I held my head in my hands, the day’s images all out of order. I could’ve stayed in there for hours—my body screamed for it—but I toweled off, sat at the desk, and wrote up my notes.

THE FATHER

1.

There’s nothing for me in my condo. Nothing on the glass walls, where I can’t hang paintings, nothing to make with the steel appliances, nothing in the stack of hardcover novels that only vex and bore me. The wound in my arm tingles and calls, almost like a sexual organ.

I let my hair down; it swings almost to the backs of my knees. I pour a glass of wine and put a frozen dinner in the microwave, chicken in wine sauce with roasted red potatoes. I stand there, drinking, until the timer counts down, and then sit before my laptop with the food.

I’m startled to find an e-mail from Gordon Stone. I can’t recall the last time we corresponded. Besides composing the foreword to The Complete Bystander, Gordon has kept busy writing slender books about the famous food regions of Europe. Evidently the journalist from Vice contacted him and mentioned her plan to interview me.

She’s excruciatingly earnest, don’t you think? I wanted to disillusion her as a matter of principle. But it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard if you were coming to the launch. In fact, I didn’t even have your e-mail. I had to find it through your company.

I feel a pang of shame that Gordon knows what I do for a living.

I ran into your old friend, Annette Cale, at a function recently. She told me she’d seen you on 6th.

I remember the flicker in her eyes—“Whitney?”—as she took in the fingernails, the wilding hair.

I was very jealous, it’s been so long since I saw you. Please, Whitney, come to the launch. I’m attaching the invitation. You can’t ignore your family.

Gordon doesn’t understand, and somehow my years of silence haven’t conveyed it. I have no family, not really. Even my mother was a stranger in a mother’s skin. I’ve begun to look like her lately—a little harder, a little meaner, as if the nutrients have drained from my face—and it’s given me a clearer vision of her. Now I recognize her not as a lonely woman, not at all, but lonely around me.

I visited her occasionally after that day in Los Angeles. I’d had to admit she was right, the solution was impossible, it didn’t exist. “It sounded like science fiction,” she told me, and never mentioned it again.