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Letter

YESTERDAY MORNING I received an email from basically the last person on earth I ever would have expected to send me an email, my ex-girlfriend Alana.

As it was, this was the worst possible day for me to receive an email from Alana, this being the day that I was to complete and deliver a proposal on behalf of my employer – a proposal that will, I do not exaggerate when I say this, make or break our little agency. Essentially we are competing, the Institute is, with a rival organization for a long-term government contract. One of us will receive this contract and the other will not; it is an all-or-nothing proposition – one winner, one loser. This is why I’ve done nothing for three months but type words into a computer, then immediately delete these words, or most of these words, then type more words, many of which are the same words I only just deleted. Because I’ve had no choice in the matter. We simply have to win this contract; we can’t not win this contract; and so the whole thought of what happens if we don’t win this contract, if we lose, is not a thought I even want to think.

Unfortunately when I clicked on my inbox and saw that I had received an email from Alana, I had not yet finalized the Institute’s proposal for this contract; specifically the charts and graphs. In fact at this moment the charts and graphs were nothing but empty boxes, placeholders, and so given that the proposal was due to be delivered this day by five o’clock it was imperative that I leave for work as soon as possible and not dillydally over Alana’s email.

Indeed this was my first thought. My first thought was to leave the email until evening, that is, until after I had completed and safely delivered the proposal, at which time I would be free to study the email at my leisure, to read it fifty times if I wanted, a hundred times, but for now it seemed best to leave the email unread. Best of course meaning safest. For it occurred to me as I stared at Alana’s name in the SENDER column of her email, that I had absolutely no idea what she had written in this email and therefore no idea how I might react to what she had written. One might say – and this is something I actually thought at the time – that these two unknowns posed a danger to me, for I could easily imagine a circumstance in which Alana’s email would upset me to the degree that it would affect my work performance, which on this of all days would be a disaster.

For some reason this situation made me think of that television show many years ago in which there was this curtain and behind this curtain was something, you didn’t know what, but something, perhaps something terrible, you didn’t know, and then at last the curtain was opened and you saw what it was. Only of course it was more like the moment just before the curtain opened and you really didn’t know what was there, except in this case I at least knew one thing, I knew who had put the thing there, Alana had, Alana had put it there and she had put it there for me.

For this reason alone I was tempted to read the email immediately. However, considering the situation at the Institute, the as yet unfinished proposal, it was clear I had no business doing so.

I actually thought this as I sat there; I thought, People are counting on you, you simply cannot let them down – all these thoughts about the Institute and my professional responsibilities; what it would mean if we didn’t win this contract, what it would mean to my colleagues, many of whom have families to support. And then having thought these thoughts and having gone through the whole thing in my mind several times, the risk involved given my feelings for Alana and given the fact that on this of all days I needed a clear head at work so that I could focus all of my attention and energy on the task at hand, I simply went ahead and read Alana’s email.

It was wrong, I know that, I knew it before I did it, and yet I could not stop myself. I loved Alana. I love her still. When you love a person like this and this person sends you an email like this, you have no choice but to read that email immediately. You cannot leave that email for a better time. There is no better time for such an email from such a person. It may be wrong, it may be reckless, but still you do it, I did it, I would no doubt do it again, even considering what happened as a result.

*

However before actually reading Alana’s email, before actually clicking on Alana’s name and actually reading the text of her email, I first locked the door to my room, then closed and locked both windows, pulling down the shades. All which seems a bit much in retrospect – particularly the windows, particularly the fact that I locked the windows. Oddly I have no idea why I did this. Was I concerned that someone might climb in through the window of my third-floor bedroom to interrupt my reading of my ex-girlfriend’s email? Really, it was like a dream in the way that dreams often proceed according to some unassailable logic which then vanishes on waking, so that all you’re left with is this intense but inexplicable mishmash. All of which is to say that I can’t explain why I locked the windows. Or I suppose I could explain why I locked the windows, there being any number of reasons for locking one’s windows – only to approach it this way would be to lie, to guess, because the truth is, I don’t really know. Not that it so much matters, in the end. That is I think what matters in the end is not that I locked my windows, or even that I read Alana’s email, knowing I shouldn’t, but rather what Alana said in her email, not this nonsense with my windows.

So what Alana said in her email was that a mutual friend had recently congratulated her on my behalf on the publication of her first scholarly paper, and that while she appreciated my thoughtfulness, she was writing to ask that I never again attempt to communicate with her, either directly or via intermediaries.

Actually she didn’t say that she appreciated my thoughtfulness but that she appreciated my apparent thoughtfulness. The implication being that it was not thoughtfulness which had motivated me to congratulate her but rather something which merely resembled thoughtfulness – pseudo-thoughtfulness. The implication being – because I know Alana, I know what she’s saying between the lines – that I had used this pseudo-thoughtfulness to disguise my true intentions, which were anything but thoughtful. This is what Alana was saying. Alana was saying that she had seen through my pseudo-thoughtful gesture to what lay beneath it and that she felt sickened and disgusted by what she had found there. I had not changed – this was Alana’s true point – in her naiveté, her simplicity, she had come to believe that I had changed, only now it was clear that I was fundamentally incapable of change. When was she going to realize this? When was she going to give up hope of me ever changing? Really it was her own fault, because who ever told her to believe I could change? This is what Alana meant by referring to my apparent thoughtfulness. She meant that I was incapable of change and that I had fooled her, or that she had fooled herself, for the last time. Finally she had opened her eyes and could see what had been plain to everyone else from the beginning. I did not love her. I could not love her. I was incapable of loving her or anyone, and yet she had refused to see this. For nearly three years she had carried around a certain idea of who I was, of what our relationship was, and had basically lived as if these certain ideas were true, when in fact nothing could have been further from the truth. As I myself had always said, we point away from the truth, we know the truth but point in the opposite direction, because deep down we don’t want to look at the truth, we don’t want to face the truth. When we tell a person that we love that person, we don’t mean that we love that person; no, what we mean is that we feel we should love that person, or that we should at least claim to love that person, despite the fact that we don’t love that person; we’re just saying we love that person to cover up for the fact that we don’t, or at best to make it so by saying it. Which is a bit of joke – words have never made anything so, they’re just words. How many times had I told her this? How many times had I explained exactly what was happening between us without her ever once realizing that what I was talking about was our relationship, or that what I was saying applied directly to our relationship, to my supposed love for her. This is what Alana was getting at with this phrase “apparent thoughtfulness.” She was getting at the fact that what I had told all her all those years was true and that she now felt grateful to me for pointing it out to her, in fact for continuing to point it out to her – witness my pseudo-thoughtful gesture. And so having finally recognized the truth of what I had been saying, she now saw that our relationship had been built on nothing but lies – this was implicit in her choice of words, particularly the words “apparent thoughtfulness” – and thus she would give anything, anything, to go back to the beginning, the very beginning, to the moment we met, and then, just as we were to meet, to turn from me, from us, from all that was to happen, and to walk in the opposite direction, forever.

I hadn’t expected this. Maybe I should have but I hadn’t. I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth, and then after brushing my teeth I flossed, and then after flossing I shaved. I always brush my teeth, then floss, then shave – in that order. It’s a little routine I have. One of many such routines. For you see, I don’t like to think about what to do, I don’t like to get to the bathroom and then ask myself if maybe I should brush my teeth or floss or shave or what I should do, I don’t like to occupy my mind with these kinds of questions. So over time I’ve developed these little routines which I follow without really thinking about them, I just get to the bathroom and open the cupboard and take the toothpaste from the cupboard and close the cupboard and unscrew the cap to the toothpaste and place the cap in this certain corner of the basin where it won’t be in too much danger of falling into the sink and rolling down the drain, and then I take my toothbrush from the toothbrush holder and spread a certain approximate amount of toothpaste on the toothbrush, and so on and so forth in this general fashion, until I’ve done everything that needs to be done on this particular visit to the bathroom, at which point I head to the kitchen and begin my little kitchen routine, the one I do after my bathroom routine, that is, after my second bathroom routine, because my kitchen routine follows not my first bathroom routine but my second.

So yesterday morning after reading Alana’s email, I went to the bathroom and began brushing my teeth, and then as part of this routine, my second bathroom routine, I took a shower, during which time I washed myself in a certain proscribed order – first my chest, then my underarms and face and neck and shoulders, et cetera et cetera et cetera, and then, after I had completed my shower routine, which I suppose is a subroutine of my bathroom routine, which itself is a subroutine of my morning routine, I got down on my knees in the shower and began to cry.

I think it was because of the water. I mean the sound of it, the noise. The way I thought of it, this sound granted me a certain degree of privacy; so long as I didn’t cry too loudly, so long as I didn’t wail, the sound of the falling water would drown me out. Although it occurs to me now that I may have been mistaken, that the water may have sounded much louder to me from inside the water, so to speak, than to someone at a distance; namely my roommate. In any case I didn’t think of this at the time and instead just let myself cry.

I don’t know how long I cried for, exactly. All I know is that at a certain point I told myself I shouldn’t cry any longer and that what I should do instead is to complete my bathroom routine, my second bathroom routine, so that I could begin my kitchen routine, so that I could get to the Institute and start working on those charts and graphs.

As you might imagine I had not intended to cry when I entered the shower – crying in the shower is not a regular part of this or any other routine. Not that there aren’t times that I cry. In fact compared to some men I probably cry a great deal, I’m probably quite a cry baby, relatively speaking. But the point is that this was no time for tears, I had a proposal to complete, the fate of the Institute, as it were, was in my hands.

Well, that may be a bit of an exaggeration. After all, the proposal was essentially done at this point, aside from the charts and graphs, so if we happened to be forced to submit it this way, just the text and nothing else – say, if I happened to be hit by a truck on the way to work – it probably wouldn’t have effected our chances one way or the other.

Although on the other hand it may have, you have no way of knowing with these things. You are working in the dark – they make you work in the dark, so that you have no choice but to do everything you can think of doing, for fear that the one thing you think of but choose not to do will be the one thing they care about, the one thing on which they intend to base their entire evaluation.

Without question I should have turned off the water at the conclusion of my shower routine; that would have been the responsible thing to do. But instead I allowed myself to cry, holding my face in my hands as the water poured down my back. In my defense I should say that I knew that this was probably my last opportunity to cry, at least for the next ten hours or so, and so knowing this I indulged myself a bit. But only for a bit. Then I stood, washed the tears from my face and turned off the water. I don’t think I really thought about Alana again until I was at work, working on the first chart.

Charts, I should say, are not that complicated. I’ve done plenty of charts before and have never had a problem with them. This chart was no different. But then at a certain point of working on the chart, something suddenly made me think of Alana, of her email, I can’t recall what now. Most likely it wasn’t anything significant. Because when a person is inside you like this, any random thought can lead to that person. And so you can be thinking about whether to align a column of text to the right or the left and suddenly remember, say, the way she parted her hair, the slant of her handwriting, the side of bed she liked to sleep on. You can’t avoid this. You can’t put a box around your thoughts of this person and say that you won’t go in that box. Even to say that you won’t go in that box is to go in that box. Although there is no box; there’s just these things you feel, in spite of yourself.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe it’s in spite of yourself that you try to avoid this box that isn’t a box so much as a feeling. I don’t know. It’s exhausting to even think about these things. I stopped working on the chart and went to the restroom, bringing along a pen and a piece of scrap paper.

I keep scrap paper on my desk in one of the slots of this little plastic sorter thing. Each sheet is exactly one-quarter the size of a regular eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper. I cut it this way, using a paper cutter. I mention this only to say that the piece of paper was not large. In fact I know its exact dimensions – it was four and a quarter by five and a half inches. I first reached for a regular sheet of notepad paper, then changed my mind and chose the scrap paper. Indeed it was as if I understood what was to happen before it happened, and was trying to somehow stop it from happening.

Actually this is wrong. It is the kind of thought one has after the fact, when everything seems fated, in retrospect. It is an illusion of perspective. When a story begins at the end, everything that follows leads to that end, including those things that might not otherwise appear to be leading there, or leading anywhere for that matter.

I walked into the stall, locked the door behind me, and sat on the toilet. Actually before I sat on the toilet I pulled down my pants and my underwear, despite the fact that I didn’t truly need to do this. That is I didn’t really need to go as such, I just needed a private place in which to write. In fact at first I was about to just sit on the lid of the toilet with my pants up, but then it occurred to me that if someone happened to come into the restroom needing to use the toilet, that that person would naturally peak under the stall door to see if the toilet was occupied. I know I do this – I lean over to see if there any shoes where you would expect shoes to be, and then if there aren’t any shoes there, I know it’s safe to go in. So putting myself in the place of this person, the next potential toilet-user, I realized that he might very well notice, when looking for my shoes, that my pants weren’t rolled down, in which case he would be apt to wonder what I was doing with my pants rolled up and even possibly complain that I was using the stall, the one and only stall in that restroom, for a purpose other than that for which it was intended. Hence I rolled down my pants. Everything has an explanation.

Although there is a difference (this is something Alana taught me; Alana so loves philosophy) between an explanation and a justification. The difference being that a justification must be supported by what philosophers have called true beliefs. Thus Romeo (this is the example that Alana would use) had only an explanation for drinking the poison, not a justification, because Juliet was not really dead when he drank it, she only appeared to be dead. Romeo’s decision to kill himself was based on a false belief and therefore cannot be justified, only explained. By contrast, Juliet, believing correctly that Romeo was dead, may very well have had a justification for stabbing herself, it depends on other things, such as whether one is ever justified in stabbing oneself, dead lover or not. Alana taught me this. No doubt I loved her more than I knew.

Sitting on the toilet with my pants down, I scribbled part of a letter to her, holding the piece of scrap paper against my naked thigh. Fortunately I had brought along the kind of pen, I don’t know what you call this kind, from which the ink sort of bleeds from the tip at the slightest contact. Had I used a ball point, which is what I normally use, I probably would have had a problem with the pen puncturing the paper. Luckily I realized this in advance and prepared accordingly.

As I wrote, my handwriting became smaller and smaller, so that at the bottom of the flip side you can barely read what’s written there, the letters are so tiny. Having written it, however, I can decipher what it says. This is what it says.

“There are no songs sung from my perspective; I’ve listened and I know. All the songs are sung from your perspective, all the songs are about this person who promised me everything, who could have, should have loved me but didn’t. Or did, then didn’t. Which seems worse, doesn’t it, to love then not love. Because to not love means to have never loved, doesn’t it, it means to go back and do this kind of global replace, love becoming bullshit. In the beginning I would listen to the radio, flipping through the stations, searching for a song that spoke to what I was feeling. I never found it. Instead what I found was you singing to me in the guise of various pop stars. It was as though the entire music industry had conspired to torture me with recriminations. Because what every third song was saying was that you promised me everything then shat on me. Or, what the fuck is your problem, can’t you see what you’re throwing away? Or, now you’re gone and I’m nothing without you, so when you build your house please call me home.”

While I was writing this, someone came into the restroom to pee. In fact he was still peeing when I finished. To maintain appearances, I tore some toilet paper from the roll and wiped myself.

I suppose I don’t mean appearances exactly; I mean the sound of things. To maintain the proper sound of things, I went through the motions of tearing off some toilet paper and wiping myself. The way I thought of it was, I didn’t want this person, who might very well know me, to think I don’t do these things. Although it occurs to me now that I didn’t need to actually wipe myself. I mean, I don’t believe that a person standing at the urinal can actually hear you wipe yourself, particularly when that person is at that time peeing. But having torn off the paper, I just did what I always do, figuring no harm could come from it. Then I flushed and left the stall.

When I emerged, the person peeing was still standing at the urinal – apparently he was having some kind of problem – so I rinsed my hands – not entirely for the sake of appearances – and returned to my desk. There I finished the first chart and went and showed it to my boss, who suggested several minor changes. However before I left to make these changes, my boss asked how long I thought it was going to take to finish the remaining charts and graphs – clearly he was nervous that we weren’t going to make the five o’clock deadline – so I said that barring some unforeseen disaster, we had twice as much time as necessary. This was the wrong thing to say. The unforeseen disaster part, that is. Because my boss then wanted to know what sort of disaster I was referring to, so I pointed out that an unforeseen disaster is by definition the very thing one cannot anticipate. All one can do, I said, is to think of everything one can think of, and prepare accordingly. Sometimes I say the wrong thing. Subsequently I made it worse by listing the various disasters I felt prepared to deal with, thinking that this would show how much thought I had given the matter. My boss, who’s actually a funny person in his way, responded by closing his eyes and holding an invisible gun to his head.

“Please don’t shoot,” I told him.

Back at my desk I spent the next several hours executing the remaining charts. In retrospect I see that I should have begun with the graphs, knowing how difficult they are. But at the time it seemed better to get the charts out of the way, so that if I ran into a problem with the graphs, I wouldn’t have to worry about the charts, they would already be done. Ultimately I had a certain amount of time to do both, so it didn’t matter which I did first, or even if I switched back and forth. This being true, one must still allow for the fact that things rarely go as planned, which is why I began with the charts, to more or less guarantee that if worse came to worse, the charts would be finished. Now I’m repeating myself. I did what I did and what happened happened.

After finishing the seventh and final chart, I grabbed a pen and a sheet of paper – an eight and a half by eleven sheet of notepad paper – and returned to the restroom. There I wrote the following. “A few days after we broke up I removed your photograph from the little plastic frame on my desk and filed it away in my Alana folder. I couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. You remember this photograph, don’t you? It’s the one where you’re standing before the ruins of what was once a castle, the one with the jacket with all the buttons. For perhaps a day I left the empty frame on my desk, but then this seemed even worse than the photograph, even more depressing, this empty frame, so I stuck it in a box in the closet where I wouldn’t have to look at it anyone. A few months later, while searching for something else, I came upon it again. I had forgotten about it. Seeing the frame there in the box, it didn’t seem right that I had saved it, because of course the reason I had saved it was so I could use it again. I was anticipating my next relationship, my next girlfriend. Realizing this, I decided to throw the frame away and even went so far as to stick it in the trash. But then this seemed wrong as well, a kind of betrayal of you, of your memory – to discard, or to attempt to discard, your absence – so I fished the frame out of the trash and put it back on my desk. That’s where it is now, and where it will remain until I think of a better place for it. Actually I rather like it there. It’s a kind of joke I have with myself. During the Renaissance, men of learning would keep skulls on their desks to remind themselves of their mortality. You see it in the paintings. The empty frame serves a similar purpose. Naturally there are times I would prefer to throw it out, or hide it, as I did before – it’s ugly. In desperation I once put your photograph back inside it. This lasted all of five minutes. For it turns out that the photograph, a photograph I have always loved, is now a lie. The truth being no photograph. The truth being empty frame.”

*

While writing this I forced myself to write naturally, that is, in my natural size, for I was concerned that if I allowed myself to write any smaller, I would take too much time away from working on the graphs. You see, I considered this time a reward in a sense for finishing the charts so promptly. However, that said, I knew it was crucial I not overdo it, which is why I made the rule about the size of my handwriting and also why I brought along only one sheet of paper – I suspected that if I did not constrain myself in these ways, I might spend the entire afternoon in that stall. Or not the entire afternoon, that’s an exaggeration, but just an inappropriate amount of time. Of course one might say that I shouldn’t have gone into that stall to begin with, neither this time nor the previous, and one might be correct in saying so. That is, one would definitely be correct in saying so, there’s no question about it; I shouldn’t have gone in. Although it’s worth noting that a person is not a machine, that for better or worse a person has feelings. I mean, for better – I wouldn’t want to not have feelings – but there are times when one’s feelings complicate matters. Alana would object. Alana would say, Alana did say that one has a choice about one’s actions regardless of one’s feelings, that one can never point to one’s feelings and say that it was their fault, that they made me do it. Who can argue with her? I had no business going into that stall, neither the first time nor the second.

As I was leaving the stall, I had another thought, something else to tell Alana, so I took a paper towel from the paper towel dispenser and scribbled down the words, “Bubo. Didn’t fuck. Way out.” Then I returned to my desk, or rather headed in that direction, because halfway there I noticed the video monitor in the hall outside the conference room and remembered something else, something important, so I turned and hurried back to the restroom. Before entering the stall, I grabbed another paper towel from the paper towel dispenser.

Paper towels, if case you’re wondering, are not the best thing to write on. This is particularly true when you’re using the kind of pen I was using, the kind that bleeds. The problem is that the paper towel tends to soak up an excessive amount of ink, so that you have to write these absurdly large letters to prevent the letters from bleeding together and becoming illegible. Basically you have to write like a child – that’s what it looks like, like a child’s handwriting. Which is no big deal, I don’t mind writing like a child, only you can’t fit very many child-like words on a single paper towel. Thus I had to keep getting up to get more paper towels, which of course meant pulling up my pants and underwear and going outside the stall and getting the paper towels and returning to the stall and pulling down my pants and underwear again – a operation that soon became tiresome, particularly since I was trying to write as fast as I could so that I could return to my desk and get started on those graphs.

In retrospect it’s clear I should have simply grabbed a larger number of paper towels per trip. However for some unknown reason I couldn’t bring myself to do this. Actually, I know the reason – the reason is that I wanted to believe I was only going to need, say, three or four more paper towels to finish the job. This wasn’t true, I knew this wasn’t true, but still I simply couldn’t allow myself to take, say, twenty-five or thirty paper towels at one time. It would have too obvious. I mean, too obvious as to what I was doing. Because what I was doing, when you get down to it, was wasting a tremendous amount of time writing a letter to my ex-girlfriend when I should have been at my desk working on those graphs. It wasn’t merely that I was being paid to work on the graphs. No, it was what those graphs meant, or could mean, to the Institute. I wasn’t merely goofing off by sitting on a toilet for this amount of time, I was betraying the trust of my friends and colleagues and even possibly risking their livelihood.

*

This said, I wonder how long I would have continued in this fashion (and perhaps it is best that I cannot know the answer to this question) had my boss not appeared in the restroom. It happened while I was standing at the paper towel dispenser. I had just taken three fresh towels and was about to return to the stall when I heard the outer door swing open.

Our restroom has two doors, an outer and an inner. I believe the inner door is there so that a person passing in the hall does not inadvertently see someone peeing – peeing being something one should not inadvertently see. Not that you could actually see someone peeing from the hall – I mean theoretically, I mean in lieu of any doors. That is, yes, you could see a person’s back, but I don’t think seeing a person’s back while he’s peeing means seeing him pee. No doubt others would disagree; hence the inner door.

On this particular occasion I was grateful for it, for it granted me just enough time to scramble back into the stall. I don’t believe my boss even realized that this other person was me. That is I believe I managed to shut the door behind me before he entered the restroom proper. Naturally at this point I didn’t know that it was him either, I just thought it was someone, another person, and that I had to get back into the stall before this someone saw the huge stack of paper towels I had left in plain view on the floor of the stall.

It is scary to think what would have happened had the restroom not had an inner door. Frankly I’d rather not think about this; enough bad things happen as it is without dwelling on the near misses.

While this person, my boss, peed, I didn’t write anything; instead I sat there waiting for him to finish. However I soon became curious, I suppose I had a hunch, so I peaked under the stall – the stall is right next to the urinal – and saw my boss’s shoes.

I would not have known I even knew what kind of shoes my boss wears, but as it turns out I recognized them immediately. He wears the kind of shoes that are really gussied up sneakers, although they resemble dress shoes from a distance. Seeing his shoes there, I felt this awful surge of guilt, there’s no other word for it, and realized what I had to do – I had to finish the letter.

Or not finish the letter, I had no hope of finishing the letter, but rather stop writing it and start working on the graphs. For I knew that if I could simply begin to work on the graphs, the graphs would take my mind off Alana. So when my boss left the restroom, I wrote a few more sentences, just enough to finish my previous thought, and here finally stopped. This in sum is what I had written. “Last week I watched a program on television I would normally never watch and am too embarrassed to even tell you the name of, but watch it I did, in part because I was curious about the actress who plays the female lead on this program, because I’ve either read or heard that this actress is really something, and in fact I’ve seen various photographs of her that appear to confirm this, her somethingness, so for this reason I knew exactly who she was when I saw her – this was in Sears, I happened to be in Sears and noticed her face as I walked past a bank of television sets. Seeing her face there in various sizes and color schemes, I decided to stop for a moment, a moment that dragged into a half-hour because I must admit there really was something about her, or rather about the character she played on this show – a character I naturally thought of as her, I mean the actress herself, because I don’t think anyone could act like that without it being at least somewhat reflective of who that person really is. While walking home I found myself fantasizing about this actress, that I had somehow met her, in a car wash of all places, although I don’t as you know own a car. Everything in the fantasy was pretty much the way it really is, except for the fact that I owned a car and didn’t know that this woman was a famous actress – that is I hadn’t seen her picture anywhere, or had but hadn’t made the connection. So in my innocence I asked her, this anonymous car wash woman, if she wanted to go candlepin bowling with me, because in the fantasy we had been talking about bowling and I had been saying that I preferred candlepin over regular, whatever regular is called, ten-pin, I suppose, although candlepin uses ten pins as well. Honestly I don’t know how we had gotten to talking about bowling, or how we had started talking at all for that matter, the fantasy begins in the middle of the conversation, and of course there’s the issue of what this famous actress was even doing at a car wash. That is I don’t think that famous actresses ever actually go to get their cars washed – they have people, personal assistants, who do this for them. In any event the actress said that she couldn’t go candlepin bowling with me, or with anyone really, because she was this famous actress and so a lot of bowlers would probably ask her for her autograph and such, and that though people were generally considerate in these circumstances, it still wasn’t worth the inevitable attention and hassle. Instead of saying, ‘Oh, you’re an actress. What have you acted in?’ – the natural or expected thing to say – I told her that when I was kid I used to set up dixie cups in my basement and bowl that way, knocking the cups over with a tennis ball. She laughed and said that she had used not dixie cups but slurpee cups, having saved the slurpee cups for this very purpose. Then suddenly it’s five years later or something and we’re in the bathroom together, because now we’re living together and I suppose are probably married – I mean, that’s the sense I have, that we’re either married or something equivalent to married: partners – and she’s at the sink plucking her eyebrows and I’m sitting on the toilet with my pants down, though I’ve long since peed, and she’s telling me some story, some famous actress-type story, and in the middle of her story it occurs to me that the only thing that matters or will ever matter is love, and that although this actress is no less captivating in person than on television, I don’t for whatever reason love her as I once loved you. So I feel totally miserable, totally broken-hearted, because although I didn’t exactly leave you for her, it was like that in a sense, because when I left you, or when we broke up, I was hoping to eventually meet someone like her, I mean after a certain period of mourning, if that’s what it’s called, mourning, and now here I’ve met her and we’re together and all I can think of is you. You were the one I loved. I knew it at the time, yet could not bring myself to love you. If that makes any sense. Which I know of course it doesn’t. It will never make any sense. So what I ask myself is, Why doesn’t it make any sense? That is I think it must be a failure in me, in my ability to understand myself. Because it happened. It happened, so there must be a reason for it, an explanation. If not a justification. Einstein said – I know, Einstein, whatever – but Einstein said that it’s the theory that determines what we can observe. So I say to myself, You need a different theory. But then I wonder if I really want a different theory – and so on and so forth – I’m sure this all sounds eerily familiar to you, the same old back and forth. But the point is, I broke down – I mean on the way home from Sears – because I saw that there was no turning back, that I had to love the actress, that I could not half-love her or quarter-love her because she isn’t you. I mean after half-loving you because you weren’t her. Then I had a truly horrible thought, a real doozie. I thought, I’m the Flying Dutchman. You see, when I was a kid (I don’t think I ever told you this before) I saw this Twilight Zone episode in which this guy is on the Titanic and then the Titanic goes down and he manages to sneak onto one of the life rafts, I think he disguises himself as a woman, and gets picked up by a ship that turns out to be the Lusitania. Which makes no sense, the Lusitania went down years later, but of course this is the Twilight Zone. So eventually the Lusitania goes down and he gets rescued by a third ship, I forget which one, another famous ship-about-to-sink, at which point he realizes he’s the Flying Dutchman, that it’s his fate, or his job, I suppose, to go from one wreck to another, forever. Granted the comparison is a stretch. I mean, you never get the sense that this guy is in any way responsible for the ship going down, he just gets put there by some unexplained force and down goes the ship. Which makes him quite different from someone who, say, breaks up with his girlfriend every two or three years. For one thing there’s the obvious issue of agency. But that aside, I latched onto this Flying Dutchman idea, and in fact it struck me that maybe we’re more similar, he and I, than it appears. I mean I suddenly wondered if maybe the reason he seems so blameless is because he’s the one telling the story, or because it’s told from his perspective, the perspective of a person who sees himself floating like driftwood from disaster to disaster. That is, it struck me that for all we know, he may be the devil. I have often thought this – the devil is not in his own mind evil, no, he is the victim of unseen forces beyond his control. Of course it turns out that these unseen forces are within himself, but still, what’s unseen is unseen. I’m sure I’m not explaining this well at all, you would not believe the circumstances under which I am writing it. On top of this I have to wonder, as I’m sure you are wondering yourself, what my point is. I think it’s that I love you and that I’m sorry. Walking home from Sears I passed that seedy little lunch place where you waited for me while I interviewed for my job at the Institute. Normally I avoid this block at all costs. But this time I went so far as to go inside the restaurant and look at the table where you sat waiting. Do you remember? I’m sure you remember quite well. When I returned from that interview, I acted as despondent as possible so as to temporarily fool you into thinking I had bombed. And you were fooled, I think. Or maybe you fooled me by pretending to be fooled. I challenge anyone to tell me that that’s not love: two people determined at all costs to fool each other.”

This is where it ends. I don’t know how many paper towels it took me to write it. Probably forty. Forty may sound like a lot of paper towels, but you have to remember that my handwriting was the size of a child’s.

In any case I now had a problem – how was I to bring the paper towels back to my desk? – or not to my desk but to the coat rack behind my desk, which is where I keep my knapsack.

*

It wasn’t as though I could fit them into my pockets, all these paper towels. Or I could have, I suppose, I could have stuffed them all in, but then my pockets would have had these ridiculous bulges. The point being that I wouldn’t have concealed the paper towels this way but rather made them more conspicuous. So I decided I had to hide them in the restroom somewhere, then come back later with a bag of some sort and sneak them out. Unfortunately there seemed no decent hiding place anywhere in that restroom. I considered placing them behind the toilet, under the big pipe there, only it seemed too risky – you could still see the towels if you happened to look in that direction, which a person peeing would tend to do. Then I thought of sticking them in the garbage, and actually did stick them in the garbage for a moment, whereupon I hit on a better idea: the place from whence they had come, the paper towel dispenser. I removed the remaining towels from the dispenser – there weren’t many left – and began shoving my stack up into the slot, five or so towels at a time. It would have been infinitely easier to load the towels from the front – that’s how the cleaning guy must do it – but of course the cleaning guy has a key to the little metal door in the front of the dispenser. So I did it the hard way, from the bottom. Sadly I also had to reinsert the unused towels, for it would have been a calamity had some innocent person discovered my letter this way, intending to dry his face. I take solace in the fact that he wouldn’t have recognized my handwriting.

When I returned to my desk, I found a note from my boss on my chair. The note read, “Had a thought about the graphs, but you’ve probably already finished them. No big deal, just a thought.” This was total bullshit. Or I shouldn’t call it bullshit – my boss deserves better than to be called a bullshitter – but it was not at all what he meant. What he meant was, “Where the fuck are you? I expected you to bring me those fucking graphs an hour ago. Do have any fucking idea what fucking time it is?” He couldn’t say any of this of course, so he said what he said. But he tipped his hand by leaving the note on my chair. You don’t leave notes on chairs unless you’re worried that the note might get buried in a person’s inbox. A note on a chair means, “Read me immediately, I am critically important.”

I had no other choice but to go see him. My only hope was that he would be on the phone when I arrived. He wasn’t. He said, “How’s it going with the graphs?”

“Fine, no problems,” I said. “I’ll have something to show you very soon.”

“Is the deadline five o’clock?” he asked. “I can’t remember when the deadline is.”

“Yes, five o’clock,“ I said. “Definitely five o’clock.”

“I can never remember these things,” he said.

“Well, that’s fine,” I replied, “because I can never forget them.”

Then I left. I won’t go into what we were really saying except to note that as we spoke I noticed that his hands, which were resting in his lap, were curled into fists. It is a habit he has when he’s upset. I don’t think I’d ever see him this upset.

*

Back yet again at my desk, I began at last to work on the graphs. As you may have guessed, things did not go well. In short, the spreadsheet program I used to produce the first graph, or rather attempted to use, automatically generates a legend. You have the option of deleting this legend or customizing it in various ways, but there is one thing you cannot do: you cannot move the legend outside the box that holds the graph to which the legend refers. I was not aware of this until yesterday. The only way to move the legend any appreciable distance is to expand the box in which it and the graph are contained. But by expanding the box, you also expand the graph. So if you want to move the legend but don’t want to expand the graph, you are fucked.

The reason I wanted to move the legend outside the box was so I could place two graphs side-by-side. These two graphs, I thought, could share the same legend, which I would center, I thought, beneath them. You cannot do this. I tried. In fact I spent nearly an hour trying. It can’t be done. I considered many things and attempt many things, and none of them worked.

By this time it was two-thirty. I would prefer not to discuss how much time I had previously wasted in the restroom. The way I figured it, I needed to leave the office by four-fifteen at the latest, maybe four-twenty, in order to deliver the proposal by five o’clock.

In the seventy-five pages of guidelines and instructions we received in advance of writing our proposal, the government made repeated reference to what it referred to as Acts of God. It did not define Acts of God, but it did make clear that a proposal delivered after the deadline would not be accepted unless the agency in question could prove that the proposal’s timely submission had been delayed by an Act of God.

Whatever the government meant by an Act of God, I knew for certain that the receipt of an unexpected email from one’s ex-girlfriend would fall outside the scope of the definition. All of which is to say that I was in trouble. I did however have another idea. And that was to switch to a layout program and to produce the graphs there, building them from scratch and drawing each line individually, as opposed to having the program generate the graphs. Clearly this approach would take more time, but at least I would have control over the placement of the legends.

It would have worked too, had my layout skills been better. For the truth is, I don’t really know how to use this kind of program, I just bumble along and try different things until something works, assuming it does. So I gave it a shot for perhaps five minutes, recognized it was hopeless, and picked up the phone. The person I called is named Bubo. Actually that’s not her real name, her real name is Babette. Alana dubbed Babette Bubo. A bubo is an inflammatory swelling of the lymph gland in the groin. The Bubonic Plague was a plague of buboes.

*

I had a sort of relationship with Bubo right before and right after Alana and I broke up. I say “sort of” because we never actually slept together or kissed or held hands or did anything, really. I might have wanted to, I did want to, but I never did. Then I stopped calling her and she stopped calling me, or she stopped calling me and I stopped calling her, it’s sometimes difficult to tell with these things, and that as they say was that, it was a “sort of” relationship. This happened a year ago. The reason I called Bubo yesterday is that Bubo is a graphic designer and is pretty much the only person I know who knows how to use a layout program. I called asking for her help.

Before calling Bubo, I considered my options. The way I saw it I could either be honest and say that I desperately needed her help and would she please please please help me, or I could pretend that this was a social call, that I had been thinking of her and was wondering how things were going with her, and then, after we had talked for a while and a certain rapport had been established, I would casually mention that I had been wondering how one would, say, execute a graph in PageMaker.

What it came down to, I am sad to report, is the question of expediency. Which approach would grant me a better chance of getting what I needed? It didn’t take long to answer this question. My thinking went like this: I am calling because I need something, and for no other reason. If I didn’t need something, I wouldn’t be calling. If Bubo realizes why I’m calling, she will be less apt to help me. Therefore I must do what I can to prevent her from realizing why I am calling.

Notably I had considered calling Bubo many times in the previous year. In fact on several occasions I had gone so far as to pick up the phone and dial her number. But I was always sure to hang up before she answered. I didn’t really want to talk to her. Or I did want to talk to her, I just didn’t want to want to.

Philosophers refer to this as a second-order desire, the desire to desire something, or sometimes the desire to not desire something. It is one of the things that sets us apart from other animals. Alana taught me this. Had I been a chimpanzee, I would have called Bubo many times in the previous year. Not being a chimpanzee, I resisted the temptation.

Evidently Bubo was delighted to hear from me. She me told a story about a guy she knows whose apartment is furnished entirely with milk crates. This guy has forty-seven milk crates in all, she counted them herself. I asked her to have tea with me; I don’t know why I did this. I suppose I got a little carried away. I mean, with my playacting. I don’t really want to have tea with Bubo. Correction: I don’t really want to want to.

I asked her about the graphs and she told me how to do them. I don’t think she suspected anything. Alana could never lie, she was a terrible liar. I have a gift for it. After hanging up, I went back to the graphs. Bubo’s advice was enormously helpful, although the first graph still took almost a half hour to complete; it was painstaking work.

I showed the finished product to my boss, who appeared to be ill, I thought, and was sweating profusely; I noticed the stains under his arms.

“Problems?” he asked.

“Solved,” I said, and showed him the graph. I did my best (it was difficult under the circumstances) but I did my best to exude a certain relaxed though by no means lackadaisical confidence. “We’re going to beat the bastards” I tried suggest by my manner. “They’ve haven’t a chance against us. Look at the kind of graphs we produce.”

The fact is, I was certain that the bastards, or DUI as they are called, had already submitted their proposal, while I had perhaps an hour and fifteen minutes left to churn out five more graphs. Fortunately I was able to use the finished graph as a template for the others, which saved a great deal of time. Moreover I relaxed my usual standards a bit, figuring that no one was going to measure the charts to see if a particular segment did indeed encompass the indicated percentage of the overall area. So long as it looked plausible, I considered it done.

At about three-forty, which is when I finished the fourth graph, I realized I was going to make it, and with time to spare. I suppose I got a little cocky then, for I started in on another section of the letter to Alana, writing this one on the computer. I worked on the graphs for a bit, wrote a few sentences in the letter, then switched back, keeping one eye on the clock. After completing the final graph and importing it into the main document, I sent the document to print, and while it was printing I worked on the letter. There wasn’t time enough to finish it, this section, so I printed what I had and stashed it in my knapsack. This is what I wrote. “I didn’t sleep with Bubo. I know you thought I did, but I didn’t. The one night she stayed over, I slept on the couch. This comes as a surprise, doesn’t it? You had us fucking at the first opportunity. Had I cared for her enough, it would have happened, I suppose, and we’d be together today, I suppose, as ridiculous as that seems. Did I ever tell you how young she is? She’s young. Looking back I see that I used her. I wanted out and she was a way out. Probably I’m being unfair here. I have a way of being unfair. Fortunately I’m not sending you this part, so fairness is not an issue. When I was a kid it occurred to me that God knew everything and that God loved me. Not that I ever believed in God. But you see what I’m saying – I’ve always wanted to confess. The night Bubo stayed over, we had this disagreement over sleeping arrangements. She wanted me to sleep with her – I mean in my bed – but I insisted on the couch. She said, ‘I’m not going to jump your bones, if that’s what you’re afraid of.’ I said it wasn’t her I was afraid of but myself. This is how we would talk; it was like being in a movie. Then in the middle of the night I decided to take my shirt off because I had this idea that she would come in in the morning to say goodbye and discover me with my shirt off, which I thought she might find sexy, me wrapped up in the sheets with my shirt off, so I took off my shirt and then periodically throughout the night would wake and re-position the sheets to my best advantage, as I saw it. God, if God exists, is privy to an incredible mountain of crap.”

That’s where it ends – as I said, I didn’t have time to finish it. While placing it in my knapsack, I remembered the paper towels. They were still in the restroom, in the paper towel dispenser.

*

I grabbed the proposal and went to wave goodbye to my boss, who thankfully was on the phone. Then I hurried to the restroom. Unfortunately there was someone at the urinal peeing when I arrived, so I went into the stall and, to maintain appearances, pulled down my pants and underwear and sat on the toilet. When the peer finished I stood and pulled up my pants, but then immediately pulled them back down again, having heard the outer door swing open. This happened several more times. Apparently there are certain times of the day (I had not been aware of this) when people tend to pee more often than others. No doubt it has to do with when we eat and how long it takes us to digest our food. I considered leaving, and leaving the paper towels behind, but was concerned what would happen if the cleaning guy happened to pick this night to refill the paper towel dispenser.

Frankly I have no idea how often he does this, but I do know how often he cleans the restroom; he cleans the restroom every night. Does he refill the paper towel dispenser each time? This I don’t know. I think if I were him, I would probably do it this way, as it more or less guarantees that the paper towels will never run out. Of course this approach may very well seem like overkill to him, to refill the dispenser each and every time, in which case he may do it on a schedule – say, every other day, or a certain day each week.

My point here is that I couldn’t risk leaving the paper towels behind. It wasn’t just that I was afraid of what would happen if the cleaning guy found them, the inevitable fuss this would cause – “Did you hear what they discovered last night in the restroom, in the paper towel dispenser?” – no, it was the thought of losing what I had written to Alana. This I couldn’t bear. On the other hand, I couldn’t wait another minute, for it was now four-twenty-four, which gave me no cushion whatsoever if the train were running slow or some other minor disaster were to befall me. So I left, figuring I would return after I dropped off the proposal.

Luckily, very luckily, a train was pulling in just as I arrived at the station. This gave me back my cushion. I sat down and started yet another section to the letter. As crazy as this sounds, I became so immersed in what I was writing that I missed my stop. I didn’t realize this until I heard the automated announcer announce the following stop. There was nothing I could do. I stood at the door waiting for the door to open. As the train pulled into the next stop, I glanced across the tracks to see how many people were standing on the opposite platform. There seemed to be a lot. This was good sign; a train would be arriving soon. The moment the door opened, I bolted up the stairs and down the other side. I looked down the tunnel and there I could see the light of an oncoming train. Everything was going to be alright.

The train pulled in and I got on. And then I saw something extraordinary, in retrospect. A man was standing against the door at the back of the car, the door leading to the next car, balancing himself in the corner. This man, who in every other respect appeared to be perfectly normal, perfectly average, was wearing a pair of blue pajama-type pants, the sort of blue pajama-type pants one wears in the hospital, and he was also wearing, if one can use the word wearing in this context, a white, newly laundered straight-jacket. He was standing there, hugging himself beneath the straight-jacket and struggling to maintain his balance. I glanced at the people around me. An older woman grimaced and shook her head, so I shrugged my shoulders and turned up my free hand. Then the train stopped and I hurried off.

Strangely I didn’t think about the man again until this moment, recollecting the sequence of events. The only other thing I remember about him – and this is not really about him but about me – was that I couldn’t imagine how he had managed to insert a token into the turnstile. Unfortunately this question will remain unanswered, for I lacked the courage to ask it or to even look at him for more than a few seconds at a time. Plus, and this is the main thing, I was determined not to miss my stop again, man in straight jacket or no man in straight jacket. And I succeeded.

Then I ran up the stairs. When I reached the street I just kept running, holding my knapsack under my arm. The office was just three blocks from the station. When I arrived, huffing, the clock on the wall behind the receptionist said four-fifty-four. I had arrived with six minutes to spare.

I triumphantly handed our proposal to the receptionist, then strode to the restroom – I actually needed to go this time. While peeing I made a fist with my free hand and murmured, “Take that DUI.”

On the way back to the Institute, I wanted desperately to continue the letter to Alana, my head was filled with things to say, but the train was packed and I didn’t get a seat. All I managed to do as I held onto a pole for balance was to scribble a few key words onto the side of my left hand, just below the thumb. “Fantasy. Gun. Comfort.”

*

There was no one at the Institute when I arrived. I went to the restroom to get the paper towels. The outer door was propped open by a bucket and the cleaning guy’s supply cart was blocking the doorway. This was not good. I went inside. The cleaning guy was standing there by the sink, reading my letter, which was in two piles before him – a read pile, presumably, and an unread pile.

“Sir,” I said, “that’s my letter you’re reading. I know it’s crazy, but I left it in the paper towel dispenser. I’ve come back to get it.” He looked at me like I was some kind of stain which it was now his responsibility to remove.

“You did this?” he asked.

“Yes, I did,” I said. “Believe it or not, for certain reasons that would be difficult to explain, I had to hide the letter, and this seemed the best place to hide it.”

“But what if someone wants to dry their hands?” he asked. “What is this person going to use?”

“Sir, I honestly don’t know. What I’ve done is wrong, that’s much is clear. People have to dry their hands. I would never want anyone to have to walk around with wet hands. I’ve had to walk around with wet hands and I can tell you it’s no fun, no fun at all.”

“But if you write on all the towels...”

“This is very embarrassing to me, but I received a correspondence this morning from my ex-girlfriend. It has affected me very much. These paper towels are part of a letter I’ve been writing to her. I’m wondering if you would be kind enough to return them to me.”

He nodded, but didn’t hand over the papers towels. “Do you love her?” he asked.

This I could not believe – the cleaning guy was asking me if I loved Alana.

“Yes, I do,” I said, “I believe I do love her.”

“Then I would not speak of this actress,” he said. “A woman would not understand.”

I nodded in agreement and he handed me the towels. It struck me as I left the restroom that I had lied to him, that I do love not Alana, or at least not in the sense I had indicated to the cleaning guy. Had I loved her, I would have stayed with her. This is the truth, isn’t it?

*

I sat down at my desk and spent the next hour or so expanding on the words I had written on the side of my hand, adding this to what I had scribbled earlier on the train. Here is what I wrote all together. “Sometimes it doesn’t seem right that my life has continued. Sometimes I think it would be better, or more appropriate, were I to quit my job and sell my things, what things have, and leave. But where would I go? And what would I do there? Sometimes I imagine myself in New Orleans. I don’t know why New Orleans. I’ve never actually been to New Orleans. But I imagine myself in New Orleans. I live in a boarding house. I have a job as a security guard at night. Often I read. There is a certain wisdom to killing off most of the important characters at the end of a story, because then you know that it’s over. Losing you has felt like a death but it hasn’t felt over. I go on. It doesn’t seem right that I go on. I don’t do this anymore, but for months I had this recurring fantasy that you had kept the key to my apartment and had come into my room while I was at work and were waiting for me. So I walk in and put my knapsack on the bed, the same as always, and then I see you sitting in the green chair with, as insane as this sounds, a gun in your hand. You’ve got a gun. Lord knows where you got it, but you got it. Of course I know that you would never in a million years really do this (this is me speaking now( not me in the fantasy – nor even ever dream of such a thing. But in the fantasy it somehow makes sense, I suppose because it’s my fantasy not yours, so the character played by you is not you but me in some sense, me projected into you, or something projected into you, or something projected into something, I don’t pretend to understand any of it. So as weird as this seems, I’m totally calm through this, as though I had been waiting for it happen, which I hadn’t. I say, ‘If you don’t mind, I’ll just close the door now.’ Then I walk over and close the door and sit down on the chair side of the bed and say, ‘Okay, I’m ready now,’ so you say, ‘You’re ready. What do you mean you’re ready?’ so I say, ‘It would be better if I did it myself because that way you’re in the clear, assuming you don’t plan to kill yourself as well, I mean after killing me, in which case it doesn’t really matter who kills me, me or you, because either way I’m dead. Unless of course it means a lot to you to do it yourself, in which case you should be the one to do it, please don’t let me tell you otherwise. Although I must say that even if I end up doing it, it’s going to be difficult for you to explain how that happened, given that you’re the one who brought the gun. Unless you decide to claim that it’s my gun, which I don’t think would be smart. For one thing, I think that the police are pretty good at tracing these things, and for another, you would have to explain how it was that you had come to be here on the day I ended up killing myself. Granted you could say that you had come to talk with me and that I had became increasingly distraught, the way people in these situations do become distraught, only my distraughtness had escalated to the point where I finally pulled out the gun and shot myself in the head. People do do these things. But like I say, everything rests on the origin of the gun in that case, which is not in your favor. On the other hand, there are a lot of things here I don’t know, and needless to say, it’s your decision, so I’m prepared to support you, for what’s it worth, in whatever you decide.’ You begin to cry at this point because this is not how you thought this would go, lord knows how you thought it would go, but this is definitely not it. To see you crying like this, my first thought is to scoot over and put my arm around you and stroke your head and your cheek, all the while saying goofy things like, ‘Hey, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say those were tears rolling down that cheek.’ Only I don’t dare do these things because of course you’ve got a gun and you’ve come to kill me, or to make me think you’ve come to kill me, or to figure out if you really need to kill me, or to kill yourself, or whatever you need to do, so you’re not going to appreciate it very much if I try to comfort you. This is where the fantasy usually ends, with me wanting to comfort you but being unable to do so because you’ve got a gun and you’ve come to kill me. Writing this now, I begin to understand. Because after we broke up I remember feeling that the worst thing, the very worst thing, was that you were out there somewhere suffering, but that I couldn’t comfort you because I was the one who was making you suffer. My friends grimace when they hear me say things that make it seem like I’m guilt-ridden. I’m not guilt-ridden. Or I am guilt-ridden, but as much as I’m guilt-ridden, I’m also frustrated. I want to go after the fucker who did this to you so that I can come back and tell you that it’s okay now, that you have nothing to worry about, that he will never hurt you again.”

*

I cried several times while writing this, particularly at the end. As a result, these annoying little tear stains appeared on my glasses. I tried to wipe them off with the back of my tie, but this only made it worse. Normally I would have gone to the restroom and washed my glasses in the sink, only now I was worried I might run into the cleaning guy. Suffice it to say, I will need to figure out some way to deal with the cleaning guy.

So instead of washing my glasses, I transferred what I had written onto a floppy disk and slipped this in my knapsack. Then I left the Institute.

At the bus stop and also on the ride home, I made a list of certain things. Here is that list. It is incomplete. “Your face as you slept. Your brown chair. Your walk seen from behind. Your voice on my answering machine. Your breasts. Your mangling of expressions. Your sleepy eyes. Your tears in the airport. Your tears in bed. Your sock collection. Your glasses next to mine on the night table. Your so-called filing system. Your fragility. Your toughness. Your favorite earrings, the Turkish ones. Your drawing of a tree – one leaf. Your literary examples. Your self-respect. Your heart, always your heart. Wherever I go, you are with me. Your sentence construction. Your kiss. Your irrational rationality. Your poetry. Your stories during sex. Your way of thinking. Your decency. Your face as you slept.”

When I arrived home, I made myself a peanut butter and banana sandwich – I hadn’t eaten all day, not even breakfast. Then I sat at my computer and typed all the various pieces of the letter into one document. They didn’t really fit together, the pieces. It is a mishmash. As I typed I was tempted to change things, in particular to remove those things I considered unflattering – I mean unflattering towards me of course – only this seemed false. Why lie? Plus there was the question of which parts to cut exactly, that is, which parts really constituted the unflattering parts. For it struck me that the parts I considered most unflattering might not really be so unflattering, and vice versa. In any case the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that it didn’t matter what I cut or didn’t cut, that Alana would react the same way regardless, assuming she even read the letter, which I doubted she would.

Not that I blame her. Never would I blame her for this. If anything I applaud her for it. As her friend, and I was once her dearest friend – perhaps to her shame now, but it’s true – I know she does this for herself and that it is the right thing for her to do; the only thing, really.

I numbered the sections, then immediately removed the numbers, as it made the letter resemble an essay. Instead I placed a centered asterisk between each of the sections and wrote a brief introduction, for it seemed weird to just begin with the part about the songs. This is what I wrote. “Dear Alana, Here is what I wrote today. I am sending it to you in violation of your recent request. Believe me, I realize that you will never forgive for me this, or for anything for that matter. However the more relevant issue for me in my life – and I truly mean no offense here – is whether I will ever forgive myself.”

I signed the letter love, assuming that typing one’s name can be thought of as signing something. Then I logged onto my email program and pasted the letter into a new message.

Many times in the past year, when sending email to friends, I had noticed Alana’s name at the top of my list of email addresses. Seeing her name there – I mean in the past – I would often resolve to delete it – what was I saving it for? – but could never bring myself to do so. Clearly I held onto the address in the hope that I might one day use it again.

And perhaps one day I will, but this I knew was not that day.

I deleted the email and returned to my word processing program. There I printed the letter and filed it in my Alana folder. With all the others.

You see, there are a lot of unmailed letters in that folder. I write them periodically. It is all I can do. When I write them, I always believe I’m going to send them, it would be difficult to write them otherwise, but never do I send them. You really can’t send letters like this. Then I went to bed.

But before I went to bed, I performed my final bathroom routine – which I suppose is my final routine of the entire day, unless one can consider turning off one’s light to be a routine, which I don’t personally think one can.

It is, to say the least, a sad story – a man, knowing he shouldn’t, writes a letter to his ex-girlfriend, a letter which in end he decides not to send. It is sad, yes, but what can you do?

You can do nothing, as it turns out, so that’s what I did, I did nothing. I turned out the light.