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By Root 611 0

an elemental fear out of deepest childhood. She could not remember where she lived. She stood alone on a corner near the elevated tracks, becoming desperate, separated from everything. She looked for a storefront, a street sign that might give her a clue. The world was receding, the simplest recognitions. She began to lose her sense of clarity, of distinctness. She was not lost so much as falling, growing fainter. Nothing lay around her but silence and distance. She wandered back the way she’d come, or thought she’d come, and went into a building and stood in the entranceway, listening. She followed the sound of voices and came to a room where a dozen people sat reading books, or one book, the Bible. When they saw her, they stopped reciting and waited. She tried to tell them what was wrong and one of them looked in her handbag and found numbers to call and finally got someone, a sister in Brooklyn, it turned out, listed as Billie, to come to East Harlem and take Rosellen home.

Lianne learned this from Dr. Apter the day after it happened. She’d seen the slow waning, over months. Rosellen still laughed at times, irony intact, a small woman of delicate features and chestnut skin. They approached what was impending, each of them, with a little space remaining, at this point, to stand and watch it happen.

Benny T. said he had trouble some mornings getting his pants on. Carmen said, “That’s better than off.” She said, “Long as you can get them off, sweetheart, you’re the original sexy Benny.” He laughed and stomped a little, battering himself on the head for effect, and said it wasn’t really that kind of problem. He could not convince himself that the pants were on right. He put them on, took them off. He made certain the zipper was in front. He checked the length in the mirror, cuffs more or less on shoetops, except there were no cuffs. He remembered cuffs. These pants had cuffs yesterday so how come not today.

He said he knew how this sounded. It sounded peculiar to him too. He used this word, peculiar, avoiding more expressive terms. But when it was happening, he said, he could not get outside it. He was in a mind and body that were not his, looking at the fit. The pants did not seem to fit right. He took them off and put them on. He shook them out. He looked inside them. He began to think they were someone else’s pants, in his house, draped over his chair.

They waited for Carmen to say something. Lianne waited for her to mention the fact that Benny wasn’t married. Good thing you’re not married, Benny, with some guy’s pants on your chair. Your wife would have some explaining.

But Carmen said nothing this time.

Omar H. talked about the trip uptown. He was the only member of the group who lived out of the area, on the Lower East Side, and there was the subway, and the plastic card he had to swipe through the slot, swipe six times, change turnstiles,

PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN, and the long ride uptown, and the time he landed somewhere on a raw corner in the Bronx, not knowing what had happened to the missing station stops.

Curtis B. could not find his wristwatch. When he found it, finally, in the medicine cabinet, he could not seem to attach it to his wrist. There it was, the watch. He said this gravely. There it was, in my right hand. But the right hand could not seem to find its way to the left wrist. There was a spatial void, or a visual gap, a rift in his field of vision, and it took him some time to make the connection, hand to wrist, pointed end of wristband into buckle. To Curtis this was a moral flaw, a sin of self-betrayal. Once at an earlier session he read a piece he’d written about an event fifty years earlier when he killed a man with a broken bottle in a bar fight, gouging the face and eyes and then severing the jugular. He looked up from the page when he spoke these words: severing the jugular.

He used the same deliberate tone, dark and fated, in his account of the lost watch.

Coming down the stairs she said something and it was only seconds after Keith did what he did that she made the connection. He kicked