40

An owl lands on the balcony. I want to open the sliding glass door but I’m afraid of scaring it away. Its yellow eyes glint in the dark. It hops down from the banister and comes up to the glass, and I see it’s not an owl but a cat, with a black head and an orange body. It hisses and spits and slaps at the door.

I’m in a weird spot this evening in the city, looking for a place to dispose of the used condom wadded up in my fist—between the seats in this movie theater, or a trash can on the street?—I don’t want to be noticed.

What if literary beauty is the opposite of how it works in the other ‘fine arts,’ and to succeed it must be functional, effectless; it’s too easy to make things pretty; Nabokov spoke of mechanical patter…