The Narrator

timing   His watch didn't work. Well, it worked, but randomly, and offered him facts meaningless, useless, and, in this moment, reassuring. At 10:30 in the morning on the second of August, Irish Daylight Time he might say to be specific, because, he could be that specific if he put in the effort, his watch could say that it was 6:12, either a.m. or p.m. on the seventh of that month, or perhaps another, for the date was represented as only an analog number - 1 through 31 inclusive. "Why do you wear it?" she asked. He considered the standard answers; that people expected someone like him to wear a watch, that he liked the jewelry aspect of it – it's thick, clunky, cheap Soviet style, that it reminded him of which hand not to write with, but he didn't want to lie. "With this," he tapped the crystal, "time can be wherever I want it to be." And she smiled the way she did when he said things like that. addiction She had two cigar et...

In exile in the North American Midwest I am robbed of the essential smells that gave me shelter as a child. Surely there are memories made up of images and memories made up of songs and memories made up of stories remembered as you lay in bed on the cusp of sleep. There are memories that flood the brain from tastes and those that ri se out of textures that have soothed or scratched. So the right kind of mashed potatoes can make me feel truly warmed on a cold night, and black pudding is all about my father, and there is a certain spin of wool, that which matches the Hudson's Bay Blankets that kept the night air off our child bodies, that instantly makes me tired. But I can not find the smells. Lake Michigan is beautiful and wondrous, but it does not smell like big water to me. There is no salt in that breeze to fill the nostrils. There is no gently rotting mix of seaweed and fish either. The scent of the truly far away does not hang there, in any version, not the sl...

We considered the possibilities as the rain exploded in tropical storm ferocity and the streets turned into exquisite mirrors. There are points in our lives of perfect balance and points of ferocious balance when no choice looks as bad as standing exactly where you find yourself. "Didn't Janis Joplin sing, "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose?"' I asked. "She did." "I heard her sing that in Madison Square Garden," I said. "And then we went back home and then she died. Everybody dies." "Don't get weird on me." "I'll try." There is a long silence as traffic whooshes through the water piling on the street. The Seagram's Building, modern perfection, casts a warm glow into the puddles that creep under Lever House where we sit, staying dry. Somewhere over there a really bad trumpet player plays. Behind us a tourist struggles with a hot dog stand that is both "Kosher" and ...