It’s strange to miss people you don’t deserve to miss. My mentor and I weren’t close, though the training provokes a certain kind of intimacy. I have no right to miss S, a stranger.

What I know but can’t see through the blur is that my sense of what I deserve needs undoing. That I have exactly as much a right to be addressed as does anyone, as do you.

TAXONOMIES

It’s zero degrees today. Actually, it’s New Year’s Day.

I don’t have a good track record with holidays: birthdays, anniversaries. You can ask the two philosophers, or any of the rest. I have, you might say, a fucked-up relationship to the expectations of others. The wife and I may share this trait; so may the anarchist, though he would use different words. Maybe you share it too.

It’s zero degrees. A thin layer of ice has made a vignette of the window overlooking the bodega, itself vignetted by a string of holiday lights. A child the size of a fire hydrant stands next to a fire hydrant, bundled ridiculously in fire-hydrant red.

Weeks pass. It’s still cold. No word from my mentor; Love, too, has gone quiet. The wife and the husband have scheduled a “talk,” which is to say that in my mind they are due for a talk. The sun is bright and bears down on the owner of the bodega as he carries out a stepladder, positions it in the center of the broad and dirty window, climbs it, and begins to bring down the string of unlit lights.

I order a manual for growing psilocybin mushrooms. I download two books from one syllabus: A Lover’s Discourse and All About Love.

I check, periodically and futilely, for a message from S.

On the radio, I hear a story about language, or about language games, though not Wittgenstein’s. Instead, the old parlor game Twenty Questions.

According to the show’s guest, in languages in which gender is not represented in the grammar—in which pronouns and nouns and adjectives are uninflected, shared by all—the game of Twenty Questions runs an unfamiliar course. Among speakers of these languages the question “Is it a man or a woman?” which often follows an affirmative reply to “Is it a person?” might not be asked until question nineteen or twenty, if at all.

Who is pictured while the other questions are being asked?