The End of the Story

Then, although it was still the end of the story, I put it at the beginning of the novel, as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest. It would have been simpler to begin at the beginning, but the beginning didn’t mean much without what came after, and what came after didn’t mean much without the end.

I suddenly felt I might be what he thought I was. There had been other times when I felt nameless and faceless, walking through city streets at night or in the rain when no one knew where I was, and now this feeling had unexpectedly been confirmed by the man standing across the counter from me.

I was turning him into something less than another human being, as though he were as passive as anything else I wanted, any other object that I wanted to consume—food, drink, or a book.

But even though I now knew where he had been, this did not change what I had imagined while he was gone, so that the two versions continued to exist side by side, and in fact, the version I had imagined was the stronger of the two, because it had developed in me so slowly and I had lived with it so much longer.

A woman anchored him in the real world, connected him to something. Without her, he floated.

He and his friends only sat somewhere and talked to each other in a way that didn’t add anything to them or change them.