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really gone and done it.” When we see ourselves as others see us, we become, for a moment, a “me,” and when we look back at our imperial “I” from the vantage point of “me,” we say, sometimes irreverently, “Hey, you!” The geometry can be confusing. My “me,” when observed by another “I,” is a “he.” And each of the points of view these pronouns name has its own time. The time “I” spent mopping the floor felt like an eternity, whereas for “me” it was five minutes, give or take a tick.
    You have told your husband, the sloth, about the leak, about how often the kitchen floor needs to be mopped, but he never comes into the kitchen; it’s “Get me a beer, will you?” or a chicken wing. The sloth shifts one haunch, then another. Your time with the TV has become mop time. Flop. Flop. This marriage is a joke. I didn’t expect to be fucked by a cliché. Not me. I was expecting a cock of some kind, of course, but not a sloth’s dickie. We never wake up in time. We think we are different, and won’t make the mistakes other people make. They play the fool. That’s the rule. But what about you, now? Now you are as wet and stringy as your mop. Flop. I thought I’d never be one of them, one of those sagtitted, muss-haired, mum-dumb broads. Well, baby, you was wrong. You is in a flat fix. So what shall I do, since I’m Catholic and all? Mope and mop? Flop and sob? Is that it? Yup. Jig’s up.
    Our fledgling writers, aspiring professionals whose machines beep about their spellings, will make a careful study, naturally enough, of the function of the pronoun, the psychological and ontological import of each, examining such contemporary classics as Juan Goytisolo’s
Makbara
, which is almost a textbook of pronoun significance and use. Sure they will. Or their instructors will require them to. Sure they will. When, their mentors rhetoricallyinquire, do we normally find this brutal “Hey, you?” fastened to the present tense like a horse to a lawnmower?
    Well, sometimes it happens when “me” says to “I”: “You are such a jerk!” Otherwise, it occurs when, as an actor, for instance, we ask the director what we are to do next. “You” becomes the first word of an order—a command or directive. My hubby, let’s suppose, has told me to do something with my life, so I leave my place in front of the TV, my place beside him on the sofa, and come into the kitchen. What then? “You imagine a lot of water has leaked on the floor from beneath the fridge, and you mop it up.” It may be simpler managing the second-person present in Spanish, but even so, Carlos Fuentes’s
Aura
remains a rare tour de force, with its central character utterly in the power of a mysterious, historically determined fate that speaks almost over the shoulder of the writer himself.
    You’re reading the advertisement: an offer like this isn’t made every day. You read it and reread it. It seems to be addressed to you and nobody else. You don’t even notice when the ash from your cigarette falls into the cup of tea you ordered in this cheap, dirty café.
    Under such an aura, you mop the floor as in a dream; you wonder what is on TV now; you think that your husband is a ten-toed sloth. So forceful is this tense and person, it is as if the café had been commanded to be cheap and dirty. You mop. You think: I wish Roberto Rossellini had thawed me out. Then I could be like this fridge. Aleak. Alas, alack, you are only a frump, a sloth’s frump at that.
    My survey brings me now to the third-person present, also a favorite of the young. However, the masterwork in this mode is Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter,” which is written in a series of paragraphs or “screens.” We might think of them as windows through which we peep, as indeed plenty of peeping occurs in the story. What is seen in each screen or window is reported to the reader the way Helen’s husband—the ten-toed sloth—describesthe expression of the slapped