The Woman in the Corner

Last night’s dream stripped me bare. I was at a beach compound that seemed to stretch forever, the waves pacing back and forth like guards. My companions drifted in and out of focus—sometimes they were cops in rumpled uniforms, sometimes professors in tweed, and sometimes both at once. I alternated between the two roles without effort, my badge turning into a fountain pen and back again.

Then the letter arrived. The envelope was the weight of a confession. Apple headquarters. Inside, a memo on paper so white it seemed to hum. In the upper right corner, a photograph of a woman: steel-gray hair, bifocals balanced on the edge of her nose, eyes fixed on me as if she could see through my ribs. Her expression carried the inevitability of gravity.

The memo stated plainly: You are a fraud. Your life will be dismantled.

I looked up from the page and the dismantling had already begun. My invitation to a retirement party—revoked. Chairs scraping, conversations halting, faces turning away. The compound’s air grew thick and briny, as if the ocean were climbing into the rooms to watch.

I woke with the letter still in my hand, though it dissolved before I could read it again. The feeling remained: the certainty that I had been living in two incompatible worlds and the border guards had finally compared notes.

I sat up and reached for a book, any book, to hold onto something real. It was Phil Stutz. I reread his words on “the lower channel,” that slow, dirty current of short-term gratification. I could almost hear it lapping at the shore, waiting for me to wade in again.