I am a student of low-affect living edged with self-deprecating irony. I am a character of lower-affect living a bit on edge with Mr. Irony, a self-deprecating therapist. A therapist of self-deprecation

He doesn’t know how to swim; he’s more like an elf than a water sprite. And still, he loves the water. Ever since Lord Byron and he rented the boat, they’ve gone out on the lake almost every afternoon, braving the storms. In the past few weeks the rain generally begins fairly late. 

We used to go to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights. It excited Don. He loved going into the dark old dives, ducking under the doorway and following me in, me with my robe on, my boxing gloves tied around my neck, and all the workers inside the bar turning on their stools, turning as if some day someone special might be coming through, someone who could even help them out, perhaps—but Don and I were not there to help them out.

The storms of summer are the most memorable. One might happen in this way: out of the stillness of a humid afternoon, in the midst of which you sit with a gnat whining at your ear in enhancement of your solitude, you hear a rending as of a tree splitting down its middle, and then an explosion like a crate of dynamite goes off.

Three were we. We were three. Roaming the night. In our stagecoach, Netley, he drove. Sickert charmed them, Sickert the painter, charmed the whores, up to us, from the streets. I lulled them, one by one, to easy death, with poisoned grapes, then opened them, sliced with knives, I William Gull, the Crown physician. 

Cyparis the Lilliputian came at noon out of the dust clouds of the coastal road, out of the year’s first cold dust. As in every year before, Cyparis drove along the shore, two duns harnessed to his covered wagon, and with his whip he traced menacing, mad figures in the air, screaming at the people of Tomi the names of heroes and beautiful women. 

Sea birds are aloft again, a tattered few. The bone white terns look dirtied in the somber light and they fly stiffly, feeling out an element they no longer trust. Unable to locate the storm lost minnows, they wander the thick waters with sad muted cries, hunting signs and sea marks that might return them to the order of the world.

The alley became a river in the rain —a river with currents of clattering cans and a floe of cardboard. The boy would wake to the headlights of lightning spraying the walls of his small room, and lie listening to the single note of drops pinging the metal hood of a blue bulb that glowed above a garage door. Finally, he’d go to the window and look down.