3

“SHE MUST HAVE BEEN quite rattled when you burst into the house complaining about your name,” I said.     “Was she!” said Ariane.     “I can imagine that scene.”     “Can you?” she asked. There was a bit of a challenge in it.     “Yes,” I said, accepting the challenge. ...

IN ARIANE’S MOTHER’S DEFENSE, it must be said that when the time came to name her she was reacting, perhaps overreacting, to the trouble caused by the names she and her husband had given to Ariane’s older brothers. They were both named Ernie. ...

IF “LODKOCHNIKOV” was an embarrassment for her, “Ariane” sometimes felt like a curse. When—in junior high school—she found out where the name came from, she could hardly believe that her mother would give her such a name, a name so rich in implications for a life. ...

WHEN I ARRIVED at Ariane’s house, she greeted me with a wet kiss, quite a kiss—lascivious, shameless, dizzying. It was the very kiss that I had dreamed of when I was a boy, except for the fact that she tasted of scotch. ...

FOR ABOUT A MONTH, in my version, I saw her nearly every night. Most of the time, she talked, and I listened. I took notes; she did not. I tried to get a word in now and then, and now and then she allowed me to, but most of the time she did the talking. She had a lot to tell me. ...

I WENT AWAY to college, stayed away for graduate school, and then returned to teach molluscan biology, local history, folk etymology, and recreational mathematics at Babbington High. When I returned, Ariane was still in town, at the same place, down by the docks, but I didn’t see much of her. I just never seemed to have the time. Then one night her house burned down and Ariane was killed. ...

MY BEST FRIEND was my imaginary friend, a boy named Rod, short for Rodney, friend of my own invention. I based him on a boy that I met by chance one day, a runaway boy who was passing through Babbington on his way to somewhere else, anywhere, nowhere, who-knows-where. ...

Dedication

For Mad

Epigraphs

Let not the reader be scandalized by this gravity amid the frivolous; let him rather recall that there is a grandeur in all follies, an energy in all excess. — Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (translated by Jonathan Mayne)

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to seaIn a beautiful pea-green boat; . . .They sailed away, for a year and a day,To the land where the bong-tree grows; . . .And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,They danced by the light of the moon,The moon,The moon,They danced by the light of the moon.— Edward Lear, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”

Each cell is an island:—the inhabitants, shipwrecked mariners, cast ashore upon it by the adverse blasts of fortune: partners in affliction, indebted to each other for whatever share they are permitted to enjoy of society, the greatest of all comforts.— Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon; or, the Inspection-house; Postscript, Part I

The soul selects her own society,Then shuts the door;On her divine majorityObtrude no more.— Emily Dickinson

Here I inhale profounder strengthAnd as I am, I speak and moveAnd things are as I think they areAnd say they are on the blue guitar.— Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

Happy New Year from me and the artist formerly known as Prince.

I’m taking a short break.

I’ll resume the serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy on Monday, January 8, 2024, with the first episode of What a Piece of Work I Am.

BECAUSE THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING, and, as Quanto pointed out, most of everything is nothing, every day, every moment, more nothing separates the rest. With more and more Zwischenraum, the universe is becoming more and more transparent. When Raskol sprayed me with that beam of photons from the flashlight, some of them were reflected outward, arranged in a pattern imposed on them by the contours of my face. Many of them never made it out of the atmosphere, of course—they collided with molecules of this and that, got transmuted, caused transmutations—but the number of photons in that beam was enormous, and lots of them got away. ...