To be Nicola, Antonio thinks, to ride his Shadow VLX, far, to the Nuart Theatre, toward the traffic of 405, to be Nicola instead of Antonio just as Nicola’s brother, Matteo, had wanted to be Nicola, to tell his former wife, when she was eight and a half months pregnant with Ada, and his mother, who was visiting for Christmas, that he had to leave them for six hours to watch The Best of Youth at the Nuart Theatre, three hours of Nicola Carati and his family on Saturday afternoon, three more hours on Sunday evening — if you’re feeling strong enough, Nicola says to his daughter, drive to your mother — to ride to the Nuart Theatre on a motorcycle that rattles him if he crosses the sixty-miles-per-hour mark, to answer dismissively when his former wife and his mother ask him why he needs to watch such a long movie now, can’t you wait, his mother said, any minute now your daughter will be born, to not know why he felt the urge to see Best of Youth, no, Antonio thinks, even then he must have known he was riding to the Nuart Theatre to see Best of Youth because Dr. Adler had told him to (because Dr. Adler knew he wanted to become a writer, knew his misgivings about being a father, his dread about being a husband, even knew his dreams because she encouraged him to write them down and share them with her — I knew a woman who knew my dreams, Antonio writes — and when small birds sighed, Theodore Roethke says, she would sigh back at them — did you agree to become a father to please Dr. Adler? — does it matter now? — dear Dr. Adler, Antonio writes, thank you for the new family you’ve given me — an Italian movie like a Tolstoy novel, Dr. Adler said —), to know why he felt the urge to see Best of Youth but to not know how to explain this urge to his former wife or his mother, but perhaps Dr. Adler, who used to believe and perhaps still believes that only the interaction between doctor and patient changes the patient, in other words only in the warmth of Dr. Adler’s office could Antonio rehearse how to be other than what he was, told him to watch Best of Youth not for literary reasons but because she wanted him to learn how to be Nicola, as he has indeed tried to do, watching Best of Youth so many times over the years that he has come to believe he can speak Italian like Nicola — voltate! — to learn how to be a father from a movie might sound ridiculous, Antonio writes, but how else do men learn to be fathers different from their own monstrous fathers?—holotropic breathwork? — tried it once already—constellation therapy? —twice —okay you’re excused, be Nicola—to be Nicola, who plays limbo with his young daughter late into the night, who playacts at being Charlie Chaplin to amuse his young daughter, who, after his wife leaves him to join the Red Brigades, rearranges his life so he can spend most of his time with his young daughter and never remarries just as Antonio’s mother never remarried while Antonio and his sister lived with her — your daughter has softened you, Nicola’s sister says — yes, Antonio writes, that’s what daughters do — and one day Nicola’s daughter, who despite being abandoned by her mother has become a lighthearted adult — children are more resilient than we think, Nicola says — receives a letter from her mother, who’s finally out of jail, and Nicola’s daughter asks Nicola what she should do, and Nicola says if you’re feeling strong enough, drive to your mother, and so she does, waiting for her mother with a bouquet of flowers outside the library where her parents met — Mama — embracing her mother — you tried to overthrow the government and now you have to ask permission to play music for me, Nicola’s daughter says to her mother inside a church in Florence — to be Nicola’s daughter listening to her mother performing Bach on the church organ for her for the first time — Bach’s Invention No. 2 in C-Minor, Antonio writes, which I have played for my daughters, too — contemplating the vast universe of those years without her mother — everyone in your dreams is you, Dr. Adler said — Mama — but no, unlike Nicola’s daughter, Antonio hadn’t been feeling strong enough to board a plane to Baltimore to help his mother handle his sister, who couldn’t discern what was / wasn’t imaginary anymore, or yes, perhaps he thought he could pretend he was as strong as Nicola’s daughter because he had a steady database analyst job at Prudential Investments, two daughters and a former wife who tolerated his erratic attempts to remain with them, so about twelve months ago, a few days after Antonio’s mother called him and told him his sister had accused her plus Obama of conspiring against her and had thrown her out of the house she owned in Baltimore (for years Antonio didn’t care about houses or cars or whatever else people purchase to pass the time before they die — the pitiful concerns of philistines, I probably thought back then, Antonio writes — and so for years Antonio ignored his sister whenever she asked him to please bring his daughters to her new house in Baltimore, a house his mother often talked about not because it was a luxurious home that stood as a symbol of his sister’s success in life, but because she knew that house was a comfort to his sister, who had rejected almost everyone in the family as retribution for what she perceived as their rejection of her — a house was a comfort to her, Antonio’s mother said, a place of her own — but unfortunately one evening one of his sister’s neighbors had parked her car in front of her house, waiting to pick up her kids at the bus stop, and his sister, thinking her neighbor was conspiring against her, had allegedly threatened to shoot her neighbor and the other families at the bus stop if they didn’t get off her property, for which she was arrested and charged with multiple counts of assault and cruelty to children — Ms. Marta Terranova stated that Estela Jiménez came to her car and started beating on the window with a knife, the police report says, to the point that one of her children begged Terranova to drive away because she didn’t want to die — and so Antonio’s mother was concerned that his sister, alone and unsupervised, would aggravate her unfortunate legal situation as she awaited her trial proceedings), Antonio surprised himself by boarding a plane to Baltimore, renting a compact economy car, and driving from the airport to his sister’s house, unannounced, of course, armed with the disastrous resolve of the reasonable, no, Antonio thinks, he doesn’t want to think about his sister ranting at him about radial frequencies from satellites with lasers, or about his sister throwing him out of her house, or about him and his mother in a government agency filling out forms to commit his sister to a mental institute, so much of that trip to Baltimore he has already forgotten anyway and if he were to think about it too much his mind would be less likely to erase it — I don’t intend to write about my sister here, Antonio writes, among my so-called sugar arrangements — nor do I want to give you the impression my so-called sugar arrangements are a diversion from thinking about my sister’s misfortunes, Antonio writes, because of course my so-called sugar arrangements are a diversion, but so are all other activities that allow me to pass the time without thinking of the misfortunes that have happened and are still happening to my sister — and although of course Antonio’s ashamed of his avoidance, no one needs to know, he won’t tell anyone, and thankfully he no longer believes in a god that can strike him for avoiding his sister’s misfortunes, so yes, Antonio will rather think about Jasmine from Your Sugar Arrangements, or he’ll rather rereread A Lexicon of Terror & Other Stories by his last former girlfriend, the science fiction writer he still likes to call Silvina (S7), or transcribe the conversation he recently had with Dora (S3), another former girlfriend, whom Antonio hadn’t seen in almost five years, since around the time his second daughter was born (Dora had demanded that he stop sending her sporadic messages, however seemingly innocuous they might be, resorting to the hackneyed language of breakups to do so — it is disrespectful of you to continue doing so not only to me but to my boyfriend, Dora wrote, and since we’re living together he is well aware of any and all efforts you’ve made — so he hadn’t had any contact with her through any medium in those five years, until recently, when he discovered through casual Facebook research that her new relationship had ended since she’d posted a public picture of Bailey, her dog, along with a comment about how her new former boyfriend had stolen her dog and could someone please talk some sense into him — I was not surprised their relationship had ended, Antonio writes, I knew their day would come because it comes to all of us — and so after exchanging seemingly innocuous Facebook messages during the spring, Dora agreed to meet him on a Sunday afternoon outside of Menotti’s Coffee Stop in Venice Beach toward the beginning of summer #8), or he’ll rather think about his upcoming arrangements this week and the next, or about anything other than his sister’s unreason, or her misfortunes due to her unreason, or the accretion of misfortunes that culminated in her unreason, or her whereabouts since she ran away from her trial proceedings in Baltimore a few weeks ago.