recognized my human existence. Still, my tic of guilt took the form of her shape, standing in the wind on the lighthouse rail, standing still in a mist of bullets and shoes and salt air and my saliva, like the cursed icon from a black-and-white-movie poster she’d resembled when first glimpsed so long ago, or perhaps a figure of Zen contemplation, a mark of ink brushwork on a scroll. But I didn’t try to find Julia-simple as it would have been, I knew better than that. Instead I let my obsessive instinct get to work tracing that figure, waiting for it to turn abstract and disappear. Sooner or later it would.
That left who? Only Ullman. I know he haunts this story, but he never came into view, did he? The world (my brain) is too full of dull men, dead men, Ullmen. Some ghosts never even get into your house they are so busy howling at the windows. Or as Minna would say, you pick your battles-and you do, whether you subscribe to that view or not, you really do. I can’t feel guilty about every last body. Ullman? Never met the guy. Just like Bailey. They were just guys I never happened to meet. To the both of them and to you I say: Put an egg in your shoe, and beat it. Make like a tree, and leave. Tell your story walking.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’m deeply indebted to the books of Lawrence Shainberg, Kosho Uchiyma, and Oliver Sacks, the words of Tuli Kupferberg, and to conversations with Blake Lethem, Cara O’Connor, David Bowman, Eliot Duhan, Matthew Burkhardt, Scott McCrossin, Janet Farrell, Diane Martel, Alice Ressner, and Maureen Linker and the Linker family.
Thanks also to Richard Parks, Bill Thomas, Walter Donohue, Zoe Rosenfeld, Tooley Cottage, the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) and the Corporation of Yaddo.
The name Saint Vincent’s is here used fictionally and is in no way meant to impugn the venerable charitable institution nor the venerated saint of the same name.
About the Author
Jonathan Lethem is the author of six novels, including the bestsellers
