At work, on my lunch break, I go up onto the roof with my salad, I sit in the shade of a large satellite disk, and at the level of my gaze there’s a placard proclaiming BLUES ALLEY. That’s a jazz bar where I used to go in 1996 and 1997, twenty years ago. I was working at the Voice of America then. And I always used to go there after midnight, when my night shift finished. The music would have stopped, the guests were dispersing, the musicians packing up their instruments. I used to come here because of a delusion: under the blue light of the bar, at the end of the day, I could be one of them, musicians, free night birds, and not a bewildered immigrant. I haven’t been there for nearly twenty years. But now almost every day, if it isn’t too cold or if it isn’t raining, I sit on the roof just after midday, opposite the bar. It’s in a very narrow alley and if I were to stretch I could reach the whiteboard inscribed BLUES ALLEY. In fact, all my past is always here, just across the road and within reach. If I were to take off properly, I would be able to jump into it from this roof.

After two months of not setting foot in a bookshop, we went to Barnes and Noble. Two months without the aroma of books. She walks behind me explaining: “There’s nothing in this shop. They only have books that sell well here.” She’s right, but I need to breathe in the smell of paper, for it to restore my balance, and I wanted to buy Don DeLillo’s new novel (Zero K, which went on sale yesterday). I easily found the book on the shelf, but the design and layout of the text put me off. I think I’d find it tiring to read. That happens to me with certain books, they are made ineptly so that they become an unattractive object. I’d like to read the new novel, but my eyes resist it. We went out as warm rain began to fall. It moistened the body agreeably. It was too hot in the car, the windows misted up from inside. As we were leaving the parking lot a motorbike materialized right in front of me, with a woman hugging the driver around the waist. Two old people, in fact. When the rider appeared in front of me he was so close that I first saw his frightened face and heard him scream. It was only thanks to that scream that I instinctively trod on the brake, they passed in front of us, and I paused for a few seconds before we went on. I watched that old couple in front of us, he seemed confused and kept changing lanes uncontrolledly, I skirted carefully around him and continued. Sanja kept saying, the whole time: “Drive carefully! Please, drive carefully!” She thinks there’s something wrong with my concentration. And she’s probably right. When the bikers had disappeared from my rearview mirror, she said: “The woman on the motorbike wasn’t wearing a helmet.” (That’s against the law in the States.) She’s become very perceptive.