Prologue
In which I do my utmost to relate the strange circumstances by which this book has come about, namely by the finding of a mysterious document in my pocket.
Of all the gifts God has given me, the only one that has produced any fruit is insomnia, the scourge of poets to suffer darkly and write brightly, provoked by inspiration drawn from pockets of the night devoid of petty concerns or distractions. In these nocturnal hours of waking repose, I am utterly lost, drifting through the mist of what is too shapeless and transparent to see by day, floating among the hushed whispers ever-present in my mind but audible only in a dark and quiet room. Every night I close my eyes with a rosary in hand, thumbing bead by bead until at last I drop from the cloud of consciousness, if only for a moment, and I am no longer looking at the darkness behind my eyes but a different scene entirely, something fantastic and sublime and often frightening, until my eyes flash open some unknown hours later and I find that I now hold a pen and that the past night’s ethereal reveries have seeped out of my unconscious and stained the journal beside my bed with cryptic notes and strange drawings. My rosary disappears every week or two, invariably turning up after some time in the strangest of places, and this morning it was gone, an unsurprising circumstance given the intensity of my dream the night before, and how vividly I remembered it: I had been walking the streets of my beloved hometown Chicago, and it was filled with voices howling in some discordant choir, each trying to be louder than the others, and I began to scream too, as loudly as them, but soon my words were drowned in the clamor and I did not know what I myself was saying.
Eagerly I flipped through the many weeks of shapes and riddles in my journal, as nonsensical now as ever, but was disappointed to find only a blank page at the end, nothing new. Displeased, I rolled out of bed in the suit I’d fallen asleep in and stood at my seventeenth-floor apartment window overlooking London, the city just now waking to repeat its yesterday and rehearse its tomorrow. Of course, I would not be doing anything new down there either, and I think that is why people like me would much rather talk about what we do than actually do it, because well-chosen words disguise the triviality of doing something someone else can do just as well or better. I thought living in London would add a unique spin to this American life, but still the modern question keeps me up at night: what act can I perform in this world that is good and human and worthwhile? It is hard to answer by showcasing how many legal briefs I can write before noon. You see, I came here after graduating from a law school just outside Boston, which I had attended in hope of doing something profound. Now, however, I am a talking (or arguing) suit, and thinking back, maybe I should have stayed in school another six years and learned to build rockets or edit genes––
No, no, I am sick of study, sick of reading and sick of writing. Undoubtedly I have become jaded, seeing most things as hollow intellectual games, and in this state I wonder what I could actually find appealing. I could have all the money on earth and give it away to a stranger; I could walk the moon and become weary of the moondust. But if I lived in old Rome, Athens, or Jerusalem, if every day my life was in danger, we would see how interesting things would become.
Ignore all this. I am always grumpy before my first cup of coffee. I make it Irish, of course, just like my Irish grandfather, who used to say it was the secret to a long life, and he made it past seventy. I am by no means an alcoholic. I do not drink past sundown––I believe Hemingway did something similar.
I walked into the kitchen and splashed a dash of bourbon into a mug before moving to make coffee, but remembered I had no pods left for my espresso machine. What now? I opened my refrigerator for orange juice to make a whiskey sour, but found none. I briefly considered whether a vodka Red Bull might not do me better this morning anyway, but I didn’t want to waste the whiskey I’d poured. Whiskey on the rocks is never a bad option. I dropped a heavy ice block into the cup and topped it off with some vermouth and more bourbon so I could sip a proper beverage in the shower.
After gulping it down, I turned the shower dial to freezing cold and brushed my teeth under the frigid water. I dressed in the suit I woke up in, ate a protein bar, pocketed a banana, and was out the door to the stairwell across the hall.
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