It feels ridiculous to make a salad for only yourself. You wash the lettuce, tear it apart, cut up the tomatoes, add a little dressing, and wonder whether it will feel less ridiculous, hollow, artificial, with the passage of time. Don't add dressing. No one is watching. Try to cover the hum of the fluorescent strip light and the refrigerator with the radio. The radio is worse. It shouts at you, advertisements, drum and bass, little girl or boy groups voicing perfectly timed musical cliches to computerized accompaniments, right-wing shock jocks with switchboards lit up by fear, hate, and ignorance, or New Age flatulence masquerading as enlightenment. Turn it off and that just leaves you the hum and the salad. If you don't add dressing, it will be over that much faster. Then you try leaving out the tomatoes. Before you know it you're just left with a bowl which, sooner or later, you fill with cereal and milk and then- for the hell of it- you start to add a little scotch to the milk.

If now the market determines that your job ought to go the way of the tomatoes and there is no place you have to be at any particular time anymore, you will find yourself drinking alcohol dangerously, without any pretext. Some people drink to celebrate, others to unwind after work, others to lubricate social intercourse. This is not anymore why you drink or why you drink so much more than at any other time in your life. At first, you drink because it's one of the last things that they, the others, the still-functioning, gainfully employed, socially participating others do that you can do. Maybe you drink for the taste. Then you drink as a dare. You dare yourself to have another one when it isn't really appropriate, to see whether anyone will notice. But there isn't ever anyone to notice, and you drink upon the realization of this. Then you drink to see if you can get from 2:17pm to 3:55pm without noticing the time, without feeling it. The idea of slicing a tomato when you've reached this stage is completely out of the question.

No one calls, and after a while you feel pleased with how long it has been since the last time you thought about how long it had been since somebody called. You can't remember when you last remembered. You must really be getting good at living like this. And it's just as well because when the phone rings by this time, even when it's a wrong number, a hang-up, or a telemarketer, you don't want to speak to anyone. You're in no fit state to speak to anyone. It's not even a matter of sobriety. Even sober, you're in no fit state to speak to anyone. You're out of practice. When you do have to speak to someone, say, someone selling you bread, milk, cereal, toilet paper, or scotch, you have trouble. You have to practice the words and the tone of the small talk, and it always sounds stilted. You're either too vague or too focused or too polite. The person serving you looks at you strangely and you know you've done it badly. You can't do it anymore.

The neighbors can do it but not you. They're living your life for you on your behalf. They change their cars, their houses. They don't concern themselves with the problems of the world, its trouble spots, local and foreign. Places in which they don't live are potential vacation destinations which they will discuss with their local travel agent. On election day they vote not as their parents and their parents before them did but as their perception of their socioeconomic status demands. They read their newspapers in the thirty-second bites through which they've been conditioned by TV to see the world. Not that it's ever quiet enough to read for longer amid the amplified noise they continuously pipe though their houses. You hear it, whether you want to or not. You hear them laugh at night with their dinner guests. You hear them in their beds. The groans must be exaggerated.

You ask yourself if it was ever really that good. A little numbed, you turn on a small light in another room, go to a cabinet and to a drawer that you don't visit much anymore, and fumble in the half-light for images. And there she is, lovely as ever. There are more images, deeper and deeper in the drawer. Ah yes, you remember. It was that good. Remember her skin, you weak bastard. Concentrate and you won't hear them. Smooth, olive, soft, a sweet scent on her neck, on the back of her neck and below her ears, and you burying your face in her hair. Remember her body. You never knew where to start. Remember the taste of her, how she would take you. Remember the different rhythms she had for you, the change in the tension of her body. Remember the tightness of her, the many ways she held you, the sweetness of it. Whatever they have next door is a far cry from what you and she once had. If you weren't so drunk, you'd call out. They would know who it was, but to hell with them. No, not really. To hell with you, and when they do finally stop, your head is between two pillows and you are breathing in the alcohol from your own breath. They wake you in the morning. You hear them getting up. There is a point to getting up but for the life of you you can't find it until you see, through the mess you've made of everything, her. The photographs of her are still with you, and you get up to go and look at them again.

The place is a mess. Things are wearing out all around you but she looks at you with those dark eyes, and the memory of how it felt to look into them suggests that maybe only she is real and that everything else, the solitary existence, the unemployment, the whole damn mess, is imagined. She has to be real. There she is in the photographs as true as anything ever was and in some of them you are there with her. You remember when each one was taken, although sometimes you wish you didn't. In one she is sitting on your knee. You have your arms around her. Remember how that felt: her weight on your lap, your arms meeting around her waist. She is smiling. You are not. Something had made her smile, but the smile was not for joy. Perhaps it was for you, because she knew you might need it afterwards. And perhaps you looked sad for the same reason, because you had guessed there would be an afterwards. As she sat on your knee and smiled, not genteely, but with that fierce warmth and intelligence shining in her eyes that you would never again find in any other woman, did you suspect she would leave you so soon? As you carry her now to the bookshelves, as you hold her, blow dust from her, or wipe your eyes, you must have known.