and didn’t grow out of my own soul, and two, I possessed something unique, a special strength and a depth of feeling that would allow me to withstand the hurt and injustice without being broken by it. In the worst moments I only needed to pull myself beneath the surface, to dive down and touch the place within where this mysterious giftedness lived in me, and so long as I found it I knew that one day I would escape their world and make my life in another. There was a hatch in our apartment building that led to the roof and I used to run up four flights and scale a wall to where I could see the hard glimmer of the overpass where the trains ran, and there, where I knew no one could find me, a secret quiver of joy slid coolly through my veins and the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, because I sensed, in the raw stillness of the moment, that the world was revealing something of itself to me alone. When I couldn’t get to the roof I could hide under my parents’ bed, and though there was nothing to see I felt the same thrill, the same sense of privileged access to the underpinnings of things, to the currents of feeling on which all of human existence delicately rests, to the almost unendurable beauty of life, not mine or anyone else’s, but the thing itself, irrespective of those who are born into and die out of it. I watched my sisters trip and tumble, one who learned to lie and steal and cheat, and the other who was destroyed by self-loathing, who tore herself up until she could no longer remember how to put the pieces together again, but I stayed the course, Your Honor, yes, I believed myself to be somehow chosen, not protected so much as made an exception of, imbued with a gift that kept me whole but was nothing more than a potential until the day came that I would make something of it, and as time passed, in the depths of me, this belief transformed itself into law, and the law came to govern my life. In so many words, Your Honor, that is the story of how I became a writer.
Understand: it isn’t that I was excused from self-doubt. All my life it has shadowed me, a gnawing sense of doubt and the loathing that accompanied it, a special loathing I saved only for myself. Sometimes it lived in an uneasy opposition with my sense of chosenness, coming and going, troubling me until, in the end, my secret belief in what I was always won out. I remember all those years ago how I almost balked when the movers brought Daniel Varsky’s desk through the door. It was so much larger than I remembered, as if it had grown or multiplied (had there been so many drawers?) since I’d seen it two weeks earlier in his apartment. I didn’t think it would fit, and then I didn’t want the movers to leave because I was afraid, Your Honor, of being left alone with the shadow it cast across the room. It was as if my apartment were suddenly plunged into silence, or as if the quality of the silence had changed, like the silence of an empty stage versus the silence of a stage on which someone has placed a single, gleaming instrument. I was overwhelmed and wanted to cry. How could I be expected to write at such a desk? The desk of a great mind, as S said the first time I brought him back to my place years later, possibly the desk of Lorca for God’s sake? If it fell it might crush a person to death. If my apartment had felt small before, now it seemed tiny. But while I sat cowering beneath it I remembered, for some reason, a film I’d once seen about the Germans after the War, how they starved and were forced to chop down all the forests for firewood so that they wouldn’t freeze, and when there were no trees left they turned their axes on the furniture—beds, tables and armoires, family heirlooms, nothing was saved—yes, suddenly they rose up before me wrapped in coats like dirty bandages, hacking away at the legs of tables and the arms of chairs, a little hungry fire already crackling at their feet, and I felt the tickle