
This is a process that has no limit, and yet when we try to follow it, we keep bumping our heads against something. Usually it’s a lantern, left behind probably by those who first explored this region of the universe, and then extinguished by time and a lack of fuel. By the same forces that turn us into raving lunatics if we weren’t already born that way. Or certain the alternatives are even worse. I roll my pants legs up and sit with my feet and calves in the hot water and almost immediately I am joined by a woman named Mary, a former grad student in Dennis’ department who has gone on to an Assistant professorship at the University of Houston and is, according to Dennis, in the midst of a vicious divorce, a woman who retreats to the things and the places she knows so as to have the courage to become someone altogether new. To throw off the past while wallowing in it at the same time, and in this she reminds me of myself if only because the cowardice of it seems so familiar. The swagger designed to obliterate something underneath, a child living in a hole in the ground, the water dropping continuously from the tree roots, from the places in the soil that are cold to the touch at first, and gritty, just the sort of thing to keep you from sleeping, until you get used to it, until you can’t imagine a day not spent in the company of centipedes and the creeping millimeters of frost. Around the edges you may expect to find certificates, blank piece of paper let fall from an open briefcase, a careless and as such, evenhanded redistribution of those things that differentiate one person from another, that mark one out as worthy of notice while dooming the other to senseless toil and long division. At the center, though, there are no more words to be placed on the paper, no more paper really to accept the words. All of it has disintegrated the way castles do when the state declines to refurbish them. Or when there are no individuals left with a taste for history. They have been shuttled out the back door with a promise of brandy or peanut brittle, to the accompaniment of a brass band. Mary spares no moments stripping down, removes her clothes as if they have been chafing her and invites me to do the same, to get down off the lip of the Jacuzzi and settle in, but my view of the pool and the woman in it, my original object of pointless observation and terrible longing, would be lessened by the oblique angle a position in the apparatus offers, and besides, I am beginning to realize I am not the man I think I am insofar as I thought I was any sort of man at all. As opposed to a visitor from another planet, say, or a mistake in generation. A thing that wasn’t meant to disintegrate immediately, but probably wasn’t meant to thrive either. Like a piece of soap. Or a creature of the sort one sees on occasion scurrying over the surface of a brick.

