I prosecuted my father, Daria said, although my mother didn’t want to press charges so I had to provide my statement alone and attend his trial alone, how old were you, Antonio said, thirteen, Daria said, just seeing my father in dreams terrifies me, Antonio said, although I’m used to these apparitions by now and they don’t happen too often, I see my father in my dreams too, Daria said, but I’m most terrified to run into him in this reality so I’ve told my friends that if I ever ask them for a quick exit they should take me seriously — dear Daria, Antonio writes, you’re the most courageous woman I’ve ever met — I remember waking up late at night and seeing my mother in our living room, Karla said, staring out the window in the dark, like an automaton programmed to power off at night because her owner was asleep and no household chores were needed, and so in honor of this memory of her, Karla said, one of my earliest memories of my mother, Arturo, because my mother is the subject of most of my performances, I reenacted the punishment my mother knew from school in Seoul at a busy street corner of Koreatown in Los Angeles, a punishment that consisted of tilting her body forward and keeping her arms raised (and here Antonio searches online for corporal punishment + Korea + school and finds too many variations on her mother’s punishment) — on my father’s birthday my mother asked me and my sister to tell Dad that we wanted to leave Tokyo and return to the United States, Hannah said, and so we told him and Dad left the dinner table and locked himself in the bathroom, why did your mother ask you to say that, Antonio said, because she wanted to return to her lover in California, Hannah said, whom she’d met at a playground while Dad was finishing his graduate program — dear Hannah, Antonio writes, I can see myself in your father, locked in the bathroom to conceal his despair, although I like to believe if you and your sister were my daughters I wouldn’t have let you go — we had a good time but I don’t want to see you anymore, Artemisia from UCLA messages him while Antonio’s on a conference call about the geometric distributed lag marketing model he has built in between SQL queries, you treated me well and don’t take it personally but it’s hurting me, I want to have a healthy relationship not an arrangement, I see the way waitresses look at us and I feel low, I know people are judging our age difference and I can’t handle this shame anymore — Artemisia wanted to become an attorney, Antonio writes later that day, so she was studying philosophy when I met her on Your Sugar Arrangements — send me your class syllabus please — what is the mind? — let’s watch The Shining at the Nuart Theatre and smoke some jays — goodbye, dear Artemisia — in town for summer break can I see you tonight, Jasmine messages him while Antonio’s on a conference call trying to explain to sundry marketing managers the methodology pitfalls of attitudinal segmentation, tonight it is, Antonio replies, although after the Goth Raver incident Antonio should be avoiding these kinds of encounters but instead he just tries to schedule fewer of them, wondering, each time he slips away at 9:15 p.m., whether this will be the night that destroys his life, which of course increases the thrill of these encounters (not only for him but for his arrangements as well since they’re slipping away from their dorms or their parents’ basement (Vera, for instance, had taken him to her mother’s basement through a side door and a dark corridor and when her mother heard them she yelled at them from above and Vera yelled back in the same island language — Vera’s basement had a sleeping bag instead of a bed, Antonio writes, but it did have plenty of rugs, scented candles, immense canvases with hundreds of doodles on them, splotched cans of paint—)), I’ve finalized a plea agreement for your sister, Antonio’s sister’s attorney messages him, so she will be transferred from the hospital to Baltimore City jail this week, Roger Sessions’s Piano Sonata No. 2, Jasmine says later that evening in answer to his question about what she has been playing, play it for me, Antonio says, because they’re at the Frates Cafe, where chamber musicians can drop in to play Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and perhaps because of Jasmine’s outfit, which brings to mind a flight attendant en route to Maui (white jeans, blue blazer, handkerchief around her neck), or because of her long black hair down to her waist that Antonio knows she’ll ask him to pull later — I know you know I don’t need to ask you, Arturo — or because she’s petite and smiles too much on her way to the upright piano, too eager to please, removing her blazer and handing it to Antonio, who bows to her, glad to add intrigue to the performance by pretending to be her servant, or because the Frates Cafe brings to mind the cafe in the movie Shine, where David Helfgott, a pianist whose formulae of reality have been distorted, sneaks in to perform Flight of the Bumblebee — I mean, the point is, David Helfgott says, if you do something wrong you can be punished for the rest of your life — the audience is taken aback by the speed of Jasmine’s fingers and the severity of her sound, as is Antonio, who hasn’t acknowledged just yet that for him this vision of Jasmine plus Roger Sessions equals an onrush greater than those caused by, say, pornographic videos of rural Russian women selling fruit while underneath the counter men lick their legs, and after Jasmine is done rebuking the audience that condescended to her inside this cafe that reminds Antonio of Amsterdam, even though Antonio has never been to Amsterdam, Antonio and Jasmine drink from a pitcher of cheap sangria while occasionally a scrawny Caucasian American violist who has no chance whatsoever with Jasmine interrupts them, trying to impress her with his role as organizer of local concerts, you okay to drive, he says, eyeing Antonio as if suspecting him of trying to take advantage of her excess of sangria, don’t worry he’s driving, Jasmine says, and so Antonio drives her mother’s 1980s BMW to The Other Home, where he, distracted by the intensity of his desire for her, forgets to cover her mouth — she shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek, Denis Johnson says, and it felt wonderful to be alive to hear it — which culminates in his neighbor banging on their shared wall and then on his front door, and perhaps because of his disbelief that his neighbor exists (Antonio has never seen his neighbor), or because Antonio and Jasmine are silent and still now and isn’t that the point (why is the neighbor still banging on the door?), he takes too long to wrap himself in blankets and open the door, it’s one in the morning can you shut the hell up, his neighbor says, okay, Antonio says, too unapologetically (because if his neighbor would have been a man he would be egging on Antonio instead of interrupting him, no? — dale con todo, Bruja —), and the next morning, after opening all the windows to air out the place and showering in silence, his empty apartment seems, as usual, unreal to him — a Japanese pianist was here last night? and she woke you up twice in the middle of the night because she wanted to keep going? — I don’t believe it either — and as usual, once he has purged his body of any evidence of wrongdoing, a purge that reminds him of Bill Viola’s Inverted Birth, which he watched at Disney Hall with Katerina, also known as Uzi Kitten, he crosses the laundry room that connects his building with the building where his daughters live (a laundry room that every week seems more populated by other people’s junk (bicycles with handwritten warning signs, boxes with pictures of electric heaters)), and when his former wife opens the door Antonio immediately knows something’s wrong because she doesn’t greet him — good morning, Tato, she doesn’t say — was there someone at your apartment last night, his former wife says, what are you talking about, Antonio says, the building manager messaged me that there was a noise complaint from your neighbor last night, his former wife says, that’s strange, Antonio says, allowing her question no importance whatsoever, and while in the kitchen Antonio continues to pretend that this is all probably due to some irrelevant misunderstanding, his former wife picks up his keys, crosses the laundry room, enters his apartment, returns, and says don’t ever talk to me again, walking out and driving away, and once he’s sure she has gone he crosses the laundry room, enters his apartment and finds, by his bed, the dog collar he’d fastened on Jasmine’s neck (how is it that he remembered to hide the metal leash that hooks to the collar and dispose of the vinyl tape he tied around Jasmine’s wrists but forgot to hide the collar? — you and your stupid Bill Viola showers, Arturo —), and that day and the next everything at the apartment where his daughters live is as before except Ida pretends he doesn’t exist, although every now and then she asks him a harmless logistical question so as to not alert the children about their rift, and as the days go by Antonio hopes she will resort to her own erasure mechanisms, and because she has given no indication that she’s planning to resort to them he tallies what he could offer her to slowly overturn her pretending he doesn’t exist, for instance moving to Czechia, or giving up The Other Home, as Ida has suggested several times through the years, although the latter offering terrifies him because The Other Home has allowed him to skirt the disastrous father / husband reimaging that had been activated when he married Ida nine years ago (if current role = husband and father, then Antonio = Antonio’s father), in other words by calling Ida his former wife he isn’t a husband, and by having another home he isn’t a father (if current role <> father / husband, then Antonio = Nicola).