You’re young, you have your life ahead of you; and that’s true, I did—not to mention the life to come, in which, well, my life would somehow be both ahead of me and perfectly in step with every decision I make. You’re great to think that – so what was she saying? Was she affirming my be-lief in the life to come—or, perhaps, to keep her happy, I should say a life to come? That way she might not feel like I’m saying she must necessarily also have a life to come—i don’t know why she would want that, but, if that was all she could believe in, then, i guess she didn’t have a choice. I think that’s the main point that some of us want to make—that we’re not free agents, that we don’t have a choice, and the life, this life, is nothing more than a dream that doesn’t involve the consciousness of the person that’s asleep.

Who’s door is that? Yes, truly, one door opens, but can’t I stay here, or go back in time? What if I don’t like it on the other side of that door—and who am I to think that they will open it? Ursula is asking me who’s door this is; but it’s my door, so I must be overhearing something, unless she’s trying to tell me that this is her door, and I should pursue our affair. But to think something like that might be over-doing it, given that, a long time ago, people would tell me that I think too much—and, as I understand, that may have been true, but, if it was, I had a good reason: I never should have been playing baseball in the first place, for example. I should have been drawing and painting, as I soon found out—or, when it comes to women, well, I shouldn’t have been with them at all.

     Is this how you treat me? my Scotch uncle asked.  Yes, it is, Ursula said.  So they were talking to each other, now?  Was i some kind of switchboard operator?  (I was expressing consonants using my Scotch uncle’s voice, as opposed to my own—he needed the exercise).  I didn’t know how good an idea

     I’d been sticking with my voice and Ursula’s voice and waiting for the others to chime in, but, I considered, I needed to maintain the connection—or else I’d just forget about them.  That is to say, I wasn’t hearing from them that much.  So I changed my idea—I’d use their voices on various things

     don’t zone out, listen to me, in here  and by in here she meant at the center of my brain, basically.  A quiet place that yielded a quiet voice—which was something that started between your ears as opposed to in your throat.  But here my wine drinking uncle was saying something that I couldn’t

13      There was some indication that Ursula, my Ursula, was behind the Ursula I currently projected—but I can’t be sure.  I just say that because when I thought of Ursula, I saw some lines that represented a different woman, my woman? in yellow—and yellow was the color I had last observed when thinking of

     The more I watched Ursula speak the more i realized that we lived in different orbits—i wasn’t going to find entry into her world.  She had too many people around her: she was bound to be recognized, here, on earth, for all that she was and all that she could be.  She’d realize her

     Well, we were in the car for a while, and I did my best to tune out and or in for the journey.  At one point the note length changed—I was doing a relative half note breathing in and inserting an eighth note to go with the two quarter notes of the “o” sound. 

     i’m not going to eat a whole pizza by myself  no, of course not, something had to be done about that.  An invitation?  Possibly, unless she was talking to her live-in lover, and i was just hearing the echo of it pass through her mind.  But I think she recognized a certain pitch, when

12      It had been a few days, now, that I’d been away from our usual appointment; my scotch uncle and i had been working on the Riemann hypothesis, and, get this, we were making music together, too.  Or was it some other uncle making music—perhaps the lung-cancer uncle—the wine drinker?  I didn’t know, for