Skip to primary content

Mercy

DURING MY LAST FOUR MONTHS IN NEW YORK, I lived on nothing but roasted cashews and beer nuts, and then, when the cashews finally ran out, just beer nuts.

I had had my own little business selling nuts from a street cart, but the business had failed, my cart impounded for eleven hundred dollars in delinquent fines, and so I found myself with nothing, no assets whatsoever, aside from a twenty-five-pound box of roasted salted cashews and a fifty-pound box of beer nuts.

They took everything – my scale, my metal scoops, my fourteen plastic see-through display containers, and of course my entire stock of nuts and dried fruits, aside from the aforementioned cashews and beer nuts which happened to be on order the day my cart was taken from me.

The only other thing I ate during this period were the crackers served at a poetry reading I would attend each Sunday and Tuesday night in the tiny shoe box apartment of this famous West Village poet, Emily Glen.

I mean of course famous for a poet, Emily was famous for a poet, which is to say, not really famous at all except to certain other poets and poetry lovers, of which I was one, I was a poet back then, or I wrote poetry, which I suppose makes one a poet, the writing of poetry, or does so in part.

Emily was seventy-some years old and always wore speckled spandex tights, she had this incredible collection of speckled spandex tights in various colors and designs and she lived in a West Village shoe box with her grandson, who was five or six years old and whose mother, Emily’s daughter, was either mentally ill or alcoholic, I’ve forgotten which, and so they lived together, grandmother and grandson, in the self-same shoebox where every Sunday and Tuesday night Emily would host poetry readings.

It was Emily’s custom during these readings to serve crackers, sometimes she served cookies as well, but whether or not she served cookies, she always served crackers, Emily always had various kinds of crackers for the poets to eat, don’t ask me what kinds specifically, I have never bothered to learn the names of crackers, although I can of course differentiate between them and like anyone prefer certain kinds over others.

A half hour or so before the readings were scheduled to begin, I would arrive at Emily’s apartment to help her set up the chairs and such, and then whenever Emily went into the kitchen to answer the phone, I would shove a few crackers into my mouth – the crackers lay on a large serving plate in the living room – only before actually chewing the crackers, I would wait for them to soften a bit in my mouth because I didn’t want Emily to hear me chew and realize that I had started in on the crackers.

I don’t know if Emily ever caught on to what I was doing with the crackers, but if she did, she certainly never acted like she did, which either way you look at it was a blessing – whether Emily knew and said nothing, or simply never knew.

During the readings themselves I would continue to eat as many crackers as I could get away with eating without making it seem as though I was eating an inappropriate number of crackers. I can still remember sitting there waiting for one of my fellow poets to reach forward and grab a few crackers so that I wouldn’t be the only person eating them.

I loved poetry then, poetry was my life – “To see you naked is to remember the earth, the smooth earth, swept clean of horses," “We don’t know anything, we haven’t learned a single thing about pain, that bitterly cold season only leaves long streaks in our muscles" – god, I loved poetry, only what I actually thought about while people read their poems was how long it had been since I had taken my last helping of crackers and thus how long I would need to wait before taking my next helping, because of course I was afraid that people would notice how many crackers I was eating and realize how hungry I was and pity me, and I couldn’t stand the thought of being pitied, and so I never told anyone that my nut business had failed and that the real reason I would walk all the way from 116th Street on the East Side to Barrow Street in the West Village, a good six miles, was not because I loved the city – like Lorca, I hated the city – but because I didn’t have any money for the subway.

::

One night on my way home from one of Emily’s readings, I felt so hungry and nauseated by the thought of the beer nuts waiting for me uptown that I went into a supermarket on Third Avenue in the mid-twenties and stole a block of Longhorn Cheddar Cheese.

The way I did it was, I walked in and went straight to the dairy case and picked out the cheese I wanted – I tried to act sort of oblivious and matter-of-fact, like the dairy case was own personal refrigerator – and then simply placed the cheese in my jacket pocket and walked right past the cashier and out the door. I didn’t even look to see if anyone was watching me, that’s how hungry I was, that’s how sick I was of beer nuts.

Oddly, I had never stolen anything before, except perhaps for a few library books, a few books of poetry, I was so crazy about poetry then, I mean I wrote poetry, I read poetry, nearly every night I went to poetry readings where I talked about poetry with all the poets I knew, these sad weird pathetic people, and so yes, I did once or twice remove the little bar code thingee from the inside jacket of a book of poetry so that I would never have to return it to the library, so that the book could be mine forever – but aside from these few bar code violations, I don’t think I ever actually stole anything before stealing the cheese, the cheese-stealing incident was really the first time I stole anything, or the first time I felt that I had stolen something, the first time I felt that I was a person who stole.

Outside the supermarket, I headed up Third Avenue, being careful to maintain a leisurely pace, the pace, as I thought of it, of an innocent person. A few blocks uptown, certain now that I wasn’t being followed, I tore open the package and began eating. While eating I continued to walk and while walking I talked to myself out loud, saying something like, “This has to change. You can’t survive forever on Emily’s crackers, on stolen cheese. Even the beer nuts, as disgusting as they are, will eventually run out. What happens when you reach the final beer nut?"

For some reason, I can’t explain why now, this seemed hysterically funny to me, the notion of a final beer nut, the last survivor, so to speak, of a once-proud nation of beer nuts, and I laughed at the thought of it. In fact I couldn’t stop laughing. Block after block I walked up Third Avenue eating my cheese and periodically bursting into hysterics over this ridiculous and, let’s face it, let’s be honest about it, not very funny idea of a final beer nut.

::

A month later I moved to California with a woman I met at one of Emily’s poetry readings, Nina. Nina and I were lovers of a sort, I mean we had sex sometimes but she didn’t want a boyfriend, she wanted to be free, so she would sleep with me whenever there was no one else she wanted to sleep with, I was her fall-back fuck I suppose, and I went along with this humiliating arrangement because I was love with her – you know, she was so beautiful and intense and of course she wrote poetry, and because I was nearly out of beer nuts and because she reminded me of Carolyn Kinney, this girl I was crazy about in fifth grade, and because she offered to lend me the money for the flight to California.

When Nina and I arrived in Berkeley we stayed with this friend of a friend of hers, and the moment I first met this guy, the guy we stayed with, I knew for certain that my relationship with Nina, such as it was, was over. I mean he was this classic California surfer guy and astrophysicist and it all so painfully obvious what was going to happen and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

On our second day in California, Nina went off with this guy to see his lab, he worked at a lab in the Berkeley Hills, and I stayed behind because I just couldn’t stand to be around him, for on top of everything else the guy loved poetry, or so he said, he said he loved poetry, although he didn’t seem at all to me like a poetry person. In fact to me he seemed the very opposite of a poetry person, the sort of person who knew the names of certain poets, the titles of certain poems, but who hadn’t actually read any poetry, as such. Like I say, I knew full well what was coming, I knew that Nina was about to jump into bed with this good-looking surfer slash astrophysicist slash poetry-lover, and so rather than spend the entire day with these two as they made eyes at each other, I remained behind and searched the apartment for a book to read, preferably a book of poetry.

As it turned out, there was just a single volume of poetry in the entire apartment, that being Lorca’s Poet in New York, which admittedly is a great book, only I very much doubt that Mr. Poetry-lover had actually read it, or that if he had, that he had understood a word. “I denounce everyone who ignores the other half, the half that can’t be redeemed, who lift their mountain of cement where the hearts beat inside forgotten little animals and where all of us will fall in the last feast of the pneumatic drills." No, there was just no way that this guy was into Lorca, this guy didn’t know from Lorca – the fact is, his whole poetry-lover thing was just a ruse to get Nina into bed, as Nina had a weakness for guys who claimed to be into poetry, guys such as me, although in my case the claim happened to be true.

Not that it mattered how full of shit he was, because when you get right down to it, he was this studly scientist-type while I was a pathetic artist-type who just the previous month had been living on nothing but beer nuts.

The more I thought about these two and what these two were about to do, the more despondent I became, and the more despondent I became, the more I thought about it. All afternoon and into the evening, I sat in this guy’s living room, by his record player, playing one sad song after another and becoming more and more morose, more and more despondent.

As will happen, night began to fall and so the room where I sat became darker and darker, and yet I never bothered to get up and turn on a light, I just sat there and remembered various scenes from my relationship with Nina, the happy moments, as it were, and then repeatedly realized that these happy moments were all in the past, that all I had now and that all I would ever have from this point forward were memories of happy moments with Nina, as opposed to any future such moments. Just memories, I told myself, no moments. No moments, I told myself, just memories.

By the time the front door opened and the two of them walked in, the room was completely dark. Consequently, they failed to notice me sitting there, less than fifteen away. Most likely they assumed that I had left the apartment – after all, all the lights were out – I myself would have made the same assumption in same circumstances.

I didn’t say anything, I don’t know why, I suppose I expected them to turn on the light any second and find me sitting there. But they didn’t. In fact for a time they didn’t do anything so far as I could tell, and then I heard the sound of their jackets brushing together and these unmistakable emissions of pleasure.

They were kissing, they thought I was gone and they were making out in the little area between the living room and the kitchen.

Never say there is no mercy, mercy exists, we simply have to find it, invent it if necessary – I prayed that they would head to the bedroom without turning on the light, without finding me there, I literally asked god in my head to grant me this one wish, just this one, this one time, nothing more – and my wish was granted – I heard some whispers and then they walked down the hall into the bedroom.

Hearing the door click behind them, my first thought was to jump up, open the front door, and close it loudly, as though I were just returning from some adventure, and then call out, “Hey, where is everybody?" But then I thought no, I thought fuck it, I thought I can’t stop this thing from happening, so why try? So instead I sat in the dark and did nothing, I just sat there thinking, or not thinking, I think I tried not to think but failed, then tried to think about nothing but failed, you can’t really think about nothing, you can’t really stop yourself from thinking, you can’t stop your brain from producing thoughts, and then for some reason I remembered this scene from Doctor Zhivago, I mean the movie Doctor Zhivago, when Zhivago is just a boy and his mother has died and he’s at her funeral and he looks up at the sky through the trees and we hear this lovely strain of balalaika – you know, the theme song to Doctor Zhivago – because this is where I first got the idea to be a poet, to write poetry, because Zhivago was a poet and he had this intense relationship with Julie Christie which involved poetry in some way, I mean he wrote these incredible poems about her in this abandoned snow-bound estate house during the Russian Revolution, and it all just seemed so great to me when I was a kid, particularly the scene in the estate house when Zhivago writes his poems, and sometimes I would go outside at night and stand on the lawn and look up through the one tree we had, whatever kind of tree it was, I’ve never been able to remember the names of trees, and I would hum the theme song to Doctor Zhivago and feel these big feelings I associated with poetry, with the life of a poet.

::

The next day I found an ad in the Berkeley Weekly for a personal care attendant. This is how I met Fred, by answering his ad. In truth I wasn’t entirely sure what a personal care attendant was or did, but the way I thought about it was, how hard can it be? Besides, I needed the money.

I confess that it frightened me, the thought of attending to someone’s personal care. What did that mean, personal care? I wondered if it had something to do with shit and was pretty sure that it did.

As it turned out, Fred had this degenerative nerve disease, ALS, whatever ALS stands for, and as a result was wasting away, his muscles atropying, his lungs weakening.

At the time that I met him, Fred’s disease had advanced to the point that he had virtually no use of his arms or legs. Consequently he would spend most of his waking hours in a custom-designed wheelchair, turning the pages of a book with a stick he would grasp with his mouth. Fred also used this stick to push a button located on the arm of the wheelchair which opened the front door and another button which activated the speaker phone. He had been a theoretical mathematician. There was virtually no hope of a cure.

I ended up working with many different disabled men over the years and learned in that time that some people are better suited for this sort of life, the life of a disabled person, than others. Basically the less controlling you are, the better. Because it’s incredibly difficult to explain to someone, say, how you like to be fed, how much food you like on the spoon and how far in your mouth you like the spoon to go and also the way you like the spoon to be sort of lifted up as it leaves your mouth, the back of the spoon, that particular motion.

I mean first you have to be able to explain it to someone, this spoon thing, which is no easy trick, very few people have this kind of facility with language, nor do many people actually know how they do what they do, or used to do, as in Fred’s case, the various discrete actions one must perform in order to feed oneself, and even if you’re capable of breaking things down like this and explaining it to another person, you still have to find someone who can understand you and carry out your instructions.

As an attendant it is a lot like trying to make someone come. You know, some people can come from more or less anything, or a wide variety of things, while others require a very specific set of stimulations, and even then there’s no guarantee that they’ll actually come.

Unfortunately, Fred had the latter sort of personality. Thus he would become increasingly frustrated whenever his painstakingly detailed instructions were not carried out in the exact way that he would have done, had he been able. For it’s one thing to be this fussy when you have full use of your body and can actually feed yourself or jerk yourself off, but it’s something else entirely when you’re completely dependent on another person, when you can’t even wipe your own ass.

Which of course was Fred’s predicament, he couldn’t wipe his own ass and yet had certain very specific ideas about how his ass should be wiped.

I should say that Fred had full control of his bladder, but because it was such a production to pull down his pants and transfer him from his wheelchair to the toilet, then back to the chair again, he wore an external catheter. If you’ve never seen an external catheter, it’s this condom kind of thing with a tube at the end. In Fred’s case, the tube led to a plastic bag that hung along the side of his wheelchair. The condom part of the catheter was much thicker than that of a real condom, which for obvious reasons is made of ultra-thin latex, whereas Fred’s catheter was made of this sort of dish-glove material.

It was crucial that Fred’s penis hang down a certain way when he sat in his wheelchair and that the tube hang down a certain way also, because otherwise Fred’s urine might back up and flow out the other end of the catheter, the end I would roll up around his penis, which is something that would actually happen sometimes, sometimes Fred would pee on himself.

It is gross, I realize that, but this is just the way it is, the way it was, this was Fred’s life, Fred had to be concerned about peeing on himself, he had to make certain that his catheter fit right and that the tube hung down the right way, that gravity was working in his favor.

You can’t imagine what this is like. I don’t think that I can imagine what this is like and I was there, I knew Fred, I worked with him, each morning I rolled this catheter thing onto his penis, I arranged the tube.

I don’t care what anyone says, we are each alone with our pain. In fifth grade I took part in a classroom debate, I don’t remember what the debate was about, but I remember that there were four kids on each team and that one team was in favor of the thing, whatever it was, while the other was against it, and so we held this debate before our classmates, only I didn’t say anything, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I’d spent an entire week studying the subject of the debate, so I knew quite a bit about it, but when the time came to debate, I froze, I couldn’t think of anything to say, any argument to make, nothing, my mind went blank, so I just sat there in silence in front of my entire class, including Carolyn Kinney of course, the nicest and smartest and prettiest girl in the entire fifth grade – what in the world ever happened to Carolyn Kinney? – and all I could think of as I sat there was that I just wanted it to be over, I just wanted it to be a bad dream, something I could wake from. But of course it wasn’t a dream, it was real, I knew it was real, and so I knew that I had to say something, I couldn’t just sit there the whole time in silence, but that’s what I did, I knew I couldn’t but did it anyway.

After the debate, as I was walking back to my chair, my teacher, Mrs. Staller, a wonderful and gifted human being who wore an extraordinary amount of make-up, almost like a clown, touched me on the shoulder and said, “Next time."

::

Anyway, Fred committed suicide. I heard about it years later, I happened to stop by his apartment to visit, I hadn’t seen him in several years, and he didn’t answer the buzzer and his name wasn’t on the mailbox, so I knocked on his neighbor’s door and asked if she knew what had happened to him, where he had moved to. This neighbor was the one who told me. She didn’t volunteer how he managed to do it, and I just didn’t think it proper to ask, although it was the first thing I thought of.

I mean Fred couldn’t pick his own nose, let alone kill himself, all the man had was a stick.

I’ve thought about this a lot, I’ve spent a great deal of time imagining the whole thing from Fred’s perspective, and it seems to me that he was confronted with a very difficult problem. Because I know what Fred was like, I know that he wouldn’t have wanted to involve someone in his suicide against their will, that he wouldn’t have wanted someone to realize after the fact that he or she had actually helped him kill himself by, say, giving him the pills.

It is the final indignity, to be physically unable to end your own life.

So I imagine Fred wanting to die, I imagine him deciding that it’s just too much, that his body is a prison, that his life is torment, that he has nothing to live for but to keep his brain alive, only his brain is driving him insane, so he begins to think about how to kill himself and soon realizes that he can’t.

Or no, I don’t think this is right, I don’t think that this is a new thought for Fred, I think he’s been thinking about it for years, working it through in his head, after all Fred was a mathematician, he had a very logical persistent sort of mind. So what was his solution in the end, that’s what I want to know – because if Fred really did do it alone, which I very much doubt, he must have acquired what he needed over time. If it was pills, say, which is what I think it was, he must have gone to a doctor complaining of insomnia, or maybe several doctors, and then, I don’t know, probably had an attendant grind these pills into a powder, then had another attendant mix the powder into a drink, then had a third give him the drink just before he went to bed that night. In this way none of his attendants would have known for certain that they had helped him.

It’s like what they do with firing squads. I mean you have ten men in a firing squad, except that one actually fires a blank. None of them know which one of course, and so they can each feel that maybe they didn’t execute anybody.

Of course it’s not really the same thing, is it?

Not that it matters, because Fred wouldn’t have done this, he wouldn’t have manipulated his attendants like this. Therefore he must have had an accomplice, that’s what I think, someone who knew what Fred was planning to do and had agreed to help him.

So if I’m right, this person must have placed the pills in Fred’s mouth, assuming it was pills, and the way I imagine it, there must have been a lot of pills involved, you know, thirty-two pills or something, and also a pint or so of liquor, because that’s how you do it, you get shit-faced and you take all these barbituates and then you pass out, the combination of the barbituates and the alcohol does the trick.

So who was this person, Fred’s final attendant, and what did this person think as he or she placed a few pills in Fred’s mouth, then brought a straw to Fred’s lips, a straw leading to a bottle of whiskey or something, and then waited for Fred to swallow before giving him a few more pills and another sip of whiskey, until Fred had swallowed the whole bottle of pills and finished all the whiskey?

Oddly, I actually think I know to some degree what this must have been like, because there was this one time, after I had been with working for Fred for several months, when he suddenly asked me what I thought of sex, specifically sex outside of marriage. It was such a bizarre thing to ask all of a sudden, Fred and I had never discussed anything like that before, he was pretty much all business with me, so I said something like, “I don’t know, Fred. I think it’s fine. I mean, I suppose it depends on the people, the situation. What do you think?" and Fred explained to me in his very precise manner that there was a woman in Berkeley he sometimes had sex with, a disabled woman. “You’ve actually met her," he said, and then I remembered this extraordinarily unpleasant woman who had appeared one morning in her wheelchair while Fred and I were doing his range of motion exercises.

The thing is, I wasn’t sure till this point that Fred could even get an erection, I didn’t really understand how his disease worked, what effect it had on his sexual functioning. But now that I knew about this woman, everything came together in my head and made perfect sense, because Fred had been so oddly solicitous of her, in fact he had treated her like an old dear friend, which it was clear she could not have been.

Fred asked me if I would be willing to push him in his wheelchair to this woman’s apartment and help situate him in her bed and then return a few hours later and take him home. Naturally I agreed. In fact I got a little choked up – I mean Fred had this entire battalion of personal care attendants, there were four different guys who would work with him at different times each weekday and then another four on weekends, plus various substitutes, and most of these guys had worked with Fred much longer than I had, and so I saw it as a kind of acknowledgment of me, that he trusted me with this special assignment, and it was all I could do to act like everything was completely normal and not cry.

::

These same feelings returned on the day that I pushed Fred to the woman’s apartment, while I pushed him in fact, only this time it was much easier to hide what I was feeling, since I was behind Fred as I pushed and he couldn’t see my face.

We said nothing the whole time, or next to nothing, for there was nothing to say, and so all I did was push him while he sat there in his chair being pushed and occasionally instructing me to turn at a particular corner.

When we entered the woman’s apartment, I couldn’t help notice that it was filthy and smelled of cat piss. As to the woman herself, I noted as she rolled off into the living room that she had full use of her arms and also some limited use of her legs, which of course explains how she and Fred managed, she would be on top.

Fred had me wheel him into her bedroom, lay him in her bed, undress him and place various pillows around him to stabilize him, all at his instruction. I had never worked this well before and would never work this well again, it was as though I was inside the man’s head, I understood everything he said the moment he said it. It was like sex, that’s the way I think of it now, like sex when sex is right and you’re with this other person and everything else drops away, only it wasn’t as pleasurable as sex, not that it was displeasurable either, pleasure wasn’t really the issue, what was the issue? – there was no issue, it was just me and Fred in this woman’s bedroom and we were both just focused on the task at hand and on each other, so it was like music in a sense, like playing music with someone when you’re there and you’re listening and the feeling between you is right.

After getting Fred into position, I left the woman’s apartment and wandered around Berkeley, just looking at the trees, the vegetation, I’ve never learned the names of these things, the different kinds of plants and flowers. As I wandered I tried not to think about Fred, about what Fred was doing right then, I tried not to visualize it, because it seemed cruel somehow, cruel that I had seen her bedroom, cruel that I had placed him in her bed and had removed his clothes, cruel that this thing they were doing could not be private.

Eventually I ended up at home – I was living at this time in a converted garage in North Berkeley – and as I opened the door to my little room, my little hovel, this ludicrous thought ran through my mind that Carolyn Kinney had left a message for me on my answering machine. It sounds insane, I know, but suddenly I imagined that Carolyn Kinney had tracked me down after, what? – what was it was? – fourteen years, just to tell me that I was the most intense boy she had ever met and that she could never get over the fact that I always did the math problems in my head and refused to show my work.

Of course I didn’t really imagine that Carolyn Kinney had called – that’s crazy – but even if she had called, which I couldn’t imagine she had or ever would, it was just a bit much to think that she would then leave a message for me on my answering machine telling me how intense I was.

No, the whole thing was just a joke, or not a joke, a fantasy. Although it’s true, I did check immediately to see if I had any messages, and I did think as I checked how incredible it would be if there were a message from Carolyn Kinney, but then of course I was always checking for messages back then – every time I came home or returned to the garage from the main house, I would look immediately to see if the little message light on the answering machine was blinking.

It was an obsession I had, born of loneliness.

The light would blink once for each message. If it was blinking, I would count the blinks. Usually the light was not blinking, and I suffered. I suffered most when I’d been out all day and there was nothing. What gets called love, I sometimes think, is a kind of insurance policy against facing this thing, an unblinking machine.

::

There was another disabled guy I worked with years later whose name was Fred also, and this Fred had a kind of penny collection. He kept most of his pennies under the television, on the television stand, in these yellow peanut butter buckets. One bucket had the words RETURN TO BANK written on the side in magic marker, while the other said PENNIES TO CHECK. There were more pennies on the kitchen table, right where Fred liked to sit, in two separate piles, and one of my responsibilities as Fred’s morning attendant was to take the right-most pile of pennies and place them in the yellow peanut butter bucket marked RETURN TO BANK, then replenish the left-most pile with pennies from the bucket marked PENNIES TO CHECK.

I did this first thing each morning, before I went into Fred’s room to wake him. Later Fred would sit in his wheelchair at the kitchen table – this is what he did most of the day – sliding the pennies from the left-most pile to the right-most pile, one at a time, checking to see if any happened to be rare and therefore valuable.

Fred was hoping to find a particular penny, I forget the vintage, worth a staggering sum, tens of thousands of dollars, he said, depending on its condition. Unfortunately, Fred’s disability made it difficult for him to slide the pennies from left to right, but still he found this easier than sliding them from right to left, so he always insisted that the unchecked pile be placed to his left.

Actually he may have insisted on this arrangement just to keep from getting confused, as he had no other way of knowing which pennies had been checked and which had not.

You see, it would have been a disaster from Fred’s perspective if all he did all day was slide the same pennies back and forth across the kitchen table – rather the man needed to feel, understandably I think, that there was some sense to what he was doing, that each day he was moving closer to his goal.

However, in all the time I worked for Fred, he found just two pennies worth any more than a penny – one worth about a nickel, the other a dime. Strangely, I never realized how bizarre this was, how wretched.

So maybe it wasn’t really so wretched. Certainly if Fred had ever actually found the penny he was looking for, it wouldn’t have been wretched, it would have been incredible, it would have been Carolyn Kinney on the phone long distance. Or not Carolyn Kinney because let’s face it, Carolyn Kinney is just a kind of placeholder for something else, someone else, I honestly don’t what or who, but something, someone, asylum, communion, deliverance.

Suffice it to say, Carolyn Kinney hadn’t called that day, the little light was solid. Not meaning to, I thought about Fred then, about what Fred was doing at that moment, what Fred was feeling, and the woman too, what she was doing and feeling, and I hoped that it was good and that they were both lost in it, the feeling of it, and that if they were thinking anything, they were thinking that this is what they had been waiting to feel, and that they had to remember it, that they had to live it in such a way that they could remember it.

Before I left my room to return to the woman’s apartment, I lay on my bed for a time and read some poetry, Lorca’s Selected Poems, which is a book I still have, having stolen it many years ago from a library in New York, a book I still love as much as anything, particularly the poem, “Casida of the Dark Doves," which I know by heart and often recite to myself still, although I cannot say that I have ever understood it.

Through the laurel’s branches
I saw two dark doves.
One was the sun,
the other the moon.
Little neighbors, I called,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.
And I who was walking
with earth at my waist,
saw two snowy eagles
and a naked girl.
The one was the other
and the girl was neither.
Little eagles, I called,
where is my tomb?
In my tail, said the sun.
In my throat, said the moon.
Through the laurel’s branches
I saw two naked doves.
The one was the other
and both of them, neither.