The Sleeper

He was a champion sleeper and could knock off consciousness at a moments notice to descend into dreams thick with his waking joys and sorrows. It was a skill he always had, ever since he was a child and learned to manipulate the clock through dropping out of his waking state. He awoke for the sake of his hunger and thirst, or if he had a bladder about to explode. As he grew, he awoke for the sake of self-responsibility, for the stray lovers his slender frame managed to attract by virtue of measured silence and sound.

The sleeper worked in a glassy office on Madison since he was fresh out of Columbia. He managed to climb in the ranks by virtue of his uncanny reading ability. He didn't call it speed reading, but that's what it was. He read at a torrid clip, perhaps channeling his ability to slip into dreams into an ability to slip into a story. The other editorial assistants simply couldn't keep up. By virtue of his success, the city opened its social gates. The city requisitioned him to all kinds of parties attended by luminaries. At once such party, he met his wife to be. His wife-to-be took one thing and made it into something else. She took a so-so happiness and made it into a waking joy. Married life brought new and unprecedented waking delights so that the sleeper forgot about what he did best.

 For one thing, his wife was a beautiful woman in the way he preferred a woman to be beautiful. Perhaps not the model of every man's beauty, but someone who had all the pieces in place to slip into the shoes of his dreamed of composite. The edges overlapped but little. The first tragedy of the sleeper's life was when, at 31, they discovered they could not have children. There was something wrong with the sleeper. They visited several recommended doctors on the matter. When the sleeper told the doctors about his only known health defect, his ability to fall asleep for however long he wanted, they tried to connect the dots and piece together a puzzle. The puzzle could not be solved.

With little warning, on the heals of a complex verdict regarding the state of his reproductive physiology, his wife left him for another. Apparently, there were other unhappinesses associated with life with the sleeper. His wife was unsatisfied. It all came out in a conversation. He was not the image of her ideal mate. He was not the man who, laid upon the image of her dream composite, created no overlapping edges. She had always suspected this, but had managed to put the discrepancy out of her head. While she was still young, she wanted to go on a quest to find her ideal. When the sleeper asked her where she would do this, she said that she would travel first to Spain and then to Italy, where the men were tall and graceful. If that didn't work, she would journey to Iceland.

Several weeks passed until the fateful moment came when the sleeper put his head down on his desk at work. He slipped into a dream of India, of fruit stalls in an outdoor bazaar beneath an evening oil canvas sky. He sampled the most delicious plum, chewy and endless like the plums from his childhood. He dreamed of his beloved x-wife and her composite mate. Her ideal was tall and dark. He was wearing a tuxedo. She hoisted him up piggy back onto her back at which point he turned into a feathery white bird, flying her out over the dim and dangerous landscape. As he dreamed, he became aware of the time slipping past, the day ending, people struggling to waken him, lifting him onto a gurney, carrying him to the hospital. Fuck it, he thought as he explored a strange India, losing himself in a dream within a dream, the contented life inside a mansion inside blue eggshell. Midnight in the hospital. He awoke, laughed, got dressed, paid the whopping bill and went home.

 He lay down and slept some more, ticking off the minutes in his sleep as he propositioned aloof dream women in a fictional Union Square, the rickety skeletons of dead and dying sky scrapers crumbling in accord with a decaying civilization. The following day, he needed to meet with a famous writer, a celebrated dissident, a legend of southern Europe. Throwing his gangling arms out wide, the legend told the sleeper that life was a big joke. The question was the punchline. If you could find that, then you could do anything. If you could find that, said the legend, you could even sleep with the most beautiful woman in the world. When the sleeper tried to turn the conversation to the legend's forthcoming book, Veronika Decomposes, the legend changed the subject to Aspen Colorado, the only inhabitable American place outside of New York and San Francisco. OK, so the legend was a bore. That did not fully explain the bilious hateful feeling that arose from the sleepers gut from the space his ex-wife's detour had left. Sitting on a park bench in Central Park, he fell into a dream about losing his teeth. His gums were in an unhealthy state. Then he was living in an igloo in a wife swapping Eskimo community, only none of the wives wanted to sleep with him. Instead, he presided over the transaction of other men's exchange. He was the middle man of an arctic orgy. He recognized his wife's composite in the form of a tall Eskimo in a tuxedo who stood apart as if eternally posing for a photograph. As before, he set aside the urgency of the waking world, felt himself lifted onto the gurney, felt the waking world tilt its odd course toward the hospital. He awoke. He prepared to leave. This first involved removing the i.v. from his arm. "I wouldn't do that if I were you," said the man sitting next to his bed shrouded in darkness. "Why not?" "Relax. Talk to me for a little bit." "Who are you?" "Me? I'm you." "What the hell's that supposed to mean." "It means I understand." "Understand what?" "I understand your ability." "My ability?" "I understand what it is to sleep your life away. Only, I now use my powers for good and not for evil." "Your powers?" "Not everyone can put himself like that into an unbreakable state of hibernation." "Can you?" "No, not exactly." "So that you don't exactly have my powers." "Yes, but I understand them." "How do you know?" "I read your chart. My name is Doctor Nod." "You've got to be kidding me." "Donald, it's actually Donald Nostrand. The Nod part I made up." "Oh." Doctor Nod invited the sleeper to a facility on the outskirts of Washington DC. He flew him there in a helicopter. The sleeper mainly went for the helicopter ride, although he found the view drab. From a helicopter, the East Coast of the United States looks like jungle interspersed with highways and factory outlet shopping centers. When they landed on the roof of a tan building, Doctor Nod told the sleeper that this was where all the biggest sleepers worked out. Tests were done, the goal being a state of suspended animation which would someday make deep space travel feasible. That was the goal. This is where the sleeper met the larger than life personalities, the champion sleepers of the world. They reminded the sleeper of the writers he would meet now and then, only in an objective sense they lacked charisma. Before the sleeper returned to New York, Doctor Nod reminded him that he always had a place at the facility. "Only we understand you," said Doctor Nod. "Remember the mission. REMEMBER THE MISSION!" Doctor Nod shouted from the landing pad as the helicopter launched itself into the blue sky. The sleeper smirked and drifted off. There was no sense in staying awake for the flight. Word spread in the office building that the sleeper was a narcoleptic and was nodding off in the middle of dinner parties and being carried off to the hospital. An attractive woman named Josephine came to his office to comfort him. Josephine had the things the sleeper liked to see in women. She gave him some of her Adderall which she took for a disease called Addison Reeve syndrome which involved any number of minor seizures taking place in her brain making focus impossible. He thanked her, took the Adderall and suddenly began hacking and slashing the legend's new novel, Veronika Decomposes. He eliminated the first several paragraphs and the entire first chapter, which laboriously and pointlessly explained how life was some huge joke. He edited deep into the night and sent his draft to the legend who did not respond. That same evening, his propositioning of Josephine didn't go over very well. The sleeper was put on leave from his work. Several days later, laying in his bed, he decided to see how long he could remain unconscious. He went to the bathroom. He went back to bed and slept all day and all night. At the end of the following day, he began to receive urgent messages in regards to his physical well being. He felt himself pushing the envelope. He passed through dream after dream in which he was discarded for another man or else behooved to step aside in favor of a kindly ideal. He sadly acquiesced, charitably acknowledging the way of the world. When he couldn't stand it any longer, the pain in his back, his massive dehydrated headache. He awoke. His strength came back as he swallowed the water at his bedside. He was awake, alive. After eating a large meal, walking through the city, he never felt clearer. The colors, sights and sounds were crisp. He went to a liquor store and bought a flask of Bim Black. He walked around the city taking sips from his flask. Later that evening, piss drunk on a train, he decided to wake the sleeping homeless, to usher them into a new and uncharted state of clarity, only whenever he tried they brushed him aside in favor of their hard won dreams. He returned home. He dreamed of being invited to a grand ball somewhere in Europe only to realize that he was actually the valet and that he had dinged up someone's car. The sleeper figured his ability was good for acts of minor crime. The first of such acts was, obviously, stowing away. He could potentially express mail himself anywhere in the world provided there was someone on the other end ready to pick him up. He could stow away on a ship and sleep until they had reached international waters. He could attempt to become famous by sealing himself off in a glass box in a public space, a ticker counting off the minutes of his record sleep. Only how would they know he wasn't faking it? He could get rid of all his worldly possessions and travel the world, a mendicant sleeper requiring little in the way of lodgings. The sleeper would see the world. He flew to Paris where he spent his first night on the street before being transported at early dawn to a French hospital. He awoke in time to be served brie on a baguette with a glass of wine. He traveled to the south, spending a night dreaming in the misty Pyrenees before passing on foot into Spain. Walking the streets of Barcelona, in the back of his mind he kept a look out for his ex-wife. She would like this city of architecture and excess. It was her kind of place. Obvious and contrived, like a dashing middle aged maitre d who was also a musician. As he drifted eastward, he let his beard grow. He became familiar which each country's health care systems. France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland. Occasionally, less than pleasant things happened. He was robbed of his socks and so he stopped changing his socks for a time. A man who can sleep anywhere, for however long, required little in the way of attire. When it got cold out, he bought a pare of felt boots. He bought an old tank drivers hat on a street fair in Ankara. In Armenia, he was accosted by a man wearing outdoorsey clothing unheard of in the region. The man in the green fleece vest handed him a card displaying his first name and last initial. He said he wanted to recruit the sleeper to come and work for the Central Intelligence Agency. "How did you find me?" the sleeper asked. "We have our ways," said the individual in the incongruous vest. Stanislaw B. purchased a room for the sleeper in the most expensive hotel in Yerevan. They went clothing shopping together, although Stass could not be persuaded to part with his green vest and brown corduroy pants. They ate a great deal. Stass was interested in the ancient history of the Slavic peoples migrating out of a legendary realm, ever westward, ever further into waking misery. "We know about your unhappiness," he said. "You mean as a Slav? Or as a CIA agent?" "You could say that your unhappiness is famous with us. We think we know what you need." "What do I need, Stass?" "A true enemy. It worked for me. I was a man unhappy like yourself rejected by most women until I found my true enemy." "So who is your true enemy?" "Islamofascism." Late that night in his brand new clothes, his face still smarting from the Armenian shave, the sleeper sneaked out into the streets of the still sleeping city. He boarded a train for Georgia. After several days wandering around Tbilisi drunk, sleeping in church yards, he passed into Azerbaijan. From Azerbaijan, he stowed away on a ship to Turkmenistan. Traveling through Central Asia, he found it useful to be asleep most of the time. In politically unfriendly places, the sleeper noticed that, rather than take him to a hospital, they bundle him off sleeping toward the border. And so he was literally dumped in the dead of night onto a dirt road somewhere in Uzbekistan. He woke from a dream in which he charitably acquiesced to sleep at the foot of his wife's bed. Her lover's body was long, requiring a refined mattress to support his full deceptive heft. In markets and bazaars on his way into India, through Pakistan and Afghanistan where he disguised himself as a Persian Dervish, he often thought he spotted Stass B out of the corner of his eye. He was detained in Kabul and sent to a facility known only as Summer Camp, a place for questionable bearded individuals of American descent. He slept most of the time he was there, confounding his interrogators by dropping off beneath the oppressive heat lamps or in the middle of blaring music. He thought about teaching his technique to the other inmates of Summer Camp, but he didn't have a technique. He could only drop off at a moments notice. Sitting in his cell one evening, he resolved that his issue was his endless charity. He accepted the needs and desires of his dream characters, never once asserting his own will, never once bending people's caprices to his own needs. He resolved to be more aggressive. Finally one day Doctor Nod came to visit him. It was just like before. The sleeper awoke on his straw mattress to sense a shadowy presence. "Happy to see me?" "I can't really see you." "Is this better?" Doctor Nod moved closer into a stray sunbeam cutting through one of the wall slits. He lifted up his heavy sunglasses revealing his hazel eyes. "What are you doing here." "I've come to offer you a deal." "A deal? As far as I know I'm being detained here because of my beard." "That's not all." "Then maybe you could explain to me what is going on here?" "We want you back on the mission." Ah yes, the mission, the dream of deep space travel. But what was the point? To escape into a nothingness deeper than dreams? "I think I'll pass." "Then my hands are tied." "But I haven't done anything." "Done anything? Do you think doing something has anything to do with this? Hehe." The sleeper felt filled with a sense of anger and pity for himself. She had left him in search of her ideal man. Her ideal man had been discussed at length between herself and her mother. The ideal had been mapped out by another and by another before her. It was a mere form, a kind of tradition, and held no intrinsic virtue. Meanwhile, he was a man of talents. He lay his head back on the straw and fell into a dream of cloud piercing mountains where joyful children awaited, welcoming him into their secret mountain city. He stayed in the city, offering his services as a teacher. He felt the outside world using every means at its disposal to waken him. But no force in the world other than himself could awaken him. He worked in the mountain city of his dreams, setting up intricate games of nonsensical, free form basketball, lecturing on humanities drift out of legend and into a waking state slowly but surly mirroring the truth, beauty and justice contained within a dream dreamed long ago by a caveman. He felt his body demanding to awaken, his heart palpitating in his chest. But he refused to acknowledge its demanding rhythm. He held imperious sway over his sleeping state. Within his dream, he suddenly realized he was in love with a caretaker, a faceless composite beloved, the lost love of his early childhood. She wore crimson and black homespun and cradled his head in her lap. Her dark, glossy hair fell into her face as she laughed. He felt his heart giving up, pumping the blood through his body ever more slowly. He took a walk through the darkness of the mountain garden, holding his beloveds hand. He felt his sleeping body lifted and carried. He lay himself in the garden, let go of his beloveds hand, closed his eyes and opened them. He lay on a dirt road. Next to him rested a canister of Gatorade and a power bar. His arm shakily outstretched reaching toward the Gatorade. He restored himself to a sitting position. He was in the forest somewhere on a dirt road in India. The second life of the sleeper was different from the first. Perhaps it was only a change in location and occupation that did the trick. Then again, maybe his imprisonment at Summer Camp taught him the value of open spaces. He now gave himself to different occupations that seemed useful to him. He taught children how to write. He worked in Indian hospitals reading Rudyard Kipling short stories to people who cried out in the night, their dreams of love and rejection cut by the pain of living. At last he entered a Hindu ashram where one of its masters, M.S Ramchan Ph.D, taught him how to channel his sleeping ability to enter meditative states in which his conscious mind could scan his dream dialogues, as he used to scan manuscripts, and chart the point where his consciousness intersected with humanity's slowly awakening vision.

The Table

My mothers family is full of people who don't know what to do. No one ever told them. My grandmother was a nurse who acquiesced and supported her taciturn, alcoholic husband, a seller of insurance. He didn't dream of selling insurance; nor did he fully embrace it as a way of life. He didn't know what to do because no one ever instructed him of the avenues a man must pass through to achieve happiness. He crunched beer cans into little circles, hiding them in the garage. When he grew old and demented, my grandmother resuscitated him multiple times, adminstering CPR, keeping his heart going until help arrived.

My grandmother's father, rumor had it, belonged to the Columbus Ohio Klu Klux Klan. My great grandmother read Emily Dickinson poems. Dickinson and the Klan only make sense within a certain context. Outside of a very particular environment, they don't correlate. They were Methodist hay seeds who did not blossom under the pressure of poverty, nor wilt under the dog star of excess. They simply subsided, year in and year out, back to their British Isles origins. Obscure religious impulses drove them to immigrate to America wherein they continued to enact the quiet and strange drama of subsistance. Methodists, insurance salesmen, secret Klansmen.

When my parents divorced, whatever harmony they once had totally annihilated. Not an ounce of friendship remained. All was enmity. Like atoms smashing. My mother was left with several of the few positions their marriage had accrued. A walnut shaker table purchased in a furniture store by my father's parents, remained.

The table was designed to last. It was pretty and varnished and as tasteful a product of New England religious mania could be. It was a real piece of furniture. We ate at it, all of us, for the years my mother dated David, the great anti-Israel Jew whose every shirt bore a political slogan -- Leonard Peltier, Big Mountain, Chernobyl -- who liked to decorate the house with sage smoke fanned by seagull feathers from an abalone shell. We sat at the table with David who had signed on with the Palestinians thereby perhaps de Jewifying himself or at least signing on with the ranks of the good hippy Jews. That, and he was an electrician and lived in California, pulled it all together.

He was an energetic man of sensitive nervous temperament. He taped the entire Iran Contra hearings using two VHS recorders stacked on top of each other. As he watched the hearings, he tssked and muttered. This is all true, mind you. After his vegetarian meal, usually consisting of spaghetti smothered in Kraft Parmesan cheese, he had one cigarette out on the balcony. One magnificent smoke a day.

We all sat around the beautiful table, his little girls, my brother and I, my mother. We held silent contests to keep from getting on David's nerves. We ate spaghetti with salads, sometimes chicken. My mother lived and breathed 80s red meat anxiety, so we had none of that. There was copious broccoli. There was green spaghetti, presumably reaping some of the nutritional content out of spinach.

David more or less had the direction and the charisma and the slightly annoying self-belief men named David usually possess. Little David, king of Palestine. Although he bemoaned the plight of the rock throwing Palestinians who, along with Yasser Arafat, clamored for a return of the land seized during the war along with an end to the great worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

The table, during this time, was like a remnant of my parents' marriage. In my mind, it was our one chief possession. It was clearly the best thing in the entire house. It may have been around this time my mother began discussing the table's sale. Or perhaps it was later, after David had moved to Berkeley never to be heard or seen again. (We only learned of his death years later. He passed of a heart attack during a second flowering wherein he had begun playing in a blues band and kayaking in frothing and dangerous waters).

We packed up everything, including the table, and moved away from California to Bellingham Washington. Here, discussion of the table's sale began in earnest. My mother showed the table to some glassy eyed people selling Amway. The table was not sold. Now, we sat the three of us around the table. On the weekend, with the visitation of Mark, there were four.

Mark wasn't like David. For one thing, he didn't have the dietary peccadilloes of David. Like David, he seemed uncomfortable with being Jewish. Perhaps his love of pork chops was an expression of this, although to be frank, he was raised by secular and successful Alaskans, one of whom wasn't Jewish at all.

By now, we no longer cared to try to preserve the shape of the table. We did things to it that one ordinarily wouldn't do to a prized table. Scratched its surface, gaveled forks, etc. My mother seemed to take delight in degrading the table, our only article of furniture. We put the silverware and plates directly on the table. Who cared? She often discussed selling it and downsizing in general, moving out of the small half duplex into a place even smaller. She discussed the idea of getting rid of everything.

For me, these were occasions of arguing counterpoint. I didn't want to get rid of everything. I was worried about what we would do without a table to sit at. The table was like an anchor. It was permanence. Plus it was a beautiful table, a legitimately nice thing. I didn't understand why my mother insisted on deriding it.

We sat around the table. With the vanishing of David, thus ideology more or less vacated. This was pleasant because it meant I didn't have to weather evenings with the McNeil Lehrer PBS News Hour on in the background broadcasting scary information about nuclear warheads and AIDS. Mark was strictly a-political, although once to his credit he argued the Israeli side. More than anything, he liked trashy mystery novels.

"He's read all the good stuff too," my mom said.

I was impressed that he had read all the good stuff. The literary canon loomed large before me. I was such a slow reader, I didn't see how I would get through it. Mark was a fast reader. Sometimes, we'd go to the bookstore where he would turn in a grocery bag full of cheap paperbacks for a selection of new cheap paperbacks. Mark made bathroom fixtures in a shop in Ballard where he lived and slept. Above his desk he displayed a full body plaster cast of my mother. He was better looking than David, taller. He was the kind of man you somehow think as a little kid you are destined to become. He was a ski instructor in Alaska, if that gives you any idea of anything. He was friends with a family in Portland OR. Fellow Alaskans. We occasionally went down to visit them. Down in Portland, he showed an effluviance of emotion he didn't show around us, around the table. I don't know if effluviance is a real word or not.

Then, I went off to college. I didn't know what to do. Like my forefathers, no one had ever told me what was going on in any sense. All my rhetorical positions were counterpoint. I majored in English. I never knew what to say about the books they made us read. What was I supposed to say about Mourning Becomes Electra or Shakespeare for that matter or Hilda Doolittle?

Whenever I returned home, I expected the table would at last be gone, but it wasn't. It was still there. Half its space was now covered with things. Mark had left and so the table now only seated one. Although its surface was scratched and wax covered in areas, it was still a beautiful piece of furniture.

The Case of Erich H.

1.

I study him for months in the big building on the corner of Frigate and Espinoza Ave. where LA cedes to an endless stretch of beige bungalows and convenience stores. The distances in those parts are too great for foot travel, hence the hackles they throw up on the shoulders of the human psyche. Hence my patient Erich H.. I can see him now in my minds eye through the barbed wiring on the roof of the complex raising a homemade astrolabe to the blue evening sky.

As the things of my marriage vacate, including the man himself, my daily trip to Taft House remains. My job entrenches itself. I feel needed. It is a good feeling, and I am lucky to have it. My co workers express their need for me with beseeching, hungry eyes. As my thoughts coalesce into perspective, the things my patients say cut less. They are an assortment of drug addicts, psychotics and schizoid personalities down on their luck. You have to always be in the proper mental state not to care. You have to be free from clutter in your own life so that words can't get their hooks in you.

I see more and more my marriage in their own wild claims and assertions. I see the old self struggling to maintain its scaffold of control up until the very last gasp. And even after the point where functionality morphs into a padded room, they continue to act as if they understand how the world works.

Sick minds know everything.

2.

As things with Bradley work themselves toward a legal resolution, I receive a new patient, a typical advanced addict, paranoid, dug into his world view like a soldier in a trench. His name is Erich H.. What separates him from the start is the level of filth he has accrued. They needed to pry him out of his little back alley where he used and ate and shat and wrote on yellow note pads. After a while, I manage to piece together Erich H's life story.

"I just wanted to have a little piece of pleasure. A little something for me after all that shit had finally washed over. Is that too much to ask?" Erich H. asks as he picks his nose, his tobacco-stained fingers rooting through his nasal locks. "A little something for me?"

Mundane psychological suffering comes from the same common place. You learn this. There is real psychological terror, the kind that rips at someone like a grease fire, the pain of the amputee, the rape and molestation victim, the mutilated. But the other side of suffering is embalmed and ritualized self-propagating obsession stemming from everything and nothing. Such is the case of Erich H. as he explores his hallowed hall of self-built pain fortified by a wasting addiction. Although he doesn't see things that way. Erich H. says the world has wronged him, his family has abandoned him, his ex wives have discarded him for other men. Muddled attributions of guilt. Tales of grandeur, of how he was before being crushed by the indifference of strangers. Drugs are merely a side note in his own special story.

"I got up at 6 am everyday made the commute," he says. "All that, I was doing all that for them." He reaches under his shirt, picks some belly button lint and fondles it beneath his nose.

"What are you doing?"

"What? Oh."

The self, if left unchecked, can be a dictator and dictators and infants are all ego, self-oblivious and self-affirming. They are monads, like early, primitive conceptions of God. They revel in their own smells. They do not stomach down time, empty moments, self-appraisal. They require a cataclysm of sensation and cascades of drama. Every moment is an uncommon terror. Consequently, Erich H. views himself as highly original: he is a writer, a graduate. He has held a day job that paid well.

"What then went wrong?" I ask, trying to coax an admission out of him. Of course, he has already told me the answer, but I want to hear it from him. After several marriages, coming into a small amount of money, he embarked upon an epic narcotics binge which left him in penury. I want to hear an equivalent narrative of some sort, an admission. Sometimes, you don't get what you want.

"I gave everything. I loved them totally and lost everything."

"That's addiction," I tell him. "That's what it does to everyone, not just you. And they probably still love you."

His look of sorrow overtakes him. He is a man of looks. Sorrow, wrath, glee.

"You think?" he asks me, making me feel like he is in dialogue with me, like he isn't totally set against the process.

I learn the basics of Erich H's story through 3 hour-long consultations in early November. I read between the lines. Erich H. is kicking cold turkey. He weeps but he does not break. He rolls cigarettes with the tobacco I charitably keep at my desk for hard cases. I'm not supposed to do that. Therea are certain things you can't do in public buildings. Taft House is also a public building even as it seems like a private nightmare. Not my nightmare. I love its groaning foundation, its peeling walls and nonsensical layout. It's like an art project representing the unwell mind in the shape of a building.

3.

Bradley Sucomb's gorgeous, crisp shirts and the way he had of always smelling OK - his lack of flowing, untamed body hair - invited me into his company. From there I discovered that once a certain line was crossed, I was in love.

Bradley Sucomb was the first well-maintained man I met after 15 years of UCLA. Unlike the men I dated as a student, candidate, whatever, he did not speak the language of double entendre wherein one's every word suggests a desire to be elsewhere. His silence was not, as they say, fecund. It was just well-groomed silence smelling of designer aftershave, imbued with the sound the wind makes as you glide down the coastal highway. He worked at a bank. He regularly slept with two other women as he married me. He continued to see them because he was a common garden-variety self-justifying sociopath.

"I didn't know what to do," he told me as he paced our flat, picking up his possessions - a glass angel, a wicker basket. He picked them up and put them down again. "Can't we go away from here for a while?"

"Going away isn't an answer."

"Then what is? What can I do to fix this?"

I often see my ex husband Bradley Sucomb in my patients, in particular, in Erich H.. They both have an addict's tendency to take a lie deep into its end game before scattering the formation beyond accurate recall. They both drink a bluff to its dregs until the bluff seems like the bluff. Men like this are good at turning your words around and making you feel like you are insatiable and demanding. Haven't they done enough for you? Haven't they given their life's blood? Did not the inmates of Taft House, that fine flawed Panopticon erected during the presidency of Howard Taft, also function as providers, consolers, and husbands? Were they not always there in some form? Did you not abandon and betray them even as you made it appear that they abandoned and betrayed you? Weren't they thoroughly fucked by destiny?

"I gave them everything," Erich H. likes saying. "You wanted money? Here, take it! You wanted to go on a trip somewhere? Go! By all means! Everything I did, I did for them!"

Erich H. rolls cigarettes spicing his morning phlegm sack which he relieves in my waste basket. I think it took him many years to evolve that, like a toad climbing out of his ancestral sea. Like with Bradley Sucumb's cigars, the way he can identify their special smells. They are men of secret olfactory interest. Erich is an artist; Brad is into cash and sex; Erich begs; Brad buys; neither has a clue why it isn't working.

4.

Taft House is five stories. It used to be a little country asylum back in the 1920s when the neighborhood was still orchard land. The bottom floor is intake. The men live on the 3rd, the women on the 2nd where it is marginally cooler. The hard cases, the one's that involve blood, shouts, and random alarming nudity, go on the 4th; isolation is on the 5th floor. In the basement of our little tower there is a recreation area with a ping pong table, some weights, a rowing machine and a television set embedded inside a wall behind plate glass. There is a little garden in the back. The unit houses 50. It should be shut down, closed for good. My favorite part of it is the roof where there's this little seating area. It's like the crow's nest. You can even see the ocean from up there on days when it's so hot the idea of the sea doesn't make sense.

I once met Dr. Hamm up there for vodka-spiked lemonade. We made a plan of it: I would bring the lemonade and he would risk smuggling in a flask of vodka. We used our ordinary coffee mugs. When he gestured out toward the horizon, mentioning the pollution of the coastal waters, the permanent demise of reef life, I felt a deep sadness well up. I asked to change the subject. This flummoxed him. He turned away, his delicately bearded profile catching the city light and embossing upon the meager, hazy distance like a souvenir photograph. That is how I knew that he had some emotional demand that I didn't want to know anything about.

At lunchtime, I walk down the street to Diego's convenience store where I buy something microwavable. Diego keeps all the meals in the same ice chest. There's a great variety of pot pies and turkey dinners and dishes people ate during the 50s as they watched Leave It To Beaver. The ice around the walls is permafrost. And then I return, running my little circle jerk in the afternoon or on alternate days doing one-on-one counseling for men and women who will not admit defeat.

These are the rudiments of my life at Taft House. When Erich H. arrives I am 39 years old and in the middle of separating from my husband. I eat a frozen meal everyday from Diego's. I do not aspire to travel. I enjoy reading in cool, open spaces like museums, churches and City Hall. I like the idea of the 1930s and 40s. I like a man's hands. I like washing the dishes and watching birds make their nests in clogged gutters. I don't vote. I don't watch what I eat. I have stopped craving sex like they say you are supposed to crave it. Sometimes I take drives in the LA hills where, hunkered between golden, grassy mounds, I feel an indescribable sense of peace. I realize that I have been seeking this peace all my life. Sometimes I didn't know that I was seeking it, but I was, always.

5.

I met Bradley Sucomb at Jennifer's wedding. Jennifer married Ted who had this thing with his voice, with breath control and posture. He was often smiling, his mouth flung wide in delight, the saliva on the inside of his cheeks like the waters of a southern sea laughing up at the sun. He and his groomsmen wore different color silk cumberbunds that reminded me of the 1001 Nights. I imagined them on horseback riding out from the secret cave, out to rape and pillage. Ted enunciated his vows and as he did so, I felt as if the world congratulated him in inverse proportions to the way in which my patients perceived themselves punished.

The contrived nature of Ted's Alexander Technique and my own failed marriage made me briefly question if my patient Erich H. wasn't right. The World of Teds did not specifically seek to crush an Erich H.. Crushing Erichs is just what Teds do. But then I brushed aside my brain and saw that both Jennifer and Ted were weeping on the altar and there was an open bar. After that, everything happened quickly. I found myself swept up. In those days, whenever I drank I drank Stingrays, their rummy sweetness leaving me in need of sangria, beer, anything to wash away the tropical undertow, depositing me on firm ground waiting for a car somewhere or back at home again in the muffled, ringing silence.

As the day turned to evening, I found myself on the beach with Ted's groomsmen. Although, I was friends with Jennifer, I gravitated to Ted's old college buddies. They were silent like me. They undid their ties, unbuttoned their shirts, and in the remaining refracted haze marched down to the clammy sea entirely naked as if to prove a point, to remind themselves of who they really were beneath their clothes. My former me would have congratulated such audacity, but now in the gesture I saw them reveal their inner Erich H.. When they returned from their swim, cocks dangling, I felt like a spartan maiden cultivated by glossy nudity into the simplistic philosophy of live or die. It felt good. I did not like that it felt good because I knew I was repeating an old pattern. We passed around a bottle of Jack Daniels.

"It's not like you would die for each other, right?" I asked, inexplicably, drunkenly. "It's not like you would even put yourselves in that position."

"Maybe that's the secret," said James, his voice carrying the pretentious steel melody of a knife cutting lies as Ted spoke with the rounded fullness of an ancient Athenian orator establishing truth. "We don't allow each other to assume that posture."

"But you've never even experienced failure," I said, chortling in my booze. After all, were they not all Harvard business school graduates? White, male, handsome, the mold of man? What transitory, laughable form could such failure take or, rather, fake? They grew cold to me, or at least I thought they did. They read in my comment my own inevitable decline. I did not play ball. Although I was a woman, the one they selected out of a slew of women on the basis of my taciturn drunkenness, they circled their wagons. All their impulses seemed crystal clear. We lit a fire. Someone rolled a joint. The joint sealed the quiet, subtle sanctimony of the circle of those men.

6.

Erich H. cannot cultivate such postures. That is part of the problem. Once his inner dictator rediscovered early childhood's outrage, he could not process the accompanying series of events leading him to me today, his face raw from a new bic shave. He spits a wad of phlegm into my waste paper basket, tucks his finger into his nose, withdraws and glances at it as if unobserved. "People suck!" he raves. "They just suck! And once you've given them everything you have had they will throw you out like garbage."

"But what about the drugs? What about taking care of yourself?"

"A little powder?!" he says in askance. "It's only a little pleasure in a shit fuck world."

I dream about Erich H. I dream he walks on a conveyor belt designed to carry luggage. One side of the conveyance represents the baggage of his father and the other the baggage of his mother.

"There are other ways of getting pleasure out of life," I say.

"If there are, I haven't seen any of them," says Erich H. "Did you know that Freud hated women? That your entire profession is founded on German Jewish misogyny?"

In another century, maybe Erich H. would be a bohemian revolutionary. Or maybe a court charlatan. Rasputin.

"There are many branches of psychology. Much of Freud's theories are now taken with a grain of salt."

"He thought all men want to fuck their mothers and kill their fathers."

Erich H. often puts things in the starkest terms.

"It seems like the things in your life have made you so unhappy."

"Not things, people. People suuuuuuck," says Erich H. elongating the word suck to emphasize an irrational certainty that reminds me of a prayer.

"Is there anything you can remember outside of people and writing that has made you happy in life, that provided you with any peace?"

"I don't know. Good question," Erich H. smiles upon me and a rainbow stretches from one mountain peak to another. That's the way it is with addicts. They pound your zone with rage and remorse until they lob a soft smile, opening you up, making you feel as if you have achieved something. "Let me think. When I was in college, I took some Astronomy classes. I really liked them."

"Why didn't you stick with it?"

"I don't know. Maybe I should have."

"Would you like some Astronomy books to read?"

"Get me some Astronomy books!" says Erich H. re-voicing my question in the form of a demand.

Erich H. does not come from an abusive family. As far as I know, whatever marriages he had collapsed of their own accord. His suffering is common. His error is common. the pain that fed it precluded the safety of decorous silence enjoyed by some. He is unstrung. I write "diagnosis: unstrung" in my Blackberry as I shop for Astronomy textbooks at the UCLA bookstore. He cracks open the first one I give him and starts to cry.

"It's so fucked up."

"What is?"

"Life."

It is 11:30. I release him to recreate and walk down to Deigo's to the frozen food chest. I root through the roaring cold. I select something and bring it up. There is a pleasant ease, a generous grace to this simple act. Tomorrow, Saturday, I have a meeting with my soon-to-be ex husband Bradley. That night I dream of the treadmill. It is the baggage carousel at LAX. I do not want to depart, but I must. I don't know where I am going. I have my tickets.

7.

"Can't we talk it over?" asks Bradley Sucomb my ex, phrasing the question as if further negotiation is only absurdly reasonable.

"We've already discussed this Bradley. There's nothing to discuss. We're meeting here today to agree upon the final details of our divorce. Pure and simple."

We sit in the outdoor patio seating of a TGI Fridays. The sunlight is too harsh and illuminates the gross foods too cleanly so that there can be little doubt of our own piggish appetites. I want Diego's frozen food chest, the echoing cleanliness of City Hall.

"Haven't I been good to you?" he asks me, his strong jaw hovering above the steak fajitas, pronouncing above the death of cattle.

"Brad, we aren't here to discuss what you are or aren't, but to simply resolve on these details."

"That is so like you! Clinical to the last drop."

I pause. The reason why I chose to meet in a public location was to avoid a scene. I understand the parallels. There is no reason to engage, and yet I prove human.

"Are you still seeing them?"

"No! No! I am not still seeing them. One! I am seeing one of them but only because she needs the support."

I lean back in my chair.

"Can't you see I'm nothing without you?" he asks. "I'm a mess. I need you to come home to. I need you to make love to."

I see the depth of his psychosis unfurl like a jumbo American flag at a used car dealership.

"Brad, you need help."

"I know, can you help me?"

"I can't help you."

"Dammit Sarah! Why do you have to be that way," he coaxes. "Can't you see, everything I did I did for you? I, look, I gave you everything! Even now, this, this. This is from me to you. I give you me."

Bradley Sucomb is Ted Lambert is Erik H. ad infinitum. I look around me, at the little Erichs and Erikas digging into their smelly platters. The only thing left is observation and very dry commentary. I boil down into an eye observing Bradley Sucomb shedding his vexatious tear. I love you.

"I don't think you know what that means," I say.

Our transformation into half lives completes itself among potted azaleas. He reaches out his broad hand from across the table.

"God damn it!" his facial expression betrays its underpinning of wrath, a wrathful inner tyrant. So, there you are.

"I mean, please! Please come back to me! Take my hand! Can't you just take my hand?!"

8.

"I'm an astronomer now!" Erich H. enthuses. "You know what I do all day? I read about the stars and about planets and light spectra and nebulae, the cosmic wombs. How cool is that?"

We sit around my desk as we always do when I think back on us, Erich and I.

"Pretty cool," I say.

"Damn straight!"

Some may call him an inverted narcissist, but I like to think of him as a little boy.

"So, what are you going to do when you get out of here?"

"Get out? I don't want to get out! I want to stay here and read. It's a great reading place."

"Maybe you could study astronomy at the community college? Plenty of older people going back."

"Study? What do you think I'm doing here? I am studying. I read two or three of these books a week. You keep buying them and I keep reading them. That's what we've got going on around here. You buy the books and I read them. We're a team."

"But you know, Erich, my job is to help you with your problems so that you can rejoin society."

"Society? Who needs society? Listen, can't I have something? Can't I have this? All I want to do is to sit around, read about Astronomy and smoke cigarettes. What's so bad about that?"

"That may be the case, but we can't keep you hear indefinitely."

"Why can't you? I mean, things are going so good! I'm the model inmate! I help with the chores and in the kitchen. Why replace me? Why not get more of me to populate this fine Bellevue?"

"You know it can't be that way."

"Why not? Why can't it be?"

Reaching my hand into the ice chest, I am cleansed of his flame. He was but a little loved spark. Once years ago a mother loved his spark until it turned into a flame, and the boy became a proud man that took from life as he had been taught to take. And for whatever reason a part of his child self remained. The screaming part. The self is problematic. People are problematic. Not just some: all. I want someone with whom I can share the little delights of Diego's ice chest. I do not want to travel. I want to stay. I want to sit in silence.

"Maybe this is something you could pursue once you get out?"

"Don't you understand? I don't want to get out! I want to stay right here, OK?"

"Erich. Listen. You can stay here for the time being, but I'm not going to bring you any more books until we start having a conversation."

"Do we have to go through all of this again?"

"A conversation about your drug addiction."

"Oh, please, OK. What do you want me to say?"

"I don't want you to say anything."

"Do you want me to say I'm sorry? OK. I'm sorry. Write that down. I'm sorry."

"Your drug addiction took your life away from you. It took everything you had."

"My drug addiction," he mocked. "All the sainted platitudes of psychotherapy. Did you know that Freud hated women?"

"You've mentioned that before."

"He thought all men want to fuck their mothers and kill their fathers."

"Yeah, you've mentioned that."

"My addiction. It's just a little powder. Can't I have some pleasure? Can't I have something?"

"But look, here you are. You ended up here on your own."

"I know!" he shouted, his face assuming its expression of wrath. "What do you want me to say? I know! I fucked up, OK? Now, can we talk about something else? Can we please talk about something else?"

For as long as he was there, Erich H. did not crack. We released him, begging to stay. For a long time, he stood out on the street by his box of astronomy books pacing and cursing. He did not know what to do. I did not want to give him a ride to the shelter because I did not want him in my personal space like I did not want Bradley Sucomb in my personal space like I didn't want to know anything more about Dr. Hamm and his environmental worries. I felt that I had given everyone so much time and that I no longer owed anyone my company. I gave everything. All mundane pain is more or less the same tangled web of self-propagating illusion. The thing about giving is there is always more left to give; there are always different ways to give.

Finally, Erich H. migrated to the park up the street. Several weeks later, he waved to me up the little hill beneath the looming Cyprus trees. He smiled at me. I guess he had been sleeping up there, star gazing. I felt a crippling feeling of connection in that smile. I waved back. It was all I could do. I knew that he was in one of his generous moods in which he wanted to speak to me about astronomy. Perhaps my mistake was always using those moments to discuss his darker side. At which point Erich H. would always say, "Do we have to discuss this now?"

Do we have to discuss this? Many men and women ride that refrain through lives of disturbed monetary and social success. The ones who crack are both lucky and in danger. Seeing how things really work is not fun. It is illuminating. Not everyone is capable of processing the information. Not my ex husband and not Erich H..

New York is a city that still exists

New York is stuck in the shape of a mid 20th century vacation spot. Its chief allure is anachronism, its chief attractions are objects and forms of the past that somehow still exist.

Of course, first stop for any tourist is Broadway. Broadway has a naturally mid 20th century feel. The heart of the attraction is a ritualistic observance of a tired art form.



Fun!  Sort of.  Snor.

Most great cities have nostalgic qualities. The difference between New York and London is that London is obviously very aware of its own historical nature.

New York doesn't recognize what is and isn't historical about itself.

The older districts of New York don't have a historical feel. History does not append easily to them because it is as if the intervening years don't exist. They feel like places that somehow still exist. They aren't necessarily rundown, but are literally as they were.



Coney Island Ave. possesses the mercantile atmosphere of the mid 20th century:



Most world cities have their exhibition of cutting edge. Take for example Berlin's Potsdammer Platz. Once riven by the Berlin wall, Potsdammer Platz set the tone for the 21st century.



In New York City, the chief structure setting the tone is a commemorative obelisk.






Entering the subway late at night feels like stepping into a 70s Bronson movie.




Another emblematic section of town is Cony Island. Everyone knows about the controversy of the dilapidated amusement park that is as much a part of New York as anything. Keep it? Or tear the whole thing down! There is no middle ground. Perhaps another city would invest some money in the area. I can't imagine Seattle tearing down Pike Place Market.

To tear down the old amusement park and put up chintzy condos. This makes sense only in a situation where people are literally living in the past.



New Yorkers are old time schemers. It makes them feel like they are world wise movers and shakers with lots of new fangled modern ideas.

I ran into them years later

Dave

I ran into Dave years later in the financial district McDonalds. When I asked him what he had been up to, he said that he had been in space.

"In space?"

"Yeah, the international space station."

He said that he had been the supply officer, which meant that his primary task was to take care of the supplies. They launched him from Kazakstan.

We dug into our meals, him the quarter pounder value meal with a side of Chicken McNuggets and a large cola, and me the value menue cheesburger and a glass of water.

"Wow, what are you doing here?" I asked him.

"You can only do that kind of work for several years. It's like you're a gymnast. You're training really hard, and then after you just can't work your way back up to that peak performance level."

"Wow, that's insane," I said.

"Being in space takes a lot out of you. It's not natural."

Dave was looking fairly prosperous, with a nice button down shirt and slacks. I noticed some graying by the temples. I knew he had been a hard worker, but I never imagined he would ever go to space.

"Good luck with everything!" he said after he was finished.

Lance

I ran into Lance years later on the Q train.

"Lance, is that you?"

I couldn't believe it.

"Garret?" he asked.

Lance, someone I knew from Margaret Perrywinkle's Academy for the Exceptional had gained, like, 300 pounds. His ass was spilling over three seats. Plus, he was wearing a swiss alpiners hat with a big peacock feather sticking out of the brim. He had an amazing handlebar mustache and a long beard that had been waxed into a sharp tip. Aside from that, he was dressed in a fairly nice suit.

"Wow." I said.

Since the train was largely depopulated, we were free to talk. Lance was just returning to Manhattan from his warehouse in Sheapshead Bay. Turns out, he made a fortune in the manufacture of Swiss alpiners hats made by unemployable hassidic Jewish religious fanatics.

"You know what the secret to work is? Do what you love..." he said.

"And so you love hats."

"Not just any hats," said Lance, "Fine crafted swiss alpine hats made by the hands of fanatical Jews."

"Wow," I said.

I had to get off in canal street to buy dollar dumplings. Lance said that he was taking the train up to the upper east side where he had an expensive apartment. He declined to give me his phone number, but said that we might bump into each other again.

I was bowled over. I watched as the train departed, Lance, larger than life surrounded by everyday people.

Steve

I ran into Steve years later, if you will believe it, while I was at on a layover in Salt Lake city on my way to visit my mother.

"Dude, check this out."

He showed me a picture of his wife.

His wife was a knockout.

Steve was just someone I knew for some reason. I'm not sure why. It was as if the sole purpose of my previous experience with him was to establish the basis for our chance encounter in the Salt Lake airport.

"I, like, buy her plastic surgery. She'll get anything done I ask."

"Really?"

"When we met, she was just average looking, but I got her a boob job, a butt job, a nose job..."

"You basically got her all the jobs."

"I got her all the jobs, and now look at her."

She was really good looking. Steve had a bunch of pictures of her in his wallet. There was a picture of her in a swimsuit on the beach, a picture of her taken from behind walking through the streets of some city.

"She likes it," Steve said.

"Likes what?"

"Likes body modification. Were thinking about getting more extreme."

"Wow," I said.

"That's my flight. Good luck with everything!"

I watched Steve board his flight to Miami. He was looking good.

***

At some point in my 30s, I began to bump into all sorts of people. One thing these encounters had in common was that the people told me what they were doing, but never asked me what I had been doing. Was I just a good listener or something?


Susan

I bumped into Susan years later in the Union Square Barnes and Noble. We were both browsing the biography section.

"I'm actually looking for my book," she said.

It turns out that Susan had become the world's foremost authority on Alice B. Toklas.

"Here it is," she said.

The book was called, "Being Toklas."

"Wow," I said. "Impressive."

"I'm actually lecturing at the Sorbonne right now. Columbia has me lecturing out here. I've done more traveling this year than ever. I'm so sick of airports. Did you know Scott and I are married?"

"Scott?"

"Yeah, Scott Swank?"

So, she married Scott Swank, another person I knew. I had no idea.

"We have seven adopted Chinese children now," she said. "Scott has immobile sperm. Read my book!"

Then, without saying goodbye, she turned and walked away. Wow, I thought. It felt like she was the barer of news about her life that was at once commonplace and yet mildly mind blowing.

B.J.

I was somewhere, some kind of theater in the round. It was dark, except for the stage. There was a guy on the stage sticking needles through his face. Then I realized, it was B.J.!

His act was an extreme must see. Lots of needles, some feces, blood, pool balls. According to the flier, he had spent years in Amsterdam. He had come straight from Amsterdam to New York.

I waited outside to say hello. "B.J.!" I shouted as he passed, draped in some kind of white silky material.

He didn't recognize me or if he did, he simply had no time to say hello as he was bundled into a limo and swallowed up by the city.