Between 11:49 and 12:16

Near midnight, the train runs more slowly—especially my line, which is all above ground and runs north-south along the eastern edge of the city. I boarded the train at 11:49pm at the northernmost stop. This city likes to call itself a city that never sleeps, but by this time of night there are hardly any lights on. In the windows, passengers see their own and one another's reflections, and behind them a dim and changing scene made of 7-11s, fluorescent bus windows, street lights with halos of dry leaves, break lights, and vertical signs for cheap hotels.

Most likely there are not so many people in any car on this train. My car had eight one of whom was standing, which meant that less than half the seats were taken. Still, strangers can end up sitting next to each other, even though one could not sit down next to a stranger when there are so many empty seats. What happens is that the car empties, and people are left sitting next to each other. One is too lazy or polite to get up and move to a place where he can have two adjacent seats to himself.

What would happen if you got up and moved? It happens from time to time. You think, To hell with it, we'll both have more room this way, and thereafter consciously avoid eye contact with your former neighbor. So when, on occasion, a person sitting next to you does this, you understand the motivation exactly but feel offended anyway.

There were two young men seated next to each other on my train home tonight. As it happened, they were both headed for the same stop. One of them could have been still in college. He wore somewhat baggy jeans and had spiked hair. The other might have been just out of a master's program, a young office worker or banker, perhaps a lawyer. He wore jeans and an untucked dress shirt, but it was too late at night to be able to tell much about him from the way he dressed. He was tired and quite good-looking, in a certain way that inclined one to think that here was someone who would be successful enough, professionally and socially, without having to suffer too much hardship.

Behind this young man, seated back-to-back with him, was a well-dressed young woman. Her clothing, black pants and a dainty silk shirt with a floral pattern, was too pretty for work, too tasteful for a night out, and too expensive for a student. She was too young to be married. Maybe she was on her way back from a date. She wasn't especially attractive, but she took good care of herself. To the right of the two young men was another young woman. She was naturally attractive, but dressed more casually than the other and had a hairstyle that didn't suit her face, which was lightly made up. If you looked, you might feel she ought to have put on slightly less eyeliner.

As the train moved between one stop and another, the college-aged young man stood up and moved toward the door. Almost immediately, the other young man stood and began to follow.

There had been no apparent impetus for the first young man to stand. The train wasn't very close to the next stop; there hadn't even been an announcement of the next stop to jar him into premature action. He hasn't finished a magazine article or a chapter of a book. He wasn't listening to music, and he hadn't received or made a phone call. It was truly a strange time to stand up, and whatever caused him to do so must have been the result of a long and isolated series of thoughts.

It was clear, though, the first young man's standing had prompted that of the second, who was certainly aware that the next stop was his. But at the slow pace the train was traveling, it would be a full minute or two before it arrived. The second young man could have sat back down, but he didn't, for reasons that are certainly unknown to him, even if he happens to be exploring the issue as I write this. He didn't sit down, but he was aware of having stood at a strange time, and of the obviousness of the fact that it was the other standing that had caused him to stand. He allowed a small part of his mind to lazily consider strategies for defusing the possible implications of follower-mentality or latent homosexual desire.

He took a small step away and turned his back on the other young man, who was facing the door and had not noticed any of this. As he turned, he looked briefly at the prettier girl, who had been looking at him. She looked away, but not quickly enough to appear embarrassed. His attention was quickly transfered to the woman who had been sitting behind him—or rather, to a strange action being committed by this specimen. The was holding both her arms out straight out, her hands meeting to clasp a black object directly in front of her face.

It was a camera phone, although it was unclear what she was photographing. There was an old couple dozing at the end of the car opposite her, but her hands were not pointed toward them. The young man continued to watch.

The phone took its photograph, emitting an electronic simulation of the sound of a camera shutter, which was the loudest noise in the car for that moment, and the only unexpected sound that had been heard for several stops. That is to say, it was fucking loud and one wondered whether he should would feel self-conscious. As the woman drew her arms back toward herself, the her hands rotated to reveal the other side of the phone, which had a large screen. She had been photographing her own face.

The young man smiled, or laughed silently, and sidled over a bit to try to catch a glimpse of the screen. The woman's back was to him, so he didn't know what her face looked like, or why she should choose to photograph it now. Surely she already had a photograph of herself on the phone, if she wanted one. It was not a new model, so she must have had it for some time. He tilted his head farther than would usually be tactful, obviously trying to look over her shoulder. He was tired and the train was almost empty, and no one was paying attention, except me.

But he didn't bend his head far enough or look long enough to tell what the woman looked like. He gave up almost immediately, without thinking about it. A second later the train slowed as it reached the station. He turned toward the door and the back of the other young man. The door opened, and both of them walked out. The profession-looking young man walked quickly, passing the college student in perhaps six long steps, not turning his head even a little as he stepped onto the escalator. At that moment, the college student noticed him for the first time, but, as the young professional walked down the escalator while the student stood, had forgotten about him entirely by the time he reached the bottom. The attractive young woman who had looked at the attractive young man earlier might think about him again in an abstract way, if she is that type of person.

First draft

What follows is a children's story that was told to me by a friend of a friend, in the course of recounting a bad baby-sitting experience. I don't know who wrote it originally or where it's from.

The Stone Rabbit

Because the monster was so terribly ugly, he lived alone in a cave. It may be because he was so terribly ugly that he was even called a monster. No one ever looked at him long enough to be able to tell what he was. However, it is hard to imagine anything but a monster having been so ugly, and so it was widely assumed that he was in fact a monster. In any case, it may be that there is no difference between being monstrously ugly and being a monster.

No one ever explained this popularly espoused, if largely subliminal, theory to the monster, but he wasn't blind. He saw his reflection, and he knew that to call his face "unattractive" would be like referring to the Irish Potato Famine as "that time McDonald's stopped serving French fries." His was an authoritative and enlightening repugnance—all living things were aesthetes in his presence: humans and animals fled from him, the humans struggling to pant the word Monster! through the trembles and constrictions of abject fear, the the animals braying, squeaking, or gasping in a manner that transcended species; plants, those loyal companions to all who fear the the perception and cognition of others, browned and shriveled when he came near, leaving the area around his cave a desolate landscape of dirt, mud puddles, and sparse, rotting vegetation.

In fairness, the monster could never object to the treatment he received. He had a certain amount of familiarity with Aristotle. One of his great ambitions, aside from someday having a friend, was to read the seminal works of Western philosophy. Given his freedom from social commitments, the reader might assume that this project presented no great difficulty, and in fact the monster set about it with spectacular gusto. In fact, his new enthusiasm for academics led him to espouse an obscure theory of "(de/re)constructing paradigmatic temporalities," which he understood to mean he ought to read in alphabetical rather than chronological order. He completed the As without incident, but at approximately the time he came to Barthes he found that certain pages would burst into flame when his gaze fell upon them. He told himself that the problem lay in cheap recycled paper and shoddy binding; however, his ego never known society's soothing caress, he lacked the ability of knowing self-deception that allows so many of us to overcome our daily vicissitudes. He never got round to starting up again on his project. Nevertheless, he had got through Aristotle, and Aristotle resonated with him. He correctly identified the phrase "[the primacy of sight among the senses^*]" as one that was both pertinent to his life and sanctified by millennia of citation, and he copied it in his most careful and florid handwriting along with his other favorite "moments" from the As onto a large unlined sheet of paper taped to the wall near his bed.

A chameleon, Victorian furniture, a child's attempt at oil painting, egg salad. Ugliness is not a universally intolerable feature. In certain objects it may even be desirable. In any case, humans have a great tolerance for ugliness. Zoogoers can admire a chameleon in a glass tank, Victorian furniture may be reclined in, parents coo over the art of their offspring, and heaping bowls of egg salad adorn a great number of picnic tables and Christmas dinners. And this is to say nothing of plants and animals. The demand that one's face will be pleasant to look upon could have, and perhaps should have, seemed willful and capricious to the monster. But he never failed to understand that his ugliness, superficial to his own consciousness, was a thing that burrowed into the selves of others, catalyzing toxic reactions at a chemical level. The chemicals of our selves, he understood, were to be guarded with utmost care. Death itself was preferable to subjecting them to the caustic processes the monster represented. That much he had gleaned from his own reflection and from the As.

Shunned by society, monsters find ways to allay boredom, often, it seems, by carrying off children, livestock, or virgins. If our monster was not bad-natured enough for such behavior, not was he immune to the toxic effects of loneliness. As the reader can imagine, he needed a friend.

From the outset, the monster knew that a human friend was out of the question, contact with civilization being an impossibility. It once occurred to him to keep a pet, and he obtained a hamster. For one such as a monster, the advantages of a hamster are obvious: hamsters sense largely by smell and live in cages. But the hamster, employing the mysterious instincts for which animals are so envied, managed to construct a crude rope out of fiber from its sawdust litter, and one morning the monster awoke to find it dangling from the bars on top of the cage. There was no note.

And so the monster turned, as do so many in his position, to stone carving. "If I can't make a friend," he thought, "well then I'll make one." What he meant, of course, was that he would construct companions for himself rather than finding them.

Night and day he labored. His initial handicap was two-fold: for one, he had never carved stone before; for two, only rarely had he been privileged with a glimpse of the front side of a living creature, since they tended to bolt in terror as soon as they saw him.

He solved these problems with diligence and imagination, respectively. After a time, the dismal landscape around the monster's cave came to be populated with a small but growing society of inventively fronted statues, both human and animal in shape. The monster had no "end point" in mind for his little group—in a hidden, treasured place within his mind was the hope of reconstructing all the people, the sparrows, worms, cows, dear, fish, and other animals that had once inhabited this place. Pragmatically, he knew this would be impossible, but he sometimes allowed himself the fantasy, and when he did it he felt a fluttering joy, as if his imitations of white moths had come to life and were searching ticklingly for yellow wildflowers inside his chest.

But after a point, his work slowed. He wanted to enjoy the fruits of his labor rather than carving away day in and day out. There was a particular female whose company he especially enjoyed. She was not beautiful by any stretch of the imagination, but not quite so ugly as he, and he was flattered by her lack of projectile vomiting. Their conversations were one-sided, but that didn't bother the monster. The two of them would stand arm in arm enjoying each other's company—he discussing Thomas Aquinas or Agrippa the Skeptic, she listening attentively. The monster enjoyed the society of all his creations, but it was she who charmed him in sleep and made his dreams anxious for morning.

Fearing she'd be lonely while he was away, he carved her a pet rabbit, to whom he confessed his feelings for her. There were days he saw nothing in her but stoney indifference; other times it seemed as clear as day that she loved him, and he knew that the next time he saw he would take her into his arms, but when the time came his face flushed bright red and he found himself paralyzed by some nervousness from some unknown source. The rabbit was a good confidant. He offered a sort of immobile sympathy, and never breathed a word to anyone.

In the end, it was she who made the first move. One day, he sweatily held her hand and wondered aloud whether Augustus of Hippo more properly belonged to the medieval or to the classical period, he thought felt a tiny squeeze. Daring to imagine that she would come to life had made him feel ready to sob hard enough to tear himself apart, although he had only let out one heavy, quavering sigh and pushed the thought from his mind as quickly as he could. Now, as he brought his wart-crusted lips to hers, he sensed the barest, most enticing trace of warmth radiating from her. As they touched, she crumbled to dust.

The other statues collapsed as well. As the monster turned to them for consolation, his immense ugliness leveled them one by one, and at an accelerating pace, so that within a month the devastation was complete. He buried the pieces of each as it fell, digging graves as they were first dug, as an escape from the unbearable madness of the spectacle of death, as a denial of having lost.

The stone rabbit alone was not affected. It stood odd-faced and good-naturedly through everything, and when the monster had finished the last burial he collapsed next to it, exhausted and heartbroken, and fell asleep. That night dreamt of being nuzzled by a warm rabbit with brown fur and a constantly twitching nose. When he woke up, he found himself shivering with cold and wet with dew. His arm was draped over the rabbit. It was as cold as the dirt.

In the many years that followed, the monster never carved another living thing. The rabbit was enough. He spent every day with it, stroking it behind the ears and contemplating the As. He sang to the rabbit in his ugly voice, drew ugly pictures for it in the dirt, and told it jokes that no one would have thought was funny. He slept by the rabbit every night during the summer. During the winter when the barren dirt froze solid, he would come out of his cave early in the morning to break the ice off the rabbit and pour hot water over it. Then one day the monster didn't come out of his cave, and he didn't come out the next day, and many hundreds of days passed, and on none of them did the monster come out of his cave, and in his absence first moss, and then grass began to grow, and the yellow flowers and the white moths came back, and there were fish in the stream and the trees grew back their leaves.

On one of the endless number of days on which the monster did not leave his cave, a young man and a young woman walked in the woods, side-by-side with warm laced fingers and steps that were small and zigzagging with ungainly desire. They came to a small meadow with many small hills, abundant in yellow flowers and white moths that they mistook for butterflies. They wandered around the meadow and touched each other's chestnut hair, then fell down on a hill and kissed each other's tingling lips and chests with nothing above them but the sky and the endless universe, and when the young woman worried about grass itch, the young man smiled and lay down his jacket for her, and removed a condom from his wallet.

Later, the young man got up to stand for a few moments behind a tree. When he returned, he found that his lover had slipped back into her white blouse and was bent over to see something on the ground. He approached from behind her and wrapped his hands around her waist in remembrance of act love they had lately carried out. Then he saw what she was looking at. "I wonder who made it?" said the young woman. "It's pretty," said the young man, letting his hands slip from around her waist.
__________________

^*There is a single word for this idea, which no amount of googling has been able to uncover. It appears somewhere in James Joyce's Ulysses, but I haven't got a copy with me.

First draft

There is too much that could be said about this man (some of interesting, much of it not—all very related to the matter at hand) to attempt to say much of anything, except that he no Everyman. We will not give him a name, but don't let that fool you; as far as this story is concerned, you don't have a name either. Assume that you and he are about equally idiosyncratic. Call him "the patient," because that is what he was.

The doctor entered the room shortly. He was entitled to the honorific because he held a Ph.D. in neuropsychology (he would have had a thing or two to say about the second paragraph of this story), wore a long white lab coat, and carried a clipboard. He knocked brightly, professionally as he opened the door. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wore his hair very short, and impressed the patient with a 1950s-style authority. The patient felt a surge of an emotion that might best be described as a hybrid of fear and relief in unknown proportions. Here was the embodiment of an institution, an arbiter of power and powerlessness, of safety and knowledge, of yearned-for consolation, of responsibility, of uncomfortable necessary procedures.

The doctor introduced himself with a handshake that was similar to his knock and haircut. He understood that this must be very confusing but assured the patient he was safe and well cared-for. He directed the patient to watch a short film on a television on a high black metal frame, which he rolled in from just outside the door and pushed out again once the film ended. The film was of the patient himself. In seemingly good spirits, he had explained his condition: "At the end of the day, when you've been awake for a normal amount of time, maybe sixteen hours, you start to feel unbearably tired. Once you fall asleep, you lose all your memories from the previous day. They're trying to figure out why, but nobody's been able to yet. It's best for us if we go along with what they say." When the film ended, the doctor pushed the television frame back through the door. The patient could hear the wheels squeak and the dangling cord knock against the wooden walls as someone pulled it away down the hall.

"I understand that you have questions," said the doctor. "We have a routine. I don't give you much information until lunch time. You have agreed to this."

Overwhelming news of a medical nature is a nearly universal facet of life in the developed world. Its seasoned purveyors have seen too much to be moved by dramatic emotional performances. If only one could accept this news with the same jaded professionalism, as though it were any other business transaction! The patient thought: Have a good attitude about this. You may be crazy, but you're not ranting crazy. You've still got your wits about you. He'll admire you in a way, maybe when he goes home tonight he'll say a few words of praise to his wife and kids over baked chicken and potatoes and peas. He'll have taken off his lab coat by then.

Revision and continuation of 19.2.07 1:44 AM, first draft
C.f. 19.2.07 1:44 AM; 11.2.07 4:22 PM; 17.2.07 3:50 PM

Anyway: To have woken up in a room that is not one's own, and is not where one remembers having gone to sleep, what does one think once the initial perplexity wears off? It is difficult to imagine. There is no popular yardstick for this sort of situation. One may have seen something similar in a spy movie, but one is not a spy.

There is too much that could be said about this man (some of interesting, much of it not—all very related to the matter at hand) to attempt to say much of anything, except that he was as idiosyncratic as you are and should not be taken as an Everyman, even if we still don't give him a name. Call him "the patient," because that is what he was.

The doctor entered the room shortly. He was entitled to the honorific because he held a Ph.D. in neuropsychology (he would have had a thing or two to say about the second paragraph of this story), wore a long white lab coat, and carried a clipboard. He knocked brightly as he opened the door. He was tall, broad-shouldered, wore his hair very short, and impressed the patient with a 1950s-style authority. The patient felt a surge of an emotion that might best be described as a hybrid of fear and relief in unknown proportions. Here was the embodiment of an institution, an arbiter of power and powerlessness, of safety and knowledge, of yearned-for sympathy, of responsibility, of uncomfortable necessary procedures.

Continuation of 11.2.07 4:22 PM, first draft
C.f. 11.2.07 4:22 PM; 17.2.07 3:50 PM

Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, a man waits for a lavatory. Uninvited, the barest inklings of impatience have made their pointless arrival. All the same, he participates willingly and good-naturedly in the unspoken society of long plane flights, and is ready with a smile for the feaser of the protracted occupation. His need is not urgent. He has come here more for a reason to stretch his legs than for anything contained in the restroom. His thoughts have so far drifted pleasantly. He paces a little in the space provided by the emergency-exit row.

With businesslike alacrity, a second man, ignorant of the first, has just arrived on the scene from somewhere else in the plane. It is night, whatever that means in these hurtling confines over the Pacific Ocean, and the lights are off to allow passengers to sleep. As nonchalantly quick as he came, the second man opens the lavatory door and slips inside, closing the door behind him. He does not so much as glance at the first man, who is stunned for a short time. Realizing what has happened, the first man glances furtively about to see if anyone has witnessed the silly injustice.

A third man, farthest over on the emergency-exit row, is the only one to have seen, and now sees the man's glance and divines the meaning of the glance; but the first man fails to turn far enough to make eye contact with the third man, and thus will spend the rest of his life believing that no one had seen what just happened. Although he will be reminded of this trivial incident once in a great while, he will never mention it.

The third man believes the first man's movements betray certain emotions in small quantities tempered by acceptance: indignation, shame, annoyance. It is an accurate perception. The third man turns back to his movie, glancing up occasionally. The first man continues to wait.

Second draft

When the doctor stooped to retrieve his coat from the floor, he paused at the base of his descent, looked at the patient, and said, "Good night."

The phrase good night, if ones takes it perhaps too literally (and the reader is invited to remove her attention from this text and take a long moment to do so), is one of profound if Elizabethan tenderness. By the end of his long day, the patient was inclined to see this quaint poetry, and to consider that between himself and the doctor, was a dense void, insurmountable by any degree of sincerity, the far side of which nonetheless sustained all the moments of a true person.

He lay there in his comfortable, unfamiliar bed, holding book under the light of a cozy lamp. He could not read more than a sentence or two before his thoughts drifted, while his eyes continued to move across the text in a disconnected and meaningless way. He felt as though several cool worms were exploring the inside of his body. But he remembered the doctor's goodbye, and when he thought back over his day he felt a deep swell of gratitude and compassion, which quieted the worms somewhat. Leaving on the light, he turned over suddenly, pulling the thick comforter tight around him. His legs felt heavy, and the physical strain of being human for a day began to ease out of his back and shoulders. The pillow made an agreeably crunchy sound as he moved, and he burrowed his head into it and let out a relaxed sigh.

Ending, first draft
C.f. 11.2.07 4:22 PM

His first thought upon waking was: He woke up in a room that was not his own.

It is probably a bit early for remarks, but two remarks need to be made about this. The first is that, strictly speaking, the phrase first thought is a misnomer here. Even for the so-called omniscient narrator, it is impossible to say what happens inside of one's mind in the first slow moments of wakefulness, before the heavy matrices of language and society and identity settle down onto the awoken, when it may be that the psyche is thrown open to possibility. We will not assume this to be the case, but if it were, it might be speculated that in that moment, his true first thought, transcribed into our language, was something like: Here I am in a room. Natural light comes in through the window. Morning light on a light hardwood floor. White walls. A house in the country? The bed is queen-size, soft but not too soft, with comfortable sheets. The curtains are white, there is a closed wooden door past my feet and to my left, with an old-fashioned metal knob, door and knob both painted white, and the pillows emit a soft, agreeably crunchy sound when I move my head on them ever so slightly. This must be my room. I have a awakened in a pleasant room and therefore to a pleasant life. On a rocky peninsula, with a lighthouse nearby, whitewashed with a spiral staircase on the outside? This day will be a good day. If one of the many patterns of neural activity that could account for the thought this must be my room did blink briefly in his mind, it was an illusion, though an illusion of the truth, as we will see.

The other remark is that he was not in any sense a neurotic or pretentious or self-centered man, and was certainly not accustomed to thinking of himself in third-person past-tense narrative, and was very fleetingly—again, unlinguistically—annoyed for having conceived of himself as if (the irony here is unavoidable) he were the protagonist of a work of fiction.

Beginning, first draft