I spent a spell down south in my younger days, and what I missed most about my native region during that period — and I missed plenty; I am nothing if not provincial — was the changing of the seasons. Warm weather is great, but there was something sad about the lack of variety — I firmly believe that you need the classic rotation: the promise of spring, the seduction of summer, the crispness of fall and the grim determination of winter. Each season is disappointing in its own way — spring is a sorry procession of rainy days and frizzy hair, summer never turns out quite the way you expected it would and there’s a lot of sweating, fall is always too short and all your plans to drink Irish coffee in leather jackets in the outside seating area of bars inevitably wind up with you laying half-dressed on the couch while disappointing football drones on in the background, and winter — well, let me tell you a story: When I was living far away I came home one winter for the holidays and took a cab from the airport to meet my father for lunch downtown. It was about a week before Christmas, and as we drained our initial Manhattans my dad began to muse about the upcoming celebration. “You know, when I was a kid,” he said, in a voice that suggested he wasn’t even aware of my presence anymore but actually talking to himself, realizing something for the first time, “I spent the whole year waiting for Christmas. The lights, the music, the presents… all of it. It really was the happiest time of all. Now,” and here he paused for a second, as if to review the substance of what he was about to say and to make sure its import registered, “all it does is remind me that I’m a year closer to death.” Which is severe, sure, but not untrue. And that’s what winter is. Anyway, what was my point? Oh, yes: the seasons. Whatever they lack, however they inevitably fall short, I still think it is important that we go through the annual cycle. We need them to remind us that life is in constant flux, that everything changes but eventually falls back on itself. That said, HOLY SHIT IT IS FUCKING FREEZING OUT. And will be for the rest of the week. Dress warm, kids.

As to those, who in presence of their betters are too lowly in speech so that they bring not their voice whole to the lips, it happened to me and without full utterance I began:1

Yes, it is terrible, and sudden2

. He thrown everything off balance.3 And then he did go off balance on the ice, taking a step back from the eyes which had penetrated him and emptied his face.4 What was that dim distant music, those vestiges of color in the air?5 The penalty of light forever.6 Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out.7 He swore he would forget the enormous hallucination which had thrown him off at first, and he sought another method of work.8

The scare will appear as a ripple at the base.9

Pushed up where a blue-sheen God with listless eyes could look at it. 10 The picture isn’t sharp or it won’t stay in my mind.11 I huddled in my cave, grinding my teeth, beating my forehead with my fists and cursing nature.12 There was some affectation and pose in this; but as time went on, I felt more and more genuinely indignant.13 This basic phenomenon being what more abstraction-capable post-Hegelian adults call ‘Historical Consciousness.’14

He began his search already convinced that he wouldn’t find anything.15

Passion there was none.16 It has already been remarked that questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof, in the ordinary acceptation of the rule.17 We live in a world in which there is an immense amount of organization, but it is an external organization, not one of the ordering of a growing experience, one that involves, moreover, the whole of the live creature, toward a fulfilling conclusion.18 Everyone has — technical secrets.19

This was their music, loud, bland, bloodless and controlled, and he was beginning to like it.20

He moved, and the scene became itself.21 There were no parachutes.22 No climax.23 No light; but rather darkness visible.24 It is lightest just before the dark.25 He could have been telling the truth, I don’t know.26 And escalators are safe.27 I never bore people I haven’t known for at least a thousand years.28 Instead I fix my gaze on a series of pathetic furnishings.29 It was in no sense time wasted.30

I fear that this place is very shocking to you; can I do any thing to make you more comfortable?31

He slipped because when I told him stay out of that mopped spot did he do it?32 Have you already decided on the next barn to burn?33 Or, like me, do you subscribe to the notion that people who knew what they were doing began to die off about 1945 and are now on the brink of extinction, and that they have been replaced by fakes and poseurs?34 Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs?35

The Industrial Revolution meant both a departure from traditional technologies and a bewildering eclecticism of revived historical forms.36

Therefore, the first piece of advice is this: to achieve style, begin by affecting none — that is, place yourself in the background.37 Produce the impressions or original sentiments, from which the ideas are copied.38 When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience.39

The scrape of a match, and at once he is bathed in cool blue flame.40

As though there were some anti-placebo effect.41 Any reference to the author’s avowed or supposed purpose and general state of mind is in fact misleading, for it distracts us from the text to “external” matters about the author’s biography and his psychological condition or creative process, which we tend to substitute for the “internal” constitution of the work as such.42 This kind of foolishness carries very little water with me.43

Then the question of the hangman came up.44

He’ll take advantage of anybody’s necessity.45 One must not look at stigmata.46 And there comes a point where you have to call an end or at least announce a limit to sacrifice.47 Silently the corpse awaited the autopsy.48

So he made a very small forest, with just one tree in it.49

We hunch up knee to knee and nose to nose like the two devils on the Rorschach card.50 Your new hairdo is fascinating and cosmopolitan.51 I don’t suppose, maybe, we could …52 This was when they sighted the returning butterflies.53 It is an offering now, as they drive between the black cornfields.54 Storm still.55 The storm almost killed us.56 I accepted the melodrama of declaring that.57

One night while her head lay upon his heart and their cigarettes glowed in swerving buttons of light through the dome of darkness over the bed, she spoke for the first time and fragmentarily of the men who had hung for brief moments on her beauty.58

Maybe they were smiling.59 Later they traded stories about the books that had saved them.60 I am glad if I gave satisfaction.61

It is a just remark of Dr. Johnson’s (and what cannot often be said of his remarks, it is a very feeling one), that we never do any thing consciously for the last time (of things, that is, which we have long been in the habit of doing) without sadness of heart.62

But melancholic inhibition seems puzzling to us because we are unable to see what it is that so completely absorbs the patient.63 And all this mixes with your most mystic mood; so that fact and fancy, half-way meeting, interpenetrate, and form one seamless whole.64 The world, perceived as an interior, shimmers with artifice.65

The stranger hastily retreated, and drew his hat over his eyes.66

And it was a pity, because I could have buttered him and eaten him alive.67 His indifference had left him on the periphery both of that movement, and of life, and of everything, so he barely had been touched by it.68 He got right in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there.69 Everybody drowned but the rats.70 If I could become one of them, if I could only part with my language, my manner, my belongings.71

Is it possible that for some time past the destructive elements in Klee’s character were few and effectively — though with great effort — submerged, but that Klee perversely guarded the notes and themes provided in despairing moments by these elements, and that these notes, all too honest, all too unanswerable, eventually contributed decisively to his inevitable but no less abrupt and disturbing end?72

I don’t know how the authorities could have entrusted him with such a position.73

But by now too many choices have been made.74 The hospital had come for me.75 Let’s suppose for a moment that I don’t go flying off into the night.76 I wish you and yours every joy in life, old chap, and tons of money, and may you never die till I shoot you.77

Clouds make the sunshine blink light and dark in the yard.78

It was the same sun, the same light still shining on the same sand as before.79 Shapes of risen sleepers lay in the pressed and poisoned grass.80 I heard the repeating rifles behind me and the shrieks, but my head was a calm green church.81

On the one hand, the author wants to have his or her own words, wants to be the master of a personal style; on the other hand, narrative bends toward its characters and their habits of speech.82

Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them.83 I had all the freedom I needed, so I stayed right here with the masters.84 I know very well, how little reputation is to be got by writings which require neither genius nor learning, nor indeed any other talent, except a good memory, or an exact journal.85

1

Dante Alighieri. Purgatorio, Canto XXXIII.

2

Sophocles. Aias. You may not want to toggle between the footnotes and the main text; the illusion of continuity is fragile enough as it is.

3

Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” And who knows what I might blurt down out here, in small type.

4

William Gaddis. The Recognitions. None of the lines I’ll be using are infamous, as far as I know. Except for Milton’s.

5

From Nabokov’s Pale Fire, whose system of footnotes and references, if traced with academic rigor, prevents the reader from ever finishing the book.

6

John Ashbery, “To Redouté,” from The Tennis Court Oath. Which may be the only volume of poetry I own.

7

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, a book forever associated with my mother, who loves to teach it in her English class, and my sister, who as a little girl looked quite like the movie’s Scout, not least in the haircut department.

8

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Circular Ruins.” Are you trying to guess where each of these comes from?

9

From “In a Tub,” by Amy Hempel, whom I once saw but did not approach on the subway.

10

Jean Toomer. “Becky,” from Cane. Gil-Scott Heron sings a song about her.

11

Susan Sontag. In America, with shadows of “On Photography” flickering about.

12

John Gardner. Grendel. Literature punishes monsters for being true to form, and also for frightening us as children.

13

Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The Gambler. There’s a lot to be said for books that fit in your back pocket.

14

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest. I’ll spare you the reflexive and long-winded and syntactically curlicued joke about enshrining a footnote enthusiast in a footnote.

15

Italo Calvino, “The Queen’s Necklace.” But is there indeed any victory in becoming a reference point?

16

Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It seems that nothing of Poe will surpass my introduction to him.

17

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism. In the spirit of its contents, I use this treatise as a drink coaster.

18

John Dewey, Art as Experience. I am only ever 70% sure of what Dewey is talking about.

19

Philip K. Dick. The Man in the High Castle. I am only ever 70% sure Dick was sane.

20

Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis. Mysteriously shrugged off by critics but to my mind the best post-9/11 invocation of pre-9/11 Manhattan. Not that I was there.

21

John Williams, Stoner. If I convince you to read one thing, let it be this.

22

Joseph Heller, Catch-22. Perhaps the truest line in this whole desperate exercise.

23

John Barth, “Title.” As my dad would sniff, “It’s about aboutness.”

24

This comes from Milton’s description of Hell in Book I, line 62 of Paradise Lost, but I have never read Paradise Lost. Rather I have read the David Markson novel Reader’s Block, which borrows the phrase without attribution.

25

Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me. I’m wondering which other clichés can be similarly reversed for noirish punch.

26

Kelly Link, “Most of My Friends Are Two-Thirds Water.” Which unfolds smack in the middle of my own neighborhood.

27

Nicholson Baker. The Mezzanine. I am to be haunted by this sentence for life. The rest of the novel, too, in all its Byzantine banality.

28

J.D. Salinger. “Just Before the War with the Eskimos.” Eric is playing coy with Ginnie, but it’s a legitimate aspiration, or at least a convenient explanation for the bouts of silence and/or aloofness that have been known to convince new acquaintances that I hate them.

29

Daniel Clowes, David Boring. The jarring possibilities of sequential art — dream-logic juxtapositions — realized.

30

Joan Didion, “California Dreaming.” Yeah, is the wasting of time even a scientifically coherent event? Are we not always fully using it?

31

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Bad nonfiction has stolen the alternative title tic. There’s little so discouraging as a journalistic blockbuster styled “[Provocative Phrase]: [The Boring Thing This Book Is Actually About].”

32

George Saunders, “The End of FIRPO in the World.” You will weep, I promise.

33

Haruki Murakami. “Barn Burning.” You will feel a slight tingling, probably.

34

Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood, an all-question novel whose gimmick I am hijacking for the purposes of this paragraph, and of which I have only read the bit excerpted in The Paris Review No. 187 (Winter 2008), an issue given to me as a housewarming present, that I might “leave it on the coffee table and never read it.”

35

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. No digression of mine could do this shaggy dog justice.

36

James F. O’Gorman, ABC of Architecture. Because in some unforeseen circumstance, I may be required to design a building. And I want it to be pretty.

37

William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 2nd Edition. I have long thought it would be funny to assassinate a minor celebrity, get caught, and have a heavily annotated and scrawled-upon copy of this tract discovered in one’s trench coat pocket. Obviously with special attention lavished upon purely illustrative sentences like “Without a friend to counsel him, he found the temptation irresistible.”

38

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. There is a Humean tormentor in the freezer in my office break room. It is an “everything” bagel that sits nestled in the door shelf. Every time I open the freezer my eyes fall upon it; this connection is unshakeable. Surely it is the same bagel that was there yesterday, and the day before, yet our human resources department informs us that the refrigerator is swept clean every Friday afternoon to keep it hygienic and, in theory, odorless. Possibly they do not bother with the freezer when cleaning out the main cavity of the refrigerator. Possibly a coworker buys a new bagel early each morning and eats it after I have left for the evening. But who is storing bagels in the freezer, anyway? And is it really an “everything” bagel? Is it not sometimes just a poppy seed bagel, or a sesame seed bagel? Curiosity and empiricism are not enough to bridge the gap between the impression and its attendant idea. Good art shrinks that gap but remains a faint idea, more beautifully stated than most. Were I to open the freezer door and find the bagel missing, it might feel like tumbling off a roof and discovering that, in certain rare cases, gravity makes an exception.

39

Edmund Burke, An Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Life can be softened by pretending you are not the one living it. Also: does no one write enquiries anymore?

40

J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace. Its three pages of elemental violence outweigh a century of Hollywood carnage.

41

Kay Ryan, “Bitter Pill,” published in that same issue of The Paris Review I meant to not read.

42

M.H Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 3rd Edition. N.B. This sentence has been wildly misappropriated. As have the rest.

43

Jim Shepard. “Ancestral Legacies.” There is no crumb of history so ludicrous that Shepard cannot extract some further strangeness.

44

Donald Barthelme. “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby.” Its ending a decrescendo of dizzy perfection.

45

Willa Cather, A Lost Lady. Is it too late to mention that I haven’t exactly read all of the sources referenced? That I am forever “getting around to that one”?

46

Stanley Elkin. The Living End, a novel about the afterlife. Mainly hell. Frankly, it doesn’t seem publishable.

47

Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow. Proof that insufferable people are capable of fiendishly engineered art, as if you needed it.

48

Octave Feuillet, Luck’s Favorite. But I know it from its harmonic appearance in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, an epic with many memorable phrasings of its own. I imagine Bolaño preferring to be remembered as a formidable reader, and surely he knew what Borges once said when asked a vague question about his artistic lineage: “Well, I can tell you about the influences I have received, but not the influence I may have had upon others. That’s quite unknown to me and I don’t care about it. But I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that’s more or less irrelevant.” I should add that this Borges quote is another of the many gems I came to through Markson’s Reader’s Block. Yes, Markson’s books are like that, addictively so.

49

Crockett Johnson, Harold and the Purple Crayon. The grandfather I never met was named Harold.

50

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. One sort of New Orleans.

51

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces. Another sort of New Orleans. I’ve never been.

52

Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Allegedly written in the small town where I attended college, in a house I no doubt passed every day.

53

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses. A novel.

54

Alice Munro, “Labor Day Dinner.” A short story.

55

Shakespeare, “King Lear.” A play. A drama. A tragedy.

56

The Curse of Lono, Hunter S. Thompson transcribing a justifiably rattled Ralph Steadman.

57

Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances. More meteorology. More madness.

58

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned. Whenever someone says they couldn’t enjoy a novel because they “didn’t care” about its “unlikeable characters” I want to hurl this specific volume at them from across a very large room. And miss wide.

59

Raymond Carver, “Tell the Women We’re Going.” People of the minimalist sect talk about the power of the unsaid, of the hollows, and they’re mostly right.

60

Andrea Barrett, “Birds with No Feet.” A title that would take a lifetime to top.

61

P.G. Wodehouse. The Code of the Woosters. Jeeves, of course, but something I hear Wodehouse saying when complimented on his mastery of farce.

62

Thomas de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which should be reprinted at great expense and branded as “THE ORIGINAL ADDICTION MEMOIR.”

63

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia.”

64

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale. Or: Thar, She Blows!: The High Seas Heyday of Weird Whalers, Craggy Captains, and Ill-Considered Revenge.

65

“The Dome.” Dangerous Laughter. Steven Millhauser. Whose storytelling will resurrect your wonder.

66

Matthew Lewis. The Monk. Just a luridly gothic tale of the supernatural written in ten weeks toward the end of the 18th century by some nineteen-year-old who was about to become a member of British Parliament.

67

Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. Which is based on the actual honor killing of the author’s friend.

68

Michel Houellebecq. The Elementary Particles. Becoming a novelist would be great, but becoming a controversial French novelist would be really great.

69

Denis Johnson. Angels. There is a specific awe attached to first-person accounts of death — when they’re very good one suspects the author has done the dying and come back to tell us about it.

70

Kurt Vonnegut. Cat’s Cradle. I suspect the reason we treasure Vonnegut in our teens is because he sounds like a teenager, too, but a way smarter one.

71

Steps, by Jerzy Kosinski, a Jew who served as an altar boy while hiding in plain sight in Poland during the Holocaust and, four and a half decades later, cut short his prolonged illnesses by asphyxiating himself with a plastic bag, leaving a note that remarked: “I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual.”

72

Robert Coover, “Klee Dead.” One day the uncanny will come for you, too.

73

Nikolai Gogol, The Government Inspector. Bureaucrat-bashing cannot go out of style. When there are no bureaucrats left, we will continue to ridicule the type.

74

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow. I have a terrible habit of bringing one giant book on vacation, with the preposterous logic that it’ll “lighten the load,” and always look like a broody snot on the beach.

75

Donald Antrim, The Verificationist. Which I have already written about reading.

76

Michael Frayn, Copenhagen. The understated, non-scientific metaphor in a sea of polished, high-concept similes.

77

James Joyce, “A Little Cloud.” There was a time when I did not recognize how miraculous it was to rebuild Dublin with total precision, brick by brick and word by word. There are things I want my younger self to understand.

78

“Trilobites,” by Breece D’J Pancake, whose suicide may have been an accident.

79

Albert Camus, The Stranger. Is it somehow easier to cherish bleak things?

80

Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark. I hear McCarthy’s friends are geologists.

81

Barry Hannah, “Dragged Fighting from His Tomb.” In which time is dilated, then compressed.

82

James Wood, How Fiction Works. I am pleased that there are people who try to know.

83

The Waves, Virginia Woolf. I am pleased that there are people.

84

Anton Chekhov, “The Cherry Orchard.” Uttered by Firs, the absurdly old and pathetically dignified butler, and who knows how any actor can say it with a straight face.

85

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels.

Sometimes Miles Klee stays inside.

Small world. I have this nightmare about James Franco regularly.

I’m guessing Diddy’s really worried about how his new album is going to sell, evidenced by this very odd video of him wandering Broadway, buying (but not eating) ice cream and harassing Jews on the street. Haha, BRB, busy listening to the Kanye album still.

“We now know from ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian records… that credit systems (what is today called virtual money) preceded the invention of coinage by thousands of years. Money was actually created by bureaucrats to track state resources and spread unevenly, never completely replacing credit systems. Barter, in turn, is largely an accidental byproduct of the use of coinage or paper money, a refuge for people operating in cash economies where currency has for some reason become inaccessible.”
 — The actual history of money.

You know what’s “in” this holiday season? It’s a purse with a twist! A purse that has a strap, you see, or a chain, that you can put over a shoulder and hang there — or maybe be kicky, and also put it around your neck and therefore wear it “cross-body.” This leaves your hands free to do things that ladies like to do with their hands! Like paint dolls or play the maracas or smoke meth just windmill the air with your free, free hands! No joke, people, the Times is all up on this, so hurry and do it fast.

If you love the goyishe holidays but are burdened by the crushing guilt of Hebraicism, here’s a solution: the Christmas tree made out of Stars of David. Now everyone can enjoy!

“The harmful effects of heavy drinking were buffered when partners drank together vs. apart. Also, when both partners drank either heavy or light amounts, as long as they were similar amounts compared to their partner, it was better for the relationship than when one drank heavily and the other lightly.”
 — Ash Levitt, PhD, explains the findings of a study on how alcohol affects romantic relationships between men and women. While Levitt cautions that, “We really can’t make the blanket statements about drinking and romantic relationships that people have come to expect,” I think the takeaway here is pretty clear: go shot for shot with your partner if you want to stay together.

Photo by karl151k, from Flickr.

by Jeff Hart

Paul Fennel was waiting in front of the motel room door when his soul mate and I pulled up, his face flushed the color of brake-lights from forehead to chin. I watched as Paul auditioned a variety of places for his hands — in-pocket, out-of-pocket, thumbs through belt loops — before hiding his overactive digits in a tangle behind his back. Darlene, The Virtue, watched this too, and sighed.

“That’s him, huh?”

“Go to him,” I replied, sagelike. “His soul cries out to yours.”

“Barf,” she said, as she stuffed her wad of chewing gum into my car’s crowded ashtray.

As a lifelong connoisseur of the thrift store acquired suit, I immediately recognized the green-tag bargain Fennel had donned for the occasion. The coat sleeves were too short, or the starched French cuffs too big, or both. The shirt ballooned from pants that found no purchase on Fennel’s narrow hips, creating a floppy belly of polyester. He had a frame better suited to a one-piece pajama. Looking at Fennel, all giddy and spiffed up for the spiritual prom, I suddenly dreaded that Darlene, who’d finished apathetically riding me only hours ago, might actually do what I’d paid her to and explain to Paul that he’d mistaken wily whore tricks for metaphysical connection.

“Be nice to him,” I said, too late, because Darlene was already out of the car and approaching Fennel.

“Ok, weirdo,” she said, her head cocked. “What do you want from me?”

Paul shrank back before her. I could see tendons in his neck clench from the extreme effort of maintaining eye contact. He managed a faltering smile as he opened the door to the motel room.

“Please,” said Fennel, beseechingly. “Not out here. “

Darlene allowed herself to be gently ushered into the room. I got out of my car. Paul scurried over to me, his cuff pulling fully free from his coat sleeve as he extended his sweaty hand. I clasped his limp fingers in mine and, after releasing him, resisted the urge to straighten his suit.

“Thank you, Mr. Mullins,” said Paul, “for bringing her.”

“Had to. I’m the knot, right?”

“That’s right,” chuckled Paul. He reached out again, this time awkwardly patting me on the shoulder, as if I was the one in need of reassurance. “Will you wait out here for me? It won’t be long.”

“Ok, Paul,” I nodded.

Paul pushed his glasses up his flat face and turned from me, disappearing into the motel room.

“Go with God,” I told the closed door.

Of course I eavesdropped. Through the door I could hear only the low murmur of Paul’s voice, his timorous stops and starts punctuated by shrill objections from Darlene, those eventually decreasing in conviction and volume until it was just Paul speaking, steady, under control. I gave up listening.

I lit a cigarette and thought about this time tomorrow, when I planned to be drooling against the cool glass of a Grey Hound window. I figured myself square with God, having paid back the divine intervention of two nights ago by arranging this meeting, regardless of the result. There would be no more psychosomatic back pains, I’d cut the invisible strings that bound me to New York. Eventually, a landlord with a fistful of unread eviction notices would drag my dusty futon from my abandoned office to the curb outside where it’d be carted off by some Tompkins Square squatters.

My New York epitaph: This futon donated by a sometimes not-so ineffectual detective. He disappeared.

Briefly, I thought of Claudette. She’d be cozied up in her brownstone at this hour. The cello prodigy tucked safely away in its room, Claudette snuggled under the arm of the vegan-grocer, sharing a crossword and a glass of free-trade vino. It was an image I’d conjured frequently over the last few years, whenever I needed an excuse to stay in bed or pour another drink or, more often, both. At that moment, visiting that domestic fantasy, I felt nothing. Not a bad kind of nothing, not a sucking emptiness, but a contented apathy. I thought about Ahmet, quietly walking the aisles of his bodega, restocking the ice cream case, and felt the same level of sentiment toward him as I did for Claudette.

Which is to say none.

Darlene flung open the motel room door and stood in front of me. Paul had lasted with her about as long as I had. Her face streaked with tears, Darlene fixed me with a wild-eyed look, equal parts rage and disbelief, as if I’d thrown her into a room with an adorable animal that’d gone feral from its uncontrollable case of puppy love.

“What?” I asked her, bewildered.

“You fuckers,” she replied, and slapped me.

My cheek stung, my ear drum rattled. I’d been slapped before, but always for reasons easily discerned. Before my jaw could work its way around a question, Darlene had turned away. She strode across the parking lot, chin high and shoulders square, laying the defiance on thick, wanting me to know that whatever Paul said hadn’t gotten to her. But I’d seen the look on her face. I knew better.

Paul joined me in front of the motel, rubbing his own cheek. We watched Darlene in silence until she was gone, swallowed up by the shadows of Long Island City.

“So. How’d it go?” I asked.

“About as I expected,” he replied.

Paul tapped my chest, where my cigarette pack was outlined in my shirt pocket.

“Could I try one of those?”

“Sure.”

I lit us cigarettes. Paul watched me before taking his first drag, trying to replicate the way I held my smoke, the way I flicked away loose ash. He surprised me by not coughing.

“What the hell did you say to her?”

Paul’s gaze wandered after the departed Virtue, his lips screwing up around his cigarette.

“I told her that I’d first seen her in one of my visions. That we would meet at the Unfettered Souls and, over time, I’d have worn down her defenses. We’d leave this awful city on a bus and start a quiet, uneventful life somewhere. We would have been happy.”

“Nice line,” I replied.

“Yes,” continued Paul. “Then, I explained how I let her brother die.”

I looked at Paul. He tossed away his cigarette and looked back, his gaze unwavering.

“Her brother, Derek May, I saw his path too. The horrible things he was capable of, that he was already working his way toward. By stopping him, I altered things. I put myself here, with you, instead of with her.”

Absently, Paul itched at the spot on his breastbone where Darlene had burned him. He took off his glasses, slipped them inside his coat, and rubbed his eyes.

“You can’t understand what that’s like, Mr. Mullins. To make a decision, fully aware of the future you’re closing yourself off from. Not a vaguely formed what-if — I’m sure a man like you has plenty of those — but full knowledge of a different life. Would you want to live with those details?”

“No,” I said.

“I wanted to explain to her. To apologize. I knew it wouldn’t make a difference,” he said. “And it didn’t. But I tried anyway.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“You know, Paul, a little part of me had actually started to believe you.”

I ground my cigarette out and rounded on Paul.

“I’ve been having a shitty couple of years here,” I began. “I realize that I have not, of late, been at my best. Probably why, when you came around, I let you suck me into all that predestination talk. Debts to God and so forth. I was glad, you know, to have a purpose. What would your boy Wayne Maker call that?”

“A coping mechanism,” answered Paul.

“Yeah, that.”

“Or maybe transference?” he shrugged. “I never actually read his books.”

“Shut up,” I said. “The point is, you’ve got the same thing going. You’re not a psychic. And that hooker you just made cry? Not your soul mate. You made all that up to deal with whatever scary shit you saw over in jihad territory. You and those other two jarheads — one of them is dead, by the way, so add that to your guilty conscience — you’re living in a fantasy.”

Paul smiled at me, his look filled with that gentle condescension grown only in dogma-rich brains. I grabbed him by the shirtfront and shook him. He didn’t resist. He was so light, it felt like shaking a Polaroid.

“There’s still a guy out there trying to rearrange more than your pattern. You understand that, right? That a sociopath with a Purple Heart and a literary fetish is going to kill you because of this fairy tale you’ve stitched together?”

“I’m aware of the danger, but disagree with your premise.”

“I’m willing to get you out of the city,” I continued, adding, “pro bono.”

Paul shook his head and carefully brushed himself free of my hands.

“I’m afraid that’s not an option, Mr. Mullins.”

“Why not?”

“It’s not his plan.”

“Fuck His plan.”

“Not Capital H,” said Paul, and took a step to the side, away from me. “The lowercase H that’s been hiding in the trunk of your car.”

I spun around in time to see the muzzle flash. The discharge was thunderous, the cannon I’d kept hidden in my office eager to please after so many years of disuse. Yossarian handled the recoil like a professional, his laconic smile undisturbed. He’d shot Paul Fennel in the chest.

The second time I talked to God was when Yossarian had me kneeling on the parking lot of a seedy Long Island City motel.

Jeff Hart lives in Brooklyn. His other writing can be found over at Culture Blues.

Photo by Fabio, from Flickr.

Remember last month when a man in Sacramento received a receipt from Burger King which read “Fuck You”? Now a woman in Nebraska has encountered a very similar victimization, having been referred to as “a real bitch” on a receipt from Pizza Hut. WHEN WILL THE MADNESS STOP? Also, the reporter’s voice on this clip has to be heard to be believed. What a world!