Free 10 by Ben Lerner Page B

unexpected praise, the women his friends attempted to set him up with had invariably read his book, or had at least glanced, in advance of their meeting, at those preview pages available online at Amazon. This meant that instead of the conventional conversations about work, favorite neighborhoods, and so on, he’d likely be asked what parts of his book were autobiographical. Even if these questions weren’t posed explicitly, he could see, or thought he saw, his interlocutor testing whatever he said and did against the text. And because his narrator was characterized above all by his anxiety regarding the disconnect between his internal experience and his social self-presentation, the more intensely the author worried about distinguishing himself from the narrator, the more he felt he had become him.
    He spent most of the afternoon at the little drafting desk beside the window, answering e-mails from the college, where he was on leave from teaching, and failing to answer interview questions for a small magazine in England, worrying about his teeth. He did laundry—there was a small washer-and-dryer unit in a closet—and he paced the eight hundred square feet of his third-floor apartment distractedly, opening a book at random, reading a page, returning it to the pine shelf without knowing what he’d read. He showered, stood naked in front of the full-length mirror on the inside of the laundry-closet door, and considered his unfortunate body, how it might appear to Hannah, whoever she was, how he might compensate for its many flaws through strategic angling and flexing.
    They were meeting at a bar in Dumbo far from any train. When the sun had set, he decided to take a long walk, eventually make his way there. It was still unseasonably warm but there was now an implication of winter in the air. Lights and voices looked and sounded different within it, sparkled more, carried farther. He turned left onto Atlantic from Fourth Avenue, the adhan issuing from the mosque’s crackling speakers, and slowly walked the mile and a half to the Promenade. He leaned against the iron railing; the intensities of Manhattan loomed across the water.
    Eventually he turned from the river and wandered back through Brooklyn Heights. On a small cobblestone street that dead-ended unexpectedly, some conspiracy of brickwork and chill air and gaslight gave him the momentary sense of having traveled back in time, or of distinct times being overlaid, temporalities interleaved. No: it was as if the little flame in the gas lamp he paused before were burning at once in the present and in various pasts, in 2012 but also in 1912 or 1883, as if it were one flame flickering simultaneously in each of those times, connecting them. He felt that anyone who had ever paused before the lamp as he was pausing was briefly coeval with him, that they were all watching the same turbulent point in their respective present tenses. Then he imagined his narrator standing before it, imagined that the gaslight cut across worlds and not just years, that the author and the narrator, while they couldn’t face each other, could intuit each other’s presence by facing the same light, a kind of correspondence.
    Reggaeton from a passing car returned him to himself. He checked his phone for the time and directions to the bar and walked underneath the roaring bridges into Dumbo, his hands cold with anxiety as the meeting place drew near. He was late enough now that he assumed Hannah would have already joined Josh and Mary. He found the address—no sign, just a single exposed bulb near the door—touched his face to see if it was greasy, would be shiny, but found it dry. Then he located the little packet of breath strips in his coat pocket. When he tried to place one on his tongue, he realized he’d accidentally removed several mentholated strips at once; they congealed into a gummy mass, which he spat onto the sidewalk.
    The bar was twilit in the