Ubi Sunt

Dear Emily — It seems true, as you always suspected, that my mind is not right. How can I tell you this? Now that you're halfway around the world, now that your life is so deep in difficulties, now that so much is at risk for you and for us. Maybe this is not meant for you after all, Emily, maybe I'm just talking to myself again. Talking to myself: something's the matter with U. It's not just the old narcissism and depression but something new and quite frightening. Harley tells U about a nightmare in which he conceives a body identical to his own, yet not his own — maybe it comes from watching himself too many times on tape. U has never been on the tube but he understands the problem: when he looks in the mirror he too does not see himself but another, or to be accurate one of the others. There seem to be quite a few, shimmering around him and swarming through him. U gets these fits, starting out as ordinary vertigo with the racing pulse and the sudden catch in his brain like the rush of dope or the stroke of some great Idea — but this time it's something alien, altogether outside his ken. He feels distributed, disseminated, broadcast. U seem in this moment to exist in more than one place and time.