Over at the Morning News, my new essay “Fanboy” is up. The artwork here is a beautiful illustration commissioned from an artist by the name of Katie Turner. This is an essay that began about a year ago in a comic book store in New York, when I did a doubletake and noticed that the comics I was reading had an overwhelming common them: white superheroes on black ops teams, working for the United States government.

As the essay details, I’ve long had a theory about comics, that they have an uncanny ability to reflect our dreams and our unconscious projections, and Freud did too—he used a comic to illustrate his groundbreaking work on dreams, in fact, and used it without comment. Which is to say, even Freud unconsciously saw the ability of comics to communicate or illustrate dreams. The essay I wrote then turned into something about two comic book moments separated by 35 years—the first, when I was a child, the second, last year, as an adult. And tells the story of how I survived growing up mixed-race with the help of the X-Men, the racial unconscious of the United States, as Colorlines puts it, and the whitewashing of superheroes, per the New Yorker magazine’s Bookbench blog. I’m grateful to them for linking and commenting on the essay, and also to The Morning News, where I’ve just been made a Contributing Writer. It’s been my homepage for over a year now, as I find it a funny, smart place to start my day—I don’t freak out as easily about the bad news when I start there—so, I’m thrilled to join up with them. I look forward to seeing my pencil sketch profile portrait on that masthead.

My days are for now starting at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbertide, Italy, for the next month, where, after a hectic and sad goodbye to my friends and students in Iowa at the Writers’ Workshop, I’ve come here as a fellow, to write, and, apparently, live in a castle and be fed very delicious Italian food, which is easing a little of the pain of being away from my boyfriend. If you are ever given the chance to apply, do apply. Did I ever mention as a kid I always wanted to live in a castle? Anyway, for one month now, I do.

Yes, that’s the one with the somehow controversial photos of the two female leads of Glee, Lea Michelle and Diana Agron.  The above pictured here is the very beautiful Fore Street restaurant, which I love almost as much as I love its bar.  In it I detail a new family secret: where to go for a lobster roll made from a lobster cooked to order, fresh, for you.  If you order it deluxe, they cook two.

I saw Heathers again last Friday night. I remembered how I went to it twice the first night it appeared in theaters. My friend Libby and I drove out to it in her ancient and enormous Cadillac DeVille, and as we left the theater, looked at each other in amazement and said, “Again.” And then after a cigarette, went back in.

Watching it, hearing the familiar phrases my friends and I had quoted so intensely over the years, as the characters said them, it was weird. It was like they were copying me and my friends, who had, of course, been copying them.

I was back in Amherst for the weekend, to drop some things off in storage that hadn’t fit into the apartment I share with my partner in New York (I prefer calling him my boyfriend as partner still sounds like maybe we just go home and look over contracts together). Fitting things into our apartment was a sort of miracle. Dustin, my boyfriend, was filming a short horror film in Concord, not too far away, and at the end of the weekend I would join him for the closing dinner and drive home the next day. He’s very talented, especially with the things of this world, and he can look at them and see ways of resolving their conflicts that are just not apparent to me or many others. Anyway, these things I was taking to storage were simply outside the realm of his considerable abilities but also mine. There was nothing to do with them except put them here.

There are things, as I said to friends at lunch today, that you both cannot have around you and cannot throw away. “Do you imagine a future where you bring them back into your life,” asked one of these friends. “Sort of,” I said. “If we get a house, sure.” My questioner was almost twenty years younger than me, and I know he thought I was some sort of hoarder. “Get rid of them?” he asked.

I shrugged. It’s no use explaining some things to people in their twenties, when time  and the world will team-teach it to them all the same.

People kept asking me if I was enjoying the fall weather. Sort of, was the answer. The spectacle of the changing leaves was lost on me for most of the weekend, as if it was just too much to bother with, to enjoy it. I was busy. I was seeing friends, meeting babies for the first time, I even raked a friend’s yard out of some sort of mix of the desire to just do something physical and outdoors and repetitive and the pleasure of cleaning something.

As I left that friend’s yard, I drove down her dirt road toward the paved one that would take me back to town and stopped, as a wild turkey delicately stepped into the road and gave me the long eye. It was followed by approximately thirty others. It was hardly the first time I’ve seen one, but I felt a visceral pleasure at the sight of them. They wandered into the road, and I waited patiently as they crossed, one of them even pausing to give me what could only have been the wild turkey version of a flipped bird. And as they hauled into the woods, glossy and dark and headed who knows where in their huge numbers, I drove off, and as if they’d pulled a veil off my eyes, the fall and the sun setting and the light in the trees were all beautiful to me, and I became excited, even. I bought my boyfriend a pumpkin and some apples, drove to the storage place and realized, as I pulled in, that I had not remembered the number of the locker, having been there just the one time back when I was moving and leaving town.

The storage place is behind a motel there, and the clerks run both. The motel easily dated to the era of Heathers, and standing there, I felt like I was a character somewhere out of the sight of the main characters. If the filming had required extras to play things never filmed, in some insane theater of method acting that required, say, the world outside the film set to also be in on it, that was where I was. The desk clerk there had no power, he told me, to go into the manager’s files to find out what my number was. “It’s no problem,” I said, which was my way of not saying, That sounds super sketchy. The image of all of my rental fees going to the manager where he could skim them filled my head. “I’ll just try my key and I’m sure the lock it opens will be the one,” I said.

Twenty minutes later, as I stood looking at someone’s stuff that wasn’t mine, lit up by the headlights of my car, I understood that Masterlock keys will open locks that are not yours. I think they have just counted on the idea that no one would ever try to open someone else’s lock with their key. The sight of their Rubbermaid containers filled me with sadness, that I could even accidentally see them.

I went back to my clerk. He called his manager, and while he’d been very friendly to me, and acted as if of course everyone did this, he was instantly dismissive of me in the third person to his manager in tone. “Yeah, uh, there’s this guy here who forgot his locker number…” I said nothing because of course there was no way he was paid enough for the amount of acting he had to do with me and his manager. I couldn’t mind seeing behind the curtain.

As I went to lock my own locker up, I wondered if I minded, that someone else could just open this locker up. They would of course have to know the secret I had just discovered. It was just incredibly heavy and sturdy modern furniture you couldn’t steal without a rental truck, boxes of literary magazines, old notebooks. My key hadn’t opened all of the Masterlocks I’d put it into, just one besides mine. It would take someone else a series of tries with several different keys. It wasn’t exactly like it being safe, but it was good enough for now. I stopped in at the clerk one more time. “Tell people not to use Masterlocks,” I said, as I told him my story. His eyes went wide in a horror I didn’t feel, as if I’d told him all the lockers were just sort of…open. I saw him about to ask me which locker I’d opened. He didn’t. I didn’t offer it. It seemed like an invitation of a kind to tell him, that the people whose locker I’d opened would probably just accuse me of stealing something, when I’d just put the lock back on, and he seemed to realize this also as he stopped himself. And so I just waved goodnight, enjoying our mutual recognition of the way people are, and drove off to bring my boyfriend home.

*When I drafted this post, without a title, it came up with the randomly assigned post number “1989″, the year Heathers came out. Make of it what you will.

[Note: Part 1 is here.]

25. Novels are hard, not like diamonds but like fate, the choice you make that reveals it was never a choice at all.

26. Then it is the novel as jailer. You in a small dark room with no answers to any of your questions and no one seems to hear your pleas, not for for days, months, years. Indifferent the entire time to all requests for visits or freedom. Hard labor too.

27. Or novels can be Champagne Charlies. The limo pulls up, there’s cash, a stocked bar and an entourage. A boyfriend/girlfriend you haven’t met already mad at you for not calling enough, arms crossed, pretty face steamed.

28. Or it is the Fugitive, arrives at night through an open window. Not quite a dream, it carries a work order signed by the president of your own dream factory. You strain to recognize your handwriting.

29. As the work proceeds, the factory is near the roads leading back and forth to the jails and the Champagne Charlies can be seen headed in and out. Sometimes it is clear that the prisoners and the party are trading places (the entourage fits in the cell). Sometimes not.

30. The Fugitive leans at the window, watches, has guessed the limo and the cell are the same.

31. Or it is a Lover. It is impatient, it wants you to know everything. And it won’t stop until it’s done. Factory, cell, limo, it doesn’t matter where you are or with who: the conversation will not stop. It is not endless but is long, it is longer than the writer can contain, and so it gets written down and is born that way.

32. This being because a novel is a thought that is too long to fit in your head all at once until after it is written or read.

33. It is not shorter then. Your hats still fit. But inside you there’s more room.

34. Think of a dream with the outer surface of a storm and the inside like the surface of your days as you have sometimes found them. The novel being the only way to lead anyone to the entrance of those days.

35. Or it is a stranger on the street, walking up to you, grabbing you by the lapel and walking away with you quickly, with passports, money. You fall in love as you leave immediately, together.

36. The novel coming not from the mind but the heart, which is why it cannot fit in your head. Why, when you hear it, it seems to be singing from somewhere just out of your sight, always.

37. Meanwhile, or the duration of the novel your heart can believe it is a liberator. You will not deny it this belief as you do at other times in your life because you are distracted by the story. It is why you love novels more than you think you do when you read them.

38. You discover you are in love with the unmet ending—or rather, you long for it. It is the radio station that plays from your radio only when it is in this one corner of the room, which is to say, at the center of your chest.

39. The heart’s ruse is nearly over. This entire time, it has convinced the novel it was only following along.

40. This entire time the game it has played with the novel was like the date that begins with love’s possibility but ends with the memory of the other, the one you lost or who lost you and who you fooled yourself into thinking was gone from your heart forever, but instead put on a mask, that of the stranger who you kiss against the wall in the street at night.

41. Of course a novel is also a mask.

42. Not for the novelist. Not for the reader. But for something else the novelist brings in from the back of the tent like a lion on a chain.

42. Do not notice the slashes in the novelist’s shirt, the welts along the arms and legs. Do not try and decipher them. If the lighting is right you will see them only when you have the chain in your hands and you are ready to let go. You will remember then. The cuts will make you try to imagine what the novelist went through. This is also a fiction but you will not write it down and it will leave on the wake of the next thought you have.

43. Unless of course you are also a novelist and then it is sometimes your next novel. You wake to realize you are in the back of the tent.

*                     *                     *

At the gym, where I watch TV news, I could only find news on how a famous black man was arrested in his home or news of how a famous black man was murdered in his home. And then footage of people photographing the famous black man arrested in his home, having beer with the arresting officer, and the president and vice president.

Bud Light discovered they were no longer an American beer more or less at the same time the rest of the country did.

Race has somehow become a cover story, a way to avoid a deeper discussion about anything, even race.

*                     *                     *

Three weeks ago I have a dream. Grandfather Chee on a street in New York, holding flowers for me, laughing and smiling as if he isn’t dead. As if his death were one of his tricks, like pretending to be sick to get us to visit Korea.

I make my way across the street and wake up before I get to him. I open my eyes feeling bereft.

He’s been gone a little over a year. My other grandfather, Grandfather Goodwin, has also appeared to me in a dream, once. In that dream, he led me through an enormous, impossibly beautiful garden.

I don’t know what it is about my grandfathers and flowers.

*                                   *                                 *

In Italy, an Italian friend tells me, stories begin with one sentence in the past tense and then the rest in the present tense.

I immediately think of the way so many stories begin in America. “So I was at the store and this guy behind me says…”

The present tense is often maligned wrongly. I think people believe you can’t represent the past through it. That you are writing a character who exists as I-Character only, and not as both I-Narrator and I-Character. But this is wrong. All across the world people tell stories this way to the other people in their lives and everyone understands them. For some reason it becomes confusing on the page.

This may in the end be why ancient Greeks mistrusted written language.

*                                   *                                 *

In Greece 2 weeks ago, I make begin making a comic. Here is a sample page:

My pre-internet brain returned somewhere in the plane from London to Athens, and on Sifnos, I read books whole in a day or two, as I used to do when I was younger. I draw, do yoga, swim. I feel as if I’ve picked up again with the person I was when I was 19.

When I leave, my life feels interrupted again. I try to understand how to fix this on the plane back and in the days after leaving the plane.

*                                   *                                 *

You might notice I haven’t been on twitter, a friend says, when I run into him over the weekend in New York.

I nod. Yes, I said. What’s up with that?

I realized all that time I spend on those things, I could be working on my loan or writing something that I can sell for actual money, he says, and chuckles.

Yes, I say.

My novel is eating everything in my mind right now, except the ability to draw.

This was drawn in Athens airport. The Sphinx was found when the airport was being expanded, and is part of a group of antiquities on display there, all discovered during the expansion. We know the myth of Oedipus and the Sphinx, but on finding this, I liked the idea that there was a race of Sphinxes, not just the one famous riddler.

I stood and drew this for nearly an hour, almost missing my plane back to the US.

I keep thinking of a quote from Claude Levi-Strauss, who, it turns out, was born in Brussels. The quote from his Tristes Tropiques, his comment about how a culture’s dreams of its future are shown in the decorations of its women.

Palin’s wardrobe, Michelle Obama’s, Carla Bruni, Hillary Clinton— every outfit is treated like it’s an oracle.

I feel tired of the idea that this is the news from the country where I’m from—embarassed, like I’m on a porn site in public, instead of a news one. I’m tired of how much of the news is from people saying that the Obamas did this or that “wrong”, which reads to me only like people who don’t realize Bush still isn’t in power. I’m tired of being angry. I think of what my agent said to me last year, when I was freaking out about the election.

“You know who you’re going to vote for, right?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“So, stop reading the news.”

At several points on the trip, I check in from the hotel I’m in and the news aggregating sites I use just look like ways to turn newspapers into a fight club, with commenters leaving crazy angry comments for pages, and in the process, generating page views for the aggregator site’s ad rates. It’s as if you subscribed to a magazine that included a mask you could put on and fight your neighbor with, over what the content means. Anonymously.

And when I get home, and pull my print magazines from my mailbox, I remember this. I imagine my professor neighbor waiting to leap out at me, his face covered in a Mexican wrestler mask.

After reading the online news for a few days, I take to reading the Financial Times. I have come to like print again, to like reading something I can’t click through and that when I’m done, I fold it and recycle it, or use it to line a box I’m shipping. Also, though it is terrifying to read Business news even when it’s not a crisis—for how they talk about people and life—you know more about the world if you read it.

The many trips I’ve managed to make this year to Europe start to make the last year seem like some kind of oscillation, like I’m not traveling as much as having a year split between here and there. I look at it on the screen of my computer, rendered into flat pages of its current events, and can’t believe I have to go back and live there, where it seems like everyone would just be shouting all the time.

I love Belgium, it turns out. I had no idea what it was, going into it. It’s another of these European countries that were carved out of different ethnic territories that had little relation to the national boundaries put up around them, and so there’s a modern dissonance between self, place and ethnicity. Ethnicity is personal, nationality is taxes, self is self. And with the arrival of the Moroccans, the Flemish seem distracted from their grudge against the Walloons.

In a strange way, it feels like me.

Canada has more comics than we do, it occurs to me, as I walk through The Beguiling in Toronto. It is the best comics shop in Toronto, and perhaps in all of Canada. I pause to admire what appears to be an actual original page of a Tintin comic, framed and on the wall. Tintin in the submarine that looks like a shark, with Snowy.

At the border, the guard had questioned me. Business or pleasure? When I said “pleasure”, she said, It’s a terrible time to come to Toronto for that. She raised an eyebrow, genuinely skeptical.

Most of what I like to do is indoors, I say.

2.

As I walk out of the Lululemon store in Toronto’s Eaton Center, I’m looking for a place to stop and put on the shell I just bought. I’m there for the weekend and the temperature has dropped so quickly, the air is like a lash. In the Eaton Center, it’s warm and nothing is on sale really, unlike in the US. Also, everyone looks happy and healthy. It’s almost like traveling back into the American past. I feel a little doomed by it and put the bag down.

As I pull the tags off, I notice someone standing near me, leaning back over the glass railing a little while he reads a row of text messages on his iPhone, smiling. The smile is familiar. He’s young, dark-haired, handsome, has a kind of effortless casual chic—dark slim jeans that are still a little loose, a sort of dark car coat, boots, a long scarf wrapped close to his neck, and scruff, of course. He looks like the boys I saw in Paris. His coat is even a little tatty, but on him it’s adorable, not sad. His expression changes—and I realize I’m watching him closely because he’s Dominic Cooper, the actor from the History Boys who made it one of my favorite films.

He looks at me sideways and I say, Excuse me, are you an actor? I start soft in case I’m wrong.

I am, he says.

Were you in the History Boys?

I was, he says. Did  you see me in the play or the film?

The film, I say.

Not many people have seen the film, he says, and smiles.

I compliment him on his work, ask him about future projects. The person he’s with appears, I let him go with a “keep up the good work.” About fifteen minutes later, he walks past me as he leaves and gives me a big smile. Cheers, he says, and nods his head.

By now I’m standing with my friend Juliet, who I’ve come to visit. She smiles at me. He didn’t have to do that, you know, she says, teasing. He loves you.

3.

Later that night, at Baby Huey’s, my new favorite club in Toronto, as the dj gets the crowd moving, I realize Toronto is like if New York and Portland, Oregon had a child.

I dance and then leave.

4.

In the Toronto airport, I imagine writing many, many things that could be made into films starring Dominic Cooper. It seems to me the second novel, for example, most certainly has a role for him. And as I write this, I realize he could be in the first one also. I get into the smallest plane I can imagine, a twin-prop, and my flight races the snow back to Hartford.  I drive north to Amherst, even leaving the storm’s edge on the highway, but it catches me by the time I get home, and as I sleep, covers the ground around my house with snow.

Only Canada Air, it occurs to me, when I hear of all the flights that were canceled. Only Canada Air could have gotten me home.

The day I leave, I go to the bank to make sure I can take out the money for the rent due on the apartment where I’ll stay, in the 1st. The woman teller is wild-eyed when she looks up. Before she says anything, I know she’s incapable of helping me. I consider the etiquette of asking for someone else.

I have asked if there is a withdrawal limit and if so what is it. She squints at the screen. Well…

She looks over at the next teller and asks her to come over, as I knew she would. What is that, she asks?

You take money out on that card? She looks at me as if I am a child.

Yes, I say. I think of all the money I have taken out, a river of cash in my mind.

Hunh. She squints at the screen. I’ve had people in with that who couldn’t take out money.

Don’t change anything, I say, with an abrupt suddenness that surprises me.

What’s my daily limit, I ask again. This all seems like something any of them should just know.

1000, she says, and then if the machine is offline, 1500.

This makes no sense to me at all, and in fact seems indicative of everything wrong with my country’s financial problems. I still have to go to get a crown put in, teach about Persepolis and Helen of Troy, and then drive to Newark airport, so I don’t ask about offline. Instead I have a brief fantasy of taking out all of my money, right there, and buying gems. I imagine myself going through passport control, my hands covered in cocktail rings.

Thanks, I say.

Have a nice trip, she says, still squinting at her screen.

_______________________________________________

It takes 5 hours to get to Newark. On my Air India flight, a beautiful male steward gives me 4 bottles of Gordon’s gin when I ask for a gin and tonic, along with 2 glasses full of ice and two cans of tonic. I wonder briefly if he’s joining me and decide I must look like a man who needs a bit of restocking.

Air India is a revelation. I don’t pay for the cocktails or movies, though my headphones in my seat pocket don’t fit the socket. I say nothing, not wanting the steward to feel badly, instead watching Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers twirl silently. My seatmates are American. one is a young struggling writer. Her boyfriend is impressed that I am published. He asks me about it, what it must be like.

It’s…a bit weird, I say.

He wrinkles his brow.

This thing you’ve had in your head for years is suddenly on a shelf, where any stanger can go look at it. It takes some getting used to, I say.

They nod. They see all my gin bottles and order gin also. You don’t even drink gin, the writer says to her boyfriend, laughing.

We toast the flight and the airline, our excellent inflight Indian food.

________________________________________________

I am in Paris for the next thing in my head. The city is full of handsome men with shaved heads. I am here without my computer. In my bag I have clothes for 5 days, 2 notebooks, pens, a sketchbook and a camera. I am writing from the Rue de Rivoli, where a cute waiter is making tight turns around the tables and flirting with the men behind me, who are very taken with him. All of the chairs are facing the street and no one pretends they are not there to watch everyone pass by.

This weekend I go to see castles. More soon.

I sit at the gate in Athens airport, Gate A5, waiting for my flight to London, and make the drawing above.

The plane is delayed, and it occurs to me that as soon as I left Sifnos, everything that has started to go wrong started to go wrong.

I shouldn’t have left, I tell myself.

Right before leaving, I get a smile and a nod from the most handsome waiter on the island, Nicky Fortis, who says, Hi Alex.

Hi Nicky, I say.

I don’t know how to tell Nicky I’m leaving. If I tell him, then I really am leaving. So I act as if I’m not leaving. As if the boat will just not come. I can’t leave, now that he knows my name—this is the thing I won’t say to myself.

The only ticket I could get for my departure time is one in “exclusive” class, almost twice as expensive as my ticket out, and I have to sit with boring people. Once I’m on the ferry, the surf is rough and people run to the bathroom to throw up. I am somehow literally unmoved. I eventually go and sit on the deck and make a drawing of a father and son at the rail as Athens comes into view. I take the subway to the Athens airport from Piraeus, and there find a meal of chicken and peas that only manages to remind me I’m leaving Sifnos.

My sense of foreboding continues, and sure enough, once I board the plane, the airconditioning on the plane isn’t working while the engines are off, and then once the engines come on and we’re finally cool and waiting to take off, a woman in the back decides she can’t fly, and we do have to let her off. As we power the engines down and she walks to the front, she tells the captain she’s changing her mind, and he kicks her off. I don’t believe you, he says. We’re now almost 3 hours late. We have to unload the plane of passengers and our carryons and get on a bus while the plane is searched in case she left something on it, and then we get back on, and as we taxi down again, some Greek man in the back begins to demand the pilot take off immediately, like it’s a car he can just drive off, or he wants to get off also, and I feel a rage that makes me both weak and incredibly strong.

I talk to the woman next to me instead. She’s older, in her 50s, tanned and very kind, a handsome silver-haired woman on vacation with her handsome silver-haired husband, who also looks tanned and kind. They’ve been going around Greece swimming, and they have fit bodies and the relaxed air of swimmers. It makes me understand that I need to keep swimming, talking to her.

We’re trying to get me to my hotel, Hotel 55, in North Ealing. By the time we land the Tube is closed. Which is to say, it’s 1:30AM. I was due in at 10:30PM. After a taxi and a bus, I get to my hotel at 4AM.

The rest is a long road, that begins with the Hotel 55 in the dark and me calling inside for the night doorman to come and open it up and check me in, the room a good bargain at 80 pounds, me placated by degrees. By the quiet dark air-conditioned lobby, the room, beautiful and simple, contemporary design, the shower, clean and with powerful water pressure. I sleep deeply, for six hours, have breakfast in their beautiful contemporary garden with my friend David, and then we go around London for a little sightseeing. I get on the plane back, and once back, decide to drive home to Amherst, instead of staying over at my friend Jorge’s place in Queens, in order to begin moving the next morning. I get back, finally, at 2AM and am up the next morning at 8AM, when it is plain to me I should have stayed over in Queens.

I move for five days in the heat and rain, swimming every day in the afternoon, because it’s the only way to feel connected, somehow, to me. With my ears stopped up by water, I can only hear me. And as the happy couple showed me, in the plain way they were together, and happy, and relaxed somehow while the flight was delayed in the heat and anger, swimming makes everything okay.

The new apartment is beautiful and empty. After the first two days I don’t want to bring anything else into the apartment but there’s still more stuff to come. I hire a boy who actually knows how to drive a fixed gear bike and a circus performer girl who is basically there because she’s lusting after the boy. The three of us make for a sort of moving circus, or a circus of moving, and I imagine her making flips as she carries my boxes. I pay them and also give them food I never used but that is still good, rice vermicelli I will never make, beans I can’t care about. My old apartment, as I empty it, seems, on the third and fourth days, like a museum of my ambivalence, and I call it that, and on the fifth day, the day the housing office tells me I must have it empty, I push hard, and manage, eventually, to get it empty.

I vow to never move this way again, ever.

Which is to say, this is the end of that particular road.

————————-

After two weeks of, as my friend Meredith puts it, touching everything I own, it’s time for me to leave again. I drive to Maine to take care of my mom, who’s having a knee replacement, in a car still littered with things from the move I don’t have the heart to bring inside. Two Le Creuset pans, for example, scorched and in need of resurfacing, rattle in the backseat. They seem too valuable to throw away and yet I don’t know how to fix them. Perhaps, if I’m attacked, I can pull them from under the seat and deflect a bullet, or stun an assailant.

Are you excited, I ask her on the phone.

What? No, she says. As if this is the worst question.

I think you should be excited, I say. And she laughs, which is good. For how she’s my mother, she both understands me best and doesn’t understand me at all. And I think the same is also true.

I have been watching Grey’s Anatomy episodes in what will eventually be my formal dining room, but for now is a provisional bedroom, where I set up my bed with the help of the fixed gear cyclist and the circus performer, and left it. On that night, I briefly imagined living there as I did in a New York apartment, but the empty rooms of the house call me into them, and we have conversations that end with me deciding my bedroom is upstairs. But also, and not deliberately, Grey’s has me thinking of my mother’s surgery. Every mom on the show is my mom, every problem my mom’s problem. This isn’t, of course, going to help her in the slightest. One show features a patient who doesn’t believe in God, or medicine, and his doctor insists he has to want his new heart or it will be rejected. I of course am trying to get my mom to want her new knee. And when I tell my therapist about this, he approves.

In the hospital, the helping of her is multifarious. I imagine helping her everywhere. Once I bring her home, the reality is, she’s doing quite well. She is released early, which is good, because, as if all of the people in the hospital have been watching Grey’s also, they are all back from vacation and spending too much time talking to each other. At one point, I summon something that I think of as the “I’m kind of bald, I have big muscular arms and am not at all happy right now” face, and go to the nurse’s station to find out where her pain meds and bed pan are, and when they ask me, defensively, if she’s rung for them, I hold up two fingers and walk away, saying, Please bring them right now.

They rush to get the items to her.

My mother is impatient with me a little, and I tell her she’s ornery, even though I’m secretly glad. She hasn’t been ornery like this in a long time. My belief is that the knee will restore her to herself in a way she doesn’t expect, and because I want this to happen, and because she’s negatively suggestible, like me, I don’t tell her. I stop trying to get her excited about her knee, because it will mess up her getting excited about her knee. Yes, I say, instead. I’ll go to the drug store right now. I say, I need to get some pens, to make more drawings. Or I say, I’m heading out now, to go swimming.