All Fours: A Novel

“take Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. If he gets the bird, then who is he? What’s the cartoon about?

So, this was the cost of that free feeling each morning. Brutal. But there was enough hypocrisy built into life, one shouldn’t choose it. “I think this is good,” I rasped. “Yeah?” “Yeah.” We looked at each other in shock, like two people hovering in the air with nothing holding them up. No scaffolding, no strings, no wings—but not falling.

One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

He didn’t understand that you could create a world—a fantasy, a nightmare—and bring other people into it, not just artistically but in life.

And now in this lifetime we only felt right when we were saving a life together, fixing a flat tire by the side of the highway; we only became us against insurmountable odds. The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved and then some of the time we were fucking furious about this and it

But there had to be an alternative to my approach. Surely one day someone would say: Wait, you’ve been taking the stairs this whole time? You didn’t know there’s an elevator? And to that I would say: Oh. Duh.

The future itself was another lover, reaching backward in time to cup my balls. Instead of dangling in the present I was held, I was safe; I was gently squeezed and aroused by my never-ending preparations.

In the brief instant when the strobe caught us we were just souls, meeting each other’s eyes, dead serious. This wasn’t possible with language. Words always took things down a notch with their supposed knowing, their elaborate trying. Words kept you in two separate brains. Dance was the way to close the gap. What gap? How could there be a gap betwe

Working was a romance with life and like all romances always seemed on the verge of ending, was always out of my control.