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bothered toprotest. What was I to do, after all? Chandler dealt from a position of strength, and nothing would ever change that—for I was always desperate to sell, and he was always indifferent to buy. Nor was there any point in feigning indifference to sell. The sale would simply not be made, and no sale was finally worse than being cheated. I discovered that I tended to do better when I brought in small doses of books, no more than twelve or fifteen at a time. The average price per volume seemed to go up ever so slightly then. But the smaller the exchange, the more often I would have to return, and I knew that I had to keep my visits to a minimum—for the more I dealt with Chandler, the weaker my position would grow. No matter what I did, therefore, Chandler was bound to win. As the months went by, the old man made no effort to talk to me. He never said hello, he never cracked a smile, he never even shook my hand. His manner was so blank that I sometimes wondered if he remembered me from one visit to the next. As far as Chandler was concerned, I might have been a new customer each time I came in—a collection of disparate strangers, a random horde.
    As I sold off the books, my apartment went through many changes. That was inevitable, for each time I opened another box, I simultaneously destroyed another piece of furniture. My bed was dismantled, my chairs shrank and disappeared, my desk atrophied into empty space. My life had become a gathering zero, and it was a thing I could actually see: a palpable, burgeoning emptiness. Each time I ventured into my uncle’s past, it produced a physical result, an effect in the real world. The consequences were therefore always before my eyes, and there was no way to escape them. So many boxes were left, so many boxes were gone. I had only to look at my room to know what was happening. The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself disappear.

    T hose were difficult days for everyone, of course. I remember them as a tumult of politics and crowds, of outrage, bullhorns, and violence. By the spring of 1968, every day seemed to retch forth a new cataclysm. If it wasn’t Prague, it was Berlin; if it wasn’t Paris, it was New York. There were half a million soldiers in Vietnam. The president announced that he wouldn’t run again. People were assassinated. After years of fighting, the war had become so large that even the smallest thoughts were now contaminated by it, and I knew that no matter what I did or didn’t do, I was as much a part of it as anyone else. One evening, as I sat on a bench in Riverside Park looking out at the water, I saw an oil tank explode on the other shore. Flames suddenly filled the sky, and as I watched the chunks of burning wreckage float across the Hudson and land at my feet, it occurred to me that the inner and the outer could not be separated except by doing great damage to the truth. Later that same month, the Columbia campus was turned into a battle-ground, and hundreds of students were arrested, including day-dreamers like Zimmer and myself. I am not planning to discuss any of that here. Everyone is familiar with the story of that time, and there would be no point in going over it again. That does not mean I want it to be forgotten, however. My own story stands in the rubble of those days, and unless this fact is understood, none of it will make sense.
    By the time I had started classes for my third year (September 1967), my suit was long gone. Battered by the soaking it had taken in Chicago, the seat of the pants had worn through, the jacket had split along the pockets and vent, and I had finally abandoned it as a lost cause. I hung it in my closet as a souvenir of happier days and went out and bought myself the