of research had evaporated. It occurred to me that I could at least feel less guilty regarding all the lies about my family, as nothing significant had been built upon them, but in fact I felt wave after wave of intensified remorse. It became increasingly clear to me that I would have to confess my slander to my parents at some point in order not to be consumed by it, which added dread to my guilt. My distress about Isabel and Teresa, coupled with my guilt about my parents, opened onto larger questions about my fraudulence; that I was a fraud had never been in question—who wasn’t? Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak. I could lie about my interest in the literary response to war because by making a mockery of the notion that literature could be commensurate with mass murder I was not defaming the victims of the latter, but the dilettantes of the former, rejecting the political claims repeatedly made by the so–called left for a poetry radical only in its unpopularity. I had been a small–time performance artist pretending to be a poet, but now, with an alarming fervor, I wanted to write great poems. I wanted my “work” to take on the United States of Bush, to shed its scare quotes, and I wanted, after I self–immolated on the Capitol steps or whatever, to become the Miguel Hernández of late empire, for Isabel and Teresa and everybody everywhere to read my poems, shatter storefronts, etc. This was a structure of feeling, not an idea, which made it harder to dismiss, and I felt it more intensely in direct proportion to its ridiculousness. And when I doubled my dosage, and the insomnia returned, I began to read and write feverishly. This was less a new faith in poetry than a sudden loss of faith in pure potentiality.
Besides the insomnia, which this time lasted, save for a few nights of long and total and dreamless sleep, for a couple of weeks, I experienced two other notable side effects: first, my jaw was constantly and involuntarily clenched; second, I had what the internet told me was sexual anhedonia, lovely phrase. Both side effects had a certain rightness of fit with my general despondency, which was not diminishing, and I found this correspondence comforting, the way one savors abysmal weather when one feels abysmal. Additionally, I began to convince myself that the white pills were responsible for the intensity of my suffering, that I was having an adverse reaction, and this mitigated my fear of feeling that way forever; if I went off the white pills, I’d feel better. But I was too scared to test this hypothesis, and so, after a few days, I upped my dosage even further, taking a third white pill each morning, and when, after reading or revising poems for several hours, I would suddenly start crying, burying my face in a towel so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, or, when shopping for wine or cigarettes or hash, I felt mild dissociation, the world curling at its edges, I would reassure myself by saying that the white pills were themselves the primary cause.
The relationship I might have had in the flattering light of the subjunctive.
After the first week of my new dosage, however, a week in which neither Isabel nor Teresa called on me, I achieved a new emotional state, or a state in which emotions no longer obtained. When I would try to describe this condition in chats with Cyrus it seemed utterly contradictory; on the one hand, I now felt nothing, my affect a flat spectrum over a defined band; I could watch videos of beheadings or contractors firing on Iraqi civilians or the Fox News commentators without a reaction and I did. I reread Levin’s most soul–wrenching scenes