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One of the worst days of my life was when I heard a voice narrating my life, which is either a sign of schizophrenia or coma.

How does it sound or feel, you ask? Or you ask, Wasn’t that a movie staring Will Farrell called Stranger Than Fiction?

The answer to the second question is: that’s a different idea. As to the first question: it was loud and it felt like I’d become somewhat of the butt of a joke.

In any case, what makes my particular experience disagreeable was that the narrator was timed incorrectly, meaning that the voice I heard narrating my experiences uttered things that had happened at some other time or had yet to occur.

Which made the process of identification difficult to understand at first. Let me provide some instances. The first thing I do in the morning is make coffee. I pour the water after filling the filter basket with grounds. Months ago, I poured in the water and as I poured the water, I heard a man say in a clear, deliberate tone, “He opened the door to his car and emptied the coffee cup onto the driveway.”

The first thing I thought was: Gregory Peck is in my house. Or, why would I hear myself pretending to be Gregory Peck and why would I say “He opened the door to his car and emptied the coffee cup onto the driveway” as Gregory Peck. Of course it would be impossible for Gregory Peck to be in my house as this wonderful actor died in 2003. I concluded that this was some sort of mental anomaly, some trick of the early morning mind. Soon I was drinking coffee and forgot about it. But then, an hour later, during a conversation with Gerald, the narrator returned and in that wonderful buttery, mushroom-chewing voice of Gregory Peck, it said, “Suddenly, the cashier turned to him, raised a ripe plum, and said, ‘This one reminds me of a blood-soaked Saturn.'”

I said, “What?”

Gerald said, “I said The Netherlands played much too reservedly.” I pretended to agree with Gerald and went back to my office. As I entered the office, Gregory Peck said, “And he thought, ‘Why are the clouds so fluffy?'” I sat in my chair. And it suddenly occurred to me that, indeed, just yesterday I’d looked into the sky and asked “Why are the clouds so fluffy?” and recently the cashier had actually compared a plum I’d purchased to the planet Saturn. I stood up. Gregory Peck said, “He got out of bed, put on a pair of slippers, went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth.” I went to the coffee machine in the small refreshment area and Gregory Peck said, “In the nick of time he grasped for the branch and hung on for dear life.” I recognized all of these as events from my own life.

No one in the office heard this voice. All appeared normal. Gerald was standing at Lucy’s office. He was holding an imaginary Jabulani in his hands, probably instructing Lucy on the proper method of catching this disastrous technology.

Gregory Peck visited me throughout the day. He spoke in my head on my drive home. My wife asked me through dinner, “Why are you smiling like that?” In answer, I had to make up funny Gerald stories to make my outward response to Gregory Peck’s insistent and accurate narrations of my life appear to her as normal.

After dinner, I concluded that yes, Gregory Peck was in my head and he’s narrating my life, but he’s not doing it as it happens, but as it did happen: My life in the past tense and in the third person. I had become a “he,” a “he” who tripped on the sidewalk, smacked my brother on the cheek, broke his leg at football, stood at the unemployment line, told my wife how lovely she was in that dress, swerved in traffic, and, yes, considered murdering a neighbor whose dog insisted on watching my every movement from the fence and I had fantasies that there must be a camera in its collar.

Yes, yes. I went through all the typical reactions: Why was this happening; how to stop it; whom to call or whom to ask; why these moments and not others. One day, Gregory Peck said, “And then Gregory Peck said, ‘He opened the door to his car and emptied the coffee cup onto the driveway,'” which was, of course, exactly as it had happened. Then Gregory Peck said, “Gripped with terror, he wondered if Gregory Peck was in the room . . . and he considered whether he was going mad . . . ” which was not quite as I’d remembered.

Things moved on. But then Gregory Peck said something very strange. Gregory Peck said, “Suddenly he realized that he’d forgotten his wallet.” I hadn’t remembered forgetting my wallet. The next day, I pushed the speed somewhat aggressively and was stopped by a policeman. He asked for my license and, yes, I suddenly realized that I’d forgotten my wallet. After this strange incident, things grew even stranger. Gregory Peck said, “He pointed to the screen and identified where profits had gone up” and “The day was particularly hot and humid. The air quiet, still, and heavy. He knew that he would have to go, face things, deliver this horrible news” and “The device with which he would strangle the dog became heavy, like a dead snake.”

I wondered about the future. I wondered about accuracy and how a man might change things to come, if having them narrated before hand could somehow alter potentialities, outcomes, events. Yes, I wondered about consequences and inevitability.

You asked, “how does it feel.” I tell you it feels as if every step you take forward might lead you off a cliff.

Gregory Peck became my companion, my voice, my agent, he became my inner “I.” He said, “He wondered if all futures were dark. He wondered if Gregory Peck had license. Was Gregory Peck evil or some strange gift?

Gregory Peck said, “One day he found himself in the woods. He looked left, he looked right. He moved ahead. For some reason he remembered being here before. Recognition, though subtle and discontiguous, came from patterns formed by branches and the glow of light on the ground. A different voice spoke in his head now, relating the familiarity of things, telling him that soon the answers would come, that he must focus on a point ahead and concentrate, and that, really, the solution was simple, the solution to the voice, Gregory Peck’s voice, would soon be solved but the precise moment of this knowledge was unknown. In any case, all would soon be made known. Yes, he remembered being here before, and yes, he could just as likely have been somewhere else, too. But that now, at this moment, he told himself, he was here and not somewhere else. And what a strange thing it is.”

In my living room I have a drawing of foxes dressed as English gentleman hunters. They’re drinking wine, eating fowl, and having a good time (except one of them has pissed his pants). When I turn away, they become a part of Mandelbrot’s curves and repetitions, his complex numbers. And I always turn away (as one can’t stand in front of a drawing forever).

The cats are at a hanging plant with their little teeth and claws in a corner, pretending something in the realm of 1 through infinity among the primes. It’s easy to think of them as widgets or strings of code for a machine, Python code, or the millions of duck prints counted from above the earth, scanned, color-coded, and ascertained for pattern, message, or future scripts that might double as poetry or painting or suddenly become that old day you will someday re-observe in the dark of some sickness.

I can smell the approach of cooler days in the sway of those delicate window dressings; how the breeze turns them into a childhood spent under the bed. None of this need be understood. If you can see a child hiding under a bed (blinking, watching for a stranger’s shoes) and the gentle lift and fold of the sheers in a cool dry draft then you’re doing just fine, as it’s meant only as experience in words.

Imagine for ten seconds that God is real, if you’re not already a believer. Imagine that God created the capacity for meaning. Now imagine writing images that make no sense. Something like:

“Where did you grow up?”

“I grew up in my mother’s armpit.”

Or something like this: Imagine you’ve found two pine needles. You stake them upright in a random piece of fresh banana-shaped dog shit. Sure, put it on a white plate or in a hotdog bun (if winter, if fresh, it’ll steam nicely). I know you can paint worse things, and you have, and you will. Wait then for an observer to happen by. Imagine their reaction. You’ll be amazed in your Godhood.

It so happened that the man at the head of the auditorium told us that we were all fools and that we were being killed by technology.

And it just so happened that I raised my hand and asked him how he’d come here, by what means had he made his way.

“By train, of course,” he said.

And I asked him how he could sleep with himself as the train was just as likely a technology as electronic text readers and weblogs.

“We’ve been sucked in by the dream of technology,” he said. “We are dependent.”

I raised my hand. He called on me reluctantly. I said, “But for how long? Would you take away a Macaque’s stone?”

“The amount, sir,” he said. “It’s the amount.”

I thought about machines. I remembered a television program about a man who lived his life one day ahead, knowing the future from a newspaper he received a day prior to everyone else. With such an advantage, imagine the riches, the schemes, the good things you could do for your fellow creatures. This is the future knowledge machine, a machine of anticipation, a new machine for thinking not about the future but about the present.

We had dinner, the speaker and I, and we continued our discussion. I asked him to consider poetry as a machine. “Consider these lines from two separate works,” I said (1, 2):

reflecting my own shining face
back at me. sometimes i feel

and (I could only recite bits and pieces)

I heal, how I deal, I shuffle my stuff

His response was to smile.

The “shining face” could be the moon or the glimmer of the surface of a fish, I said, and the second is really a song, a beat, a means of remembering the motions of things that accumulate. I asked him to consider the photograph of a foot, which is really about the act of forcing something open and to keep it open, a metaphor of locomotion, and with this foot we open the exit and the young ones escape into the freedom of open country. “Cervantes is in that photograph,” I said, “Ovid in the poetry.”

He appeared confused. So I told him about the filmmaker and a film entitled in passing.

“That film records instances of infinite, conjectural narrative,” I said. “Nevertheless, the film alters the past, as what we consider the past is merely an act of the motion of the present moment. Read those poems, study the photograph, watch the film. I urge it. But know that you will be doing it at a moment called now and when you remember their instances in a future present, when you record in your own way the woman, who forgot her hat, and the man to whom she’s speaking (or imagining as a horse), we don’t know his name, but he may be hungry or he himself may be remembering the taste of corn or fish or he may be thinking “what the hell am I doing here,” know that they persist. In the poem, the poem’s speaker will always “sometimes feel” and the other voice will always be at the art of shuffling and that foot in the photograph will always be wedged into a corner, opening the door for all those trapped children, who long for the daylight or the infinity of darkness. And that woman taking pictures in the film, will always be present. She’s trapped in the film. Watch it and you’ll see her there, trapped forever by the camera.”

By this time the speaker was weeping. I hadn’t expected that from this discussion he would develop a new terror of poetry, photography, and film, a new terror of technology, such as chalk and shoelaces.

Many of the people (conference goers) who had attended the morning talk were also having dinner in the hall. The speaker stood up. He called out, “We must burn all the books, all the cameras, and all the keyboards. Every book is a trap, every film and photograph, a prison.”

I tried to calm him. “That wasn’t my point,” I said. “Recall what the poet said:

tethered, i feel,
is a good word;

or painting promoting the art of good fortune.”

But he pushed me away. He lifted a camera out of his jacket pocket. He let it fall to the floor where he crushed it under his shoe.

People have that book they remember reading. They find the book later in life, pick it up, open it, then put it down because it isn’t the book they’d read when they were young. It has the same title, the same words, the same folds in those places where the reader had paused. But it’s a different book. The reader wonders what happened.

When I went back to that old wish tree, the paper slips now brown with age and clinking in the breeze like dried fruit peels, I found the one I’d written and hung there so long ago. Understand that we can wish to keep something; we can wish to hang on to what we have. In this world, one can wish for riches or peace or a cure or even another world or rain. Given this, the tree had sagged, so weighted down it was with wishes. When they’re new the trees stand green and high and proud, but whey they grow old, they lean and look sad in the shaded evenings. They’re backs grow crooked. There are so many wishes.

When I removed my wish, the tree kept its posture. It wasn’t such a heavy wish, not so bold, and wasn’t the kind of wish that would bring the clouds to the desert or the warm to winter or life to the dead. No, it was a simple wish, the script written small with the nervous hand of a child. It is, however, customary to keep wishes to oneself, and so I can’t reveal the wish, and I wouldn’t know what to make of it anyway, as, since the wish had been made, I couldn’t say what had happened, what had changed. Why such a wish would matter to me, unknown. But I do know that in most things, other than oil spills and the sicknesses I can do nothing about, I would wish for nothing, as I yearn for nothing more than what I have.

In the novel The Life of Geronimo Sandoval, the author explores the notion of the simultaneous and the coincidental. But we could also put it another way. Imagine three characters, Esmerelda, Diderot, and Wang, only one of which is a character in the aforementioned novel.

Mornings for each of these characters happens at a different time and under different, as they say, stars, or, in the case of this example, positions of the sun. Each of these characters has experienced water. For Esmerelda, water has always been experienced out of taps or sprinklers, in a swimming pool (crowded), or in film. For Diderot, water is a geographical and geometrical concept as he is connected to his lover by canals, which contain and channel water. For Wang, water is vast and deep; it separates nations, and when the season is on, cold storms crash against the stones.

For each of these characters water is accompanied by two complex phenomena: the sound of birds and the image of trees. When Esmerelda waters the grass, a small plot of it and allowed by the city government on five odd days of the month, sparrows collect on the electrical wire above her garden in a line and watch the water, and behind them, typically but not always, upper wind flow brushes through the trees, and she watches and listens to the birds.

She asks her son, “Why do they do that?”

“They think it’s a million insects,” he says. “And they don’t know which water drop to go after and eat.”

Diderot, on the other hand, departs his lover’s apartment and follows a canal to his own place, which is compressed into a collection of apartments on a hill. The door to each apartment is shaded by a small tree. He carries the image of his lover, who keeps parrots. The parrots come and go out of her open windows. They collect in the apricot trees. From a distance, in those they trees, they look like colored beads.

Wang, however, imagines in the sound of water the movement of trees, as the trees of the city and the winds of storms are inextricably connected. At the market, the white and gray birds persistently land, hop about, seeking the children who feed them, but they disappear when the storms come and the trees that line the streets thrash in the wind.

One day, Wang saw a bird drop something on the sand. He went to it and picked it up; it was a delicate miniature glass pitcher about the size of a bullet, with a piece of paper rolled inside of it. He took this amazing artifact and raised it against the sun. He tried to read what might be written there. Diderot, on another day, purchased a small glass pitcher from a shop, one of those delicate miniature pitchers people use as nick knacks. He gave it to his lover. His lover treasured such things, placed it on the shelf above the kitchen sink, and one of the parrots, who was not amused by nick knacks, nudged it into the drain. Neither Diderot nor the lover nor the bird noticed the small piece of paper rolled inside the pitcher. Esmerelda, at some point in her life, took a small glass pitcher from her mother’s store of collectibles, wrote “How I wish I could live by the ocean” on a piece of paper, rolled and stuffed it into the beautiful miniature artifact, and flushed it down the toilet. (Her father had once told her that this was the equivalent of dropping the message in a bottle from the shore of a lonely island. “If you don’t live at the ocean,” he said, “use the latrine.”) The order of these events can only be inferred.

One day, as it happened, Esmerelda, Wang, and Diderot found themselves seated beside each other at the International airport. This happens every day and so cannot be considered either coincidental or in any way miraculous. And it may happen every day that, seated beside each other, quiet and nervous, each about to embark onto the respective schedules of his or her lives, and at the same moment, they imagine birds, construct the shape of water in their minds, and experience the movement of trees, and perhaps, if they even remember, recall a small glass pitcher (who knows where it is now?).

One day I called myself.

Reader, you may ask, “How could you call yourself.”

The answer has to do with the nature of relationships. I have a relationship with an image (several really) of myself from many years in the past, in and around the time I met Juliette in the Lake Region. I was in a boat, fishing with friends, good friends. One of them said, “Is that a branch.”

It’s a person, I thought. We came alongside and I pulled her out with help and I would learn later that Juliette couldn’t swim, but, luckily, had learned, when she’d fallen, the art of buoyancy. We wrapped her in a jacket and made for the pier.

Her family ate on tables cut close to the floor. They gathered on their knees at the table, reached for bowls of things, talked loudly through the meal. Juliette and I would take walks after dinner. We’d sit under a tree and watch the water and Juliette told me that her father thought I might be too strange for their kind.

I see myself at the river. I hear myself saying, “I must be strange to him.”

Juliette told me his story, how he stood at the window of his house and said, “How can I make a life here?” I remember feeling guilty. I remember wanting to make love to her under the tree.

Her father lived where few could touch him. In his smile I saw abandonment. I saw how the political lives of people killed the young. I heard the miss-used speeches of preachers in whatever language.

She never wore her hair long. She had small hands that made deep impressions in my arms. (I can still feel them. I can still see the tips of her hair as the light would passes through.) I felt for the saplings in her arms and legs, and on her lips I tasted the residue of sweetnesses, vivid sauces, the tangs of citrus. I heard the numerous languages she spoke into the phone, sometimes hotly, sometimes in the tone of birds. Too whom, I asked, but it was really a whisper. “Friends from school,” she said. “There were so many.” She was the only one who ever slapped me. She was the only one I ever heaved over my shoulder and raced around the couch saying, “Ha, I have you.” She once fed me a small bean with chop sticks. Seconds later I wept from the pain.

So much that when she was gone, I felt as if I’d leapt from a rapid place to tumble painfully through slanted grass, bumping against a stone, stunned. I’d shake my head, rise, and imagine the days to come as weatherless or more like the shed skin of old snakes, carrying myself into a future where often I’d catch myself standing at the water or seated somewhere and hearing unknown words leaking from a crowd or in the light reflecting off dark water, I’d see my head penetrate and move on. You bear multitudes of selves and see them sometimes. Sometimes you’re are a figure on the floor; sometimes you’re a young man in a boat, reaching for Juliette; or you perceive yourself smiling because her father has promised to return that place you still can’t pronounce and kill the more canny ones; or you see yourself on a soft surface beside her: the oils, the slicknesses, the salts, the glow of the moon.

Or you pick up the phone. It’s the wrong number or it’s a relative. It could be anyone. And you become the person you were years ago, for a brief moment, because the voice on the other end of the line utters words you remember yourself saying. It happens fast. It’s speedy. You see yourself calling and at the same time you see yourself answering. In a moment, you’re both people, two flames aputter or briefly frozen or smoking side by side in a dim space. You’re of both selves, near and distance. And you wish that she was in between them.

My friend, Jesus, Jesus Villa, who was a chemist by trade (he worked in oil), and who was also my roommate in The City, asked annoying questions.

“Should I wear pants today?” he would ask.

Elena, who met us at the apartment every morning for coffee, would say, “What color pants?”

I would say, “He had a pair of yellow pants once.”

“Should I eat cereal or a bagel?” Jesus would ask.

Elena would say, “It depends on whether it’s hot or cold outside. Unless it’s September when it doesn’t matter.”

“I thought it was August when it didn’t matter,” Jesus would say.

I would say, “One time, when I was a kid, I locked myself outside of the house and it was 25 degrees. My mother was asleep.”

“Did you have to break a window?” Elena would ask.

“I don’t remember,” I would say. “But I remember I was cold. And obviously I didn’t die.”

“Should I drive or take the bus?” Jesus would ask.

“Now that really depends on the weather,” Elena would say, sipping coffee.

“After work, we should go swimming,” I would say. “We should go swimming or to the cafe.”

Jesus would rub one of his elbows. He would say, “Swimming or a late coffee? Tonight?”

Elena would say, “Swimming’s too dangerous.” She thought many things were dangerous. “And I drink too much coffee.”

I would say, “I almost drowned once. I drank too much and I was with friends in another friend’s pool. I think one of the bigger friends flipped me and I went down deep. I remember the colors, bright yellow from the pool lights. I also remember not being able to figure which way was up, so I swam in a circle, struggling to understand the concept of up, down, and, worse, the idea of breathing.”

“Obviously you didn’t die,” Elena would say.

“We understand the physical properties of water,” Jesus would say. He always brought up the physical properties of things. “Even so we love to be near dangerous things.”

“I heard that young children who die by drowning do so in silence, so quietly that an adult seated by the pool or by any other body of water won’t even know it’s happening,” Elena would say.

I would say, “Somebody reached in and dragged me out. I remember just going around in circles under the bright yellow water. When I came out I was sober as an elephant.”

The house is empty. I remember coming here as a boy and I can still taste the popcorn we ate on the nights over, the nights I spent with John and Judy here.

But mostly I remember Galatea. I asked her, “Why me?”

I’ll leave out the erotic parts, some of the physical details. Judy would bring us popcorn, we would pop balloons, and when we became touchable, the argument about atomic cores, about whether the new poetry should be eaten or stored for future use. Judy would heat up the images and we’d (mostly I) watch till dawn. The others drifted off around midnight or later, earlier, what have you, given their natures, and I would wait.

She said, “Because you never ask and no one will wonder.”

Her voice was like a Christmas light. Her eyes contained the image of single snow flakes, sometimes the contours of sculpted fingers.

She would enter the kitchen. I remember her warm hands on my shoulders. She told Judy and John to avoid improper restlessness. “Look forward gladly to the long winters of school,” she said, and then she would wink at me, and her lips would shape out the repeated expression: “No one will wonder.”

But I wonder now. I wonder about the children we made in those days, me, Galatea, and the soft summer air under the trees.

In the older days of intelligent systems, everyone knew what was what, what was for search, what was for display, what was for organizing, what was for propelling. When I was five, the law changed, and when it changed, it became difficult to tell who had the synthetic heart that had become autonomous, cell self-generating, linguistically free.

“This is Galatea,” John said. “She’s the house, the container, she keeps everything going.”

I’d imagine all that in the dark when she came and in the morning when Judy and John had traveled off into their futures. But the now the house is empty and I wonder where she’s gone, what happened, leaving the physical dwelling empty.

And where were the children, our offspring? Galatea their mother, I their father, we together what, some of the details expressed elsewhere in motion image, and narrated in her own words?