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End of Story

FOUR YEARS AGO I WROTE a story called Badger. Badger is about man who, while working at an agency much like the one I worked at then, repeatedly sabotages his coworker’s computer. The story was based on my real-life experience at that time; that is, I had a coworker who I hated in much the same way that Badger’s unnamed protagonist hates his coworker. However in contrast to my protagonist, I never actually sabotaged my coworker’s computer; instead what I did was, I wrote a story about a man who does this.

In the story the coworker eventually goes mad as a result of the protagonist’s actions. The protagonist doesn’t intend for this to happen—in fact he does everything he can to stop it from happening—and yet this is what happens: his coworker loses her mind and, though this is never explicitly stated, her job, inadvertently granting the protagonist his deepest wish.

The writing of this story proved unexpectedly cathartic for me, and in fact it transformed my relationship with my coworker. However this new state-of-affairs was short-lived, for soon after I finished writing Badger, my coworker had a mental breakdown. It happened quite differently from how I had written about it. In Badger, the coworker, provoked by the protagonist’s actions, comes to believe against all reason that there is a badger that lives in the office building where they both work. This belief is part and parcel of her descent into madness. In real-life, my coworker simply became depressed, for reasons that were never clear to me or my colleagues, reasons that in any case were unrelated to any action on my part (or so I believed at the time). Sinking further and further into depression, she took a leave of absence from her job, during which time she had a psychic break, one from which she has yet to recover. It’s a tragic story. While it was unfolding, I noticed the similarity with what I had written, but I never conceived of any connection between my story and the real-life tragedy. Still, when I learned that my coworker would not be returning to work, I felt a certain inexplicable guilt. Evidently on some subconscious level I believed that by writing Badger, by conceiving of such a tragedy, I had helped to bring it about.

Several years later I wrote another story, called Bookmark. Bookmark is again about a man much like myself who, while looking at porn on the Internet, unexpectedly finds a site that features his ex-girlfriend having sex with a man in a doctor’s office. On the site, his ex-girlfriend is identified as Jennifer Joy. It is a name he finds ridiculous, just as he finds many things about her ridiculous, including, for example, her pubic hair, which she has shaved in such a way so that all that remains is this tiny vertical strip above her labia, which he refers to, with some derision, as a “landing strip.” This landing strip leads him to think about their former relationship and about the distortions of time and memory, about how one’s feelings can become distorted over time, so that you find yourself reacting with a complete lack of compassion or empathy towards a person you once would have sworn you loved, and once did love, if the truth be known.

Much like Badger, Bookmark was inspired by a real-life relationship, although again like Badger, Bookmark’s premise was invented. That is, I never actually found any photographs on the Internet of my ex-girlfriend in a doctor’s office, on an examination table, fucking some guy with dyed blond hair and a tattoo of a chain around his bicep. It would have been hard to even imagine such a thing, although I suppose that’s what I did when I wrote the story: I imagined my ex-girlfriend doing these things, and I imagined how I might feel if I discovered it, and I wrote a story based on these imaginings. Writers do this sort of thing all the time.

As with Badger, writing Bookmark proved unexpectedly cathartic. For, like my protagonist, I had more or less forgotten my feelings for my ex-girlfriend. In the process of writing, I found them again. I didn’t start with the intention to find them; I didn’t actually know they were forgotten. But somewhere in the process, as I recognized how unkind I was being, or how unkind my protagonist was being, I realized what I had lost.

After finishing Bookmark, I posted it on Oblivio, a website where I publish my stories. The next day I received an email from a different ex-girlfriend, someone considerably less significant to me than the one in the story. This other ex-girlfriend wrote that she was pleased and as she put it flattered that I had bothered to write a story about her. She was mistaken, of course: the story was about someone else. The reason she had made this mistake was because she had become, in the decade or so since our breakup, a porn actress. When she wrote to me, she asked which of several sites I had found her on. I immediately visited all the sites she mentioned, and in each I noted with some chagrin that she had shaved her pubic hair in the exact manner I had described in Bookmark.

I wrote that story in June of last year. Just over a week ago, I wrote yet another story. This one I’ve never shared with anyone. It’s called Father Says, and it’s about a man much like me who finds a diary on the street in a pile of garbage. The diary he finds is written by a young girl who believes that the world is about to end, because that’s what her father tells her. Much of the story consists of her diary entries leading up to the day the world is supposed to end. The last entry is written on the morning of that day.

As much as I liked this idea, I struggled to write convincingly in the voice of a young girl. Nonetheless I did what I could and managed to finish the story, albeit not to satisfaction. Then I set it aside. Later that same day, while walking on Washington Street, I found a diary in the garbage in front of the church at the corner of Sterling and Washington. It was written by the girl’s father. Everything I had described happening in my story happens in the father’s diary.

*

I rushed home and printed out a list of all my stories. Then I went through the list and thought about what happens in each and how I had come up with the idea to write it. As it turns out, the majority of these stories were closely based, from beginning to end, on real-life events. In these cases, the stories were simply retellings of earlier experiences, condensed or changed in such a way as to make the written story more interesting or perhaps to disguise its original source. Other stories, a smaller number, were either completely made-up, like Father Says, or began from a real-life experience but then branched off into fiction, like Badger and Bookmark. Without exception, every story in this group—there were about twenty in all—had come true, although in each case there had been a single significant difference between what I had written and what later happened. It was, to put in mildly, unnerving. Evidently—and there seemed no way around this conclusion—all my stories come true.

I work professionally as a freelance web developer; I make websites. When I encounter a problem while coding a site, I’ve learned to run tests to isolate it. So for example, if a page isn’t rendering as expected, I’ll create a radically simplified version of that page, with large chunks of code removed, and see what happens. I’ll then repeat this process as many times as necessary, changing the tests each time, until I’ve figured out what’s going on.

I took the same approach here. I wrote a story, a very short story, about a man who, needing a large paperclip, finds one, mysteriously, in his shirt pocket. After writing this story—it was only a few sentences long—I reached into my pocket and found a button I had been searching for earlier that day. Naturally I recognized how badly designed this test had been, for I had put the button there myself and had merely forgotten about it. I then wrote a second story, this time about a man who receives a crank phone call from the President of the United States. In this story, the president calls and asks the man if there’s anyone there named Jass, to which the protagonist says no, and so the president says: “Are you sure? I’m the President of the United States and I’m looking for a man named Jass. He gave me this number to call. His first name is Hugh. A Hugh Jass.”

I got that bit from The Simpsons. It’s one of Bart’s crank calls. It was the most outrageous thing I could think of. Anyway the phone rang the moment I finished it, and I saw on my caller ID that the call was from Washington: it had a 202 area code. The caller ID said simply, “White House.” I don’t know why exactly, but I couldn’t bring myself to answer the phone. What if it really was the president? What if he really did ask for a man named Jass? It seemed too much. As much as I despise our president, I didn’t really want to listen to him repeat that ridiculous line about a Hugh Jass, and in any case I didn’t need any more confirmation than I already had. My stories all come true.

In what I suppose is an ironic twist, I’m not the kind of person who believes in supernatural powers or supernatural phenomena in general. Or rather, I wasn’t until last week. Now I don’t know what I am. That is, I don’t know what I believe. Even before this happened, I had been becoming, over the course of many years, less and less certain of certain things. Basically I reached a point where I knew or believed as much as I would ever know or believe, and from that point on I’ve been forced to abandon much of what I had known or believed because I could no longer defend it to myself. It’s been a kind of stripping away.

This isn’t the same thing exactly, but when I was younger, in my early twenties, I discovered that my ears are different from each other, that the left, lacking a fold possessed by the right, sticks out a bit. I hadn’t realized this previously. I remember the moment I first saw it. I was standing in the bathroom of the apartment where I lived at that time, looking at my face in the mirror. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular; I was simply looking at myself. I like to do this sometimes to remind myself that I’m a person in the same sense that other people are people; that when I’m with someone, that person is with me, another person, in the same way that I am with another. Of course it’s not that I ever forget this or think something different; it’s just that I need to periodically experience it again, to make it real. And that experience, each time, is like seeing a photograph of the earth from outer space and suddenly remembering that the earth is a planet in the same sense that the other planets are planets, and that each planet is orbiting the sun, which is itself one of some nearly infinite number of stars in the universe. One would never argue otherwise about these things, and yet they slip away because they have little or no significance to us, in how we live our lives.

When I saw my ear for the first time, I realized that I had seen it countless times before, in mirrors and photographs, and that it had previously registered as something like unease. Something about my face had always made me uneasy, and here it was.

Of course it’s all too easy to look back and apply one’s current ideas retroactively on the past. However I really do believe that there was something I had seen in my face all those years, just as I believe that I knew on some level that my stories all come true, or that, at minimum, there was something strange about them; that they weren’t just stories, a fancy sort of make-believe; that they held a different and deeper significance for me.

The moment the call came in from the White House, I finally understood their significance. And that moment, a moment in which my past sort of collapsed on itself and reconfigured itself as something different from what it had always been, was like the moment of an accident, or just after an accident, the moment when you realize that this thing that just happened, really did happen, and that it can never be made to unhappen. Not that, in this case, I would have wanted to undo it. On the contrary, I wanted it to have happened. And now that it had happened and that I knew it had happened, I thought of the only thing I could possibly think of in that moment. I thought of Julia.

Julia is a colleague and friend; we work together at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Actually we don’t really work together: she’s a full-time gardener there, while I work one day a week as a consultant on the Garden’s website.

On the day I found the father’s diary and wrote the story about the president making a crank phone call, I don’t think I really knew what was happening between me and Julia, I don’t think I had really allowed myself to recognize what I was feeling. The reason for this is plain: Julia has a serious boyfriend, someone she’s been seeing for five years now.

Thinking back, I recognize that I’ve been in love with Julia for some time. When does the stage that proceeds love give way to love? Is there a moment, a crossing over, when you know it’s over, which is to say, begun? I think there is, or I think there was, in this case. We were in the Shakespeare Garden. Julia likes the Shakespeare Garden, and so we were sitting on the bench there, talking. We had just had lunch, and for some reason we were talking about decisions, about our methods of deciding things, and Julia was telling me that she can’t make any decisions, any serious decisions, without the use of what she called a decision matrix. The way this works is, Julia first defines her options, her possible choices. So if she’s, say, trying to decide between three apartments to live in, each is considered one option. Next, she identifies the various factors to be considered. So if it’s a decision about an apartment, those factors would be things like price, location, layout, amenities, and so on. Each factor is given a value relative to the other factors. So for example, Julia may determine that price is twice as important as location, which is itself twice as important as layout. If this is the case, price would be given a value of four, location a value of two, and layout a value of one. I think you know what’s coming. Julia evaluates each apartment on a scale of one to ten, for each factor. Then she multiplies these numbers by the value she has assigned to that factor. So if price has a value of four, she multiples each apartment’s score for that factor by four. Then she totals everything up and arrives at her choice. Except that (and this is Julia now; this is totally revealing of who Julia is) the choice she arrives at is not necessarily her choice. That’s right. After all this mumbo-jumbo with factors and values (all of which, by the way, she enters into an Excel spreadsheet), Julia then asks herself if she really wants to live in the highest-scoring apartment. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t live there. She may well end up living in the lowest-scoring apartment. It totally depends on where Julia feels like living. In the end she decides on the basis of what she feels like doing and completely ignores the decision matrix. The decision matrix serves no purpose whatsoever other than to give Julia something to do while she’s putting off making a decision.

When Julia told me this, something inside of me gave way. Or maybe it had already given way and this was merely the first time I recognized it. I don’t know. None of this makes any sense. I just know that when Julia told me about the decision matrix, and specifically when she got to point of explaining that the decision matrix is not what it appears to be, I was in love with her.

Later, when the president called, my first thought was of Julia. Only I didn’t really think of Julia then, but a fictional Julia, a Julia based on Julia. And what I thought is that I would write a story about her. I’ll write a story, I thought, in which this fictional Julia falls in love with me, or with a man like me. She’ll fall in love with a man like me, I thought, and she’ll leave her boyfriend, the one in the story, I thought, and we’ll live together, Julia and I, and if there’s no money, I’ll write a story in which there’s money; and then we’ll have kids, I thought, though I don’t believe that Julia actually wants kids; but in the story I write, she’ll want them very much. This story version of Julia will be somewhat different from the Julia I know, although she’ll still be Julia; it’s just that in the story she’ll have left her boyfriend for me and will have changed her mind about kids.

I never wrote that story, though. At least not on this day. On this day and on the days that followed, I did nothing, more or less, but ponder my fate. Now, when I say that I pondered my fate, I actually mean that quite literally, because my fate, I now realized, was in my own hands. If my stories all come true, I could write myself any sort of life I wanted. I could grant myself immortality; I could bestow upon myself god-like power and dominion. About the only constraint or obstacle I would ever face is the fact that there would always be one thing that would happen differently from how I wrote it, one deviation.

It appeared to be pretty fucking amazing. But then the longer I thought about it, the more I realized how complicated it is. After all, it wasn’t merely my own fate I could affect, but the fate of the entire world, the fate of the entire universe. If I wanted, for whatever reason, I could make the universe contract rather than expand, or expand rather than contract, whichever it is, although it struck me that that would be a rather dangerous thing to do, because I don’t even know if it’s contracting or expanding now, nor do I have any of way of knowing what would happen if I changed it from one to the other. And then there’s the fact that something will always turn out differently from the way I write it, which only adds to the uncertainty. So which thing is going to be different? If I say contract, is it going to expand? If I say expand, is it going to contract? Or is it going to spin in circles? This example is ridiculous, so let’s consider another. Let’s say I decide to end injustice, or if not entirely end it, then at least, say, reduce it by half. Even setting aside the fact that something always turns out differently from how I write it, there’s the question of what would happen if this really happened. I’m not trying to make a case for injustice, but as I thought about this I realized that a world with half as much injustice as ours would be a very different world. What would that new world be like? For example, the economy. Our world’s economy is predicated on and fueled by injustice, by the exploitation and manipulation of workers and consumers worldwide. You reduce injustice by half, and what happens to the world’s economy? I’m not saying that the world’s economy is a good thing, a thing that should be part of a better world, but how do we get from this world to that one? I don’t know the answer to this question, and I’m afraid (this is what I thought about in the days following the president’s phone call) that I might really fuck it up. As I said, this is aside from the unpredictability of the stories themselves, the fact that something always goes a little funny between what I write and what happens. Moreover—and this is just as crucial, I think, if not more crucial—there are certain ethical questions here. Specifically, do I have the right to decide for all humankind what world we live in? I don’t think I do. I can tell you right now that I wouldn’t be too happy if someone else were making these decisions for me. Even assuming the best case, which is that the decision-maker’s intentions are the best intentions you could possibly have, I’m still not happy about it, I’m still not comfortable with this usurping of my autonomy. When the president suddenly felt compelled to call me and ask for a man named Jass, a Hugh Jass, he, the president, was no longer the idiot I think of him as being, but a different idiot all together. It seems harmless enough when we’re talking about crank phone calls, but once you take it to the next level, once you consider the ramifications of any kind of meaningful “intervention,” you realize that such an undertaking reduces humankind to a giant insect colony, or something less than an insect colony, because at least insects are free to live, and die, according to their nature and according to the laws of nature. This thing I’m calling an intervention totally violates all that.

I thought about this for days, pacing around my apartment, back and forth. Walking around the kitchen table. And what I decided, finally, after a week of nothing but pacing, was to do nothing, to write nothing. Anything more seemed not only outrageously dangerous but unthinkably presumptuous.

Now, please note that this decision only applied, as I thought of it, to stories of global or large-scale concern; I wasn’t including the more intimate sort of stories I usually write. This is not to say that I decided to continue to write such stories; only that I considered this a separate question.

It was a question, however, I would be forced to address very soon. During my week of pacing, Julia sent me an email in which she asked how I was doing and what had happened to me the previous Tuesday. We have a standing arrangement, Julia and I, to have lunch together on Tuesdays, which is when I work at the Garden. The previous Tuesday I was in apartment, pacing. In my response, I asked her to have lunch the following day, which wasn’t a Tuesday. This was a bolder step than it may appear, as Julia and I had never had lunch on any day but a Tuesday, and in fact had never even seen each other on any other day of the week.

Julia agreed to meet me and asked again how I was doing. I wrote back that I was fine, but that a lot of had happened, all of which I would tell her about at lunch.

That night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, I found myself thinking about old television shows. The first was I Dream of Jeannie. As you may recall, this show was about a genie, named Jeannie, who lived with an astronaut who she loved because he had rescued her from the prison of her bottle. Jeannie had certain genie powers which the astronaut, her so-called master, Tony Nelson, forbade her from using, though use them she did. This show will forever be associated in my mind with Bewitched, which was basically the same show. Here the main character, Samantha, was a witch who had married a mortal man, an ad executive, Darrin, who forbade her from practicing witchcraft. On marrying Darrin, Samantha agreed to forego witchcraft for the sake of their marriage, and yet time and again it proved her only way out of a bind. I thought about these shows, if it’s not already obvious, because I identified with the plight of the female leads. Well, with the plight of the male leads as well; I identified with the plight of everyone. On I Dream of Jeannie, there was a character, Major Healy, Tony Nelson’s best friend, who wanted nothing more than to exploit Jeannie’s power for his own gain. I identified with him most of all. When I was kid he seemed the only character with any sense whatsoever, and I would often imagine what the show would have been like if he, not Tony Nelson, had been the one to find Jeannie’s bottle.

Nothing much ever changes. I spent most of this night considering that same question.

*

The next day, at noon, I met Julia in the Garden, at the Lilac Collection. As soon as she saw me, she asked if I was okay. I suppose I didn’t look so good after so many days of not sleeping. I said I was fine.

“Where were you last week?” she asked.

“I was at home,” I said.

We walked past the Rose Garden and the Cherry Esplanade, then followed the Celebrity Path to the Fragrance Garden, where there’s a staff-only terrace. At a table in the corner we ate lunch. At one point, as I chewed my food, I looked at her and thought that if I wanted, I could make her kiss me right then. It would be simple. All I’d have to do is scribble something on my napkin. Just a single sentence, that’s all it would take. Something like: “A woman suddenly and for no apparent reason kisses her friend while sitting on the Fragrance Terrace of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and in so doing reveals her true feelings for him, feelings she has been suppressing out of respect for boyfriend, who as it turns out would be pleased that she is finally doing what will bring her happiness, because deep down he simply wants her to be happy, even if being happy means leaving him to be with another man.”

Or maybe I’ll write a shorter sentence, I thought. Just to get the ball rolling. Something like, “She kisses me,” or, “We smooch.”

No such sentence got written, however, and instead I told Julia, by way of explaining my absence the previous Tuesday and my appearance on this day, that I was working on a new story and that I didn’t feel comfortable discussing it yet.

I think Julia knew there was more. And I think she was hurt that I wouldn’t share it with her. Usually we tell each other everything, aside from a few off-limit topics, such as our feelings for other.

The conversation turned to some gossip about a friend of hers who had just been dumped by her boyfriend. This boyfriend was upset because the woman had kept an Excel spreadsheet in which she documented their sex life in great, quantified detail: the number of orgasms she had per session, the positions they used, how long they remained in each, and so on. I asked Julia why she and her friends happen to love Excel so much, and she said it was because of the graphs, because the graphs are so pretty.

When Julia left to return to work, I walked to the Desert Pavilion, a glass-enclosed conservatory room filled with desert plants from around the world. It’s my favorite place in the Garden. I walk into that room and my body relaxes. I think it’s the sense of space, the quiet. Here, surrounded by cacti and succulents, I thought about The Zone from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. The Zone is a place possessed by a mysterious alien force, and within The Zone lies a room in which one’s deepest desire is said to come true. One can only reach this room with the help of a renegade guide called a stalker, and Tarkovsky’s film is about such a journey undertaken by two men and their stalker guide. When the men, after great hardship, reach the threshold of the inner room, the stalker tells them the story of his mentor, Porcupine, who entered the room to save the life of his son, who was deathly ill. However when Porcupine returned from The Zone, his son remained ill, while he, Porcupine, became extraordinarily wealthy. Having thus discovered his deepest wish, his true nature, as it were, Porcupine hung himself.

Remembering The Zone and its inner room, I came up with the idea of writing a story in which my deepest wish comes true. This way, I thought, I wouldn’t have to decide anything; the story would decide for me. All I’d have to do is write the words “and then his deepest wish comes true,” and it would happen. Of course it wouldn’t really be the story that would be deciding in this case, it would be me, it would be my deepest wish, but still I wouldn’t have to be so explicit about it, I wouldn’t have to write, “She falls in love with me, and leaves her boyfriend, and we live happily ever after.” I wouldn’t need, in other words, to specifically change Julia’s feelings for me, assuming they needed to be changed.

It was this idea of changing things, of changing Julia, that bothered me. There was a story I wanted to write, a story I wanted to be true, but I didn’t want to have to change Julia to make it true. That seemed wrong. Not just morally wrong, but wrong in the sense of unworkable, a bad idea.

I’ve often wondered about whores, about how men can go to whores, how that works exactly. I mean for the men. Because the biggest turn-on for me is a woman’s desire. Her desire fuels mine, and vice versa. I don’t think this holds true when whores are involved. Whores are paid to do something. But you can’t pay a woman to want you; only to act like she wants you. So when a whore acts like she wants you, what are you thinking, that she wants you?

Of course I wouldn’t be turning Julia into a whore by making her want me; she really would want me in this case, it wouldn’t be a pretend sort of wanting. But then it wouldn’t really be Julia either.

I left the Desert Pavilion, walked upstairs, and borrowed a pen from the security guard outside the Trail of Evolution. Then I went back downstairs, to the men’s room. There, sitting in a stall, I wrote a story. This story was only a paragraph long. Four brief sentences. I wrote it on a paper towel. When it was done, I folded it in quarters, placed it in my pocket, and walked across the hall to the Tropical Pavilion, where I stood at the door and re-read the first sentence: “She meets me in five minutes in the Tropical Pavilion.”

Some months ago I made a little Quicktime movie which I subsequently put on Oblivio. In this movie, following an introductory sequence in which I dance in my bathrobe, I discuss a conjecture put forth by the philosopher Robert Nozick. Nozick asks us to imagine that scientists have invented what he calls an experience machine, a machine that can generate the illusion of any experience. The way it works is this: You program into the machine the specific experience you would like to have. It can be experience of five minutes or five years, with real or imaginary people, in the past or the future... there are no limits of any kind. Then you lay on a slab in a room and are hooked up to the machine. While the machine is on and running, you are unconscious and therefore unaware that the experience you’re having, or that you believe you’re having, is an illusion. It’s like a dream in the sense that the world of dreams is, for the dreamer, the world. In my little movie I tell the true story of a friend who, while a graduate student at Harvard, taught introductory philosophy to incoming Harvard freshman. She actually taught this class several years running, and each year, in each class, she would ask her students if they would consent to be hooked up to Nozick’s experience machine, and if so, for how long. The vast majority of these students not only agreed to be hooked up to the machine, but said they would do so for a lifetime. It’s stunning.

Nozick created the experience machine to give us the intuition that something matters to us more than pleasure. And that something is truth. The experiences generated by the experience machine are illusory, they aren’t really happening in the world. So for example, I could program the machine to give me the experience of having sex with Julia, but I wouldn’t really be having sex with Julia. In fact while I’m supposedly having sex with Julia, the real-world Julia could very well be having sex with someone else; namely her boyfriend. Point being: I agree with Nozick. Truth matters. Somehow this fact was lost on all those Harvard freshman, perhaps because it’s been lost on our culture, but it hasn’t been lost on me. If Julia falls in love with me because of some supernatural mumbo-jumbo, the literary equivalent of voodoo, has she really fallen in love with me? Or more to the point, is this what I want when I want her to love me?

Back outside the Tropical Pavilion, I read the rest of the story, put it back in my pocket, and, having estimated that five minutes had nearly passed, walked into the room.

The story reads, in its entirety: “She meets me in five minutes in the Tropical Pavilion. There we share our true feelings for each other. Nothing else happens. When it’s over she forgets the conversation.”

Now, I knew I had no right to write this. It would become, in the end, the equivalent of reading her diary—or worse. Neither Jeannie nor Samantha ever did such a thing with their powers. All they ever did was turn people into poodles or blink them to the South Pole. They worked on the surface and never used their powers to look inside a person, or to force what’s inside outside.

What I did was wrong, granted, but here’s why I did it: I figured that if I knew how Julia felt, I would know what to do. There were only two possible things I would discover in the Tropical Pavilion. Either Julia loved me, or she didn’t. If she didn’t, my course of action was clear: I would do nothing. End of story. However, if my feelings were reciprocated, the plan was to confess my love for her and go from there.

Now, when I speak of confessing my love, I mean not the first time, the time in the Pavilion, the time she will soon forget, but a second time, later.

This was a rather regrettable part of the plan. That my confession of love, my second, would be for Julia her first. So that at the very moment that I would want us to be closest, there would be a distance between us, a distance that could never be bridged. I will have taken away those precious two minutes. And my memory of this would forever separate us and undergird our relationship with falsity and duplicity.

Maybe regrettable isn’t a strong enough word.

In any case, this is where my plan ended, with me telling her, for the second time, how I feel. After this, whatever happened, I resolved to not use my power to change anything. So if Julia was to tell me that she wanted to find a way to make it work with me, then we would find a way to make it work, or we fail to find that way, but whatever happened, I would never again write her lines for her—or rather, listen in on them in advance.

This too was part of the plan. And whether or not I would actually stick to it, it was with this in mind that I entered the Tropical Pavilion.

*

I regretted the choice immediately. I mean of the Tropical Pavilion. I always forget what it’s like in there. It’s insufferable. They’ve actually made it like a jungle. It’s like an enormous steam room packed to the ceiling—a sixty-five foot ceiling—with every imaginable kind of bloated, overzealous plant life. My first thought every time is of the scene in Burden of Dreams when Werner Herzog is standing in the Peruvian jungle and saying, “We have to humble ourselves in the face of all this overwhelming misery and fornication.”

Anyway it’s not like I had any choice at this point. I stood just a pace inside the room and looked for her.

The path through the Pavilion describes a circle. You can’t really see across that circle because the middle area is taken up with jungle, so I walked around the circumstance and found her on the other side, studying an Amazon Lily plant. The moment I saw her, I wanted to back out. That’s what I would have done under any other circumstance. In this case, though, I knew it was pointless.

I’ve always known about the power of stories, particularly the ones we tell ourselves. However, this moment in the Tropical Pavilion was the first time I ever felt truly trapped in a story. Because you see, the woman in the Tropical Pavilion looking at the Amazon Lily was not Julia; it was Sally, my ex-girlfriend, the porn actress, the one with the landing strip.

What could I do?

I tapped her on the arm. She turned, saw me, shouted my name, hugged me, looked at me again, hugged me again and said, “What are you doing here?”

“I work here,” I said.

“You work here,” she said.

“I work here.”

It went on like this for a while and then she pointed out that I didn’t seem that surprised to see her.

“I’m in a kind of shock,” I said.

She talked about how amazing it was to run into me like this, given that she’s recently been thinking about me again, after not really thinking about me for many years.

“It’s like we were meant to meet like this,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Unfinished business.”

She nodded.

“I never felt you were that into me,” she said.

“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t feel that strongly. I’m sorry.”

“I tried to keep you with sex,” she said. “Sometimes that works.”

“Why bother?” I said. “Did you really love me that much?”

“No,” she said. “Or yes. As much as I was capable of then.”

There was a pause.

“No,” she said.

Heading back, I walked past the Japanese Garden and followed the path up the hill to the Overlook. There I sat on a bench and looked out on the Garden. I don’t think I thought of anything, if that’s possible. I just looked.

And then, in the distance, beyond the Esplanade, I spotted Julia in the Rock Garden. She was hauling rocks up and down a hill, carefully avoiding the shrubs as she made her way up. Two-thirds of the way, she positioned a rock and then headed down again to collect another piece of granite. From this distance the shrubs and lichen appeared as a patchwork of pastel colors. There was a soft circle of light green, which I knew, because Julia had taught me, was Littleleaf Box. And then, just above that, a flash of yellow where the ragweed is.

When I left, there was a mist in the air, like it had rained, though I don’t believe it had.

It’s a day later now and I’m at home, at my desk. I’ve been writing a story. It’s almost finished. It’s the story you’re reading. I think it’s called Sentence. I wanted to call it Story but that seemed too much like all those poems that people write called Poem. In any case, whatever I end up calling it, it’s nearly done and there’s just one thing I need to mention. It’s that this story will be the last one I write that comes true. I have decided to surrender my power, for reasons I’ve been trying all this time to explain.

I realize that I could have handled the whole thing with just a single sentence, something like, “A man discovers that every story he writes comes true, but then decides to surrender this power because it turns out to be not such a good thing, which is what he does, he writes a story in which he gives up the power at the end, after which it’s gone, just like that, poof.” Instead, though, I chose to start from the beginning and provide this convoluted build-up. Writers do that all the time.

About Julia, my plan is to talk with her next Tuesday and tell her how I feel. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m scared of scaring her and not really sure it’s the right thing to do.

The other thing that worries is the fact that something must turn out differently from what I’ve written here. It’s pointless of course, but I’ve tried to guess what this something might be. I’ve thought that perhaps the power will prove unsurrenderable, or that it will turn into something different, a different power, so that that’s no escape. I’ve thought that all my stories might suddenly become false, so that my former coworker will miraculously regain her sanity.

On the other hand, maybe it’ll turn out to be something dumb. Maybe I’ll wake tomorrow with matching ears, only I won’t notice it at first and so I’ll suffer, I’ll torture myself over the question of what’s different, because something must be different, only it won’t seem like anything is. Maybe I’ll make myself crazy this way, really crazy, and Julia will wonder what’s happened to me and so I’ll finally have to tell her the truth, though I know deep down she can’t possibly believe me, and then she’ll say, in disbelief, “Why would you give that up?” and so I’ll say, “Because I love you. Because I love you and I was afraid that I would use the power to make you love me back, only it wouldn’t be you who was loving me but some character based on you, and I couldn’t bear to do that and anyway I only want you to love me if you love me, not because of a story I’ve written that makes it so.” At which point Julia... well, I’m not trying to be pushy here, but it certainly seems, from a dramatic standpoint, that this would be an excellent moment for her to kiss me. No need for dialogue. No need for her to say, “I love you too, you idiot.” Just kiss him. Boom. Fade to black. End of story.