I cannot bear, by now, to explain myself to strangers. Spelling out afresh my number of sibs, how many parents dead or living, my childhood ballroom dancing lessons while wearing those little white chimpanzee gloves— the very prospect of my issuing charm toward some “date” (i.e., a total stranger!) makes me feel ill and worried, fake.

By now, such an inventory of my life history must include my friends! It’d take my whole remaining life to tell it, tell that, tell them all.

And who, new to my address book, would willingly learn so endless a yarn? Prom themes of Dead Iowa Boys. No one should indulge me.

So I would sit now. In portrait rockers of my dead. I would now learn to sit.

On the big porch of an old house in a little town, there’s a semi-tubby man rocking, not reading a paper, not writing a letter, not doing his taxes, not doing nothing but setting there, listening to birdsong, and that is me now.

Am I lucky, or what?

And if I did not change the pandemic,

Q: How did it change me?

Answer:

B.C. —I did not know anything.

A.D. —Then I sorta did know I hadn’t, known.

And post A.D.?—Now I fully know I knew almost enough. If Doing ranks among the crudest yet more honorable forms of Knowing. I pretty much did. Know.

Of Robert’s ending all I’ll say is that he understood we were in the room, that we’d drawn up close around his bed. Don’t ask me how I know he knew. How do any of us know anything about the rest of us? Trust me, there are signs too subtle to leave even one overt smudgy stain. He knew it was I who held that bone rake previously considered the music-writing hand of an artist formerly known as Robert. He knew that Alabama had been forced to leave for her Berlin show. Those two had already said their goodbyes (just in case). I did and didn’t want to be there to see the terms, the scale of it, but I suspected.

He knew I had just emptied his apartment of the kiddy porn and bigboy love stakes, coast clear now for his folks, so they could sleep in that most hospitable and proactive of fruit-topped beds. Before I phoned them there to grab a taxi and come fairly quickly please, I tried to tell him a tale, to make the subway mishap into a comic story for him: of a blue shopping bag that split on a uptown local. He was past speech since his last direct orders, “broom closet.” But I could see a ghost of an eighth of a smile still ham-mocked somewhere in him. I knew that it—a joke about some vice of his made overly public and therefore comic—had reached our boy last thing. Amen.