The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle teabags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they’ve forgotten to do.

She inserted another roll. She was sure she already had what she’d come for but a hundred times in her life she thought she had the cluster of shots she wanted and then found better work deep in the contact sheets. She liked working past the feeling of this is it. Important to keep going, obliterate the sure thing and come upon a moment of stealthy blessing.

“Exactly. When I was a kid I used to announce ballgames to myself. I sat in a room and made up the games and described the play-by-play out loud. I was the players, the announcer, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn’t been a moment since those days when I’ve felt nearly so good.”

He had a smoker’s laugh, cracked and graveled.

“I remember the names of all those players, the positions they played, their spots in the batting order. I do batting orders in my head all the time. And I’ve been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since. The pure game of making up. You sit there suspended in a perfect clarity of invention. There’s no separation between you and the players and the room and the field. Everything is seamless and transparent. And it’s completely spontaneous. It’s the lost game of self, without doubt or fear.”

“I got to Minneapolis. I went back to school for a year but then I dropped out again and fell into another spiral of drugs and nonbeing. There was nothing very special about it, even to me. I was a salesperson for a while in a heavily carpeted shoestore. Somebody gave me Bill’s first novel to read and I said, Whoa what’s this? That book was about me somehow. I had to read slowly to keep from jumping out of my skin. I saw myself. It was my book. Something about the way I think and feel. He caught the back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten.”

[...] Used to be that time rushed down on him when he started a book, time fell and pressed, then lifted when he finished. Now it wasn’t lifting. But then he wasn’t finished. Live in a large bright apartment with gray sheets on the bed, reading perfumed magazines. There is the epic and bendable space-time of the theoretical physicist, time detached from human experience, the pure curve of nature, and there is the haunted time of the novelist, intimate, pressing, stale and sad. [...]

[...] Want to live like other people, eating tricolor pasta in trattorias near the park. Always whiting out and typing in. He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold. [...]

She shook easily out of the T-shirt, arms unfolding full-length above her head, and Bill almost turned away. Every time she did this, breasts and hair swinging, he felt the shock of seeing something full-measure, almost lost in the force of it. He advanced the action in time to give it stillness and coherence, make it a memory of shape and grace caught unaware. She wouldn’t ever know how deep-reaching that painted moment was when her elbows scissored out and she slipped free of the furled shirt and stretched to a figured yawn, making him forget where he was.

“What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes.”

“You like to overstate.”

“I overstate things to stay alive. This is the point of New York. I completely love and trust this city but I know the moment I stop being angry I’m finished forever.”

"[...] By the time you listen to this, I’ll no longer remember what I said. I’ll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up. The truth is I don’t feel awkward. It’s probably easier to talk to you this way. But that’s not why I’m calling. I’m calling to describe the sunrise. A pale runny light spreading across the hills. There’s a partial cloud cover, which makes the light seem to hug the land, quiet light, soft, calm, pale, a landglow more than a light from the sky. I thought you’d want to know these things. I thought this is a woman who wants to know these things more than other things that other people might attempt to tell her. The cloud bank is long and slate-gray and altogether fine. There really isn’t any more to say about it. The window is open so I can feel the air. I’m not deeply hung over and so the air does not rebuke me. The air is fine. It’s precisely what it is. I’m sitting in my old cane chair with my feet up on a bench and my back to the typewriter. The birds are fine. I can hear them in the trees nearby and out in the fields, crows in clusters in the fields. The air is sharp and cold and fine and smells altogether as air should smell early on a spring morning when a man is talking to a machine. I thought these are the things this woman wants to hear about. It tries to cling to me, soft-skinned and moist, to fasten its puckery limpet flesh onto mine.”

“If I live and live and live, boringly into my middle eighties, I wonder how much I’ll be able to add to the pleasure of those memories, the intense conversations, all those endless dinners and drinks and arguments we all had. We used to come out of a bar at three a.m. and talk on a street corner because there was so much we still had to say to each other, there were arguments we’d only scratched the surface of. Writing, painting, women, jazz, politics, history, baseball, every damn thing under the sun. I never wanted to go home, Bill. And when I finally got home I couldn’t sleep. The talk kept buzzing in my head.”