I am not going to report on the book I picked up from the stack, opened, and began to read, then put down, with its bright-patterned cover, background lilac or rose, brighter flowers abstracted and bleeding to the edge, title scrawled in a deep orange red above, in smaller lettering, the name of my faraway friend. I’m not going

to copy his beautiful opening line about sexual

pleasure and

reading. I’m going to report, telegraphically, on the actual

news, dominated today by the march

of the white supremacists

the countermarch of the anti–white supremacists

the think piece about white supremacy

the behavior of the white supremacists

the behavior of the pigs, so like

the behavior of the white supremacists

the behavior of the larger group of anti–white supremacists

who were nonetheless

by the calculus of power

outnumbered.

I’ve been avoiding the news in these news reports, reaching instead

for the new, an attempt to pry

it out, from remains, from

bibliomancy.

You aren’t surprised; you know by now how I am.

I’m going to pick up the book again, the one with the pink

cover, shiny, tear-proof, and read the second line

and then the third.

CASTING

I dream about S. A dream that vanished on waking, then rebuilt itself, image by image and sensation by sensation, a series of affective aftershocks that continued for several hours of the day. At first I thought I might be dreaming as either the husband or the wife: the dream could have belonged to either, with a near inevitability; it may have helped one or both to move forward, or sideways—something. But it was, truly, about S, at least as much as a dream can be said to be about a person impossible to picture, impossible to represent.

S was simply present, infused in the narrative without being cast in it exactly.

Casting, after all, is what S seems to exist to avoid.

The scene was like an animated card from the tarot, a symbolic illustration come to something-like-life. Its setting was a rectangular stone-lined pool in the courtyard of a crumbling house, once grand and large enough for several dyads, triads, and multiples—a potential site for the anti-nuclear option, though all markers (markers that were sensed rather than observed or read) pointed toward a lonely past of opulent but unused, light-filled rooms. Back in the courtyard, a shallow pool: a reflecting pool that, covered in duckweed or some other pond scum, refused to reflect.

I was there—(Were you? There was a diffuse and haunted sense of being observed from somewhere in the house, above the courtyard.)—but I was there in the pool, looking down at the scum, trying to locate, to decipher, something that could pass for my reflection. The scene froze there.

What made it unfreeze is the part I don’t understand.