All the while, I’ve had few expenses. I travel infrequently, save most of my money, invest in ultraconservative bonds, live very comfortably/frugally on my interest as my imagination and energies have begun to wane, and I find myself unable to write novels, even novellas, concentrating more recently on enigmatic prose pieces that mimic nonfiction, in the service of what I would call “higher fictions” (if the term were not so pretentious). As I have lost what minimal curiosity I once had in the complexities of characterization, the bedrock of the traditional novel, I have gained a keener interest in the complexities of “concept”: how a concept, or idea, can be made to develop, as if it were a character in a way; as an unpromising seed or bulb that appears rotted, stringy, hairy, can yet be coaxed into sending out shoots into earth, flourishing in a cracked flowerpot, and finally “blossoming”—like my favorite spring flower, narcissus, with its pale, delicate petals, its faint, sweet fragrance that is the very emblem of fragility and finitude.

In this way boldly exploring not a mere “mystery,” but the essence, the germinating seed, of mystery itself.

And so: perhaps that is why I am drawn to Keisha. Not repelled by the woman’s extreme fragility and aura of (dare I say it?) premature doom, but instead attracted by it.

6.

Eagerly anticipating my return to McGuire’s Grocery.

For the first time in memory, waking early, before dawn, with a wild sort of elation—anticipation—(is this what others mean by curiosity, an ardent fluttering of the pulse?)—to see what effect my second gift has had upon the cashier.

Discovering that I am frequently glancing at my watch. I am frequently thinking of her.

Surely the first time in my life that I have thought so intensely of a stranger whose last name is unknown to me.

And now that I think of it, there is something touching, I suppose, in this curiosity. For curiosity is a cabinet of vulnerabilities. Ignorance is the bulwark against the risks of curiosity. I do not know, therefore I am. I yearn to know, therefore I am incomplete.

Curiosity is a habit of youth. The desperation to know what others think of you. The curse of adolescence, wishing to control what others think. While at my age I scarcely care what I think of myself, let alone what others think of me.

(Perhaps, perversely, as interviewers have claimed, there is a “renewed interest” in the fictions of N__ of the 1980s; it isn’t likely that I will ever know, since I lack the curiosity to investigate. I do own a computer, a very old Dell, but the last time I checked, the clumsy machine was not connected to the internet, and its word-processing skills are so crude, I prefer my 1996 Japanese electric typewriter, now a sort of antique treasure among typewriter aficionados.)