"I got angry with the girl I lived with. I heard myself getting angry, I converted my outcries to a singsong, as if the anger was coming out in spite of me. You know how certain floor managers behave toward their clerks. When the clerk makes a mistake and the manager has to reprimand him he tiptoes his voice, he speaks as if he is parodying his own stupefaction. He is speaking in a tone which says, This is how I would behave if I were a floor manager. I stole from stores. I spent a good deal of time in them. I know. The girl was not orderly. But there is some pain inaccessible to parody. I could not live in the filth. Yet I wanted her. The wanting strummed the underbelly of my anger. We became lovers. Then we stopped being lovers. We got separate rooms. We were separated by several feet of corridor and a little gossip. I went to her room when she was not there. She probably knew I came. I seemed to spend more time there once I had moved out. She had installed a little range near the window. She left her pots on the range. She kept them covered. She had never done that before. I stared at those pots for a long time one day wondering why they were covered. Was she excluding me completely from her life. Or was she indicating that she could cultivate a sense of order. She was putting the lid on her disorder, so to speak. Or maybe she covered the pots in all innocence, maybe something was cooking in the pots. Maybe she was trying to mimic me from a distance now there was no danger I would overwhelm her. But was the imitation in all innocence or a way of baiting me, subjecting me to parody. I went away soothed. I had come no closer to a solution but I had acquired several possible solutions, they brewed in my depths, they cancelled each other, they fertilized each other, they diverted attention from each other so that no one became conspicuous enough to be invalidated. I turned off the light. I could not remember if I had turned it on or if it was on when I came in. When she came back I heard her, first walking down the corridor then entering her room. Somehow I was relieved the light was off. I had put the lid on all my looking. For the second before she turned on the light, for the second that she remained in the doorway sniffing, mulling over the past and anticipating the future I was a spectator at my own absence. The room was alive with my absence and there was no glare to pollute that absence. I enjoyed that. She turned on the light. She refunded me to myself doing that. She accepted the task. She accepted her relation to objects. And she made my turning off the light real. She purged it of all the buried intentions that drove me to turn out the light. She turned it on simply, a little of her innocence, her guilelessness, her lack of suspicion, rubbed off on me. She accepted the change in the landscape I had effected. It was valid, I was validated. She did not smell its strangeness, there was no strangeness. I was grateful to her. It made me uncomfortable to know I had compelled her to turn on the light and that she had submitted to the imperative without question, without rancor. I looked back on myself, she refunded to me the moment when I turned out the light.

"Her walking back and forth fascinated me. It was her calm. I was all upheaval and she was all calm. The calm was a verdict on my upheaval. I wanted to draw her attention to me. I wanted to discover the secret of her calm. I wanted to live in her obliviousness, I wanted to burrow deep into it. Perhaps that was the basis of my attraction. I wanted to stew in her obliviousness. A little later I began with drugs. I met you a few years later," she said to the black man. "The first time," he said interrogatively. "The first time it was painful. I puked. I abstained. I did not go back. I wanted to go back not because of a craving. I wanted to go back to discover why I had puked. I wanted to put the sensations under glass. Each time I abstained I felt whole, it was a contingent wholeness. It depended on the vice that lured me. There were times when I felt positively blissful with abstention. I congratulated myself on my self-control. And it was exactly at those times that I ran the needle along my arm, as if to celebrate my abstention. I needed to remind myself I was abstaining, or else I did not feel as if I were abstaining. Running the needle along my arm assured me that I was abstaining. Sometimes I ran it along my thigh." I thought of dissolves in the films of Von Sternberg. The camera is about to dissolve from one image into another. It is precisely on the verge of dissolution that the image affirms itself, it is at the moment when Dietrich is about to be flushed away that she is most real, most apotheosized. I listened to her voice and it reminded me of the great scene from "Morocco" where Dietrich has just located the whereabouts of Cooper in the hospital. She strides down the corridor. The camera tracks with her, past potted plants and Sternbergian paraphernalia. Her face is sphinxlike, intent. The music is a haunting piano ditty. Her stride, the music, the mobile camera annulling the carefully constructed mise en scene with its movement, they are all being flushed away and they are protesting against the flush. It is significant that she is moving, she is moving toward Cooper in the next scene, she is protesting with her movement against dissolution from frame to frame. She is affirmed. All those objects in Von Sternberg, as in Ophuls, existed to be swept past, penetrated, annulled. They were not impediments on the way to the image, they were part of the image. To disregard them was like peeling off the leaves of an artichoke to reach the essence of the artichoke. Then I remembered Masina's artichoke eyes in "La Strada" and the mockery of the fool. Both Zampano and the fool torment her. Basehart's fool torments her like an androgynous son, the son who uses his androgyny, his irreverence, as his only weapon against the predominantly sexless mother. And Zampano torments her with incomprehension, callousness. She is caught between them, mater dolorosa. Splashes of the river returned me to her.

She was only abstaining when she resisted the encroachment of the vice. "I began to weave. I even bought the right kind of yarn. But when I became engrossed, when I was on the verge of a marvelous stroke then I had to jump up and celebrate, postpone my immersion. I was like you. I thought I was celebrating my immersion, my engrossment, but I was running away from it, postponing it. It became an object, an acquisition, something palpable, something that waited for me in the future. I had to get the needle and run it along my arm to calm myself, to have a witness of my self-sufficiency, my reformation. I felt alive in my abstention only when the opportunity for violating it was near, or just after I was recovering from a violation. Too much abstention began to stink far worse than dissipation ever did. I did a lot of weaving. It was very important for me to buy the right kind of yarn. I had a teacher. She used certain expressions. I mimicked them as I worked. I did not understand why I mimicked. Then I realized that I was appropriating her outer covering. Those expressions were so many impediments on the way to her essence, if I appropriated them then she would never use them again." "Why?" asked the black man. "Because by doing whatever I did I invoked the opposite in external reality. It was an old belief of my childhood, it died hard. It was a kind of inverted omnipotence." I looked away from her. She was too powerful. I could see one of the sidestreets leading up from the river and it seemed lined with brownstones that marched glumly upward toward a bare height. They marched upward to the end of the world. I wondered why I imagined no thoroughfares at the end of the street, why I invented an abyss, why my whole being felt there was no end of street except the sky. Was the sky a dead end, the final dead end against which there was no appeal? Or was the sky the ultimate abyss into which I could fling myself, rescue myself from her talk that suffocated me. She no longer belonged to me. Did that image of the street represent how I felt about myself as I listened to her or was it an escape hatch from myself. I heard cyclists. It seemed there were four of them. The sound of the pedals was the hum of cicadas. The two in front were joking, revising their schedule at every turn. The last looked straight ahead or I imagined that he looked straight ahead, eager just to keep up with them, not to be shamed by their virtuosity.

"When I weaved something that pleased me then I could not live in the product. Whatever I had produced made me hunger for what I had not produced. What I had produced made very clear, burningly clear, the absence of all I had not produced. I felt the force of that absence impinging." I thought of sounds impinging on the frame in Bresson. "I tried to weave when it rained. I looked up at the raindrops, to absorb myself in their migration down the glass. There was no scythe of a windshield wiper to cut that migration short, to cut short their individual elongations either. Sometimes it was difficult to differentiate their path from their gigantic distension in the course of the path. Some of them sacrificed mileage to elongation. But it was exactly at the moment I felt myself engrossed in the drops that I felt the need to shoot up. It was like touching the extremities of my own shadow, excruciating. The minute I connected to something I had to jump up and celebrate. Or perhaps it was less celebrating than feeling secure. The raindrops were watching me. I would be shooting up in the shadow of my connectedness to the raindrops. I would be able to return to them after the shooting up. I could impersonate myself, give way to my wants, in their shadow, and at the same time I was shaming them, it was in their shadow I did my rain dance of self-destruction. So don't think I shoot up because I can't get engrossed in anything. Don't give me any of that hobby shit. It's because I get too engrossed, I feel myself going under, getting connected. But I connect myself to the needle, to the drug, because as I am getting connected I am always at a little distance from myself, I know I am doing something destructive, bad, I will be punished. Whereas if I get engrossed in the raindrops there is no end in sight, there is no punishment, no endpoint. I saved the weaving for later, it was an object to return to. I have a terrible foresight, I foresee the end of the degradation, connectedness to my needle." "You reify it," I said quietly.

I remembered Truffaut's "Tirez sur le pianiste." Charlie and his girl friend have been kidnapped by the voluble thugs. Charlie tells a joke, the girl hesitates, then laughs. They all laugh. There is a cut to a long shot, the car is visible through foliage, through fragile branches. The car is tiny, moving through traffic, but you can still hear the laughter, the laughter is hypostatized, quantized. The car contains it like a small packet of energy. The car prevents you from getting back to the laughter, it is an impediment, and at the same time it becomes the embodiment of the laughter, its movement is a sign, we read its movement as a clue to the laughter. Inert matter has been rendered sentient by the long shot. Narrative has succumbed to a set piece. Then I remembered the interrogation scene in Chabrol's "Leda." The police have come to the country house after the murder of the husband's mistress. The son is pouring tea, the mother reclines in her chaise. The police are deferential. Then one of the officers becomes insinuating, inquisitorial. Then he laughs at his implication. Then the wife laughs. Both laugh venomously. And there is a cut to another axis on the laughter. The laughter sustains the cut so that the dislocation is smothered, rendered inconspicuous. The laughter is a pretext for a cut. The camera dollies subliminally around the back of the chaise longue. The actors are indistinct, we merely hear their laughter. Here there is a shift but the cut and the camera movement are still very much embedded in the narrative. The camera dollies furtively like a cat around the laughter, the new angle converts the laughter, the laughers, into a datum. Laughter has been reified. We search for it as for an object, we try to penetrate to it through the chaise longue. In Truffaut we tried to penetrate branches, a car. I looked for the cyclists, I looked for her fermentation in the movement of their calves, the frantic pedaling. But they were gone. A frequent device of cinema: a conversation takes place in a car, a fracas, a threat is unveiled. The situation completes itself in a long shot. We watch the car: it pulls over to a side of the road, it collides with another car. We are given information indirectly, we must deduce, inert matter--cars--becomes sentient, impediment and embodiment."Give me a cigarette," she said. "I always shoot up not when I'm most in pain but during a moment of calm. It would be too excruciating to have my cravings coincide with source of satisfaction of the cravings. It's almost as if by shooting up when I don't feel the need, in the absence of the need I cut off the shooting as an avenue of escape. I want to survive in the absence of props, amid a veritable penury of props. I negotiate with the drug in the absence of the craving, I speak for the self that craves the drug, I pump myself full of the drug when I am immune to its effect, or when I seem to be. I always try to eat when I am not hungry. For if I ate when I was hungry only I would soon feel the pitiable inadequacy of food. Otherwise I can attribute the inadequacy of the act of eating to my own lack of appetite or surfeit, or bad timing. And sometimes I shot up just to see if I could survive the shooting one more time.

I had to verify my existence the same way I had to verify the fact the pots were intact when I left the room. Yes, I went back, I had to check the lids, take them off, put them back on. When I shot up and the shooting was not synchronized with my craving then I recovered quicker. I could go out into the sun, into Riverside Park, and I wasn't even afraid of the maniacs letting their German shepherds run loose. They must have labeled it cavorting. The word probably soothed them. But to see those beasts leaping under the elms, that was too much. I even walked in their path. Nothing would happen because I had already punished myself by taking the drug when I did not feel the craving. Of course I was not whole, the way other people were whole, walking their dogs, the poison was still in me. Other people could live on the surface of themselves. They did not have to burrow into themselves, gnaw at the surface of themselves, make a fissure within which to crawl, avid of orifice they invent new ones, every pore a potential channel, avenue of escape, pathway of disintegration. I focused on their forearms. I was amazed at the absence of tracks. I wanted to touch those forearms, kiss them. I felt indescribable tenderness for those forearms, free of fissure, intact. I wanted to make my home on those forearms, in those forearms. I did not know who I was anyway so I was not compromising myself. After all, once the poison was in me I was no longer myself, I was myself plus something else or minus something else. I envied the stability of those forearms. The whole park was swarming with forearms free of fissure.

"It is excruciating to walk alone in the park on a Sunday. And yet in some way I felt I was doing it for them, I was making an object of myself for them, I was their center of gravity, I provided them with an orientation. No matter how far afield they went, how far from their comfortable brownstones I was there to lead them back, I was my shame, my shame was their center of gravity, I was the long line of bread crumbs Hansel and Gretel scattered in the forest on the way to the witch. And as a reward they would tell me who I was, was I the self of yesterday with one or two more holes in my arm or was I totally transformed. I felt everyone could see my incisions. It seemed I injured my walking, I injured myself as an object, by having stuck a needle into my arm. And yet I did not consider that it might have been more excruciating to walk without visible flaw, that at least in the perceptible flaws I had an outlet to distract me from the vague anguish that never left me. At least I provided some motive for their prolonged stares or their indifference which was like a long stare stretched to the breaking point. I felt everyone knew I had a cramp in my stomach. I had to wait for the pock mark to go away. Time is the schema of an expiation, I incubated the future, I made the future real by waiting for the recent redness to go away. That assured me a future, the intolerable duration before the wheal disappeared. At that point I never anticipated the nostalgia I would feel for the absent redness. I would see a blank spot on my skin and I would miss the inflammation which told me if I was inflamed I was also alive. I wanted to have skin as smooth as other girls', as hard as a man's. But Betty Jane, you know you can't be like the other girls, you have no arms and legs. I walked and walked and hoped by the time I got back to my room my sunburn would have annihilated the tell-tale signs. It was a parody of patience. I dug into myself in order to be able to wait for the signs of digging to be effaced, annulled. And for the waiting I was contingent, I was living the myth of a future self free of fissure, innocent of imperfection. But in the meantime I never knew what self exacted my allegiance: the self that waited, the self that had dug, the self that was to be free of flaw. I shuttled among all three. I lived in their interstices. I did not know what compensatory mechanisms to recruit to keep me going, to be able to keep my head high in the crowd, among the monkey bars and sandboxes. The pigeons were bearing down on me. Or so it seemed. But they were only skidding into pools of elm.

"One day one of those German shepherds leaped at me. It dug its teeth into my leg. I felt the master waited a little too long before he called it back. He was taking the measure of the dog's efficiency. But at my expense. Our eyes met in the moment of greatest pain. At the moment when its teeth were in my leg and the teeth of his gaze buried in the depths of my sclera I didn't want to pull away. I felt a curiosity about how deep the teeth could go. And I felt protective of those teeth, they belonged to me, I didn't want any outside influence to accelerate the penetration. I did not want to lose the sense of possession. I sang for the supper of penetration. Just like people who are given proctoscopy. They sing for the supper of penetration. They want to be penetrated. When I lived in the country I had a room on the fourth floor of an old house. Late at night one of the boarders would return in his car. The car speeded into the driveway. The tires, the chassis, penetrated my body as I lay there. And at methadone they like their urine analyzed. They like to have their body processes exposed to the light of day, the light of grime. The man finally separated the dog from me, took away my connectedness. We began screaming at each other but it was clear there was gratitude, at least on my part. Rage was the schema of my gratitude. Maybe two per cent of my words express my feelings, maybe two per cent of my words are the image of my feelings, maybe two per cent of the time there is a one-to-one mapping between feelings and words. The rest of the time words are a means of prolonging the feeling, prolonging it, inducing it, suppressing it, camouflaging it, celebrating its birth or extinction. I was drawn to the man. He seemed like someone competent on the subject of therapy.

"Therapy!" She laughed bitterly. "It was only later when I thought about his calm quizzical look as the dog was biting my leg off I had what could be classified as a normal reaction. I hated him, hated the dog, hated the dog's need. Perhaps he was a psychologist, perhaps he was an authority on Janov and Freud and Laing. I'm tired of those enfants terribles, with their programs, their pronouncements, their poses on the cover of books, savage messiahs, who play their games of revisionism and innovation at the expense of patients. I'm tired of these frustrated novelists who romanticize the victims of domestic shell-shock. But maybe he knew nothing at all about therapy.

"But how did you compensate yourself for all the sores on your body?" the black man asked. "I had resources, hidden resources. I turned one heel inward as I walked. Pigeon-toed I seemed to have a greater grip on myself. I felt intact. I proclaimed my flaw, my hurt by walking pigeon-toed. And that way the holes became flaws in a general program of flaws and so they were not out of place, they were transformed, they were no longer flaws. If I had held my head high and walked bow-legged, strutted with arms and tits, then I would have felt the flaws encroaching, denying the strut. I steadied myself, turning inward steadied me, I awaited an invitation to turn outward. None came but I could get past the sandboxes and the benches without scar. I had gestures too, gestures that took me beyond the self with the hole in its forearm. It was difficult to find gestures but once found they transformed me, cancelled the self with the hole. Through the trees I watched the sunset. I stooped and stared. The simplicity of the gesture restored me to myself.

"I was smoking furiously now. None of my fumes wrestled with itself. With each new cigarette I tried to kill the numbness produced by the previous. I tried to erode away the novelty of smoking, to get to the essence of smoking, but I would never get to the essence of smoking by watching myself and yet I would have felt inconsolable if I was not a spectator at my own immersion. Each cigarette was a failed attempt at immersion. Each new cigarette was an attempt to penetrate the thicket of all the failed cigarettes, to subtract the effect of those cigarettes on me and achieve the feeble commerce between myself and the cigarette. Each cigarette numbed me to a need for cigarettes, I smoked one more cigarette only because I had smoked the one before. Each new attempt was an attempt to break away from habit and examine the cigarette, the smoking of the cigarette, to determine its effect on me independent of habit, to determine the nature of my need. Yet before I could smell the novelty, the uniqueness of smoking I was overcome with the sameness and a kind of relief at the sameness of the effect, same as the effect of the cigarette that came before. And each new cigarette caused a kind of recrudescence of the effect of the other cigarettes. It added another layer to the impenetrability of the essence of cigarettes. Erosion of habit and numbness to the effect of cigarettes gave me little time to smoke simply. I was looking for the self that smoked but I did not want to find it, I did not want to evict novelty, the novelty of a new cigarette, I did not, in some part of me, want to coincide with myself, I preferred to be on the trail of myself, leaving clues for myself, always more than I could assimilate at a given instant. Weary as I was pursuing myself I felt instinctively that I would be made far more weary by catching up with myself. The search was merely a pretext for feeling lost, lost in my efforts and lost in her past. I was numbed to my pain, soothed, smothered. In trying to overcome inertia halfheartedly, in trying to overcome a halfhearted inertia I was most comfortable. The black man did not smoke. He did not have to light a first cigarette in the hope of retrieving himself by inhaling. He did not have to smoke a second cigarette, almost crushing the butt-to-be between fore and middle fingers. He knew in advance that smoking the second was a vengeance perpetrated on the first for not giving the required sense of self, by smoking the second I proved to the first I did not need it. The first cigarette drove me into the arms of the second and yet by smoking the second I seemed to be celebrating everything in the second that the first lacked. I looked forward to the foul aftertaste. Smoking reminded me of Mastroianni smoking in "8 1/2" to the tune of his mistress's babble about her husband--he martyrs his fumes to her babble. Smoking reminded me of Olivier smoking during the confession scene in "Rebecca." Smoking made me one with Anna Karina in "Vivre sa vie" when she explains to Brice Parain that she is responsible for every gesture; smoking permitted me to emigrate to the foreign country of "Pierrot le Fou" where Belmondo nursed a butt between his teeth, stoic, stunned, impassive, as Karina sings to him of their love. I had precedents for my behavior. But in their case, except perhaps in the case of Karina, their energy was channeled completely into smoking. It was not partitioned between smoking and watching themselves smoke. And I was condemned to watching myself, in case she ambushed me. I had to maintain a vigil for the self that preserved its calm, its innocence, in the face of her outflow, the self that would at all costs survive her ambush. She gripped her syllables as a woman in labor the bedposts. Midwife uncertified, I was not quite prepared for what she expelled, bloody and bristling. But the black man survived without smoking, without benefit of a third cigarette to put an end to the turmoil he must be feeling in listening to her. Smoking was supposed to protect me and then like all props it became an impediment on the way to defending myself against all she expelled. She was on to the pots again.

"I had to go back to the pots. I felt I had contaminated them merely by looking, I felt I had uplifted the lids merely by looking, by speculating. I waited until she took a shower, then I went back. I felt the kind of need you must feel for me, without even diagnosing it." She was cutting into me. She was clinical, not venomous. "My needs have an ominous trajectory. I wanted to watch as they were extinguished in the dark. I felt that by going back and verifying I would come to the end of my needs. I was all rapt attention. One would have said a schoolgirl at her first fireworks. I touched the pans to make sure I had not altered them. I could not remember for the life of me whether I had touched them. It was like the times in the department store when I was on the verge of making a killing. There was so much intensity in the moments before I touched them that when I was actually touching that was a kind of respite from being conscious. I was setting right the lids but I was only making things worse. I was supposed to be verifying the original position of the lids. But this new act made it harder for me to get back to the original situation. I was supposed to be making sure. But immediately I was in the making sure it became an impediment on the way to making sure, it disturbed the equilibrium. The minute I was in the act the act became an impediment. I had to extricate myself from it. You are thinking that I had a need to satisfy that had nothing to do with pots, nothing to do with lids. But how could I satisfy needs I did not know. If they did not feel like needs they were not needs. And after they are introduced to you how do you confront them, make them known, satisfy them. Leave me to my pots. I was prepared only for the moment when I lost the opportunity to satisfy my needs. I was adept when it came to the onset of regret for missed opportunities." I thought of Lambert and Marcher. "Once I began verifying it became a disruption, not a verification. For I was terrified of my own touch, my touch was polluted. If there had been some means of verifying without touching I would have been happy.

"Maybe by setting right the lids I was dislocating them." Was regret a sentiment? But if I could elevate ambivalence to the status of a sentiment then she was permitted the same with regard to regret. Sentiments need our help, they are remedies, false remedies, but remedies, or perhaps the names are false remedies and we are sentinels on the frontier of false remedies. It was getting cold, it was no longer evening. Water lapped the pilings, behind us the warehouses. "But I'm over that hump now. She did not come back for awhile, each time I touched the lids I lost consciousness, it was as if at the moment of contact I was swallowed up in a sense of inadequacy. At the moment of touch I felt deprived of the organs necessary to verify. At the moment of contact I was all contact, I had no body parts, no orientation. My body was an impediment to verification. When I touched the pots they became an extension of my body or my body became an extension of the pots and I was unable to extricate myself. There was nothing to touch. I was touching myself. I almost fainted. I almost wished she would return at that moment. That way confusion, shame, hesitation, all would be swallowed up by and dissipated in her outrage. Maybe I did not really expect outrage. She took her time, the shower went on forever. I looked around the room. I did not want to leave a trace of myself yet my gaze fastened on every object and refused to move. My gaze was a tell-tale sap that anointed its targets. I even touched what my gaze had set awry: napkins, clothes hangers, pen cartridges. And as I was repairing what my gaze had dislocated I felt the best defense against leaving traces of myself was to remain there when she returned. To camouflage with my bulk all my aftertastes. My absence was more potent than my presence. That I sensed. My absence had an invigorating stench. My absence would not slander me. My presence would betray me, make me less noxious than I was. My absence would speak without visible tremor. I noticed things I'd never noticed when I lived there. When I lived there objects were extensions of me, they were the extremities of my own body, they were defined as the endpoint of a gesture, the alluvial deposit of a gesture. Now they forced themselves on me, separate entities, forcing me to be an object among objects, finished, no longer in transit, replete with flaws. Maybe these objects came out of hiding once I had left. Each discovery gave me a sense of infinite loss. It was as if every time I discovered an object I could smell the objects of a similar nature I had missed. Every discovery created a retroactive negligence. Why is that? Let's see. Is it more frightening to me that the past was void or full. I felt as if I hadn't been ready, on the alert, for all the previous stimuli." "Because there weren't any," suggested the black man.

"The fullness of the moment created the missed fullness of the immediate past and I wanted to discover more items. Maybe I was afraid of concentrating too hard on what I had uncovered: dolls, talcum, miniature lamps with figured bases. I had to believe they were just the beginning of an arsenal. I was in pain, greed distracted me from consciousness of what I had already discovered. But in pain there are islands of habituation, I adjusted the pot lids again. I washed them a little with my spittle. But I knew I wanted to stop, I knew I should not touch what belonged to another. Was it good sense or the echo inside me of an adage gone sclerotic. I set the dolls on the bed. They became independent of me. Each one propped among its fellows moved me deeply. They each accepted their place in the line. I submitted to them. I watched myself as I relinquished my own anguish with a gulp and turned to them, my self-denial buoyed me up, I was suppressing myself for the sake of objects, that must not be saddled with my anguish. Then I realized that I had propped them on the bed so they could look down on me, force me to deny the anguish, play at hiding my feelings. I examined every gesture, I had a pretext for examining every gesture, it must pass customs before admission into the foreign country of their innocence. But concern with them was only a pretext for self-consciousness. Just as when an adult talks to a child he listens to every syllable, he applauds his ability to suppress himself, to secrete a simpler self who traffics in proverbs and banalities. He monitors every syllable, every word, and is amazed at their beauty. He has a pretext for looking at his words. He looks at them as he emits them and he looks at them again when they are rebounded back from the child's incomprehension, wry importunity. The child has not gobbled the words up as adults do. They are refunded and the adult pretends to be disturbed the words are refunded. But secretly he is exhilarated that the words come back. I propped the dolls on the bed so they would watch me, so I would have a pretext for vigilance. Usually with adults I watched myself constantly, incessantly. Now I could play at watching myself. These objects would catch nothing, they would not blackmail me. I was not afraid, vigilance was not eaten up with fear. I played at vigilance, I fingered my inflection, I fingered my gestures, I wanted the masquerade to go on forever.

"Eventually she came. She tried to joke, as in the old days, when we were lovers. Or assumed that whatever we were doing categorized us as lovers. But our sparring was imperfect, cautious. We played at tormenting each other lightly the way old friends do. Once over lightly, like omelets. Our tightrope toppled. But she did not notice the pots. She moved around the room. Motion invigorated her. Her words were disembodied. They came not from a stolid schoolgirl but from an Egyptian princess. I almost wanted her to notice the pots. To be rewarded for my labor. And yet I was in terror also lest she discover I'd been tampering with her possessions. She moved. As she moved I felt I had to move. At first her movement reassured me. I could sit still. Then I began to look at myself sitting as from a distance and I felt she must feel my sitting, my reclining, while she moved, was an impertinence. Her moving was an order to get up. I got up, stood by the door, tapped my finger on the hinge. I was outside her order. I was doing something. I could not be extricated from my own motion. I was no longer waiting for her to descend on me. "Why are you smoking so many cigarettes?" she said suddenly to me. "I'm afraid," I said, and lit another. Did I smoke, did I light up another cigarette, to escape the self that was cornered by her, trapped into confession, just as she had feared being trapped by the Pot girl, or to provide an arena in which that self, the self that confessed, the self that was trapped, could expand? Did I smoke to seduce her with a pose or did the security of her presence, her awareness of my smoking, allow me to investigate myself smoking? I was no longer afraid to claw toward latent strata. She was there, I wanted to escape her and I wanted her to clarify me. As I puffed I wanted to come to the end of all puffs. I looked at the river. I wanted a barge to pass in the darkness. The fumes settled in my nose, I was happy, I was seared. I was immune to further searing. I confused the settling of the fumes with the passing of a barge. When I looked up the barge was still there, refusing to move. She watched me smoking, she crowded me out of my act with her gaze, the smoking went on without me. I felt the cigarette would drop from my fingers at any moment because there was no one to steer the frigate of the act into port. It was only when she spoke I began to be free of her, to live in her narrative. Or rather, not so much when she spoke and I understood the words but when she began speaking and I registered only the violation of the silence. For when I began to understand words, when I began to smell her effort to convince me, to make meaning out of rubbish, then I began to watch my self understanding, fingering her words, refusing to unite them. Then I began to curse her for the words she imposed on me, stuffing down my gullet her excreta, and then I began to feel the need to confess, to confess my deformation of every word that came from her. And the need to confess, the concentration on the need to confess, the sense of rottenness that disqualified me for, exempted me from, listening, was a welcome distraction from listening. The accent shifted from my listening to my future telling of how, because of my own rottenness, I was unable to listen properly. Was I smoking because of her or in spite of her. That was the disadvantage of being around another, even in darkness. Her attention, her mere presence, made me feel I was posing. I could not decide whether I smoked because she was present or not. Maybe I felt I was posing because I had to think about what I was doing while I was doing it, so there would be no unforgivable lapses. I held my arm a certain way after inhaling and immediately after my arm was placed, fixed, I felt I had planned it, put it there purposely, as on an auction block, on an executioner's block. And after my arm had come to rest and there were no repercussions I felt surprised, I anticipated reprisals, I watched my arm, I felt my arm was some kind of libation. Maybe I had to make her feel I was not excluding her from my act, that she was the sap fecundating all my discontinuous motions converting them to gesture. I was not smoking because I wanted to smoke. I smoked as a makeshift until she deigned to continue, smoking I proclaimed my impasse. I was trapped like a leaf in the ice of gesture, she was the thaw for the winter of gesture. She was the sap that flowed through the canals of a depopulated city. The black was immune to and bereft of this need, to be directed by others. He got up, sat down, tossed, turned, scratched his balls. Her presence made no difference to him.

"After the pots I never saw her again." The sound of the cyclists' pedaling was the flap of birds' wings, the rending of a fabric. The firmament was being torn to shreds above our heads. She held her ears. "What do you know about psychiatrists?" she said to the black man. "Do you know what it is to feel such need, every meeting is a crisis, an ordeal. You give your all to the most insignificant stranger and you walk away shattered because he did not respond. Every relation soon becomes parody, a pale ghost, of the ideal relation. Neither of you know. He has medical school and you have--your blackness. But you don't know the unbearable excitement before the most trivial encounter, when everything is at stake and nothing is at stake. You examine every gesture, you look for signs. You're in a different time zone then. You're on the trail of something, someone vanished long ago. And then when the other is gone, the source of your signs, you're evicted back into the old time. You move your arms, you stretch, and you seem to be moving against infinite resistance, as in boiling pitch, like Dante's damned. Because you're used to being in pursuit, used to driving the moment toward a climax that never comes. Because for the other the encounter is merely an encounter, a way of passing the time, your presence does not create for him a different time sense. He walks away with vast quantities of your blood, all your words, spilled from you with the lance of his silence. I'm tired of driving the simplest encounters toward some kind of climax they aren't prepared for and perhaps I'm not prepared for it either. That's why I apply myself with such intensity, post with such dexterity to the old outburst, because I know it will lead nowhere. And it's after that it's most excruciating. When the other is gone and you're left without a sense of yourself, drained, dehydrated. It's like time itself has congealed. You do the only thing you can do. You deplete yourself. If there is a little food in the ice box you throw it away, those acts assure you of the future precisely because you are unprepared for the future, you have incapacitated yourself for the future. So the future will come. It will come. It will take your depletions as a sign of unreadiness and it will pounce, it will swoop like the eagle toward the toad. And instead of terror when you feel its claws churning your underbelly you will rise to meet it and frighten it away."

"Were you alone or in a group when you shot up?" I asked. "Shut up. I don't hear you. Go away." The words she would have to use to answer were too excruciating. And then she said them and they were not excruciating. Or maybe it was the connectedness to me she dreaded, the connectedness that came from understanding and responding properly. But she had driven me a little distance and she could respond to the space from which I was evicted, created by my eviction. Or maybe her words were not an attempt to drive me away but a way of conveying her discomfort to me, the schema of a discomfort for those with too much pride to speak straightforwardly. "In a group. I liked it better in a group." The U-1 man assented, he gave a long lazy yawn of assent on which many pleasant memories stuck like flies. "You have a reason for shooting up. I mean, you hear the sound of the needle in the flesh, the little spurt of resistance. But in somebody else's flesh. It seems as if you are submitting your own flesh to that foreign needle. And they will take your immobility as a kind of defiance, refusal. You hear the sound as a kind of command. Or as a sign that the coast is clear. They are distracted. They will not prevent you. Or you stab yourself so you don't have to listen and think about the other needles going in. You inject the drug as a kind of distraction. When I'm alone there is no motivation. It's getting cold." We walked along the margin of the pier. At some point we lost the black man. We lost Ws interest once we were in motion. The Village was dark but rawly lit. Trash eddied off the pavement, the closest it got to migration, toward other orchards. The windy waste of dust and trash driven against playground fences like prisoners impatient of parole meant the sky was a n-ii1ky purple, electric. Rain was imminent. I did not have to look up to know. Ozone seared my membranes. We stopped in front of a store, open house. They invited us in for free coffee and cookies. They would save our souls before it was too late.