fiesta power leveling if x = y
bank and he was making a lot of spare cash. He was at first a funny story and then a kind of expression we all
used: ‘Gettin’ over like a blue-eyed Jew in a sperm bank.?’
‘Yeah,’ I said dopily.
‘You may be too young to know this yet, but eventually you will look around and notice:Nazis always have the
last laugh.’
Then we were wordless through the towns of Terre Noire and Fond du Marais, places named both whimsically
and fearfully by French fur traders, before the subsequent flattened pronunciations by Scandinavian farmers
made the names even more absurd: ‘Turn Ore’ and ‘Fondue Morass.’ ‘You’ll find I say about eighty-nine
percent of what’s on my mind,’ Sarah said. ‘For the other eleven percent’ I use a sauna.’ She put a CD in the car
player. ‘Bach’s first French suite. Do you know it?’
After some clicking and static,fiesta power leveling, it began, stately and sad. ‘I think so,’ I said, not sure at all. My friends had
already begun to lie, to bluff a sophistication they felt that at the end of the ten-second bluff they would
authentically possess. But I was not only less inclined this way but less skilled. ‘Maybe not, though,’ I added.
Then, ‘Wait, it’s ringing a bell.’
‘Oh,runescape power leveling, it’s the most beautiful thing,’ she said. ‘Especially with this pianist.’ It was someone humming along with
the light dirge of the Bach. Later I would own every loopy Glenn Gould recording available,swg credits, but there in the car
with Sarah was the first time I’d ever heard him play. The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of
tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a careful
equation, and then not: if x = y, if major = minor,swg power leveling, if death equals part of life and life part of death, then what is
the sum of the infinite notes of this one phrase’ It asked, answered, reasked, its moody asking a refinement of
reluctance or dislike. I had never heard a melody quite like it.
‘You live near the stadium, right?’ asked Sarah. We were already back in Troy. She swung the car down Campus
Avenue toward the tiny street, Brickhurst, where I lived. The neighborhoods near the university were already
mostly empty for the Christmas holidays, but in houses that were not student housing, frequently there were
lights strung along the soffits and the brightened gutters seemed to shout cheerily, ‘WE are here! WE ARE
HERE!’
‘I’m at 201 Brickhurst,’ I said.
‘Brickhurst?’ I suspected she was one of these out-of-staters who’d moved here a while back but had only a
pieced-together knowledge of the town, a mind map assembled on a strictly need-to-know basis. But she was
there in less than a minute.
She put the car in park. She patted me on the shoulder, then let her hand run down my coat sleeve. ‘Thanks,’ she
said. ‘Phone me when you get back into town after Christmas.’ Her face looked fantastically sad.
‘OK,’ I said, not knowing what else to say. ‘Sounds good.’ It was the midwestern girl’s reply to everything.