mocking, an undertone I had not heard at first. Other times I would hear a cry just as I woke, as I crossed over into wakefulness or departed from sleep, and on those mornings I rose with the feeling of something wound around my neck. A hidden weight seemed to attach itself to simple objects, a teacup, a doorknob, a glass, hardly noticeable at first, beyond the sense that every move required a slightly greater exertion of energy, and by the time I negotiated among these things and arrived at my desk, some reserve in me was already worn down or washed away. The pauses between words became longer, when for an instant the momentum of pressing thought into language faltered and a dark spot of indifference bloomed. I suppose it’s what I’ve battled most often in my life as a writer, a sort of entropy of care or languishing of will, so consistently, in fact, that I barely paid it any attention—a pull to give in to an undertow of speechlessness. But now I often became suspended in these moments, they grew longer and wider, and sometimes it became impossible to see the other shore. And when I finally got there, when a word at last came along like a lifeboat, and then another and another, I greeted them with a faint distrust, a suspiciousness that took root and did not confine itself to my work. It is impossible to distrust one’s writing without awakening a deeper distrust in oneself.
Around that time a houseplant I’d had for many years, a large ficus that had grown happily in our apartment’s sunniest corner, suddenly became diseased and began to drop its leaves. I gathered them into a bag and brought it to a plant store to ask how to treat it, but no one could tell me what it had. I became obsessed with saving it, and explained again and again to S the various methods I’d used to try to cure it. But nothing eradicated the disease and in the end the ficus died. I had to throw it out on the street, and for a day, until the garbage truck picked it up, I could see it from my window, bare and ruined. Even after the garbagemen took it away, I continued to page through books on care for houseplants, to study the pictures of mealybugs, of twig blight and canker, until one night S came up behind me, closed the book, put his two hands on my shoulders and held them strongly there while staring fixedly into my eyes, as if he had just applied glue to the bottom of my feet and needed to hold me in place, applying steady pressure until it dried.
That was the end of the ficus, but it was not the end of my agitation. No, I suppose you could say it was just the beginning. One afternoon I was alone in the house. S was at work, and I had just come back from an exhibition of paintings by R. B. Kitaj. I made myself lunch, and as I sat down to eat I heard the shrill laughter of a child. The sound of it, its closeness and something else, something somber and unsettling behind that little ascension of notes, made me drop my sandwich and stand so suddenly that my chair fell back. I hurried into the living room and then the bedroom. I don’t know what I expected to find; both were empty. But the window next to our bed was open, and leaning out I saw a boy, no more than six or seven, disappearing alone down the block, pulling a small green wagon behind him.
I remember now that it was that spring that Daniel Varsky’s couch began to rot. One afternoon I forgot to close the window before I went out, and a storm blew up and soaked the sofa. A few days later it started to give off a terrible stench, the smell of mold, but something else too, a sour, festering smell as if the rain had unloosed something foul hidden in its depths. The super removed it, grimacing at the smell, the sofa on which Daniel Varsky and I had once kissed all those years ago, and it too sat dejectedly on the street until the garbagemen came for it.
Some nights later I woke suddenly out of a cavernous dream that took place in an old dance hall. For a moment I was unsure of