In the beginning, I was dust. Separate and soon joined, part sperm and part egg. I was joined together by God. I believe in one God, the Father the almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth. Of all things visible and invisible. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and The Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be, world without end, Amen.
MM) A Club for Gentlemen strikes me as a deep pandemic novel, that is, it feels to have been written largely in the bleak, interminable isolation of lockdowns, like a glimmer of a ray of hope from the deep recesses of your imagination. It is capricious, digressive, and possibly your longest book? Tell the readers how it came about and what it’s about. In your words.
The boy brought my watch back to the blankets we heaped. It can’t get wet, he said. The rocks hurt the boy’s feet. The water licked my toes. We needed to be in or out so we ran. People cheered. I wanted to cheer but all I could do was suck, gasp, fight. I heaved and sunk deeper into the water. I breathed through everything that was cold. We needed to be in or out so we went in.
Scrawled above this scratch-paper diary is a checklist of organs. I’ve returned from the restful defeat of rural Massachusetts to recover them. Stomach. Heart. Lungs. Twenty-four hours to chase the parts of me abandoned six months prior by a different me. Someone I wouldn’t recognize on the other side of a crosswalk brawl.
My train rattles through winter-bleached Brooklyn. I watch people pitch tents on bombed-out graffiti rooftops.