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CHAPTER 14

MY EYES OPEN and squint at brilliant, blurry whiteness. Far away, chimes sound from underwater. Am I underwater? Where am I? A blurry face floats into my field of vision and looks at me. Am I standing? If so, how is this face appearing sideways?

“Hello, sleepyhead,” it says.

It is a woman (pardon my assumption, but I am foggy and have not the energy for nonbinariness), and I understand I am lying on my back. I still do not know where I am.

“Where am I?” I ask, in order to find out.

“You’re in the burn unit of the Burns and Schreiber Burn Hospital in Burnsville, North Carolina.”

I take this in for a long while.

“Am I burned, then?”

“Yes.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Three months. You’ve been in a medically induced coma, which is fortunate because most of your painful treatments have already been attended to.”

“Is my name … Molloy?”

“No, honey. Oh, dear. You don’t remember who you are?”

“I thought perhaps I was a comedian named Molloy.”

“No. Your name is Balaam Rosenberg.”

“Oh. Right. Except I go by B. so as not to wield my maleness as a weapon.”

I say this to her by rote. It is a blurry statement without weight or meaning.

“I see,” she says.

I don’t think she does. Nor do I, frankly, at the moment. She checks my pulse.

“Am I disfigured?” I ask, suddenly terrified.

“We don’t know what you looked like before you came here, so it’s hard for us to tell. There are no photographs of you online, only an upside-down caricature of you on the jacket of an obscure book we were able to order from Alibris for six cents. We studied your driver’s license photo, but it is very small. For some reason, smaller than is typical. We didn’t want to reconstruct your face to be very small. So we did the best we could, scaling it up using a piece of graph paper. Here, have a look.”

She holds a mirror to my face. I am afraid but force myself to look. I am pleasantly surprised. The beard is gone but so is the port-wine stain. It’s not bad. I don’t think you could tell I’d been in a fire. My nose does look bigger.

“My nose does look bigger,” I say.

“Does it? We had to rebuild your nose. We couldn’t tell from the driver’s license, which wasn’t a profile, of course. We just guesstimated based on your religious heritage that it would look like this.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning what?” I ask.

“Oh. Well, Rosenberger Rosenberg—we just assumed—”

“I am not Jewish, if that’s what you just assumed.”

Then I hesitate. I don’t think I am. I feel certain I am not. I’m a little foggy about things, but of that I am fairly certain.

“I’m sorry, sir. That is our mistake. We did take the liberty of circumcising you, thinking it had been an oversight on the part of your parents and family mohel not to have had a bris performed, and we also needed skin to graft for your nose.”

“Wait, what?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Let me get the doctor. He can explain it better.”

“So my nose is made from penis foreskin?”

“Just part of it. Because the nose is on the larger side we needed more than just your foreskin, as your penis, while maybe not technically a micropenis, is a little on the small side. I’ll get the doctor. He can explain the whole procedure.”

She hurries from the room. I study my new face in the hand mirror. It could have been worse. They did an excellent job with the grafts. I don’t look like a burn victim. And the port-wine stain is gone. I might even look a bit younger. I am about to train the hand mirror on my penis when the doctor walks briskly into the room.

“Mr. Rosenberg. Hello. I’m Doctor Edison-Hedison.”

He shakes my hand, squirts some antibacterial gel into his hands from the wall dispenser, and rubs them together, also briskly.

“How are we feeling today?”

“I’m OK. I don’t remember much.”

“Well, you’ve been in a medically induced coma for three months. Your memory should or shouldn’t come back at some point or not.”

He looks into my eyes with a bright light.

“Mm-hm,” he says.

“Did you say my memory should not come back?”

“It’s been known to not happen. Studies show there can be long-term, deleterious effects to the brain from induced comas. Well, any type of coma, actually. But we hope not. We surely hope not.”

“I don’t even remember how I was burned,” I say.

“Um, a truck fire, I believe,” he says vaguely, then calls off: “Bernice?”

The nurse enters.

“How was Mr. Rosenstein burned?”

“Berger,” she says.

“Burgers,” he repeats to me. “Some sort of grease fire while you were grilling, I suspect.”

“No,” corrects the nurse. “His name is Rosenberger. He was burned in a truck fire.”

“Rosenberg, I think,” I say.

“I thought it was a truck fire,” says the doctor, pleased with himself. “That’s what I said!”

“I don’t think I have a truck,” I say.

“It was a rental,” says the nurse. “The cashier at the Slammy’s—”

“I love me some Slammy’s,” says the doctor.

“The cashier,” repeats the nurse, checking her notes, “Radeeka Howard told the firemen you told her you had a movie in the truck. She called you a ‘crazy Jew who wouldn’t leave me alone.’ That’s neither here nor there, but it’s in the report, so I thought you should know.”

I rack my brain. I do remember something about a film. I was hauling it to New York, but I cannot recall any more than that.

“Was anything saved from the fire?”

The nurse unlocks a cabinet, removes a small plastic bag, and hands it to me. Inside it, a singed doll. A donkey, I think. Or a jackass. I don’t recall the distinction. Or a mule? It has hinged legs, tail, and head. Burro? I study it, trying to recall something, anything. Nothing comes. There’s one more thing in the bag: a single frame of film. I hold it up to the light. It shows a fat man in a checkered suit and derby hat. He smiles, coyly, childishly, grotesquely into the camera. Right above his head there seems to be an iron bar. Motion blur suggests it is moving toward him at significant velocity. Is someone about to hit him in the head with an iron bar? If so, he is at this moment blissfully unaware of his impending doom. As are we all in our daily lives, I muse. A word pops into my head, as if from nowhere, as if from some deep, hidden place. I say it aloud:

“Molloy.”

What does it mean? From whence does it come, to drop unbidden into my consciousness like a speeding metal bar? I recall that Molloy is a character in the eponymously named Molloy by S. Barclay Beckett. It is a book I have never read, even though I have heard of it sixty-three times, I believe, and have pretended to have read it many of those times. Could that be the Molloy I am thinking of? It is a mystery. Perhaps I will find my answers there. Then I recall that when I woke from my coma, I asked if my name was Molloy. Molloy, it seems, is some sort of key to all of this.

“Do you happen to have a copy of the novel Molloy in the burn center library?” I ask.

“We do not,” says the nurse. “Since this is a hospital, our patient library contains only books that take place in hospitals. So we do have Malone Dies, by the same author, which takes place in a hospital, if that is of interest to you.”

“It is not. Doesn’t Molloy appear in the same volume as Malone Dies and The Unnamable, though?”

“Yes. But we cut those two out of the volume as they do not pertain to hospitals. Our library only contains books that pertain to hospitals. We could order it for you from Amazon, if you like. Hopefully it’ll arrive before you are released in five days. We don’t have Prime.”

“Yes, please,” I say.

AS I LIE here for the next five days, waiting for my release, I think. When I’m not focusing on how much more I can now see my nose between my eyes, I prod the newly empty space in my brain as if it were the site of an extracted tooth and the thing I’m prodding it with is my tongue. My psychic tongue. I’m prodding and poking it with my brain tongue. This empty space, this leerstelle, is what remains of my passion, which was Ingo’s film.

Memories come back piecemeal, not of the film itself, but of all that surrounded it. Ingo was a big, dull Swede, lumpy, unformed, hulking. Oddly, he had a full head of hair: white, neatly cut, conservative. But other than the hair, he was a golem with a snub nose and rubbery lips. It is difficult to imagine he was ever handsome or even presentable. We are informed by our desire scientists that symmetrical features are the most attractive. Ingo was not symmetrical. His snub nose was a messy, right-leaning blob. His watery eyes were of various smallnesses. His pale lips seemed to be trying to escape to the left. And yet with all this going on, his face was not even interesting. If I momentarily looked away, I found it difficult to recall. Growing up must have been lonely for Ingo. Women are distrustful of pretty and even handsome men, but they still desire them. And an unmemorable face connotes a character deficit. It lacks ambition. It reeks of conformity. Although I have never been seen as conventionally handsome (except by my mother ha ha!), I have been considered memorable, and because of that, I have a certain appeal to the ladies. Perhaps they see the intelligence in my eyes or the compassion in my mouth. I pride myself on my humility, so I feel a certain embarrassment even speculating about such things. Perhaps it is the mindful furrow of my brow. None of this is for me to say. My impressive forehead? But in Ingo, there were no such indications of character; there was only an emptiness, a blankness. I do not mean to suggest that he appeared as an automaton, for an automaton can be imbued with the appearance of personality. But Ingo was a sculpture abandoned mid-creation. And now it was too late. The sculpture was crumbling from age. It was turning to dust. What was he leaving behind? What had he to show for his lengthy time on this planet? The answer is nothing. It would be sad if only it were possible to feel for this creature, but his countenance did not allow for it. And because of this, we feel only anger. Ingo did not care enough to allow us to feel fully human by feeling pity for him. His small, unmemorable eyes pleaded “love me” but offered nothing for us to love. It was ungenerous and it made my blood boil. I felt the urge to haul off and punch him. As a student of the art of boxing, I can, of course, throw a decent punch. So even though he towered over me, I knew I could fell him. But I would not hit Ingo, and in this way I was the bigger man.

I rose above his arrogance. I would not play his game. He told me he was a filmmaker of sorts. It is all I could do to not laugh in his unformed face. I do not mean to brag but I can detect an artist on sight. It is my version of gaydar (which I also have). Artdar. This is not based on physical appearance. Both a Sam Shepard and a Charles Bukowski are equally conspicuous to me. It is in the eyes, or, in those rare instances where they have no eyes, it is in their fingertips. This is the case with blind filmmaker Kertes Onegin, who astonishingly acts as his own cinematographer (he does employ a focus puller, but she is also blind). His technique of “feeling the scene” as the actors perform (his films are all in extreme close-up and include his hand in every shot) creates an intimacy unlike any I have ever before seen in any film, and it has made him a target of the #MeToo movement (blind edition). Onegin’s movie снова нашел (Found Again), which explores a rekindled romance between two pensioners separated for forty years, is arguably the most erotic film ever made. That the bodies making love are old and that there is a fifth hand delicately describing the contours of these bodies adds in exponential measure to the experience of the filmgoer. I conducted extensive interviews with Onegin for my monograph Onegin’s Feelies. During our conversations, he required we sit within touching distance and would caress my face throughout, sometimes sticking his fingers in my mouth “to see how wet.” I remember thinking, this is the most true conversation I’ve ever had and also the least true and also again the most true. I will admit there was even an erotic component to it, and although I am not a homosexual by inclination, I did submit to this eyeless genius, this typhlotic Rembrandt late one evening after too much retsina. I do not regret this, for how can one regret true communion? Ingo had none of this to offer. Not in his soft, soggy eyes, like old grapes, not in his pruny, sausage-shaped fingers, like old plums. You are no Onegin! I screamed in my head. You are not my dear, dear Kertes! as I waited for that inevitable question:

“Would you watch my film?”

Let me say, quite bluntly, I am not an admirer of the cartoon in any of its myriad forms. It is to me cloying and sentimental. It is not film in its essence, which, to my mind, is the capturing of a moment. Animation is the manufacture of a moment, and, while one can admire the skills of the illustrators or computer fellows or clay manipulators, one cannot fully invest. It is always at arm’s length. From the very first motion picture recording, the magic was in the commitment to the tether of the ephemeral. Never before in human history had this been possible. Certainly there had existed still photographs for quite a while and that was miracle enough, but whereas a still photograph stops time, kills it, a moving photograph captures it alive. A butterfly in an enclosed habitat, not skewered and mounted on a pinning block. From the very early days, there have of course been the tricksters, the illusionists (among whom I must, with great sadness, count the animators). And certainly innovators such as Méliès have their minions, but, for me, he has never been a satisfying genius. It must be noted that Méliès was a stage magician and his interest was not in revealing life but rather using this new form to further his repertoire of chicanery. That is to say, his work is antithetical to honesty, to the bare-faced vulnerability I most require in my cinema-going experiences.

So it was with great surprise that my attitude was changed by Ingo’s film. It is animation as I have never experienced. Soulful, heartbreaking, profoundly felt. That it is accomplished in such a manner has made me rethink not only how life is lived and the physics of time, but as well, in a metaphysical sense, who we are and the existence of God. That Ingo accomplishes such a true thing not only with the illusion that is stop-motion animation but with the very artificial subject of “movies” gives me pause, undoubtedly the longest pause of my life. I only wish I could remember it.

“I’ll watch for three minutes,” I remember saying. “If it then seems worth my time, I will watch more.”

“In any event, it’s kept me busy,” he said, as he led me to a chair facing the small movie screen.

“I’ll sit after three minutes,” I told him. “If I choose to continue.”

Ingo hovered over me as the film started.

Some of it is coming back now, fuzzily.

It is silent, of course, as his work on it had commenced in 1916. Perhaps sound will be added eventually, I postulate, thus reflecting the coming changes in cinema and technology. That might make it an interesting curio, if nothing else. However, I’m afraid I will never know because, of course, it will be terrib— Wait! The first shot surprises me. It is not terrible, and I must admit I am a tad disappointed. Mostly because I cannot in good conscience quit after three minutes, but also, if I am to be entirely honest, I do not want to have been wrong. I don’t want this to be good. But the first shot is good or at least not bad. Yes, the animation is crude, as all stop-motion animation was in the early days, but there is something startling in the immediacy of the imagery, in its vulnerability, in the mise-en-scène. I am put in mind of Hegel, the philosopher not the cartoon crow. Surely this mountain of desiccated pale flesh could not be a reader of philosophy, and yet …

Three minutes come and go. I cannot look away. I am witnessing something, the first human to pull himself from the primordial ooze of animal unconsciousness to marvel at the beauty of a sunrise. And Ingo witnesses me witnessing it. I am distrustful. Is there a long-dead animator whose life’s work Ingo had stolen to play off as his own? Did Ingo murder him (her, thon)? Was I to be his next victim? Would my as-yet-unpublished monographs soon bear his name as author? But I cannot turn away. I cannot run. In a flash, the first nineteen hours pass. Ingo turns on the lights.

“Now sleep,” he says. “I will wake you in five hours and we will begin again.”

My world is now upside down and I do as I am told. As Ingo predicted, my night is fevered, the characters in the movie ripping into my dreams, infecting them with their gags and punch lines. Where does the movie end and my mind begin? I can no longer say. And I laugh and laugh in my dreams until blood pours from my torn esophagus like so much rainwater from a gutter on a stormy night. In the morning, the movie picks up not where it ended last night but where my dream ended. Or so it seems. How could this be? Perhaps it is a trick of psychology. Perhaps Ingo understood that the human brain will always fill in blanks, will want to weave disparate parts into a cohesive whole. Could Ingo have studied the work of Pudovkin? I refuse to believe he was educated in the montage theory of Soviet cinema. Yet the seamless blending of Ingo’s movie and my life seems to belie my conviction. It is as if the melding of cinema and dream has turned me into another character in Ingo’s film. I am the one who watches, and so I dutifully play my role and continue to watch the film.

The weeks pass. I neglect my monograph. I neglect my relationship. Ingo hovers.

As much as I feel I should not pull myself away from this experience, there are things in my life to which I need to attend. Perhaps five hours’ sleep plus an additional two hours to eat, bathe, and take care of personal and professional obligations. The remaining seventeen hours a day would belong to this nameless film.

“This is not ideal,” Ingo tells me.

A very different Ingo from the Ingo of a few weeks ago: confident now, demanding, an exacting artist who knows just how his film is to be experienced, oddly handsome now, his snub nose at a jaunty and dashing angle, like an admiral’s cap. I have to admire this new and emboldened Ingo. Am I perhaps a little sexually excited by him now? I will acknowledge that I do very much want to please him. But, no, I will take my two extra hours a day. I must assert myself. Wouldn’t Ingo respect me more if I don’t make myself his doormat? I tell him I must. He nods assent, but I have disappointed him.

“Your film is magnificent,” I say: an olive branch.

I cannot bear to see this look in his eyes, eyes that see right through me to my soul. I’m sorry, Daddy, flashes in my sleep-deprived brain. Is this even happening? Is this part of the movie? I can no longer tell. I decide I must not disappoint Ingo. I will continue with his prescribed regimen. And then a strange thing happens: Ingo dies. I try to revive him by yelling his name over and over, but to no avail. I call the police.

CHAPTER 15

OR, WAIT, IS that right? Or was he an African American Outsider Filmmaker whom I discovered and perhaps mentored? I am still a little foggy on details. I remember both versions of him. I do, in no uncertain terms, feel the absence of his film, the hole it has left in my brain. I know it gave me reason. I know it was like falling in love, like that feeling of something new, that realization that goes, oh yeah, there’s that in the world. The world contains that. The world contains the possibility to feel like that. And now it is gone, and I know I can no longer feel it or know for certain that such a thing exists in the world. My fire, my reason, is gone, but the massive imprint it left on my soul is still extant, just as a deep meteor crater remains at the site of its earthly collision, the meteor vaporized upon impact. The damage is all that remains of Ingo’s meteor, the hole, the emptiness, the ever-present missing thing, whose presence is its absence, whose meaning is its loss, whose value is a profound mystery that can only be guessed at. As I walk the perimeter of the negative space of Ingo’s film, something comes to me, something I read a long time ago, perhaps at Harvard, where I believe I studied:

All that is not the man describes the man, just as the negative space in a silhouette tells us every bit as much about the sitter as the positive. —DEBECCA DEMARCUS, Solving for X

DeMarcus, an Appalachian poet, woodcarver, and professor of optometry at West Virginia Wesleyan, had served as my first guide through the labyrinthine world of ma, the Japanese concept of the “space between,” the interaction between the mind and the object. Now, finally, I find myself confronted with ma, not as a poetic abstraction, but as the terrible reality at the core of my being. The film is gone, and therefore, the part of me that merged with it, that changed with it, that saw the universe in a fresh way because of it, is gone as well.

I stare out the window at the tire plant across the street. I think about tires, how they’re round and have holes in their centers. It’s analogous to the missing film. Yet the empty space in the center of a tire is useful; it allows the tire to attach to the wheel, which allows it to turn on the axle, which allows the car to move forward. This gives me some hope. Perhaps this missing film will allow me to move forward. Perhaps the missing film is the hole in the tire that is my brain.

We must look at loss in all its forms, mustn’t we? Loss of relationships, loss of love, loss of power, loss of memory, loss of status and the panic that ensues. We must accept that loss is a basic element of existence. The element of absence. All will be lost. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,” says replicant Batty of Blade Runner fame, in a rare moment of poetry and coherence in that inept, wrongheaded film by a director who cut his teeth in television adverts and seems unwilling or unable to recognize that the purpose of cinema is antithetical to that of selling toilet tissue. Be that as it may, this is a profound line that exists only because it was improvised by the brilliant Dutch acteur Rutger Hauer. So I am forever grateful to him and his gevoelige geest.

Another thought plays over in my head as well. There are so many things playing over in my head now that it has become difficult to pick out the separate quotes. With a little effort, I get this: “Each insect death is a loss from which we cannot recover. The world needs to be reinvented each time.” Of course! The great Hindu saint Jiva Goswami. There was a time, not that long ago, when I carelessly and selfishly regarded dead insects on my windshield as an inconvenience rather than a thousand, nay, a million tragedies. But those insects, and the hundreds of millions of their squashed fellows, need to be acknowledged. They lived. Their presence changed the world. I did not get to know them all very well. I never got to know them as individuals and now I never will, because they are forever gone, scrubbed from my windshield with my shirt, itself the dead bodies of many cotton plants I will never know. Did I treat Ingo with similar disregard? Was I ever able to see him as an essential, irreplaceable entity? Or was Ingo a means to an end for me? I am put in mind of the Jain Insect Hospital in Delhi. Jainism is, of course, an ancient and profound religious philosophy that, among many other wonderful notions, teaches of the sacredness of all life. Thus, they have a bird hospital, a cow hospital, a shrimp hospital, and the aforementioned insect hospital. There are other hospitals for other creatures in the works, but changing humanity for the good takes time and money.

I visited the insect hospital in 2006 for a feature on the movie The Ant Bully, in which I planned to take the movie to task for its unrealistic depiction of ant hospitals. I felt it was a necessary point to make, but I had to travel all the way to India to gather my proof. In the end, the piece got axed in favor of some drivel by Dinsmore about how A Bug’s Life got insect circuses wrong. But in the process I learned about the Jains and fell in love.

TONIGHT AT THE burn hospital we’re having chicken-fried steak again and Jell-O.

“There is something missing now,” I tell Edison-Hedison between mouthfuls of orange Jell-O.

Edison-Hedison nods, his own mouth full of cherry.

“In me,” I clarify. “Since I’ve come out of my coma. There is a hole in me, empty and hungry to be filled.”

“Well, I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or any of the other psychos. In point of fact, I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I have a terrible bedside manner, that I am not compassionate, that I am distracted, abrupt, and condescending. So keep that in mind as I proceed, and take my advice with a grain of salt— I should also mention that I am also not a social worker, licensed or un—but what you describe is what everyone feels—everyone, all the time—according to my limited and anecdotal research. So take my advice: Forget about it. That hole is unfillable. Get on with your life. Go back to work. Get a hobby. Find a nice, achievable woman and settle down.”

“I already have a girlfriend. African American, I believe. You’d know who she is, I think. I think she’s famous. I believe she was the star of a popular sitcom in the nineties.”

“Oh! What’s her name?”

“I don’t remember. But you’d know who she is. Then maybe you could tell me.”

There is a long and terrible silence.

“I’m scared and confused,” I add.

“Well, as I previously explained, I am not qualified in any of the mental healthish arts. But I can send in a counselor.”

“I feel a slippage; things are not steady.”

“This much I can tell you: Things aren’t. Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future, a very sensible thing Steve Miller sings in an otherwise nonsensical song. Do eagles fly to the sea? Why would they? I don’t know, I’m not an ornithologist, but I think not. But the slippage part, that’s real.”

“I think they fish there.”

“Ornithologists?”

“Eagles. In the sea,” I say.

“Maybe so. I’m not an ornithologist or, for that matter, an ichthyologist.”

“Nor am I.”

“Then I guess we’re both just bullshitting, n’est-ce pas?”

“It’s not the slipping of time into the future, which I have come to terms with, with which of I am concerned of. It is the slippage of my thoughts, my definitions, my mental landscape that terrifies me.”

“I’ll call the counselor. Unfortunately, you’ll have to make do with our grief counselor. That’s all we have. We have a lot of dying here. It is, after all, a hospital.”

“I’M NOT REALLY grieving,” I tell the grief counselor, a fat man in some sort of vestment.

“Not even lost time?”

“Maybe.”

“Lost memories?”

“Maybe.”

“The movie you say you lost, which I suspect is merely symbolic of lost memories and lost time. I suspect the movie never existed.”

I show him the single remaining frame. He holds it up to the light.

“This is not a movie,” he says. “For it is not moving.”

“It is a single frame.”

“This is a stillie,” he says. “Don’t kid a kidder.”

I massage my temples.

“I find it telling that your ‘lost movie’ and your coma were both three months long,” he says.

“I think it is a coincidence.”

“If there is one thing they teach us at grief counseling camp, it is that there is no such thing as a coincidence.”

“How would they know that? And why would that be part of grief counseling training?”

“Don’t be a baby.”

And with that admonition, I am released into the wild along with a Goodwill brown polyester suit, plastic shoes, a cardboard belt, and a paper bag holding my wallet, my single frame, and my donkey. I am returned to a world both oddly familiar and familiarly odd.

They point me in the direction of the bus station and I walk, passing a mother kneeling in front of her toddler, talking to her quietly and trying, I presume, to calm her. The child, face tear-stained, looks into her mother’s eyes. When I am half a block away, I hear the child scream, “This is not fun!” What is fun? I wonder. What does fun mean to a child? From where does the expectation come that we are to have it? I smoke the cigarette I discover in my hand.

As I wait for the bus, I struggle to cut through the fog in my head. The smoke of the movie fills my memories, but I can no longer recognize it as it curls around the goo and the tricks and silliness already there. I think stupid thoughts. Then I think them again. I am a joke machine set on automatic, generating ridiculousness. If I knew how, I would stanch the flow; I would create a space in which a dignified existence were possible, in which I could breathe. But it does not seem to be possible; I do not exist. I am a distraction. I surreptitiously study the others here, this cast of characters, my fellows at this moment, in this poorly ventilated room, in which the stink of humanity is paramount. There are too many people in the world, most of them, it would seem, in this room, offering up a panoply of body odor and diabetic urine and feces and sick. Stale cigarette smoke hangs on their clothes and mine. I look up to find a man is staring at me. Our eyes meet and he does not look away. It is a challenge, a game of chicken, and I will lose. His eyes are cold and mean and I see myself through them or I imagine I do: an urban weakling, a homosexual, a Jew. His disdain bores into me. I am ashamed of his version of me and ashamed that I care. I glance up again, hoping to discover he has moved on, but he hasn’t. His eyes on me make it even more difficult for me to think. It crosses my mind that perhaps he is mentally ill, that perhaps he is psychotic, that if I don’t keep tabs on him, I might find him, too late, upon me, beating me to death. His anger is that focused. What have I done to make this man hate me so? The answer is nothing. I have done nothing. I have lived my life ethically and still I am broken, ruined by loss and fire, reconstructed by small-town anti-Semites into parody. My one stroke of luck, the discovery of a previously unseen film of monumental historical and artistic significance, maybe by an African American, maybe by a Swede, has been all but ripped from my memory by a heady combination of mental trauma and brain damage. Why is there no sympathy for me? I have never intentionally hurt anyone. I have always gone out of my way to be decent. I am not perfect, to be certain, but there are so many who are much worse, whose days of reckoning never come. Would this man stare at them? I think not. He would see those men as manly, looking out for themselves, taking what they want. The world is not fair. I cannot remember. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I think that is a thing I read, but I cannot remember. As the station fills with more and more passengers, I can no longer see the staring man. I feel his eyes anyway. It surprises me that there are so many would-be travelers. It is not a holiday as far as I know. I don’t recall all the holidays but I know it’s not Thanks Day, which I am certain comes in the fall sometime and it is very hot today. It is a summer month. The people here are almost all wearing overalls sans shirts. Some are wearing overall shorts, sans shirts. Some are wearing something called shirtveralls. I know they’re called shirtveralls, somehow. How do I know that? Everything is mysterious now.