Our doubles do all the work. It is our doubles in the past learning from a splinter in the thumb not to test the texture of wood that way, our doubles spread out over the continent of the past and the peninsula of the future pulling on shoes and disagreeing vehemently and climbing from one bed to another at the invitation of whatever it is gets such things accomplished. And they all possess that same odd lack of affect common to the type when they appear on film, recognizable, sure, and yet not the same, distant and somehow less than completely human, so that when we stare at them from whatever great distance we happen to occupy at the time, they don’t even really seem to share our features. The outline maybe, the place where body blends in with not-body in subtle shades and degree, but if we are fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of the eyes, say, they are grainy and far away, looking out at nothing. The same applies to those the doubles approach, those that take the doubles to bed for whatever reason, or speak to them crossly or simply pass them on the street and then disappear again forever. From this distance, Squid seems to move with all the jerky, instinctive determination of a walking stick, crosses the room and lies down next to the girl as if there were stage directions involved, maybe even someone pulling a lever. But he knows discussion must continue, at least for the moment, lest she think him awkward and inexperienced, the very thing, of course, he is and wishes not to be, the way we are always less sophisticated or intelligent than we would like others to believe. And we learn to bury the tension this causes by whistling tunes that haven’t been invented yet. Or at least haven’t been written down. Though certainly they are built on a framework that has been explored previously by those who make it their business to create something that seems unique, but is still safely familiar in its construction. They hope, of course, it will make them a great deal of money by drawing audiences in with the promise of discovering the next earth-shattering thing. Without alienating them in the process. After all, right turns smack of the abyss when we have been taking lefts, and certain expectations have a right to be met if only because they have been around for a very long time. They are like an ancient docent at the museum saying any number of erroneous things – that the Pollock was actually painted by an alligator with a brush in its teeth, that George Grosz was preparing to move to Haiti – but is still allowed to remain on the job because the city’s children have grown quite fond of him. They might not return should the man get kicked to the street.

Her intentions are obvious even to a boy who doesn’t know what intentions actually are, who envisions them as a set of playing cards one keeps in one’s head, and when the command is given to take a card, to turn it over so as to reveal what’s on the face of it, that part of it that distinguishes it from all the others, one does as one is told. Perhaps, then, our desires are all merely accidental, things implanted in us by a Providence that enjoys a game of dice, a hand of poker or a magic trick, not just now and then, but habitually, as if it had been brought up on the streets and had to learn how to feed itself by gambling. Or maybe, Squid thinks, that’s not what actually happens on the streets at all. Who knows? Maybe he has been led to believe things about others less fortunate than himself from reading too many books and watching too many programs on tv in which the characters take lsd and then jump off the nearest roof because they think they can fly. And of course it has been written down ahead of time that they are wrong much as it has been written down somewhere precisely when the planet will stop revolving around its own axis and how many ounces of coco go into the making the perfect mousse. It’s when the others have chosen yet one more well-thought-of chophouse, one more destination that has made its way into the pamphlet, that they find themselves alone in the hotel room he shares otherwise with his brother, and they are on separate beds, she by the bathroom wall and he closer to the window with the curtains drawn and the view behind the curtains of the other wing of the hotel (he knows from having seen it) and the other people who look back on occasion when their own shades are open and their own mobile lives have slowed, if only momentarily. The movie on the tv is science fiction, clones doing something in a world that has turned, for some reason, minty green. There is the vague threat of biological annihilation, though Squid can’t concentrate adequately to determine how that threat is related to the advent of the clones, if at all. Strange, how all connection is torn asunder, how our ties to the physical world reside somehow in our ears. And the rest of our bodies do not admire this solution. They object fervently, with whatever guerilla tactic comes to hand. If only he could make the connection -- who knows? even the clones themselves might offer insight into how he is supposed to get to that other bed. Certainly such things as clones know more than they are letting on. They have to have experienced something in whatever time they have been allowed to roam around. While Squid – fifteen now, thirty some day, forty-five – he has the sense that he will nearly always be waiting, he will nearly always be a mere three feet away.

The foreign country reminds Squid of a place in his mind he visited once when he was even younger, a child who liked the inside of his closet more than he liked whatever happened to be outside of it, a child who thought his mind a place where you could meet any number of strangers and still know their names. This was accomplished through a process we might now consider mundane, a trick, really, very similar to the method for identifying things through trial and error, through the disqualifying of those souls who don’t fit certain categories and those who don’t seem to be bothered overly by the fact. Squid thinks he ought to recall more information about this island he is visiting, with its royalty housed in palaces that look from the street like ordinary buildings, all stone and mason and ironwork out front, even if those palaces are of outsized proportions. Perhaps he has read somewhere and forgotten the history of this palace, or the other palace almost exactly like it (but located a hundred miles away) that all those in his group – his mother and his brother and the girl from Orlando who has become enormously friendly and her decidedly less friendly older sister and their altogether arctic parents – will be visiting in several days, the exact number of which is of no more concern to him ultimately than is the shape and the diameter of that part of the eye that remains hidden behind the flesh and the bone that together make up the socket. In fact, he is not sure he wants to know anything beyond what is happening at that precise moment, the girl from Orlando leaning on him suddenly, complaining of the heat, of the miles they have walked as a group since the start of the day, her arms thrown over his shoulders (she, standing behind him, on steps, and thus at a slightly higher level) while those charged with protecting the royalty in their palace go about their ceremonies across the street. And in this position, she can say things in his ear that no one else can hear, not the crowds that surround them, not the other members of the group peppered throughout the crowd, but nonetheless close by and no doubt (especially her arctic parents, one of whom will hang himself two months after the conclusion of this jaunt abroad) watching very carefully to see if they can read her lips. Not even the queen in her palace, who is, of course, reluctant to show her face in the window because she has better things to do, no doubt. Or maybe she isn’t even in the country. Maybe she has gone to the town where Squid lives and is waiting there patiently for something to happen. For the dam to break upriver, for instance, and the houses to wash past one after the other, or at least bits and pieces of them, the lumber and the animal cages, until all of it gets wedged in under a bridge that spans the river. And then, of course, the bridge too gives way in the face of that unthinkable weight and ghastly momentum.

Michelle has her opinions too, mostly about the act of masturbation and why it is so important that someone watch. Perhaps, she says, her upper lip glistening with the heat and the weight of what she is about to say, the weight of what she has said already these past two hours and these past two days, claims she makes that are oblong on the surface, like the windows in a front door, but no easier to see through ultimately. Because someone has come along and modified the substance they are made of, has turned that substance into something that resembles itself and yet is not itself, something that might fool the novices, but when are they ever consulted? Perhaps, she says, the body is the same thing as the mind, in that it can’t help but behold itself at exactly the same time it is in operation. The only way it can hope to determine its actual effects on the surrounding milieu is to look at itself through the gaze of another. It must hijack that gaze the way we frequently hijack our opinions from the print journals we subscribe to and then forget to cancel. Or, when we try to cancel, we are thwarted by a bureaucracy not unlike that the Romans invented so as to keep track of their holdings beyond the Mediterranean. As Michelle sees it, the lover suffers from a kind of cataract that keeps his body out of view. The addition of another body at close range could only serve to heighten the distance he feels by ensuring a total elimination of himself. A spiraling outward into a place not unlike outer space in that it is cold and there is room enough for everyone. But once the others get there, they suffer the vertigo that comes of losing gravity itself, of being free to rotate on more than two axes. Dennis thinks the image forced and invites us to contemplate instead the towers downtown, their alternating colors in glass and the way they throw the sun back at itself as if their makers weren’t the least grateful for anything that came before the charter that made this place possible, that convinced the first settlers they were wasting other people’s time and lives, to be sure, but not their own. It is a kind of Manifest Destiny in reverse, he says, the plains and expanse of the sky itself returning to the eye from which they first sprang forth, albeit accidentally. Eventually everything will be a white dot against an endless black background and people won’t know any longer what the name is of a single thing that occupies their memories. Not the rocking chairs or the hungry locusts. Not the place on the back of their hands where the veins cluster in cul-de-sac patterns.

The monotonous pounding begins to seem like a trick, something set up by those who would like to see the afternoon end badly, and I turn away, as deeply as it pains me to do so, from the sight of the woman swaying in her white dress and bare feet, and I say something to Dennis to the effect that his world has suddenly become comprehensible to me because it is depicted using cartoon characters and women deeply-enthralled by rhythm, all of which is designed to make him angry because Dennis does not get angry. He is the antithesis of nature and its propensity to spit things in a rage, not because he doesn’t have legitimate reasons to turn against what little of the world is there for any of us to grasp, but because it would cause him indigestion. He allows me, though, to cut beneath the armor for reasons that never seem clear to him but which materialize for me now and then like handprints in the condensation on a car window. The difference in temperature outside and in makes the past appear suddenly as the present, the print left behind by someone who was simply passing by in the alley, who leaned against the window in order to balance himself while he pulled a pebble out of his shoe, say, or while he peered in to see if there was something he could steal. Maybe we are supposed to find continual reminders of what others have done around us even if we can never know what these accomplishments might stand for. Whether or not they stand for anything at all. It’s possible signs don’t point in any particular direction. They don’t even feel at home on a pole. I suggest out loud and within earshot of the others that Dennis is feeling out of sorts. But this ploy stems, of course, from the fact that I am feeling out of sorts, and I think Dennis has become, despite advanced degrees, impressionable. But I know too that he is familiar with any deceptive strategies I might have become familiar with in the intervening years. And I wish to get his mind off the lover who wants Dennis to watch while he masturbates, which, Dennis says, might have been interesting if it had happened just the once, but where do you find the energy to officiate when you don’t know the rules? How do you settle on that bed and still feel as if it will support the both of you? He’s all the way in Houston, I say, as if this is all it takes, and when Dennis doesn’t respond, I suspect he is visualizing those days when the both of us were young enough to feel the need to discuss seriously what would happen to us once we grew old. I know I am.

One has to wonder at the wisdom of inculcating members of a species with desires this all-consuming, with the very real sense that everything else must be submerged, must be annihilated by this compulsion that can’t really serve much purpose beyond making every waking moment a horror. Sure, the bottom line is furthering the species on the docket, but at what cost? How are we supposed to enjoy the vast stretches of time between moments of questionable gratification? Or maybe no one else suffers these things to the same degree I do; no one else allows himself to be hijacked and bound with mechanical tape, stowed in a corner where the rats mingle with the bilge water and the salt spray. I have long suspected a defect in the wiring like that which sends a house up in flames, a degeneracy handed down from peasant forefathers wandering the hills near Palermo, or spearing fish at the mouth of a river that is itself prey to overtopping its banks at the least provocation, the sight of someone making her way to the water’s edge where she too is looking to make a meal of whatever happens to be floundering in the shallows. Or there is laundry to do and we just haven’t yet caught a glimpse of the basket. Maybe she will return at precisely the moment when the water has gotten chest deep and the eels and the dolphins that otherwise content themselves with the sandy depths a mile or more beyond the mouth of the river, where the ocean is tea-stained because it must accept all comers, it must allow the silt to enter it and secure itself accommodation, the eels and the dolphins suddenly find themselves in close proximity to her skin and they relish the cover offered by the situation, the boundaries suddenly on their side for once and willing to make all ills better. What would you do? I wonder as the woman takes her shoes off, one arm over the young man’s shoulder, the other reaching down toward the foot that comes up, first the one and then the other, all of it still in time somewhat with the hands on the drums and the sound waves breaking on all those who have circled up around the original circle. Would you take the opportunity to slither closer, to undulate right up to the very skin of her thighs? The changing angle at the elbow as the woman struggles to keep her head above the surface? Or would you introduce yourself first? Would you stick your eely head out of the water and say something interesting and apropos you had stumbled on once when skimming through The Discourse on Method? The woman sinks her toes, just as soon as they are free of the shoes that had contained them (and which are now swinging by their straps from her right hand, the free hand, the one that does not rest on the young man’s shoulders and so must shoot out perpendicular to the body, on occasion, so as to keep the woman and the man she is draped over, from falling backwards into the dirt where the grass has been worn away by a thousand, two thousand other pairs of shoes or similarly bare feet), into the dirt as if they were the delicate end of a trowel, and she lowers her head to allow the hair to cascade over it on all sides and it seems for a moment as if she has become all movement the way jellyfish are all movement, really, not even the protoplasm on which they’re based counting finally as something that might actually be there, might actually exist in its own right, if the jellyfish decided for some reason to cease its relentless explorations.

The young man is dark and oddly vacant-looking, a copy of something that hasn’t entirely surfaced yet, that has been trying to work its way out of the ground for a millennium. A student most likely, he is deferential to Dennis and contemptuous of the rest of us, though this contempt seems less a direct statement than an accident, something that can’t be helped, the way clouds can’t be helped when there is an excess of water vapor in the atmosphere. I decide that if I were ten years younger I would feel an immediate need to imitate the young man, to try to ingratiate myself with him, though this probably results from a lack of memory on my part, the inability to conjure what my actual motives and desires consisted of even a month or two previous. How is it possible to know with any certainty the outlines of the ego when the ego is like a machine? It is designed by people we never actually meet and its inner workings remain hidden precisely when the machine is at its most active. When it is not falling apart. To get at the gears and mechanisms inside, one has first of all to shut it off, to pry the protective coverings off and then speculate as to the precise function of each of the infinite parts one is confronted with. Some are labeled and some are merely borrowed from someone else’s ego because that person was close at hand and he didn’t seem to need them. Or at least he didn’t object. The woman is moving to the drumbeats in exaggerated fashion, her long black hair swinging up against the young man’s shoulder, and he has the audacity to get aggravated by this, or at least to feign aggravation and then feign a lack of aggravation immediately following, so that neither the young woman nor anyone who might be observing them more closely than is necessary or healthy has any idea finally of what his true feeling are in the matter. Should she cease gyrating, should she keep all parts of her body to herself? I have the sensation of physical pain at the sight of her, a longing so thirsty and deep, I am tempted to name it and put it in a jar for future reference by those who come along after I am extinct, after all such desires have bled into each other and so diluted themselves, turned themselves into faint echoes -- the wind at the other end of a canyon or the sound of a trumpet solo reproduced on the single inadequate speaker of an old cell phone.