Bookstall

We live in a community overrun by a liberal arts university. The Pulitzer committee is in town.

There is one of the ravers downtown who has attracted notice. She blares and babbles all the day long down on the main street, and her virtue is, no one can understand her. Abstraction is, after all, the roiling thunder in currents betoking depth. She is thus a postmodern marvel.

She is writing into her journal when she is not raving. Furiously scribbling, as if settling old scores. Apparently the university press has published some of her writings in one volume, and then they marketed it all around as a sop to the uneducated street masses, saying in their meetings, we must overcome our elitism by supporting these lowly dregs sometimes. The journal is supposed to be better than Jacques Derrida. She's a natural genius, they are saying. She will most likely win a Pulitzer. Wonder if she'll bathe in Sweden.

I find the book at a booth in a street fair for thirteen dollars, which I don't have. The husband of Heidi, a bookseller classmate of our boys in real time, is the merchant. Here, just wait, I say; Niki J will be along shortly. She'll have the price. I take the book and now it's up to me to pay, only I cannot until my loving lady returns.

There she is now, down the block, entering the square. I hustle over to solicit funds … only … it ain't her! How embarrassing.

Now I have the book and still haven't paid for it. I take the auto now. I don't know why. The road leads up a very steep incline. I will park up here. That's best. I don't know why that either. I will park in this space in front of a building which has obviously burned very recently.

Okay, I think to myself. I'm parked up the hill from the street fair with a book by a postmodern genius I haven't paid for, in front of a burned-out building, after mistaking my wife for a stranger, and none of these various parts hang together. Nothing relates to anything else. I don't even know why I bought, or made as if to buy, the book.