We sat in the lobby reading the paper. This, I was thinking, is the way to spend Halloween. A doorman with a knife piercing his brain passed out candy to a Pippy Longstocking and a princess.
Then the elevator opened and a purple thing slithered out. This is the only way to describe it: a purple thing. A human child, male, encased in purple stretch fabric with no mouth or eye holes, yet somehow able to navigate the lobby.
The purple thing was funny and ontologically disturbing, as the best costumes tend to be. How did this thing breathe? With no visible openings, how did it enter the costume? What was it? And finally, why?
At 5:30 I woke up and went on a walk. The sky was an unusual shade of blue and my mood was dictated by the hour. It was that time of day in which you are awake only if you have a plane to board, and I felt a sense of readiness and heightened efficiency.
I ate donuts for dinner and went over to a friend’s house. On the way there I saw all sorts of Halloween folk: girls in zombie outfits, women in cat-eye makeup and black ensembles, men with face-paint. The donuts weighed heavily in my stomach as we watched a movie. I had the feeling of having incorporated a lot of matter but no nutrition. On the train back the lights went out for a minute, a man said ooOOOoo, and then the lights went back on.
Something to put you in a good mood is watching one shy lesbian send a brownie over to another shy lesbian working seven feet away in a coffee shop. Ladies! Where once there were gentlemen, now there is you.
Late in the afternoon I sat still and watched the Triops. It had rained all day and the dressing for and braving of weather made me long for a tank of unchanging comfort in which to flutter, like the Triops, without rest.
And he doesn’t rest, not that I can tell. A thumb-sized creature in the shape of a horsehoe crab, he is always moving when I turn on the light, subsisting on three pellets per day of Triops Food from a white envelope. This is all. His metabolism must be slow. For a thing in perpetual motion, he keeps the weight on.
There’s no sense in wishing for the inevitable, but still: this year I want to skip ahead to the feeling of having surrendered Halloween night to nothingness— to an overstretched candy-corn-for-dinner stomach and a book and no curiosity whatsoever about what anyone else is doing.
On Fridays we had art class. One day we made clay heads, each of us struggling to sculpt a head from life rather than from what we imagined a head to look like. The heads were fired in a kiln and set upon a table the following week for us to claim.
For 23 students there were 20 heads—two students had been absent that day and one head, I guess, had been lost.
I scanned the table but could not find my head. Slowly the other students located theirs and the heads dispersed. Towards the end of the drift I saw that one head looked more familiar than the rest, and I reached for it. At the same moment, another student—also named Molly—reached for that head.
We were too young to lie about clay heads and I remember staring at the figurine as a teacher mediated our conflict, flickering between complete certainty that I’d made it and total non-recognition of the object. My fear regarding children—having them, if that happens—is that a similar ambivalence will set in.
After dinner I stood on the corner for a minute, wondering whether to go home or not go home. Home would involve pacing around 200 square feet of space looking for something to do. Staying out would involve the same thing over a larger mass of territory.
The apartment came with a chandelier. Can we call it a chandelier? it tinkles and has dangling elements; however, these are not made of crystal or glass. They look like smashed Mentos. For such a conspicuous ornament, the chandelier seems to register as exactly neutral.
