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Suki was in his study when she found a book he stole from the UCLA Library sometime in the 90s. The following sections of “The Implied Reader” are stained with the juice of something that doesn’t exist: Sections two hundred thirty-one, two hundred thirty-two, two hundred thirty-three, two. Hey you. Stop right there. I mean it. Seriously. I’ve come down from the violet skies to save the day, I’ve come down from the hills near Burbank, Calif., in which in December twelve persons were killed. I think I can’t be seen and all of a sudden I can be seen. The stupid editor removed my apostrophe just like a gratuitous quote from Anatole France. And I just appeared here, somehow, a week ago. In Burbank, with a fat husband, a son who’s probably going to be fat once his own kid grows up. Pretty much every night he falls asleep while texting me. And then when he wakes up the next morning, he texts me, apologizing a billion times all morning with odd smells stuck to his skin and sick dreams infecting my head. That book he stole from the UCLA Library, not my fat husband, but HIM, is able to lure me back to some alternate numbering schema, where an actual duplicate transaction could be identified, where that fat husband of hers had left off, would secretly read books like Nabokov and composite texts ‘cobbled together’ from texts of different types, as if in his mind there was uncertainty, some indecision or some conflict that caused him to remove his name from the list two days before the trip so he’d have disappeared. We’d have disappeared like a gratuitous quote from Anatole France.
