The Observer

It is a thundery spring morning of blackish blowing trees and clouds the color of cast-iron, marbled by yellow cracks. The window beside me is made so opaque by the storm that I can see my face in it -- another person. But this one after a night of little sleep looks like a zombie who has risen from a hole in the ground to push his haunting face through the world. In the lobby of my apartment building are people on their way to work, carrying newspapers and clutching bags. My impression is not that they are hard-working and virtuous people but simply that they are better than me. Yet when I consider that they too have deep secrets I realize how alike we are.

On my own like this I close my eyes and hold my breath, like a man dropping into a well. I no longer ask myself whether I am happy. It hardly seems an important question, though it seems there is all the time in the world to answer it with a clear reply. I inhabit this space, all this hissing air, going from one life to another, believing I am unchanged. I have lived like this for a long time. But today (I have no idea why it had not occurred to me sooner--perhaps it was the sight of my face in the glass) I have an intimation of another self within me, someone lurking, and I thought: Who are you?

I am living many different lives, and I know I am a slightly different person with each person I encounter -- lie to each of them, or choose a different version of the truth for each of them; remembering what to include and what to leave out. We are secret cohorts. They invented me; I invent them. But for each of us there is a more complete person beyond all that fiddle. Wasn't I a new man when I was alone?

I did not want to take the effort to write anything, and so I mumbled to myself: maybe I am living my life like this not because I want to enhance it with the intensity of many selves, but rather because I am afraid to be alone. I am fearful of meeting face to face and having to give a name to that odd solitary man; I am afraid to see him (that is, myself or my many selves) whole.

But this rainy morning I see there is even an additional person that inhabits me. He is the observer, the witness to all this, like the inspector on a train who just enters the coach to examine tickets: not a word, not a murmur, only the nibble and bite of metal punch. This observer was the one who stands aside and makes the notes and writes. His life is lived within himself. He is silent, he seldom gestures, he never argues, he dreams, he is everything, he sees everything, and so he is the one who suffers.

He goes to the library, he takes long walks, he sits in the corner seat on the subway and his reflection never stares back at him -- his eyes are always fixed on other people. He is the one who reads items in newspapers entitled President Bush Defends Iraq Policy and Stock Market Plunges in Face of Inflation Fears on the Red Line. He takes long solitary walks. He makes excuses about not taking his medication and hurries away from demanding people to eat a snack from a fast-food restaurant in the park and feeds the leavings to the pigeons. He picks up discarded letters and reads them, foraged from the trash room in his apartment building for first drafts of messages that people throw away -- all that passion in a few lines; and he stares intently at the way women's clothes fit their bodies. If a woman glances at him he goes away; if ever he catches anyone's eye he looks askance and moves on. He is a letter writer. He kills time watching television. He goes to museums. He sits alone at concerts. He loiters in libraries. In the early darkness of winter he pauses at the lighted windows of houses and looks in. He eats dinner standing up, never goes into good restaurants. If there is a fight on the street, or an argument in the next room, or a crossed line, or someone punishes a child, he is transfixed, and he listens. He is alert, he is alive -- not an actor waiting in the wings for a cue that would bring him on stage. This is his real existence, and there is no time to waste, because his life is passing and it is no more than a bubble the size of a seed pearl rising to break at the surface of the liquid in a tumbler, and then it would be over.

Being alive is being alone, I write, concealing my small notebook behind my hand. Being alone is being alive.