Page one: The novel begins with a hailing of the muse and a quick history of man’s moral awakening, mastery of his surroundings, and subsequent fall from grace. In my version. In your version, a man named Mr. Henry enters a flat in London and discovers that his wife is taking stomach medication. You go on to say that it is raining outside and that an oblong (?) Quaker youth is on a “hickey spree.” I respectfully suggest you put aside whatever hallucinogens you might be keeping on your nightstand and concentrate on the text I have provided you with.

My dad is retired—or was. Is it that they need the money? I fantasize about a heretofore unknown gambling problem, hush funds, love children. My mom sells my old comic books and De La Soul cassingles on eBay. She doesn’t know I know. Every so often I’ll think about stuff I loved in my youth, and a search inevitably brings up her dealer name.

I amp the bidding when it seems safe. You could say I’m looking out for her. But how is it that her four grown kids have neglected their parents’ financial needs?

I go to bed with a nagging sense of guilt, though this is how I usually go to bed.

I’m forever reading about people who get so incensed at a book that they fling it across the room. This always seemed to me journalistic boilerplate, like those ten-minute standing ovations you read about at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, for the first time in my life, I fling a book across the room. The six-hundred-page bulk of The Truculáta leaves a dent in the wall, which I attempt to conceal by moving the lamp.

The wife on Ambien hails Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks. It’s four A.M. Drivers from many countries gather on the corner, fling curses at our window, break out the booze, promise each other their children in marriage.

The wife on Ambien forgets about our children, Danica, eleven, and Morris, five. We named them after a race-car driver and a cat. It was her idea. She had it on Ambien. I get home from work after nine and see them attacking each other with belts while she sleeps, all the cushions and pillows piled in the center of the living room. Don’t wreck our fort, Daddy, Morris says. That’s more like a tower, I say. Then don’t wreck our tower, Danica says. What about homework? I ask. Homework’s for losers, she says. Losers like you, says Morris. Honey, I call, but the wife on Ambien is sawing logs.

But back to meeting Bethany. Dinner had made me sluggish. Before b-ball at the gym, I planned to shower, get through more of The Gothic Image. It was a book for my medieval history class, about religious art in France. I was a hundred pages behind. The previous owner had highlighted a single sentence in the introduction (“Work of the thirteenth century interests us even when inadequately executed for we feel there is something in it akin to a soul”) before giving up. So far, I understood that one line perfectly, but not much else.

My paper was on René Magritte. Lately I’d been captivated by any work of art that contained a work of art within it. A play within a play, a book within a book, a painting that depicted another, smaller painting. I had never paid attention to such things before. Was the interior work of art less “real” than the surrounding work? If so, why does our mind attribute levels of reality to what is, after all, just color on canvas? Since a painter can paint a painter painting a painting, could we ourselves be paintings, painted by some larger, divine painter—i.e., God? Pondering such things probably wouldn’t help me get into law school, but I couldn’t stop.

My father lives all the way in Taiwan now, where he chairs the welding department at Fuxing Normal University. Taiwan seems random for a white guy named Cal Felix from Peekskill, New York, but a plush gig is a plush gig. He has a driver, a Beemer, a Taoist dietitian. He has a brutalist townhouse, infinity pool on the roof.

It was unreal, that existence. After the army, I had landed at a Pasadena hedge fund called Sempiternal Analytix. It was as weird as the war. Psychopaths in office casual, USC pennants on the wall. All the guys talked fast, used nouns as verbs, verbs as nouns. Surface the spend. Table the thrash. They loved to hear themselves produce language. And there I was with my lips that didn’t work.

After my wife left me, I took a Mediterranean cruise by myself. It was unseasonably cold and I hardly left my cabin, even for meals. I had never been on a cruise before, but I thought that countering the dramatic change of Hannah’s departure with another dramatic change—i.e., being at sea—was a good idea. Something along the lines of two wrongs making a right. It was a terrible idea. It was what it was.