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all read each other’s work, not so much to honor the writer or ever really to mention the text in detail, but simply to consume the person. I tried to play my part in this sober, pedantic game. Now, however, as I watched the alley, I had trouble concentrating; I couldn’t sink my teeth into the puppy. I was half-expecting to see the boy trot up to my window in his little cut-off shorts and a flimsy tee-shirt. I was also half-waiting for Claudia Jones, though I knew I’d do better stationed in the hallway outside her door. If there was something self-defeating and repressive in my method, I didn’t realize it at the time, for I imagined myself sitting there with the patience of a baited trap. Sometime during the second day, I decided to read only the first and last paragraph of each chapter of the book. Everything I read, however, sat so disconnected in my mind that I finally found myself reading the introduction, hoping this would join together the jumble of ideas. The city outside seemed moribund, as if the air were contaminated and everyone were diseased and quarantined. It wasn’t so much the gray weather or my sporadic sleeping, as it was my low, gray shiftless mood that seemed to blend the boundaries of day and night, so I didn’t know exactly at what moments I picked up the book or put it down, but eventually I came upon a moment when I opened the book and discovered that there were no more pages left to read. This act of completion roused me a little, making me realize that although all the world appeared to be overcast by a desultory haze, I alone was suspended. Elsewhere, life was being lived: Plans were enacted, lusts consummated, and bodies splayed on both sheets and spikes. Perhaps, right at that very moment, W. McTeal was on all fours, still baffled, and looking past his thigh at a propped camera; meanwhile, on a stark corner cot in a white ward, the boy was trying to gnaw through his restraints (this was how I always imagined him for some reason); quiet and faceless, in a damp, windowless chamber in a cellar, in the gloom of a single light bulb dangling from a wire, the social worker was selecting her leatherwear and whip; and perhaps somewhere in West Virginia, a young, goofy-looking man was furtively leading his favorite goat behind the barn and unwittingly preparing himself to usher in the Apocalypse, by siring Satan. Although it was difficult for me to imagine that terrible cosmic drama, in which the human race was not only the prize but also the playing field, I felt a small prompting in my heart, and whether for the light or for the darkness, I abandoned my post at the window and stood in the middle of the room. I slowly turned my head, my eyes passing over everything, as if all the objects that surrounded me, which in fact defined me, from the bookshelves to the microwave, belonged to no one, least of all to me. The clock read 1:14, sometime in the afternoon or the night. In this drunken, fog-bound mood, I left my apartment and entered the hallway. I had a vague notion of walking up to Claudia’s door and rapping hard upon it. After all, despite her idiocy, she must have known that I existed, because who else had been sliding her mail under her door? I stood before her apartment and tried to peer in the peephole, but I merely saw the reflection of my own eye. I leaned back for a second and then, by impulse, rapped two times, hard, with the butt of my palm, just as I had seen my landlord do on the day I’d first moved into my apartment. I looked at my eye again in the little circle, and as I stared at my eye, I sensed that the tiny window was the only thing separating me from Claudia Jones, we were eye to eye, and both of us were looking at the same thing: my eye. I was thrilled by the proximity, by my boldness, and of course, by the sudden realization—not that I was on the threshold of making an absurd gesture—but that never once did I ever see the bloated woman