It was as if I had reminded her of some truth. “That’s right. You’re right. Bad. God, I’m so stupid. I wish I was more like you.”

“How is that?”

“Brilliant, like you.”

“Eigen, I didn’t talk until I was five.”

“You couldn’t speak?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t speak. At least, I assume I could have if I had chosen to. What I did choose to do was write notes and that only got me into trouble. I was loose with my notes. I learned that it’s best to keep most ideas to oneself.”

“I talk too much,” she said.

“It’s late, Eigen.”

“May I sleep here?” she asked.

“Why?”

“I’m scared.”

I said okay and she handed me the empty glass, lay back down, and pushed her nose into Trigo’s. “Fat face. I love this face.”

“I’ll sleep out on the veranda,” I said, but I was not certain she heard me. Trigo seemed happy and so I left him where he was.

6

I was asleep, uncomfortable and in a dream. I understood in my dream that I was nowhere but in my head. The Mount Rushmore in front of me was not in South Dakota and the mile-wide gorge behind me was not in Arizona, but in the space I had constructed. Trigo had all four legs, and though they appeared to be functional, he refused to either stand or walk on them and so I carried him. For some dream reason he had an English accent, not a posh James Mason sort, but one with corners, like the actor Michael Caine’s.

“How long have we know each other?” Trigo asked.

“Five years.”

“My, but doesn’t time fly? Mal fliegt. Do you know how difficult it is to affect an English accent while speaking German? Seems like only yesterday I was lying there in that cardboard box on the sidewalk outside the Euler-Fermat Center for Formerly Exceptional Children Who Grew Up to Be Socially Awkward Adults, the EFCFECWGUBSAA. You were on your way to receive an award for managing to avoid suicide, if not suicidal thoughts, for thirty-five years of life, but you never made it in there. Instead you paid five dollars to the dirty, dreadlocked White boy who claimed I was the only survivor of a litter from a bitch that died giving birth.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I found you at the Providence, Rhode Island, Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the PRISPCA.”

“Don’t be an asshole.”

We moved along the rim of the canyon, what I took to be the south rim, but it was the north side. I considered my feelings, not an activity that often entertained. To designate feelings, to verbalize them, was to, necessarily, alter them, with no particular direction or mission. When I was very young, I didn’t trust speech, believing that other, nonword languages would intrude, complicate, or obstruct meaning, body language, facial expressions, timing, inflection, and so I wrote notes, letters. Now I knew that any movement from initial, pure thought was a movement away from precise meaning or representation. What Trigo had taught me was that pure meaning did not exist, never did and never would. Meaning is always constructed after the fact. Not only is there no private language, but there is no such thing as private meaning.