Issue 23

Deven James Philbrick

Edna Steinsaltz was the kind of woman who, wrinkled face aged with wisdom and wine, always answered your questions with another less clear question. After school in my childhood and early adolescence, I would cycle to her apartment building nearly daily, crossing the rusty railroad tracks and the throngs of pedestrians at every corner, where she would greet me at the door and pinch my supple cheeks, and I would eat fish sandwiches with cream cheese and capers on them as though there were no food to be had at home.

On each of my daily pilgrimages, I encountered an old black bum, or so we called him then, who drank his whiskey out of a paper bag and portended the apocalypse in a breathtaking oratory, whose gnostic visions haunted me and made the endless parade of stray dogs that populated the sidewalk howl with manic fervor as if to tell those of us who only spoke in language that his words—only some of them were really words—were true. “Boom! Boom! Boom! Don’t be a hyena!” his ramblings would begin. “Simbi, Simbi, Simbi and the Marasa, release me from my corporeal prison! These men have only big good angels, rien d’autre n’est en dessous! Feed me a goat, feed me the fishes, where on earth can this blind man see? Praise be to the Marasa, because we want answers now!” The itinerant prophet, who smelled like cinnamon, spoke with a kind of lilting warble that told me, even in my youthful naivete, that he was speaking some kind of nonsense. But when I’d pass him, I could feel the earth rumble and the dogs would make a ruckus.

When I’d get to Mrs. Steinsaltz’s apartment, she’d have the fish sandwiches already made up and laid out for me. I’d tuck into them right away, and she’d close the Venetian blinds and watch me scarf, a mystic glint in her glassy eyes. “Don’t you forget,” she would say as I took big bites, “these little fishes all had to die so you could eat them. A hook in each mouth, a slit down each belly, agony.” I was insatiable each day when I’d make the trek over just to eat and listen to the old woman’s cracked voice make cryptic claims and see her eyes watch my little body stuff itself with fish. My father didn’t like me going over there, for reasons that he articulated thusly: “That old Jewess is a witch, and she wants to eat little black boys for supper.” I asked her once, there in the dingy little apartment, what a Jewess was.

“What’s a nigger?” she replied.

“Someone like that bum down the street who talks French and drinks from a bag.”

She just smiled and drew the floral curtains over the already shut Venetian blinds. I do not know whether she was trying to shield me from something outside or to shield something outside from me, but I do know that, despite my father’s warnings, I felt profoundly at peace there, every day.

My memory of Mrs. Steinsaltz is beleaguered by the creeping gremlins of imagination, the cloying abundance of curt wisdoms and off-color apothegms building up like silt and becoming indistinguishable from their cerebral impersonators. Sometimes, when the light quality in my study is just so, and the blinds are in some position or other, I remember the wild limp with which she moved through her dusty little apartment, or the crackle in her masculine voice. And sometimes, in dreams, I remember the black bum and the delirious, half-grammatical French he would screech in the streets, the terror with which it sometimes gripped me, the pity with which it other times did. I wake up, drenched with sweat, go out into the kitchen and fill a glass of water halfway, drink about half of that, and then just stand there for a while. Sometimes until the sun comes up.

A dinner table with an ice-white tablecloth and candelabra centerpiece, in a restaurant downtown. I had met two acquaintances for dinner—a French woman and an American W.A.S.P, whom I suspected, though I was not sure, were sleeping together. The woman was a singer, visiting the United States to perform. She spoke with the heavy, lilting, cigarette-roughened yet still elegant voice one might expect, with an accent thick enough that I could barely understand her.

The man, who was a book reviewer, was giving us an uninvited lecture on the aesthetic failures of Bernard Malamud. The man was several years, perhaps even a decade, older than me, and the woman was perhaps a decade younger than me. “Why anybody still reads this guy,” he said, “I cannot tell you. It’s pure drivel. Really masturbatory stuff. My latest piece digs right into him.” The woman appeared perplexed, as though she was unsure what he was talking about, which was probably a consequence of the language barrier of which I was becoming increasingly aware. “But the worst part is that all of the other major critics love him.” My eyes rolled without my willing it.

She asked me if I was a music lover, and I told her that I liked blues, but that I couldn’t play any instruments. She laughed and told me that maybe I would hear her sing one day. I smiled. The book reviewer asked me if I’d read Ellison’s Invisible Man. I said yes, I had. He said of course I had. I nodded.

The events that followed are unclear to me now, as I try to recall them, but it happened that I ended up in a hotel room with the French woman, Hélène, lying naked next to me, her body somehow magnetic and antipathetic at once, her interest in me inexplicable. She was the initiator of our sexual contact, but she made me feel like an aggressor in the hotel room, and was frustrated, angered, even, by my naturally gentle tendencies. When we were finished, she hummed a melody in my ear that I couldn’t quite place, and I, lying naked and still, was humiliated and dejected.

I wrote an article, once, in which I excoriated the right-wing Israeli government, unrelenting U.S. support for it, and indeed, Israel’s occupation of Palestine in general. I published the article in a short-lived magazine of political opinion with what I imagined was a small readership.

I was invited, around this time, for an interview on public access television, the kind of program with a total viewership in the double digits, on which anyone who’d ever held a position at a college or university, even an adjunct position at an institution of little to no repute, received significant praise and adulation—except that my appearance, despite the apparent prestige of my having worked as a college instructor for a brief time, was met with anything but adulation. The host of the program was a man much older than me, wearing a yellow T-shirt with a snake on it and horn-rimmed spectacles, smoking a thin cigar, seated in what was probably the basement of his home, which had wood-paneled walls and dingy orange carpet and an outdated computer monitor with a screensaver that depicted multi-colored pipes forming labyrinthine patterns across the black square. He introduced me as professor, even though I’d never held that title and hadn’t worked at a college in years. He read a few decontextualized sentences from my article and then, with a lack of hedging or language coded for television that caught me very much off guard, asked me, making sure to address me, again, as professor: “Why do you hate Jews?” I couldn’t do much other than deny the accusation, and yet a denial seemed to offer credence to the position, as though he were offering a legitimate reading of my article—an article which I had originally suspected would be uncontentious. So, instead of critiquing the conflation of Israel’s position on the global political stage with Jewishness itself, I just sat there, staring at the guy, and he raised his eyebrow as though he had bested me, or as though he didn’t know what I would say next, or as though he was nervous to have this dead air on his program, or as though he knew someone like me would be hopelessly inept and forever abandoned by language.

I am, now, alone—yet not. Ghosts of people I have and have not met surround me, fill me with dread. They pulsate, flicker. One of them knocks a half-empty coffee cup off my desk. It thuds but does not shatter. I should clean the spill, but do not. I am ambivalent, frightened, tired. The white specters induce claustrophobia, turn the pages of books left thoughtlessly open, render me immobile, dead. One of them speaks to me, her words miasmic, floating, straddling the boundary between corporeality and thought: Why do the righteous suffer? I am silent. A heavy silence. A rabbinic silence.

A friend came to visit me from Hungary, and I was impressed, shocked even, by both his responsiveness to the weather with respect to his clothing and the volume of alcohol he could consume in one evening before passing out. A dusting of snow would prompt him to put on an overcoat, an anorak, two sweaters, mittens, a hat with tassels, a scarf, two pairs of socks, and long underwear, while a ray of sunlight peeking out from behind cloud cover would prompt him to get nearly naked, astonishingly immodest and unembarrassed by his exposed, wrinkled chest and flabby thighs. He was old, even back then.

His English was quite good, though heavily accented and occasionally ungrammatical, and he spoke it as though it pained him to speak a language that was not his own, as though each word uttered was an affront to history; a sense of history, the gravity of history, the melancholia of history, pervaded everything he said and did. No American I ever knew was like this.

The man was especially cosmopolitan, having spent great deals of time living in Berlin, then Nice, then Athens, and, for very brief periods, London and New York. He had grown up in rural Hungary and moved to Budapest (he was insistent, passionately so, that it be pronounced Budapeshhhht) to study as a young man. When pressed on what would cause so naturally provincial a man, who insisted himself upon the provinciality of the Hungarian national character, to globetrot with such vigor for so many years, he would grunt and sniff and shrug, and then we would have wine to break the tension and his eyes would light up. We’d drink until I couldn’t stand up anymore, perhaps I’d pass out on the couch, and in the morning, in my head-pounding semi-drunk stupor, he’d be up and dressed and humming to himself.

The Hungarian snored very loudly, such that I often had to bury my head underneath my pillow to fall back asleep after having been awoken by a troublesome dream, the kind of dream that had beset me for my entire conscious life. He would wake up much earlier than me and rattle around in the kitchen, preparing himself some elaborate breakfast with groceries he’d bought himself, that made the whole place smell of paprika. When I’d wake up, he’d laugh and come rub my hair, say people like him and people like me were not so different after all, though his curls weren’t as tight as mine, and that he always liked to touch it before I’d gotten the chance to style it. It reminded him of his father, the carrier of his Jewish ancestry. He would bring women and men over and have sex with them in the guest room. Sometimes, if I was up in the middle of the night, I would hear him in the room, alone, talking to himself in German, or listening to voice recordings of particularly angry-sounding Germans, or crying.

On one night in particular, I could hear Wagner coming from his room. At first, I thought it was “Ride of the Valkyries,” but then I realized that my own knowledge of classical music was so pitiful, so hopelessly impoverished, that I couldn’t tell one Wagner composition from another, and that I probably couldn’t name one besides the one that immediately leapt to mind, so it could have been any Wagner composition, but something in it made the fact that it was Wagner so inescapable that I felt haunted by it, or by him, as though the thin walls of my apartment were awash in the spirit of pre-war Germany, or of music itself, or of something altogether more sinister. I could hear, through the walls, the sounds of my Hungarian friend’s movements, compulsive or nervous footsteps, a dull and repeated thump, the moving of furniture, but I could not make out just what he was doing.

In a critically acclaimed television program about Italian-American mobsters, there is a scene in which an old Jewish record producer (dear friend of the central character and his mafioso buddies) and the descendant of black performers who were signed to the producer’s label meet to discuss repayment of owed royalties, reparations for old injustice. The old Jewish record producer is sympathetic during the beginning of their conversation, but when it becomes clear that financial compensation is his interlocutor’s objective, when the exchange becomes a “shakedown,” as it were, his demeanor changes. “You’re talking to the wrong white man, my friend,” he says. “My people were the white man’s nigger when yours were still painting their faces and chasing zebras.” One can interpret the scene multifariously, with reference to diverse cultural iconography. The Jew who is indignant when he discovers he owes money. The black who blames his problems on others and asks for a handout. One, both, or neither of those stereotypes play out in the scene, alongside other potential stereotypes. To what effect, I cannot say.

I was standing in a crowded subway car in Boston during an extended period of heavy travel. Most of the strangers who surrounded me, I surmised from briefcases and backpacks, to-go cups of coffee and tired, listless facial expressions, were in the middle of their morning commutes, probably coming into the city to work their lucrative jobs that afforded them nice houses in the costly Boston suburbs. My unwieldy suitcase and lack of familiarity with the train system was an evident inconvenience to everyone I encountered that morning.

One pair of people caught my eye, and I did what I could to focus on them without them or anyone else noticing. A man and a woman, old and young respectively. The man, though not quite elderly, was significantly beyond middle-age, and the woman was, perhaps, barely over twenty. Their racial difference suggested that they were not related to one another and the woman’s demeanor, inward-facing, shoulders forward, body lowered just slightly, as though for potential self-defense, indicated that they had probably never met before this moment. While I couldn’t be sure, and her occasional smiles complicated this assessment, I could read fear on the woman’s face. The man was speaking very loudly, telling her that he used to live somewhere far away, asking if she’d ever been there. She shook her head or nodded in response to each of his questions, and at one point he reached out and placed his hand on the small of her back and she smiled, but I couldn’t quite interpret the smile. She said something back to him, but her voice was so quiet and the train car was so loud that I couldn’t hear what she said. The man laughed very loudly, so loudly that it sent a shiver through my entire body. Then the man leaned down next to her and whispered something in her ear and she smiled again, but I swear I saw her flinch when he first began to lean. After she smiled, he pulled away and laughed again and continued speaking at full volume, changing, now, the topic of conversation to the cost of living in eastern Massachusetts. The woman looked down at her feet, no longer smiling.

While I wasn’t quite sure whether or not I was watching an act of predation, whatever it was I’d seen made me equal parts angry and sad. I do not know whether it was the blackness or the whiteness of the encounter that engendered such feelings in me—perhaps it was precisely that difference, the chasm between black and white I watched play out, that stirred in me those emotions that I cannot describe except by reference to the physical sensation in my muscles and organs, a kind of queasy ache that made me viscerally aware of my body. I suspect, though only in retrospect, that the woman was similarly aware of her body, standing shoulder to shoulder with the unfamiliar man in the cramped subway car. I wonder whether or not the man, too, had such awareness. I wonder whether or not either of them could perceive the difference, the ineluctable and untraversable gap between their races. Doubtful.

There is a very poor family who lives beneath me, Italian, I think, or perhaps Greek. The parents, probably in their early thirties, have an astronomical number of children, each of whom screams and cries and laughs and creates his or her own unique style of commotion at all hours of the day and night, and when I look out the window of my study, I often see them down in the street, riding tricycles without helmets or hitting each other with sticks or involuntarily summoning the police to bang on their parents’ door and give the two of them a crude reprimand, a disinterested warning, or a quiet reminder that children must be supervised.

The poverty of this family is, at times, very troubling, or even morally outrageous, as all eleven of them cohabitate in an apartment that is identical to the one in which I live alone, but then I think to myself that outrage—at the government, at my country, at my countrymen—is not a morally serious position, that emotion independent of action means nothing at all, and I let it go. The only thing that kept my family from being that poor is that my mother and father had only had two children, whereas these folks have nine, if I’ve counted correctly. To stretch a box of pasta four ways is one thing, but to stretch it eleven requires a miracle. How or if they afford the rent here, I have no idea.

The children are terrors. Once, I saw two of the older boys, down on the walkway, kicking a scrawny, pallid, curly-haired little white boy while he screamed and cried. Some sisters of the older boys watched and giggled. Although I ordinarily err on the side of not involving myself, as it seems to me to be none of my business, I felt so incensed that I stood from my desk and marched right out front to confront the attackers and rescue the small, curlicued boy. When I got out there, the children all seemed bewildered, the girls ran, and the boys stopped their kicking and just stared at me, eyes dumb and lifeless, vaguely reminiscent of eyes I’d seen at some indeterminate other place, some indeterminate other time, and it was chilling, for just a few seconds. I hadn’t said a word, when one of them burst into hysterical tears and cried out, “I’m going to tell Mom a darky yelled at me.” Both fled.

I extended my hand to the tiny boy to help him off the ground, and he accepted and stood. I asked him what his name was, and he told me it was Dotan. His face was badly bruised, he had a black eye, and his lip was split. I offered to bring him inside to ice his wounds, and he silently obliged. Once there, he climbed up onto a wooden chair and I retrieved an ice pack for him, wrapped it in a paper towel and pressed it to his face.

“Do you live around here?”

He nodded.

“Where are your parents?”

He shrugged. He had said nothing beyond his name, Dotan, a name I’d never heard before. I got a glass of water for him and brought some crackers over to the table—I’d never hosted a child before and wasn’t sure what the appropriate protocol was. Then, as if inhabited by some otherworldly presence, Dotan started to babble like someone unhinged, although his babbling seemed just a bit too coherent, too committed to its own logic, to be the pure babbling of a mentally deficient child. It was a speech about nothing. My ability to listen to him waxed and waned, time became immaterial, I barely heard him. “The endurance of mercy makes us tired,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he had memorized a script or if he was speaking extemporaneously—the vocabulary of his oratory belied his age, which couldn’t have been over five or six. “The questioning of mercy makes us a people.” The coils of his hair bounced as he spoke. Eventually, Dotan left, and I sat, alone in the kitchen, unsettled or even frightened.

Not so long ago, though the effort it costs me to remember it suggests otherwise, I was filled with what I then thought was hope, but now recognize as naïve sanguinity. In previous elections, I’d voted out of fear—fear of what would happen if the opposing candidate was elected. This time was different. Identification, admiration, serious investment in hope for its own sake, for the sake of people like me, for the sake of honorability, diplomacy, complex thought, and elegant speech, all swept me up and carried me off to the voting booth, where my profoundest sentiments were made material. It was almost immediately afterward that the bubble popped. I ought to have known earlier, before the election, but it wasn’t clear to me until mid-February, barely a month in. On the internet, someone found a picture of him at a dinner table with a white tablecloth, hands up in gesticulation, speaking with Edward Said. Pundits exploited this trivial image, made their newest talking point what they supposed was his virulent anti-Israel stance and by extension his anti-Semitism. While for the far-right, those who actually believed that anti-Israel meant anti-Jew, this was deeply frightening, for me, because it foretold a return on my investment in hope, a humanitarian intellectual in the White House, a far cry from his predecessor. Soon, very soon, he spoke of Israel’s security as a top priority for the United States, and his foreign policy began, and I recognized my own mistake almost immediately. I went back and read statements he’d made before the election, about Israel, and it was all right there, public, unambiguous. His position had never changed. The pundits had lied to stoke the anxieties of the segment of the electorate for whom his middle name forecast violent jihad, for whom his skin-tone revealed that he was born far away and could thus never be a legitimate president and should be hung from a tree. But their vitriolic lies and bigoted smearing masked a truth that seared my flesh, a truth I should have known all along, that the great unifier was a clandestine defender of stasis, another in a long line of faces for the political machine responsible for so much suffering, that my hope had been puerile and simplistic, that his election was an empty gesture, behind which was nothing. This revelation felt like a personal injury in a way no other political event ever has. I was mortified. Bilked.

I have been in love three times in my life, and one of them was with a girl from New York named Melinda. She was short in stature, with luxuriant brown curls tumbling down past her shoulders, thick-rimmed glasses in front of vibrant eyes and resting on an elongated nose, and particularly elegant hands with beringed fingers and long, painted fingernails. Melinda refused to smile when she had her photograph taken, but would smile the moment you lowered the camera, and would throw her head back whenever she laughed. She was an implacably happy person—she had a kind of dispositional, almost metabolic happiness, as though giving other people joy, which she could do very easily, could brighten her entire demeanor, and as though she had never considered the possibility of childhood bone cancer or of genocide. This, in one way, attracted me to her enormously, but now, in distant retrospect, gives me a twinge of nausea and a rage that I feel in my chest.

Melinda hated to be naked and would close her eyes when we made love, as though not being able to see herself made me unable to see her, and would deny any of my requests to leave on the lights, even for a moment. She would lock the bathroom door when she took a shower and would never change her clothes in front of me. None of this, though, was done with anything other than carefree joviality, a joyousness of spirit that made it seem to me that even her discomforts, her objections, her resistances to this or that, were expressed in the only form in which she could express anything, which was with a warm smile and a relentlessly positive attitude, which I believed in the early days to be put on, but later discovered was a genuine feature of her being. She was, possibly, the most caring person I’ve ever met, sensitive to the most minor change in my feeling about anything at all, and immediately ready to console. She was that way to others too, always helping strangers, even when to do so was absurd, moving a turtle off a busy street, giving the same homeless people bus fare every day for a week.

The night I met Melinda’s father, I wept in a hotel bathtub and thought about what it would be like to drown. We had flown to New York to dine with them for Passover—they’d been told I wasn’t Jewish. Her father was short and bearded and spoke as though every word were a cough, which caused me to question whether this was his natural mode of speech or a signal to his family of his discomfort with my presence. When first he saw me, shock tore across his face like a plastic shopping bag blown down a sidewalk during a hurricane. It’s an interesting little problem, having to figure out why a white man is uncomfortable around you, whether it’s to do with the impropriety of your being in love with his daughter or the impropriety of your attending a sacred meal, or general discomfort at being in the same room with you, or something entirely apart from your color, something to do with how stressful a day he’s had, or the way you’re dressed, or the way your eyes sit on the front of your face. You cannot know. But this time, I knew. There was a change in Melinda that told me all I needed to know, a sense that her happiness, though not gone, was somehow tempered with an unpleasant feeling I’d never seen before, a sense that not everything was beautiful, and I found myself as disgusted in that moment with her as I was with her father.

When we flew back, everything had changed. Her deep, deep smiles looked shallow to me and her bright, bright eyes dull. It was not, I don’t think, so much a change in her as it was a change in me, in my constitution, in what the bottoms of my feet felt like on the cold linoleum floor of the bathroom as I could hear her singing to herself in the kitchen. What I had previously thought to be boundless sensitivity was bounded. Something unexpected had imposed finitude onto her, which made the way she scratched the bridge of her nose when she was pensive, or the way she’d dance without music when she didn’t know I was looking, or the way she’d have the coffee already brewing when I’d wake up in the morning distressingly, unbearably ugly to me. And she hadn’t the faintest idea that I felt this way. I swore off white women, after that. But it didn’t last long.

Oh, Melinda: How your image is a part of me even though I don’t want it to be, how your father’s trenchant and vitriolic lips stuttering Hebrew prayers are inside of me, and how I can’t escape from the chains of my memory.

I have never been to Germany, but once, just recently, I met an elderly woman with a thick German accent and a leashed Affenpinscher at a bus stop. She was wearing a white fur or faux fur coat and a hat of the same material, had a face done up with comically plentiful makeup, and a large mouth that made her ingratiating smile a little wily. She asked me, quite uninvited, if I was Catholic, and I said no. The Affenpinscher tugged on his leash, but she yanked him back and he sat still. She told me that Catholicism was a scam to swindle money out of the gullible. Somehow, and my memory of this is not all there, she started in on her biography. She had been born in Germany to a profoundly conservative and repressive household and had thus desired not only to leave her family, but to leave her country and come to the United States. Her brother suffered from a severe mental illness of one kind or another, and she felt enormous guilt in abandoning him, but got over it. Once in America, she met a kind but regrettably illiberal man whom she married and with whom she had her three children. When her youngest child started school, she divorced her husband and changed cities to pursue a life as a painter. She had many black friends and was interested in civil rights. One of her daughters married a black man. She identified not at all with her Germanness, found it to be an unsightly and unfortunate feature of her personal history and to have nothing whatever to do with her sense of herself. She told me that she couldn’t name the current chancellor of Germany. Her dog yipped and she tugged at his leash again. She was as American as they came. One of her sons, the youngest one, had grown up to be a civil rights lawyer, who had represented black men falsely accused of violent crimes, and in one instance in particular, a Jewish man who’d had the windows of his home smashed in by members of a white nationalist group. Her son had taken the case pro bono and they’d won. She took this to be one of her proudest moments as a mother. The man received some financial compensation, but was murdered a year and a half later by members of the same group. She told me that this depressed her greatly, but didn’t undo her pride in her son’s achievement, her impression that the story had a happy ending.

Her dog tugged at his leash, and she told me that she’d voted for the United States’ first black president. She adored him, had his picture on her mantle, read both of his books, believed in him with all the fervor she could muster. And I, the unwilling auditor of her life story, could barely hear the bombs in Libya or the screams of drone-struck wedding-goers over the thunderous clap on the back of liberal, white America.

I can recall, with great effort, a time a friend (white, gentile) and I went to see Sammy Davis Jr. perform at a casino in a city I’d never before visited. Even then I wasn’t much of a gambler, but I found it far easier than I would now to squander a few hundred dollars on nickel slots and blackjack for a little thrill and a bogus chance at striking it rich. We drank martinis and smoked imported cigarettes, and my friend gave the waitresses a hard time. I have never been a fan of the kind of music that feels more in service to show business than to human feeling. I like, and I liked then, people like the three Kings (Albert, Freddie, and B.B.) or Buddy Guy. But I didn’t mind hearing a show that included some music if it entertained me otherwise, and Sammy Davis Jr. was funny, indeed. But the way my friend howled with laughter, the way he threw his head back and his jaw slacked like it was going to come unhinged, and the way he pounded the table, rattling our glasses like he was participating in some kind of chant, and the beads of sweat rolling down his forehead while he drunkenly wailed, made me feel as though Sammy Davis Jr. were behind some kind of bars, and that our spectating was a kind of consumption; I felt like we were eating him. And when he came out with the line, “Handicap? Talk about handicap. I’m a one-eyed Negro Jew,” I had to bite my lip to keep from crying.

Three teenagers set a homeless man on fire. The news report revealed the races of neither the assailants nor the victims, only that all four were men, and that the victim lived on the street. The news report made the act of violence seem totally random, as though the three teenagers were merely releasing some concentrated violent energy that had percolated inside of them for some time, and this man, the victim, the person without a house, was quite simply the kind of unobtrusive person on whom they could expend their built-up energy. If the perpetrators had been black, the report would have identified them as such. The victim could have been. Rather than anger or fear, I feel only isolation in response to hearing the story. The isolation, the news story, this anecdote, all have nothing to do with race. Less than nothing to do with religion.

The ghosts, real or not, return whenever I am alone. They are shimmering white clouds that form the shapes of others, the shapes of memories, the shapes of the contents of deliberate thought. It is their whiteness that strikes me most about them, that makes me try to reach out and touch them, that makes them frighten me. One of the ghosts flips through the pages of my books on occasion, and now, as I watch him, his beard fluttering in the eerie breeze, I feel moved to attack him, just so I can feel that he’s real. But instead, I only shut my eyes. I really am alone.