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Back Loudermilk
Chapters (60)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Personae
  4. I: Early Days
  5. One. Control
  6. Two. Doubt
  7. Three. Fate
  8. Four. Same
  9. Five. Fine Arts
  10. Six. In Loco Parentis
  11. Seven. Settling
  12. Eight. Neighbors
  13. Nine. Prospects
  14. Ten. The Lucky
  15. Eleven. Instruction
  16. Twelve. Same
  17. Thirteen. This Is a Pipe
  18. Fourteen. This Is Not a Pipe
  19. Fifteen. The Reason
  20. Sixteen. That Person
  21. Seventeen. Predictably
  22. II: Writing Teacher
  23. Eighteen. Early Poems
  24. Nineteen. Motivation
  25. Twenty. Allegory
  26. Twenty-One. Grief
  27. Twenty-Two. A Portrait
  28. Twenty-Three. Veils
  29. Twenty-Four. Soft Power
  30. Twenty-Five. Lists
  31. Twenty-Six. A Break
  32. Twenty-Seven. Elsewhere
  33. Twenty-Eight. Custom
  34. Twenty-Nine. Parity
  35. Thirty. Fortune
  36. III: Volta
  37. Thirty-One. Images
  38. Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man
  39. Thirty-Three. Letters
  40. Thirty-Four. We Prefer to See Ourselves Living
  41. Thirty-Five. Love
  42. Thirty-Six. The Iceberg
  43. IV: Your Best Reader
  44. Thirty-Seven. A Novelist
  45. Thirty-Eight. In Advance of the Broken Arm
  46. Thirty-Nine. Their Penultimate Encounter
  47. Forty. Détente
  48. Forty-One. Worlds
  49. Forty-Two. Recognition
  50. Forty-Three. Persistence
  51. Forty-Four. And Then
  52. Forty-Five. Mingling
  53. Forty-Six. You
  54. Forty-Seven. Persona
  55. Forty-Eight. Est et Non
  56. Forty-Nine. The Author
  57. Epilogue
  58. Afterword: The Libertine
  59. Acknowledgments
  60. About the Authors

There it ends. Clare rolls her eyes. The story is—the stories are—ridiculous, and yet: they are analogues for each other, foils if not twins. They each describe vital, ineluctable forces. Monstrous entities, furred and fanged and made of words, obscure themselves by means of their enormity. They are images we cannot quite look at, glimpses of a catastrophe we convince ourselves comes from another country, another way of life; not our own. Clare’s father, Clare thinks, had he been a careless man?

It chills Clare and chills her hotly.

Today is Christmas.

She did not die.

Thirty-Two. A Very Interesting Young Man

Thirty-Two

A Very Interesting Young Man

On the first day of the year, there is a foot and a half of snow in Crete and Harry has, uncharacteristically, left the house. Loudermilk went home to The Cleaner a week ago.

Crete is a bright vault at 3:00 p.m.; air very fresh. Harry follows a squeaky path dug between banks to the downtown. He hopes he won’t encounter anyone he’ll be compelled to speak to. The few residents he sees are either over the age of thirty or under the age of ten. Everyone moves with caution.

Harry means to stretch his legs and then return to the place, get back to his notebook, but for some reason in spite of the holiday the Ground House at the center of town is open, and Harry is suddenly aware that coffee prepared by someone other than himself, for himself, though eminently affordable, would be an amazing luxury.

Harry goes in. He mutters his order to a girl with reddish dreadlocks. He receives a small coffee and pays with a twenty. Now he goes to the vacant bar along the window, lowers himself onto a stool. The snow is amber, or it is cornflower blue.

“Hi.”

Harry turns. The poetry woman Marta Hillary is standing just a foot or so away.

“Hi there,” Marta Hillary repeats. She is a poet, Harry corrects himself. She wears a black parka. The tip of her narrow nose is pink. This is an event.

Harry manages to nod. He struggles to prevent himself from losing his balance on the stool.

“I know we’ve met. Where was that, exactly? You’re not in my class?”

Harry knows that sentences exist, but currently they hover somewhere out of reach, spinning.