“Your wife?” Esmerelda had asked him why he had such a beaming look upon entering the room, and he had related his brief encounter with the calypso in question; she hadn’t expected his being so forthright with his feelings.

“Well, it’s just a turn of phrase,” he said, gesturing and glancing about the room. Freed of the weight of his declaration, he became pressingly aware of his exposed position in its center and made for the comfort of the couch, which he sunk into and continued:

“I don’t know—I want—I’d like that, certainly. If it worked out that way. But that was a crazy thing to say. I just mean that I think she’s great.”

“When did you meet her?”

“In high school.”

“Well, that’s a good place to meet someone. And when did you last see her?”

“Well, I haven’t seen her, not in years, since high school, I think. That’s why it was so serendipitous. To run into her over by the park, I mean I know she likes to walk there a lot and I like to run there a lot, but I’ve never seen her, so it was serendipity, right?”

“Right. And she asked you out? Where to?”

“Oh, nowhere in particular—I think she didn’t want to be too forward, no? But she said we should catch up. And get a drink. People don’t get drinks for no reason at all, right?”

“It’s quite the jump from drinks to marriage.”

“Yea,” he said with a heavy sigh.

“Well, don’t be discouraged. I certainly think you should see her; just call her by her name, you know?”

“No, you absolutely should not! Guard your mind from the vile hieroglyphs of this woman!” Gabriel strode into the conversation with his usual disregard for the pleasures of pleasantries.

“What’s the trouble? There’s no harm in seeing her,” said Esmerelda.

“What’s the trouble? The trouble is that he might succeed! And being his roommate I will have to watch court-side as he trades all that he is for a spell of sycophantic love in the spring-time, and then I will be tasked with dragging him up from the mud when she cruelly casts him to the dogs for getting in the way of her consultantic crescendo! It’s not worth it in the slightest—and I am primarily concerned with your well-being, Cicero, and only secondarily my own. Though truly it would pain me to see it happen.”

“You’ve never met her.”

“Please,” said Gabriel, “I don’t need to have met someone to know what they are like. The way you talk about her is information a-plenty; a meeting would serve only to confound my

Lorrie turned the page and found the next one blank. She flipped back and forward again; still blank. She turned the next few pages: blank, blank, blank. Frustrated, she began flipping through the book and found, to her dismay, that the next hundred pages were all blank. She had just settled into with a cup of fresh cocoa, and her dismay soon simmered towards rage.

How could printing fail so catastrophically? Were there not checks in place for this sort of thing? For centuries the industrial leviathans and digital daemons of the old world had spun themselves hot perfecting the production of reams of books, and even now as the dying-star craft slipped into its final phase she could hold in her hand incontrovertible evidence of its frailty. The same pages which had minutes before been vessels of imagination now seemed laughably physical; stamped, pressed, cut and sewn like skin under surgery, injected with IV ink. Every imperfection rose to the surface in solidarity with the missing pages: the criss-cross cut of the corners, the letters slanting towards the top of the page, the peeling of the binding by the cover. Tomorrow morning, she thought, I’ll take it down to the theater and see if I can get a new copy. For now she would continue, and on reading the first line she nearly forgave the missing pages, for they had given up the ghost just in time for a critical juncture….

“I’m moving to New York.”

Oh calamity, how often you call upon feeble men!

“Where?”

“To New York City.”

“To New York City,” Cicero repeated, dumbfounded.

“That’s right.”

“When?

“Next week.”

“Have you decided yet, whether to be a bauble or a trinket?”

“That’s unhelpful, Gabe.”

“A city of sound and fury, signifying nothing! Oh, spare me! Ezzie, please! What a paradise it was before you spoke the name of that great and abominable city! Sit down with us for a moment, let me speak some sense into you! Is it this because of this good-for-nothing Cicero? It’s only been a few months since he moved in, I can take care of him, don’t worry about it, we’ll find someone else, someone worth living with. Or are you hungry? I’ll cut you up some apricots—they don’t have apricots in New York, Ezzie—they’ve got things they call apricots but they are as cold and shriveled as the clouds and the weather and the women.”

His pleas were frenzied and all-at-once, like a tropical thunderstorm. But Esmerelda had a work to do in New York, and Gabriel’s fire and brimstone could not dissuade her. So the next Sunday Cicero found himself wheeling one of her two large suitcases towards the bus stop for the 5. They rode down to Market and got off at Civic Center.

“Can I ride down there with you?”

“Yes.”

She spoke to him, but his answers caught and came out like he didn’t know her.

“We’ll keep in touch,” she finally said, and gave him a warm hug.

“Sure,” he said, and watched her walk off the train. The doors closed behind her with neighborly indifference.

Through a series of imperceptible turns fate marches us towards vistas which we could scarcely have dreamt months ago, yet from which, on arriving, we can trace our path with a mathematician’s rigor; hindsight is deductive. Riding Bart back to San Francisco, Cicero arrived at one of these vistas. He was tilting his head to watch his monochrome reflection dance in the curvature of the back of the green seat before him. His mind frogged from topic to topic in a vain effort to distract himself from the canyon before him: life in a house inhabited by the devil named Gabriel. At last he closed his eyes and saw it in all its sprawling terror and chuckled.

The first truth: in addition to being a disappointment to his namesakes, (a reality which has already been explored through the harsh words of the singular Gabriel Galilei), he was also a disappointment to his parents. His parents could be accurately described as the sort of couple to meet at Berkeley, have a single son, name him Cicero, and provide him “a childhood in which every day was thought out, yet from which no story emerged”, as one rival couple from the land beyond the Caldecott Tunnel put it upon gleefully learning that Cicero—unlike their sterling daughter—had failed to gain admission to his parent’s alma mater. Hence the disappointment. Had they heard this remark, they would have taken offense to it. They were masters of the art of taking offense at truths.

The second truth: the aforementioned sterling daughter was named Catalina, and Cicero loved her. He had begun loving her in a familiar way: in the curves of everyday conversation, in a high school classroom. And she had fatefully begun loving him back. Three months before their separation she had staked claim to the deepest recesses of his soul by telling him, “I like the sound of your voice.”Unfortunately, unlike most loves, his love for her enjoyed such a lack of friction that for a decade, by way of inertia, it had simply never stopped.

And so it was that by the time he moved into the resolute Victorian, for Cicero the world of love had been reduced to women on the one hand and Catalina on the other. At night when his room was cold he would pull his comforter past his head and tuck it behind his head, and as he waited for his body-heat to warm the air between the comforter and his skin he wold embrace his extra pillow and pretend that it was her and practice little flirtatious conversations with her.

One day, arriving home stressed and from work, he decided to talk a long run through Golden Gate Park. He crossed Stanyan and was waiting at the median between Kezar and JFK when he heard the swell of her voice, like distant waves crashing.

“Cicero?”

He turned and saw her in all of her coastal splendor, blonde over blue: Catalina! An angel in a white blouse—and now her blue eyes swelled up like the tide. The light turned green, he crossed, and her sweet voice sounded again as she waved:

“Cicero? Hi! My god, how have you been!”

“Catalina?” was all he could muster.

“Yes!”

She gave him a hug. It had been four years since he had seen her, briefly, at a Christmas party. They chatted for a minute or two about nothing that he could remember, because he was focused only on the warm summer night feeling of talking to her.

“Well, I don’t want to interrupt your run. But we need to catch up! Maybe we grab drinks sometime soon?”

“Yes, yes!”

“I’ll text you.”

She smiled and continued on her way, and he continued on his, and the world was filled with purpose. At last he understood the words of Pangloss! He ran down to Blue Heron Lake, where, overwhelmed with happiness and incapable of wiping the smile off of his face for long enough to breathe properly, he sat down on a bench and took in the scene. A pair of ducks were bobbing in front of him. Staring at the ripples on the water, he received the revelation that everything was perfectly in its place. All was quaint, so utterly particular to this time and place.

He laughed out loud at his luck, and a great boulder began to rumble down the mountain of his mind. Catalina had seen him and said hello. And she wanted to get drinks! And drinks were a date, surely, what else could they be? And why would she ask him on a date if she did not love him, like he loved her? with her now! And, well, Catalina Augustine—didn’t it sound swell? Who could deny that it rolled gracefully off the tongue? Oh, what a wonderful world!

He stood up and took a deep yoga-breath. Heading home, he felt that he could embrace any passerby on the street. As he came back through the Panhandle he saw that the peeling yellow paint of the grand Victorian was transfigured into an amber honey. And stepping inside, he was quite certain that there was nothing in the wide and wonderful world which could disrupt his pleasant state of mind.

Cicero rushed down from the porch. In the mayhem he managed to grab hold of the flailing leash and pull it taut, feeling the writhing spool of muscle on the other end slowly unravel. Eventually the dog popped free and turned its attention towards him, who, emitting a much less potent scent than the man lying face-down in the sidewalk and intent on not angering the riled up dog, slowly coaxed it back towards democratic solutions.

“Are you okay?” Esmerelda said, rushing towards the scene.

Mrs. Franklin, who had regained her feeble command of her dog’s leash, repeated the same question from ten yards off.

Gabriel rolled over onto his back, clearly more irritated than injured.

“It’s perfectly alright, Mrs Franklin. I shouldn’t expect anything else from you.”

“Thank you dear. I’m terribly sorry. It’s the weather. He gets a cold, and he gets so irritable when he’s got a cold, you know!” She was slowly waddling further away. “I’m so sorry. It’s just—it really is just the cold.” She looked down at the dog, who was still coming down from his bloodlust, and scrunched her nose. “Aren’t you so cold mister Arthur? Don’t you have a cold? Aren’t you such a sick little dog?”

She continued on her way.

Gabriel pushed himself to a sitting position and stood with a groan. He opened his jacket and retrieved a small wooden comb from an inside chest-pocket. Wandering over to the nearest car, he carefully combed his hair back into its vineyard-row pattern and wiped dirt and blood off of his scraped cheeks and took a sharp, deep breath.

“What a paradise it was!”, he finally exclaimed, “before these damn dogs took over our city. I can’t walk a single block without seeing one. In the parks, in the offices, in the restaurants, in the bars—when will they be satisfied? When they have laid claim to the churches too?”

He paused expectantly, but neither Esmerelda nor Cicero graced this outburst with a response, so he shortly continued:

“‘He’s just being friendly!’—I swear, I want to kick them in the mouth! They used to be contained to families in homes large enough for them. Now we’ve got ugly little twenty-five year olds living alone in ugly little studios easing their ugly little lives with ugly little dogs, all because they think they deserve to own anything they can buy.”

“Mrs. Franklin is a lovely neighbor,” said Esmerelda, “and there’s no need for an outburst.”

Gabriel was not to be deterred.

“This has nothing to do with Arthur!” he cried defensively. “In fact I place him among the very best of dogs in this neighborhood. He is well-bred and exudes a consistency that is quite becoming—he follows through on his intentions. I trust that he will always do what he believes is right, and that is as honorable a trait as any, regardless of whether I concur with his morality. I am concerned with the political issue.”

His voice picked up steam and cadence, like a tumbling boulder:

“The dog-owners have reached critical mass and they are forcing their lifestyle upon the lot of us! I don’t blame them for advancing their own self-interest, but I will not sit back and concede my own. Hannah Arendt said that revolutionaries do not just find revolutions lying in the streets and pick them up; they create them, or something like that. Well, I say it’s high time for revolution! We’ll have to fight hard to claw back our streets—politics is a zero sum game! We’ll start with a program of dog-free streets. Once people see how much better their quality of life can be, we’ll start with a proposition to exile all the ugly ones. I think it’s a wonderful strategy. Many people are wrongfully convinced their own dog is not ugly—but nobody enjoys the company of an ugly dog that they recognize as such. All we need is an objective method of scoring their attractiveness and we’ll be underway.”

Another lack of response from his two interlocutors. Another awkward pause before he saw, walking towards him, a young woman with a yappy white terrier.

“Look!” he cried, pointing in her direction. “That’s a four.”

Her face reddened as she removed her headphones.

“Be a little louder, would you?”

“Tell me, honestly, that you’d rate that godforsaken thing higher than a four,” he said, jabbing his finger again in the woman’s direction, “and I’ll do you one better; I’ll shut up.”

Unsure of how to respond, the woman kept walking.

“I am not going to rate passerby—or their dogs,” said Esmerelda.

“Oh, come on. You’ve got a number in your head. You’re not an angel for refusing to say it out loud. Butter yourself up in your own mind, but I’ll call you what you are: a damn Pharisee!”

Esmerelda rolled her eyes.

“I’ll give it a five,” Cicero said, venturing into the fray of a conversation with Gabriel.

“Yes!” he cried. “Now you’re speaking sense!”

“Dogs are like women,” he asserted, gesturing with his hands, spurred on by the strength of this give-and-go. “I can grant an exception for the cute ones, but why anybody puts up with an ugly one beats me. Nobody desires the company of an ugly dog. To be sure, many are deceived as to the status of their own dog—but if they could only be enlightened as to the sheer ugliness of the creatures they strut about this city with, surely they would come to their senses!”

Before this molotov left his lips he knew that it was a step too far, and for the remainder of the conversation the great pendulum of Cicero’s sympathy swung decidedly back towards Esmerelda. With each passing sentence Gabriel dug himself deeper and deeper, until they had built for each other an impregnable rhetorical wall around the sacredness of dogs.

When they finally threatened to go later that same day to the animal shelter to pick up a puppy to bring into the home, Gabriel threw up his hands in capitulation.

Later that evening, Cicero wandered downstairs to the wonderful earthy smell of a slow-cooked stew. Esmerelda was standing in the kitchen with a creased blue apron on. She opened the oven and removed a steaming dutch oven with two towels.

“What are you cooking?”

She lifted the lid to reveal a magnificent jumble of hearty beans, sausage and chicken wading in broth, all of their caramelized reduction scratched like cave-paintings into the side of the pot.

“Cassoulet.”

As the three roommates spooned mouthfuls of the invigorating meal, Cicero cleared his throat for a sort of toast.

“I’m going to rent the room.”

“Oh, spare me the pleasantries,” retorted Gabriel with a dismissive wave. “You haven’t passed the bar, no need to speak like one of those scoundrels.”

A loping stomp brought him up the stairs, and the door unleashed the stench of rotting fruit onto the sidewalk. Cicero was hurried inside and greeted by stale air in the foyer. As his eyes adjusted he found the source of the smell: a bunch of bananas, black with yellow spots, were melting into the countertop like an abandoned snowman.

“Are you gonna throw those out?”

“I’m making banana bread this weekend.”

“Right.”

Oak-wood floors stained in indiscriminate splotches came into view, then a sectional couch with each cushion sunk in on itself. Gabriel fell onto it, and it deflated further in defeat.

Cicero waited before venturing, “So… the room?”

“Ah!” He said with a sharp breath and a pained gesture. “Down the hall. We’re running a see-try-buy motion. Make yourself at home, spend the night, and come find me in the morning if you want the place.” He closed his eyes and started rubbing his head back and forth on the back of the couch, smearing in fresh pomade grease.

Cicero, concerned, wandered down the hall and opened the first door to his left. A staircase headed down, book-ended by another door, and a strange warmth and the distant sound of rap—is that Trippie Redd’s Hellboy?—drifted up from the room. He took a step down, mesmerized the thick heat emanating from below…

Two big hands landed where his shoulders connected to his neck and slammed him sideways into the wall. The stair railing connected with his hipbone and he yelled in pain, his front foot slipping on the slick stair. Gabriel’s wet hair was on his shoulder, his mouth hovering over his ear, breath hot like the room below.

“Wrong room. You don’t go down there. You’re across the hall.”

He was released with another shove, collected himself, briefly considered the fact that $900 rent wasn’t worth living in fear of a lunatic, and headed for the door without a word.

“Well, don’t leave yet—you haven’t met Ezzie!” Gabriel’s voice had regained its assertive humor.

“I’m not interested.”

“EZZIE!”

He waited for a second, then bellowed again: “Ezzie! The cis boy is here!” and looked over grinning.

“Or I can call you sissy, if you prefer. Sissy’s good.”

“It’s Cicero,” he said, immediately regretting speaking at all.

“Well, offer’s pulled. Cis it is. Cicero’s a name you earn, champ.”

One foot was already outside when angelic voice from above sang, “Coming!” He turned imperceptibly; Gabriel perceived it.

“Damn, just the voice? Most people cave when they actually see her.”

She appeared at the top of the staircase at the back side of the living room, an evergreen with curls of redwood hair pouring down the sides of a portrait-perfect face. What struck him most was how much information she transmitted in a dozen steps, defying entropy. She moved with the grace of a classical pianist; she exuded the warmth of an old wood fireplace with a cast-iron grate; she carried herself with a divine disposition, the kind which made everyone feel as though they had only to keep on, precisely as they were, to earn her respect and attention. And he had the sense that anybody who had ever met her would, under duress of nature, be forced to admit precisely the same things.

“Hi! I’m Esmerelda,” she said in that voice which ordained every word.

“Cicero.”

They shook hands.

“Well—I’m sorry I wasn’t there to welcome you in. Gabe’s not the best of hosts. But he told me you’re here about the extra room. Would you like a tour?”

“Yes! I’d love that.”

So off they went. She showed him the living room and the kitchen, where the stains and the smells now seemed to denote a home deeply loved. She pointed out Gabriel’s bedroom with a cordial “I’ll spare you the details”. They wandered up the staircase, which opened to another hallway run with a beautiful rug in deep maroons and burgundies. Paintings of ships and horses hung on the wall in beautiful bronze frames. At the end of this hallway was another door, to Esmerelda’s room, which “is always open, if you need anything”. They walked past the windows where the serpentine houseplants grew from beautiful ceramic pots, and they were vivid green and the soil was wet with care.

Back downstairs, they entered another bedroom. A light wooden twin bed frame sat squarely in the center of the room, with a thin mattress and a folded pair of sage green sheets. A few feet of space stretched along each side of the bed, with a small cabinet on one side. The only other furnishing was an old mirror with a dented frame, balanced precariously in a corner.

“You’ll sleep here on the main floor, in between us! If you want the room, that is. Gabe and I were talking about it earlier today, and we thought you could spend a night—to try it out—and let us know sometime tomorrow if you’d like it? There’s one more place upstairs I’d like to show you before you decide,” she said. The crows scattered as they stepped onto the balcony moments later.

“I like to come here in the mornings,” she said, leaning out over the creaking railings.

“I see why.”

Down below the Panhandle paths carved through grass like a river through a canyon, the people little rocks.

“Gabe’s a little crazy, but it’s worth it in the end,” she said suddenly.

That was all the assurance he needed.

“I’ll try out the room.”

She smiled warmly.

Later that night, Cicero looked at himself in the stained old mirror. Once-blond hair and once-bold ambition had both matured into the pale browns of adulthood. All that running and all that cycling, and still his body remained wanting for any description beyond the vague impression of having solidified into its current form from a more viscous material. Still his mind felt like the bananas downstairs: mush. What did he have to lose? He made the bed thoughtfully, crawled under the covers, and fell asleep.

Six o’clock the next morning found Cicero still fast asleep; Esmerelda walking the familiar curves of the Panhandle, her hands clasped behind her back, watching a family of song-sparrows peep their heads around a tree; and Gabriel sauntering along the same path as Esmerelda, in the same direction as Esmerelda, but in a deeply darkened and disturbed state of mind.

His ears were ringing from the music they played at Madrone, from which he had been forcibly removed from minutes earlier. He wore his standard going-out fare: dark jeans, a tattered black varsity jacket, a dying cigarette, a simple gold wedding band. The gloom cleared from his eyes when he saw, walking not ten yards in front of him, a beautiful young woman looking at some birds.

He looked down at the empty bottles of beer he was holding; they would not do for an introduction of this sort, but a quick glance about yielded no trash can. What to do? To the right, a homeless man slept on a bench. The decision was made, then rationalized: as he passed the bench he discreetly flicked one of the bottles behind him. It indiscreetly shattered.

The shattering startled the young woman, who turned about and cast him into the fire—it was Esmerelda! How did I not recognize her? He cursed, thumbed the wedding ring into his left hand, removed the dying cigarette with his right hand, and shoved both deep into the pockets of his jacket.

“Ezzie!” he shouted, opening his arms wide in her direction.

“Gabe,” she replied, walking towards him.

He brought his arms together and folded them across his chest—unfolded them—pointed at her—and finally returned them to his pockets.

“Fancy seeing ya-up this earrrly!”

She smiled softly, then glanced at the smoke billowing from his pocket.

“Oh this?”—he removed the cigarette—“I know you don’t like the smoking, it’s just—tough morning and all that.”

“You’ve got to stop.”

“At least I keep the damage to myself,” he commented derisively with a gesture towards the broken glass at the feet of the stirring man.

“John has been sober for several years.”

“Oh, god. And I thought he was just another run-of-the-mill homeless drunk in the neighborhood. You’re telling me he’s recently relapsed?” He sighed, then added: “how do you know his name?”

“I talk to him,” she said.

This was a foreign concept to Gabriel.

“Like, conversations?”

She let this question hang in the air as they continued walking back home.

As they arrived at the front door, Mrs. Franklin, out for her morning circumnavigation of the neighborhood, turned the corner with her German Shepherd. The dog caught the distinctive scent of generous pomade and stale cigarette smoke, cocked his head, and barked.

“Oh, Arthur! Bless you. Bless you!” said Mrs. Franklin.

Arthur barked again, viciously, and took off at a full sprint. The leash whipped tight and pulled Mrs. Franklin in a tumble to the ground. Gabriel crouched, raised his remaining bottle high above his shoulder, and screamed primally.

“Stop!” cried Esmerelda.

It was the particular sound of her voice, which had already staked a claim deep in his subconscious, which interrupted Cicero’s idyllic sleep. He groggily wandered downstairs and opened the door to a great spectacle:

There before him was Gabriel, swinging a glass bottle back and forth in lumbering jerks like a great dancing balloon outside of a discount gas station, tired tentacles of hair whipping about. There was an elderly woman, strewn on the sidewalk like a discarded cigarette. There was Esmerelda, mortified. And there was a great big German Shepard, leash flailing behind, teeth bared, bounding towards Gabriel at full speed.

Whether this is true is an exercise left to the reader. But if such men do exist, they have never counted Cicero Augustine among their company, or even among their second circle of acquaintances. His perfect morning began with a run into the park, down JFK, around Blue Heron Lake and up to the top of Strawberry Hill to take in the glistening city below. His trusty commuter was a Surly bedazzled with mismatched X-Pac bags, on which he would cruise down the Wiggle each morning and up along the Embarcadero each evening. He ran so many races he started e-mailing race directors asking for twenty dollars off the registration fee for the privilege of not taking home another damn shirt; whittled away countless hours scouring Facebook Marketplace for discounted Paul components; and religiously attended his favorite run club on Thursday evenings only to complain about the crowds on Strava. In short, his life orbited his lungs, so that he could avoid contemplation of its sorry state. So it is not surprising that, for lack of anything more interesting to discuss, we first meet him telling his date about an upcoming race:

“I’m doing a half-marathon next month!”

“Wow. That’s long. Twenty-something miles, right?”

“Well, thirteen, for the half.”

“Oh. What do you think about while running?”

“Ha!—it’s hard to say. Nothing, really. Or, not nothing. Sometimes something. I guess I’m not sure. What do you think about?”

“I don’t run.”

“Sure, okay—how about in general.”

“In general?”

“Yea—what do you think about, in general? You know, you’re going about your day. What are you thinking about?”

“My dog.”

“Okay. Right! Love dogs! Can I see a picture?”

“Um—my phone’s in my purse.”

“Right. Okay! Anything else you think about?”

“Well, work.”

“Work! Love work. Gotta love work.”

“I don’t.”

“Right—I don’t either. It was just a phrase. I’m just saying phrases. Well, let’s talk about something more interesting.”

“What I think about isn’t interesting to you?”

Cicero took a long sip from a glass of water and smiled in silence as a waiter dropped off a plate of food. He looked across the table. Her eyes were diverted, her shoulders slouched. Time to change the subject to something more romantic.

“What are you looking for?” he said.

To this a response came with unnerving speed, thoroughly rehearsed but not once considered: “I’m looking for a man who’s secure in his masculinity. Someone who can really bring out the divinity of my femininity.”

He nodded and solemnly replied, “That’s a lot of inities.”

This was apparently a bad thing to say. On hearing it she leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs, and deflated what little tension had existed like a stale air mattress.

He was saved from scrambling for a phrase to prop up the collapsing conversation when a man at a nearby table abruptly stood, pushed in his chair, and with two large strides stood in front of the pair. Thick black hair, slicked back so violently it could have been combed with a knife, rained from his square face towards the shoulders of his starchy denim jacket. A matching pair of jeans completed the outfit. Dark brown eyes started at Cicero, then down at the recently delivered food: three fish tacos, garnished with two bulbous slices of peeled orange. He picked one up, tilted his head back, and took a monstrous bite.

“These are fabulous. It’s the cara cara oranges. They’re so wonderful this time of year. I love the produce here in California—love the produce!” Another bite, then a third, and the taco was gone. He grabbed a napkin off Cicero’s lap and wiped the trail of salsa running from his lip.

“I apologize for the interruption. Is this a date?”

“Yes.”

“Sure,” said his date.

He glanced over; she was looking at the man.

“Ah! My apologies. I hate to interrupt a date, and especially one that’s going so well! But I must address an important personal matter between myself and the gentleman. All I’d like to ask for is ninety seconds of his time. I’m sure the lady won’t mind?”

“The lady doesn’t mind at all,” she said, with more verve than he’d heard all night.

“Wonderful. Thanks, really, for being so understanding. It means the world. Just ninety seconds.”

“I’ll go freshen up,” she said with a smile before standing—hesitating a moment, then grabbing her purse—and walking away.

“Well. My sincerest apologies, Mister…” He snapped his fingers and pointed.

“Ci—Cicero.”

“Cicero? Hah! So much for nominative determinism.”

“Sorry?”

“You’re a dreadful rhetorician, brother. Why do you think she’s so turned off?”

Cicero had no words, so he said nothing.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what’s up? What the matter is, or what’s the matter with me?”

“I—”. He took a deep breath and was arrested by the auto-body scent of the man’s glistening pomade. “What’s up?”

“There you go! I’ll keep it short: we’re looking for a roommate. Ezzie and I. You’ll meet Ezzie, she’s wonderful. Such an angel. We live in the big yellow Victorian over on Central. We’ve seen you around, always huffing and puffing through the park—we’ve had our eye on you for a while. We’d like you to be our roommate—one time offer—are you in?”

Cicero, dumbfounded, reached for his glass of water.

“Well, say something!”

“I don’t know you.”

“I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the question at hand. But I’m Gabriel, good to meet you.”

Gabriel stuck out his hand. Cicero didn’t shake it.

“Uh… I’m good. I don’t need to move. I have an apartment. And again, I don’t know you. So. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Gabriel grabbed another taco and took a bite. “Really, these cara cara oranges. Quite good. Well, my ninety seconds have come and gone. You enjoy the rest of your date”—he glanced towards the restroom—“and just think it over for me. It’s a nice house. You’ll come around.”

A piece of paper was slammed on the table and slid towards Cicero, and then Gabriel walked away. He paused a moment, turned, and placed a wad of cash on the table with a dismissive “for the food—Ezzie would kill me if I didn’t,” as if they both knew her. Then and left.

Cicero breathed out. He picked up the cash: $100 and the paper. Written in beautiful capital lettering with a blue restaurant pen:

CENTRAL AND FULTON. CORNER. BIG YELLOW ONE. $900 / MONTH. PLEASE?

$900? This is a joke. Who does he think he is? What am I going to tell Amanda?

Luckily this question needed no answering, because ten minutes later, after he finished the last limp, lukewarm taco, it became apparent she would not be returning. Cicero flagged a waiter and paid his bill. He crossed the street and felt his legs drift into the familiar rhythm of a loop around the Panhandle, as always when he was presented with a choice. He did not walk to make decisions; he walked to unearth decisions already made. Walking dried out his mind until cracks formed, and decisions bubbled up like molten lava.

On the first lap his turrets were staffed, his bridges raised, his storehouses filled with grain. I cannot just up and move live with a stranger. But on the second lap the steady beat of the advancing armies’ drums grew, their ladders hit the walls, and their flurry of arrows flew. I don’t love living alone—perhaps I can just go check it out? His mind fell quickly—by the third lap only the citadel remained, besieged by the allure of discovering what kind of man would offer to live with such a stranger he had so disrespected—and at such a price! As he came around the loop a fourth and final time he pulled the paper from his pocket and read it as if to confirm the address, but he already knew which house it was as certainly as he knew he was headed there.

He drew near and slowed. The house sucked up his attention like a sponge, growing taller than those around it. It waited, tired, on the corner: a resolute Victorian glaring at the river of passerby below. Its cracking yellow paint drooped with the weight of the evening. The western wall was adorned with two balconies with alabaster railings, from which a pair of crows were cawing at each other. A big bay window curtained by serpentine houseplants jutted out from the upper floors; below them, the ground-floor windows were boarded up with a slipshod mixture of cardboard and paper.

He crossed the street and walked up to the house. The yellow paint stopped at the ground floor to reveal bare wood and graffiti. The corner of one window was occupied by a forlorn copy of The Singularity is Near.

He tensed when a firm arm landed on his shoulder.

“That’s been there for a singularity or two.”

Cicero turned towards Gabriel, who shook his shoulder and thumped his chest twice.

“Welcome home!”

Lorrie folded the printed program she was reading from closed. She held it out towards Robert, but he did not take it. She slipped it into the pocket of her big green velvet jacket. She was dressed up, with knee-high black boots and curled hair, for the first time in months, because for the first time in months he had agreed to take her out on a date.

This is going to be great!” she said.

He said nothing.

“It’s been so long since we’ve been to the theater. Memos are such fun!”

“Fun and expensive.”

“Aren’t you excited?”

“Yea, I’m excited.”

“Do you ever wonder what someone going to a play in Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, or a big block-buster in the twentieth-century, would’ve thought if they could’ve seen a memo? Would they have been scared? Or amazed?”

“Yea, probably.”

“Probably scared? Or probably amazed? Or probably something else?”

“Probably scared.”

Banners advertising the show were plastered around the theater. “The wonder that is The Prince of the Panhandle can best be described in the words of the great Gabriel himself: what a paradise it was!” read one.

A life-sized poster covering a column showed a gaunt man with windswept brown hair perched triumphantly atop a black mustang, trotting along a wide tree-lined avenue. Intricate gold lettering underneath the horse’s feet read: “The funniest memo of the year… the denizens of Central Avenue are Quixotes incarnate.”

“Should we get some popcorn?” Lorrie offered.

A zealous “No.” was quickly qualified with “or, I don’t need any—you can get some if you want. But we’re running behind.”

What she wanted was for him to want to share some with her. So she said “no”, and they filed into the theater and found their plush seats and sat down. She slipped her wrist into the slot in the chair arm to authenticate herself.

Soon the cavernous screen around them turned dark grey and text faded into view: “The Prince of the Panhandle is rated R for the portrayal of debaucherous, deceitful, misogynistic, lecherous, and evil thoughts & actions. The American Memory Corporation does not endorse the perspective of any characters presented in this production.”

Lorrie glanced excitedly over. Robert looked concerned. Another paragraph replaced the first:

“The memories of Gabriel Galilei can be particularly offensive to the moral sensibilities of modern audiences. Remember that you’re in control! If you get uncomfortable, you can tone down Gabriel at any point, or turn off his perspective entirely. The red button on your seat will put you in contact with an AMC attendant should you have any questions. We are here for your comfort and pleasure.”

The screen went black for a few seconds. Then the memo opened with a wide shot of the Panhandle, with its dog-walkers and its bikers, its sandwich-eaters and its people-watchers. As the camera panned up to show an old Victorian home situated on a corner across the park, with peeling yellow paint and dead plants in the windows, Lorrie felt the familiar cold tingle of external memories blending into her own, and settled in to enjoy the show.

“That was so good!” she said as they exited the theater into the hallways and the excited chatter of the audience fanned out.

“Did you like it?”

She tilted her head.

“Did you not?”

“I thought it was alright. I just didn’t like Gabriel.”

“What? He’s the best! What a paradise—”

“What a paradise it was, before the la la la. Yea, I got it. That stupid phrase was so overdone. Look, I can get behind a bad guy, but he’s got to be compelling, not just… bad! I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but every time it switched to his perspective he dug himself a deeper hole. I can’t believe we’ve got a park named after him! I mean, I turned down his thoughts, and still—”

“You turned him down?” she cried.

“Yes I turned him down! He was pure—” he searched for a moment for the right word—“evil! Oh—let’s campaign to kill all the dogs in San Francisco! Oh—I’ll rip off my friends for thousands of dollars each month. Oh—I’ll sleep with the love of your life hours after you introduce me to her. I mean, give me a break! And there was no remorse, no growth, nothing! Did you really listen to that devil drone on for three hours?”

“He didn’t want to kill the dogs, he wanted to exile them,” she corrected. “And only the ugly ones. It was all laid out in a very logical manner.…”

“Oh, my mistake. And besides, Gabriel wasn’t the only problem. The whole plot got so convoluted in the middle! What was the point of that whole subplot with the Magpie guy? He just hated technology? Was that the joke? And then they were just tromping around the east bay forever. I know it’s based on real memories, but seriously, they could’ve abridged it or something. I felt like we bought tickets to the extended edition!”

“Mr Magpie! You can’t hate Mr. Magpie! He was the best roommate of them all! Even the folks they didn’t contribute much to the story made the whole neighborhood come alive. You got such a sense for what it was like back then… it all felt so real, so rustic.”

“Rustic? Give me a break. It’s an adventure flick, not a stew. And they didn’t even succeed at the adventure part. They kept trying to build up the suspense with the treasure and the escape and the march and all that, but obviously we all know how it ends, so it was just boring.”

“What? Just because you know the ending, doesn’t mean there’s no suspense! If anything it’s more exciting when you know what happens. You get to see how everything fits together!”

“But nothing fit together! It was just Gabriel being horrible, and Cicero falling over himself trying to get women far too good for him, and the both of them ruining their own lives and the lives of everybody they met, over and over again! Then magically—poof!—Cicero’s a king and everybody loves him!”

Lorrie took a deep breath. She had many things to say. She settled on, “Did we watch the same memo?”

“Well, they say everyone experiences it differently.”

“Maybe we just agree to disagree.”

“Sure.”

They continued walking in silence. Lorrie considered the frequency with which she agreed to disagree with her boyfriend. Then she opened up the program again to take her mind off the unwelcome terminus of that train of thought.

“Look at this,” she said, pointing at a paragraph hidden in the corner. “For those old souls in the audience, a written-word version of the narrative written by the Historical Society’s esteemed editor is available in the gift shop!”

“I didn’t know they still made books!” Robert said with a laugh.

“Well, let’s at least go check it out.”

“Briefly—it’s already eleven.”

Near the entrance to the theater, Lorrie found an ancient man in a thin cardigan curled up in a fold-out chair set behind a wooden table, with six or seven copies of a thick book on it. She picked one up. The cover was maroon and thick and adorned in the center by a small rectangular painting of a man standing on an overturned bench in a park, addressing a crowd. The Prince of the Panhandle was embossed in an ornate font over the top of the image, and smaller silver lettering underneath the image read A true account of the events leading to the coronation of Cicero Augustine.

“Do you read books often?” asked the man, in a thin, humble voice.

“Oh, no,” replied Lorrie, blushing. “I’m just browsing.”

“It’s so rare that I see young people interested in these things anymore.”

“We just watched the memo.”

He smiled. “When people say memo, I still think of the old one-pagers.”

“One-pagers?”

“Memo used to mean a document they would send out in a corporate job. Usually one page; usually bad news. It’s funny how words change like that.”

“Yea,” said Lorrie. “Do you like our modern ones?”she asked with a smile and a gesture towards the theater.

“Oh, I usually tend to just read books. Though they’re getting harder to find these days.”

“Why do you like them?”

“Oh, I’m probably just an old man stuck in my ways.” He paused, then added, “Have you ever kept a journal, dear?”

“A journal? No.”

“I’ve kept a journal for many years. Each day I write what I did, or what happened to me, or what I thought. Every so often I write a lot more. And then when I’m caught in a contemplative mood, I go back and read it. You want to know what I think, when I read it?”

“Who does this guy think he is?”

The man smiled.

“My most frequent thought is—really? That’s what I thought? That’s not how I remember feeling! Wasn’t I more angry about that? Or more excited? I find myself having written of the most momentous occasions with such vanity that I want to scream!”—he grabbed a stiff Robert by the shoulders and shook him with each syllable—“don’t you know what you’ve just got?”—then turned back to Lorrie. “On other pages I discover that I have written with the greatest reverence about the most fleeting of feelings. When I was young it was usually love. I was in love with her? That trivial girl? That trivial boy?”

Lorrie smiled.

“We should be going,” Robert whispered with a tug at Lorrie’s arm.

“I always find myself, in my writing, not quite as I remembered. I don’t like the memos because memories always say exactly the same thing, and it is never the truth. Words are just the opposite: read them a hundred times and you will have a hundred different thoughts, and all of them will be true.”

“We really should be on our way.” He grabbed Lorrie’s arm, but she tugged it free and picked up a copy from the table.

“I’d like to buy one.”

Robert waited impatiently as the delighted old man figured out how to ring up the purchase. As they drove home in silence, Lorrie opened the book and began to read…