I don’t know why I strung everything together with commas like that. It felt like a moment of addition, of accrual. Like a moment to reject subordination.

Doesn’t matter anyway. The message refused to send.

WHAT WE WEREN’T DOING

while on the night shift or the day shift swatting rumors and confirming fears, or while doling out MRES in churches strewn with sleeping bags and cots, or while standing in waders in basements wielding buckets while the seismic numbers were revised and various Bodies of Standardized Naming continued to argue—storm, hurricane, storm …—what we weren’t doing, and it would be strange to blame us for this (though among the first responders were some who seemed partial to assigning blame), was paying a lot of attention to what was happening downriver in the city in which Love—in another world, it now seemed, though it was the same world—had met.

The mail still arrived every day, though most of the routes were interrupted and people had to pick up their letters and parcels at one of the post offices that hadn’t been evacuated. My PO box on the bottom row in P______ had been soaked; S’s postcards sat in a regulation cloth sack behind the counter at C______, where I had to wait in line for up to an hour to receive them. The last two arrived on one day, and then for a week there was nothing, and then I stopped going to the post office in C______, and then, ten days after Ezekiel fell, the mail, without warning, stopped coming altogether.

THE NEWS REPORTS

The Glass Bead Game is a book on my shelf. It was given to me by a girlish boy I called Bambi, with whom I was hopelessly in love. Its pulverized

cover, green beige with an illegible image, illegible text, is hinge-taped

to the equally pulverized, illegible

spine. I would follow Bambi home on the Tube, pretending I lived

in his neighborhood. I lived

across town, I

read the whole way home, happy in my misery

as now, drunk on disaster, this book

tumbling from the storm-shaken stack.

Once, Bambi almost kissed me, we were high, we’d just finished

our nightly communal theft from the till, café now empty—

almost kissed me, I swear—

later handed me the book, inscribed:

“Take good care of this. It is meaningful tome.” Castalia, the

futuristic

site of the novel, gave Tim Leary the name for the rebrand of his

International Federation for Internal Freedom. It’s mostly

about men (The Glass Bead Game), though there is in a late

chapter a flashback to a time “when women ruled” (this

according to Wikipedia, which also reminded me of aspects of the

plot and characters, including the pagan rainmaker, Knecht,

who, having lost his rain, sacrifices

himself to “the tribe”).

It took years for me to realize I’d misread Bambi’s loopy

handwriting, to recognize his error