Free Lying in Bed by J. D. Landis

invisible. He just erases them. He’s an outspoken conservative, but he confuses people because of his adamant opposition to the death penalty. He thinks the death penalty is lenient. He believes there is no worse punishment in creation than to be locked up in a room with nothing but your thoughts. I don’t agree with him. Sometimes I dream of being locked up forever in a room.”
    I can remember going walking with my father, before he’d given up on me. There was no part of the city we didn’t visit together. He’d make me look at bums and prostitutes and drug addicts and what he called sharpies in their big cars and parents who were slapping their offspring and raging black people and jaundiced gamblers in Chinatown and strutting rodomantades on Wall Street. “Epictetus is wrong,” he would say to me. “People are evil. They arevulgar and hideous. And they breed. So generation follows generation poisoned with hatred and self-interest. No one is not guilty. If it were up to me, I’d wipe them all out and start again. Paradise would be an empty world except for you and me.” Then he would buy me a hot dog from a vendor who would inevitably wither under my father’s scrupulous gaze.
    She stepped closer to me. I thought it was because she was feeling sorry for me. I told her I was sorry.
    â€œNo.” She moved her hand toward me but did not touch me. “I like it. I told you: I’m sick of people who are always moving around and think they want to find a place to rest but don’t really because they can’t bear to stop and look at what they really are. They look at the back of a quilt and admire the intricate stitching because they can’t imagine anyone could sit so long to do that. They buy a quilt and ruin it by looking at it with their restless eyes. I detest them.” She stepped back from me, still without touching me. “So what would you do in that room of yours?”
    â€œListen to music.”
    â€œIs that why you’re wearing those headphones around your neck?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhat about your career as a rhetorician? Did you work for one of the top firms?”
    Her little joke was really quite witty, the idea of firms of rhetoricians competing with one another for business throughout a city where the formal beauty of language has been sacrificed to the polyglot elisions of the hearing deaf.
    â€œLanguage failed me,” I explained and wondered if she would recognize the echo from her own notebook.
    â€œSometimes words fail me,” she said, absolutely echoing herself and watching me intently as if to see if Ihad heard the echo and thus could read her writing. She was devious and direct at the same time, which I found enticingly confusing. “Words fail me,” she added, “after I’ve had sex.”
    â€œWords fail me before I’ve had sex,” I responded and knew even before she’d burst out laughing that I’d made perhaps the first spontaneous joke in my life and not at all the sort that I and my fellow students of language, all of us having had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the eighteenth century, used to make in college and that generally involved intentional catachresis, which is of course the misuse of words themselves.
    â€œYou’re a funny man. You talk funny. You think funny. You dress funny. You have a funny haircut and funny glasses and funny shoes. But you do have a beautiful face. Do you know that? You have the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen.”
    â€œMy mother used to tell me that.”
    She put her hand to her mouth and turned around and walked away from me. I had not seen her from behind or noticed what she was wearing. She was dressed in many overlapping layers of colorful clothes: perhaps three shirts whose sleeves were of different lengths, a tiny purple skirt, green tights, droopy gold socks over the bottom of the tights, and short, black