The Rupture

From the inside of my parked car I peer briefly through someone’s far window. I see a prismatic electronic screen that hijacks my attention with its shifting, bright hues, a vision of reality that I quickly comprehend isn’t real. This is a stranger’s apartment but it resembles all the apartments around it. The image is a subterfuge of colors and shapes I don’t find coherent, a flotilla of pictures and unheard sound that ensnares my unconscious. It’s oddly soothing. Sometimes, at home, I use the television to fall asleep. My cell phone doesn’t relax me at all with its staccato news. Is the content or the presentation appealing or both? How does the brain interpret these signals? As clouds of light and noise or are these something primeval and directly linked to our emotions?

and what I mean by that is I live in a workhouse and what I mean by that is I'm going to die young, and what I mean by that is old, but in six years, my life expectancy, according to my doctor at the V.A., not that I have any diseases or anything, just that my body has been Houstoned, it's been divorced multiple times, from health- care, it's been churched, couched, coffined, coworkered, cowed, toasted, tested, twisted, radiationed, the boss not allowing me to wear a dosimeter because he didn't want to scare the other employees, find out how much we've been getting blasted by x machinery,

The literary season had grown rough and isolating. Few had ever read the new Nobel Prize winner, but that would change. Translators feverishly checked their dictionaries in order to get the Icelandic man's novel, essay collection, and radio play done for Christmas. Elsewhere, the two literary novels everyone should read were discovered to be not so good. People had bought them and read fifty pages and thought, Oh, well, back to the internet. Yet many of the critics agreed they were both brilliant, assured, and certainly the best work the authors had produced in years, though one of them had only that book to their credit. An agent went to lunch with a few other agents and asked after business. One said, Everybody's writing the same story that sold five years ago. If it was five years ago, I could afford that house on Long Island.

After a get together I usually talk to Vanessa about anything annoying that was said, but in some cases I don't wait. I express my thoughts to others, and in this case that's what I did. We were out to dinner with Steve, a lawyer, and his wife, Pam, a talented painter and friends since elementary school with Vanessa, who is also an artist, mainly watercolors and collages. Steve is around six feet tall and every time we see him his stomach has expanded; we suspect he's well over 300 pounds. Whenever we share a meal with them he eats a lot of bread and butter, drinks a lot of wine, sweat forming on his forehead and upper lip, and seldom fails to mention that he takes runs on the beach and does sit-ups and push-ups at the end of his run. As we drive home after dinner, Vanessa and I often express fear that Steve is going to run himself into a heart attack. Vanessa is a kinder person than I am, and she doesn't make smart remarks about what Steve would look like doing sit-ups and push-ups. I'm the one who does that. It's nothing to be proud of, but I'm confessing to keep things fair, because I got pretty hard on Steve.