ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, I MADE ARAGOSTA AL SALMORIGLIO, broccoli with anchovy and garlic sauce, and thick-cut French fries. And, fool that I was, I blew almost another grand on another bottle of that Clos du Mesnil 1995. Money down the drain, almost literally. But fuck it. The year past had been the most diabolically fucked-up year in my life. I would toast its end with the champagne I chose.

The broiled lobster came out beautifully. I had watched it closely and pulled out the pan the very moment that the olive oil in the salmoriglio sauce set it aflame, placed the hunks of sizzling hot lobster, still moist and tender on the inside, into a bowl, and poured over them more salmoriglio, which I had reserved and only very, very slightly chilled.

It was un pasto ambrosiaco, a meal fit for the gods—of which I was one, was I not?

I should have got myself a cake or a pie or something, too, I thought with some regret. I had been good, all too good, these last few months as far as my diabetes was concerned. But one could not live in deprivation. That was not living. Fuck my diabetes. It had fucked me.

A banana cake from Billy’s. An apple pie, or a pecan pie, from that little joint on Chambers Street. A half-dozen cannoli from—oh, fuck, I didn’t even know who made good cannoli anymore. And ice cream. And fresh whipped cream. But what had I got? Fruit. A fucking pear. Some blue goat cheese, a stick of finocchiona. Not even a few sweet figs or dates. Oh, well, maybe it was better in the end to ring out the old year and ring in the new salubriously.

New year? Who the fuck knew what year it was, anyway? According to the old Roman calendar, we were now in the year two thousand and fifty-something. The sixth-century abbot who, through his interpretation of a fairy tale, decided to split everything into B.C. and A.D., reckoned the year preceding what he, and we after him, call A.D. 1 to have been the first year of his snappy new Christian calendar, rendering the year called A.D. 1 to have been not the first but the second year, thus throwing us all off by a year ever since. To further confound matters, the hypothetical Jesus could not have been born in the year the abbot set forth. Historical research into New Testament “evidence” reveals that he would have to have been born a few years earlier. So A.D. 1, or the abbot’s zero year, would really have been more in the range of 4 to 7 B.C. We were off on all counts.

And then you had the Chinks, who were in the year four thousand seven hundred–something, and the Jews, who were a little further on in years than the Chinese. According to some of our Muslim brothers, we were now only in the year fourteen thirty–something; and one of a confusing variety of Indian calendars has us well past our four millionth year.

As for the custom of the first of January marking the start of the new year, this was not widely accepted even throughout Europe until the seventeenth century, with Italy and England holding out until the middle of the eighteenth century.

So what the fuck was it, and why was I celebrating it? Without banana cake and ice cream, no less? This whole fucking world was crazy. Its brains were running out of its nose.

Lingering with my second champagne, I drew from a desk drawer the slim bundle of papers on which I had written during the four seasons past. I sat with the last of that second champagne, my cuttings of pear, cheese, and finocchiona, and I began to peruse those writings.

There were not many sheets and scraps, and of what was written on them, not much made sense.

Several of the scraps presented words that found their place in my memory as well: notes about the taste of blood, with adjectives and similes and such crossed out, one after another, deemed insufficient, inadequate; a shopping list with “dated after 4/10” underlined in parentheses after the item “goat milk”; a poem of sorts that remained untitled:

It is the gods, the nine of them,

whose names we have forgotten

that we must love and fear,

for they are within us, seeking light

in the darkness where we do not look,

where the dead parts of us lie.

One piece of paper contained no writing at all, just the impression of a cute lipsticked kiss. After a moment, seeing the color to be not red but a reddish dark brown, I realized that it was not lipstick but dried blood.

Hadn’t I started work on a new book this past year? Or had I just thought that I was beginning work on a new book? Was there any way in hell that I possibly could have considered what was on any of these papers to be even the germ, the seed, let alone the worded opening breath of a book, however inchoate?

Yes, not one of the most diabolically fucked-up years in my life, but the most diabolically fucked-up year in my life.

Something that struck me was the disregard for grammar and syntax in much of what was here. Even in my most hurried notes, I usually gave more care to these things than to the legibility of what was being scrawled for my own eventual decipherment. And there were pages here where my illegibility was so daunting that, after some effort, I merely turned them aside with a shake of the head.

Then there was a page on which I had very neatly printed with an unwavering hand these words alone:

YOU WILL DIE VERY SOON