David Markson used to come into Strand all the time (I guess he still does). He once walked past where a coworker and I were trying to pretend we weren’t stuffing our faces with greasy bacon-egg-and-cheeses and said something like, that smells good. I wasn’t the one who recognized him.

Sometimes it’s hard not to miss a life I didn’t have to take seriously. Sometimes I feel like I escaped something terminal. It’s weird how happy it makes me to remember always volunteering to run the inventory up to the warehouse on the mornings I opened, so I could sneak to the diner across the street for second breakfast. Or how I would sit a bit longer at the counter there nights I closed, and bring back cheese fries for the back desk, how the guys at the diner all knew me and I couldn’t bring myself to tell them, the last time, that I wouldn’t be coming back.

There was a party and he knew something was off and I wasn’t thinking all this stuff, but I was carrying it, I guess. He said, what could be better? He was being serious and I hated it and I said, Nothing, and meant it so much I almost choked on my own ashy throat. Nothing could be better. Thinking of the meteor shower, huddled under the sleeping bag on the hill, cold hands and a romantic impulsiveness. What I’m thinking about the man next to me, now, on the patio, is: it’s only a mistake if I don’t learn from it. I think: You’re one of Them, foolish enough to insist sensitivity and sincerity are actually a kind of weakness, some unfortunate defect.

One drink and my buddy who knows, who hears everything and tries not to know it too well, we get the fuck out. Fold back into the kitchen and drink how we’re meant to, and I try to explain again. That he has a good, strong heart. That this matters. And–no, dude, just listen: It matters. It matters that I’m always trying to tell him shit I don’t know how the fuck to say, because there aren’t words for it, and that he hears it anyway. I don’t know how deep it gets in. I can’t know if he carries things too. But he can hear me.

And then California and Christmas on the beach and whiskey and the sunset. And the panic and the guilt in the hotel after it was too late to change anything. For the first 48 hours after I land Guy and I are inseparable. And I’m not anxious, about anything. I forget to crave nicotine. Then the phone call from the city, the insustainability of the whole thing, half a pack suddenly gone, I would do anything to help her and I know, just by being me, that I can’t. She knows it too. But she calls. She knows some things I don’t and tells me things no one else would tell me, that I don’t fully want to hear, and I went so far, to avoid looking, but still I don’t stop answering.

Result: I’m sick of irony, I tell Chris on the porch the other night. Not in the actual, literary-device/sitcom-laughtrack unexpected-outcome sense. In the snarky, smirky, let’s-pretend-none-of-us-have-sincere-emotions sense. I try to reason my way out over and over, and discourage sincerity in sensitive people for fear they’ll be crushed, but I’m a romantic way past a fault.

What I didn’t say was, I tried to find some kind of definitive version of This is Water. I found: no two printed versions alike (online or on paper), no record of the video (anecdotally?) made at the commencement on YouTube or through Google. Because certain little bits are missing from one version, and other little bits are missing from another. Like, of the suicide references. And reading A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, I can’t comprehend how so many people could say, I knew him, but I had no idea… Because it’s all right there. Even the reference (in a footnote, of course) to how he filled three notebooks with ramblings over a single incident while he was boarding the ship. Or just the way he writes about Dostoevsky. Maybe it’s easier to see after the fact. Maybe we can smell our unstable own.

The difference, I believe, being that I’m a romantic. (In the Edna St. Vincent Millay sense? I guess…) I mean that I also saw Love in the Time of Cholera and hated it, I mean I almost didn’t even finish it, because Florentino is a fucking poser. Because a real romantic would revel in that kind of suffering. Thrive on it. And this dumbshit goes crying to his mother instead.

Dostoevsky understood this, too, and DFW was the first one able to put it into words. That suffering can be an oasis. A refueling point that carries one through the drudgery of work and schedules and cleaning and commuting: the guy who made me question everything then broke my heart and doesn’t even know it, every halfassed story I ever let into daylight, people I love and depend on who have nearly killed me, every ignorant and unforgivable thing I did entirely to myself, songs I can’t listen to anymore on repeat in the back of my head that keep the blood from stopping.

Then the nights cool off. Free pool and jukebox at Streets on Wednesdays, so we head on up. Fall into doubles with strangers but we grab a second on the patio and “I missed you too.” Strange to hug someone I usually only touch in the most masculine of ways: high-fives, dead-arms. Say I can’t go back, it fucks with my head, December I want to be far away, like Nowhere, surrounded by Nothing, (nearly crying now with the frustration of failed articulation, rage at knowing I couldn’t do any better sober, anyways,) come winter I want a death you can come back from. And he, knowingly, says, I did that, and smiles something about the dreams and I say yeah, I want a coma you can write in, and later we discuss Mexico with — admittedly — disparate degrees of sincerity. Me, what I really want, is an island.

His fiction is the same way: Jesus’ Son, Angels, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man all skirt along the margins, this last maybe most of all. It’s about a man who moves from the Midwest to Provincetown after a failed suicide attempt, picks up a shady detective job, falls in love with a lesbian and slowly grows more and more delusional until he finally dresses in drag, steals a boat and tries to shoot the Archbishop. Disorienting in the deepest sense. (Incidentally, if you liked The Crying of Lot 49, you might like this too. Except where Pynchon leaves things murky, Johnson’s guy is clearly making connections where there are none, is clearly insane.)

The disconcerting thing for me is that I never fully settled into it the way I did with Jesus’ Son or Angels. A lot of the instability in both of these, I think, came from the outside, and here it’s all internal. It’s not that he takes us over unfamiliar terrain — he brings us to the center of an earthquake, some beautiful backwoods country no one’s ever heard of swallowing itself up.

My first bike ride since high school happens like this: Sam and I are smoking outside the LoDo store, which I just closed. And he’s saying can’t I just take the bus and meet him at the bar? He doesn’t want to walk, he wants to ride. And I’m giving in, and some kid says, hey, do you want this bike? It’s been here for like 3 days. No lock, no rear brake, no helmet, no back reflector. A little too much slack on the chain when I downshift.

I’d forgotten how good it feels.

So there’s this book by Yann Martel. Four of his early stories. Named for the first one, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios. It’s about a 19-year-old boy, in the mid-80s, dying of the random AIDS he got from a Mexican blood transfusion. From the point of view of his college friend, who visits in the hospital and they make up stories to pass the time. And the friend holds it together pretty well while the kid’s getting worse and worse, until one day he comes to visit and the kid’s gone blind. And the friend, whose life is not ending, loses it.

And later I almost say it. If I were you I’d leave him to rot. I have every right and no right. Instead, we tell each other stories, to pass the time until forever.