Oh, All You Immigrants And

This Is What You Do. You Make A Future For Yourself Out Of The Raw Material At Hand.

I Was Living My Own Future And My Brother's Lost One As Well. I Represented Him Here Just As He Represented Me There, In Some Unguessable Other Place. His Move From Life To Death Might Resemble My Stepping Into The Kitchen - Into Its Soft Nowhere Quality And Foggy Hum. I Breathed The Dark Air. If I Had At That Moment A Sense Of Calm Kindly Death While My Heart Beat And My Lungs Expanded, He Might Know A Similar Sense Of Life In The Middle Of His Ongoing Death.

The Vestibule Door Opens Onto A June Morning So Fine And Scrubbed Classira Pauses At The Threshold As She Would At The Edge Of A Pool, Watching The Turquoise Water Lapping At The Tiles, The Liquid Nets Of Sun Wavering In The Blue Depths. As If Standing At The Edge Of A Pool She Delays For A Moment The Plunge, The Quick Membrane Of Chill, The Plain Shock Of Immersion.

There's The Fact That American Fiction Is Basically The Most Apolitical Fiction On The Globe. A South American Writer Wouldn't Dare Think Of Writing A Novel If It Didn't Allude To The System Into Which These People Are Orchestrated - Or An Eastern European Writer, Or A Russian Writer, Or A Chinese Writer. Only American Writers Are Able To Imagine That The Government And The Corporations - All Of It - Seem To Have No Effect Whatsoever.

Dear Leonard. To Look Life In The Face. Always To Look Life In The Face And To Know It For What It Is. At Last To Know It. To Love It For What It Is, And Then, To Put It Away. Leonard. Always The Years Between Us. Always The Years. Always The Love. Always The Hours.