The film’s credits sequence, after the MGM lion roars, rolls against a backdrop of stenciled wallpaper and a gaslit sconce—someone said the walls reminded them of a particular image by Bellocq, the one where the photograph’s subject is wearing vertically striped stockings and holding a glass up as if for a toast, and someone else said that would make sense since the film is set around the time that photo would have been taken—but it was the score to the credits that got us to sync up our disparate moods: soprano, crash, thud, tremolo, something that could have been a theremin but was probably just violin.

We sank into our positions, sought and found convivial contact (Kim’s and my knees touching lightly, unremarked), and readied ourselves to be outraged.

Paula (Ingrid Bergman) is in love: it’s ruined her art; it will ruin her life. Of course, we know it—how could we not? We pass the pipe.

No one in the room is in a current relationship, I remember, looking around: divorced; heartbroken; happily single; single and looking; not interested; deep in impossible love.

“Are you afraid?” Gregory asks with his uncanny lisp. “Of me?” “No, of happiness.”

“Don’t fall for it, Paula!” Marc heckles, uncapping another tonic water drawn from his bag. “Stop spoiling!” Stella whispers, elbowing Marc and making the soda spill.

I’m trying to focus on the film, but the minute the group settles into companionable stillness I leave the scene, as definitively and completely as I remember leaving my bedroom the one night I successfully astral projected—at nineteen or twenty, after studying the technique under Caleb and Mariko all semester, prone on the floor of our shared room in the shared house—and found myself (unoriginally—I’m sorry!) flying over the beleaguered two- and three-story apartment buildings of the surrounding streets, the ungroomed patches of lived-in yard, the late-night stragglers filing out of the every-night live blues spot, and feeling, really feeling, the wind in my face.

I reach for that experience while acknowledging all the ways in which this time is different: I didn’t fly; I didn’t even leave Leslie’s living room, not fully, but it was as if my sensing apparatuses had left the room, had detached themselves both from my material body and from anything that could be figured in language as “my body.” And, conversely, while that first time all the drama of the experience was in the mere fact of it—nothing happened other than what I’ve described: I flew, I viewed my neighborhood from above, I returned—this time, there occurred an event, at least there occurred a part of an event, sadly truncated.