The Book of Air and Shadows

invented realities-artificial lives, Photoshopped photos, ghosted novels, lip-synched rock bands, fabricated reality shows, American foreign policy-through which we daily slog. Everyone, from the president on down, is a novelist now.
    I suppose we can blame Shakespeare himself for starting it, because he made up people who were
more
real, though false, than the people one knew. Dick Bracegirdle understood this, which was why he set out to smash Shakespeare and all his works. I took a history course at Columbia-Haas will recall it too, because I took it on his recommendation-a man named Charlton taught it. It was English medieval history, and although I have expunged the Domesday Book and all the kings and queens from my mind, I recall very well his take on history in general. He said there are three kinds of history. The first is what really happened, and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened, and that is 90 percent of the history in books.
    (Anyway, reading over this scene in the restaurant I find I am absurdly pleased with it. Yes, it could have happened that way. That
is
Mickey’s voice I’ve put there, and I expect that people who know him, if they read the above, would agree. And I find that reality has swum in to inhabit the fiction I created, and I am absolutely sure that if Mickey read it he would say, Yeah, I recall it just like that. So I write the second kind of history here. As did Bracegirdle, I imagine, although he was an honest man, and I am not.)
    I should mention now that shortly after this event I stopped into one of those electronics shops on Sixth Avenue to buy a cell phone battery and for reasons I can’t quite recall…no, actually I do recall. As noted, I have a mind more disorderly than I would prefer and have been in the habit of scrawling down random notes about this and that when they occur to me, in the pages in the back of that aforesaid diary. Unfortunately, I sometimes find I can’t read what I’ve written:
see urty abt. srtnt
would be a typical notation. But while I was in the shop my eye fell on a digital voice-activated recorder, a Sanyo 32, and I thought to myself that here was a solution to my disorder and I purchased it for seventy-two bucks. It is the size of a cell phone and it records two solid hours in high-quality mode. Since I bought it, the last two hours of my life’s sound track has been saved for later listening. It has been invaluable to the present exercise.
    After lunch, I ran Mickey back uptown in the Lincoln. He’d drunk most of the wine with the couple of gimlets and he was fairly well oiled. When Mickey gets like this he invariably talks about his three wives. The first Mrs. H. was his college sweetheart, Louise, a strapping blonde from a fine old New England family, who doled out sexual favors standing up under the balcony and the hanging ivy of her Barnard residence hall, as we all did in those days, and somewhat more intimate ones in our apartment. She started letting him fuck her in senior year after she had the ring, another jolly tradition of those times. I recall weekend mornings in the apartment, Mickey in his maroon velour bathrobe (or dressing gown as he pretentiously called it) making fussy coffee with a Chemex, and Louise swanning in, faintly embarrassed at the sight of me at the kitchen table, but carrying it off with class. She usually apppeared on these occasions in black tights with one of Mickey’s oxford dress shirts on top, an outfit I have ever since considered wildly erotic. (Tights were underwear in those days; I have never quite become used to girls racing around town exhibiting their bodies in them-always a certain vibration in the scrotum.) She also appeared without bra, as she was an early adopter of that style, and she had lovely, pointed, jiggly ones too.
    The assumption at these matinees was always that Mickey was the big stud with the mistress, while I was the poor but honest sexually deprived grind, and didn’t we all giggle at this play! In fact, at the time I was getting rather more sex than I could handle from a woman named Ruth Polansky, a thirty-six-year-old librarian at the Farragut Branch of the New York Public Library. This I kept secret from my roommate and everyone else, out of embarrassment for myself and a credible fear for Ruth’s job. Is this germane to the