Ascension

You had been in France and for some reason come back to lead me to the basement and tell me how to clean it. It was full of surprising minutia. I vacuumed strings. Maybe we were looking for something.

Later, my father told me that the repairs couldn't be done, or received at least, without taking a computer to the shop. A laptop wouldn't do.

When I gained a hazy consciousness, I was standing in a bar, dark as the rest and peopled by shadows that yelped about this and that, but mostly that.

I was vaguely on Ascension.

Naturally I found it curious.

I'm in the den of my grandparents' house in Little Rock, and there's a photo album that says "Herman: 1924..." Naturally I found it curious that someone would have compiled album of photographs of my grandfather five years before his birth. I never opened it. Naturally I found it curious.

If I had only seen this side of your face, and you were with a group of your friends...

I am in the supermarket. I don't really know what I'm doing here. I decide to check out the books, and soon I stand before the magazines, stuffing my own mouth full of toothpicks (the blood tastes like the cherry tooth-gelatin they had at the dentist's office when I was a kid). While my mouth gushes cherry, I focus on the magazines, which get only my brief attention; to my left, a lecture is going on in an infernal, terra-cotta amphitheater, in which my Spanish literature professor (a demon) discusses the ghost of José Arcadio Buendia. Like my maternal grandfather he haunts in a welcome way his family's gatherings.

I finally find what I'm looking for: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps my favorite book. Having accomplished a great deal, I walk to the pharmacy, which is also the bathrooms. As I am keeled over a tiny wastebasket full of paper cups, pulling the toothpicks out of my mouth, I realize that there are far more inserted than I remember inserting. And the cherry flavor is gone. Long gone. It is here that I realize why I am going to the pharmacy. I have diabetes. As it happens, the ominous "they" has found a link between bipolar disorder and diabetes. And I have both. I have been gone all weekend to Little Rock, remembered my bipolar drugs, forgotten my insulin syringes. I turn to my left and catch a glimpse of cousin Philip: "I hardly recognized you," I say.

"Yeah, that happens a lot," he says.

"I feel the same way," said cousin Thomas who has been standing nearby, listening in on our conversation. "I mean, we hardly see each other."

"I know," I say.

"If I had only seen this side of your face" - I take his head in my hand and cock it to demonstrate to Thomas - "and you were with a group of your friends..."

I look at them both for a moment:

"I don't think I'd recognize you at all."