The professor crossed his legs, emitting a sigh of absolute contentment. I crossed my legs, hospitably, though I find the position uncomfortable unless affairs fall out in a very particular way (if not aided by an unseemly manual adjustment). I had not anticipated this little discomfort in my visions of the evening, and now it forced me to think, as I certainly hadn’t foreseen, of the professor’s own bodily configuration, and whether he too was concealing his discomfort, whether he had in fact been concealing various aversions all evening, or whether, more happily but again not at all what I’d planned, his own affairs, which I could now hardly fail to picture in detail, fell out safely below the point where his thighs pressed together, or, alternatively, though this was unthinkable, were stowed above.

Such notions as these I had of course contemplated many times before in the face of this physical, if not metaphysical—never mind I can see no way to make it metaphysical—proposition. Did men everywhere endure a like discomfort for their own unfathomable leg-crossings, a move clearly appropriated and stolen from its native environment of women’s legs, women being the superior pretzels by far, or was there some peculiarity in my own affairs, perhaps, and this is really what I feared, an uncommon compactness?

I did not intend to cover this here, but then I did not intend to be thus preoccupied in the early moments of my retirement with the professor from my little-used dining room to this lamp-shaded and fire-lit enclave which I called either my study or the library, and which I had on this night, moments before, inexplicably referred to as my boudoir.

“Shall we retire to my little boudoir?” I had asked the professor, imparting a casual irony to the word, despite having in the moment utterly forgotten its definition, but who today can suavely propose these retirements, which must have seemed as natural as Adam and Eve only a century ago?

I had not omitted, however, to provide snifters, and a crystal decanter worth a week’s salary, on a pewter tray within reach. I now poured while the professor emitted a second sigh. What a cozy place it was. You would be a profound original to imagine the walls in terms other than of oak paneling, and not to posit rows of weathered volumes on all sides from floor to ceiling, as well as a heap of maroon leather, would be mere perversity.

This was the scene, for which I had prepared, and there sat the professor sighing.

It was time to speak. I belong, however, to the often distinguished species of man who can never think of anything to say. Recognizing this, it had once occurred to me to evolve a speech-generating machine, or algorithm, for the simulation of spontaneous sociability. The algorithm would take as input, for the convenience of a user who can rely on no help from the imagination, even if only to think of a sailboat, simply the first three things he lays eyes on. It would then generate a sentence something like, Remarkable, isn’t it, how [item1] forces one to reevaluate the terms of [item2] in light of the economy and/or climate change, given, the rising presence and near ubiquity of [item3]? I had, however, not evolved such an algorithm.

It was still far too soon to ask after my purpose, and without my girlfriend present to buoy conversation, I was able only to reply to his maddening sighs, the sighs of a being who did not, it seemed, desperately, desperately want anything, with my own attempted sighs. But perhaps he was sighing only to put me at ease. Nevertheless, I wondered just then whether, if I’d had in my pocket a little button whose function was to remove this professor, quietly and inconspicuously, from existence, I could have resisted pressing it.

I had been fiddling, at any rate, with the button of my tweed jacket to such a degree that I had succeeded in buttoning it. This was evidence the professor couldn’t have missed of the human nervousness I had been all this time dissimulating. I could yet, however, play it off as intentional, a buttoning preparatory to standing, evidence rather of my desire to prolong my seated audience with him as long as possible, so much was I enjoying it. The buttoning left me with no choice then but to stand, leave the professor on the crudest pretense, and enter the kitchen, where I found my girlfriend contemplating a picture, a favorite of ours, of a sailboat on the open sea.

“How’s it going?” She whispered.

“All right,” I whispered back, suddenly feeling this was true. I slid my arms around her and sighed. Perhaps it was only that my legs were uncommonly thick, due to the presence of powerful muscles. Perhaps it was this thickness, rather than any unmanly compactness in the area, that was causing the trouble.

I returned to the professor, suavely.

[reproduced by kind permission of Katy, for whom this was a valentine]

Sforza* was already a dead man.

I repeat: My involvement in the affair, late as it was, would have doubtless proved supernumerary to the workings of heavenly Justice. Anyone living within a day’s ride of Milano could have deduced that Sforza would be assassinated before the next Good Friday. The mathematics were plain for all to decode. The man was an ass and a half. You noble and occupying French would not have lifted a finger to save him, even had you known my dark intention. I am not a genius of hate, nor was my hatred unique; nor was it uniquely satisfied by his public extinction at the hands of mine own trustworthy maul, il Frantoio,† which is even now there in the corner, shining as if with instinctive bravado, or some would say hubris, or perhaps they would not say anything, the thing being but a humble instrument, a dead and never-living, and certainly never-speaking object of tremors—a humble instrument of wraths such as my family’s for the Sforzas.

The act itself was no matter; if you have clubbed a beast to cook its flesh, you have already killed before the eyes of God, and Sforza was no less beast—I have not been swayed from this opinion, monsieurs—than the chickens whose shit he fell upon as blanket after I had struck him. He was more beast than they, truly, for they at least took flight to escape a dying animal, namely Sforza, whereas he took no flight when his father’s army was crushed and his city gifted, by God’s perhaps less than translucent but always ultimately beneficent grace, to all of you.

In any event, as I aver, the act itself was not worthy of description. The maul attests! [A laugh is perhaps indicated here in the MS by a stroke of ink in the shape of a mouth with spittle flying forth, dotting various is henceforth below on the same page.] If only iron could but wink! Ah. We must leave it at that. I killed him before a crowd; several children looked on in astonishment and childish praise. One offered me his sleeve to mop up the blood that berosed my left boot.

And then came to pass the event worth testifying to: A frightened capon—frightened for losing his hens, not frightened of this humble sinner and hero of the people of Milano—escaped the grip of his owner, a boy of fourteen or so with dirty locks of ruby hairs whose eyes betrayed an intense and violent lust after the sort of bloodshed I had lately caused; you should find this boy and make him a captain of your fiercest squadron, sirs; he will not disappoint you when the Spanish send their auxiliaries up the boot and after our fair city. But, ah, I see the boiling room is prepared and your cloaksmith, eager to fit me with his leaden cloth. So be it. I speed my end:

This boy of fourteen ran after his capon, further spurring it to madness and sudden movements. I tried to escape them both, and to escape your men, who already were called over from further down the Via Toscana to run me through—or so I imagined; little time I gave to the inventiveness of your Gallic deathsmiths—but the capon buffeted me seriously about the cheeks and nape, and I pitched backwards over a barrel of melons. The courageous capon, whose ruby plumes matched the locks of his owner, then alighted upon the smashed-in head of Sforza, causing all around to laugh and point. This dizzied the bird all the more, and it expired on the spot, its feet wedged wholly down the open neck of the dead man, its wings obscuring what little remained of his skull, its barb-sharp beak thrust out proudly as if in but one moment, ah one moment!, to be speechifying—and with this inert chicken for a head, I swear by God, Sforza looked better than ever he had. The crowd guffawed, unrestrained now. He has had his retribution! some said, and the like. The French soldiers arrived and laughed, too, for it was quite obvious that the capon had expired mad with demonic possession, and that Sforza had earned himself a special treatment in the Inferno where I too shall soon be escorted.

Our congregation, then, was composed of merchants and children and beasts, and a killer and some soldiers, who are also killers, and for a moment the joviality of this tableau lifted my cockles. But soon I realized what had truly happened by my hand: The Via Toscana was completely blocked with stinking, shouting humanity. This, truly, was Sforza’s revenge: Not to peck at my jowls as a capon, but to arrange a scene so pitiful and risible that it would stop his city for an afternoon, costing it hundreds of florins.

Well, it is all meager enough, my sin and his counter-sin. I have said what I have been brought before you to say. I pray you have buried the twain as twain—capon and beast-man, I mean. Sforza deserves no less than a partner as intractable as he.

And now, my amiable extinguishers, hand me over that metal cloth, that I may be purged in the room of steam, and that I may feel the bond of bone and lead that will carry down my soul below! Hand it quick, and keep well my gentle maul—for it knows not what it does, save that its handiwork is Milano’s, truly. My every deed is done; my moment, passed. Pray quick! Pray quick! And remember the lusty-eyed lad! Give him the saber and watch the Spaniards quiver! Give him the maul, more like! Give him the maul!

§

*Pandolfo Agnese Galeazzo Maria Sforza, illegitimate third son of Lodovico Sforza and largely unsupported claimant to the Duchy of Milano in the spring of that year in which the Fearsome Father, Julius II, was elected to the Holy See [1503]. Infamous for using his short-lived political agency to stop the city prostitutes from working on religious feast days; for financing the creation of several new city gates which soon stopped opening; and for opposing the schemes of every other political actor in early sixteenth-century Italy—refusing to ally himself with the Venetians, the Holy League, the French, the distant and amicable League of Neutrals, and even the saintly and largely theoretically Unacting Confederation of Lombardy—Sforza earned himself the nickname “il Blocco.”

Sforza’s own lieutenant and third cousin, Paolo Maria Vitelli di Pisa, stole his gravestone and sold it to a dying man with the same initials who had been born around the same year as il Blocco. In this way, the site of his earthly remains became mysterious until 1992, when a team of Croatian archaeologists uncovered beneath the Via Corsica a small ceremonial anvil carved with the likeness of a man with an anvil for a head. The initials “P.A.G. Sforza” crowned the image, with the words Deus spero non olfaciunt circling the man’s feet below. The anvil was reburied outside the city by a distant descendant of the Sforza clan, but it was stolen three days later. Recently, a plumber in San Martino admitted on his plumbing blog to using the anvil to block a rat-hole in his garden wall.

†”The Buster.”

I blame myself
of course
for this student’s struggles
me being
the
educator
mentor
person in charge
etc.

            But we were kindred spirits, really.

We were souls
lost and shuffling
shuffling papers
papers dropping on my desk
me writing meaningless letters on them
A—,
usually
(the minus
to maintain my academic
integrity)

But this one guy
Stanley
I pitied this guy

He showed up only once in a while to class
always late
or extremely early
often before any of the other students were there
and always with a story
about this uncle of his
—and if this was a lie I give him so much credit—
who had a terrible habit of wandering
out into the city
in the middle of the night,
and everyone in his family—
twenty-five or so cousins and daughters squished into one room—
had to go out searching for him

“He’s like psycho,” Stanley told me.
“Like mental?”

One word to describe this guy? To describe Stanley?

            Frustrated.

He is the bystander
who gets soaked
by the dank
rainwater gathered into a huge puddle on the side of the street
when the random
car
speeds
by

            whoosh

“Just do this one assignment,”
I told him,
“Do the best you can,
and I’ll give you an A minus.”

He wrote mysterious prose
utilized creative punctuation
apostrophes ’’’’ everywhere
lots of random
(seemingly random)
s   p   a   c   e   s
all lowercase letters
USING
u
for you
and 2
for too
to
and two
and all the papers he handed me
had those perforations
on the edges.
Forget about typing anything up.
This was the best
I was getting

One day he approached me after class
all nervous
harried
carrying like three bags filled with god knows what
—I guess he’d been searching for that uncle of his
(or the classroom)
or busy jumping out of the way of
puddles—

and said,
“Hey, Mister, could you write a
letter for me?

            A letter of
            recommendation
            or
            whatever?”

I’ll admit that I laughed at him
and I told him he should probably get one from someone
“in his field.”
I explained what I meant by that,
but he replied as if he’d heard it before,

            “It just has to be
            general.”

So I consented to write him the letter
knowing
no one else in his right mind
would

but I regretted it immediately
didn’t know what to write
and felt funny about it
even offended

frustrated
by
everything
not just the task at hand

and all that happened was
I flaked
I just didn’t write it
I never wrote the letter for Stanley
and Stanley disappeared
never saw the guy again
semester was over
and that was that

            gave the guy an A—

                        out of guilt

guilt

that for some weird reason
never dissipated

and so for you, Stanley Stanleyson,
wherever you are,
I’d like you to know
that I’ve finished your letter

To Whom It May Concern,

It is my
  extreme
    pleasure

      to write to u
        on behalf
        of Mister Stanley Stanleyson

Who
Persevered
Despite facing odds
That u or I or anyone else
Quite simply cannot
Fathom

’’’’’

DO NOT!

hesitate to contact me if
u have any questions about Mister Stanleyson

(as it would be my pleasure to discuss this fine specimen)

or
  if
    u
      c
        an
          old
            man
              out
                wandering

cuz
everyone

  rly
    rly
      rly

        misses him

From the icy tarn of Bilderlee
You shimmered as if just for me
And blessed me with the gay caress
Of your uncommon manatee-ness

I had invented this poem, obviously not just that moment but over the course of several hot showers the week I first brought him home, and perhaps I had been more eager than I’d known for an opportunity to pass it off, for his benefit more than mine, as anthologized literature. Bilderley is his own last name, and in fact my own last name of late, my original having been Bilder, German for pictures, and my bride’s having been Lee, meaning a protected area, as from wind.

I hoped the manatee, less formally Emporio, would understand from this spurious classic not only that manatee-ness was a quality our poets could appreciate, but also, more subconsciously, that he himself could take credit for melting the former ice of my existence, and that he was the very picture of shelter from winds, a windbreak par excellence from the demoralizing gales of life. The reason I employed our shared last name, rather than my own solitary former last name, which might have made more sense, was simply and quite excusably to accommodate the rhyme scheme, or so I imagined.

“Did you just make that up?” asked my bride, proudly beside me.

“Of course,” I said. “It’s Whitman,” I added.

Happily, the contradiction appeared to pass over Emporio’s head. Anyway, he could not know, I realized, that I had been reading from Norton, having not turned his face from the children now boarding the bus, which subsequently drove by and around the corner, leaving a belch of black smoke, not at all unlike a plumply reclining ghost, in the air above the trees.

Then my bride and I went back into our shack, the manatee wobbling, but there, still positively there, between us.

She walked from the kitchen with her lunch to the room with the table and gazed into the depths of the bowl, wishing she’d added alphabet noodles, that there were messages to decipher, or that she had vision enough to read the herb crusted broth line that had gathered in a zigzag ring. Inside this house, it was a quiet day. Like all the others it would stretch and stretch and then contract like a rubber band, leave a mark and then fade.

The cavewoman would not have scrutinized her reflection in the enormous mirror as she brought the steaming spoon to her mouth for the first slurp of precious broth. Nor could she have read the newspaper, or known there were so many ways to steal, so many objects to buy, so many children hungry, so many different subway routes to the airport, or so many airplanes always headed at the exact same time to the exact same place.

Once, the world may have contained itself in one hot bowl. She brought the spoon to her mouth picturing herself in cavewoman sweatpants. She swallowed the broth and wondered at the way warmth could travel even to her fingertips.

That ancient woman. How much more she must have tasted—weird eviction notices from the future floating in the shape of willow bark, uncorked reserves of gasoline, the open road, a chemical compound of a pop tart—the hum of the internet settling in a film across her tongue. Or maybe not. Maybe she was just hungry for the next bowl. Maybe her soup was full of pine needles. Some guy in that Herzog movie might know.

She ate her lunch. It took about 20 minutes. And as she washed the bowl she wondered why she was not nuanced enough to know the effects on the pallet of a warm bowl of dirt.

You reach for a word as you reach for an itch.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

December 3, 2011: We met in front of a coffee shop on Cortelyou, drove a van to Coney Island, and picked editors out of a hat in front of a boarded up building.

This is the last time I can remember us all being together (though we weren’t all together here.) But I remember us as all being together. I remember an endless sequence of days where we were all together, days of coffee and board games and laughter and exercise balls and guitars. I am forever wearing a tiny pink women’s sweater and calling myself the Stormtrooper of Love.
In truth, I don’t believe we have all ever been in the same room at the same time.

We are (more) scattered now.
No matter when I say this, it will always be true.

The second law of thermodynamics states that systems tend towards disorder.
(To wit: D.G. is upstairs, editing the almanac, a year later.)

Most trouts live in lakes or rivers. Some, like the rainbow trout, will spend two or three years at sea before returning to freshwater in order to spawn. The important thing is that trouts eventually return.
I am not a rainbow trout; I miss the rainbow trouts. I miss them buckets.

I found this video on my phone today and forgot that I had ever taken it. When I watch it now, over a year later, I am reminded that we were chosen by the spirit of a man who had part of his right ring finger bitten off by a deranged Pontiac dealer in 1973.
This should not have worked.
It’s worked out pretty well considering.

I replay this video again and again. I put on headphones, straining to make out the conversation everyone up ahead is having as David and I trot circles around one another. But it is lost. In its place, I imagine countless other conversations we have had. I imagine countless other conversations we never have but always meant to.

I imagine that if I walked down to the living room right now, everyone would be there.

I construct meaning from poorly-shot video. I construct memory.
When I imagine us, I cannot help but imagine us walking into a sunset. It’s just the way I am put together.

Nostalgia is a ghost.

The men brandishing spike-collared pit bulls like handguns had chosen, Randy admitted, awfully cute handguns. JFK-bound planes droned above so that he whispered to someone away off in the century, “When I was your age, kid, you could look up anytime of day or night, even in the country, and see three, four airplanes at once across the sky. We wouldn’t think twice about it. You don’t believe me? Man, live long enough no one believes you. Live to be a hundred, a hundred-twenty, that’s what you get.” And he went in to buy the filtered cigarettes this time and a diet drink. The woman who served the soup and always coughed, coughed, and Randy hoped it wasn’t emphysema, even though emphysema isn’t contagious.

Arriving at work, Randy waved to the grumpy kid who shared his cubicle. The kid was a grump because he had been to grad school yet here he was, sharing a cubicle with the likes of Randy, Randy who looked so different as he came in just now waving at me, like a whole new person, this morning after I met you.

Dignitaries, each of has had a dream, after too much drinking, that we have followed a handsome stranger, from the cross-town bus we ride with our precarious departed, into a restaurant where this attractive person, whom we have never seen in life, has barricaded him- or herself into the only bathroom, and we have nowhere to go. My senators, we all lie in the same loft bed, mysteriously bereft until the bladder forces us up to shout what’s important, to leave off midway for beautifully stratified sandwiches, to grumble good day and return to our mansions, where birds pick the thin autumn trees for a morsel of what is absolutely everywhere.