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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

Our team stayed aloft in a plane for three

days straight, much as crimes, in the end, are

overwhelmed by personality. It’s a quiet,

seething understatement to say the public

will survive the current plague of zeros.

I preceded this deluge: I will try to keep

my argument strictly precolonial, with

heavily bulleted sections: “1. Experience,”

“2. Lessons Learned,” and “18. Action Plan.”

Though in my haste I have been heard to say

there is no richer subject than the 2001

anthrax mailer (or mailers). “I know not how to

hurt other people,” I also say. I stay low key and

crank out patients. You are patient

when you find beers, yes? Austere and dyspeptic,

I just thrive there, collecting endorsements

from the entertainment world, Clintonian

masks. I preceded this deluge.

I preceded this deluge. A superb antagonist,

a high-water mark, dingy with clarity, bathed

in top-secret fluid, I went boar-hunting

occasionally. It was the greatest time of our lives.

Forty-Eight. Est et Non

Forty-Eight

Est et Non

Directly after the accident, everything was shuttered. Then, slowly, and perhaps also abruptly, it wasn’t. Or, it wasn’t, and it was. It felt to Clare like a monstrous task. All things were open. But all things were things. There was nothing in the way of anything else. But it was all only real. It didn’t make “sense.” Clare stood at the top of an enormous tower. The tower was round and tapered like the world’s tallest chimney and constructed from stone. The weather was extraordinary. The tower was located in the middle of an ocean. Wisps of cloud dangled in its environs, but most of everything everywhere was blue. There was the dense sky, so thick it was a sound. There was the water, dark navy. Clare could discern the curvature of the earth. Mostly she tried not to look down.