Ah, what selfish cheaters, these miracle-workers, tearing apart the laws of space and time to get ahead. It’s a wonder they haven’t made the universe collapse. A beach could be a mountain, after all, if every grain of sand didn’t want to be the peak. On the other hand, the value of these miracles shouldn’t be presumed too quickly, since it’s not clear whether Kennedy or Kennedy’s assassination was the greater leader in the ’60’s. Of course preventing the world from being destroyed in the Cuban Missile Crisis probably could not have been managed minute-to-minute by the dead, but on the other hand the death of Kennedy, in the hands of a superior manipulator like Johnson, became an unanswerable argument for the Civil Rights Act. How strange it is that a person’s wishes, generally ignored when they’re alive, become a gainsay-less mandate upon their death, at the very moment they cease to know or care what happens.

Maybe it has a point, since I’m starting to doubt my mind in general. A few years ago I started remembering my dreams much more vividly than before, if not always the complex prowlings of my mind within them at least the general atmosphere. I often find them disturbing, not generally for what transpires as much as, for example, the fact that the dominant impression is almost always of the light, an eerie subterranean glow that has never mixed with light of day, the light I imagine illuminating No Exit. But what right have I to feel more at home awake than in my dreams, when dreams are the mind’s own fire, while it is the waking world which is the outside Other? But so it is, and I feel that dreams mark the progress and continual failure of the mind to replicate the beauty of the outside world. I’m like an insecure immigrant, continually convinced of and embarrassed by the superiority of my surroundings to the homeland in my mind.

On the other hand, a person will labor months or years to bring forth a book, a set of dead words on paper, but to conceive a living person, and violate the metaphysical law imposed on God himself, that a creator is unable to create something equal or greater than himself, can be done in a moment, without thought or skill, between plugs on the soured nipple of a tequila bottle. So maybe all the manufactured echoes and depictions, as well as the laws, limitations and restrictions surrounding sex are necessary to give it a magnitude and scope in the field of human invention commensurate with its worth, a cathedral built to hold that tiny reliquary, those few sorry minutes at the heart of it all. For instance, I’m pretty sure my Puerto Rican friend in the department here was conceived during one of the brief treaties between rum and the Catholic Church. Not his creation itself but the obstacles in its way, as well as the means of sliding past them, are the true works of art and finesse.

At the same time in any human relationship the two people become parents in which one impregnates the other with the phantom child, the image of themselves that the other bears and carries in their mind. These attenuated offspring multiply vastly and promiscuously in almost any life, and give birth to their own spawn, which at every remove become thinner and shallow, more and more a matter of word and rumor, and finally, and this only for the lucky at that, the final descendants will linger only as print, whose characters slightly resemble blackened twisted bones mummified in the preservative white desert of the page. And at this point they will finally fulfill Kafka’s necessarily premature statement that “I am literature.”

As the history of life shows, the original blobs banded together so they would individually benefit from being part of a larger group, but eventually the organisms became just organs, perfectly capable of being sacrificed if the larger entity deems fit to do so and powerless to stop it. Every year when little Nordic countries come out on top in the various global quality-of-life indices Americans retort that of course since they’re so small they don’t have as many problems, as if this were somehow an argument against their arrangement. Of course prosperity arises from world-wide economic connections, but about the only reason anyone seems to be able to think of for wanting to be in a leviathan of a political entity is to defend oneself from being devoured by an even bigger one, which doesn’t say much for the leviathan in principle. Besides, as the Swiss demonstrated, if you have enough gold buried away where only you can find it even the Nazis will respect your territorial integrity.

Not that I’m saying we should raise the banner of secession this year, since it’s well known how the U.S. government responds to the call for self-determination from breakaway regions within its borders, but Americans could at least stop ovulating for microphone pleasurers like John McCain who make it a point of pride to have done their best to turn the already-bad-enough two major political parties into one. He constantly brags about “reaching across the aisle” to the other party. Hey McCain, why don’t you keep your lecherous hands to yourself? Actually, he doesn’t “reach across the aisle,” he is the aisle, and all this reaching is an essential part of the Senate’s functioning in about the same way that the carpet on the Capitol floor is. I really don’t understand why such posturing is so popular, since the bipartisan are like the bisexual in that virtually everyone else is turned off by at least half the people they consort with. In any case, please don’t encourage him or others like him; he’s already basically the living incarnation of the AARP’s new advertising mascot, the purple donkephant, and I fear that all the inter-special intercourse that gave birth to it and its ilk is going to cause some sort of epidemic to cross the species barrier.

The atmosphere was already dangerously askew. Would I even see my friend at all for the next two days, or would he just peace off to his basement Hades with his willing Persephone, abandoning me to two days of the barren winter of really awkward conversations with strangers? Fortunately it didn’t turn out that way, since the two sisters turned out to be as smart and vivacious in a sort of acidic way as the girlfriend, and in fact in general their voices and mannerisms were so similar to each other and hers that, as with siblings is sometimes the case, talking to them basically felt like an extension of my relationship to her minus any shared experiences or knowledge.

A couple of hours later we went off to a rodeo, where the announcer claimed that the guy with the sparkly American flag shirt beating a horse with a whip until it bowed down to him, then got up on a little pedestal and chased its own tail around in a circle symbolized the perfect working of American democracy, which I suppose after all it did. Six years of continuous living in the eastern U.S., Paris and China almost convinced me that I’m a real Westerner, and maybe I am, since that whole spectacle had the alienating effect of two magnets with the same charge coming together.

The next day the weekend got completely T-boned by one of the sister’s boyfriends, who the others definitely didn’t approve of, showing up on short notice. He was supposed to arrive at mid-day but was late, so we left her to wait for him and set off to go swimming as the sky was thickening into rain clouds. Within an hour of arriving at the pool rain was pouring down, but we stayed, since the girls weren’t going to let such untoward events make them abandon the outing. So naturally when we got home they tried to make conversation with “the dude,” as they called him, but now, with two couples, one of which only semi-welcome, out of six people, the gravitational fields had become definitely unbalanced, with random areas of the house becoming off-limits at a moment’s notice, like the highways being repaired in the summer, and no one satisfied with each other’s respect for etiquette in this regard. It left me alone a lot with the similarly unpaired youngest sister, whose birthday celebration the whole thing was supposed to be after all. I wondered whether I should be making a move on her or something, for the sake of symmetry as much as anything else. The whole mood was threatening to go all Chekhov at any moment, tipping from anticipation into regret before the weekend was even over, confrontations slipping away or left hanging in the air just because they were too tiring.

But the next day came at last, with a long early-morning horse-back ride north of town. The countryside was extraordinary: a wide valley under a rich blue sky, surrounded by a mixture of rounded and jagged mountains covered with the delectable white parchment bark of aspen trees which, all being connected underground into one super-organism, had a beautiful but disturbingly homogeneous appearance and, unlike most of the evergreen trees around, hadn’t been killed off by the current plague of pine beetles. So the forest appears to be going the same way as the rest of America at the moment, since under assault the ones that herd together in a clump are surviving. I sometimes think people are like aspen trees: an invisible subterranean mass of connections that only poke above-ground into the definite forms in which we see and hear them at the moments we run into them, and thrust up in other, similar forms at different moments. Maybe the price of being a perpetual traveler is never to be around long enough to get a reckoning of the totality, like I’m just channel-surfing other people’s lives.

The caveman brain of humans still tends to think of a fight as the sort of tiff or scrum where you have a chance of protecting yourself. It’s hard to accept emotionally the frightening asymmetry of the modern age, where any battle involving firearms means, as far as the human body is concerned, all offense and no defense. Still, maybe our helplessness to protect ourselves from our own inventions has paradoxically made the world a safer place in the end, has given pause to all those wishing to do each other in but fearful of suffering the same in retaliation, just like in a more extreme sense world peace has flourished in the shade of the mushroom cloud. In any case, that’s not the source of the satisfaction you experience when blasting away with a .22 on the side of a mountain. But even though like Zeus we were standing aloft raining down hot-blooded justice on random rocks and trees, he showed us the inferiority of our arsenal to his by promptly raining us out. If only every army commencing hostilities in some fetid drainage ditch like Belgium could be so easily dissuaded.

On the other hand, Moscow does possess a real greatness, and with its hills and forests and monasteries, in some ways has more character than St. Petersburg’s dictatorially imposed obeisance to the flat, straight-lined, symmetrical ideals of conflict-free harmoniousness, like the Ritalin-enforced peace of an elementary school. It is also more alive: more money, more people and, despite the stereotype of “Russian” Moscow in contrast to “Western” St. Petersburg, Moscow is now a much more international center than St. Petersburg, which is basically just a fancy-looking provincial city.

But this liveliness seems more than a little unhealthy. The money and prices in Moscow are more than inflated. We stayed at the Marriott, which granted is probably not exactly typical, where rooms are $1000 a night, a omelette and coffee for breakfast goes for $65, and wireless access is $15 an hour. That would be one thing in New York or London, but in Russia that $1000 is equal to a sixth of average yearly income. I can’t help thinking that the bubble that is modern Moscow is a bit like taking a Viagra and getting an erection lasting for more than six hours: you might be amazed that such intensity of pleasure could last for so long, but in the end you’re still going to have seek medical attention or risk permanent damage.

p.s. The Moscow Marriott, like any good American hotel, claims saving water as the reason for which they only change your sheets if you request it, which is kind of funny, not just for trying to play the environmental awareness card in Russia, but because the water pressure in the shower, glorious as it was, makes me doubt somewhat the depth of their devotion to the cause of water conservation. Bathing with that thing is like aiming a hurricane at yourself. I’ll be dreaming about that while cautiously dribbling cold water over myself when showering for the next two weeks due to the fact that they turn off the hot water in apartments in St. Petersburg in the summer, allegedly to make repairs.