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By Root 648 0

’s condition being timeless and unreconciled to reality. Having refused to give up her lifelong mourning, she lives outside of Milwaukee in a small group home with a view of Lake Michigan. There, minded by salaried employees, she passes a contemplative life colored by the narrow spectrum of apathy, except for episodes at the piano. She has been given antidepressants, sedatives, and stimulants, but still she does not speak. She reads, or seems to: she glares at the words and turns the pages with impatient finger flicks. Occasionally she peeps and squeaks. But when she sits down at the keyboard, she plays with a rather frightening virtuosity, though without any recognizable human feeling—the music emerges from the instrument with the dead expressionism of a player piano switched on in an empty room. Catherine’s face remains vacant no matter what musical notation passes in front of her or what her fingers find to do to occupy the time.

The subject of the job market removes Catherine from the conversation, and soon his stepfather tells Nathaniel that he has to go back to work. If this were a real crisis, the old man would stay on the line, but for him identity has nothing to do with money or with how the world actually works, and that is that.

“Thanks, Pop,” Nathaniel says. He puts down the phone and looks around at the comfortable dinginess of his apartment, now, thanks to the absence of valuables, unburglarizable. Outside the window, a cardinal chirps frantically as if affrighted. Nathaniel would like to snap off his imagination and its multiple narratives, but it’s stuck in the ON position, and if he didn’t live in his imagination half the time, he wouldn’t be himself, and he wouldn’t be bothered by Coolberg. Maybe he wouldn’t be bothered by anything, period. He would live on the Blessed Isles.

He leans forward to gaze out the window. He sees his own reflection in the glass. What good is an identity, anyway? his reflection asks him. For that matter, what good is a reflection? I lived in Wisconsin before I lived in New York, he tells the reflection, these were my parents, I broke my arm when I was twelve and Brian Hennerley tackled me when we were playing touch football, I first kissed a girl when I was fourteen, I remember she was ticklish…the rubble of the personal, the dust motes of the specific. Who cares who you are? the reflection asks, pointing at him. Every identity consists of a pile of moldering personal clichés given sentimental value by the fact that someone owns them. The fallacy of the unique! A rubbish heap of personal data, anybody’s autobiography. You can’t sell it or trade it. Besides, everyone has an autobiography, the principle of inflation thereby causing each one to be worthless.

Well, okay, the reflection admits, maybe some identities do shape up better than others thanks to the clothing of grace and good fortune. Of course, of course, of course, of course. Some identities are significantly richer than others, you’d have to be a fool to deny it. Better, more magnificent sins enacted on satin sheets in the penthouse, with music piped in through the floor grates along with the perfume, lend a certain robust glory to a man’s memory trove. Whereas some existences are empty dry sockets giving off the radiation of pain, victimization, mere shadows on the wall, dim bulbs, lethal vicissitudes, black holes in space, gigantic gravitational vacuums piloted by hungry ghosts…

Nathaniel finds that he is sweating again as these gigantic formless concepts tumble out of the window glass’s reflection into him, taking up mental occupancy. The unpleasantness of these ideas causes him to radiate a nervous malodorous sweat that he himself can smell and be offended by, and to remedy the smell of himself, he rushes to his closet to put on a clean shirt. He searches among the hangers and in the dresser drawers for the blue Brooks Brothers that his sister gave him, once upon a time, the one with thin rust-colored vertical stripes and a button-down collar, the shirt that always cheers him up, the wonder-working shirt. Wearing