WE ARE having the despair conversation, one of several despair conversations—extinction, guns, politics, academia—we could have embarked on, and any of those would have been good, we'd have spoken with real fire, in complete, savage agreement, furthering our covert project of salvaging whatever we can from our old shipwreck in an hour, an hour is worrisomely little time to rectify five years' estrangement, meaning each minute as it slips by feels fraught, and instead of choosing any of the topics that might have elicited gladly impersonal vehemence we've gotten into the despair that touches us most closely, despair over what is going on in writing, and one of us says I'm so sick of the new pieties, “This isn't your story to tell,” and the enforcement arm swings into action, and the genuineness of this despair mutes the tone of our voices, it's possible we are just making each other sad or even beginning to wonder if this was a mistake, trying to revive a connection that was always a little too complicated for comfort, exceptionally close without ever achieving rockbottom trust, host, therefore, to certain intensely untalked-about shadows, and if that's what's happening and despite ourselves we're finding out we have nothing left to say to each other, then at least I won't go on wondering, one of us thinks, and the other says:
—What about that thing you always used to say at the beginning of every workshop, the axe for the frozen sea within us, how writing was supposed to afflict us like a suicide, like being banished into a forest far from everyone? How if the book we're reading doesn't wake us up like a blow to the head, what are we reading for?—and now the thing is to skate across everybody's frozen lakes without leaving a scratch. God forbid you leave a scratch!
—Like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, says the older one, remembering the workshop where she first saw the younger.
—A book's supposed to do that. Supposed to wreck you. You're supposed to be willing to be wrecked. To feel everything. You're not supposed to be fucking swaddled.
We are mirroring each other, leaning forward at the same angle, hanging our heads slightly, identical small tucks at the corners of our mouths, not smiles but the premonitions of smiles, and one of us holds the stem of her wineglass between her fore- and middle fingers while the hands of the other rest on the bar on either side of her wineglass, and the distance between her wineglass and her
