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goodbye.
    Alena worked alongside Sharon and her husband Jon, two of my oldest New York friends, at a small production company that specialized in editing documentary film. It was a job Alena held part-time in order to support what she called her “artistic practice,” a practice Sharon had had trouble describing and about which, because of the phrase “artistic practice,” I’d had grave doubts. But it turned out Alena was serious, in spite of being hailed as a rising star by a postmedia art world that so often valorizes stupidity. Her current show, which, unable to do any of the heavy lifting, I’d watched her hang, consisted of images and a few objects she had deftly aged: she’d painted a portrait from a contemporary photograph and then somehow distressed it— I couldn’t understand her reluctant explanations of her process—so that it was networked with fine cracks, making it appear like a painting from the past. There was a painting based on an image downloaded from the Internet and then enlarged of a young woman whose eyes are lined with running shadow and upon whose face a man beyond the frame has ejaculated; she stares at the viewer as if from another century, the craquelure confusing genres and lending the image tremendous gravity; the title read: The Picture of Sasha Grey . Alena had painted several magnificent Abstract Expressionist imitations and then subjected them to her method; the Pollocks appeared compellingly unchanged, others seemed as if they’d been recovered from the rubble of MoMA after an attack or had been defrosted from a future ice age. There was a small self-portrait, also painted from a photograph, that had not been altered, had suffered no crazing, and the immediacy of its address in the context of the other work, I mean the directness of the sitter’s gaze, was so powerfully located in the present tense that it was difficult to face.
    Kissing Sharon hello at the café, I felt static as my lips brushed across her cheek, as if Alena and Sharon were coming into contact through me. Sharon ordered mint tea and I ordered what I thought was a simple drip coffee that turned out to be an exorbitantly priced single-origin Chemex affair. At the tiny table beside the window looking onto Houston, we split a large slice of chocolate bread. “It’s Valrhona,” Sharon said, which meant nothing to me; Sharon had a chocolatier’s vocabulary—almost everything she ate, it seemed, involved chocolate. “Are you sleeping together yet?”
    When we left the café and wandered south I could feel the trains moving underground. I could feel, at least imagined that I felt, Sharon’s pulse in her biceps, slightly faster than my own, as we walked—as we almost always walked—arm in arm. I looked up at an illuminated billboard on which nothing appeared but a violet wash, probably because a new advertisement was going up, and asked Sharon, who is color-blind, what she saw. Overhead the stars occluded by light pollution were presences like words projected through time and I was aware that water surrounded the city, and that the water moved; I was aware of the delicacy of the bridges and tunnels spanning it, and of the traffic through those arteries, as though some cortical reorganization now allowed me to take the infrastructure personally, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. Sharon saw grays and blues, and as we crossed Delancey she described a movie she wanted to make about color-blind synesthetes who report that numbers are tinged with hues they otherwise can’t perceive.
    Soon we arrived at the packed gallery, where we’d planned to meet Jon, but he’d texted to say his cold had worsened. We made our way to the white wine on a table in the near corner. I saw Alena talking to two tall and handsome people across the space and I raised a hand awkwardly. She looked at me steadily while speaking to them but