“The old woman wanted Platt on a plane to Raleigh by sixteen hundred but he wanted to meet in person, which is why he was sitting in the back corner booth of the Home Turf Sports Bar in LAX drumming his fingers on the table and wishing for a cigarette. There were no cigarettes and there weren’t going to be any. He had quit for the seventh time and thrown his last pack of kreteks in a trash can in Chhatrapati Shivaji with a yellow Bic and a sheaf of torn boarding passes. He had been through ten time zones since Tuesday, running on airport burritos, instant coffee, and a need to get paid that was beginning to make him sweat. And the old woman and her lawyers were late…”

“It happened that years back, when I was still in the Navy, I attended the wedding reception of a friend in California. My friend was quite widely traveled and had an extensive acquaintanceship, which may explain why once the delighted couple had left the reception did not—as so many do once shorn of their central purpose—cease to entertain. It happened that I found myself still seated at a long table outside in the dead of the night, zipped in my jacket against the chilly mist of the Presidio, when I had the privilege of participating in the most peculiar conversation of my life up until that point…”

“It came to pass that before the coming of the Prophet, peace be upon him, in a certain lonely and desert land there was a citadel. The sultan of this citadel was a mighty ruler, blessed by Allah with great riches, a strong army, and two heirs, each of the same age, having been born of the sultan’s two most beautiful wives on the same day, in the same hour, yes, in the very same moment, as much as any other. They were the great pride of the sultan and he lavished every possible thing on them: the most wonderful stallions, prized jewels, and delectable sweetmeats that came out of all the debatable lands about, procured at great cost. But these worthy sons were both well accomplished: they sat horses well, could draw any bow, and speak to any man, whether he was a shepherd or a noble vizier, with a pleasing tongue. Furthermore, they were both considered wise, discerning, and courageous…”

“We go to sleep between four hundred thread count sheets. Our humidifiers and air conditioners hiss and hum quiet, sighing lullabies. Do birds call in the night or does the wind roar? Turn the sound machine on, hear the mute and castrated murmur of the waves, or the distant drum of rain captured by microphones planted under a banana leaves in Puerto Rico. It is imported for us. For our comfort. For our pleasure…”

This is a short story in very rough draft. I wrote the bones of it a long time ago and just made some major changes. Feel free to let me know what you think.

—

You can see it coming, as it always does, in the slowly diminishing high-water mark of the glass, as inexorable as the tide. There’s no letting go, now, no stopping it. She drains the glass and pushes it away, her smile sparkling. Not tonight, maybe, not yet. You stack the silverware on the dishes and carry them back into the kitchen.

“Adam! Let’s have another glass. The red,” she calls absently from the other room.

“That was a terrific dinner,” you say. “What was that on the chicken?”

“Onion crumbs,” she says absently, as you come back into the living room with the open bottle. She’s playing with her bangs, unfashionably long now. “Do you think I should cut my hair?”

“I don’t know. It looked good short.” She probably needs to dye it again; she hasn’t touched it this last three weeks and there are dark brown roots showing under the blonde.

“Fuck it.” She pours herself another glass as you sit. “You wouldn’t notice either way.”

“Of course I would notice,” you say. But is that true? You just noticed the roots, after all. But it’s the right thing to say.

“Like you noticed when I first had it cut short?”

“That’s not fair, Evelyn. I had a lot… going on at work.”

“Oh. I guess I didn’t have anything important going on then, either,” she says.

“I didn’t mean that.” You pour yourself a glass. Might as well. The wine tastes somehow bitter. Is this the right bottle? You pick it up and examine the label. You were sure this was a new bottle, but it’s old, from the desolate outlands in the back of the refrigerator that you try not to look at too often. There are things back there—ancient cheeses, mysterious leftovers, culinary experiments—better left untouched, unseen.

“I don’t think you appreciate…” she trails off. You let it go.

You look at the clock on the wall. Six fifteen. Not late enough for anything distracting to be on television, too early to go to bed. You look back at her as she takesanother sip of the wine. She doesn’t seem to notice the bitterness; she’s looking over the rim of the glass, in your direction, but is really looking through you: her eyes are full of all the blue, abstract distance of the horizon.

“When I finish school, should we move?” she asks.

“To where?” you ask. Why would you want to move? Where could there possibly be to move to?

“I don’t know, anywhere. Somewhere sunny.”

“I have a good job here. I like my work.”

“You like your work. You like your work,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You sell shoes. Orthopedic shoes. Two months ago you hated that job.”

“It’s… been interesting lately. Absorbing.”

“Bullshit,” she says, bored by the conversation already. “Is there anything on TV?”

“Too early… Really, though, I think I could do pretty well at this job. You know they were talking about promotions today.”

“You have a degree in communications. From the best communications school in the nation. And shoes are absorbing?” She kicks her long legs over the arm of the chair and pours herself another glass. Her hands are trembling slightly.

You shrug.

“You just enjoy being at work more than you enjoy being here.”

You shake your head, fiercely. “That’s unfair. Come on. I’ve had to pick up extra hours, a couple unexpected bills lately.” You realize as soon as you say this that you’ve made a mistake.

“Oh,” she says. “Unexpected bills. Is that what we’re calling it now?”

“Evelyn—” you start, but she cuts you off.

“You know, I’ve had some unexpected bills lately.” She waves the glass at you, wine sloshing in it. “I had so many goddamn unexpected bills, I had to take the semester off, so don’t let me hear you bitch and moan about it.”

“Evelyn…”

There is a long pause. The curtains lift under a breeze that you can’t feel, and then fall back. The curtains are so faded you can barely tell they were once covered in a ludicrous pattern of smiling crabs and frolicking seahorses. She bought them, in some lost thrift store, a long time ago: they were hideous twin-size sheets and she smiled at them and said These will be stupendously ugly curtains. And she was right. You used to smile whenever you saw them. Now they just seem like an insult. One more object with a meaningless story that serves only to remind you of how things were once. How could that story, told so many times, return to life again and be what it was? Was that even the point?

“We could move,” you say at last. “We could go to the coast. My mom has a house there we could rent. There would be work.”

She tosses back the rest of the wine and set the empty glass down, squarely. She swings her legs down off the chair and plants them firmly on the floor. “You don’t want to talk about it.”

“I am talking about it. If you want to move, let’s move.”

She snorts and tosses her head. “Horseshit!” She almost begins to raise her voice, but doesn’t seem to have the energy. “So careful, so very careful of my delicate feelings.Whatever you want, Evelyn,” she says, mimicking your voice squeakily, “Let’s talk, let’s talk, let’s talk.” She reaches for the bottle and you reach for it as well, not sure exactly what your aim is but sure you don’t want her to drink any more. Her hand makes contact with its neck glancingly as your knees collide with the edge of the table. The bottle dances crazily for a moment and falls, spraying wine across the blue tablecloth. She grabs it and sets it upright.

“Whoops,” she says, flatly. You stand, quickly, and have to put a hand on the table to steady it before you knock your own glass over. The puddle of wine starts dripping onto her jeans as you walk into the kitchen and grab soda water and a cloth. When you come back into the living room she’s scrubbing furiously at her jeans with her napkin. The splatter has soaked into her thigh and is running down her leg. “Look at this fucking mess,” she says, disgustedly. She throws the napkin across the table. “I’m going to go put this shit in the wash. Try not to ruin the tablecloth.”

“What, like I did this? You knocked it over.”

“Whatever. Take some responsibility. Jesus.” She walks out, muttering under her breath.

You pour soda on the spreading puddle and scrub it, but aside from staining your hands an ugly burgundy it just spreads. ”This is a loss. It’s a complete loss. God damn it,” you say.

“Surprise,” Evelyn says from the other room.

You grab the tablecloth whole and wad it up, then take it into the kitchen and thrust it into the garbage. She’s standing at the sink, with her jeans in one hand. Still pretty as a picture, even in that ratty shirt. Her panties are yellow lace, and normally the sight of her long legs and heart-shaped ass would have had you thinking right away about putting an arm around her waist, drawing her into you, and doing… something. But she’s staring out the window over the sink now, pensive, and looking at her face you don’t feel anything. She just looks old. Used up somehow. You wonder what you look like. Worse, probably. Sometimes it’s like she’s the one draining your energy away—but if that’s so, why doesn’t she look invigorated? Something else must be in the house, between you, that’s taking both your lives. But if there was something like that, how could you fight it? How could you even speak its name?

“Do you ever think about what it would have been like if we had kept it?” you say. It’s not a question.

“Why should I when you never have?” she says, taking you aback. What does that even mean? Before you can collect yourself, she speaks again. “Fuck you, Adam.”

Taking the garbage from the can, you walk outside. It’s a spread-out neighborhood, and the light from your porch stops at the end of the driveway. Everything else is shrouded in a winter darkness. You shove the garbage into the can and pause. Something about standing there, at the edge of the paltry yellow light, staring into a quiet unknown, reminds you of standing on the beach near the house you grew up.

The first time you were old enough to walk alone through the empty, weedy lots between your childhood home and the beach, it was mid-twilight, a buckled sheet of gray cloud unfurled across the sky. When you reached the top of the last dune, you looked down across the sand and there were a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand starfish scattered there. They were laid and abandoned on the beach by the tide that was even then rolling out. You never found out what brought them there, or how; what unknown current or strange migration would leave the countless spiny bodies to slowly suffocate under the leaden sky. You went down to them, walking, then running, as the surf fled. Back and forth, armful after armful, you flung them back into the sea, but your efforts were never enough. With each unmeasured moment the ocean receded, farther and farther, until there were so many of them beached and dying, far more than you could ever carry, and the tide was not turning yet, no, not yet.

Why’d you do it? you asked me, and I shook my head. This was the last day I knew you; then you were gone, to Coronado.

I remember, when I met you, your face: your saffron hair bound high on your head in an intricate knot, your skin pale white and blue and severe as a blade. Except when you looked at me. How you softened, and I knew I was your weakness.

Walking with you was like holding a butterfly in the palm of the hand, thinking any sudden move would mar you forever. Not because you were delicate. You could spit coarse oaths and joke with the worst of us. But because, inexplicably, you had shown me and no other—not even him, not even my friend, not even your lover—the gap in your armor. Why? I couldn’t know then. I know now that a person chooses who they fall for; that you took a chance on me. Out of boredom? The despair of countless ordinary days?

The lapidary with his gold-sheathed lens curettes the callous exterior of the jewel, revealing pure and fiery crystal. The prism, laid bare, refracts the light. 

The limpid stillness of the moment hung there. I shook my head, wanting to say Because I loved you. That was what the moment called for: for the grand declaration.

But it wasn’t true. I had taken you from him because I could. What promises you thought you saw in me were vapors. I gave you little. You wanted so much, I see that now: and it comes to me that, in forcibly taking you from him, in diminishing your innocence, I should have given you something in trade. I should have given you a false piece of my soul, to carry with you, to recall fondly that your beauty had made some part of me your slave, even if distance carried us apart. I obeyed the precept: this above all, to thine own self be true. I had neglected the source: Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;/At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—/Almost, at times, the Fool.

So I said: Because I could. Thinking that was wise. 

I see this moment retreat. I have wanted, in the years that have passed since, to change my answer, my refusal, into anything else. I have wanted to scour the pain from your eyes like cutting away the flaw from a jewel. I see this moment retreat, and as the retreating moment goes, I see too flying away my chance to start anew.

You and I must live on, like the grains in the diamond, the color in the stone.

In the dream he has a cloak and a sword and a horse. He stares down from the crest of the high hill into the valley. Home and yet not. Between stone towers peasants till the fields. Thunder murmurs beyond far mountains, biding its time. But instead of the cool rushing storm of rain that he expects, from the high places down rushes a tide of flame. Hellish brands flung down like the sky itself was charred to pieces. He pulls the cloak about himself and waits for the end.

But upon waking he is naked and covered in sweat. There is no air blowing from the vents. The covers tangled around his legs. He lays still. For that one moment so hot and still he feels fear as a tangible thing. The sheets around his legs were fear, the mattress underneath him the palm of fear, the walls fingers of fear that at any moment could clutch inward on him and pin him. Helpless. Wanting strength and having none.

He stills himself. These images are only phantoms. This place his own. The girl, his girl, rests on his shoulder. He places a hand on her hair; it’s matted with perspiration. She stirs, moaning a word. Not something he understands. He slides out from under her body and walks to the hall. Flicks a finger and the unit coughs, trembles, coughs again. Cool air like a rush of winter from the vents and he sits on the edge of the bed until the moisture wicks from his skin. No nightmares, no fire.

But why when he lays back again does he still feel the weight of the sword at his belt? The girl sighs. Another word, recognizable this time: Lord, she says, lord. And when he drifts to sleep again, settling into her arms uneasily, he blinks and finds himself laying at the foot of the hill, anointed with ashes.

The rockets were supposed to be at nine o’clock but it came dark only an hour later. They ascended a ladder to his roof, sweating in the close air of the wooded street, but came down again when it became clear that it was too much effort. Instead, cheap beer in hand, they watched the first lights from the driveway and then walked down the street and sat in front of the white church. The blaze in the sky. Paper lanterns drifting on the breeze, like long-lived fireflies. The child clapped her hands and stared. Eyes wide. He murmured to himself: These are the days you’ll remember.

Yes, said someone else. Lights above the woods like man was trying to hang new stars in the abyss.

What did you say? one of the women said.

He said these are the days you’ll remember. Right? A rocket popped in the hot dark. The sound passing through them like the heavy toll of a bell.

Yes. That’s what I said. The unspoken ending: when all the world falls to dust.

You meet someone and she seems a little ditzy, but she’s interested in you and she’s very cute. You hear about her childhood, her vices. You discover hidden depths in her. You sleep together and, perhaps not coincidentally, you begin to argue. You begin to wonder if the depths are truly there or the work of wishful thinking. You call her less, tolerate her conversation less. Eventually there is a scene. You break up.

You meet someone and are pleased to discover she is intellectual. She is cultured. Her emotions are complex, subtle. You want her. You’re never quite sure if your feelings are reciprocated. She breaks up with her boyfriend. You are sure you can treat her better. She flirts but cannot seem to make up her mind. Subtlety begins to seem overrated. You wonder if you are playing a game, then begin to know you’re playing a game. She’s biding her time for something better. One day you give up. She starts calling you. It’s too late.

You meet someone and she likes you way too much. She hasn’t met your friends yet and has an unrealistic opinion of your goodness. You are tempted to do something wrong just to shatter her illusion. You realize you aren’t even interested. You sleep with her anyway. You feel awful and stop calling.

You meet someone and a couple of activities in you don’t know whether you are dating. She doesn’t know either. There are misunderstandings. Someone is invited to meet someone’s parents too early. The awkwardness is unbearable. You break up—you think.

You meet someone. You meet someone. You meet someone. Like the myth of the fairy food, dish after dish fed to the unsuspecting victim until he’s swept up in their ageless banquet, kidnapped from the mortal world, always to be hungry, never to be sated. This is how you meet someone, until you grow up.

How much time do we spend in the boundaries? How much time in the places we have carefully delineated for ourselves? We must cross the street between the hashmarks. Do not lean on the subway doors. Play in your own lawn. You sleep in one box, work in another. Even the sky is divided by the grid of electric wires. Someday they will fall down and send ceaseless energy coursing through us. We’ll burn up from the inside. Struck by our own lightning.

There is no unknown land. At least in the time of kings, if you rode far enough, there was a land that no master claimed. That time is gone.

We are controlled by property. We must have a particular name and a number and a magnetic stripe that holds our identity. Somewhere in the trackless wastes of data there is a file that controls my future. It says what I can own and what I cannot. It tells the world that I can be trusted with credit and how far. It says what I should be granted and when. If I should walk from this country to the next these files could turn me away. Impassively and without thought. I do not control my information. My information controls me.

I do not wonder at the impulse to secede from the world. There are still monks that wear the tonsure and the habit. They take their meals in common. They live, speech abrogated, lives of simplicity. How is it that they are more free than I should be? But my life is ruled by numbers. They have submitted voluntarily to the systems that controls them: the Rule. They swear: I will not speak, I will not lust. I will wear only this and eat only this. I will meditate on only good and true things. These measures taken, they can sleep carelessly, as men did in the golden world. What can be taken from those who live in poverty?

The more I am given, the more I can be blackmailed: do what we want or what you have will be taken. The more we have the less we can choose.

The university police rushed him to the hospital, but their urgency was lost on him. The sight and sound, sirens and surgical masks and scrubs the yellow-green of illness all blended together. He barely knew his body was broken, lightly remembered seeing the shard of twisted fender couched in the wreck and driven to his head like a sword. There were flashes of pain like lightning striking through the fog of confused sedation. He saw the tearful face of his son at his side, but more often he drifted from sleep to sleep. 

He saw he was a graduate student again, a little after the second war, in the manor outside Cambridge where he had stayed while finishing his dissertation in medieval studies. The house and its grounds were his brother-in-law’s, unused since the Blitz. He sat at a desk in an oriel window and looked down on water hyacinth drifting in the ornamental ponds between the wet lawns littered with yellow leaves. He wrote and read, puzzling over swerdes and Joyeuse Gard, Tristram and Parsifal. One day as he sat wrestling with etymologies he saw movement at the wrought-iron gate set in the high back hedge. He squinted through his glasses. It was someone scaling the bars. A little knapsack flew over first and then a slight figure. He sat up. It was a girl with a long fall of blond hair in a dirty white dress. She was barefoot but she picked her walk confidently across the lawn to the edge of the pond and sat, taking an apple and a book from her knapsack. She read and ate.

He smiled. She was a trespasser but it was not his garden, and she was a young thing and harmless, probably in her middle teens. It was better that someone enjoy it. He thought about going down and saying hello but his work was months past due. The next week of work she showed up almost every day around lunch. One day she stood at the edge of the water for a long while and he looked up, wondering why she wore such a quizzical look. She stepped into the pond from the grass, stooped, and lifted her dress over her head. He quickly turned away, then, hesitating turned back. She was in by then, only white shoulders and gold hair above the water, so he reasoned it was not be unreasonable to continue work where he was. He could see nothing. She swam for some time. When she looked to be heading back out he closed his eyes.

It was the next week he completed his degree and left for New York, to teach. Sixty years later he had not thought of the girl whose name he never knew, that he saw like a daughter. But in the vision now he saw her in the water as she had been. Her blue eyes locked on his, girl in the water to man in the window. From in the hyacinths her white hand rose and he knew what would be next. He opened the windows. The casements rattled; leaves drifted in over the desk. He opened his attaché and sorted through the papers. From between leather folios he grasped the gleaming hilt, swung it out. The cruciform shape was black against the rays of the sunset as it fell in a long arc. He leaned out. She smiled; she was laying back into the water. But she had caught it and swung it once, twice, three times in the water. The blade was silver water streaming. His vision blurred; he saw his son leaning down on him. The face was riven with grief. He smiled.

“Comforte thyselff—” he seyde, “and if thou here nevermore of me, pray for my soule.”

Sometimes I think about what we did, when we built the roads, their endless loops: there is no single point of entry, no exit; hundreds of millions of glittering rusting cars, run their routes, merging, changing lanes, waiting at stoplights, turn signals flashing, headlights running through the coal-black night, pistons churning, oilslick gearboxes and hissing radiators wandering with no singular purpose across a finely branching network of highway, state route, secondary route, interstate, business exchange, cloverleaf intersection; I think of the trucks jackknifed, the cars run headlong downslope into burning pine stands, the countless countless countless molecules of ozone, carbon monoxide, congealing and rising like a white haze above the white and red veins that burn night and day through the whole world, pumping people and property like a current of composite detritus, racing waves from one coast to the other; I see it all afire with motion in my mind’s eye, all of its speed, all of its iron horsepower and combusting sex, and I see it careen away into the night like one central leather-wrapped wheel had been spun by a monstrous pair of hands fixed devilishly at ten and two o’clock; I see the mass hammer its foot on a collective pedal, downshift and spin away laughing and smoking, leaving only the acrid taste of exhaust and a fading gleam of chrome in the wide-open trackless sky.

I see us the next day, walking to the ends of our driveways, leaning down and touching the bare smooth earth and clay beds where the roads had been. Not even the rainbow sheen of gasoline on the raw ground sawn open like a wound. I see us left behind.

She is thinking of him Sunday evening of the long weekend away from the firm. He had thin lips that she loved to watch curl in amusement at his own rare jokes. His eyes were studied and precisely contained behind wire-rimmed glasses. She loved the way he sat at his desk. How he would steeple his fingers and lean forward on his elbows when someone presented him an idea for comment. His words measured exactingly, sentences driven and founded one upon the other, each a crossbar or rivet in the construction of some exceptional wisdom. When his opinion was given it seemed inevitable: as irrefutable as a hurricane or eclipse of the sun. No denial of its power, no defense against it. Only to endure its cool recital and know that things had changed in its passing. She wishes those words could be her own to say.

She lays in bed across town, pretending to read the book he had recommended over a professional lunch two days before, thinking of the way he brushes his hair behind his ears when he needs a haircut and the asymmetrical knots of his ties: somehow Continental and mysterious for being so. Her gaze rootless, wandering to the ceiling. Pipes groan and tremble in the ancient walls of her apartment. She lays still, envy boiling in her gut like hunger pangs. Envying the careerless girl who brought his coffee and lunch and files. Envying the collar that hugged his throat, redolent of starch, whiskey and English Leather aftershave. Envy like a stain that permeated his surroundings: people, places, things. She wanted to be them and wanted to destroy them because she could not be them. The firm was no longer a career for her. It seethed with something not quite like love, not quite like fear. No matter which way she looked her vision narrowed to a tunnel that ended in a point that terminated at the nameplate on his door. Desire and taboo were consanguine.

Her eyes close. Distantly, she lays the book down. She can feel his warm breath on her long collarbone. Her back arches, her knees fall apart. He’s so close; the lucid voice rumbles in her veins. Somewhere far away, her hand drifts between the clean white sheet and the flushed skin of her stomach. She is taut, vibrating like a bowstring, held back from what she needs, so she lets go.

The supremely logical brain that made her his equal knows that forbidden fruit is all the sweeter, knows that she has made an assumed series of personal sacrifices to arrive at the firm: the pinnacle of achievement that guarantees her wealth and advantage and a certain stiff-lipped respect. She knows that in order for those benefits to continue without a risk that she can’t have certain things. He is a certainty. Perhaps what she feels now is the flood of passion delayed. Perhaps it is passing. Whatever it is refuses to be resisted, just as the logic of an arbitrary one of his merciless arguments refuses to be resisted. Somewhere walls of discipline are straining. Somewhere the structure is weak: rotten foundations, framing not plumb, substandard materials. It must come down. It must.

When her eyes open again, she sucks on her damp fingers, childishly, feeling irritated and sticky. The room is all at once too hot and she opens the window from her bed. Cool night air drains the closeness from the room. She flips on the television and changes the channel six times in the space of half an hour. The sounds of the city die with the sickly evening light. She flips the television back off and picks up her book, straightens the crumpled pages where it lay open. She reads a chapter. She wonders if he read the book laying in bed, as she does now; she wonders if his wife thinks of him as often as she does now; she shakes her head, and laughs, and lays the book back down, fingers trembling, wondering what she’s doing now, even as she opens her thighs. She’ll go back Monday. She will tell him she spent the long weekend reading the book. She’ll see what he has to say.

The pornography was sitting there on the coffee table of the photographer’s office when he walked in. It was high quality. Fabric-bound and glossy-jacketed books of nature photography with naked women in them. He wasn’t sure it was really pornography until he opened it because of the names on the spines, names like The Ruin of Hotblooded Youth and Turbulent Creek. The names of the photographers were prominent, too. The women were undressed and laying on mossy stumps, posed fetchingly midstream, splayed on marble conference tables, but he knew it was pornography even though the pages were glossy and the endnotes were professional because of the vacancy in them.

The pictures and women were pretty and empty. There was attitude but not personality. A curled lip or a sneer or a smile imitative of the Mona Lisa or a dropped lower lip. Mouths perpetually yawning as if beckoning to be filled by something never apparent. Eyes beady or empty. Breasts and thighs and legs seemed disconnected from their owners somehow, as contextless as the branches captured waving in the breeze. He shut the books and arranged them back on the coffee table and waited to leave. Something happened to sex, he thought while he waited. Something happened to its mystery. We used to worship the body as a mystic force, carve rude idols of heavy-breasted swing-hipped women and crouching men with priapic cocks from wood and stone and burn bloody bones at their feet sheathed in gleaming entrails and slick fat. Now our images of them are as magicless as a thousand butterflies in a case. Pinned and dry and dessicated. We have betrayed ourselves.

For all the new followers lately, I thought I’d go ahead and reiterate the philosophy behind this blog. I get too many questions asking, “Where does your writing come from?” This is how it works.

Writing is a craft. Not a gift. There is no magic. There are only words in an order chosen, at first hurried, then inspired, then finally necessary. Did you think it was different?

In the world entire there are a countless number of things you could write, could you only stoop to paper and pen, to inkribbon, to keys and screen. In the writing you will lose what you thought to record and if you work you will find it again. A map delineated and drawn through the dying memory of the territory that you first experienced and then remembered and then created.

It is all work. It is all study. There is no magic.

I knew a writer once. She wrote one thing. A sentence. She has never written again with such clarity and power that it threw a dazzling image before my eyes and dissolved again to bare ash. You write to capture that and you can. She did it once and never again because she thought it would be given to her, another sentence, just like that, a gift from the kingdom of heaven. It won’t be. The sentence was the summation, the ultima thule of the twenty years of her life to that point and it came from the work she put into her life and no more.

The genius if there is any is in the hours and days. The labor. Your back will ache and your eyes strain. You will pace back and forth in your rooms and you will not know the time. You will archive words and formulations, the cases and identifiers in a thesaurus, a dictionary, a trove you will carry ever after, between the raw and bleeding memories that you regurgitate to the page. You will record with those eyes you were given what you see. You will store what you hear with the ears you were given. The scent, the action, the denouement, the factors, the fear, the hope, the redemption, the failure, the grossness, the aberration, the triumph, and all that comes with it all, and it will not be easy. It will not come naturally.

When a woman gives birth there is pain. You intend to give birth to a world itself, to make it real from nothing at all. How can there not be pain? Anyone can do it. But there’s a trial— you are on trial now. The verdict will be delivered and there will be no mercy in it for you if you believe you and the select few were born to do it: the land of writing is for those who begin with nothing.

It is not magic, no, it is not a gift. It cannot be treated like one. Because all things must be earned. To every savant his idiocy. To every craftsman his apprenticeship. If you want to write you have to work. If you work you give yourself the gift. You give yourself the ability to write. Let’s go.

They say, I suppose, that beauty is a fixation on surfaces, but I’m not sure that’s true. After all, when we say a girl is pretty—and not pretty in the way that makes her good to put between glossy magazine pages, selling blush or wine coolers or white capris, but pretty in a way that includes dark spots on her skin from the sun and the way the wind off the sea lays her hair wrapped flat around the slender muscles in her throat—we are saying something about how she makes us feel about ourselves. We speak of the ocean the same way, when we are at our wisest—we see the sun flash on the water as it sets and we say, “Look at how pretty the sunset is,” but really we are talking about how the sunlight through the whitecaps, the blue currents beneath, the green flash, the tireless waves, and the high wind in the purple clouds make us conscious of the deep and noble tides that draw and move our own hearts. How indiscernible vastness of beauty in the sea and sun and sky and the warmth of a lover’s breath stir unexplored depths in ourselves.