10:04

by Ben Lerner

I opened the bottle of red with the label displaying the most distant year, taking pleasure in the knowledge that its value would be lost on me. I poured myself a glass in a clean jam jar

I looked up and saw the clouds as craquelure.

Excepting the sandwiches I had made for Alex when she had mono—and even those I tended to buy and not prepare—I simply could not recall a single instance in which I had by myself constructed a meal, however rudimentary, for another human being.

Moreover, what did it mean to say that Aaron or Alena had prepared those meals for me, when the ingredients were grown and picked and packaged and transported by others in a system of great majesty and murderous stupidity?

I also relished the opportunity to turn The New Yorker down, to be able to tell the story of my story as evidence of my vanguard credibility.

“I can’t figure out if abolishing the memory of pain is the same thing as abolishing the pain.”

For six weeks I’d talked about my performance anxiety with Jon and Sharon and Alena and they’d laughed at me, assured me I’d be fine.

This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism—ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.—in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality.

I feel like you don’t need to write about falsifying the past. You should be finding a way to inhabit the present.”

I would meet her and Roberto at the subway stop nearest their apartment, the D on Thirty-sixth in Sunset Park, and he and I would travel together, transferring to the C at West Fourth, to the Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side.

was a reversal of figure and ground: I wasn’t a balanced person who had his difficult periods; I was an erratic blind to his own psychological precariousness; I was no more a functional adult than Pluto was a planet.

How many out-of-character things did I need to do, I wondered, before the world rearranged itself around me?

Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.

I did not say that our society could not, in its present form, go on, or that I believed the storms were in part man-made, or that poison was coming at us from a million points, or that the FBI fucks with citizens’ phones, although all of that was to my mind plainly true. And that my mood was regulated by drugs. And that sometimes the language was a jumble of marks.

why be such a fuck

I spent a few minutes describing this ideological mechanism to Alex before I realized she was asleep.