It was only then I could viscerally remember what faith had felt like—this bright feeling in the nerves, a sense of being porous and airy. Reality was clear.
NY Times Book Review: June 15, 2025 – A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book” is both an elliptical novella and a seething memoir. Decoding the connections is at once frustrating and exhilarating.
My friend Francis couldn’t play the piano, couldn’t or simply wouldn’t, wouldn’t or just wasn’t, and whatever the reason was I didn’t like the sound of it, so we made a bargain: if he could not play for himself, I would call him every morning and he would play the piano for me. It would be my job to listen and his job to play, a mutual task, as I needed obligations, and he needed to leave his mind and return to his hands… Each of my calls with Francis began the same way—brief hellos, how are you feeling, then one of us would ask the other whether they were ready, and the reply was always the same. We were always ready. I had pictured myself writing as Francis played scales or practiced songs, but for the first few days his hands hardly remembered the keys, and I had nothing to work on, no thoughts worth keeping, hardly any thoughts at all. He played slowly, sometimes with a metronome, shards of chords or songs in parts for no more than a few minutes, but after a week he began, as if by some miracle, to sing, and I muted myself and folded onto the floor to cry, not for him and not for myself and not for anything other than the fact that any pattern can be broken, that there is no end of patterns breaking down. Weeks went by and months went by, and I called him from different cities, different rooms, and over time he could play a little longer, a little freer, songs he knew by heart and songs he was still trying to write. It was as easy as it was unusual, this distant company, this regular puncturing of our tendencies toward solitude and shut doors…
But then I thought of the mornings when Francis fumbled a note or fell short of his falsetto and how he used to shyly apologize, and how over time he stopped saying he was sorry and simply continued, allowing the errors to live.
NY Times Book Review: June 15, 2025 – A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book” is both an elliptical novella and a seething memoir. Decoding the connections is at once frustrating and exhilarating.
Clara was always so gentle with me, soft knocks on my bedroom door, a hand just barely on my back as we walked, her voice always low with me, like speaking to someone ill who had just woken up. She once came to my room with a sack of clementines and asked me if I would like one. I didn’t know what a clementine was but I said yes. I always said yes. We sat in the living room and she showed me how to puncture the skin, tear back the peel, divide the sections out like a strange bloom. I ate one after another just so I could peel them again and again. (Did anyone else notice how citrus skin released a wet blast of oil with each pull?)…I kept my mouth full of citrus, rubbed the oil from the peels against my palms and wrists, and still every time I see a clementine I think of this moment, think of Clara.
Dark Sky reports 71° F. Cloudy for three hours. 22 minutes til sunrise. And…95% humidity.
I’m out the door. The edge of night has turned. I’m late. Disappointment drips. Morning brings others. I’m part way through Catherine Lacey’s “The Answers” where she explains: “Some people need to be unseen, to be alone, to be unreachable. And there was nothing wrong with this…” This felt so right, so me. Yet, I would have finished it differently…“And there is everything right with this.”
It’s not been a good week – not a single, self-inflicted act, but a culmination of events. A cumulative pile-up of sleep deficit.
4 hours. (Monday)
5 hours. (Tuesday)
5 hours. (Wednesday)
6 hours (Thursday)
4 hours (Friday)
6 hours (Saturday)
A cumulative deficit of 18 hours. The insomniac gets through his days, 1/2 present, 1/2 hallucinating. This Man, blessed to be migraine-free, now has intermittent lightening bolts sizzle – Warning shots – Wake-up calls.
It’s a new habit. Deep sleep for two to four hours and then UP, followed by half-a**ed attempts to get back to sleep.
The e-equipment on the night stand beckons. Work emails. 5-6 books at various stages of completion. Early morning editions of the newspapers. Blog posts. A dozen unplayed podcasts. Music playlists.
I keep wondering what, in me, might be constant. I catch myself looking for that remainder, retracing my steps as if in search of lost keys. I am always wondering if there’s something holy between people, a formless thing, something that can’t be bruised… But maybe I really did sense something vague and holy in others’ eyes, something sacred in crowds, in a bus of people staring out their windows, watching life. There should be a middle ground between believing in a certain god and believing that some mysterious third substance was between people. Like churches, I thought, there should be a place for people who just weren’t sure. There should be a place for people who see something but won’t dare say what it is. Maybe there’s something, something between people that is more than air and empty space, something holy in that nothing between one face and another.
