bowed my head and began to weep. I was without reason. I was beyond depressed. I was the opposite of ecstatic, whatever that is. We were drinking with David Markson, and he had made me sad. William was to blame. “Harold Brodkey died of what?” William asked him. “Do you think Wittgenstein was isolated from himself?” William asked him. “If you had Alzheimer’s, what would you write?” William asked him. “And what about Mark Twain?” William asked him. “Do you think Beckett hated Joyce? In the end?” I asked him. Dirk did stretching exercises. It was cold, in that bar in Hoboken, after our lackluster reading at Hoboken Books, and we talked about Dostoevski, and we talked about Sylvia Plath and Edward Albee and William S. Burroughs and Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. We didn’t come to any conclusions. We were quiet, all of us, for a while, all flooded with memories of people gone and betrayals and loss. We were drinking bourbon, and finally we stopped asking questions and we listened. David Markson was talking in a low whispered voice about love, and we drank for hours. There was a moon that night and it glowed, and it was bright, even in Hoboken, New Jersey.

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