I RAISED MY GLASS IN SALUTE TO MYSELF, TO THE VINDICATION of my hatred and my freedom. But there should be a different glass in my hand, with something different in that glass.

There was no shaving, no showering, no brushing of my hair or of my remaining teeth. I pulled on some clothes, stuck my cheap plastic choppers into my mouth. I had been advised by Olivier to take my doses of baclofen even if I were to drink. But I took no baclofen, and I left my morning diabetes medications, my glyburide and my metformin tablets, in their vials in my medicine cabinet. I had no time for these things. I wanted to get drunk. Now. Right now. I patted my pockets for money, cigarettes, keys. I slammed the door shut behind me.

The first thing I did when stepping forth into the world, which until this morning had bound me, was to spit with loud, thick vehemence on the pavement.

It was not yet half past nine, and the bar on Reade Street was still rather empty, the way I liked it.

When I was a little kid on my way to school at half past eight in the morning, I used to walk by joints like this, look in, and think: who are those guys? Now I was one of them.

I slapped a few twenties down and ordered a pint of Guinness and a double shot of Jameson. I drank the whiskey in two swallows, the Guinness in three, then I ordered more. I drank them and ordered more again. I stalked outdoors to spit again, loud and thick, and to smoke a cigarette. I watched the island-nigger nannies waddle by pushing white yuppie brats in three-grand prams and strollers. I’d rather have them as neighbors than the mothers of the brats they pushed. I flicked my cigarette butt in the direction of a passing twin stroller, then reentered the bar and drank more. I pushed the emptied rocks glass into the bar gutter and drank only Guinness.

A few city workers, a few union slobs wandered in. They watched, or stared at, the news on one of the three television sets behind the bar as they drank. They were like a bunch of old ladies lost in their soap operas. Whenever the satellite reception went on the blink, they grew nervous, unbearably alone with nothing but themselves, their dull empty lives, their dull empty talk, their dull empty laughter so like the sounds of cows at slaughter.

I glanced at the television screen nearest me. In these joints these days, it could not be avoided. In these joints these days, television had the attributes of the Judeo-Christian God: omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient. That glance upon the face of Yahweh-Yeshua brought me something most unexpected, something I had never before seen. It was a commercial for Barnes & Noble, the bookseller whose corporation had come to represent something like a monopoly of bookstores. I liked Len Riggio, the chairman of Barnes & Noble. He was a good guy. But I had watched through the years as Barnes & Noble grew from a single store in New York to an immense chain that operated throughout the country. And as it grew, independent bookstores vanished and its own stores gave over more and more space to cafés, magazines, newspapers, comic books, children’s books, CDs, DVDs, calendars, games, gifts, and greeting cards instead of books. And what books they did sell became increasingly of a timely and crass commercial nature. Buddhism for Dummies, How to Get a Job You’ll Love, and ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies came to be more easily found than books by William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, or living writers of worth.

So here I was looking at a Barnes & Noble commercial. I had never thought I would see the day when a bookseller advertised on television. But how disheartening it was. It was not a commercial for books. It was a commercial for the latest model of the Barnes & Noble electronic-book reader, the Nook. Worse, there seemed to be little to do with reading or books, even e-books, in this commercial for the new Nook e-reader. Rather, its flashy gimmicks were to be set forth as its selling points. Its VividView color touchscreen, its Internet-browsing, e-mail, instant-messaging, flash-chat, flash-video, and game-playing functions; its access to high-definition movies, television shows, and music. As for reading matter, it could be downloaded via iPod, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, or Android smartphone, as well as a PC or Mac.

This was literacy as she now stood, or, more like it, as she now lay in the gutter. The last thing I wanted to do was think. But I am no fucking Ch’an master, and this stupid fucking commercial on this stupid fucking television pushed me to it.

I went back a long way with my friend and editor Michael Pietsch, the executive vice president and publisher of Little, Brown. We began working together in 1983, when he was with Scribner. I can still see and remember the feeling of those old Scribner offices, with their somber, age-rich wainscot paneling and creaking floors and books and books and books. Charles Scribner III could still be seen on occasion ambling about, pausing a moment here or there as if remembering it as the spot where, as a boy, he had seen his father conversing casually with Hemingway and now whimsically expected to hear the voices of the conversation resume. Those offices were in the grand old Scribner Building, on Fifth Avenue, on whose ground floor was the grand old Scribner Bookstore, which would close a few years later, losing out to the Barnes & Noble store across the street.

Through all the years that followed, as Michael ascended and I did whatever the hell anybody wants to say that I did, I have been proud to say that he is my editor. I loved our lunches together, talking about literature and the colors and music of words. But lately even Michael’s talk wandered to the dystopia of electronic books.

The new, top-of-the-line Nook tablet cost $249, with, if one desired, a Saffiano leather cover available for $89. The top-of-the-line Kindle DX cost $379, with an optional Cole Haan hand-stained pebble-grain leather sleeve available for $119.99. The Kindle Prime membership fee was $79 a year. It was easy to see where Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other e-book merchants were making their money, but what about the publishers? And fuck the publishers, what about the writers?

I thought of some of the books in my library. The five vellum-bound volumes of the eighteenth-century Zatta edition of Dante with its magnificent copperplate engravings. The first printed edition, from 1576, of Dante’s Vita Nuova. The 1948 first printing of The Cantos, inscribed by Ezra Pound to himself while in the bughouse at Saint Elizabeths. The first edition of Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo. The signed and numbered limited edition of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms. The twenty volumes of the hand-bound-in-leather second edition of The Oxford English Dictionary, their blue goatskin covers gilt-stamped, their pages gilt-edged. And so many more: so beautiful to have, to behold, to feel, to read.

These were books, the writer’s words dignified and framed in ink and paper, leather and boards, not pieces of cheap plastic shit. I had been lucky to make it all these years to the end of publishing, the end of books, the end of literacy. I look forward to the day when I can put the piece of cheap plastic shit, the computer on which I now write these words with my right index finger, into a big black garbage bag, haul it down to the street, and smash it to the gutter with all my might.

I drank more. But wasn’t I writing another book? That thing with the fucking leopard in the tree? The miller and the whatever? Yet another exorcism performed by the possessed upon himself, yet another telling to myself that after this the demons would be gone from me, yet another discovery that once they had been brought forth from me, I would find only deeper, darker demons that had lain beneath them? Yes, I seemed to sense, there were pages awaiting me at home. Pages with things on them that no black iron pipe could kill. But the demons and I would sit together now and drink.

Another double Jameson now to go with the Guinness. I gazed through the window. There was a lot of good-looking leg passing by out there. What a drag it was that rape involved so much exertion. Just to get some broad to be still while you jerked off on her calf or had her suck your cock without being properly introduced.

“So where you been hiding?” the bartender said. He must have figured that I had drunk enough to no longer want to be left alone. He was wrong.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I was here just the other day.”

“You haven’t been here in months.”

The old guy was losing it. This was too much. First that commercial, now him. I looked at him and he looked at me. I pushed my empty glasses toward him. He poured more whiskey into the rocks glass, fetched a fresh pint glass, and drew another Guinness.

“I swear, Nick, I haven’t seen you since the spring.”

“You better lay off that Johnnie Walker before he tips his hat to you and walks off the label. This is the spring.”

“Well, then, if you’re right, the calendar’s wrong.”

I shook my head, looked away from him, nonplussed. I drank down some of the whiskey, drank down some of the stout.

The bartender leaned against the cash register, as if trying to determine if I was pulling his leg. Then he let out one of those high sheela-na-gig tee-hee-hee’s of his.

“Hey, Charlie,” he called out to one of the union flotskies. “What month is it?”

“What month is it?” Charlie called back. “Last time I looked, it was September.”

The bartender looked to me, nodded in self-satisfied verification, then let out another little tee-hee-hee.

One of the drunken civil servants had a folded newspaper at his elbow. I put on my eyeglasses, went to it, squinted down at the date.

By now I had drunk too much to be rattled, but I was rattled. I could not remember the summer, not a single bead of sweat of it. Nothing.

When had I hit Melissa in the ass with that pipe? Hours ago, this morning? Or could it have been months ago?

I could not have gone unknowing through the summer. I could not have forgotten it. I mean, it was still the summer, there were a few more days of it left, and I was aware of this day, this moment. So what had happened? I was aware of this morning, of the hatred that had taken me. But, again, had that really been this morning? The lights still worked. That meant that I had paid my bills, that I had been conscious and functional. Then I realized that it didn’t: I approximated and paid all my monthly bills for each coming year in advance every January. I felt my face. There wasn’t much of a beard. I had shaved at some point recently. I saw in the mirror behind the bar that my hair was somewhat shaggy. I felt weak. I looked bad. But I must have eaten in recent days. Then again, I had once, years ago, gone three months just drinking and not eating. The doctor in the hospital where I ended up told me this was impossible. But I knew it was very possible because it was the truth. Now, however, I had been taking my baclofen and not really drinking much at all. Or had I been?

It was just a matter of relaxing and remembering, I told myself. But I could not relax and I could not remember.

After a few more drinks, I was not relaxed, but I was drunk and did not give a fuck about anything. And I remembered. Nothing that had to do with this season or that. But I remembered: images and things and feelings, barely discernible but recognizable, flowing out of time through my memory, or what I believed to be my memory, in the slow river of dark night that was my mind, or what was left of it.

That thing with the monkeys. Those monkeys, those dead monkeys.

The taste of Sandrine’s blood, the taste of all their blood. Endeared and estranged, asphodels that bloomed in the night.

The taste of that croissant, the caress of that breeze, the heavenly corn silk and persimmon flesh of her pussy.

“Oh. Melissa. I don’t really know her. She seems like a nice kid.”

“Thenceforth evil became my good.”

The woman who spoke another tongue, the leopard who awaited glance in bowering shade.

“For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”

“It was the look in my father’s eyes.”

A doorway on Thompson Street.

“I know this guy. He’s all right.”

All that matters is that the words are brought forth and set down: the words that are from or about she who is of the legends.

I loved her. I wanted to have her for whatever remained to me of forever.

The oak leaf on the sill.

Maybe it was over, I told myself.

It was then, suddenly, that I realized that I hated her.

I had thought it was the drawing of the blood. Then I knew it was the blood itself that was the essence of the transformation. Then I knew there was no transformation.

“I’ve seen things come out of them.”

Blood and spicy V8 juice.

The long dark passage without breath, the dark passage longer than life.

And I will never forget this. Or will I? All the brain-mold and deathless water bugs of memory that we cannot rid ourselves of, all the seemingly meaningless detritus that has bored into our minds and remains there, no matter how much we would extract it. Remembrance is a derelict, wretched, and infested broom closet in which almost all that is worth remembering, almost all that we wish we could recall, is lost and irretrievable amid the haunted litter of what we wish we could forget. The brain is not, as they would have us believe, a miraculously complex machine. It is a junkyard, a dangerous dumping ground of rusted ills; and what we regard as reason and intelligence are nothing but the diseased rats that dart and scramble through it: the crumbled plaster of things past turned to asphyxiating dust, stirred by the dead air of our inward stirrings. The mind is a lugubrious, malfunctioning instrument of self-torment, fear, and ghosts. Brilliance and beauty are but the flames of the mind that demolishes itself, the fire of arson in the junkyard. And memory is a killing thing, chewed upon and consumed by the rats, but rarely scorched by the fire that drives out the rats.

My eyes were shut. There was a sudden phosphorescence.

“If you can comprehend it, it is not God.” Augustine, no? And the human mind, which summoned that God into a lie of being, can never and will never understand itself. And whence this arrogance from brain to mind? The brain was just another organ, prone to if not defined outright by illness and disease. The heart, the liver, the prostate, the brain: one or more of them would get you in the end.

Well, I was still here. At least I believed I was, and that was good enough.

All of the lust and blood, Melissa and Lorna and the rest.

The cravings had ebbed, and this, I remembered, felt good. The dwindling of it all, my sexuality, my desire for physical intimacy of any kind.

Was a lingering of that lust still there?

There were cunts and there were pussies. Anatomically, I mean. Most women had cunts. Ugly jagged-purfled necrotic folds of livid flesh and tissue to which one all but had to close one’s eyes. They had come to repulse me to the point where I would not enter into them, could not enter into them. But some young ladies had pussies. Alluring bivalves of pink, puffy vibrant flesh that were a pleasure to behold and to smoothly, lubriciously, sweetly enter. Behind my closed eyes I saw Melissa anointing with the chrism of her pussy the stiletto heel of her shoe, then slowly sliding it into herself. But now—for how long had it been so?—even pussy repelled me. What waited hidden within seemed to be not beautiful sacrament but something disgusting, unclean, and dangerous. And now I felt the same about a kiss, a caress, a touch. It was all repellent to me.

Even the bloodlust, the desire for new life, seemed to have left me. To recall the taste of blood was to be taken with repulsion. I no longer wanted to merge with those who possessed the youth that I had lost, the youth that, however fleetingly, I believed I had regained.

Awaiting glance. I had been like that for years. The dread of eye contact. The dread of physical contact, of any physical intimacy. Somehow, as the years had passed, these had become anathema to me. But now it was over. What was over? Something. Yes, something was over. Or was something just beginning?

Was I here? Was I really here? I did not even feel the hate of this morning—or whenever.

Why had I so intensely wanted a knife with a leopard-bone handle?

The theory of solipsism had now found a place in quantum physics. As the theory has it, only one mind exists, and all that seems to be reality is only a dream transpiring in that one solitary mind. The identity of the dreamer, of course, could never be known.

Was I the dreamer or the dreamt?

But that shit made no sense. Maybe I was going mad. Or maybe I was mad.

The shadows of early dusk were here. I staggered home. I felt the shadows to be those of another life than mine. The few blocks of my staggering seemed endless.

I saw that my kitchen was a cluttered mess of stinking empty bottles. Beer bottles and wine bottles. Vodka bottles. Whiskey bottles. A grain alcohol bottle. Even my glass jug of snake sake, with the dead snake coiled at the bottom, was opened, half empty, part of the snake protruding desiccated above the liquor that was left in the bottle. There was a pizza box, with a few slices of pizza still in it, lying on the floor.

Who had done this? Had Melissa done this in revenge? I could not remember if she had a set of keys or not. But no, who would conceive of doing something like this? I rushed about, banging here and there, looking for further signs of intrusion. I lunged to the drawer in the bedroom dresser where Melissa had kept her hosiery and fancy high heels. They were all still there. I gathered up some shoes and pantyhose and held them close to me. They were better than her—they were her—and they were still here.

I made it to the couch and collapsed. I tried to light a cigarette, but I could not. I wanted water desperately, but I could not get up. I coughed from deep within and thought I saw something like a rat, but vaporous, shoot from my mouth and scurry wildly away.

Lorna screamed from her cross.

I slept—it was a thousand years—then woke in darkness to see if morning had broken. But all was black, and I could not raise myself to go down again to self-annihilation. I felt that I had reached the depths of direst hell.

Then I felt someone sitting beside me.