Spy of the First Person

by Sam Shepard Narrated by Michael Shannon

Overview

The final work from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, actor, and musician, drawn from his transformative last days
*
In searing, beautiful prose, Sam Shepard's extraordinary narrative leaps off the page with its immediacy and power. It tells in a brilliant braid of voices the story of an unnamed narrator who traces, before our rapt eyes, his memories of work, adventure, and travel as he undergoes medical tests and treatments for a condition that is rendering him more and more dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him. The narrator's memories and preoccupations often echo those of our current moment-for here are stories of immigration and community, inclusion and exclusion, suspicion and trust. But at the book's core, and his, is family-his relationships with those he loved, and with the natural world around him. Vivid, haunting, and deeply moving, Spy of the First Person takes us from the sculpted gardens of a renowned clinic in Arizona to the blue waters surrounding Alcatraz, from a New Mexico border town to a condemned building on New York City's Avenue C. It is an unflinching expression of the vulnerabilities that make us human-and an unbound celebration of family and life.

Editorial Reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review

The first words of Sam Shepard's remarkable, quietly devastating last book, written in the final year of his life when he was dying of ALS, let us know what he's up to: "Seen from a distance." In Spy of the First Person, Shepard, a restless wanderer trapped in a failing body, squeezes himself through an escape hatch by doing one of the things he's always done -- writing. He objectifies himself, putting distance between his corporeal and mental selves by splitting alternately into observed and observer in order to report on his predicament from afar. One of many searing observations: "The more helpless I get, the more remote I become."

Shifting between first- and third-person perspectives, the book's focus is an old man rocking on a screened porch or parked under a tree in a wheelchair. A sort of doppelgänger spies on him, peering through binoculars from across the street, trying to figure out what's going on: "The baseball cap, the grimy jeans, the old vest . . . Telling stories of one kind or another, little histories. Battle stories . . . mumbling to himself." The mysterious watcher mentions iced tea, reading, and people coming by all day -- a son, a daughter, two sisters -- from "deep inside the house" to tend to the man. He notes the man's mounting unsteadiness on his feet, the progressive difficulty breathing. He observes, "His hands and arms don't work much. He uses his legs, his knees, his thighs, to bring his arms and hands to his face in order to be able to eat his cheese and crackers."

The increasingly incapacitated man is trying to figure out what's going on, too. ALS is never mentioned by name, but he paints a clear enough picture of the disease's ravages, consistent with neurobiologist Lisa Genova's more clinically detailed depiction in Every Note Played, her forthcoming novel about a concert pianist suffering from ALS. "They gave me all these tests," Shepard writes of dismayingly useless visits to a famous clinic in the "painted desert." He describes the torment of itchy eyebrows and of a monotony barely broken by birds and butterflies. The disease's encroachment induces both a detachment from his body and a sort of paranoia, reflected in the feeling that he's under surveillance: "Someone wants to know something. Someone wants to know something about me that I don't even know myself." Later, he comments, "I wouldn't mind answering if I could. It's kind of interesting to have someone genuinely interested in me."

In a sense, all writing is a way of stepping away from oneself and taking the long view -- and so is acting. In the course of more than fifty years, Shepard did plenty of both, writing more than fifty-five plays and acting in more than sixty films. He wrote about a mythologized West in stormy dramas about dysfunctional families torn by alcoholism, brothers battling each other, and fathers fighting sons. He wrote about abuse, addiction, and those left behind by the American Dream, in works like his 1978 Pulitzer Prize winner, Buried Child, before they became the ubiquitous dark matter of stage, screen, and memoirs. A consummate lone ranger, he ran on his own rogue steam -- a persona that made him a natural in roles like The Right Stuff's Chuck Yeager, for which he received an Oscar nomination (despite his purported fear of flying). But producing this spare, potent book -- on which he completed edits just days before his death on July 27, 2017, at age seventy-three -- required the help of his three children, two sisters, and his former lover and lifelong friend, Patti Smith. Spy of the First Person is, among other things, a paean to family.

His previous book, The One Inside, which was published earlier in 2017, was a muddled, intensely interior mix of dreamscape and memory. It was dedicated to his cherished family support team and featured a powerful epigraph from David Foster Wallace that applies equally to Spy of the First Person: "Why does no one take you aside and tell you what is coming?" This slim posthumous volume is a more coherent, urgent, and moving work of autobiographical fiction. It packs a punch, and not just because we know the circumstances under which it was written, or that it's his last. There are things Shepard wants to say, and he knows it's now or never.

Shepard's man-on-the-wane lets his mind roam where his body no longer can -- to memories of sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a condemned building on Manhattan's Lower East Side nearly fifty years earlier, to migrants waiting for work on a street corner in northern California. Despite having been urged to stay in the present, he confesses that his thoughts are drawn to the past, which "always comes in parts. In fact it comes apart. It presents itself as though it was experienced in fragments."

Many sentences begin with "Sometimes" or "For instance." At once elliptical and direct, he frequently addresses his children. "I'm not trying to prove anything to you," he writes. "I'm not trying to prove that I was the father you believed me to be when you were very young. I've made some mistakes but I have no idea what they were. And I've never desired to start over again. I have no desire to eliminate parts of myself. I have no desire." The echo of those four words reverberates loudly.

Shepard's ability to dramatize a scene with minimal words remains intact, resulting in powerful mini-plays. At one point, his daughter -- literally lost in his memories -- interrupts, "Wait a minute, Dad, what room? What are you talking about?" She tries to urge him indoors to avoid oncoming rain, but he asks her to push him to the grocery store in his wheelchair, as there's a whole list of stuff he wants -- bananas, sardines, instant coffee. "Dad? Dad? Why do you need these things now? Why all these supplies? You're not going hunting," she says, even as she accedes to his wish.

He is heartbreakingly aware that his hunting days are over. Leaving a crowded Mexican restaurant after a lively dinner with his family, he notes that a year ago he "could walk with his head up. He could see through the air. He could wipe his own ass." Now he's "a man sitting on shaggy wool with a Navajo blanket across his knees," being pushed by his hale sons.

And too soon, he's gone altogether. But he's left us this extraordinary valedictory work.

Heller McAlpin is a New York–based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

Reviewer: Heller McAlpin

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

This novel's themes are echt Shepard: fathers and sons; shifting identities and competing versions of reality; a sense that there are watchers and there are watchees in this world of dusty gravitas. The setting is the American West. The prose is taciturn. The pronouns have vague antecedents. The book is cryptic…sly and revealing…There are echoes of Beckett in this novel's abstemious style and existential echoes.

From the Publisher

Sam Shepard's Spy of the First Person is a devastating work that is also full of life and wonder. From its heartbreaking dedication to him by his children to its last longing and truthful pages, it is an intimate masterwork.”
—Michael Ondaatje, Booker Prize–winning author of The English Patient 

“Moving. . . . Sly and revealing. . . . This novel’s themes are echt Shepard: fathers and sons; shifting identities and competing versions of reality; a sense that there are watchers and there are watchees in this world of dusty gravitas. . . . You can tell you are moving into the realm of myth when you are holding a slender novel like this one that has large type and ample margins, to give the words room to reverberate. . . . There are echoes of Beckett in this novel’s abstemious style and existential echoes.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
 
“Eloquent. . . . Its effect is one of atmosphere rather than narrative, an aching requiem sung in the shadow of extinction. . . . Shepard’s gaunt lyricism conjures an album of bleached images in which the life of a man and the changing face of a country are cataloged with both love and bafflement. . . . A lived richness burnishes each page. . . . It is difficult not to be moved by these sparks of beauty and belonging. They light up all the brighter for how quickly they go dark.”
—Dustin Illingworth, Los Angeles Times

“Beautiful . . . Cryptic, almost hallucinatory. . . . Remarkable. . . . There’s a subtle curiosity at work, too, the curiosity of a writer to the very end. Unsettling, yet brave.”
—Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today

“In Spy of the First Person, two narrative voices wind together in beguiling fashion. . . . Spy of the First Person returns to the uncanny experience evoked in all of Shepard’s fiction of being both the observer and the observed. . . . Shepard has always been a spare and oblique writer, creating a sense of dreamy discomfort. . . . The sketches jump to northern California, the Alcatraz prison, a doctor’s office in Arizona and even the squats of the Lower East Side in the 1970s. But as always, the itinerancy masks a profound feeling of imprisonment, as the scenes inevitably circle back to the old man on the porch, who has been rendered so immobile that he has to ask for help to scratch an itch on his face. Yet that appeal for help marks a small but significant change. Shepard’s wanderers have usually been on unaccompanied journeys with no departure or destination, only an ever-repeating present instant. But Spy of the First Person ends with a scene of family solidarity. The old man watches himself being pushed in a wheelchair to a crowded Mexican restaurant. . . . ‘The thing I remember most,’ he thinks, ‘is being more or less helpless and the strength of my sons.’ At last he has no choice but to accept the company of others as he travels through the great wide American somewhere.”
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
 
“Haunting. . . . A testament-like fever dream of autofiction.”
—Elisabeth Vincentelli, Newsday 

“As the narrator’s body grows weaker, his days are filled with trips to the clinic with loved ones, and a cascade of memories—orchards, surfers, the mid-1970s. He describes being ‘exhausted from the chaos of this era’—‘Napalm. Cambodia. Nixon. Tet Offensive. Watergate. Secretariat. Muhammad Ali.’ . . . He has rendered the thoughtful, interior months of his own last act into spare and profound prose.”
—Jane Ciabattari, BBC
 
“Powerful. . . . Ultimately, Shepard drops all pretense, closing out this collection with two heartbreaking chapters detailing his final days, and bringing the reader up close to what Rilke called ‘undiluted death.’”
—John Winters, WBUR

“Spy of the First Person captivates in its distillation of many of Shepard’s enduring themes—the death of America’s frontier, identity and loneliness. . . . Shepard illuminates loneliness beautifully in this slight but rich and moving final work. In the final lines the old man sees ‘the moon getting bigger and brighter . . . two sons and their father, everyone trailing behind.’ Shepard’s valedictory message is one of hope.”
—Alasdair Lees, The Independent (London)
 
“There’s plainspoken reflection on the tempos of everyday life, in a signature style that lopes elegantly and rhythmically across the page. . . . Surreality emerges in Shepard’s visions of his mundane West, as well as the familiar voice of a lonely, achingly acute observer. . . . The pages of a man’s life, with all its glory and monotony, are sewn together here with steady pathos and flashes of brilliance, dark and light.”
—Molly Boyle, Santa Fe New Mexican 

“Spare but not slight, surreal yet stoic, an intriguing and moving glimpse into what falls away and what still matters at the end. . . . Shepard evokes the sense of mystery and the exploration of the myth of the American West that permeated so much of his work. . . . With Spy of the First Person, Shepard exited head up.”
—Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

“It is, radiantly, Shepard’s voice. . . . Shepard lets his characters keep their secrets, even as they reveal timeless and universal truths. . . . [A] stunning and eloquent final soliloquy.”
—Lew J. Whittington, New York Journal of Books 

"Snares with virtuoso precision both nature’s constant vibrancy and the stop-action of illness. Told in short takes pulsing with life and rueful wit. . . . Offers acid commentary on episodes in American history, and revels in the resonance of words. . . . A gorgeously courageous and sagacious coda to Shepard’s innovative and soulful body of work.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) 

“Elegant, unpretentious, funny, and touching. . . . Slim but potent. . . . Gently escorts the reader out to the edge where life meets death.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review) 

“A sharply observed, slender novel set in familiar Shepard territory: a dusty, windblown West of limitless horizons and limited means of escape. . . . Offers arresting portent. . . . It’s exactly of a piece with True West and other early Shepard standards, and one can imagine Shepard himself playing the part of that old man in an understated, stoical film. . . . In the end, this is a story less of action than of mood, and that mood is overwhelmingly, achingly melancholic. The story is modest, the poetry superb. A most worthy valediction.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2017-10-31
A sharply observed, slender novel set in familiar Shepard (The One Inside, 2017, etc.) territory: a dusty, windblown West of limitless horizons and limited means of escape.An image at the beginning of what is billed as the recently deceased Shepard's final work of fiction—until the next one is found in a drawer, presumably—offers arresting portent: robins are singing, chirping away, not so much out of happiness with the world but, as the nameless narrator says, "I think mostly protecting nests" from all the "big bad birds" that are out to get their little blue eggs. The world is full of big bad birds, and one is the terror of a wasting neurological disease that provides the novel's closing frame: two sons and an ailing father lagging behind the rest of their family as they make their way up the street in a little desert ville. "We made it and we hobbled up the stairs," says the old man. "Or I hobbled. My sons didn't hobble, I hobbled." It's exactly of a piece with True West and other early Shepard standards, and one can imagine Shepard himself playing the part of that old man in an understated, stoical film. In between, it's all impression, small snapshots of odd people and odd moments ("People are unlocking their cars from a distance. Pushing buttons, zapping their cars, making the doors buzz and sing, making little Close Encounters of the Third Kind noises"). It's easy to lose track of where one voice ends and another begins, where the young man leaves off and the old man picks up the story: explaining the title, the young narrator likens himself to an employee of a "cryptic detective agency," even as the old man, taking up the narration in turn, wonders why he's being so closely watched when he can barely move. In the end, this is a story less of action than of mood, and that mood is overwhelmingly, achingly melancholic.The story is modest, the poetry superb. A most worthy valediction.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171880514
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	12/05/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

Seen from a distance. That is, seeing from across the road, it’s hard to tell how old he is because of the wraparound screen porch. Because of his wraparound shades. Purple. Lone Ranger. Masked bandit. I don’t know what he’s protecting. He’s actually inside an enclosed screen porch with bugs buzzing, birds chirping, all kinds of summer things going on, on the outside—butterflies, wasps, etc.—but it’s very hard to tell from this distance exactly how old he is. The baseball cap, the grimy jeans, the old vest. He’s sitting in a rocking chair, as far as I can tell. A rocking chair that looks like it was lifted from a Cracker Barrel. In fact, it still has the broken security chain around one leg. I think from this distance it’s red but it could be black, the rocker, some of these colors originate from the Marines, some of them from the Army, some from the Air Force, depends on the depth of one’s patriotism, and he just rocks all day. That’s all. Telling stories of one kind or another, little histories. Battle stories. People come by, and they see him sitting there on the porch in his rocker mumbling to himself. And they just walk up and sit down. They seem to know him somehow. At first they seem as though they don’t, but then they do. Also there are other people who come by. Who come and go. One of them looks like it might be his son. Tall and lanky. One looks like it could be his daughter. Two of them look like they might be his sisters. They come and go from deep inside the house but it’s very hard to tell from this distance how deep the house goes.

Robins are chirping approval. More or less. Robins are always chirping here, for some reason. I think mostly protecting nests. Protecting pale blue eggs. From crows and blackbirds. Swooping. Menacing birds trying to get their babies. Little robins with red breasts chirping madly trying to scare away the crows. Big bad birds.

2

They gave me all these tests. Way out in the middle of the desert. The painted desert. Land of the Apache. Land of the Saguaro. They gave me blood tests, of course. All kinds of blood tests testing my white corpuscles, testing my red corpuscles, testing one against the other. Then they tested my spinal column. They gave me a spinal tap even. They put me through MRIs. Tubes where they could look at my whole body to see if there was any paralysis in any bones or muscles. Cross-sections, sliced sections. X-rays. Ghostly pictures. And they looked at decay and they looked at all kinds of things and they couldn’t come up with an answer until finally one guy, I think some kind of neurosurgeon, he had black hair and a white coat and glasses, electric probing shocks with a steel rod. He injected them into each arm and an electric current pulsed through and I could feel these shocks in my arms. He’s the one who came up with the answer that something was wrong. And I said, well, I know something is wrong. Why do you think I’m in here? He just looked at me with a blank stare.

In the mornings I would have breakfast at a Mexican joint. Enchiladas. Cheese and eggs. Green chili.

3

There used to be orchards as far as the eye could see. Like picture postcards. Orange orchards, olive orchards, grape orchards, avocado orchards, lemon orchards, pear orchards. Orchards of every kind corresponding to the nationality that brought them here. For instance, the Italians and the Spanish brought oranges, avocados—well, the avocados came up through Mexico—tangerines, grapefruit, those kinds of things. The Italians brought olives. Out through Padua, sweeping silver leaves, limbs gnarled like old sailors. Black bark, silvery leaves. There were oceans of olive orchards everywhere. Way up in Chico there were almond orchards. Almond orchards that turned white in spring. Beautiful almond orchards that looked like Japanese calligraphy. Gorgeous. Walnut groves. Palm trees out in the Indio desert. Tall. Really tall. Some of them 100 feet or more. There was a border town between California and Arizona. The Colorado River ran through it. It was 1953 and white men used to dress up as Arabs on camels and parade back and forth in the street wearing Shriner caps pretending to be full of Arab pride. They were guys from the Midwest who owned barber shops and drugstores and had thick glasses. They had never seen the desert. I used to ride in the back seat of a Chrysler, right past the Colorado River with my aunt, my great-aunt who had blue hair and she was Welsh and her husband was fairly wealthy, but he had died by that time. His name was Charlie Upton, from Liverpool. And he had a penchant for whiskey and barroom brawls. In one of these fights he had his ear bitten off. Mike Tyson style. Bit right in half so that he only had one half an ear on one side of his face. I forget which side that was. But anyhow, he was wealthy enough to buy a Chrysler sedan on the black market during the War. Big heavy car. Beautiful car. Good for the open road. It had plaid seats. Plaid, not any other color but red plaid. I was all alone in a sea of plaid. It had an armrest that folded down in the middle of the back seat and behind each of the front seats was a kind of cord that went across, I suppose to support yourself for getting in and out of the vehicle if you were old. I wasn’t that old then, maybe eight or nine, and my great-aunt who was my mother’s mother’s sister, her name was Grace and she had blue hair. She would drive me out there to Indio to the date festival where we would get date shakes and watch the white men pretend to be Arabs on camels parading back and forth in the heat. From the tops of the 100-foot palm trees you could see parrots peeking out. Red. Black. And green. Date shakes, imagine that.

There’s a place along the way that always made me feel peaceful and I don’t know why. There’s a wharf behind it. The wharf leads out to the Pacific. The wharf creaks and moans. Sometimes it chatters and thuds when cars cross it. The timbers rattle. Sand covers the sidewalk. Sand blown in from the beach. Surfers twelve years old or maybe thirteen carry their boards under their arms coming home in the twilight. Bermuda shorts on, hair all oily, covered in sand. Small dogs walk behind them. Small dogs of no significant breed. Pelicans cling to the wharf. Seagulls swoop. Sandpipers hum and sing and dance their little dance. The seaweed is soaking. Far in the distance two people are getting up from the beach just in bathing suits folding a huge orange towel. The squirrels are scurrying for cover. The sun is setting on the Pacific. People are unlocking their cars from a distance. Pushing buttons, zapping their cars, making the doors buzz and sing, making little Close Encounters of the Third Kind noises. People are getting in and starting their cars, driving out of the parking lot under the palm trees, past the lawns, past the glassed-in sitting rooms where blond women are serving them lobster. Somebody is turning off a lawn mower. Somebody’s sitting at a bus stop. Somebody’s waiting for somebody. Lights are coming on. They’re starting to serve dinner. They’re bringing steaming pots of something. Something like crab. Something like cod. Bowls full of cod. Bowls full of hot rice. People are going home. Somebody is waiting for somebody. Somebody’s waiting for a bus. Everybody’s waiting for somebody to take them out of there—to take them far away. Down below they’re just starting to swim and it’s not even really dark yet but they are starting. Old men starting to drink. Young women are smoking cigarettes. The boats are rocking back and forth, back and forth. Bells are chiming. Some boats are unloading nets. Nets full of octopus spilling on the wharf. Somebody’s waiting.

But inside this room they’re laying down plates full of oyster, plates full of lobster. Steaming fish and rice. They’re pouring huge glasses full of beer. Moving toward the windows, someone comments on the race. I do remember this. Someone says, “A horse has been shot. The leader. The lead horse has been shot. A jockey is down on the ground. There goes the morning line.”

4

I’m not normally a suspicious person. I don’t go around looking over my shoulder for surprises. But I have the sense—I can’t help having the sense—that someone is watching me. Someone wants to know something. Someone wants to know something about me that I don’t even know myself. I can feel him getting closer and closer. I can hear breathing. I can tell he’s male by the smell of his breath. I don’t know what he wants. He gets more and more curious about my comings and goings. About me. He seems to want to know something about my origins.

5

Where exactly do we come from? That’s one question. Was it a desert? Was it a forest? Was it a mountain? Was it the prairie? Where do we actually come from? The Colorado River?

If you were traveling in a foreign country and you lost your dogs and you lost your car and you lost your note from home that your mother pinned on your collar and you lost your clothes and you were standing there naked and somebody came up to you and said, where do you belong, how would you answer? Would you ask the one ancestor who happened to be Portuguese? Or would you ask the Spanish Armada? Somebody has forgotten.

6

To tell you the truth, I don’t know where he came from. I discovered him quite by accident. Bent backwards, gasping for air. One day I was sitting here much the same way as he’s sitting now, twiddling my thumbs, and I was looking out across the road and I saw this chair rocking back and forth and then I saw that somebody was in it. And there he was. He just appeared. I don’t know whether he rented or bought the house and then invited his people there or whether they were already there and he came to visit them or whether he’s on a short-term lease. I don’t know exactly. Sometimes people appear like that out of nowhere. They just appear and then they disappear. Very fast. Just like a photograph that emerges from a chemical bath.

7

I’m not sure what he’s seeing now, the air is so hazy, I’m not sure what I’m seeing either. Whether he’s talking to himself or talking to someone else or what exactly he’s doing. The birds are not singing now. Fluffy white clouds all around but the air is still hazy. The trees are coming back to life. A pair of old red tennis shoes dangles from the telephone wires, hanging up there by shredded laces.

He eats cheese and crackers all day. Iced tea. He sips on that. But he has particular trouble with his hands and arms, I’ve noticed. His hands and arms don’t work much. He uses his legs, his knees, his thighs, to bring his arms and hands to his face in order to be able to eat his cheese and crackers. It seems that periodically he has to go to the bathroom or something. He stands. He wavers when he stands. He looks like he’s going to fall over. Topple. It must be the reason for the handicapped sign hanging from the rearview mirror of his car in the driveway. He wavers from side to side. He signals. He looks like he might very well fall over, but he doesn’t. Sometimes he calls for one of his people—one of his sons or daughters or somebody else closely related to him like his sisters. He signals and they come out on the porch. In other words, he stands, he wavers, he does these things over and over again. Cheese and crackers, iced tea, reading. Then he calls somebody and they come and they tend to him. They take him inside the house. They take him by the arm and take him inside. He goes through a screen door into a dark house and disappears. There’s no telling how deep the house goes. When he comes back, often with the same person, arm in arm, they either zip him up or zip him down. They zip up his pants. In other words he’s done something very private. He’s either urinated or gone number two and they help him with this. They help put him back together and then they stick him back in his rocking chair. They sort of gently lower him back down even though at a certain point he kind of falls into the chair backwards panting and gasping. He says, the more helpless I get, the more remote I become. Am I seeing all of this? The air is still hazy. You might ask yourself why. Why am I so interested. Is it pure curiosity or do I have some other motive. For instance, hired by some cryptic detective agency. Or is everything by accident?

8

Why is he watching me? I can’t understand that. Nothing seems to be working now. Hands. Arms. Legs. Nothing. I just lie here. Waiting for someone to find me. I just look up at the sky. I can smell him close by.

9

It was that time of day that I love so much. That people have written songs about. The time of day when afternoon is turning to night. Twilight, I guess it’s called, and I snuck across the road. I snuck across the road hoping to get a peek at him before he began any conversation with somebody unseen or seen. I crossed the road. It had been raining for three days straight. Raining. The street was still running with water. Water was coming down everywhere. Not rain but residual water. I got to the other side through the parked cars, through all kinds of parked cars. There were Toyotas, there were Chevys, there were Fords, there were Zumbayas. All kinds of cars and I got to the hedge which was neither a camellia hedge or a hydrangea or anything like that. It was unidentifiable. There were white flowers coming out of it but I didn’t know quite what they were. I can make him out through the white flowers, through the hedge. But I wasn’t quite sure. I could make something out through there, but I wasn’t sure what. Oh never mind, I’ll figure it out later. That’s the thing about later. You don’t know what’s coming up. You don’t know how all the loose ends are going to gather together. Something for sure is going to happen but you don’t know what it is. For instance—I’m outside, for instance. Out here with the birds and the bugs. Not exactly outside, but close enough. Just across the way. It’s never like it was. The clouds. The big sky. The flowers. The chirping.

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