The Future of the Illusion

It was an intimate relation that we had had because hardly anyone else was listening in, except for a new employee who was learning the ropes.

The clerk looked at these beans, and she said, “Those are the ones I always use.” And I said, “You do?”

Then she said, “Why don’t you use the canned?”

That is the finale for that. That is the end of my retelling of it, because that is the end of what I view as the significant event. Everything else about the event withers away for the retelling except for the sight of the clerk’s mouth.

Questions and answers: How did the clerk and I know when enough talking was enough? I don’t know. Did we care that we were deadly serious? I was surprised by it.

The clerk’s upper lip is neatly scalloped. Together, her lips pout. They are the same to me as my childhood best friend’s lips—the friend I had physical relations with, with a blanket over our laps on the sofa in my house.

We were girls side by side touching each other up in there where the form of the flesh is complicated. I do not know if I touched as well as she was touching me. We were about nine or we were ten, or we were eleven, or thirteen. I have no memory of sexual sensation, nor much of anything else.

I see us from the front because I am the person watching us, standing in front. I am the person who was not there at that time, who does not know whose idea it was to try, who does not know if she was the one who was afraid of being caught, if what she was doing was being done wrong.

I am still the odd man out, going backward for my training, for a feeling.

The odd woman, actually.