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the future I would come to know that look as the beginning of the end of love’the death of a man’s trying. It read
as Haughty Fatigue. Like the name of a stripper. There was the sacredness, immersion, intrusion, and violence to
the ordinary that preceded romantic love, and then there was Haughty Fatigue, the stripper, who stole it away.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked. There was nothing to put the crab-apple branch in or on,rs money, and so I just stood there
holding it. In its droop I could see it already beginning to fail, an aspect of flowers I had studied in paintings of
them.
‘I’m moving to London,’ he said. ‘I’ve had the xylophone sent to your apartment. It should show up there in a
few days. Mary-Emma can play it there. And you,runescape power leveling, too, of course.’
Was the Jack London poster a clue’ A code’ Everything had grown strange. Things between us were dissolving
like an ice cube in a glass: the smaller it got, the faster it disappeared. Thus would the whole world end, I’d been
told.
‘I’m not part of a cell,’ he said.
‘That never crossed my mind.’ Though now it did. He had accepted some assignment. That must have been it.
There was some manipulative mullah in his life’rumors abounded of quiet recruitment everywhere, though these
were whispered and sometimes whispered as jokes. ‘Why London?’
‘The English are simultaneously critical and stiffly uncomplaining’a stage Americans bypassed altogether,
having gone from a dullard’s stoicism to a neurotic’s whining in less than half a century.’
‘That is such a bullshit answer.’
‘I’m part of an Islamic charity for Afghan children. That is all. They think I’m part of a cell. I’m not. If anyone
asks you,star trek power leveling, if they question you when I’m gone, please tell them that I’m not.’
There was no room in this conversation for ‘What about us?’ The conversational space had suddenly filled with
other creatures. Perhaps we had at last reached that stage of intimacy that destroys intimacy.
‘You are Brazilian. What kind of cell would you be part of’ A bikini wax cell?’ I had once found a copy of a
lingerie catalog in his pile of newspapers. When I picked it up and looked closely, the address label bore my own
name. On one of the few occasions I’d had him over he had apparently taken it from my apartment, unbeknownst
to me, perhaps to look at the bosomy models. Now that he was apparently leaving for London, all kinds of things
I had refused to think about for very long came blowing back as if by dusty gusts aimed to tear up the eyes.
‘I’m not Brazilian.’
‘You’re not?’ Of course he wasn’t. Why hadn’t I figured that out’ Where were the bossa novas’ Why did he not
know a single phrase of ‘The Girl from Ipanema?’
‘About that I lied.’
‘Why’ Where are you from?’ Perhaps he would turn out to know the words to ‘Kashmiri Love Song,’ my
favorite song by Rudolph Valentino. My hands were truly pale! Even if he did not love them by the Shalimar.
My heart tapped against my chest like fingers on a tabletop.
‘Hoboken, New Jersey.’
‘Hoboken’ Like Frank Sinatra?’
He snickered a little,shaiya money, a look of hard pedantry in his eyes. ‘Even the very first revolution in America was
conducted from New Jersey.’
‘Gambling and disease. Right from the start. Are we doing American history?’ I looked at his familiar and
beautiful face. He was leaving me as mysteriously as he had first appeared. An agony. The exit like the

‘That’s in part what’s too bad about everybody.’
‘And I don’t like the use of the wordadoption for animals. The humane societies use it all the time, but it’s
confusing to chldren who are adopted.’
‘I once heard I. B. Singer speak of the holocaust of chickens.’
‘And now there’s that other one, Peter Singer.’
‘Are you sure you don’t mean Pete Seeger?’
‘The ethicist who says kill the deformed babies but don’t eat meat.’
‘Oh,flyff money, he’s a horse’s patoot.’
I had seen a horse’s patoot. I had seen plenty of them, and the large swatch of tail that like a creature unto itself
swept the flies away.
‘Too many Singers.’
‘Now we’re back to Sarah Vaughan. Yes. I’ll have a timbale.’
I’d seen a crock. I’d seen a horse’s patoot. It was a timbale that I’d never seen.
‘Too many Sarahs.’
‘No such thing!’
‘Too many timbales. Please! Have another one.’
‘There’s the argument that people are so cruel to one another that until we take care of that we’ll never get square
with animals.’
‘And then,runescape power leveling, as I was saying,cheap silkroad gold, there’s the argument that humanitarian practices with animals will cause us to
improve our relationship with people. We’ll say, ‘Wait a minute: We don’t even do this to animals. Why are we
doing it to people?”
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‘Sometimes it doesn’t matter where you begin.’
‘Is that really what the moral ethicists are saying now?’
‘I don’t know about them all. My field is actually dairy science.’
‘Their argument is that unless an animal is expressing all his native animalness,silkroad gold, he is being cruelly used and his
life is unworthy. You would think that would then cause them to see death as a mercy. But the death is not the
issue. It’s the life.’
‘I would think the actual killing is the issue’how is it to be done?’
And here I thought I heard Sarah’s voice. ‘How to kill chickens: Enough to feed the planet’ I mean, have we
learned nothing from the Holocaust’ Can’t we just round them up and gas them?’
More laughter all around. ‘That would express the Jewishness of the chickens’or do I mean the chickenness of
the Jews?’
‘That’s why we got Israel, baby. We’re not chicken anymore.’
‘This is such bullshit. Even humans don’t get to express the fullness of their native humanness. You think the

request for food. Sometimes comments sounded seasick, or shopworn,buy rose zuly, or shot down, or like a station on the
radio.
‘The healthcare system and the school system and social security have to have means testing. It has to be the
reverse of the way it’s been: poor people in, rich people out.’
‘This whole racial blindness thing. These people who insist they don’t notice what color other people are.
These parents who come to pick up their kids at daycare and pretend they’ve never noticed Jared’s skin. I wanna
say, ‘Honey, if you’re racially blind like you say, that’s something of a handicap. Let me give you a cane! You’ll
notice,rohan crone, by the way, that it’s white. Or maybe, since you’re colorblind, you won’t.?’
‘The phraserace card, as in ‘playing the race card,’ where did that come from?’
‘O.J.’
‘Before that, I think.’
‘Race card’what the hell does that even mean’ Another white idea.’
‘Hey, as I said, we white people had a lot of bright ideas.’
‘A black person can’t accuse a white person of playing the race card, as the white race card is played every day.’
‘In fact, it’s not really even a card. It’s more like a deck.’
‘It’s more like the whole game.’
‘Do you know Alta?’
‘She’s an awful fake poet. Oops’did I say that?’
‘I do feel I know a whole lot about her body just by reading her work.’
‘Oh, her work is so fake, that’s not even her body.’
‘A poet with a body double.’
‘I would like a body double’just for grocery shopping.’
‘Do you get those looks in the aisles when you’re with your kid’ That look that saysI see you’ve been messing
around with colored people’we hope you’re paying cash.’
‘I think I know what you mean.’
‘The suspiciousness.’
‘And the suspiciousness of religion, too. I find that antiblack.’
‘Don’t get me started on Islam.’ It was the don’t-get-me-started-on-Islam person.
‘What is the purpose of busing’ They bus in the poor black kids and then segregate them anyway,flyff money, sticking them
in the basement, in the shop classes.’
‘Were you here last week’ Or was it longer ago that we were already talking about that?’
‘When I first brought Kaz in to have him tested, to see whether he should be entering school as a first-grader or a
kindergartner’ And I sat outside the room listening while this lady gave him some crazy-ass test that went’Foot
is to shoe as blank is to muff.’ He was five years old! How’s he supposed to know what a muff is?’
‘Someday he will!’
‘Stop! I mean, that is just the most antique and ridiculous analogy! I think he said something completely random
like ‘rabbit.’ And afterward she came out to me with this worried look and said he was learning disabled and we
would have to put him in special ed. He was five years old!’
‘They track them early,runescape power leveling, for funding purposes. They need the numbers to be high enough for hiring. So the black

the old men are plotting to kill the young in order to get all the hot chicks.’
‘So that’s why war was invented. To get rid of the competition. Mother Nature had put too much competition in
play.’
‘And who is doing all this engineering again?’
‘Father Nature.’
‘Ah.’
‘Nate’as he’s known to his friends.’
‘Nate.’
‘Yup.’
‘Here’s a suffering sweepstakes: Both Black Hawk and Otis Redding died in this county. But Black Hawk gets a
bar and a golf course.’
‘He was pursued like a rat. He should get a statue.’
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‘Is there a statue?’
‘Is there a statue for Otis?’
‘I think there’s a granite bench.’
‘A granite bench’ He would have preferred a golf course and a bar.’
‘A fool’s game.’
‘And this pertains to our discussion how?’
‘Since when did pertaining pertain?’
‘Oh, yes,runescape power leveling, military recruitment of minorities.’
‘The schools are off to begin with. Busing and integration are never done right, and so it’s a fool’s game.’
The fool’s-game person again. Or the fool’s-game person’s brother.
‘Look at the schools in this town. The only one that’s not failing black kids is the magnet one where whites are
only twenty percent of the school. Now, that’s empowering! Put them in a white school, they are all relegated to
the tech courses. They get put in the basement with the vocational teachers. Then they have dropped out by
junior year,rose online zuly, while the white parents continue to hoard the resources for their gifted and privileged. They want
money for stringed instruments! They demand it! They get violins, we getviolence. Man, you’d better get some
money for some black teachers, I say.’
‘Plus,runescape gold, the school boards are hiding the real numbers. The figures they offer show only dropout rates from senior
year. If you drop out before you’re not in the tally, because you’re going to make them look bad. You’re MIA.’
‘So the numbers are a fairy tale.’
‘They’re a bad fairy tale.’
‘Told by a bad fairy.’
‘Oh,cheap rohan gold, I think I know who you mean.’

themselves with clarity, others I had to figure out.
From upstairs came a whimper, then a full cry. Sarah hadn’t shown me around the house, so I had to find the
staircase myself. There were actually two staircases, side by side, meeting at a windowed landing midway, and
then they merged and became one, going the rest of the short way up, where a plastic gate, suction-cupped to the
wall, blocked one’s path. I stepped over it with a kind of scissors kick and then made my way toward the cry. I
passed a bathroom with walls painted the pale brown of a paper bag; on the sink was an assortment of
prescription pills in their vials, as if someone were collecting beads, getting ready to make a necklace. I passed a
bedroom with a mission bed that had perhaps failed at its mission, and a cherry dresser that perhaps had not.
Atop it was a jewelry box with the phyllo thin drawers of a beekeeper’s hive.
The baby’s room as promised appeared to be on a higher floor yet, the door to which at first I could not find. The
crying was at the west end of the house, but when I opened doors to find a staircase I found only closets. There
was a short pause and then full-scale wailing began.
It was maddening trying to figure out how to get to it. I wandered in and out of the rooms in a low-level panic
that prevented me from taking full notice of them,buy daoc plat, though they seemed both elegantly pastel and cluttered to my
darting, searching eye. At the east end of the hall, on the left, I saw an open doorway. I lunged toward it,cheap daoc gold, found
yet another stairwell gate locked in place. But the actual wooden door was swung wide open, so I stepped over
that gate, too, onto steps thickly carpeted in dull earwax gold. Through a tiny window at another landing, framed
in the cross pieces,runescape power leveling, I could see spiny winter treetops and telephone wire. The staircase wound around, and then
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there it was, the nursery spread out beneath the eaves. The angled ceilings and walls were painted a pale wheat
yellow, like a chablis, and at the windows at either end of the space hung curtains of sheer white over heavy,
room-darkening shades. A double nightlight in lurid orange plugged up the electrical socket just to the left of a
changing table and dresser. Emmie’s white crib, with its Winnie-the-Pooh bumpers and bedding, was in the far
corner,runescape power leveling, and she was standing, clinging to its rail. In the short time that I’d not seen her, her silky black hair had
fallen out and in its stead tight, blondish-brown curls were growing in, the start of an afro, really. It looked
almost like a wig. When she saw it was me, her crying momentarily stopped in wonder.
‘Hey, Mary-Emma,’ I said, returning her, at least halfway, to her former name. She looked at me, then resumed
wailing. But when I went to lift her out of the crib, she was eager, and clung to me and quieted down. She was
warm and soft and smelled of powder and pee. I took her to the changing table, where she lay passively. I pulled
off her balloon-print trousers and disposable diaper, which was made of a soft, strangely layered paper I’d never
seen before and which peeled away from her pink-brown bottom like the paper from poultry giblets. The room
was dark from the still-drawn shades, and the air was moist from a humidifier. I fumbled around on the shelf
over the changing table for a plastic box of wipes and accidentally knocked it to the floor.
‘Uh-oh!’ said Emmie. She already knew both the sound and the language of things going wrong.
‘It’s OK,’ I said. The wipes were in a heater, and so the falling was loud. Luckily none of the wipes came out and

Sarah tried to make her way back to Bonnie, whom she’d lost. ‘But, Bonnie, I just wanted to ask you: Isn’t the
baby half African-American?’ Sarah recrossed her legs. She had winced a little at Roberta’s ‘little Irish Rose.’ I
could see she was torn between not wanting to seem confrontational and wanting to know just what kind of
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racism was here in this room.
‘More like a quarter, I think. I don’t know. He’my daughter’s father’once asked me what I would think of having
a child who had one black grandparent.’
This did not sound like date-rape chat, or like fling chat. Or chat, really, of any sort at all. But perhaps I was
learning a thing or two about chat. Where was Suzanne with the coffee’
‘Maybe he was Italian,’ said Bonnie.
No one laughed, which was excellent. No one laughed out loud.
Suzanne at last came in with coffeepot and cups, and just as she was pouring and passing around the coffee the
outside door cracked open. ‘Is this?’ said a man’s voice. ‘Oh, yes,runescape power leveling, I see it is,’ and the door opened wide. In
stepped a distinguished-looking man: he had a balding head with pewter-hued hair grown long and wavy in the
back; it was like he was wearing a head cape. His salt-and-pepper mustache was clipped neatly.
‘Edward!’ Sarah jumped up.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said. His gaze, which had been on her, turned to his own paper cup of coffee, which he
sipped from, as if it were not just delicious but urgent, and I could see he was showing us himself, his aquiline
profile, his handsome objectness, so that for a minute he did not have to trouble himself to admire us but to soak
up our appreciation of him. He had snapped in two the connecting gaze he’d quickly made, then unmade, with
Sarah, but one could see it was his habit to almost imperceptibly dominate and insult.
Instead of being angry, Sarah looked happier than I had ever seen her in my brief acquaintance with her.
Something in her face softened and relaxed, and a youthful light went on behind every part of it. Despite
everything, she was in love with him. I had not seen love very much,anarchy online power leveling, and it was hard for my midwestern girl’s
mind to imagine being in love with a guy this flamboyantly self-involved and,cheap ragnarok zeny, well, old. He could have been fifty
or even fifty-four. But Sarah went over to him, clasped his face in her hands,buy anarchy credits, and smooched him on the lips. He
patted her on the back as if to calm her down. His deep eyes, his charming smile’I could not then and there see
any of it. This was love, I supposed, and eventually I would come to know it. Someday it would choose me and I
would come to understand its spell, for long stretches and short, two times, maybe three, and then quite probably
it would choose me never again.
‘The cab headed out of the airport and got halfway to Pulaski,’ Edward was saying, ‘before the driver realized he
was headed in the wrong direction.’
‘Here we say ‘Plasky,?’ Roberta said quickly.
‘Came back through something called Allouez’how do you say that?’
Many of the original French traders seemed to have had such an adversarial relationship to nature, especially

‘My father died before he saw it. But he never liked to eat out. I once took him to a Benihana in New Jersey, but
the sizzling hibachi table made him very jumpy. I think it conjured all these memories of the war and the
firebombing of Tokyo. After that he refused to eat out with me. He would say, ‘Come see us! Your mother has
made a beautiful kugel!’ He was a rich old man scared of the sizzle of a grill.’
‘He was rich?’
‘Well, sort of. Is your dad rich?’ Her eyebrows arced and her eyes bugged out. We were in a dialogue that was
about something other than what we were saying. At least I hoped so.
‘People thought we were, but we weren’t,warcraft gold,’ I said. Actually, I wasn’t sure. I repeated the conventional wisdom.
‘Farmers aren’t rich. They have land but no money.’ Actually, my father didn’t even have that much land. He
had once stood on the porch and flung his arms out and said, ‘Someday, kids, all this will be yours.’ But his
knuckles had hit the porch supports. Even the porch wasn’t that big.
‘Farmers are rich when they die,’ I added.
‘I suppose,’ said Sarah. ‘I never think of anyone as rich when they die. I think of dead as about as poor as you
can get.’
‘Gate two, upstairs,’ said the woman at the counter, handing us our boarding passes, and since we only had
carry-on bags, we went directly upstairs, except that Sarah, seeing that no people were on the down escalator,
decided to try to go up it. ‘Watch this,’ she said to me. ‘This is how you get a little exercise before getting on a
plane.’ And she ran quickly up the moving steps, using it like a treadmill, and waving goofily to me from the
middle, as if she were Lucille Ball. ‘Ma’am, that’s the wrong escalator,cheap flyff penya,’ said someone on the other side, going
up, and then because it was taking Sarah so long to get to the top, someone else came riding up and said,runescape power leveling, ‘Do you
know you’re going up the down side?’ No one understood what she was doing, and so no one smiled.
‘Exercise!’ exclaimed Sarah. This burst of eccentricity in her I could see was familiar to herself, and unresisted.
Such self-permission I don’t believe I’d ever witnessed before in almost anyone of any age. I myself went up the
up escalator and watched as, still holding her carry-on bag, her shearling coat lifting behind her, she took the
flying gazellelike leap necessary to get off the descending stairs,city of villains power leveling, and which if her timing had been even a
moment different could easily have left her maimed. That all this failed to draw the notice of anyone in security
was a relief.
‘Not too bad for an old gal, eh?’ said Sarah, breathlessly grinning and pink in the cheeks. I made a smile of some
kind’I have no idea what kind’and we then moved quickly to the elaborately cordoned security line, where a
beefy, bloat-faced man took our nail clippers and Sarah’s tweezers. ‘A girl just can’t groom anymore!’ she said
to me. I chuckled to please her. She had an anxious energy swimming around her, which laughter’hers,
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anyone’s’seemed to dispel.
As for me, tension gripped my neck. I couldn’t distinguish my own fears of flying from my general
disorientation regarding this sudden trip. The plane was small, only a fifty-seater, hardly a hijacking target, and

throughThe Critique of Pure Reason. Some days grew so bland and barren, I found myself perusing Horace,
though between books I would open up my electric bass,world of warcraft gold, put on the headphones, and make up little riffs for an
hour or so, experimenting with the reverb. It always amazed me what a mere four strings could do. I had started
with cello when very young, and then descended. Ole Bob sat in the corner, winking, I believed. Playing a guitar
was so much less effort. Like a girl taking a pee. One didn’t even have to stand. One could lie on the floor and
just go at it with one finger like James Jamerson’s magic claw. One could pretend to be Jaco Pastorius in
Weather Report’especially in this weather. Here would be my report! Or Jaco on ‘Hejira.’ Here would be my
Hejira! Or Meshell Ndegeocello, whose low voice I could imitate but not well.
The days ended, then started over again, like dull redos. The heat kicked on; the heat kicked off.
I made no attempt to see my few friends left from high school, who when I conjured them in my mind seemed
dull and thickened strangers. In the fall I had written a note to one, my friend Krystal Bunberry, who for no real
reason (but unwitting prophecy) we used to call Krystal Berry Bun; her father had worked his whole life in the
toilet paper factory and on retirement received not only a free lifetime supply of toilet paper but a diagnosis of
colon cancer. He then received a colostomy as well. ‘Rusty drainpipe removal’ it was called by Krystal herself.
She had written me to see if I needed any toilet paper’they now of course were giving it away. And so I had
written her with my condolences, even though her father hadn’t actually died. The previous year I had been in
one of my friends’ weddings, Marianne Sturch’s; she had worn a sequined, strapless wedding gown, and left her
bridesmaids to wear brightly flowered dresses fit for a kind of pornographic milkmaid: low-cut and laced up the
midriff with a sort of shoelace. ‘What Scarlett O’Hara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying
to snag a plumber,’ said my mother, who perceived the loud ugliness of the dress even through the fog of her bad
eyesight. Our shoes were white patent leather, what Marianne called ‘pattin’ leather,’ though I was never sure
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whether this was on purpose or not. Not just the outfits but the entire wedding in a rental hall at the Ramada felt
tawdry and embarrassing; thirty minutes in,runescape power leveling, I found I never wanted to marry. The bride carried what looked to be
a cord of pink and gold gladioluses but were really only three scepterlike stems in yellow and peach; reminded of
my mother, I was woozy, seeing them. After that, I couldn’t muster the energy to phone Marianne’she and her
husband, Brendan Brezna,acheter kamas, went to Orlando and Cancun for their honeymoon, a busy five-days, four-nights
package with a cruise’and our paths, especially with my staying in the house like a shut-in when I came home,
failed to cross.
Everyone here seemed a stranger,cheap rappelz rupees, if not an outright alien. Before I was born, the town of Dellacrosse had been
preposterously named Little Spread Eagle, after a local Indian warrior hunted down like a dog by government
militiamen and turned first into the name of a golf course, then a motor lodge, then finally a town’everything
about the place had been a kind of jokey curse from the start. When the village councilmen changed it to
Dellacrosse, they also decided to try to remarket it as an extraterrestrial tourist site. Rumors of spaceships in the
outl ying cornfields and fiery brassy things floating through the night sky and even one or two probings of

‘Is there an echo in here?’ I said.
‘Well, tell us,’ said my mother. ‘Don’t just sass us to death.’
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‘It hasn’t really begun. It’s a babysitting job. But there isn’t a baby yet.’
‘Oh, yes,runescape power leveling, one of those,’ said my father,cheap warhammer online gold, amused.
‘What do you mean, no baby yet?’ asked my mother, who looked puzzled. My father was grinning ear to ear, as
if to say,Now here’s a how-de-do.
‘Therewill be one. Or should be. In January,’ I explained.
‘The mother’s pregnant?’
‘Well, the birth mother is pregnant, and the woman I’m working for is going to adopt the kid.’
There was silence all around, even from my dad,world of warcraft gold, as if this were a situation to be considered for all its various and
deep sadnesses.
‘It’s a good thing,’ I added. ‘This girl’she could never be a good mother. And the lady who’s hiring me’ She’s
kind of neat. She’s nice and pretty and she owns a fancy restaurant in town.’
‘That’s why she needs you,’ said my mother, concerned. ‘She’s too busy for a child.’
I was about to try to defend Sarah when my father asked with unfeigned interest,swg power leveling, ‘What restaurant?’
‘Le Petit Moulin,’ I said.
My mother turned and made a knowing face. ‘Afineschmecker running a place for other fineschmeckers.’
My father smiled broadly. ‘Oh, I remember her. Very nice woman.’ My mother turned her back to us, flipping
the flapjacks and throwing the latkes into hot oil, refusing to let go of her skepticism regarding the whole matter.
My father continued. ‘She would come and check out those potatoes as if they were diamonds. But she would
sometimes take the ones with a bit of rot in them anyway, knowing that once the rot part was cut out the rest of
the potato would be sweeter than most. Smart lady.’
‘Why can’t she have her own children?’ asked my mother, continuing in her doubt.
‘Mom, I don’t know. I can’t ask. I hardly know her.’
‘What about her husband?’
‘Whatabout her husband?’
‘Who is he?’
It was a little surprising even to me that I knew so little about him. ‘I think he’s probably a professor of some
sort, but I’m not sure.’
‘Hmph,’ said my mother. ‘Academics.’ Now she was muttering. ‘They all shoot from the hip. And the hip is
always in the chair.’
‘What did you say?’ asked my father.
‘Nothing,’ said my mother. ‘Keeping a safe distance never keeps one from having an opinion, is all. Having no
dog in the race doesn’t keep people from having extremely large cats.’ Then she added, ‘Pull your seat up to the

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.