The cable and internet have been shut off. Their silence is anxious like the purring motors of a dozen race cars speeding down your nerves, and malicious. The counter is still littered with bottles, and the recycling is still brimming. They will not pick it up for five days yet. Fruit flies are everywhere. Where do they come from? It’s autumn, and already dark. You have potatoes and rice in the cabinet. So you peal the potatoes and cut out the knobs, the gnarled eyes. Scuff your fingernails, cut fine little slivers from the backs of your fingers. They mix with the maroon potato skins and you cannot tell one from the other. You’ll bleed less if you stop drinking, they told you. You boil some coffee before the room dissembles. Your pancreas doesn’t hurt. Boil the rice now in the same pot as the coffee, washed out poorly. The broth is probably rotten, but all that salt should keep it O.K.. The coffee is lukewarm and scalded. You sit down and make a fire, which takes a very long time. You’d die in the wilderness, you think. Your survival skills are nil. The rice sticks to the pan. The potatoes go to mush. Is this any way to live? You eat in the near-silence of the fire. The gruel isn’t too bad. The coffee is bad, but you’ve had worse. Tomorrow you will get groceries. The day after that you will call the cable company. The day after that, maybe, you will write a few sentences. And then a few more. Fuck. This is no way to live. You go outside. The stars shiver and pulse, or your head pulses, or both pulse. The solitude you’re feeling is probably bigger than the sky. You will build days like sentences. Yes. You will go out and find women, somehow. Yes. Because right now this loneliness is driving you towards one thing, and one thing only. You fall asleep by the remains of the fire, which hisses and growls like some prehistoric beast slowly letting sinuous death curl around and close its white, smouldering eyes.

Morning isn’t so bad. You wake up motivated. You clean off the counters, using too many paper towels. Your last ex-girlfriend would chastise you for this: it’s bad for the environment, you’re no better than those lying scumbag republicans. You go grocery shopping, getting some more rice, some bread and some peanut butter, some apples because they’re fresh and in-season, a tomato and more potatoes and a bag of carrots. And maybe you splurge just a little bit and get a box of maple syrup cookies. Not all indulgences have to be cut out.

You meet up with your ex-girlfriend for coffee. She’s come from the gym and wears spandex. You haven’t seen her in six months. Her face is skinnier and sharper, her neck stringier. You miss her old fullness. Why is it, that what so often makes a woman most attractive is the thing she hates most about her body? When she walks up to get her coffee you try not to look at her ass; you fail. It’s fullness hasn’t diminished. Why, when you were together, did you find it so hard to get aroused? You think you’d do just about anything to fuck her again. Everything is beautiful when you can’t have it. She sits combatively, arms akimbo, laughing nervously, distractedly. You seem calmer, more together, she says, which is funny, because inside you feel like you’re moving a thousand disparate directions and like your face must be fracturing into a thousand shards from the loneliness and the regret.

At home you open the liquor cabinet. You pour a shot of vodka and sit down in front of the barren, ashy fireplace. Here’s what you decide, something outlandish, that if it occurs will absolutely be a sign that you need this drink: you will flip a quarter, and if it lands ‘heads’ ten times in a row you will drink this one shot, just this one shot. Tails. Well, you flip again, because that didn’t even count. Tails. Heads. Heads. Heads. Tails. Ok, well you’ve got nothing but time still. Might as well keep going. Head. Heads. Tails. You revise the number to five in a row; any activity is more fun if there’s a realistic probability of success. Heads. Tails. Tails. Tails. Heads. Tails. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Your head feels pinched, and your heart is racing as if a girl is about to undress in front of you for the first time, a girl you’ve spent many years dreaming about. Your hands are shaking so hard that the coin slips from them and lands, heads up. Does that count? Must there be intent in a coin toss, an inherently random event in which even the intention to throw the coin cannot possibly influence the outcome? No, you decide. It can’t possibly count. You’re going to waver on this unless you just flip the fucking coin again.

The first time you went in, the doctors told you that if you kept drinking, you’d be dead in five years. They said your liver was in bad shape, and your heart, too. You suspected this, from the chest pains. So you started running five days a week, five miles. And you kept drinking. Abstinence, you decided, was just another form of control, no different from indulgence. You would moderate. So you had one beer at first, then two beers - a reward for a good day of running and a good day of writing. You’d earned two beers. So you drank two beers two days in a row, then took a day off, then drank two beers three days in a row, then took another a day off, then two beers two days in a row, then eight beers, then ten, then two days off, and you swore up and down you were done.

You’re in your mid to late thirties, by the way. Somehow. You’re not really sure how that happened.

The second time you went in the doctors sat you down and said that if you don’t cut this shit out you’ll be dead within three years. But look at me. I’m skinny. I eat pretty well. I run five miles a day. I’ve gotten short stories and poems published. I hold down a job. I’ve never hurt anyone, or myself. I’ve never gotten a DUI. Besides, I only drink two or three beers most nights, four at most. Maybe once a week I have more than that. They asked how long you’d been doing that and you got quiet and realized that you couldn’t really remember a week since early in college when you’d gone more nights without a beer than nights with a beer.

Tails.

You drink obscene amounts of coffee.

Your brother meets you for lunch at a diner the two of you frequented with your parents when you were both boys. He’s driven out from the city, where he does something with a pharmaceutical company. I can’t lend you money, is the first thing he says, whisking the menu into his hands. His shoulders and his face have continued filling in. You try not to let this pre-emptive aggression wound you. He drinks Diet Coke like you drink coffee: rapacious, cormorant, as if trying to refill a leaky fish tank. He is your older brother. When you were young boys, you once found him crying over the floating corpse of a family fish. It was after midnight, your parents were asleep. You put your arms around his shoulders and kissed his forehead. With your bare hands you fished out the bloated fish, its scales still luminous and vermillion, and the two of you snuck out to the field behind your house. The tall grass was singing with fireflies, blinking with cicadas and crickets. You remember this while he taps the table anxiously, hailing the waitress for more diet coke, for the check. What are you doing for work? You can’t stay in the house, indefinitely, you know. It’s a temporary arrangement. Mom and dad left it for me, you know, and I’m letting you stay there just until you get back on your feet, ok? You tell him that right now you’re writing very short but serious, and beautiful, poems. He shakes his head. You put your hand on his wrist and he recoils in surprise. Please don’t give up on me, you ask. The clink of coffee cups on platters, forks on ceramic plates, the sizzle of the grill, the sing-song stream of a dozen conversations suddenly sunders you, buries you, so it feels like you’re falling beneath the surface of a sea, the noises receding above you but taking on a new asperity just before they cease. Your pulse is constricting your head. You excuse yourself and go to the bathroom. Your face is blanched in the mirror. Your bones show more than you remember. You drink straight from the faucet, holding onto the edge of the sink.

Your brother’s gone, but he’s left a three hundred dollar check.

You run five miles a day, and sometimes you go out and run wind sprints in the athletic field behind your house, especially when the girl’s soccer team is practicing. Later you pick up sharp knives and see how hard you can press them against your carotid. Later still you drive out to the interstate overpass and you park your car and hang your legs over the conduit of red taillights. You sit alone at the diner and drink so much coffee that your eyes hum like a buzz saw and your heart gallops like a quarter horse. The waitress, whose face is like a smudged map of isolated country roads, sits down across from you and lights a cigarette and offers you one, which you accept. Her eyes are green, and there is a spot of blood marring her right eye. The way the blood encroaches upon her iris reminds you of a leaf in early October beginning to die. She sits and smokes with you and says nothing.

Ok, so, you’ll masturbate instead. You’ll masturbate four or five times a day, if you have to.

A cigarette with your morning coffee is one of the five best things in the world, your dull, achy heart be damned.

Great. Now you’re a compulsive masturbator instead of a retrograde drunk. You pick up a girl at a coffee shop. You go there and you open your notebook and you’re half serious about writing but half serious about looking for women since you can no longer meet them at bars. You take her back to the house and after about an hour you have to stop and apologize. I’m sorry, you say, I jacked off like four times today. I don’t think I’ll be able to finish.

You take a train into the city where your best friend from high school now lives. He works for the D.A.’s office, something involving statistics. He’d wanted to do something large scale to reduce urban crime. Instead, he’s settled for going block by block, trying to reduce gun violence. You make one block safe, he says, and people can live there again. Then you worry about all the other stuff. Block by block you make a neighborhood livable. Not crime free, but livable. He smokes two joints a night, still. It’s early October. You trace the city’s anachronistic 18^th century grid, walking the cobblestone alleyways choked with fallen leaves. The threnody of traffic and city life is muted here. The two of you spent a year living in this part of the city in a shambly shanty of a home. It was the year of bad breakups. You two smoked and drank and walked down these alleys and talked about your exes and felt that your lives were already hollowed out in a way that couldn’t be fixed. All those days, in your memory, are flat and grey and chilly, the season early spring. The nostalgia you feel for that year is amorphous and shapeless, like the form of a fish beneath the surface of the ocean, a dark and supple shadow that moves lucidly and menacingly, mysteriously.

He takes you to a dive bar where you and he used to take turns vomiting in the bathroom. You sit at the large, horse shoe bar. So you’re really done with the good stuff? he asks. No way that I can get you to have one last drink with me, as best friends, one for all time? You demure and order a coke. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t do that. I’m being a bad friend. His wife left him six months ago. He orders a whiskey. He would call you in the outpatient facility, locked in the bathroom at city hall, trying not to cry, ranting and raving about how she wanted the dog, wanted the second car, how he’d given up everything - a political career in D.C., a clerkship with the Supreme Court - just so she could be close to her family, where she was comfortable. And she left him for a man from high school who looked her up on Facebook. He orders another whiskey. You remember coming here on dreary days in February when snow would flurry and scurry like dead skin flaking from a corpse. You drank scotch then, cheap scotch, and talked about the grand architectural novels you wanted to write.

I went out with a woman last night, he says. She might be more right for me, honestly, than Klara was. We might be more compatible. I didn’t know I could feel that anymore, to be honest, that spark of connection. I thought Klara had stolen it from me. We drank until they kicked us out. It was the first time I’d wanted someone in years, in too many years, he says. You tell him that that’s good. She’s twenty-five, man. Hardly a thing at all. He smiles ruefully and orders another whiskey. The chest of his suit seems inflated, like the great saggy lungs of a zeppelin. Do you remember us at twenty-five? You think you do, but it seems so many lifetimes away now. The chronology of all those years blurs and eddies, distorts. Such morose motherfuckers, he says. So wrapped up in our own suffering. What’s changed, right?

You thought certain things would ossify with time. What things? The knowledge and security that came with being older, whatever that means. You expected an inner calm that never came. You expected the world to stop seeming so foreign. You wanted the dialect of reality to harden into something legible. Instead, the language seems to expand, mutating, becoming stranger by the year.

How’s your writing?

You tell him that it’s going O.K., that mostly you’re sticking with stories, very short stories, because your mind is simply too fractured and too frenetic for anything longer or more coherent. Maybe someday you will try novels again. Or maybe these short stories will become shorter still, until they’re poems, and then the poems will erode like a mountain beneath wind, and soon all you’ll have left are haikus, and then less than haikus. And then silence, which doesn’t sound so bad.

Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.

No matter how thoroughly you clean, you cannot seem to eradicate the fruit flies.

The great problem with coffee is that, if you drink it on an empty stomach, it turns your insides sour and it attenuates your mood. Your vision, quite literally, tunnels. Your temper becomes hair trigger. Unfortunately, your appetite isn’t what it used to be. So you are often drinking coffee on an empty stomach. It rouses something uneasy and bitter in you. Small things seem large, and enormously irritable. The fact that you have to piss every twenty minutes seems a monumental inconvenience. Your computer freezing makes you want to punch the wall. The room being a smidgen too warm makes you want to take your, mostly empty, cup of coffee and throw it through the window. Which you do, one day, to see how it feels. And it feels pretty good, except for the new window that you have to pay for later in the week. Despite that, you don’t regret the decision, and from then on, if your mood turns narrow and irritable, you take beer bottles from the fridge in your basement, and you walk to the train tracks at the end of your block and you throw the bottles as far as you can, waiting for them to arc down and shatter.

A friend you made in the facility taught you a few things about negotiating the outside world. First, he said, time is your enemy. Time, if you think of it as an army, a whole army stretching out upon the field of battle before you, then it is your enemy, and it cannot be conquered. You cannot think, oh fuck, I have a whole army of time, from here until death, trying to make me get drunk, trying to defeat me. Because that’s a hopeless battle. You can’t beat an army of time. Luckily for you and for me, we don’t have to beat the whole army all at once. We just have to beat one infantrymen at a time, one second at a time, one minute at a time. And you can beat a single second, sure, even a single minute. And once you start beating those little infantrymen, you gain the skills to go beat the cavalry, a whole hour, maybe even the artillery, a whole day. But when you’re feeling your worst, you always gotta pull back and do battle with that single second or minute.

Secondly, he said, you’re gonna need a new hobby. I’ve tried a lotta different things, but very few seem to match the intensity or the hook of drinking. Sex, really, is the only one that comes close, but it’s hard to find sober women who’ll sleep with a guy like me for free, and if you can’t tell I don’t exactly got a whole lot of money floating around to pay for my sexual appetites. 

I could keep going, he said, but this is my fifth time in here, so maybe I’m not the best guy to give you advice.

Finally, you call the cable company.

Over the next forty odd hours you decide that there are about ten million ways for a person of the twenty-first century to distract themselves; probably more, if you’re being honest about it. There is Facebook, with its endless solipsism and its veneer of social activism; it strikes you as one cacophonous ballroom in which a few thousand people scream about their love lives and political views and artistic passions, all at once. There is the Youtube catalogue of movie trailers and sports highlights, some of them sublime in their own right. But are you here to witness the sublimity of others, through grainy footage, or to bear witness to your own with the clarity of a good sentence (which is a skill that you fear is being degraded by the endless shitstorm of entertainment)? And what is sublime in your own life, anyway?

There is the BBC writing about elections in South Sudan and protests in Spain and a hundred billion dollars being spent on sports stadiums in London. There’s CNN writing about the Republican Presidential Primary and a murderer pretending to be a cop in Alabama and a recall election in Wisconsin. There are old friends you could talk with via Skype, friends sitting in their offices in Madison or Chicago or New York or Charlotte who do not know that you are home, that you‘ve been in, and now out, of a detox facility, that you are now sitting, naked, at your computer in the basement of your parent‘s old house, drinking a cup of coffee an hour. There are about five dozen different websites that write really good literature or television or film criticism. Then there’s the endless number of blogs posting interesting political commentary, or filled with interesting poetry, or producing interesting non-fiction. And every piece of stimuli, every interesting article or every amusing video, piques something inside you, some pleasure sensor that has gotten so used to being constantly triggered that it can only think of one thing: what’s next, what’s next, what’s next?

Then, of course, there’s the porn. The endless, infinite library of internet pornography for the lonely and the depraved and the desperate and the merely bored. What of the four are you? Probably all four. The library is endless, like some horrific, surreal prison from a Borges story. There’s voyeur porn, there’s lesbian porn, there’s scatological porn, there’s ex-girlfriend revenge porn, there’s hairy cunt porn, hell there’s hairy armpit porn, there’s bestiality porn, there’s foot fetish porn, there’s pigtail fetish porn, there’s hardcore porn, there’s small-dick humiliation porn, there’s incest porn, there’s porn for people who like facial cumshots, there’s elderly porn, there’s up-skirt voyeur porn, there’s down-blouse voyeur porn, there’s fat girl porn, there’s fat guy porn, there‘s Asian porn, there‘s rape porn, there‘s gang bang porn, there’s celebrity porn, there‘s school girl porn, there‘s point-of-view porn… There is porn for literally any desire a human being could possibly concoct or develop or hide from their real-life lovers in shame. How, you sometimes wonder, are we supposed to return to our wives or girlfriends or husbands or mistresses with voracious, ravenous hearts? How can we possibly desire the real, the tangible, when the fantasy is so vivid and specialized, so ubiquitous? And how the fuck is anyone supposed to bring children into a world where men’s sexual desires are honed and sharpened within the vortex of internet pornography?

Everything, literally everything, makes you hopeless.

Your attention span, once like granite, has been chiseled away by the masons of entertainment and desire.

You email a different ex-girlfriend. She is the person you can reach out to in your most desolate moments, even if you haven’t spoken in ages. Hi R. I’m feeling very hopeless and suicidal today. Ha. Ha. Though I suppose that isn’t funny. But it seems funny.

There are two myths that you tell yourself, two myths that sustain you. The first is that if you can write the right novel, or poem, or story, your life might somehow become coherent. You continually revise this myth downward to right couplet, or right sentence, or right word. The second myth is that if you find the right woman, your life might somehow cohere. The right book or the right woman might even make you (and it almost sickens you to think this, sickens you but also makes you shiver with anticipation) happy. You know neither myth is true. You knew that coherence and cohesion, for someone like you, are impossibilities. But you hold out hope anyway.

Tails. Tails. Tails. Tails. Tails. Tails. Christ, fuck it.

You jack off and close your web browser. You think: write, for the love of God, just write. You open your web browser again, and jack off again.

Here’s the thing with time. You soon realize how easy it is to endure a minute, then an hour. How fungible and malleable those units are, how fluid. But then you also realize how pliant those units are when they are constructed of pleasure, too. How easily they’re expended and spent. How difficult they are to recover. Maybe, you think, it would be better if the moments of pain and longing went back to being unendurable if it meant the moments of ecstasy could regain their sublimity.

The only choice you have is to call the cable company again and tell them that the deal is off. I’m sorry you feel that way, but you still get the thirty day trial period for free. No, look, you guys don’t understand. I don’t want the trial period. I don’t want any of it. I, well, yes, I don’t understand. Because if I’m given the choice between sitting down and throwing myself into all this artificial, but oh-so-delicious, bullshit, I’m never going to escape it. It’s going to turn me into a drone. It’s going to blunt my real desires - my desires for love, and for conversation, and for beauty, and for meaning - and replace them with this minor, fallacious desire. The need to be constantly piqued, the need for something new. Do you get what I’m saying, man? Do you understand this? I need to want real, firm things. I need to want a beautiful fall day and the voice of a woman and the flounce of her tits. I need to want a good, carefully constructed sentence. I need to be able to sit down and think about one thing for more than a minute without my entire body growing antsy and screaming at me to find something better, something more interesting. Are you still there? Hello?

It wasn’t even like you enjoyed the alcohol the last few years. You were just resigned to it, compelled by something deep and mysterious. If drinking did one thing for you, it certainly sundered any notions you had about autonomy and the self, etcetera. Because even now, after a few months, when God knows your system has been flushed and reflushed, you still find yourself missing alcohol. It’s the way you missed running, after you quit cross country in college, or the way you still get nostalgic for the shitty jobs you worked during your early twenties - the landscaping gigs, the graveyard shift at the UPS plant by the airport. That’s the only way you can describe it. Like missing some hardship that you hated. Like missing the masochistic pain of running, or the drab mindless hours of those jobs.

You have a friend who works nighttime security for a local high school. He made you a key to the gym. When you can’t sleep, oftentimes, you drive over in your gym shorts and a sweatshirt and you go into the gym, which is immense and dark and smells of sweat and floor lacquer. You sit in the dark stretching while the overhead cauldrons of light slowly click and hiss to life. You shoot free throws, mostly. Your goal is to make a hundred straight. As you move closer, the problem is this: your form is inconsistent. Not every shot comes off your fingers the same way. Sometimes your elbow is too far outside. Sometimes the ball glides off your pinky and ring finger instead of your middle and index. Sometimes the arc is too high, sometimes it is too flat. But, despite this, the result is almost always the same. The ball settles softly, sweetly, lubriciously through the twine. If you worry too much about form - tuck your elbow in, make sure your legs are bent enough, don’t come over top of the ball on your release, make sure it slides off the middle and index fingers - your shots are suddenly less precise. Do you worry about form, about perfecting form, at the risk of missing a shot, or do your allow your body to get into a rhythm, form be damned? This is the question. You usually side with form. And then you miss and start all over.

Whenever the urge becomes overwhelming, you make a cup of coffee or you eat a maple syrup cookie. Or you flip the quarter, and with each heads, your body feels more and more electrified, every nerve synapsing to life, every atom of your existence suddenly rousing itself in a symphony of concentrated desire. When you finally stop, it takes you at least ten minutes to calm down. Your limbs feel flayed, your insides liquefied.

At the grocery story you run into a classmate from high school. It’s one of those awful encounters where, at first, you pretend not to recognize them and they pretend not to recognize you. Your shifty eyes suddenly focus intently on the soup aisle. But soon they corner you in the dairy aisle. Hey. Hey, she says. She’s so lovely with her two kids at her side that it wounds you. She’s skinny and taut and unafraid of the grey hairs that are marching outwards from her scalp. What brings you to these parts? Last I heard, you were, where were you? Some place exotic. Teaching something crazy like hang gliding, and writing novels. Pretty wild, I thought. I’m not sure, you tell her, I did travel a good amount. But now I’m home. And I wrote, too. I still write.

Some January night way back when the two of you snuck out from a party in the basement of a church and you walked deep into the woods where there were the ruins of an old plantation. They’d been mostly consumed by forest. The bracing walls had collapsed. All that remained was the courtyard, a fountain, a stone wall. You were drunk, she was drunk. You’d always thought she was pretty, in a shy way. You’d never talked to her because of those strange rules that regulate adolescent life: your friends thought she was goofy. But this one night you walked with her through the frozen, swaying woods and sat on that wall and kissed beneath a waxing moon (you had no idea it was waxing; she pointed it out, which made you kiss her more firmly). You wonder if she remembers that night, you wonder what it could possibly mean in the context of you, being here, in this decrepit grocery store in your suburban hometown all these years later. You’d like to ask her for a drink, is what you’d like to do. Her kids are holding her hands and they’re contorting themselves, antsy.

Your kids are beautiful, you tell her, very handsome kids.

You remember the two autumns you spent in Nepal. It was your late twenties. You took tourists paragliding. Strap in, take three steps, and then run, you told them. You’d run down a shoddy wooden ramp towards the edge of a cliff, and then the wind would take you, and you’d soar. It was easy to move between villages. You drank cold, thin beer and rice liquor. You ate so much curry that the smell of it made you nauseous. There were always women, too. Kiwis and Aussies especially, but also Israelis and French and Americans. There were fresh divorcees. There were students on holiday. Out over the verdant valley you flew with them strapped in beneath you. It was possible to feel their bodies literally seize, every muscle clenching at once - first in fear of that first step into thin air, but later in wonder as you dipped them down over the frothy rapids, and the small cluster of huts breathing white smoke, and the funeral pyres dissolving, the mourners in their white robes, the monks in their muddy red. You’d take them down the valley out over the fields of millet that shimmered like sun-splashed ice in the splendid, clear light. Their feet would graze the wheat, kicking up a golden wake, and then you’d come down softly, crumbling into a gentle heap. Most of all, more than the women and the soaring, you remember the funeral gats. You remember the dead. There were dead bodies laid out in public for three hours and bathed lovingly by hand. Sons washed their fathers. Mothers washed their daughters. Death was in the street and in the water and in the markets and at roadside. There was a custom that stated if someone died on the second floor of their home, their corpse couldn’t be brought down the stairs; a hole would have to be cut in the floor. So there were porches like train stations where the old and infirm could go and die. People died in public, people died in groups. And then they were washed and left to bake in the sun for three hours. And then they were burned on the river. The mourners wore white robes, and they stayed for twelve days in huts built along the water. They ate together and talked and cried. After the bodies were set aflame, men would wade in the water behind the disintegrating funerary pyres, using spades to dredge the viscous muck from the river’s bottom. They were sifting for jewelry or gold fillings. You hiked from town to town with the whole of your life on your back. You drank rice liquor and cold beer. You slept with strange women. You wrote beautiful poems in your head. At the side of the road there were always corpses. The sacrificed chassis of a water buffalo was butchered and distributed. Its massive, Neolithic head was split by an adze, the brains hefted out. You always came back to the gats, to the flames, to the bodies being washed and revered and burned. The waters were littered with bone and with trash. There was nowhere to put the trash, so it accumulated in fields and at road’s edge and in the slow stagnant stretches of river. Sometimes men would take it upon themselves to make pyres of the trash and to burn them, the acrid smoke choking passersby. The smoke from the gats was clean, light. You could walk through it and not feel a thing.

There is a dream you have, twice, in slightly different forms. Your brother is in the backyard beneath the plum tree he planted as a boy. He’s scouring the tree’s branches, looking for a ripe plum, but all the fruit has already fallen, and is now rotting on the ground. You pick up a plum and hand it to him, but its insides are mush; it’s been devoured by worms. That was the first dream. In the second dream it’s not your brother but your father looking for fruit. This time you pick up a rotten plum and you bite into it. It’s delicious, you tell him, you should really try it, but he just looks at you in disgust and keeps searching the barren branches.

There are too many women in your life. Why have you done this to yourself? You’ve accumulated the affection of women the way a small animal accumulates food for the winter, as if they’re provender, as if somehow you can stave off reckoning because you’ve lied your way into the bed of one more woman.

The ex-girlfriend you emailed about feeling suicidal writes you back. It’s frenetic and desperate and she sent the thing at 3:17 in the A.M.. You respond in kind. Two days later you take a train into the city and you meet her at a café. She’s sitting outside, in a small courtyard of broken brick and ivy. She smiles when she sees you, waves, hugs you tightly. There are two empty cups of coffee on the table, which is wobbly. You see her so rarely that each time you meet up it is like discovering a new person. She wears glasses now. Her hair has gone mostly grey, and it‘s cut short, just above her shoulders. There’s a notebook on the table, and she scribbles into it, and passes it to you. She’s deaf and she teaches at a school for the deaf. She tried, for a long while, to teach you sign language. You weren’t a good pupil. You learned the basics, but little else, despite her efforts. The truth is, you didn’t work very hard at it. Sometimes, when she thought you were sleeping, she would lean in close to you, and she would talk to you. She wouldn’t talk otherwise, even when she got angry, or hurt. She would only talk on those nights when she thought you were asleep. She’d tell you that she wished she could sing. She’d ask you why you loved her. She’d ask you why you couldn’t learn sign language, why you couldn’t do that one thing for her.

You spend half an hour writing little notes to one another in her notebook. You write about your time in the facility; she writes about her job, which is frustrating and exhausting but occasionally exhilarating. I don’t know how much longer I can do this. she writes. The kids’ attention spans are so short nowadays. All they want is entertainment. They can’t focus. But it was my birthday last week. They made me a cake. We had a big group hug which felt like a kind of break through. But things have gotten bad again.

Happy belated, you write. You had forgotten.

Thank you.

For a long time you sit in complete silence, drinking coffee, looking at one another. Occasionally she smiles, or half smiles, and you avert your eyes. Or you will smile broadly and almost laugh and she looks at the ground and smiles a furtive, private kind of smile that makes you want to reach across the table, touch the side of her face, kiss her on the forehead.

What happened? she finally writes.

I don’t know.

I wasn’t a good enough writer.

I’m not made for this world.

She is the one woman to whom you’ve never lied. After coffee you take her to the movies. It’s an old theater, a dollar theater that plays third rate movies and pornos. She likes genre movies, especially action flicks. She likes the pornos, too. You used to meet her here late at night to watch porn, which always made you uncomfortable. But she loved it, so you went. It made you feel better about not learning sign language. She wants to watch an action movie tonight, a big budget flop with bad actors trying too hard and good actors barely trying at all. You buy popcorn with fake butter and coke with ice. You don’t usually drink soda, but sometimes, there’s nothing better than a cold coke with slowly melting ice. The theater is small. It’s empty but for you and her. She likes to sit way up front. She likes to sit against the wall so that she can feel the reverb of the explosions.

After the movie you go back to her apartment and make love. She turns off the lights, which is a shame; you like seeing her. She does this because she also speaks in the dark while fucking. They’re quiet, guttural noises that remind you of ancient consonants, the kind of noises that early humans must have made to express pleasure or pain, the incremental variants of both. She’s on top of you, her hips a bit wider than you remember them. She keens softly in this primordial tongue of hers. It’s so difficult and sad to listen to that you want to sob.

You sneak out while she’s still asleep. She can’t hear you go, of course. You should leave a note, but you don’t know what to write. So you don’t leave a note. You walk to the train station instead of catching a cab. It’s possible, though not probable, that walking will ameliorate whatever yearning is gnawing at you. It’s as if, while sleeping, a nameless predator snuck into your gut and ripped something essential out, and now you’re doing triage, trying to locate what’s missing before it’s too late. The morning is unseasonably warm. You turn off the main road and follow a minor, impoverished street. Boys are riding bicycles even though it’s a school day. You smell barbecue and chipped paint. The wooden homes are faded a thousand diminished hues. There are young men sitting on slumped front stoops. The elevated train rattles not far off in the distance. A group of homeless are sitting on a ledge beneath the tracks, laughing together, sipping coffee, looking happy and content, to be honest. Their messy, forlorn beds are spread out in a neat row, side by side. You duck into a bar, order coffee and eggs, watch the pickled old crocodiles sipping their first whiskeys of the day with bloated, unsteady hands. You smoke a cigarette outside, listen to the El. This city was once a swamp, a series of canals and streams leading to a great river. Without eating your breakfast you walk down to the river. From here you can watch the immense cruise ships that loom on the horizon like claustrophobic cities. Sleek tankers lug their crude to the river refineries that glisten in the morning sun like spider webs. You think: these are our modern forms.

Your desire for a beer is like those fleeting moments when you remember ex-girlfriends. It’s an abstract net that falls without explanation, strangling you for five or ten seconds, and then lifting just as suddenly. But as you know, those ten seconds might as well stretch indefinitely, or they might as well be nothing at all. Anything’s possible within them.

You were a skinny, gawky kid with a dry sense of humor. This was back in the early days of internet pornography. In those early years women became distant, digitized myths. You hit your growth spurt at sixteen, and since then, it’s always been easy with women. But your first impressions - self as undesirable; women as figures on the wall of a cave; affection of women as validation and acceptance into larger community - are remarkably enduring.

Your brother calls one day and informs you that he’s selling the house. Just like that? But I live here, you object. Yeah, well, you can’t anymore. You’ve had enough time to get back on your feet, you know. I think I’ve been more than generous. What about your tree? you ask. What about Mr. Fish’s grave? What about Cocoa’s grave (Cocoa was your first dog)? It’s time to grow up. You’re just being sentimental now. What if I pay rent? No. What if I buy the house? With what money? Has someone agreed to publish your poetry? They’re haikus now, you tell him, haikus that are basically just dreams about larger poems. If that makes sense. Sure, whatever. I’ll stop by soon. You have two months.

You wish that you hadn’t borrowed multiple thousands of dollars from your brother without ever paying him back. Then you might have some leverage in this situation.

Your best friend comes out to help you move the important things into storage. Everything else you decide to trash: the excess clothes, the excess books, all the little mementos you’ve held onto. You once had this image of your (hypothetical) children and grandchildren cleaning out your attic after your death, and marveling at all the places you went, all the things you witnessed. Such vanity permeates everything you do.

I was trying to fill a void, your best friend says. He’s laved with sweat, sitting on the patio in your backyard, smoking a cigarette. His bullish face is pallid and his eyes seem permanently bruised. That’s all the connection was. It wasn’t real. I didn’t actually care about her. How could I have? She was a girl, that’s all. Now I’ve just got this void. I don’t know what to fill it with. I’m nearly forty and I have no fucking clue what to fill this void with.

You sit down beside him on the grass. It’s a warm autumn day. The trees’ shadows are spare with dreams of winter. He hands you the cigarette. Then he puts his head on your shoulder, and leaves it there for a very long time while you finish the cigarette, light another, and finish that one, too.

Heads. Tails. Heads. Heads. Tails. Tails. Heads. Tails. Heads. Heads. Heads. Tails. Tails. Heads. Tails. Tails. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Tails. Tails. Tails. Heads. Tails. Tails. Tails. Tails. Heads. Tails. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads.

Your ex-girlfriend comes over for coffee. She’s in gym clothes again, as if she’s perpetually exercising. She floats around the house in her socks, gliding over the wood floors. You drink her coffee before it goes cold. Where will you go? she asks. Anywhere, I suppose, you tell her. I could go anywhere. But I don’t have much money. Or any skills. What about your writing?

You smile.

She ends up staying for nearly a week. During the day you clean and she cleans, and you barely share a word with her. Sometimes you listen to music, but sometimes you don’t. Lunch is usually sandwiches and coffee. Slowly, the house you’ve known for most of your life, the house you’ve longed for during your lonely peripatetic dreams, is deconstructing. Soon it will be only a memory, and then less than that. You make pasta or chicken for dinner. You light a fire in the fireplace. You’re getting quite proficient at making fire, which fills you with a strange, primitive pleasure. You drag a mattress down and put it in front of the fireplace and the first night you don’t make love, but every night after that you sleep together, sometimes two, even three times a night. And afterwards you go outside, naked, into the cold clarity and you smoke a cigarette and when you come back inside she’s curled up, asleep. You lie awake for a long time each night, watching the receding, primeval figures the fire casts on the ceiling as it breathes, gasps, fades into embers.

She makes biscuits for breakfast, melts butter.

One day after breakfast she cleans the kitchen and then she says, Ok, I should probably go. Yes, I suppose so. She starts to cry. It seems so impossible sometimes, doesn’t it? What, you ask. Life, everything. What are we supposed to do? You kiss her on the cheek. I don’t know, you tell her.

Your brother comes over and the two of you have nothing to talk about. So you hug him instead, and eventually he acquiesces and hugs you back.

Most of the furniture has been emptied out. There are sun blanched spots on the hardwood where furniture once was. There are a few moldered cans in the pantry, condiments in the fridge, freezer burned ice cream in the freezer. The only liquor left is the stuff that’s gone beyond fermentation, the stuff that’s crystallizing. You get out a bottle of very old rum. You once met a man and he needed help getting a sailboat to Bermuda, so you went with him and you brought home a bottle of rum. You sit down at the folding table that you’re using as a kitchen table in these last weeks and scrounge for a quarter. Heads. Heads. Heads. Tails. Why are you doing this now? The house warrants one last drink, doesn’t it? Tails. Tails. Heads. Tails. Heads, heads, heads, heads. The phone rings. It is an old friend. A girl that you met when she was very young, too young, and you fell precipitously in love with her when you should have had nothing to do with her. But you couldn’t help yourself. It’s not the cheap kind of love, the kind you’ve filled most of your life with. She’s the kind of girl that you meet three or four times in a lifetime, the one who can drift in and out of your life like a warm ocean current, and when she arrives, no matter how long it has been, the two of you can sit down and talk easily about things that matter. What things matter? Your fear of death, and your desire for it. Fucking, of course; the people you have loved. Travel. She knocks on the kitchen door and she lets herself in. She’s lovely in a diminished way, like she’s spent the years since you last saw her wandering the seedy markets of the world, markets where only offal is sold, where stolen electronics and scavenged animal parts and underage girls are bartered for, haggled over. Her face is vaguely etiolated. Her eyes look around you but not ever at you. She’s wearing a jacket from London and a scarf from Jerusalem and a florid skirt from Rio. You’ve written poems about her before, most of them dreams or fantasies. About being snowed in in Prague. About being strangers stranded in a ruined industrial nightmare. She comes back to you like this, bedraggled, frazzled, manic, in the lean late hours of the night when she can still exist as a dream or apparition, when she can avoid the firm details of the day. You kiss on the cheek. Her hair is long and unkempt and she needs a shower. What is it in a person that you can love from afar? What of them remains? You remember a day in March all those years ago when the apricot trees were shedding their pink and white blossoms and you drove her around. She was fifteen then. The wind wrought confetti of the new season was falling around you, and she put her hand out the window and the sun was over half her face and she told you about a boy she loved very much and then you walked into the woods near her house and found a copse of trees by a creek swollen with melt water and you fucked in the mud and the grass. You make coffee and you sit next to her at the folding table. She reads you a poem in German. Her voice is glottal but plangent, lyric like that early spring creek flush with muddy water. You don’t want to know what the poem means. You listen to her read, the dells and craters of her face illuminated by the fragile lamplight between you and her. Her oily hair is across her brow, her hand cradles her jaw. What grace there is. What grace in this world. She closes the book and she smiles at you. You take her to the diner where you always meet your brother. You order coffee; you and she split a platter of chicken fingers. It sits between you two and you pick it apart, arms crossing, hands touching, slowly devouring the food while she curls herself against the window and tells you about her year in Germany, about her year in Jerusalem and Jordan. She liked to sit on the roof of her apartment at dusk, listening to the call to prayer, to the dirges drifting from the synagogues, listening to the bells, smelling the char of meat, the tang of spices, the ancient aroma of a city layered and lathered and marinated in the same scents for millennia. She liked the way the Arab men at the market would catcall her as she walked past their stalls. She tells you about her month in the psych ward where she met a poet who had cut out his tongue and a photographer who had cut out her left eye. I’m so afraid to die sometimes, but then the only escape from that fear is death. I don’t know what to do. You take her hand, tell her you’re grateful to see her. You drive home with the windows down and you share a cigarette. What would a fulfilling life look like? she asks when you drop her off. I can’t imagine it’s shape. I feel like I’m searching for something but I don’t even know what it is. You watch her flit across her front yard, and you think you will never see her again.

The rum is still on the counter; the quarter is, too. You felt, sometimes, that when you were writing, it was like being adrift in the open sea in the middle of the night. And when you were writing purely, honestly, it was like a bolt of lightning came down and illuminated, maybe, on the very distant horizon, the shape of an island. But maybe it was only a dream, an illusion. But you kept hoping for that lightning to strike again, kept trying to move closer to that island, hoping for just one clear glimpse of the thing. And now you share chicken fingers with a young girl you have loved from afar for very many years and it all seems so clear. But the scope of it - that immense thing - is so vast that you can't begin to explicate it. You can only know that you’ve been inside of it when you’re once more marooned at sea.

You want to end this poetically, but you don't know how. There is a loneliness inside of you that will not be filled. Not by love, not by writing, not by alcohol, not by travel. What’s difficult to know is if that loneliness was always there, from the start, or whether there was a moment in your life when it began. If there was a threshold, and on the other side of it, you were full. You think this loneliness is inside all of us, and it is irreparable. And yet we have to keep searching, even knowing that our pursuit is fruitless, doomed. So sometimes we fall in love, or think we fall in love, or lie to others so that they fall in love with us. And sometimes you sit down and write beautiful poems, or bad poems, or poems that lapse into silence. Sometimes you spend a week cooking and fucking with an old lover. Sometimes you meet up with an apparition, the most beautiful apparition imaginable, and she reads to you in a language you do not understand and then you take her to a diner at two in the morning, and then you go home alone, and you stare into the bottomless night and you wonder if there's anything out there to hold onto, anything at all.