Sulfur. Olfactory presence of many male armpits, fried breakfasts, bad stomachs, long stays on commodes. Not where one wanted to linger or talk. Not where one craved any kind word at breakfast. And when it happened that booths were shared, then one became angry that anyone took any notice, asked any questions, wished to know the name of the book in one’s hand. That was endurance---staying cold enough that the questions staggered and died on their knees.

Died like wishes. For a hill above the harvest moon, for someone other closer in one's arms than all thoughts of jumping. Wished without hoping. When one had underbeard acne, bad breath, too much hair, wore two colors of denim at once, had no grace except helpless and animal kindness, then one was revolted to wish. Could not one be spared? For one was so ugly, one's neighbors no better, and how did they manage but tricks. The princess was charmed so as not to tell that the prince was dried spit on old pajamas, rotted plastic sandals and orangutan lips. And past midnight the enchanted came fumbling from the stairwell to kiss her frog against one's door---

Awakenings. Music at four, five and six on both sides of the clock. Most hours were safe to assault with kettledrums; the walls were not thick, and there were rules, but nobody heeded. The need for practice was such an unquenchable thirst that the basement held rooms where one could practice all night if one did not mind the chill and mold, or the ghost sense of bright doors in otherwise darkness, where one followed a melody past and past those doors without finding its source in a saxophone, a piano, played without a mouth or hands.

It was after such a vain search one lost night that I dreamed:

A man was looking through his drawers, through his cabinets, his closets. It was dark but not late, and he knew he wouldn't sleep; there had been no sleep for him for a long time. He lay in bed for hours, but all he caught was half-sleep, for something worried him too much, or there was a pain in his head. Being always home was not so bad, as he had so many books and stacks of old pictures---except there was the pain or what was forgotten or what kept his thoughts under snow.

There was an accident. I know this as a privileged watcher; he does not, but perhaps it slips between the awareness of the papers in his hand---are those bills, letters, what? And the sorting finally leaves his mood and leaves him to sit in his great leather chair with a book whose words remind him of places: arboretum, burgundy, barometer. Except that this book has a marked place---how much has he read? and not remembered?---and the bookmark that falls is a leaf of stationary.

Near this instant comes a change, which is not the realization but the knowledge that the realization comes next without mercy. The stationary quivers as he lays it down: only his address with a woman's name. The last name is his.

The pear was rust-skinned, rough in the young professor's hand. When he bit it, he closed his eyes and remembered a foundry yard one November---but when he opened them it was a cool March, he was outside the store while the mid-day traffic rushed. Suddenly he was caught in the flight of a cyclist, pulling the sun on her bike's silver lines. But then! It was like watching someone go under waves; he didn't see her head. Before knowing why, he saw her stagger through the parking lot with blood down her arm from the place where she held her forehead.

He was still swallowing that bite of pear as he made the emergency call. The operator wanted to know the woman's age, what had happened, where she was bleeding, and many other things that he had to ask her, which wasn't very easy because several people were tending her, and she was on the phone with someone else, and she was crying. But once the ambulance took her away, he wondered about her answers, as though he had the right to ask her only for himself, when there would be time for explanations.

Later he was walking home. The street was full of the shadows of branches. Through those branches, through other branches, the downtown lights. He came to his house and kept walking; the night was too brilliant to go in, blue tuned almost to green. He rounded a blind corner---how dangerous for a cyclist, he was thinking---he was thinking when he saw the bike. The frame had bent from an A into an S. The back wheel had become a thread of rubber spun around two aluminum loops. A woman lay near.

She woke from dreams of dismemberment, there was a light in her face, a man holding it, she couldn't see who. He spoke, but the sounds passed too soon over her. She remembered where she was and what had happened, all of it, down to the headlights coming toward her and away. She was not so prepared as she thought. This hesitance is often a wish to keep what one has, but in her it was the need to finish what wasn't, what would be left without form: two histories of incidents that had never been put in books, one on a forest bridge and one on a beach at night, either of which would set 1878 into a new understanding. The man was saying, ‘Brigid, wake up, wake up, Brigid.' How did he know her name or who she was when his voice was so far that it was any man's and when his face was hidden?

‘You go,' she said. ‘I don't want help, I know what's here. There were dreams about it---I can't tell you---just go and let me.' She closed her eyes. When she opened them to see if he was still there, he was, and when the ambulance lit the street she saw who he was.

The young professor continued to hear the same answer: critical condition, only family or requested visitors, no others let in. He had gone home at three in the morning and come back in four hours, skewered on a half-dreamed thought from which he could not deliver himself. So a day passed in which he did not work, shave, change, or eat. But in seven days nothing was said of the patient; no condition, no information. He went back to school and delivered a lecture on East Berlin that he did not afterward remember, and at night he walked around the bed, stepping through and through a small field of moonlight.

One week later a letter came. If anyone else had known the details and hated him, he might have thought it a hoax, but it had the sound of her letters, and probably no one who hated him knew the details. Still he wondered whose hand had arranged things this way. Once he had seen a man with her, but far off---never the face. He thought of this man as he read the letter, which was not signed or addressed and was written on crumpled letterhead from their department:

Those days you waited, did you tell yourself that it was more than grasping? Grasping for a life that was not yours and shared nothing with yours, not even when once in the same bed (forgotten) when we made all foolishness then. You came because you wished your hook in me again, to get it in and twist a last several inches and gratify your sense of owning me. But I'm not writing to forgive you. I'm writing to say the last that's possible. Since you kept insisting that something be said, here it is. Accept it and try to absorb it in the whole, which is more than what you or I lost and bigger than what a woman thinks of you, as I always tried to tell you even though you never listened.

In a year he began to see a woman who was very quiet and could not tell him what she was afraid of with her silence. They were walking at night on the edge of a quarry that hid a lake; far down lighted windows drifted in the water; she was wearing black as at most times, and her hair in the fall wind was tangled and dry. ‘Do you look at a piece of land,' she whispered, ‘even someone's backyard with a swing or a clothesline, do you look at that and realize that anything could have happened there?'

At home he fell prostrate in the kitchen. A face came to him, but it wasn't that yet; it was the recognition: how does one know? Is there a sound that when you hear it you know that you have never heard it, will never have heard it, will never hear it, will never have a second longer to describe? And if not, did she know she was gone?

One day in summer when even poison ivy seemed to bend under an excess of living, I ripped out the page. I laid down the pen parallel to the grains of the desk and walked away, and that was it: all the work of a doubt.

In the main points (according to this doubt) I was correct to life, but in one sense I made a perilous adjustment: Whenever I studied one character, I found that he wanted to kill himself. It was the strangest problem. My people got angry and jealous as real people do; continually they found their first judgments wrong, they heard their children disown them, and they saw their desires folded up like dry leaves. But they also knew life when life was bright---when you have walked a long way under stars to a house where you have never been and realize of a sudden that there is such a long way left and you are not tired.

Every evaluation should have led to a balance: one should have been neither for nor against, for one was only living, and living meant desire for living. But with these people it would not be so. Was it so for me? At the time I was reading the author of Fenitschka. That certain minds appeal to ours at all is a mysterious proposition; why her confidence won mine I cannot say beyond that analysis and poetry stood shoulder-to-shoulder. Yes, there was darkness; the absence of God did not lead up and forward but down to horror, to winds along the cliffs without light. But in this absence and bitterness one lived, and one revered. Comparisons begin beneath our awareness; so it happened that I read a sentence about Paul Reé and did not know at first why I felt guilty: that it made me remember.

My first reaction had been to blame her because she was young and would not promise to love me past a difficult future; I punished her for that. Every exchange was an effort to hold down and take the advantage, take what was not offered and more and more and when it was done to walk away and forget it. When we do this with the body there is barely evidence; when we do it with the mind there is none. How she felt could be guessed; what she thought of me could not, and I had no hint until reading that sentence:

There were many extraordinary things about him which, in my youthful inexperience, seemed to me quite natural and self-evident: above all how invariably good-hearted he was, which I had no way at first of knowing was a result of a secret self-hate, so that his total devotion to a person so different from himself, this "selfless" act, was experienced as a happy deliverance.

Lou Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, trans. Breon Mitchell (New York : Paragon House, 1991), 54

After she left me, I tried successive ways of thinking about it until it was certain that none would help. I remember one night in the alley behind a bar; I was kneeling, where my friend was I did not know, whether I was drunk I did not know, my hands were out of their gloves and resting in the snow, it seems I was taking my coat off, but that isn't certain. The only clarities were the snow on my knuckles, the bricks, and the lines of a fire escape and the heavy cylindrical weight through the light-falling sleet. After that night the presumption was that I would end. We think of ending the will as a willful act, but it was more like a clear fact emerging in focus the way we forget a dream after waking and then, one minute later, remember it all.

The willful act came three mornings later. I was awake before dawn and not thinking yet; the blanket was over my head, and I saw grey light through it, and my first thought was, ‘I am breathing.' By waking degrees I realized that accepting breath means accepting every experience and condition of breath---and this was how I slipped the noose off my own throat.

But how to save my characters? I had to solve this doubt or I could not write. My life, like anyone's, seemed to consist in petty needs, desires, and angers, but when I remember that year, its cubicles, libraries, train stations, sidewalks, and cues, I see that my doubt never left me. That is, until a new thought gave me peace: That in each life, love was the leak, the weak leg, the overripe spot, and in each life, love had failed its promise.

So the despair of unfulfillment was a general despair. Yet there was no general solution. And of course despair needs a solution; when nothing is done with it, it eats the surrounding mass in ever wider circles. I saved myself through a specific solution, the only one I was capable of, and for the people caught in the webs of my stories, there could be no such help.