Sublime

‘Dear Butch,’ my father said, ‘aren’t you ever coming home? Don’t you think I’m only being selfish but it’s true I’d like to see you. I think you have been away long enough, God knows I don’t know what you’re doing over there, and you don’t write enough for me even to guess. But my guess is you’re going to be sorry one of these fine days that you s

(Mona was my best friend—until one day she left the country without saying a word. I only found out she was gone later, once she settled into her new life in LA, as if we had been no more than two acquaintances, friends of friends.) (I guess that’s exactly what we were. I was a friend of one of Mona’s many invented selves, as she was mine.)

collogue.

sisters. That our father was hers—not mine. My psychoanalyst half sister was expressing a very deep and perhaps not wholly conscious wish: she would have preferred that I had not been born.

and it was Marx who turned them on to Takashi Murakami and Tsuguharu Foujita. It was Marx, with his love of avant-garde instrumental music, who played Brian Eno, John Cage, Terry Riley, Miles Davis, and Philip Glass on his CD player while Sadie and Sam worked. It was Marx who suggested they reread The Odyssey and The Call of the Wild and Call It Co

She herself did not seem quite real.

Maybe for this reason, Gabe’s parents, Joe and Barbara, had become important to Nishad. “They were the first grown-ups who took me seriously,” he said. “And it made me take myself seriously.” Gabe’s older brother, on the other hand, might as well have not existed. In high school, Sam didn’t seem to have much to do with Gabe or anyone else; he seldo

But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now.