But as I made my way through Blithe’s life, I was held in by something other than my own sadness or seeking. I’d never been good at school, tho I did enjoy the structure of the day, being industrious for little pockets of time until I had to go home and make a snack in the empty house.

It’s nice to do group work again, I told myself.

Using the Rhiz’s special keyboard, which allowed one to type directly onto paper, I began turning Blithe into a person.

NARRATIVE REPORT: BLITHE FREEMAN

He woke up to the gentle chimes of his phone. Sunlight poured through sheer white curtains. He stretched and got out of bed. He peed and laid out a yoga mat in the living room. He rolled his shoulders, released tension from his lower back, and did a twenty-minute core workout.

After moving his body, Blithe was opened, buzzing with life. He made a smoothie with tangerines from his neighbor’s tree, adding holy basil leaves.

As soon as Saul texted, Blithe lost his glow.

“Hey, babe, I just want to let you know that we’ll process this and figure it out.”

Saul, his boyfriend, wanted them to experiment with opening up the relationship. The idea of snuggly, curly-haired Saul sleeping with someone else made Blithe feel like he would disintegrate, vanish entirely. Most L.A. gays accepted the narrative that they were hard-wired to be non-monogamous. At a recent dinner party, their friend Fain had brought up an article that proved men’s “need to procreate diversely.” People could use science to justify anything: that gays were an evolutionary abomination, that even in gay couples there had to be a “masculine” and “feminine” role, etc. Saul was not a typical L.A. gay. In fact, Saul wanted to open up the relationship and experiment with sleeping with female-identified folks, which made matters even worse.

Blithe put the phone down and tried to ground himself by walking through his apartment, passing the palm tree in its bone planter, the guest nook with its clean white-and-navy-striped sheets, the living room window facing out into the unchanging pale blue sky. At least he had the escape of work, where he could engineer stories and intrigue without going below the surface.

On his way to Elemental, Blithe played through his Line. To him, adulthood was a threshold crossed only when one submitted to the boredom of external circumstances.

So he was still a kid.

His latest project was set in the Sonoran Desert. He took the landscape and made it into a balm, a poultice of smoky nights and elaborate self-defense mechanisms.

“Margaret has just stolen into the mine at night, and with a sputtering lantern, she chisels the gem out of the place her husband marked with chalk. Her hands shake, and she flashes back to the marauders coming into their house, lighting it ablaze, taking her husband off to the Edge of Pines. Her husband followed their plan, submitting to light torture until he told his abductors the location of the counterfeit gem, and still, they killed him.”