The Sad Little Love Affair

When you say
“I love you,”
Like that,
Did you practice
By a mirror?

And in all the furor
Over authenticity,
Was that you
Or mere duplicity?

Endless reflections
Of I-love-yous,
All backwards-right-to-left,
And I feel bereft
Of direction
When I stare up to see
Endless Funhouse Clowns,
Their eyes crinkle with glee -
Because when I shout:
I love you,
They know - I know . . .
That can’t be me.

Endless

You and I will both be dead
Before Endless;
The color on your lips
Both drained of red
Before Endless.

This American Empire
Will crumble to dust
Before Endless;
Like Ozymandias’ works
By winds into the sands thrust.

The worm on the pavement -
How many forms will it take
Before Endless?
From worm to earth to rain
To the firmament,
This cycle, too, will end pain
Before Endless.

The Moon

The moon
Behind bare branches
Is a delight on any night.

And yet it bares my plight
When the light in the sky
Glints off your eyes,

Eyes that too soon,
Like the moon,
Will set upon another.

Memorial Day

Our children were forced to go to war
So they could pay for college,
With bombs to kill hundreds or more,
But they only found a village.

Hapless villagers prayed to their gods
As they were run off a high ledge;
Our children, chasing, barking like dogs,
“See? This will pay for college!”

And so they marched on Graduation Day,
Their hapless parents cheering;
And village ghosts, like out of Judgment Day,
Around the bleachers peering.

“We’ve come to see the children grown,”
The godless ghosts cried clearly,
To snatch from them the fruit they’d sown,
Tuition in lives paid dearly.

Numb and dumb the graduates were struck in their places,
Wings covered their bodies, crows’ beaks on their faces.
Cawing, hawing, into the sky flapped the murder of crows,
Unmentioned, save in prayers – a silence no memory knows.

Faggot

Your crackling energy
Brightened the room
And our faces – the first
Bottles flowing soon.

Boundless and lively,
So merry and gay,
You pranced about the room,
Lighting our faces –
A welcome boon.

Corks popped as we talked;
Great Days returning and their haunts.

Did you not like our conversation?
You seemed to demand always the attention.
Hissing like a cat and grasping at the air,
We could only laugh at your sullen stare.

Corks popped as we talked;
Great Days returning and their haunts.

But the party could not last forever.
Heads nodded; hours wore on.
And the shadows of your brilliance
Flitted from glass to glass,
Over our faces – through the plate glass
Window into the long night.

Oh, how you despised us then.
For you knew that, in our lazy silence,
You were smothered, spent.

And, oh, the contempt you felt then.
For your fiery beauty, sweet and youthful,
Had by night’s end fallen,
A face ashen mournful.

Yet, in your glowing embers of resentment,
Lies the memory of our Great Days.
We – without you – the silent faraway stars;
You – without us – the dark spaces of the night.

Snow

The snow faded, lingering
Only
In the cracks on this sidewalk . . .
And on either bank
Of the snow white lines meandering –
Stains: the ghosts of ancient
Leaves and chewing gum.

The snow faded,
Swept away
By sharp, polished shoes
Of serpentine leather;
Swept by shoes that have weathered
A life, cracked with toil,
Stained with soil.

Walking along the white lines,
Wondering, I think
That your shoes walk in warmer climes.

Old Friend

Morning,
The air through my
Kitchen window fresh:
No sign of ice.
Winter-fattened birds,
A handful, warbling,
Twittering, lilting,
All sitting, fussing,
On the rose bush -
Bare branches pointing up.
Vigorous the conference,
Salient the message,
I lean into the window,
And ask,
“Is that you, Spring?”

Daylight Savings Time

But what could I have said to you
in the extra hour?
With you staring
at the café door,
at customers entering, leaving;
and me glancing
out the window, planning
reports, phone calls, meetings.

For the week is just as long
in your life as in mine;
the hours come and go the same.
And still we do not say
what we mean.

An extra hour will not
resolve the scene.

The Temple

The Body is the Temple
Wherein the Ritual that is Life
Is conducted in Honor of the God
That is Spirit, our True Identity.

But my Temple has been defiled.
The Moneylenders and the Merchants have had their long days
Amassing coffers of coins in their Bazaars. Now the refuse remains,
Empty stalls and silent signs advertising baubles.

Prostitutes still lurk in dark corners.
Everywhere the floor is spotted with the excrement
Of the animals that were sold. A pair of dirty Drunkards is fighting
Over the last bottle of Wine sold in the days of the Bazaar.

And the God of the Temple is angry
That the Body has been defiled.
Spirit has sent its only begotten son, the Mind,
To make the Temple clean.

Mind will sweep the Temple,
Chase away the Prostitutes and Drunkards.
And one day the Temple will be made holy
For Spirit again to dwell therein.

And is your own Temple clean?
Perhaps your Mind has cleared the waste.
Perhaps some offal yet remains,
Or a Thief dwelling in hiding.

But if indeed your Temple
Is made clean and holy
And the great Ritual is conducted
All the days and nights in the Hallowed Hall,
Where then has your God gone?

By the light of the stars
My God meets your God,
And together they walk,
Past the sleeping Thieves and Drunkards,
Beyond the Temples,
In the grove beneath the hills.

Coda

Months had passed. The nightclub where the attack had taken place had been shut down. It turned out that the establishment lacked a special permit to offer entertainment. The process to procure the permit had taken too long; without entertainment the nightclub could not afford to pay wages and so closed forever.

Moonface had escaped. No one ever saw or heard from him again. Perhaps he had been placed in a forced flight to El Salvador after all.

Yesterday, while running my neighborhood errands in the hurried bustle of a summer morning, I stepped into the dry cleaner's. The Korean lady smiled and said that someone had told her that I was an excellent dancer. But she would not tell me who had made this report. Perhaps my invisible neighbors frequented the new nightclub that opened where I whiled away many a weekend evening, often recalling that this is where my father would prefer I be.

I sat at the coffee shop, the awning shading from the brilliant Sunday afternoon. I had scribbled a few lines in my journal of my trip to Paris, my birthday present to myself. It had been a summer of frequent journeys: several U.S. cities, and then my sojourn in Paris. The world had expanded beyond the confines of the little office and the little apartment. In the glare of the summer sun, all spaces stood revealed as larger than we imagined.

Perhaps the Frenchman would come today, I hoped. He was a member of a group of expatriates that met regularly at the coffee shop. We had grown friendly the way strangers who smile at each other for ages grow friendly, first with polite gestures and then polite remarks and then polite questions. Our last conversation had been amusing (though not to him) as he complained to me of his rich ex-wife and the burdensome child support payments that he still had to make despite the utter lack of need. It wouldn't work this way in France, he insisted. I had barely held up my end of the conversation. After ten days in Paris, though, I was prepared to lean on my freshly polished French. But the Frenchman did not appear that afternoon.

An old couple sat down at a nearby table underneath an umbrella, its awnings flapping in the wind. They sipped their iced coffees, the old man laying out a newspaper and the old woman producing a book from her purse. Presently, the old man, in his dun shirt and khaki shorts, looked up at the woman, his wife perhaps, and noting that she was reading returned to his newspaper. A moment later, the old woman, in her stripped summer dress, looked up from her book and seeing her husband at his newspaper, returned to her novel. Neither one of them spoke to the other. The summer wind blew around them, lifting the old woman's hair, and transporting their thoughts to each others' minds. At least that was how I decided that their lives had become: separate branches of the same ancient tree. Perhaps after having said all that there was to say only their physical company sufficed.

After all, what really was there left to say? I pulled out a worn letter pad from my bag and scratched out a title to the last chapter in the story I was writing. "Coda," I would call it.

Chapter 24

The trap had been set for Mrs. Robinson, she who was among the faceless and the numberless. Had she lived in that faraway country, Mrs. Robinson would have been forced to flee with the refugees of her village before the invading barbaric hordes. As luck would have it, Mrs. Robinson lived in the United States of America, the Great Machine, where her grandson had been caught by the police with a handful of unregistered guns in her car. So the gears ground as the great engine of government targeted Mrs. Robinson by instituting proceedings to take legal possession of her impounded vehicle.

As I opened the case file that had been placed on my desk, the gleaming teeth of the trap spread before me: the assigned police investigator had concluded that Mrs. Robinson was not an innocent owner of the vehicle, which would have removed the car from the reach of the civil forfeiture proceedings. Mrs. Robinson wasn't innocent, the investigator would insist on the stand, because she was merely a straw purchaser - the vehicle had tinted windows that were too dark for Mrs. Robinson to use. Thus, the car was really the property of her reckless grandson. And with that, the arresting police officer would testify on the stand that he had caught the grandson and four other boys in the car with four unregistered - and loaded - handguns (after a lawful traffic stop, of course). The judge would virtually decide on the spot that I had won my case and that Mrs. Robinson would have to get herself a new car.

Only reality turned out differently. I telephoned Mrs. Robinson one evening. Age was in her voice, the age of spent autumn leaves blowing in a winter breeze. She had indeed purchased the vehicle but she let her grandson use it, who would run errands for her. Sometimes he would go to "other places." But she used her vehicle to get to her place of work, a day care center, and to her evening classes where she was continuing her studies in childcare. I asked her how she got to all these places now that her vehicle had been impounded for a few months. "It has been hard," she replied.

And with those words, Mrs. Robinson brought down The Age of Detachment, which crumbled all around me like the walls that Fortress America was constructing to reject the faceless and the numberless.

It did not take long for me to notice that the courtroom I entered was about the same size as the nightclub. My mind had done a splendid job of conversion. Sitting in the jury box, compressed as only Ideas can be, were the faceless and the numberless: the Mexicans with their scarred hands; the disenfranchised poor and elderly with no official identification; the black homeowners facing eviction; American children poisoned by toxic lead toys; the child soldiers of Liberia; innocent and dead Palestinians; and the discharged Marines gripped by PTSD.

I faced a panel of three judges, who I suspected were the masters of history, although one of their blurred faces reminded me of my father. Plainly I stated in my opening argument the theory of the case so no one would suspect my strategy. I called my first witness, the police officer, who performed as anticipated and described the grandson, his little friends, and the handful of weapons he found on them. Then I called the star witness, the investigator, and proceeded to destroy his credibility. He had to admit that, although the vehicle's windows were tinted, he did not in fact know how dark they were. He had not seen the actual vehicle but had relied on another police report - inadmissible hearsay. He hadn't verified if Mrs. Robinson was truthful about her employment and her schooling. Then I completed the sabotaging of my own case during closing argument by urging that the judges exempt Mrs. Robinson's vehicle from seizure by the city.

There was pandemonium in the courtroom. The authorities threatened arrest for treason. The masters of history restored order long enough for me to take the witness stand in my own defense. My duty, I argued, was to the truth. It was for me to target the insistent rot that had a hold of the Great Machine, slowly rusting its gears until we the members of our society began to forget our relationship to one another and the various duties that we owed to each other, and particularly to the faceless and the numberless. It was the Great Machine who had failed many like Mrs. Robinson's grandson and like Moonface. Since I witnessed the truth, I had to tell it. No witness to history can remain detached. All witnessing is an act of participation within the Great Machine. Therefore, as far as I could manage, I would strive to be an agent of cleansing.

Back at the office, I rejected the police investigator's recommendations and declined to prosecute Mrs. Robinson. We met in my office, Mrs. Robinson and her old husband, to sign the settlement agreement that would instruct the police department to return the vehicle. Though tired, Mrs. Robinson smiled and thanked me in that quiet way that can move mountains and restore life to those who had been walking too long in sadness.

When the Robinsons left, it occurred to me that I could not recall the last time I had seen the man in the mirror with his sad eyes of experience, nor heard the whispers of the sadness that liked to linger in the corners of my apartment.

Chapter 23

And the headlines, with their foot soldiers the articles, marched on . . .

The Bush Administration requested - and Congress approved - $1.2 billion to construct a wall between the United States and Mexico, which is projected to cost over $60 billion over 25 years. The wall is a series of two or three 40-foot-high rows of reinforced fencing 150 miles wide and 700 miles long. The Department of Homeland Security has already suspended 19 laws, including the Clean Water Act, to build the wall. Reaction has been critical. As Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano said, "Show me a 50-foot wall and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder."

* * *
The case Crawford v. Marion County Election Board before the Supreme Court tests the constitutionality of an Indiana statute requiring a government-issued ID to vote. Republicans insisted voter impersonation is a serious problem. But every systematic study has concluded that the problem does not exist in the US. The law would adversely affect the poor, minorities, and the elderly - who mostly vote Democrat.

* * *
US policymakers have refused to face the question honestly: why do so many immigrants come? The answer lies in the destruction of the system that protected Mexico's poor at the hands of US banks and corporations who have cooperated with Mexican oligarchs to "modernize" the economy. One result, the North American Free Trade Agreement, has provided: (1) less than a third of the millions of Mexican jobs needed; (2) displacement of 2 million peasant farmers from their lands as their crop prices plummeted; and (3) a flood of Mexican business bankruptcies as US predatory chains have moved in - Walmart is Mexico's main employer of formal jobs.

* * *
"The subprime mortgage crisis is sinking America's economic ship like the Titanic," declared Rev. Jesse Jackson. Predatory lenders have been steering black homeowners towards subprime loans for years. Home equity accounts for more than 90 percent of black homeowners' networth. As the housing market collapses, much of the new wealth that has accumulated in black communities in recent decades will evaporate.

* * *
Anti-immigrant officials play on the economic fragility of the American middle-class. However, even if there were no undocumented workers in the US, the middle-class would still be endangered. Undocumented workers are not responsible for: (1) downsized and offshored middle class jobs; (2) changing bankruptcy laws so corporations can cancel union contracts; (3) no enforcement of wage and hour laws; and (4) illegally classifying millions of employees as "independent contractors" to avoid paying benefits.

* * *
Last year millions of toys sold in the United States containing toxic lead. While attention focused on China, where factory owners, under pressure from importers, used dangerous materials to cut costs, little attention has focused on the Consumer Product Safety Commission. This government agency has been weakened for many years. The Commission is headed by Bush-appointed Harold Stratton, who has a long pro-business history. The CPSC has just one full-time toy safety inspector facing tens of thousands of consumer complaints each year.

* * *
Having increased from 6,000 before Hurricane Katrina to 12,000 today, the homeless men, women, and children of New Orleans struggle to survive. The main problem is the lack of affordable rental housing; the flood destroyed 52,000 units. Congress funneled 85% of recovery funds to homeowners, leaving 15% to rehab rental housing. Local ordinances banning multi-family apartments in effect keep out poor renters from the newly gentrifying city. The total number of homeless shelter beds has fallen from 2,045 to 505.

* * *
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia's - and Africa's - first woman president, is struggling to collect on promises of international aid. She faces a national budget of $199 million with which to tackle an 85% unemployment rate and 42% illiteracy rate. A national literacy program to disarm child soldiers of the recent civil war could only handle 38,000 - but 103,000 had applied. For many child soldiers, living on the streets has become the only option.

* * *
While President Bush toured Israel, the US announced a sale of $123 million in arms to Saudi Arabia. This arms package could reach $20 billion. The US also committed to $30 billion in military aid to Israel over 10 years. While visiting Abu Dhabi, President Bush stated, "America is using its influence to foster peace[.]" A few days later, battles between Israeli forces and Hamas members killed 18 Palestinians and a kibbutz worker.

* * *
The Center for Public Integrity has assembled a database of 935 false statements made by the Bush Administration in the two years following September 11.

* * *
A Marine Corps review in 2007 of 1,019 other-than-honorable discharges issued during the first four years of the Iraq War found that a third of the discharged marines had evidence of mental illness. Funding for mental health treatment of veterans has been the worst in 20 years. Mental health-related discharges require a lifetime of veteran benefit payments. Suicide rates for marines are increasing.

* * *
White House press secretary Dana Perino admitted to not knowing about the Cuban Missile Crisis but she did state, "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

Chapter 22

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the windowpanes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet . . .

- T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"


December is the cruelest month. My father died in December. It is the month of the Winter Solstice, of the darkest night. It is also the month of Christmas, that forced, cash-registered cheer. One night I found the sidewalk leading me to the church. The actual Episcopal church had burned down about thirty years ago; the land was now a park. Services were held on the second floor of a functional building adjoining the park. The worship hall was suitably enormous, the long spaces lost in the shadows of this Wednesday evening service, one in a series of small affairs leading to Christmas Day. I entered late and took a seat; only a handful of worshippers were scattered about. I stared at the altar space with my new face but no one noticed. My ears were ringing. People appeared on the lectern, saying something about the scriptures.

I wasn't listening. Why was I here? Oh, yes - to remember my father. I looked around and, in the low ringing in my mind, was the thought: this building, too, is an Idea. I wondered what this building would be if the untold numberless and nameless had not toiled their lives away, building and slaughtering, for the glory of the Idea of Christendom. The place was too large to be a dry cleaner's but perhaps a nightclub would fit.

The scattered worshippers, like living ghosts, moved forward to surround the altar. Joining them, my eyes were drawn to the main source of light in the vast room: a few scores of candles clustered at the base of the altar. I counted them but when I counted them again, I got a different number. With each count the candles changed in number. Then someone said something about Christ and the Lord's Prayer issued from the scattered mouths. Hemingway's version came to my mind, though I did not mouth it:

Our nada who art in nada,
nada be thy name thy kingdom nada
thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada.
Give us this nada our daily nada and
nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and
nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada;
pues nada.
Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.

When the scattered souls moved towards the exit, I realized the service was over. A couple of young men with sweet smiles and long pale hands approached me, greeting me. I mouthed a few nadas and excused myself, not wanting to see the darkness swallow the smiles and hands when the candles were blown out. Why had I come here? Was it for some kind of social gesticulation? Thank-yous to cash register operators - and little other speech - could get tedious. I should have known better than to commemorate my father's memory at church; he had parted company with organized religion long before his death. I knew all too well that he would far better that I remember him among the music and revelry of a nightclub.

That was when, following the sidewalk home, the ringing in my ears became the distinct sound of fire engines. The blaring sound was tedious as a fire truck roared past. Then there was silence, the cold air of the winter night absorbing all sound. I passed an intersection and saw the streets blocked; there were six, no perhaps seven, fire engines scattered about. Most of the trucks clustered in the middle of the block, off to the left, in front of a building. Firemen moved silently, like astronauts across the surface of the moon. I never knew what happened; I looked for smoke but could see none. Perhaps a candle had tipped over in an apartment. The sidewalk took me past the the red flashing lights.

The lights of the fire engines bled into the walls of a building; when I looked up I saw a wide bay window where a Christmas tree sat quietly festooned in bright, blinking blue and white lights. Colored balls, made by nameless hands, suspended amid the greenery, reflected my questions, and - refracting them - scattered them into the silent night.

* * *
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate . . .

Chapter 21

Someone said something funny and, laughing, the splint fell off my nose. I was startled to find that I had gone into a nightclub, surrounded by strangers, with a large, gray splint on my nose. Then, slowly, I realized that this was no ordinary nightclub. I was in a dream; with that dream certainty I knew the nightclub was my mind. I looked for an exit but could see none; the crowd was too thick to escape.

The atmosphere was a mimic of the cacophony of noise in my mind to which I have become accustomed: careless, raucous laughter, yelling, voices raised in anger, someone was wailing, someone sang, and in the background under the club's dim light was the endless thumping music, now dance music, now a classical symphony, now a flute in the dark, which none of the people in the surging crowd seemed to notice.

They did not notice the music because they were not people. These were the dream representations of my ideas. I stood in that crowd, jostled lightly by the passing ideas, and watched them all. Their interplay was the harmony of laughter or the dissonance of argument. Some were large with booming voices, obese beings that needed to have the fat trimmed from them. Some were quiet and inscrutable, dressed in black. Some were male; some were female; some neither. Some were confident, well-dressed, and knew how to dance to the music that only they could hear. A few thrashed about in anger, drunk and obnoxious, and needed to be escorted from the club.

Then, with a start, I noticed people from the real world in the throng. I saw my father talking to a group of ladies, charming them I was sure, in heaven as he did on earth. There was a dream pause then, long enough for me to realize that ideas are influenced by experience, which is memory, so it was natural that the Idea Beings should talk to the Memory People who came to mingle amid the crashing noise and swaying symphonies.

Dr. Who was there, talking to a group of fears, dressed in long coats. They were smiling and nodding. He caught my eye and waved. I had seen him a week ago, nose splint in hand, and we noted the vast improvement in the nose. But still more surgery would be required to continue the improvement so he referred me to another plastic surgeon. I waved back to him with my right arm now healed, free of the wrist splint and able to write. A gaggle of my words rushed by as little children, giggling and weaving through the crowd, under coats and skirts.

I saw William Blake talking to a couple of extravagant ideas in the shifting shadows. At the far end of the room, ascending a staircase, was the television reporter. I wanted to reach out to him, to tell him that he was going to be severely injured if he did not leave that wild country, but I could not make my way through the swirling crowd. The music was too loud for me to shout. He vanished into a hallway. Moments later, I noticed a black, thin warlord in brown trailing robes disappear down the same hallway, escorted by two warriors with spears. Moonface was there, too, my assailant. I saw him in a break in the crowd. He did not notice me; he was headed for the exit when the crowd closed again and blocked him from view. I knew that I would never see him again. The certainty of that knowledge approached me then, dressed gaily, and shook my hand with a smile. A soft beautiful music was playing.

The dream was ending. Naturally, I found myself approaching the exit, shoved along gently by the countless bodies that floated past. That was when I turned around and saw him, distant in the crowd as he was distant with the years. He was accompanied by his wife and children. His wife looked up and saw me. She was at a great distance, as she was years ago when she noticed me talking to him and one of his children outside the ice-skating rink. I could not make out her face in the dim light. Then swiftly they were swallowed by the crowd surging towards the bar at last call. From their area a hand was raised above the crowd, lifting a rose into the air. But I could not tell if it was his hand as the distance and the years grew with every passing moment.

At the coat check, I was met by the Korean Lady, with my shiny, clean coat in hand. When she held the coat out to me, I felt as though she was giving me a suit of armor. "An yung ha se yo," we greeted each other. She said I needed to tell them what I saw though I did not know who "them" was. She said I needed to tell the story. Then she smiled and her eyes vanished in little slits of glee.

Chapter 20

I finally had to shut my mind to ward off the chattering of the young college students. I was riding the university shuttle bus to Georgetown with that segment of youth - the rich kids - who feigned weariness with the world yet breathlessly gushed about shoes and trust funds.

The university hall was a modest, well-lit room, with a couple of tables against the back wall with trays of cookies and refreshments. Rows of simple metal chairs faced two long tables that had been joined to form the panel. Most of the students were seated when I arrived.

This segment of youth had no trust funds, colored faces that had turned out to see the panel of nine lawyers of color, alumni of the university, speak about their experiences in law. Because we were lawyers - thoroughly disassembled and reassembled by the Great Machine of society - we took turns complementing each other and outdoing each other in smoother and more impressive maneuvers. Laughter punctuated the event.

While someone at the far left was speaking about how wonderful it was to work at the legal department of a gigantic media corporation, I finished my carrot stick. I was speaking suddenly out of a sense of urgency. Biting back the nausea of the evening, I disarmed the room by making a quick joke about the funny thing that happened to me on the way to the forum - I had nose surgery, and touched the splint. Then I launched into the message that I had to deliver as if on a mission.

There was a disease within the Great Machine, a sickness that only those who cared about the common good could sense. The engine of change and protection within the Great Machine was government. But that engine was being dismantled. Lawyers, as tools of the Great Machine, had the power and responsibility to ameliorate the sickness that everywhere the headlines screamed each day. But you, dear students, will find it hard to become tools of change. We with our many colors are all in the same group, and the ones who have written the rules are not in this room. So I caution you now: the rules were not written for you. You will have to work hard. But persevere. You will be able to do it. We sit before you here today as proof that it is possible.

The mission was accomplished: the nine of us had stepped out of the misty chamber of the past, time travelers with a message, but only I had apparently retained the memory of our temporal journey and of the charge that had been laid upon us by the masters of history. Being the single witness to history, the mission had been saved.

I sat back when it was over and watched the students fan out to speak to the panelists individually; a group was headed towards me, a black woman and two Asian men. As I answered their questions, I felt a sense of relief. The nausea was receding, leaving me with the certain knowledge that I was less detached, perhaps not detached at all. For what witness could tell his story in utter detachment?

Chapter 19

For days my consciousness remained suspended, protected by the consolation of work. In the mornings, the dry leaves would congregate on the edges of the sidewalks; I had no discourse with them. Passing the newspapers in their dispensers, the headlines attempted to scream but their sounds were muffled, my consciousness protected by detachment. In any event, I was certain that the headlines were not screaming about the faceless and the numberless.

For days I had been holding down my regular caseload and at the same time attending what seemed like endless training at the United States Attorney's Office. Though I had been litigating cases for a couple of years now, no one was a true prosecutor until he had trained with the Feds. And so I plunged into the dizzying details of opening statements, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, probable cause, search warrants, Miranda warnings, direct examination, hearsay, the exceptions to hearsay, drug test results, gun certifications, objections, preparing witnesses, impeaching witnesses, cross examination, and closing arguments.

Attorneys - by the time they become attorneys - have been thoroughly disassembled and reassembled by The Great Machine, that colossal, invisible system that sometimes goes by the inadequate term of "society." As such, they are ready with automatic expressions of sympathy when I volunteer information about my nose surgery, thus relieving them of using energy to look at my face and its nose splint nonchalantly. That energy could then be shunted to other productive uses, like parking their cars in the morning.

For days, the telephone would ring at my office with people on the other end who had things to say. One day, the telephone rang and an investigator introduced himself, explaining that he was assigned to my assault case. It was his job to develop a case, if any, against the nightclub in question. The irony - the leaves gossiped about this as I passed them once - was that armed as I was with prosecutorial weapons, the assailant would likely never be seen again. But the irony could not penetrate detachment. Thus, the energy of my interview with the investigator traveled along the telephone lines, igniting the awesome engines of Government as its great wheels began to creak and turn in the direction of the unsuspecting nightclub owner and his employees.

Chapter 18

The television reporter was in need of a bath. But so was everyone else in that forsaken country so the smells did not matter, merely part of the background. In the foreground, the local warlord had agreed to give an interview and tell the world how carnage had become as normal as the dust storms. It was dry morning in the village, before the blistering heat would overtake all but the warriors. With a sweeping gesture, the warlord - drooping robes over his thin arm, for no one was fat - pointed out the trajectory of his men. From this temporary base, the warriors - with no formal education, no employment prospects in the modern world, no understanding of the international order - would ride out and rid the land of its rot: the former inhabitants, all of whom had been terrorized into taking flight with only the clothes on their frail black forms, dragging their elderly and carrying their children and breadbaskets: refugees all whose lives were every day sapped by the scorching rocks of that sun-baked wasteland. Each day, the warlord's men on horseback drew ever closer with their spears and machetes until the scorching rocks cooled with the blood of nameless, faceless, numberless beings whose story would never be told in the evening news. The warlord grinned at the camera: a near-toothless grin, a smile beyond good and evil, like an earthquake or a tidal wave.

About 6,500 miles to the west, across an entire ocean, I was crossing the street and heard:

"Oh God! What in the world happened to your nose?"

My field of vision temporarily expanded, in a sort of spasm, and I took her in: an old woman - fat, dressed in layers of old coats - clearly homeless and mentally ill, shuffled past. Her two small, black eyeballs were lost in the clumps of flesh that collected on her blistered, wasted face. Those tiny orbs registered my nose splint for a moment, then moved on to the other senseless objects of her senseless world. Only her frozen, open-mouthed grin - nearly toothless - bore witness that she had once spoken.

Chapter 17

When I awoke the morning after the surgery, it was too late to pretend that it had been a dream - though it had seemed like a dream due to the complete absence of fear. Occupying the lower third of my field of vision was the splint, a piece of grey plastic fastened to my nose to keep it in place while the broken bones inside healed.

I laid in bed for what seemed a long time; the dark walls in the apartment turned into shadows light and dark. For a moment, I thought the sadness had come to sit at the foot of the bed. But I turned and saw it was only the lone tree in the corner; I had watered it but it still needed more attention.

The man in the bathroom mirror, that one there with the black and white beard, tried to speak but I would not let him. Quietly - for what was there to say and to whom? - I dressed and stepped out into the grey morning.

Avoiding the crowded escalator that descended into the station, I opted for the elevator. A woman with a baby entered the elevator before the doors managed to shut. The baby made gurgling noises and the woman cooed in a foreign language but I could not see them as I had placed them behind me. The splint was affecting my eyes, pulling them down, narrowing their field of vision. To compensate, my hearing sharpened; life became all sound.

In the train car, the furtive glances rustled, the hushed sounds of eyeballs moving in their sockets and eyelashes fluttering. Newspapers creaked but necks craned heads above the papers to see this Creature that stood there under the electric light that was totally emotionally detached. The doors chimed, flung open, shoes thundered, coats flapped, and suddenly I was surrounded by backs and shoulders in a smothering crowd - cut off from all view. I breathed in the blind silence.

Chapter 16

I never fully understood what happened to me or what they did to me in that room. The clock on the wall said a certain time; there was some friendly banter with the doctor who took photographs of my face for the "Before" in "Before and After." There was some more friendly banter with the anesthesiologist who ironically broke his nose years ago and never bothered to fix it. And there was yet more friendly banter with the nurse as they wheeled the stretcher down busy hallways to the operating room:

"Have you had anything to eat? Juice, crackers?"

"Are you offering me any? 'Cause I'd sure like some - haven't had anything to eat since last night."

Then there was the awkward shift from the stretcher onto the operating table, trying not to flash my ass to the operating crew as I struggled in one of those silly hospital gowns. The hairnet I wore was too big for my head. Then I saw another clock say a certain time and the anesthesiologist's hand came down on my face with a transparent mask that shot oxygen into my nose, winds that scattered the dry leaves down the hallways in my body.

Then Dr. Who appeared again, telling me that he was going to spray medicine down my nose to help with any bleeding. Suddenly, rivers of acid were rushing down the hallways in my body, searing away all the dry leaves.

"Holy shit!"

There was ringing laughter in the operating room at my response, perhaps from the doctors moving about, but the ringing seemed to come from the equipment. Everything was glaring bright: the machines, the lamps, the walls. Everything was antiseptic. Everything detached.

Somebody was injecting something in a tube connected to me. It would make me sleep, he said. There was a digital timer on the wall next to the clock but I didn't know what it was measuring. Then I looked up and the nurse appeared to be a walking avocado in her green smock with scores of avocados printed all over her or were they lemons it was hard to tell what the timer was timing perhaps another world where someone feared for me like a person paid to cry at a funeral because I never noticed the fear or the absence of fear but only that suddenly life mattered less and less and meaning was sliding helplessly off the bright walls and then

nothing.


I opened my eyes and it was another room, one of those curtained bays, overlooking a central station with doctors and nurses moving like traffic. A clock on the wall was whispering that an hour and a half of my life had been detached, beyond reach. Dr. Who appeared and told me that my nose was now straight and that I would see him again in nine days to remove the nose splint. Thank you, doctor. Then came the juice and crackers.

Chapter 15

The wind was whistling bitterly when I came upon the crime scene in the cold. There, on the sidewalk, a television set had been murdered in the night.

The thing lay like a cadaver face-down on the sidewalk. So I could not see its telltale blank expression to know that it was truly dead. But its power cord trailed on the ground, twisted, away from any life-sustaining outlet. I turned and rushed quickly to my apartment, sanctuary from the wind.

Beneath my new bathroom light bulb - a light still emotionally detached - I thought I recognized the face in the mirror. That evening, the Vietnamese lady at the salon had done a good job of restoring my face; time had done the rest. Still, you can never go back, said the face. Indeed, the Vietnamese lady said, "You nose still a little crooked."

But for her that wasn't the point in keeping the beard. She trimmed it and said, "Keep it. It look good." I imagined television stars getting this treatment, complete with shampoo, walking out as new people - whole new personas! - even though one day the television stars would all end up dead with their power cords pulled out.

Ah, but to be truly new - that required a nose job. And as fate would have it, I had one of those waiting for me tomorrow. "Your new nose, sir." said the doctor. Then, just like on TV, there would be an unmasking before a mirror and I would gasp in wide-eyed wonder at the brand-new old me, while in the background there would be some clapping and a couple of nurses laughing, carefree, and -

Wait - in the mirror, I thought I detected a new pattern . . . that face, eyes blank, said, "You cheated death." You should have laid there, face down on the steps, your pretty neck broken and your brain trailing out of your skull like cords . . . but - dancer that you were - you twirled and fell mostly on your hands. Death slunk away, the blood on your hands not enough for even a prime time special. Do you not know? Having cheated death, you are now detached from life.

About 6,500 miles away in the desert a television news reporter was left alone in that whole wild country to tell the world in pictures the story of the slaughter. He came upon a man, face-down in the dust, his entrails trailing away in twisting cords . . .

Chapter 14

(Two weeks ago, translated from the Spanish)

"Don't worry, mother. I'll be fine. Fine, fine, fine. Well, my right wrist was sprained and my left hand, the tissue there was damaged; it was swollen. And my nose was broken. And my head was cut. But that stopped bleeding."

"No, I don't know who he was. Some nut! He was bothering me. Security put him out. I guess he came back when I was leaving - punched me by surprise. I didn't see him until he was there. The punch wasn't bad; it was falling down the stairs, that was bad."

"I think he was caught. That's what one of the security guys said. But then he escaped. I don't know what happened. Yeah, the cops were called but they never showed up. But there's going to be an investigation into how the club handled this mess. They all locked their doors and disappeared. I was left outside in the cold holding my head and my nose - both bleeding. That's not how this kind of situation is handled."

"No, I'm not going to work tomorrow; it's my day off. I'm on my way to I___'s house now. A friend is taking me there. I___ will cook for me. I'll get to spend a day out there away from everything. Although with I___'s new baby, I guess it won't be all that quiet . . . "

(Tonight, translated from the Spanish)

"Tomorrow is the surgery. Yes, that soon. I have to hurry up and wash some clothes because I don't have any to wear. So I can't talk long. "

"No, I'm not staying overnight. I got someone to pick me up and take me home. Then another friend is coming to stay the night. The doctor said someone should watch me overnight."

"Well, what can I do? I have to go on. This is nothing compared to operations that other people get. I'll try to call tomorrow if the anesthesia doesn't have me too sleepy. Good night, Mother."

Chapter 13

The doctor said he could be as aggressive as I wanted him to be. He was, of course, talking about how aggressively I wanted to pursue the perfect nose. I wasn't after the perfect nose per se. I just wanted my natural nose back, which coincidentally happened to be perfect.

I was in yet another examination room. For the eleventy-twelfth time I was describing the assault to yet another doctor. Each time, the experience was like a flashbulb going off in my head - a silent shutter clicking - capturing the memory like a photograph that each time receded further away. The photograph was 18 days away now.

The doctor - in my mind he was Dr. Who after his power to transport my nose back in time - explained the options available. He was a young Asian with flawless bone structure and a perfect nose that at least inspired confidence in the painful procedures I was soon to endure. Dr. Who said that he had to offer the option of doing nothing, which I immediately waived away. Then he described the first procedure, called Closed Reduction, a name that gave no inkling as to its nature. Closed Reduction involved using tools inserted in my nostrils to move the broken bones around in the nose and align them correctly.

Should the perfect nose not result from Closed Reduction, Dr. Who then described three other progressively more invasive procedures that would prove increasingly effective. They involved incisions and insertions and anesthesia and long recoveries. But, he stressed, there was no guarantee. I was going to ask him if he had gone to law school as well as medical school but thought better of it.

Dr. Who summoned to his computer screen the image of the CT scan that was taken at the emergency room 18 days ago. There, in bright x-ray yellow, was a picture of my skull, brain, and other insides of the head. Dr. Who pointed out the dark spots - the sinus cavities - which were supposed to be dark. Then he pointed out the bright spot - my brain - which he said was likewise in good order, by which he only meant that there was no brain bleed or skull breakage.

I stared at my brain in faint wonder . . . that strange object that was both camera and subject - from which sprang crying envelopes, Korean greetings, lives that flipped like coins, stupid and senseless headlines, captive dreams, the sadness that speaks, trauma, empires racing across the earth, time travel, wolves, satellites, ice ages, earthquakes, patterns, Dr. La-la-la, the Eyes of Innocence and Experience, and all the madness of the modern world.

Moving away from the bright spot, Dr. Who pointed out the bone of my nose, which was supposed to be a perfect triangle but which was in fact a jagged triangle showing fractures in at least seven different places. That was when I realized that serious pain was headed in my direction from the future, like a cresting wave still invisible under the ocean.

Dr. Who asked me to email him photographs of me prior to the incident to aid him in the reconstruction of my nose. We scheduled surgery for Tuesday, a little soon I thought, but better to rush headlong into the ocean than to wait for the tidal wave.

On his way out, Dr. Who reminded me to make arrangements to have someone pick me up from the hospital and watch me overnight, as I would be too disoriented from the anesthesia to get myself home. "Doctor, who?" I wondered. Who in the modern world would one day wade into these memories, not-yet-surfacing?

Chapter 12

To those with an active imagination, the rain signaled the End of Days for poor 2007. The wind blew the cold droplets, sometimes stinging the face. I had missed most of the fury, having spent the day in my little office cave.

Now I shuffled through small piles of wet, mangled leaves - the little-noticed victims of time. In the day they had fallen from the trees, the collective sighs of the year. In the night, rain and human shoes had trampled many into wet smears on the sidewalk soon to vanish from time. Somewhere in the world, every day, war and famine made thousands of people vanish the same way.

With these cheerless thoughts, I hurried home but stopped short across the street from my building. There, at the door, a woman was struggling with her purse, looking for her keys perhaps. I could go there and open the door; we would both enter. But my face would be too close to her in the lobby's light. So I waited there across the street until she entered. The nearby streetlamp was the only moon tonight; the sky pitch dark.

Moon-faced, that is how I remembered him, standing there for one brief moment on the stairway before he delivered the surprise blow and ran away. I imagined his moon face walking along the sidewalk, talking to a friend perhaps. Passing me in the night, he would not notice. But I would follow, calling 911 and providing my police report number. In moments the police car would arrive and I would identify him, turning his words against him, "Hey, remember me?" He would be arrested and tried for assault. I would suggest that the federal prosecutor check Moon-face's immigration status, which would result in his detention for deportation to El Salvador.

I did not imagine a rock thrown at the back of his skull; I did not imagine tacking him to the ground in the dark. Nor did I imagine my shoe stomping his face, crushing his nose; again stomping, this time breaking his neck. Strangely, there was not enough anger for all that.

Finally, I crossed and entered the building alone, safely passing from one cave to the next. I opened the apartment door with my left hand, pinning the mail under my right arm, stifling the cries of the envelopes filled with pleas for donations to aid the victims of war and famine.

Chapter 11

I scurried out my building door in the morning cold towards the train station. In the dawn light, I had discovered that my emotionally-detached bathroom light bulb had died overnight. Having waited for more sunlight to shave, I was now running late.

But I was wrapped in the warmth of my big, wool coat. I had retrieved it from the dry cleaner the week prior. The Korean lady had smiled, jovial and squinty-eyed, emerging from a forest of hanging garments. "An yung ha se yo," we had greeted each other.

Then, pointing at the beard on my face, "Oh! You new look!" she had said. Then she noticed the splint and her face flipped into a frown. I explained that a bad man had hit me and I fell down. But I was OK, I lied. "Kamsam ni da," we had thanked each other as I left: the civilized convention of "Thank you" restored order in our universes.

Once home, I took the coat out of the plastic covering and stroked the lapels - all the blood had been cleaned away. For a moment I was thrilled by the sensation that life could return to normal, to what I knew to be normal. But we can never go back, the sadness said from a corner. This was true, I knew. Even my recent time travel attempt had been a total failure.

And so I studied the cracks in the sidewalk until I reached the train station, secure in the knowledge that work was waiting for me with open arms. Work: the way the modern world suspends consciousness.

Chapter 10

When I called the doctor's office, the receptionist delivered his interpretation of the x-rays. It felt a bit like my mother reading a message to me over the phone from the mortgage company off a sticky-note she had posted on the kitchen refrigerator.

The doctor, the receptionist explained, said to tell you that you need to keep the splint on the arm for four more weeks and that he wants to see you again in four weeks. The fracture has not moved, so that's good. He said you can also get a splint where your thumb is not held like that so that your thumb can move. Oh, you can get one of those splints for the wrist, yes. I don't know, oh they have them in any pharmacy; we have one downstairs. It's an over-the-counter; you don't need a prescription for it. Yes, sure, you can make an appointment now. Yes, the fracture has not healed. These things take like six to eight weeks sometimes.

I detected that the receptionist had lapsed into some Armchair Medicine at the end there. What did she know about how long the fracture on my arm would take to heal? Perhaps she had seen this sort of thing happen often, to the point of routine, and the patients on the other end of the telephone line merely nodded, uh-huh, OK, in a kind of distracted, unthinking acceptance.

The day had been like a coin tossing in the air since morning. Suddenly the coin landed with Disappointment face up. Earlier, when the coin was still flipping in the air, the doctor had walked into the exam room and informed me that he could not do the x-rays in his office because my insurance company would not pay for them; I had to go to a separate "facility." I had to prompt him to offer to send me to a radiology clinic on another floor of the building, as I wanted to avoid re-scheduling this visit for lack of x-rays. He agreed to view the x-ray report, which would be available within an hour, and I could simply call the receptionist to learn about his findings.

I grumbled that this country needed to get its act together and provide real health care. Unfortunately, the doctor replied with a pleasant smile, the direction we seem to be going in is towards more "facilities" and "fewer choices." It was a simple, telegraphed message, which would be lost on the distracted and the unthinking. I got it: the doctor was opposed to nationalized health care.

"How does it feel?" He took off the splint and moved my wrist.

"OK, I guess." I complained of soreness, probably from the splint itself.

"That's fine," he said.

In less than five minutes I had my x-ray prescription and saw the last that day of the doctor with his pleasant smile, his tanned, middle-aged complexion and his blond, curly hair. I walked out while the flipping coin made an arc over my head.

Every day in this, the wealthiest nation on earth, millions of patients attend five-minute "That's fine" exams with disinterested, smiling doctors who send them flipping through the air to all manner of busy, clattering "facilities" at the promptings of enormous health insurance companies. Every day the insurance companies flip the lives of patients, like so many coins, until they land on the ground, dollar-value face up.

Chapter 9

The headline on the Internet, the first object on the screen:

"Cheney's Heart Restored to Normal Rhythm"

Life is full of disappointment, I sighed. Another day had passed, for instance, and still no call from the supposed investigator who would be assigned my case. Another day had passed filled with senseless, stupid headlines but with no police detective to interview me about the assault.

"McCain Sees Progress, Problems in Iraq"

Stupid . . .

"Tourist Boom Threatens Antarctica"

Senseless . . .

"NOVEMBER 26, 2007 - Last week's release of the annual Federal Bureau of Investigation Hate Crimes Statistics Report documents and quantifies the increase in anti-Latino sentiment and community tensions we see across the nation. . . Some of the key points from the report:

"A greater percentage of crimes motivated by national origin are committed against Hispanics compared to the previous year. In 2006, almost two-thirds of all ethnic-based hate crimes were committed against Hispanics.

"Since 2004, the number of victims of anti-Hispanic crimes increased by 25%.

"While most race-based and religion-based hate crimes involve intimidation instead of assault, most hate crimes against Hispanics (and Asian Americans, Indians and gays) were assaults. Anti-Hispanic crimes are more severe. Unlike every other group, only Hispanics suffered a greater number of aggravated assaults than simple assaults."

I wiped away the news screen and turned to check email. Maybe those investigators are a bit busy.

Chapter 8

I overslept, terribly, forcing dreams to keep me captive - despite the sunshine seeping through the blinds and suffusing the entire room. It did not help matters that as my body rebelled against sleep, all the dreams liquefied, evaporated in moments.

Without seeing, I knew the sadness was there, sitting at the bedside, whispering, as it had been whispering all morning.

Depression, in highly functioning individuals, is strictly a creature of the modern world, like a celebrity walking about the room brooding, fairly unaware of the fundamental elements of life. It mattered not that I had a fully-functioning mind (relatively), working limbs, otherwise excellent health, a good job, a family being maintained by me, and a handful of people who cared if I were to be erased from the earth. The tree in the corner of the room was still forlorn, sparse leaves drooping. When was I going to replace that thing, or tend to it?

The garbage piled in the kitchen, albeit in bags. The dry cleaner awaited my arrival to retrieve the big wool coat that may or may not still have my blood stains on it. I peered through the blind - the daylight seemed like a formidable enemy. At times like these, there was nothing for it but to seek the consolation of work.

Chapter 7

The doctor entered, took two steps - it was a small room - and lifted himself onto the examination bed while I sat on the chair next to the bed, a reversal that did not occur to me until much later.

I told him what had happened that night, how the punch really didn't hurt, how all the damage was actually sustained falling down the concrete steps. In the course of this he said in his soft voice, looking up from his papers only as long as he spoke, "You have P.T.S.D., Post Traumatic Stress Disorder."

"P.T.S.D.? Me?" I thought. Isn't that only for war vets? But that would explain the pains I experienced where there were supposed to be none.

But the doctor said, almost under his breath, not to worry about it; the P.T.S.D. would fade. He always spoke this way, in soft, hesitant tones that gave the impression he was unsure of himself. He looked up at me for an instant, long and crooked nose prominent, and then hid once again in his papers, reverting to a shock of wild, black Indian hair in a white coat.

Trauma was everywhere - I wasn't entirely sure that my mousy doctor was free of P.T.S.D. himself. Indeed our very first experience - birth - is nothing but trauma. No one escapes that trauma without crying. If anyone tries, he is beaten until he cries. Welcome to the World: here is your trauma, baby. It remains to be seem whether death is equally traumatic, the sermons notwithstanding.

Chapter 6

In the aftermath of the assault, some interesting consequences have flowered - not the least of which is my new found appreciation for that most marvelous of evolutionary phenomena: the opposable thumb.

With my right hand in a splint that encases my thumb, wrist, and forearm, I have been left with one working hand; and although one hand is enough to type these words, there are unfortunately a great many vital tasks in the modern world that require the use of two functioning hands. For instance there is the tying of shoelaces and the fastening of pant clasps and shirt buttons, without which the American workforce would be compelled to commute naked or all work from home - with catastrophic consequences for the commercial real estate market and the fashion industry.

How is it that such a small but useful member resulted in the raising of human civilization? For scientists have theorized that the size of the humanoid brain truly increased and developed only after a freakish evolutionary mutation shifted the location of the thumb to become an opposable digit. The ability to grasp things generated all manner of brain activity, which in turn generated more ideas about what else could be grasped and thrown and scraped and pulled and pushed.

And before long, geologically speaking, we were racing across the earth in the form of gigantic empires - razing, pillaging, conquering, assimilating, selling, purchasing - a phenomenon that has changed barely in form and naught in substance over the millennia.

This leads me to reconsider the effect of thumbs on brain size. In fact, just over a week ago that night, a simian brute - clothed and probably employed, too - made a compelling case that the opposable thumb, even if it increased brain size, had no effect whatsoever on brain content.

Chapter 5

The rushing sound of the train and the clacking of the wheels mingled with the dark of the tunnels, oddly comforting. Patches of light darting against the dark walls outside the window drew my attention away from staring half-lidded at the back of the seat before me. Faster the patches of light came - until one swooped past and ripped my consciousness away.

I was standing in the middle of my apartment, in my underwear, holding my big wool coat. It was the night of ten days ago - the cold realization that I had somehow traveled in time rooted me to the floor. It did not occur to me to wonder how I had managed time travel. My hands clung to the wool coat. Five hours from now, this coat would be covered in my own blood.

Or did it have to be this way? To think that I could toss the wool coat aside and avoid the anguish and expense of explaining to the Korean lady at the dry cleaner about removing the blood. My leather jacket was hanging close by. Blood would be much easier to wipe from it.

Wait, did I really have to bleed, though? Alone in all the universe perhaps I was possessed with the knowledge of what would happen this night. I could easily choose another nightclub rather than that particular one. I could simply ask for an escort up the concrete steps to the sidewalk. I could spy his face in the crowd and merely avoid him throughout the night.

The possibilities were endless . . . just as endless as they had been the first time this night took place in history.

Slowly, the thought formed, the cold certainty that possibilities are always the same in number. I could not prove this mathematically, not in this lifetime. But the epiphany would not be denied. The only difference this night, it seemed, was that I was aware of the endlessness; I could slowly name the choices like pearls pulled out of the rushing waters of the future.

But what effect would my actions on this night of the past have on my future? Could I be certain that only my future would be affected? What if I went to the other club and someone bought me a drink and I took it and this act sets off a chain of events that would result in the assassination of the President of the United States? How many Emperor moths would die in Tokyo?

I was not prepared to be the Destroyer of Human Civilization - not, at least, to save on a dry cleaning bill. Here then was the great irony of time travel. The increased awareness of the future availed me not. I was paralyzed, unable to choose from among the visible futures, as if I were wholly unaware of them - as if I was, in fact, living in the present moment . . .

Ascending towards the surface world and the cold, cloudy night air, two women passed me by on the moving escalator. They were speaking French; I thought one of them stared at the beret on my head as she climbed past but I could not be sure. My head was bent downward, staring at the metal steps, listening to the clack of the machines beneath.

Chapter 4

Pattern recognition: it is the secret to all life . . . how the human infant recognizes his mother's face and sees safety; how a pack of wolves know each other by familiar scent; how a serial killer whose MO is predicted falls captive; how faraway military exercises captured by satellites are interpreted as the build-up to war; how whole species rise and fall in the recurring periods between ice ages; how earthquakes add miles between continents.

I looked in the bathroom mirror and did not recognize my face; the beard growing there - while accomplishing its purpose by drawing attention away from the broken nose - created a portrait of another person. Who is that man? The right side of his beard has more white hair than the left side. Odd, I thought. The visual sensation was so unusual that I could not decide if the beard made the man's face younger or older. I might as well have been a castaway from the future, wild-eyed and bearded, howling about the End of Days . . . except that I was too sleepy to imagine all that.

Chapter 3

The hospital nurse forgot to tell me that my arm was broken. Apparently, I mean. That explains some of the knocking about I've been doing with my hand, useless with my wrist in a swelled and bruised state.

"You're kidding," was all I could say to Dr. La-la-la on the phone when she said that the x-rays revealed a hairline fracture in my right forearm. La-la-la was the doctor's name, I decided, because it was wholly inarticulate; like the voicemail message she left me with the wrong telephone number to call, her recorded name unintelligible - another wonderfully bright foreigner who had some trouble with English but no trouble with the medical boards.

"Oh, sorry. I meant to say 715 not 714," said Dr. La-la-la. She said that I should see a doctor as soon as possible to have my hand immobilized - Oh, and until then no typing or writing. Thinking soon and possible, I snapped the mobile phone shut and looked up at a clear blue Miami sky - 1,000 miles away from Dr. La-la-la.

I looked down at my hand. It stared back, gloating, reveling in the anticipated increase in attention as I realized that it held my fingers hostage. If I could not type or write I was effectively silenced. There was no use flattering it with a self-portrait; I could not draw hands to save my soul. Very well, then, I will write less.

But, before I go into that good night, how is it that we walk about our days so unaware of our palms and wrists, innocuous things that if slightly impaired could deprive us of a whole range of motions, from writing to exercise to bathing to eating to driving to beating someone up?

Upon reflection, there is not that much to write in the modern world.

Chapter 2

I grow uglier with each passing day. The bathroom light bulb was totally emotionally detached. Staring in the mirror, I noted the mound of blood making its way from the side of my nose, passing below my left eye, bringing the swelling in its wake. It struck me as some kind of blue burrowing creature, like an animal burrowing under the snow across a white landscape.

A fly weakly collided with the bathroom mirror and flew erratically away.

On either side of the broken nose, two eyes stared back at me, one dark and swollen, the other light and intact. With a nod to William Blake, I christened my eyes: the light eye was the Eye of Innocence; the dark eye was the Eye of Experience.

And the Eye of Innocence said back to me:

Little Lamb, who made thee?
Little Lamb, I'll tell thee.
He is called by thy name,
He is meek and he is mild,
He became a little child;
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are called by his name.

And the Eye of Experience said back to me:

Little Fly
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away

Am I not
a fly like thee?

For I dance
And drink & sing,
Til some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.

The Incident: Chapter 1

"And before you clean the cut on your head, be sure there's no dirt under your fingernails first," said the nurse.

I was prodding at something under my right nostril before I realized that it was dried, caked blood from the broken nose. "So I guess I should cut my fingernails," I said.

"Good idea. I'll make sure someone comes in to give your tetanus shot." The nurse disappeared behind the curtain and I wondered what time it was, despite the clock on the wall of the hospital room attempting to communicate that message.

Later, I would learn that it had been eight hours that lapsed at the hospital - from the attack in the middle of the night - until late in the morning with the weak autumn sunlight shining on my disheveled form as I hailed a cab to my apartment. But it had seemed like much less time, an illusion of the modern world covered in the eyes-closed motion of a stretcher wheeling into rooms with machines that peered into the cranium but left the sadness undetected.

My apartment appeared as if I had returned from travel, quiet and expecting. It was all I could do to wash my face and wait for him to come. Sitting on the couch, the weakness from the loss of blood made itself known, knocking on my mind, coming and sitting beside me to whisper the thoughts of sadness.

When he walked through the doorway, we embraced briefly; I was too tired to show emotion. In the bathroom, he cleaned the cut on my head with a wet washcloth, dabbing until the dried blood liquefied. There was very little pain left. Then he showed me how cotton swabs dipped in alcohol could clean out the dried blood in my nostrils without causing a nose bleed. We sat on the couch and I handed him the fingernail clippers. My wrist was swollen and bruised; I hadn't the strength to clip my own fingernails. So we sat - he clipping my fingernails and me laying my light head on his shoulder. With each click of the clippers in his dark hands, I traveled back through the years; hands that had been an oasis in my long trek through the desert of the solitary life; hands that had offered a rose once.

It was the Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name, and it had come down to clipping fingernails in the low afternoon sunlight of the quiet apartment. For a time we said nothing - for what was there to say? He would soon enough return to his home an hour away; the children would be coming in from playing some game outside while their mother slept. There could be worse fates, I imagined. Fortune is fickle, handing out roses and breaking noses.

The Cage of Years

Salted trail of tears
On a baby doll
Leaning in a corner
Of our Childhood Room:

Could we but have seen
That youthful dreams would not be free.
Down, around the years the Cage we hear
While against the window panes we lean.

Try as we might
The wings of dream to beat in flight -
Down the Cage falls, much too soon -
Feathers in the gloom.