My brain worked better when I was playing the game full time, straining my body six days a week out there on the sunbaked arena of the field, hurling the ball at demonic speed, scampering after it, steadying myself to catch it while staring into the sun, hitting it with exquisitely timed force.

It was at that point I lost all pride and sent Albertine a despairing telegram, begging her to return on any terms. All I asked was to be able to hold her in my arms for a minute three times weekly, before she

Sister Binche began her duties in a serious manner, taking extra time to unbandage his eyes, which operation felt to him nothing like a turban, but more like

Lord Byron’s doctor and traveling companion, John Polidori, was dead by his own hand at twenty-six, having taken a potion he himself had brewed, based on prussic acid; but then, all through his time in Europe as part of Byron’s entourage, he had been trying out one form of suicide or another. 

Three were we. We were three. Roaming the night. In our stagecoach, Netley, he drove. Sickert charmed them, Sickert the painter, charmed the whores, up to us, from the streets. I lulled them, one by one, to easy death, with poisoned grapes, then opened them, sliced with knives, I William Gull, the Crown physician. 

I too, alone, survived to tell thee. A whale tells this, white as Biscay froth, a tale black as caviar. I almost lost heart. Albinos do, doomed special while feeling like the rest. We’re dark unto ourselves.

Hard to tell, sometimes, as I fix my mind’s eye on the unkempt fleece of his beard amid which his mouth moves like something undercover, if what I remember or even register is what I said or what I thought, or what he said or what I hope he said. Oddest of all is the sense I have that he is one of the most important people I’m going to know. 

His name is Tan Salaam, self-bestowed since he was dis- missed from the Tanzanian civil service for illegally dealing in four elephant tusks.

The penultimate day of term was torrid. The sun, which yesterday had remained smoldering behind low waddings of buttercup-colored cloud, burst through, intercepted only here and there by bouffant, deciduous trees whose green was already changing from spring’s parakeet to early summer’s weathered spinach.

Paul West, whom the New York Times once praised for his “unsettling nonuniformity,” died this week at eighty-five. An absurdist with a formidable, playful, idiosyncratic style—“we become inured and have to be awakened by something intolerably vivid,…