in the eye (which I hadn’t the nerve to do to others). “We need your help,” they would say, or, “What do you think of this?” I dreamed of having long palavers with them, and I would reveal to them what I thought of the books I had been reading, and I would tell them of the dark, secret, wonderful things I found in these books, things I couldn’t share in polite company. I would let slip my doubts and my fears. They knew better than anyone how afraid I was of elevators, how empty I found the idea of God to be, how alone I felt. Not even they could tell me why. Instead of blank stares, or shrugs, or awkward transitions to other topics, they responded with what they thought, they gave me advice, told me things I hadn’t thought of before. Most of these phantoms came from books, though they were seldom characters. It was the authors of those books I wanted to talk to. (How could I have talked about books with Seymour Glass? or Benny Profane? or Hans Castorp? Their own books, to boot. Never happen.) To this day, those apparitions remain good friends. Like all other friends they fade gradually away only to reappear years later, they incite quarrels with me and each other, they make questionable decisions and believe questionable things. But they always remain within reach, their essence preserved between slabs of wood pulp on a shelf. Real friends, if they should slip through your grasp, will inevitably become unknowable, and the person who you trusted and confided in will disappear and become another scrap of memory in the cerebral landfill, another pointless venture. The first thing realized by the daydreamer is how tedious the business of living is. That is why he invents people to keep him company. I have tried very hard, and in all the wrong ways, to leave this ethereal camaraderie behind and join the institutions of the joyfully alive. After numerous instances of miscommunication and unanswered complaints, my aforementioned friend and I had a conversation over the phone. We shared many of our thoughts and desires, and we found that they were incongruous, and perhaps even antithetical, to each other. She has never been allowed to care about much in her life, for its transience often swept things away, forcing her to start anew. Starting over so many times rendered her incapable, or unwilling, to cultivate anything that would be too hard to replace. Everything in her life is interchangeable. Or so it seemed to me. She thought being friends was a bad idea. I kept the conversation going for three hours, trying to make it work, trying to convince her that some things are worth doing wholeheartedly. She met my prolixity with a terse refusal. I hung up angry and exhausted and disappointed, but mostly I felt that things were not and never could be different. Page 41
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