She had an idea that pleased no one: that whatever we do is what we like to do. Even her closest friends raised their eyebrows when she took the opportunity to voice it. On several occasions she tried to explain it piece by piece — how it followed that what people do is what we like to do, because when we decide that we want to do something else, we find ourselves able to do something else quite quickly — and the people to whom she explained it picked up on one thread of the idea or another, yet no one liked it. Some people were disturbed by the amount of free will it ascribed to its subjects; some people were disturbed by the idea that we could go on doing something we liked while thinking we didn’t like it, almost everyone found it dogmatic and lacking in sympathy, and C even termed it “callous.”

She tried to explain many times why she found it such an exciting, even radical idea — that once we recognized our desires we could find support from either God or the universe, we choose, to either change or fulfill them, again, we choose — but there was either too much God in the idea for other people’s tastes, or else not enough God, and no matter what way she found to describe it, the idea pleased no one. Eventually she gave up, and decided to sit inside herself quietly and watch the world with the knowledge that whatever we do is what we like to do and tell no one about it, and even this, she realized, is what she must have wanted all along, to sit quietly inside herself and tell no one about it, because what we do is what we like to do and we always find a way of bringing about what we like.

Only R understood, but he took the idea to a place much further away, almost to a point at which she didn’t recognize or understand the idea any more, and the way he did it, quickly and quietly, scared her, so she retreated back onto her little island of intellectual safety and comfort, aware all the while that this itself was the problem, and the reason she used the metaphor of islands for other people and not some other kind of metaphor.

epilogue

After a long time she realized that she couldn’t tell if what she wanted was to find one other person who liked the idea or to confirm her suspicion that no one ever would, until she realized the key was to reverse into the question, one hand on the steering wheel, the other on the back of the passenger seat. The question was not whether she wanted x or y — x being another person who liked her idea, y being the absence of any person who liked her idea — the question was, given the fact that she already had y, and given also the fact that what we do is what we like to do, why was y the thing she wanted?

When my siblings and I were children, we grew obsessed one summer with an old edition of the game Trivial Pursuit, which we found in our parents’ cupboard, out of date by about twenty years. As the game is wholly based on specific knowledge from a certain era — in this case, from the early eighties, the heyday of our parents’ youth — we were never able to play the game as it was intended to be played, since our knowledge of a decade long before our birth, especially as children, whose knowledge was limited in the first place, was especially limited, yet the lack of ability to properly play the game only caused our obsession to grow. The four of us would sit in a circle around the board, negotiating the allocation of the colorful markers, the pies that held the little wedges one might be awarded for answering questions correctly, which stood empty, as none of us were ever able to answer a single question. Eventually two of us would fill our markers with the little wedges, one of each color, and two of us refused to put a single wedge in our markers, knowing we hadn’t earned it yet, and I only realized much later that this division, between those of us who felt entitled to something we hadn’t earned, and those of us who enjoyed denying ourselves something we knew we could never earn, formed the entire basis of a more serious schism within the family.

From a young age we’re told that not everyone’s story ends happily — via fairy tales. And yet a part of us goes on thinking that maybe everyone’s story does end happily, until we’re violently disabused of the notion by watching the story of someone we know end, unhappily. You may hold out hope that only the wicked end unhappily, but that’s not at all what happens in the fairy tales, if you read them closely.

She laughed more than other people I knew but harbored certain dark facts about her past; I always connected them to a picture I saw of her mother’s greenhouse, and the outline of their family home in the background. She had grown up on a kind of estate as an only child, in what I imagine must have been extreme loneliness. Her parents later followed her to the city, to be closer to her, and this decision instigated a whole series of events that led to her unhappy ending.

She had one joke she found extremely funny, above all other jokes. It seemed to me to explain much about her personality. It was a joke told to her by her dentist. He said if you ignore your teeth, they’ll just go away. She loved to retell that joke. If you ignore your teeth, they’ll just go away. It struck me that this was the joke of an extremely depressed person. And dentists are the most depressed and hopeless of all the professions; more dentists kill themselves than do any other professional. That’s a fact, it seems to have no relationship to reality. But the teeth, the skull, there’s something definitely morbid about that profession.

Much later she fell from a very high window. We were older then, I read about it online before I heard about it from anyone we knew, I think of her when I have my teeth cleaned, twice a year. I wasn’t surprised by the news, I had been expecting something like it; I was surprised by the fact that the newspaper described her as happily married, with two children.

I thought up a punishment: I might buy a pair of shoes, a stupid pair of shoes, embarrassing to wear, to be seen in, and force myself to wear them every day, no matter how inappropriate the occasion, how inclement the weather, or how towering my shame might grow. I found the shoes quite easily; they were a pair of Birkenstocks imprinted with a cartoon of a cat; I found them online, they were close-toed, red leather, they were to be shipped to me from Italy. I would wear them to my friend’s wedding next month; she would be horrified to see me in those shoes. As I hovered over the purchase button I suddenly closed the browser window, the application and the lid of my computer — I knew I was capable of going through with it — my punishment had gone far enough.

We each have our inviolable sides of the towel rack — his on the left, mine on the right, and both of us know that neither of us would one day try to switch.

My father told me he had recently realized how grateful he is for uniforms: “How else would we know the flight attendants at the airline desk are who they say they are?”

I had been trying out a new program of wearing the same shirts and the same pants every day, when a friend told me “You dress like Steve Jobs!” and I had to explain to him that he could never tell a woman she dressed like Steve Jobs, ever, no matter the nature of their relationship, those were the rules.

Two events happened on the same day and threw each other into sharp relief.

The first event was a walk with my childhood friend around the lake in our hometown. My friend said that she worried constantly about finding the ‘real’ thing she was meant to be doing. She said that even though she knows the path to happiness is just choosing something, anything, and doing it, that no matter how hard she tries she can’t help but worry that she’s making the wrong choice. She said just as an example, sometimes she thinks about constructing a home composting bin for her backyard. She said she even bought the 2x4s to build it, and found instructions to follow online. I said that seemed relatively low-stakes but that I knew what she was driving at. She said that she is paralyzed by the thought of starting the compost bin, by the idea that anything she chooses to do with her time naturally shuts down other avenues, other possibilities, and she worries that she’s choosing incorrectly and has gotten her life onto the wrong track.

Later that night I went to a small wedding, the first wedding I had ever attended. The bride was another childhood friend, such an old friend that as I reflected on the many years I had known her, I realized I had forgotten most of the things that had happened to us. As I sat at a table in the back of the room I remembered some sad things that had happened to us, as well as some happy things. I remembered sitting across a table from my friend as I told her I was moving to another city, and watching her burst into tears. I had been shocked because it was a time in my life at which I didn’t think anyone cared about me. At the wedding I sat in my assigned seat and watched the evening unfold, and I felt completely content with my role as a spectator. It was a pleasure just to see a room full of happy people, especially the young people in the bridal party, most of whom had either just gotten married or who were getting married in the next few months. These, I thought, were people who did not walk in circles around the lake fretting about the possibility of making the wrong choice.

When I moved in he rapdily got into much better shape, and I gained twenty pounds. I thought there must be an energetic imbalance in the apartment, so I closed my eyes and layed down on the rug in an attempt to locate it, but all I could feel was the pain in my own head. When he came home I could tell he wanted to know what was going on, but he refrained from asking me anything. Over the next few weeks I tried anything that came to mind, believing I would intuitively stumble upon the answer to the problem. The thought crossed my mind: throw out all of the eggs inside the fridge. So I did, even the two hard boiled eggs. A few days later, one of the plants died, I could tell the energetic imbalance was still with us. It rained for four days straight, I began to think there was some significance to everything. After a long hiatus I finally found a heads-up penny on the ground, 1978, and I thought and thought but I couldn't attach any significance to that year, everything was randomness, disorder.

She told me a story about a woman with whom she had gone out to dinner. The woman was an old friend of her mother’s, a remote friend, but someone who had been important in the distant past, and her mother had spoken to her about this woman many times. She and the woman were both living in the same city now, a small city that she found one could either like very much, or dislike, but that it was hard to maintain a completely neutral attitude toward. Recently, and on a whim, she said, she had texted this woman and arranged to meet her for dinner. During the meal the woman had nothing but negative things to say about her own life, and about the city. She said she lived in an apartment that had terrible feng shui, her bed pointed toward the door and she slept badly as a result. She said she walked outside her apartment and all the streets around her street were dead ends, and every day she was forced to walk the same route to the high street, that as a result of the monotony she could feel the life being sucked out of her every time she stepped outside. She said she was a dancer but worked as a paralegal for a large pharmaceutical corporation to make her money, and she both found it incredibly depressing and struggled to make ends meet. She was in her early fifties, she was alone, she had five roommates, they shared a communal house. There were more facts about this woman, she said, but these were the few you needed to understand her life. There was one more, she said, the fact that this woman was a person, a person who she was now realizing was a type of person, who moved around to avoid her problems. She had lived in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Brisbane, London and now she was here, in this city, and she said she was dreaming about moving to Italy.

“An idea has to feel sad to be true,” she said. “Sometimes I think that the more sad an idea is, the more true it is.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said. “Although I do feel that way about movies.” “That the more sad ones are truer?”

“Although there are some great comedies that feel true to me. I do think tragedy is ‘greater’ than comedy, though.”

“Like, ‘if there could be only one.’”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t know,” she said, “because I think it sort of shades into this idea that the more negative some-thing is, the truer it is. Not just sadder, but more cynical, more punishing to all parties. And what if it was just the opposite?”

“What would the opposite be?” I said.

“The opposite idea would be that the most positive version of events is the truest version. What if I lived my life, even for a week, under that assumption? Instead I live believing that the most negative version of my life is the ‘real’ version.”

“But they’re all just real versions, side by side,” I said.

“I was about to say something like that.”

“I think the key thing,” I said, “isn’t which version you choose right now, but that you realize you can decide to choose a different version at any time. That you realize you can eject one CD and insert another, to completely change the ‘score’ of your life, as it were, and you have a huge library of CDs to choose from.”

“I like this idea,” she said. “It’s simple, but effective. I like this idea of scoring my own life. But it’s kind of like you’re playing a CD in a concert hall. The orchestra is there, and every so often they may let the cymbals crash together, or something like that. Drown you out.”

“That’s fate,” I said. “Exactly. That’s cancer. That’s a death in the family.”

“The CD you put on might not matter much at certain moments,” she said. “At other moments it might matter enormously. It might be the only thing you can hear.”

He told her she resembled an artist with a name like a man’s. She forgot the name of the artist he told her she resembled, and spent days trying to remember what the name was. He had said that the resemblance went beyond the physical: she talked like the artist, she laughed like the artist, she made jokes like the artist. She thought: the name would come back to her eventually. She thought: maybe I should email him and ask directly for the name. She worried it would seem too self-absorbed.

She went to the movies. The movie theater published a quarterly bulletin of reviews, articles and interviews. Reading a copy of the bulletin as she waited in the lounge she encountered one of her favorite columns: a quarterly diary written by an actress who was also an excellent writer. In the diary the actress talked about what a difficult season it had been personally and professionally. She talked about being so unhappy and ill she didn’t even know how unhappy and ill she was, and about the burden of a generalized unhappiness whose source couldn’t be located. The actress didn’t talk about the unhappiness in exactly these terms, she spoke elliptically of a broken heart. The diary was raw but carefully considered and well-written, and it made her feel a little better that she wasn’t the only one feeling burdened by a sourceless unhappiness. She looked at her phone and thought: if I look at my phone and all I see on the screen is the date and time, if I see that no one has tried to contact me, I will truly feel miserable at that sight. She looked at her phone and saw only the date and time. The movie theater was filling up slowly and she was in her seat. She was almost finished with the actress’s diary, the actress was describing an exhibition she saw at a downtown gallery, and she recognized a man’s name. Why did she recognize that man’s name? Of course, it was the artist he had said she resembled, and she wasn’t a man at all. She thought: I knew the name would come back to me. She almost laughed. The screen went dark: Feature Presentation.

Where this ugly bar now stands there used to be a little restaurant called The Finch. It had a blue awning and a plate glass window, and it was the first restaurant at which we dined as a family when my mother and father visited me in the city. It was an upscale American bistro; I remember thinking even at the time there weren’t enough customers dining there to keep it afloat. Now I’m sad when I walk past the establishment that has taken its place because I remember the meal with my parents being uncommonly serene, a rare moment of unison and harmony. I can still see the table at which we sat, in the corner on the left, where we ate and talked quietly.

I used to go to a school for mathematics and engineering. I sat in a large lecture hall with one hundred other students, most of whom were male. I spent the duration of each lecture teaching myself to write with my left hand, and in this way alone the two hour lectures were bearable. If I had been listening to the math I would have crawled out of my skin. As the lecturer wrote the numbers on the board I would copy them as quickly as I could. After the first few minutes my weak hand would develop a cramp, it became painful to write, and this was even more of a distraction from the lecture. Slowly it grew stronger, and the numbers it wrote grew more and more legible. By the end of the semester it performed at around 60% the speed and accuracy of the right hand. The way the left hand writes is still awkward and jagged, but it is quick and far less painful than it was before. To write with both hands is a skill I acquired for myself. No one can take it away from me except me, for lack of practice. I only wish I had those notebooks full of ugly, twisted numbers from when my left hand was learning to write. I threw them in a dumpster on the last day of class, and I do not remember the mathematics I learned. Only my hand remembers.

Every summer as children we were sent away to summer camp, and one summer I was old enough to be assigned the high ropes course as one of my daytime activities. The high ropes course was a series of climbing tests and challenges set up in a way that, looking back, seemed somewhat improvisational, on an old, unused part of the camp’s property. On the day of the high ropes course we rode in the bed of a pickup truck fifteen minutes out into the woods in silence. When we got there the instructor was a scrawny, muctachioed Old Texas man named Steve, and he was kindly though we expected him to be harsh, based on what we had heard. The first challenge was simple: a climb straight up to the top of a telephone pole of standard height, using the staples a service worker might use to climb, and then a freefall from the platform attached to the top of the pole. We would be harnessed for the jump so we would only fall for about forty feet before swinging back and forth between two poles on a wire. Everyone called this one “The Screamer.”

I had lived in fear of this high ropes course for many years and had collected as much information as I could about each of the challenges so I already knew a fair amount about the mechanics and specifics of this one. When it was my turn to climb they harnessed me onto the safety wire and I set out up the telephone pole, using the staples as a ladder. The staples were hot and slippery under my hands, and in the places where my elbows touched the telephone pole, the black tar that they coated the poles with to protect them against the elements stuck to my skin. The higher I climbed the faster my heart beat and the shakier each of my limbs became. I tried not to look down, but when I glanced through my arms by accident I saw my sister and the rest of the group becoming smaller and smaller beneath me. When I reached the top of the pole, almost in disbelief, I hoisted myself shaking and heaving onto the platform, where Steve was waiting for me, sitting comfortably with his back against the pole and his legs dangling over the side. He clipped me onto the second wire I would use to execute the jump and asked if I was ready. When you’re ready, just move until you’re sitting at the edge of the platform and then let yourself fall forward over the edge, he said. Don’t hold on. I don’t think I can do it, I said. I don’t think I can make myself jump. Well just wait a few minutes, he said, and take deep breaths. You may be ready in a few minutes. I breathed and waited a few minutes. I could see the small crowd of people down below staring up at us, waiting for me to jump. I still don’t think I can do it, I said. I can’t jump from this height. I’m too scared. You’ll have to push me. Nope, said Steve. We can’t push you. You have to jump on your own. Please, I said, glancing down at the tiny faces who stood looking up at me, a few of whom were starting to disperse. Please. You have to push me. They’re waiting on me. It would have been so easy for him to just shove the clip I was hooked onto down the wire, carrying me with it. We can’t push you, Steve repeated. You have to jump on your own, or else you have to climb back down the way you came. I begged him off and on to just push me off the platform for another fifteen minutes.

It’s like that, I said, and turned to leave. Did you jump? she said. Did you jump for it? No, I said. I went back down the pole the way I came. I closed the door to her bedroom behind me.

In the year 2076 they will hold the Tricentennial Celebration of the founding of America. I will likely, at that point, be dead.

How can they hold the 2076 Tricentennial Celebration without ME???

Who is in control of whom. Whom doesn’t want it to be this way, but never learned a different way to relate to who. And who is so much better at setting the terms of these things, anyhow. It’s almost like who doesn’t need whom. Who doesn’t love whom. Although whom loves who more than almost anything in the entire world. In fact, more than anything in the entire world.

Can you imagine coming to the new world and being so homesick or tired or totally unimaginative that after traveling halfway around the globe on a boat and riding in a covered wagon to pound nails into wood and lay the floorboards of a house in a town that doesn’t exist yet, naming that town after the place you started from?

She got out of bed, still in her nightgown, went to the edge of the cliff, fell on her knees, and screamed up at the clouds: “Is this all there is!!!? Is this all there is???!”She expected thunder and lightning, but instead there was nothing, which felt even worse.

“There has to be more than this! Answer me, goddamn it! Answer me!” The cliff was inexplicably covered with the softest carpet of bright green grass.

She wanted to figure out why all the small businesses on Driggs Avenue were closing. He said it was because rents were rising, but she wanted to be able to say why much more specifically than that. It was a restaurant, a karate studio, and three or four little shops that were gone, when she walked down that avenue on her way to work. He said it wasn’t really worth getting worked up over. Think of all the shops that were left on Bedford Avenue!

He said “It’s great to see someone living out their dream despite what everyone else thinks.”

I said “Despite what everyone else thinks?”

Think of it like this: two people are each building a house—to make it easy on yourself, you can imagine the houses are side-by-side. One of them works on the house much, much longer than the other, yet his house is much smaller. It’s much smaller, but also much more finely crafted. No detail is unimportant. The other builds the house more quickly and loosely, and it’s larger. It has many more rooms, windows, a patio, and the details are not as important. It’s the existence of the house itself, as a totality, that is significant. There’s landscaping, a yard, a garden, everything is finished only to the degree that it needs to be finished to be pleasant and comfortable, but no more.

And what about these two houses? Nothing about them. These are two other people’s houses—you can’t live there. You have to build your own house, decide how long you want to work on it, find the materials—everything–yourself.

What I’m trying to say is that time is extremely limited. Time is in extremely short supply. You may already be halfway through life’s journey. You may already be halfway through a door you didn’t know was open.

She died, and now it’s just a reality. She was alive, now she’s dead, and it’s a reality that she died, young, and before her time. She died alone, and she never found true love. Or else if she found true love, she lost it, and in the end she was alone when she died. And though we all die alone, in the end, in this case she may have never had the chance to find true love, or the number of chances that one needs to find true love, so in the end she was doubly alone, once in the sense that we all share, and then a second time in the sense that she had not found the love of her life by the time she died.

Once she was alive, and had her whole life ahead of her, but then she got sick, held on for longer than was expected, slowly declined, and died alone, too young, before her time, without true love, and this is all what really happened. It’s done, it’s set in stone, and it’ll never be any different, no matter how differently we had imagined it before it happened, because she died, and in dying, made the facts of her death a reality.

A friend’s sister is becoming a nun, and he sees her only twice a year, plus occasional handwritten mail exchanged through the convent. Her head is shaved bald and she has no cellphone. On Fridays the nuns observe a day of silence, and the neighborhood guys tease them. Hey sister! Hello! How you doing! A man who has done time cleans his car outside the convent gates, and says he’ll kill anyone who harms the sisters. Inside the convent there’s no need to read the news or own a phone. There are no cars to clean or repair. There are no bare feet on the grass.

“Do you think I’ll have problems if I just don’t get married?” she asked me. “I look at my parents, and sometimes my mother even says, ‘your father and I caused each other nothing but suffering.’ And I think maybe I’m better off not getting married at all.” “You’ll have problems if you don’t get married,” I told her. “It’ll be the same amount of suffering as if you do get married, just in a different shape.” “You think so?” she said. “I feel that if I was alone, I might be lonely, but I’d be able to face loneliness more easily than whatever unknown variables another person might bring into my life. Who knows what problems the other person might introduce?” “That might be true,” I said. “But I believe you’ll be given the same amount of suffering in your life regardless of the choices you make, just in a different shape.” “Where’d you get that idea from?” she said. “Nowhere,” I said. “It just occurred to me now. It’s probably not very original. It’s probably a really old idea that appears in a bunch of different places. It feels simple to me, but profound.” “I don’t like that,” she said, frowning. “It’s as if you’re saying the decisions I make in my life don’t matter. Of course you would think that.” “No, no, that’s not what I mean,” I said. “I just mean that the universe has likely already doled out a certain amount of suffering for you. The decisions you make may change the shape of that suffering, and maybe the color, but the overall mass of the suffering won’t change. You know what I mean?” “I understand what you’re saying,” she said, still frowning. “That’s just the law of conservation of mass, applied to the idea of suffering in your life. That’s all that is.”

We finished our walk, but I felt a whole lot less clever after she said that.

A couple we know at the tennis club, Janine and Chris, divorced over a box of thin mints. Apocryphally. A tale circulated. Janine had frozen the thin mints, because she liked to nibble on them year-round. Then Chris had gone into the freezer and eaten the remainder of the last box for the year. It was the final straw. Some people told the story in a way that made Janine seem like a shrill bitch, others told it in a way that made Chris seem like a fat pig. To me, they couldn’t have been a more ordinary couple. When I saw them together they looked like a couple of rectangles in polo shirts.

Janine had quite a game and is much in demand at the club as a doubles partner, so she remarried another of the divorcees, Mark, right away. They have a fabulous barbecue every year where they roast a whole pig with pineapple, on a spit in the backyard beside the swimming pool. They have one of the guys from the club come out and spend all day digging the pit and roasting the pig, and at night with everyone there it’s kind of luau themed. They must spend five or ten K on the party every year, but the whole club comes out for it, and now it seems like Janine and Mark have never not been together.

I saw Chris hitting on the ball machine the other day, with one of the pros. He still plays at the club and doesn’t seem humiliated by the divorce, or by the story that still goes around to new members of the club. He doesn’t seem to care that we all know he ate an entire box of thin mints in one sitting. The story may not even be true. His conscience seems clean. But what he did has been set down in the memory of the country club through constant retelling, husbands and wives saying to each other: “Watch it! You never know what’ll make me snap!” And laughing, laughing.