On the evening I have been making my way round to, I sat at my desk, stared at the page in front of me, and pondered the fourteen-year-old Ian and the mystery he intends to solve: the frequent sightings of Frieda Frail’s face in the window of the house where she had died of an epileptic seizure a year before. My note to myself in the composition book: “Ian’s Sherlock worship leads him straight into the world of propositional logic and valid and invalid inference. Our not-so-ideal boy lives for cleaving true from false and busies himself with p’s and q’s and r’s as well as with the signs for not [¬], and [⋀], or [⋁], if then [⇒], and if and only if [⇔]. He proceeds step by step. His reasoning is perfect, but our hero will be misled by his deductions. Isadora Simon, Ian’s Watson, will take another more effective route.”

  While thinking about Ian and Isadora and the symbolic logic I had studied in college, I heard my neighbor start up her chant again, amsah, amsah, amsah. Her intonation had a dirgelike quality, and I realized that her sorry repetitions had begun to work on me. They slowed my thoughts and turned them in an unhappy, wounded direction, as if someone had taken to methodically rubbing my chest with sandpaper. I walked to the wall, pressed my ear against it, wished I had the old stethoscope my father had given me when I was ten that lay in the top drawer of my dresser at home, and I listened, my strained body alert to the incantation. “Amsah, amsah, I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad.” And on it went with a single variation, “Lucy’s sad, she’s sad, I’m sad, I’m sad, I’m sad.” This was worse than a mantra. I was living next to a woman so sad she proclaimed her sadness aloud every night. I could almost see her rocking back and forth in her room. In the notebook, I wrote, “I have to block her out. I’ve decided to buy a cheap radio and turn it on in the evenings. I know if she keeps it up, I’ll go insane. I stuck toilet paper in my ears and hit the foam.”

  * * *

  “Hit the foam” was code for self-induced rumpty-rumpty.

  I did a lot of masturbating in those days, but I was discreet then and reluctant to commit my onanistic fantasies to paper. That modesty has vanished. I would lie back on the foam mattress that sat on top of the platform bed I had devised from discarded orange crates I found on the street and another cut-specifically-to-your-measurements piece of plywood and generate a lover as my hand became his hand or her hand, depending on my predilection of the moment, and I twisted and turned and panted in the sheets my mother had bought for me at Sears as a stranger with black hair that fell onto his forehead and extremely narrow hips and a nice round butt entered the sleeping compartment of a train on its way from Berlin to Paris and undressed on the floor below me and crawled into my upper bunk and pressed my shoulders against the hard pallet, and as he regarded me intently, I noticed the shine on his upper lip because it was warm in the train, and he turned me over abruptly and fucked me from behind, and I loved it, or a blond girl that resembled Marilyn Monroe mounted me in that same compartment and slowly unbuttoned her blouse as the car we were in rocked on the tracks and the whistle sounded, and then I pushed her onto her stomach and pulled down her panties and took in the beauty of her wondrous ass and, in one position or another, I fingered her clit until she came and I came—we all came—sometimes the three of us came together as a chorus when I had decided on a trio. I took every part. I was man and I was woman. I was woman with man and sometimes the man with the woman and then again the woman with the woman. I have no problem recalling my masturbatory fantasies today because they are oddly fixed. The rest of me has matured and changed. I am a wise old bird now, leavened by the pains and understandings that arrive over the years, but the erotic gymnastics that took place in my head then and the ones that play out now are remarkably alike. Sexual fantasy is a machine, not an organism. I continue to have a weakness for sex on trains. It must be their rhythms.

  “To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, Madam, ’tis no matter how high or low you take it.” I kept the quotation from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by the Reverend Laurence Sterne taped to the wall above my desk as inspiration and a pointed reminder that novels did not come in a single variety. As my great-aunt Irma used to say, “It takes all kinds.”

  When I looked at the mailbox for 2C in the small entryway to the building, I found the single name L. Brite. Surely L stood for Lucy: Lucy Brite. It was a pretty name that might belong to a pretty woman, if a sad one. Brite generated associations, brightness as in the sun, but also the so-brilliant-I-have-to-blink smiles of advertisements for toothpaste, exactly the opposite of what my neighbor was communicating through the wall. There is metaphorical brightness, too, as in a person’s intellectual shininess or momentary great idea, made concrete by the image of a lightbulb above that someone’s head with little lines emanating from it that onlookers were meant to read as rays. The name inspired me, and I made a little drawing of an imaginary Lucy glowing in the darkness of her sorrow. I had forgotten the drawing, too, until I came across it in my old composition book.

  During the day, my neighbor did not sing out her sadness. She tapped and pounded on what I guessed was a small carpentry project and, while she worked on it, she whistled. Lucy Brite whistled well, a gift that reminded me of my father, who had sung tonelessly but whistled in perfect tune, something that had always astonished me as a child. How was it that in church my father moaned out hymns in a voice so flat I had to stop myself from grimacing, but he could whistle like a messenger from heaven? Whistling from my father was a declaration of high mood, a sign that for the moment, anyway, life was good for him, which made it good for us, his children, the two girls who listened to wordless renditions of “Camptown Races” or “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” or “There Is Power in a Union” from the backseat of the car, which is why I associate whistling with a picture of my father from behind—the rim of dark hair beneath his bald pate and his ears “that lay nice and flat against his head,” the only way ears should lie, according to our mother.

  We liked it when he whistled and drove the first family car I can remember, Clunky, a brown-and-white 1959 Chevy with a dent in the fender that was never fixed because “it in no way interfered with a smoothly running engine.” My father viewed the slightly squashed metal from a purely utilitarian perspective, a view my mother did not and still does not share. She would glance at Clunky’s flank in dismay before a car trip but remain silent about the affront to her aesthetic values out of respect for the patriarch, who had priority when it came to all things out-of-doors, a border that began with the garage (paradoxically, since it technically constitutes a kind of indoors), the car it sheltered, the many tools hanging from its walls, and emanated outward to the road and the mailbox in the direction of town and beyond. The single exception to the outdoor rule were the flower beds of marigolds, zinnias, and roses that hugged the side of the house and belonged exclusively to our mother.

  As a child, I thought the entire world was organized in this fashion, with mothers mostly inside and fathers mostly outside, but I was never quite sure how I fit into that scheme of things or how my sister, Kari, born two years after me, fit into it either because Kari was a cartwheeling, fence-hopping, tree-climbing, horse-loving girl who, when it was necessary, could defend the family honor. I can still see Daryl Stankey’s face as he pushed himself onto his elbows and stared up at us from the gravel of Old Dutch Road where Kari’s punch had landed him. I can see his grubby cheeks striped clean by tears and the pale green blob of snot just below his left nostril. I was so proud. Although all the credit belongs to my sister, the image of the defeated, blubbering Daryl inspires me to this day. It inspires me as much as Shandy’s digressions, as much as Marilyn Monroe, as much as the mordant prose of the seventeenth-century philosopher Anne Conway, whom I have been reading lately. Kari’s fist met Daryl’s chin because he had called our physician father “a quack.”

  In my memory, those days of paternal whistling are warm, not cold, and the car windows are rolled all the way down, and the wind rushes in on me and Kari, and I allow only my nose to cross the threshold, careful not to “stick my head out,” knowing it could end in decapitation. I repeatedly imagined losing my head to a speeding truck coming in the opposite direction. I would watch my head fly onto the road after it had parted company with my neck, now a bloody stump attached to a pathetic little girl’s body fallen over onto the backseat never to stir again, and the anguished pity I felt for Kari and my father and my mother who were left with the dead me in two ghoulish parts caused spasms in my stomach and a feeling of faintness and nausea so intense I would have to lean forward in the seat, close my eyes, and breathe deeply to recover. The drafty delights of being blown like crazy at sixty miles an hour competed with my imagination, which raced ahead of me into possible horrors. I firmly controlled my urge for momentary gratification—my head stayed in the car. Over my fantasies, on the other hand, I exercised little or no governance.

  It would be false to say that I was reminded of my father as I sat at my desk on 109th Street smoking cigarettes and trying to write my Quixotic story. I have no memory of thinking of my father then, and I wrote very little about either of my parents in the journal. The whistling connection between the first man in my life and my invisible neighbor occurs to me only now. My father has been dead for twelve years, but in 1978 he was still vigorous, still practicing medicine, still disgusted by Republicans. His whistling was welcome because my father was subject to what his aunt Irma called “black moods,” during which he seemed to disappear. At these regular junctures he neither saw nor heard any of us. It seemed to me that he roiled with unspoken torments and that they might blast out of him, that my father might spew lava, but he never did.

  Exactly what he thought about the daughter who had left home on a literary mission remains his secret and is buried with him, along with countless other secrets, in the cemetery of St. Paul’s Church in Webster, but I suspect that he disapproved of my writing year without ever uttering a word about it. The son of a country doctor who had gone from house to house by car in summer and by horse and sleigh in winter when the roads were blocked by snow, my father had clung tightly to rural truths, as opposed to urban truths, to the idea of neighborliness without fences, to Depression-style frugality and a suspicion of wealth, to farmers and workers (and the occasional doctor) in cahoots to build a better world, more socialist than capitalist, to collective labor of all kinds, including family weeding of the vegetable garden, and to an eternal idea of a useful life. Art for art’s sake made no sense to my father.

  Lucy Brite was partial to whistling Irish ballads, which are usually sad, some of which I recognized. “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” was one. Her songs drooled with melodic sentimentality and, despite the absence of lyrics, made me think of bonny lads and drowned darlings and missed assignations and winding roads in that greenest of green countries that were never taken or taken but reached a dead end in noble rebellion and tragedy because when the young die, whether to lost love or political turmoil, it is awful, and these unspoken, but melancholic subjects augmented the ache just beneath my rib cage I carried around with me everywhere, although I never knew what had caused it—a physical reminder of my vulnerability and never-ending guilt, I suppose, a physically implanted token of innumerable nameless hurts inflicted on me in the past and which I had inflicted on others, hurts that would surely return in the future. There is a false idea abroad in the West that the human being is an isolate who decides on his or her path and presses forward alone. In fact, we are always somewhere and that somewhere is always in us. Listening to Lucy’s repetition of “I’m sad” over and over was bad enough, but listening to music, even the thin clear sounds of a whistler, goes deeper. Music penetrates skin and muscle and finally settles in the bones. It can sway a mood from optimism to gloom and nudge a thought from airy contemplation to hip-jiggling, sweaty lust. In this, music is like the weather—sunlight buoys the soul, and days of rain beleaguer it with gathering thoughts of dejection. When it comes to music, human beings are helpless, rocked and rolled and lifted up and pressed down and turned around in dizzy confusion. It all depends on the melody.

  If Lucy Brite had, in fact, been someone else and had selected less mournful songs to whistle, I might not have been overcome by feelings that bled into Feathers’ story and the vivid dreams that began to muddle his logic. I wasn’t sure where in the story the dream would go, but I composed it for him anyway and put it in the notebook.

  Ian Feathers opens a door in his dream and finds himself in Frieda Frail’s bedroom at night. How he knows this room belongs to the dead woman is the dream’s secret. He does know it, however, and he surveys the room with the cold detachment of an experienced detective and searches for clues. The single bed, the night table, the lamp, and the rag rug on the floor are imbued with a quality that disturbs him. “Too perfect,” he thinks. They have the unreal smoothness of a picture of a room in an advertisement. Ian walks to the window to look outside at the lawn and the sidewalk and notices a key lying on the sill. As he looks at it, the key shudders slightly, as if it is alive. He slaps his hand over it, feels a tremor under his palm, but closes his fist tightly around it. When he turns around, he discovers a door that had not been there earlier, opens it with the living key, and sees a girl with a cardboard sign on her back that says I.F.F. The sign confuses him, and from it he suddenly understands that he has committed a crime and is seized by a terrible sense of guilt. But what crime? What have I done? he thinks. The girl leaps up a staircase four steps at a time, and with each flying hop her dress blows over her head, and he glimpses her naked body beneath. He has an erection. The dream becomes a wet dream, and Ian Feathers wakes up.

  Lucy didn’t pipe “lone lorn” ballads every day. Thank God. On the evening of September 6, her “I’m sads” were interrupted by a sudden outburst I recorded in the composition book as I stood at the wall. She seemed to be talking to someone in a loud, angry growl, and I wondered if she might be on the phone, but when she had finished her brief accusation, I did not hear her put down a receiver. “You thought you had the right, the right, the right to hurt me. You thought I was your bitch to kick. I thought so, too. I didn’t say a word. It’s back at night. You’re back. It happens again. I can’t breathe! And Lindy’s dead. The window. I see the fall.” I do not need the notebook to remember what I heard or felt. My body stiffened against the wall. And then Lucy said in a loud, emphatic voice, “Are you listening?” I jumped away from my post. I was listening, and, as her listener, the sentence coursed through me as if it were an electric shock.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The young woman who whiled away her late afternoons at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in early September of 1978 did not go there only to escape the confines of her small, dimly lit apartment or her chanting neighbor or to plan the rest of her novel or to try to make sense of Edmund Husserl, whose mysterious sentences in Logical Investigations she read over and over again. She went to the Hungarian Pastry Shop and seated herself at a table she regarded as well situated because it had a clear view of the door and every person who entered or left the establishment. From that felicitous spot, she could easily glance up from her coffee and her book and take note of any and all interesting strangers. She whiled and idled and was known to waste her money on cappuccinos and croissants because she lived in a state of perpetual suspense. She, like her hero, Feathers, spent much of her time in the subjunctive tense, projecting herself into “as if” cases and the innumerable illustrious possibilities that awaited her: charming company at the least, torrid passion at the most.

  In this respect, we differ, my former self and I. It was impossible for me to know at twenty-three that the dreadful phrase “life is short” has meaning, that at sixty-one I know there is far less ahead of me than behind me, and that while she wasn’t terribly curious about herself as herself, I have become curious about her as an incarnation of hopes and errors that had or seem to have had a determining effect on what I am now. While she was intent on rushing ahead on that imaginary timeline, the one that moves from left to right on the page and chronicles the evolution of organisms over millennia or Roman emperors or the life of Napoleon (as if time were space and not something wholly ineffable, an invisible motion so enigmatic that to think hard about it means to lose it altogether), I am interested in understanding how she and I are relatives, which means turning around and following the timeline in the other direction because I can’t imagine time without spatial metaphors—without backward and forward, without roads behind me and ahead of me, as if I am walking through it—but then my space has only three grubby Euclidian dimensions. Time, the physicists tell us, is the fourth. In our plain old human world, the young woman who lifts her eyes when she hears the door open at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in September 1978 becomes the aging woman who sits here now in September 2016 in her study in a house in Brooklyn and types the sentence you are reading in your own present, one I cannot identify. But over there in Minkowski spacetime, the still girlish “I” and the much older “I” coexist, and in that startling 4D reality, the two of us can theoretically find each other and shake hands or converse together because in the block-universe time doesn’t flow or dribble or leak, and it makes no difference whether you travel into the past or into the future. My husband, Walter, tells me the mathematics work out beautifully. And when he explains it to me, as he has many times, I say to him: The idea is that the motion of time is a cellular delusion? What is memory if my earlier self is still out there somewhere unchanged? And then he likes to mention the story Rudolph Carnap reported about Albert Einstein in his memoir: “The problem of Now worried Einstein seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for men, something different from the past and future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur in physics.” And Walter finishes off this famous anecdote by noting that Carnap had little sympathy for Einstein’s anxiety because he was a hard-assed logical positivist of the Vienna Circle and Einstein’s concern for human feeling mystified him. And I always say to Walter, but that meaningful now is nothing. It is as elusive as was and will be, and there is much to be gained from thinking beyond mathematics, and he agrees because he isn’t a hard-ass, and the problem of time is not resolved and that is just one of the reasons why I remain so fond of my husband after all these years.