…Now, literally all I want is to be hot and famous. I want power. Not power over people, but the power to act, to provoke desire that expands my capacity to live. This is not the lesson I’m supposed to learn, but I’ve always learned everything, including my lessons, a little askew. If someone were to say, what has living your life like this gotten you so far?, haven’t you always been like this, even before your transition, in one way or another?, I could only say that it’s led me to dark and beautiful places. Sometimes I wonder if there’s something wrong with me on a spiritual level: for instance, don’t I need a little Hierophant in my life, an internal structure, a system even? But I’ve never been able to fit myself into a structure, a system. Maybe that’s the Capricorn in me. I don’t care about astrology, but I like any spiritual idea in which the universe is speaking about me, or in which I am speaking the universe.
…Did Lucia Berlin ever fuck Roberto Bolaño? It seems possible, likely even. Or if they never fucked, they fucked each other’s doppelgängers, surely. How do we influence each other from a distance, across space and time? I read Bolaño obsessively at a time in my life when reading actually mattered, when it shaped me. I read Berlin much later, after I was already formed, but it was as if I had read her ten years ago. I can feel that about people, too. I met Emily at the age of thirteen, and also at the age of three. I knew my brother in a past life, or at the very least in our grandmothers’ wombs. I know Rebecca in the future, in our old age, at the moment of our deaths, when we’ll recognize each other again as if for the first time, and also, say goodbye forever.
…A few days after Sara broke things off, I was outside sitting in the sun in the backyard, reading, feeling melancholy. Suddenly I cringed thinking about how desperate I had been, how desperately I had tried to make her like me. Cut yourself some slack, I said out loud. You took a risk with your heart, it’s fine, something very beautiful transpired in the few months you knew her, not just on those two dates, but inside you. She was a muse and a bridge to a future self, a self that was being born while you knew and loved her. Nothing lasts, nothing is really ours, everything takes place in a certain time and space, a series of internal and external events, mostly internal events, for me at any rate. Just a few months ago you had just gotten out of the mess with Emily, were very very sick. Now Emily’s a distant memory, for the most part, and your health, while not great, isn’t so dire either. Something new’s coming, there’s always something new. We never really know what’s going on until it’s happened, and even then, most of life is shrouded in mystery. For some reason I thought of Josh, who was my TA for several English classes in college, who’d sit in Peet’s coffee every day in the winter in his tweedy outfits reading Bergson, Heidegger, Thomas Nagel, a book called Being No One by Thomas Metzinger, Proust, always Proust, he was so earnest about these authors, he felt he was on the verge of something very groundbreaking, he was going to somehow dissolve or heal the divide between continental and analytic philosophy, devise a new theory of mind, through literature, and I found this all very interesting, too, because I’d talk to him whenever I ran into him and he was encouraging but usually seemed puzzled, my ideas, he said, were a good start, and then I’d go walk along the Charles and think about whatever girl I was in love with at the time, Marianne or Juani or whoever, and peer into the river trying to understand the nature of reality, something that would compensate for the death and the aeons of heartbreak I felt inside myself, I’d pour Jameson in my coffee and feel closer to the truth, I’d go back to the dorms and drink the cold coffee cups I’d left scattered around my room, go up and down four flights of stairs to smoke a cigarette, go buy a bottle of champagne and a six pack and head over to Juani’s, who was like a fallen angel, the incarnation of nineties heroin chic, and we’d get fucked up, she’d do drugs too but I just drank, well drank and also took a huge amount of Adderall, and we’d get closer to each other but usually we didn’t hook up, she always talked about Max, who was my friend, kind of, how big his dick was, she’d get a call from her Jehovah’s Witness parents in Albuquerque who required her to do Bible study every night, we’d dance to the Talking Heads or watch It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, sometimes Beryl would join us, and I somehow knew I’d fall in love with her five years later, how I reunited with Beryl one night in Brooklyn in 2011 when I was very sick with alcoholism, and she spent the entire night talking to me, with eyes only for me, though of course I didn’t realize that’s how she was with everyone, but it felt good, that night Teddy punched a wall and broke his hand because the girl he’d been pining after for years was dating Max, his best friend, who actually treated her like shit and wouldn’t even call her his girlfriend, which is funny in retrospect, Teddy wanted to start a lit magazine that ended up getting launched that year, a ridiculous project for bored Harvard Advocate grads, they didn’t accept my submission, my psychotic piece that prefigured where my writing would go, mine was the only submission they wouldn’t take, which is also funny in retrospect, and I went home to my parents basement and drank through Occupy, watched Occupy on MSNBC, knowing I’d eventually have to go to the hospital, needing a bottle of wine in the morning to make it up the stairs for breakfast, getting really fat, writing on the days when I wasn’t too sick, I’m surprised I didn’t die that year, then there was the hospital, a blur, except I found a girl there, like I always do in detox wards and rehabs, and then I got home and went over to Pascoe’s apartment in Dupont and started drinking again but not as hard, and one day got on a bus to go to Somerville where Max had offered to let me stay on their sun porch, which is where everything changed in my life, where I became myself, that was 2012, the year of the Mayan apocalypse, the year I met Rebecca, the year I wrote my first book, Athambia, which is still the book closest to my heart, the winter I fell in love with Beryl, the winter I met Andrew, who lived in the house, who was my best friend for a decade until the friendship ended suddenly and totally unexpectedly one night last summer, then of course the next year there was Chris Dorner and the Marathon Bombing, it seemed as if a different timeline was starting, an abortive timeline, in which the country still devolved into chaos but people took out their rage against cops and politicians, that was when Dzokhar Tsarnaev came into my life, though we’d lived in the same neighborhood more or less for a year before that, I wrote a short story about meeting him one night at a friend’s house and talking about Dostoevsky with him, him saying the idea of the mystical Dostoevskian criminal appealed to him, something like that, I got really into the Baader-Meinhof gang that year, and into Carlos the Jackal, and into reading Lenin, which is funny in retrospect, one evening after Andrew turned in his senior thesis he got black-out drunk and ranted about the Slavs, how the Slavs had fucked everything up, had made the twentieth century a nightmare when it could have been a Golden Age, which is funny in retrospect, the twentieth century I mean, a tragic century but also a very funny one, there’s nothing funny about this century, its humor is too obvious, too steeped in despair, the twenty-first century is a Biblical century, the century of weeping, weeping and disassociation, weeping and karma, weeping and vengeance, weeping and forgetting, since no one, not even memory, is going to make it out alive.