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there was no note attached ("Happy Birthday, Abner," for instance, because it was my birthday, or, "Thought you could use this, Abner," or, "It looked like something you'd like," which it was, and is).
    And the framed photographs in the hallway. Eight of them, four on each wall. They arrived anonymously and mysteriously about a year after I got here (which would be perhaps three years ago; perhaps more, though not less). Each is a portrait of someone I don't know. Three men, five women, all in their thirties and forties, all their poses different. One man is in front of what appears to be a theatre—I can see the bottom of what looks like a marquee above him as he stands before a set of wide double doors, each with a circular window: he wears a black tuxedo; his hands are on his hips and his legs are slightly apart. He wears a small moustache and he's grinning. His hair is dark and cut short. It's an exquisite photograph because the man, who appears to be no more than five and a half feet tall (judging by the double doors) looks strong, attractive and masculine. The crisp dark shadows—cast by his body—reveal that the sun was a bit past its apex when the picture was taken. I have named the man "Allway." I don't know why.
    When I've eaten, and walked a bit in the dim woods (which gives me some blessed time away from the crowd of strangers with whom I share my house), I may show you the other photographs.
    ~ * ~
3:48 PM
     
    I do not reread this narrative. Perhaps I should. It would allow me to correct mistakes, but I'm not at all sure that what I might see, in my rereading, as mistakes aren't simply mis-directions, or re-directions, or rethinking. Mistakes aren't important. We dwell on them, regret them, get maudlin about them, write long, overwrought letters to former lovers about them.
    And, as I think about it, now, I'd say there are no mistakes, really, only facts that no longer fit what passes, in any given new moment, for reality, memories that have become obtuse, fuzzy, or uninteresting, dramas and melodramas that have run their course.

Her eyes popped open and rolled upward in their sockets.
    I heard a long low rasping noise come from her, like air escaping.
    But I loved her, you see. The truth is, I loved her as I have loved no one else.
    And that's why I came forward again, put my hands around her waist—she was cold now—and held her close for what might have been hours, until I felt her skin begin to warm again and her muscles loosen. And I heard a low, ragged humming noise coming from her, which, over the space of a minute or so, became speech:
    "You won't like it out there, Abner."
    —“A Manhattan Ghost Story"

SIX
     
Otherlife
     
August 5, 8:00 AM
     
    Wondrous Phyllis of the Otherlife always ate with nasty enthusiasm, as if she would never eat again. I said to her, once, over dinner at a restaurant in Soho called Tiny Thai, "Phyllis, I think you've got rice all over your face."
    She grinned at me through a forkful of Moo Shu pork ("Chopsticks," she said once, "are for socialites and assholes!"): "Rice?" she said. "Abner, I can eat more than you." She cocked her head fetchingly. "Want to give me a try?"
    Her milk-chocolate skin was without blemish (during our first months together), and it dressed an incredible body she displayed and used as well as any dancer, so she attracted stares from both men and women.
    She enjoyed these stares.
    "Look at them, Abner," she said more than once. "The fools want what they can't have." Then she laughed a little and added, "But we're all fools. You and me and the man in the moon—the living and the dead and everyone in between." I had little idea what she was talking about; I thought she was merely being poetic.
    She also said, on more than one occasion, "Wouldn't he be fucking surprised if I jumped on his head and swallowed him whole?" which I thought was funny, though I didn't understand it, at the time, in those first unforgettable few months.
    May, June, July,