What I Loved

metonymies. When I take out my things now, I rarely separate Violet's letters to Bill from the little photo of the two of them, but I keep the bit of cardboard and Matthew's knife far away from the other things. The doughnuts eaten in secret and the stolen gift are heavy with Mark and with my fear. The fear pre-dates the murder of Rafael Hernandez, and when I play my game of mobile objects, I'm often tempted to move the photographs of my aunt, uncle, grandparents, and the twins near the knife and the fragment of the box. Then the game flirts with terror. It moves me so close to the edge that I have a sensation of falling, as if I had hurled myself off the edge of a building. I plummet downward, and in the speed of the fall I lose myself in something formless but deafening. It's like entering a scream—being a scream.
    And then I withdraw, backing away from the edge like a phobic. I make a different arrangement. Talismans, icons, incantations—these fragments are my frail shields of meaning. The game's moves must be rational. I force myself to make a coherent argument for every grouping, but at bottom the game is magic. I'm its necromancer calling on the spirits of the dead, the missing, and the imaginary. Like O painting a slab of beef because he's hungry, I invoke ghosts that can't satisfy me. But the invocation has a power all its own. The objects become muses of memory.
    Every story we tell about ourselves can only be told in the past tense. It winds backward from where we now stand, no longer the actors in the story but its spectators who have chosen to speak. The trail behind us is sometimes marked by stones like the ones Hansel first left behind him. Other times, the path is gone, because the birds flew down and ate up all the crumbs at sunrise. The story flies over the blanks, filling them in with the hypotaxis of an "and" or an "and then." I've done it in these pages to stay on a path I know is interrupted by shallow pits and several deep holes. Writing is a way to trace my hunger, and hunger is nothing if not a void.
    In one version of the story, the burnt piece of doughnut box might stand for hunger. I think Mark was always starved for something. But what? He wanted me to believe him, admire him. He wanted it badly for at least as long as he looked into my eyes. Maybe that need was the one thing that was whole and true in him, and it made him radiant. It didn't matter that he felt little or nothing for me or that he had to pretend to get my admiration. What mattered was that he felt my belief. But the pleasure he took in pleasing others never lasted. Insatiable, he gorged on crackers and doughnuts, on stolen things and money, on pharmaceuticals and on the chase itself.
    I have no object for Lucille in my drawer. It would have been easy to save some scrap of her, but I never did. Bill pursued her for a long time, a creature in his mind whom he could never locate. Maybe Mark was looking for her, too. I don't know. Even I followed her for a while, until I came to a dead end. The idea of Lucille was strong, but I don't know what that idea was except maybe evasion itself, which is best expressed by nothing. Bill turned what eluded him into real things that would carry the weight of his needs and doubts and wishes—paintings, boxes, doors, and all those children on videotape. Father of thousands. Dirt and paint and wine and cigarettes and hope. Bill. Father of Mark. I can still see him rocking his little boy in the blue boat bed he built for him on the Bowery, and I can hear him singing in a voice that was low and hoarse, "Take a walk on the wild side." Bill loved his changeling child, his blank son, his Ghosty Boy. He loved the boy-man who is still roaming from city to city and is still reaching into his traveling bag to find a face to wear and a voice to use.
    Violet is still looking for the sickness that moves in the air, the Zeitgeist that mumbles to its victims: scream, starve, eat, kill. She's looking for the idea-winds that gust through people's minds and then become scars on the landscape. But how the contagions move from outside to inside isn't clear. They move in language, pictures, feelings, and in something else I can't name, something between and among us. There are days when I find myself walking through the rooms of an apartment in Berlin— Mommsenstrasse 11. The furniture is a little blurry and all the people are gone, but I can feel the sweep of the empty rooms and the light that comes