Free Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner Page A

between events, when in fact the period was dilated, detached, strangely self-sufficient, but that’s not really right.
    During this period all like periods of my life were called forth to form a continuum, or at least a constellation, and so, far from forming the bland connective tissue between more eventful times, those times themselves became mere ligaments. Not the little lyric miracles and luminous branching injuries, but the other thing, whatever it was, was life, and was falsified by any way of talking or writing or thinking that emphasized sharply localized occurrences in time. But this was true only for the duration of one of these seemingly durationless periods; figure and ground could be reversed, and when one was in the midst of some new intensity, kiss or concussion, one was suddenly composed exclusively of such moments, burning always with this hard, gemlike flame. But such moments were equally impossible to represent precisely because they were ready-made literature, because the ease with which they could be represented entered and cancelled the experience: where life was supposed to be its most immediate, when the present managed to differentiate itself with violence, life was at its most generic, following the rules of Aristotle, and one did not make contact with the real, but performed such contact for an imagined audience.
    This is what I felt, if it wasn’t what I thought, as I smoked and listened to the rain on the roof and turned the pages and smelled the wet stone smell of Madrid through the windows I kept cracked. And when I read the New York Times online, where it was always the deadliest day since the invasion began, I wondered if the incommensurability of language and experience was new, if my experience of my experience issued from a damaged life of pornography and privilege, if there were happy ages when the starry sky was the map of all possible paths, or if this division of experience into what could not be named and what could not be lived just was experience, for all people for all time. Either way, I promised myself, I would never write a novel.
    When it was raining in the afternoon I would sometimes walk through El Retiro, which would be empty save for a few hash dealers, all African, passing the time under the awning of a shuttered kiosk or, if it was only drizzling, standing under one of the steaming trees. There were always hash dealers in El Retiro, most of them around my age, selling eggs of what they called “chocolate,” mainly to tourists, as there was much better hash to be had. I was surprised by how polite the polyglot dealers were, the prices highly negotiable in whatever language, no threat, however vague, of violence, and their sheer numbers startled me: one for every fifty yards of the park in good weather. While they must have known each other, one sensed that each man worked alone. As far as I could tell, the police tolerated the dealers in the park, although I’m sure they could be, and occasionally were, rounded up and deported. The police tolerated hash in general; I could never quite tell if it was legal or illegal to smoke. A policeman or park official of some sort might pass by on a golf cart, see you conversing with one of the dealers, and shoot you a dirty look, but never, in my experience, would he stop; if the look were dirty enough, the dealer might walk away from you, but typically with more annoyance than concern.
    In the rainy period of my research, I would buy an egg or half an egg from whatever dealer I first encountered, the dealer surprised to have a customer in such weather, then walk to the semicircular colonnade built around the statue of Alfonso XII overlooking El Estanque. When I found a relatively dry, sheltered place, I smoked and watched the faint rain fall into the artificial lake. I had never smoked hash before coming to Spain and, unlike the weed I smoked in Providence, which instantly made me an idiot, the hash usually allowed me to