
If her handwriting had also been slightly, perhaps, serrated.
Hmmm, I thought.
Just exactly what kind of a tour are we talking about, Deau? I considered asking her, only it was a question I hadn’t even asked John.
Actually, I had never asked John much of anything, and still haven’t. I had, I remember sitting there thinking, once asked him where he was from, and he had taken me there, and had both shown and introduced me around.
Say hello to my mother.
What do you mean?
I mean say hi to Mother, come over here.
I don’t think so.
Get over here.
What the fuck
is
that?
The conversation took a turn, it took several turns.
At one point I was informed by Deau that I was now in the presence of a young woman who was both wonderful and very strange, which combination of descriptives seemed to add up in Deau’s mind to pleasantly eccentric.
Who are you talking about? I said.
We all three looked for a moment around the room with all its shelves.
I remember at this juncture thinking it was pretty strange to keep a stapler on a shelf you couldn’t easily reach. I also remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable at having been made privy to Deau’s opinion, presumably about the woman I was smitten with, no matter how well-informed, or, especially because it was well-informed, and I remember suddenly wishing that it was still warm out and that we were still sitting at the café near the tree.
Why is the stapler sitting way up there where you can’t reach it? I asked.
At this, she smiled, leaned forward a little, and said, I didn’t put it there for me.
Who is it for then?
She didn’t answer.
Oh, I said.
Stand up and see, she suggested.
I did. And found the stapler perfectly in reach of my outstretched hand. There was a short stack of multicolored paper sitting next to it. I picked up a couple pieces, placed them under the chisel end of the stapler, and pressed. There again came the short, crisp clunk resulting, this time, in sheets of blue and turquoise paper being crisply joined.
I don’t know.
I found it strange, and in fact despite all of it, persist in finding it strange, to have been thought of, in some way so exactly, while I wasn’t there.
The whole business, if you will indulge me for a moment, made my arm feel like a treasure.
Thank you, I said.
John had the event all organized. It was up to me to pick up the chips and the pretzels and the small pickles, or anyway fairly small pickles just not big ones, and the crackers and the meats, and it was up to me to pick up the liquid things too. I started with the meats and pickles. The ones I found were plenty small and rather handsome. I then acquired a variety of meats in several forms and brought them home, and then went back for the crackers and chips and pretzels and some cheese too, I decided, and more chips and some nuts for variety. Then I moved on to the liquid refreshments. What a glory is a beverage store. It is too many colors and too many varieties of shapes of container, and all the containers contain too many different kinds of liquids, and too much, and that they slosh, that it is in their nature to slosh, and that too many of them I had known too well and too recently.
It took three trips to get home with all of it, sloshing.
That’s that, said John.
Then it was the day of the event.
It was a very nice event, and, insofar as my dreams afterward were concerned, it did have a temporary palliative effect, as had been the case with other events in the past, although I have never been sure just why.
Marry the crowd! John yelled at me as at one point we stood at the drinks table.
Was that a quote? I asked.
Pass it on, brother, he said.
I passed it to the guy standing next to me. This guy said it to the guy next to him, a very old guy with a nose like something in a documentary on gross anomalies. Who are you? I said walking up to the old guy. He said something. I didn’t quite catch it. I started to ask him again, but just then someone yelled, the event!
The lights went out.
There was a scream.
The lights came back on.
John was on top of someone.
The lights went out again.
They were out for a long time.
Later, a tall, skinny woman wearing sunglasses and a floppy hat came up to me and whispered, marry the crown, pass it on.
I passed it on to John.
John said, I just did, and grinned.
The room was crowded.
The crowded room spun around me.
Anyway, the first time she saw my apartment there were upwards of a hundred people in it. I exaggerate. But there were many, perhaps too many. Or at least this is how I put it to myself, because after a time, without telling me, she left.
I am an awful drunk. If I am not much present at the best of times, when I am drunk I devolve into something I think it would not be unfair to characterize as vaguely reptilian. I sit and sit and occasionally my eyes move. The last time I had been drunk—I mean before I got very drunk at the event and retracted, like something that might be happiest under a heat bulb, into a corner—I had been drunk in the presence, to speak euphemistically, of someone I was supposed to have been watching. I was supposed to have been watching him in case he chose at that late stage to say anything, but instead I sat on the floor behind him and took small sips from a large bottle I had been left with and got drunk, and when he did say something, in a very small voice, I said nothing, and alerted no one, and I stared at the back of his head, and drank, and after a time announced to myself that I no longer noticed the smell.
The day of the event was very sunny and then it was very rainy, and I was outside, attending to a few last details, in that rainy part of it.
It was not nice, this rain. It was a cold, thorough, ruin-your-fucking-universe kind of rain and I cringed each time great splashes of it hit my face.
It is unlovely to repeatedly cringe in public, and I found myself saying to myself, quit it.
Others heard me.
In fact, one person who heard me said, excuse me, and we struck up a conversation. It was not, to tell the truth, much of a conversation. Sometimes, I am capable of striking up successful conversations with complete strangers. Once, John watched me sit down at a table with someone in a crowded restaurant and talk until that other person, quite some time later, stood up to go. This incident greatly astonished John, who, though subjected during that period to my nightly outpourings, had never once before seen me address more than four or five words to anyone besides him. In fact, one time as the two of us stood at a counter with two acquaintances of the more pleasantly gendered persuasion, John described my almost total silence, as we stood there, as a condition—a condition I struggled with, gallantly. And I must say I frequently find myself returning, when I reflect on the varying success of my interactions, to the notion that I am struggling with some sort of condition.
I must be.
It is as if part of me falls into some great dark pit, though always only part of me.