. There is a multitude of Polish men on stoops, jake-walking guys who can remember the feeling of sobriety only slightly better than the feel of a tight vagina or a solid stool, couples walking to recently purchased condos, cyclists on those old Schwinns that are as prevalent as Converse All-Stars up here in these vinyl-sided parts, where people have nostalgia for pasts they haven't actually lived, that may have only existed in spurious elegies. Most of them produce no sound until they are within a few feet. For whatever reason, my Adam's Apple suddenly feels as though it's being inflated. I'm absolutely powerless and I know it. The surrounding world goes mute as I wince, choke, and feel bathwater warmth in my eyes. I don't know where I am, or, perhaps, it doesn't register that I am anywhere specifically until the B61 speeds down Manhattan Avenue two blocks away; and then it all comes back: the distant conversations, the car alarms, the ubiquitous traffic that hisses like the static of a 33 that has nothing more to offer. And you find yourself smoking one of those cigarettes on the threshold of a set of French doors that leads to one of those balconies that doesn't protrude more than a few inches from the building. It's later now, deep into the infomercial hours. You're staring at a moon that bleeds pale tallow nimbus onto an inky sky that's neither gray nor black nor purple. It is almost colorless even though it is opaque. The burning of the cigarette, which produces that brittle snapping of brittle wood sound, somehow manages to overpower the volume of everything else for that moment. And there is only the moon and the cigarette and me. In this moment. But it's an ephemeral, perhaps ersatz serenity. Her face will reappear; that one insignificant moment you shared with her will be replayed. It is doomed to play in syndication, just like all of her life. And at some point — when the sitcom reruns from decades past have been usurped by the morning news—; once the first six-pack has been separated into six empty bottles and the empty cardboard case that carried them—; once the second sixer would be lopsided if you tried to pick it up—; once you're through half the pack of smokes and looking to a now moonless sky without clouds or stars, just an expansive ceiling the color of a wool sock—; once you don't know if it's the beers or the many moments that now separate the first call from the present — you find that the pain has become less potent; it has become simply an absence. And it's not that you've become inured to the tragic elements that operate like some spinning gizmo in the mind of Archimedes; you just know it — the loss, the absence — is going to be there from now on. The negative has been replaced by a positive: the void has taken on an existence all its own. So maybe it's that you've become inured to the idea of your individual loss. And I feel desiccated, hollow, harrowed; the night has been nothing but nostalgia and the recognition that the I of the past is distinct from the I of the present; and I feel as though I'm trapped in a prelude to the life that I want to live, and that there is a good possibility that this prelude will continue until I am too old, and that I will have to sing not of anticipation but of regret. And so it becomes about yourself. It continues to be about yourself and your loss until you realize just how selfish such thoughts are. And then you return to her. I've been over that last time we saw each other so many times that I feel as though the chasm that separates is not static; it yawns like a teething infant. And suddenly you realize — and here's the weirdest thing — that the only person not affected by the death is the deceased. They are either worm food, or circling a throne for all of eternity like some haloed bowel movement that defiantly refuses to vacate the premises of the toilet or being punished for not adhering to a morality that has been passed down by a group of pedophiles and reactionaries and people who don't seem to understand that humans have a proclivity for ingratitude, or no long conscious as an individual with a past, or a ghost, and maybe there next to you, wondering —Why the fuck are you still awake? You realize there is nothing you can do about it anymore besides remember the dead and offer solace to the bereaved who haven't yet come to the point where you are — like Dave, with whom I stayed that night; he finished off more than half a liter of vodka that smelled like bleach by ten-thirty and passed out by eleven, even though it was a Tuesday, and we had both agreed to wake up early for an eleven o'clock class for the sake of sanity-via-routine. I cursed him for his lack of foresight, but the ashen pre-dawn sky quoted my mother: —Every time you point a finger at someone, you point three back at yourself. You go back to the brisant call, the bowel-tightening-holy-shit-this-can't-be-happening sensation that comes in tandem waves like an adrenaline rush; you remember how you sputtered out nonsense while the other line remained almost stoic because there's not much more to say at the moment. And then you begin to speak more, and you both open up; and you ask when, and you ask how, and you then proceed to run through metaphysical arguments and produce whys via armchair psychology. Some people begin to conduct research while on the phone; others begin making databases of emails and phone numbers to make sure that the whole community knows of the tragedy with maximum efficiency — not because there is some desire to spread the Bad News like some Bizarro Paul; there's just an inherent need, within certain personality types, to begin doing inane tasks to avoid the real issue at hand. But this comes to an end, and then it's the party after the wake — everything that can be done has been done, everyone who was meant to come has come — and they finally let go and abandon the facade of comportment; they are cry on your shoulder, sobbing hysterically and uncontrollably, apologize for snotting on your shirt, and then laugh that maudlin laugh because it's the only thing that anyone can do given the circumstances. So you remember it: from the call to the wake; the wake to the service; the service to the burial; the burial to the lunch or brunch or whatever it is where drinks are served — even though no one seems to drink more than that one, perfunctory drink that is indulged in for reasons that no one really understands or bothers to contemplate — and where all of the petty shit that had accumulated for the better part of decade is abandoned — and then the eruption of (still somewhat maudlin) laughter that comes when people begin to remember a person as opposed to a saint; this party to the party later that night, which seems to prove that death is a force far stronger than entropy, circling a fire, passing around a handle of Jim Beam, listening to “California Stars” and “Misunderstood” and conversation on repeat, not awkward, no longer crying at the very mention of the name of the departed, genuinely happy to see all of the other sleep-deprived faces they had seen only a few hours previously, as well as the well-rested apologists who couldn't catch a plane in time to submit another friend to the ever-hungry earth. You even recall the night after this, the solitary hours spent riding your old bike through the silent, suburban roads that reared you, listening to Photo Album and Being There over and over again, asking yourself —Was she Guinevere? even if you are guiltily thinking of what's-her-name back in New York, wondering if you're that type of person who only wants what he can't have, drunk, almost running into parked cars that materialize only a few feet in front of you. You wonder if the parents of friends you haven't spoken to in a while still live where they used to as you traipse the ruins of youth. Maybe they moved out to allow new families to help in the destruction of a past that's already destroyed. And you end up in that park that has so many memories. And you're there, under the structure, taking nips from a pint of cheap whiskey that I purchased with a fake I.D. I am thinking about thinking about the time I thought about the bust of the party that followed junior prom, and how we came here: how Adler drove his Pathfinder all the way to the structure I'm sitting under. The Ozomatli album was/was/was/is playing because Adler couldn't/couldn't/couldn't/can't help the fact that he plays every album he likes until no one can stand it anymore, not even him. The keg in back was/was/was/is…and I'm not there; I can't remember it. I can't remember if I remembered what it was. It was probably MGD because kegs were always MGD unless we were dealing with Hill, the prick who would pick up Natty or Red Dog or Natty Boh, and pocket the remainder. The police never showed up that night to pursue the few boys sitting in rented tuxes that didn't fit or the girls doing cartwheels in getups that were purple and pink and too tight. And I am on the bike again, laughing my shadow, tearing through a softball field with abandon, howling at the sight of the moon light some Ferlinghetti rooster, alone again because everyone is too hungover to once again embrace the bottle in lieu of the departed, dipping again after a three-year hiatus, feeling my legs ache and pulse, watching the celestial furnace fire up one dim star at a time, all-too cognizant of the fact that every street that led to this idyll is rife with arcane memories from my adolescent years; and I am going through the non-fictional account of my boring existence thus far, suddenly struck by a feeling that is neither anguish nor spite: no, it's gratitude, gratitude for having the capacity to feel and remember again. And I'm riding in circles, laughing, out of breath, going faster, reducing the circumference of my path, taking another nip, hearing, feeling, intoxicated (by) the wet grass licking the bike tires, going past the event horizon, spinning, on my back, laughing, sinking into the Earth as the midnight dew soaks into my clothing, laughing, laughing.) The second or third night after the burial everyone is at the bar. It's the same anywhere you go. And so you can identify the mourning party, and you can tell who's having the hardest time with the death even if the faces are unfamiliar. Because you've been there. Yes, you've been there. You know the people closest to the deceased just from the infrastructure that has been established in a predictable but not premeditated way: how the parents and the older members of the family have to walk around with faces that move around as though no longer connected to their skulls, and every song and every person and every drink makes them remember, even if these remembrances are not voiced; but they don't breakdown because they have to continue thanking people for the support and walking in circles as though they're trying to find their prom date even if they just want to surrender to a nothingness not as definitive as death, but similar (hence the pharmaceuticals that are handed out like candy). You see the best friends sitting around a small table breathing heavily as they receive quick condolences from those who approach the moment with either bathos or the senseless conviviality that would be appropriate if it were a reunion; and maybe, you think, it's just an untimely and incomplete reunion. And these table-dwellers stare gravely to pints of beer that become warm over hours of silent meditation and arcane reminiscences and anecdotes that seem mundane to the people who never knew the now future-less; but to those at that table (that table like an altar set up to conjure and remember the idea, the imago, the Form, the eidolon, now dead), they are immutable from the identity of the departed. And you're there, and you're explaining to them — the table-dwellers — that, yes, you've also lost somebody at some point in time; and, yes, it was too soon; and, yes, I just can't help but think of the family; and, yes, indulging in all of these morbid platitudes is normal because real grief can't be vocalized: it is internalized more than perhaps any other emotion, and you only end up having that epiphany of GONE! once you stop consciously mourning and one day pick up the phone to recount some pedestrian occurrence only to realize that no one will ever pick up on the other end again, and then it really sets in — not simply the fact that there is an absence, but that the absence is almost as eternal as the soul is supposed to be — it's corporeal life that's the negligible/ephemeral part. They — the table-dwellers — are quiescent, all nods and torpid blinks. They smile, almost acknowledging that there will be a day when they can appreciate whatever the people at the other, more jovial tables are celebrating: a raise, an engagement, a son's or daughter's engagement, the birth of a child — a change in the pattern that had hitherto been lacking something, though the routine was by no means cumbersome. And let's not forget the birthdays, which always seem to end up producing some type of drama caused by either an unexpected appearance or an unexpected absence.