The span between breakfast and lunch is inconstant, unnervingly patternless, random. Theoretically, mathematically, randomness is impossible to produce, though on the ground there are traffic patterns, which come close to it, they are unpredictable because of error and accidents, but in most other things, especially numbers, there arrives a discernible pattern or logic. Generally, there is always less time between breakfast and lunch than between lunch and dinner. No one will go hungry, every resident knows that food will be supplied here, that lunch will ultimately arrive at our various doorsteps or we can visit the kitchen, but we don't know precisely when lunch might be ready, because each day something occurs that may change the schedule of the male kitchen helper, rumored to be a college dropout or recently expelled, who usually brings it to each of us on bicycle. When that happens, as it does each day, almost without fail, so he is part of my day and habit, I have to decide whether to say hello to him, which might alter my and his late morning rhythms. He pretends that he doesn't see us residents, so he won't startle or annoy anyone, but I always see him, unless I'm tending the fire or in the bathroom, where I worry that the curtain won't block me from view, and he might see me seated in an awkward, all too human pose. I tell myself it doesn't matter if he does, but I also know that this view could become the one he'll remember best, especially if it's silly or sad, and he could report my behavior to the cook or assistant cook, financial officer, to the janitor or groundskeeper, or, if it's especially peculiar, he might inform the director of the community, who could be called upon to speak with me privately and even caution me or put me on probation, which has happened but not yet to me. The staff talks about us the way we residents talk about them. The boy is handsome, especially on his bicycle, his long, strong legs, similar to other legs I've known, move automatically, and they distract me, since I particularly like long, strong legs, and recall those of a Dutchman, who, on a certain summer's night, wore white satin trousers. We took pills that turned us to rubber, I awoke surrounded by others having sex or making love on the floor, wanted to go home, he followed and kept coming round, I lost interest, bored even with his legs, which in retrospect aren't boring, and I wonder if they are as strong as they were then, if he cares for his body and exercises daily. It's easy to be distracted, especially if you relish the past, dislike it, or wonder at its other, unchosen possibilities and also if you collect things, including mementoes, and deduce or speculate about the multitude of outcomes. Since I have good hand/eye coordination and reflexes, a slow pulse, and can run fast, I could've become a long distance runner, but I didn't, which I regret abstractly, I played tennis but didn't relax my studies at the age of ten to practice eight hours a day, to train for the circuit, though training my body and thinking only of a backhand, forehand, when to approach the net and other techniques, might be the life I should have led rather than the one I do, and it still appeals to me. I am often sedentary, except I work standing up or squatting, and go for energetic walks and solitary night swims. I played chess, rode a dirt hike, liked multiplying and adding sums, memorized encyclopedia and dictionary listings, to keep my brain agile, was adept at setting my friends' hair in curlers and tweezing their eyebrows, and I also enjoyed squeezing the pimples on the back of one boyfriend; I liked to draw, jump rope, dance, perform acrobatics, but heights made me dizzy, so jumping over horses in gym didn't make sense as an activity. Instead I preferred to walk backward, do somersaults, act like a horse or dog or cat, even a vegetable, in dance class, read philosophy, American history, especially, and stories, and could diagnose medical problems, which, like my mother, I often accomplish with an accuracy some call intuition, though I don't believe in intuition. But unlike her, I faint at the sight of blood gushing from a gash, so I couldn't have been a doctor, and lose interest in reading some medical research material, though I'm attracted to the study of skin and genetics, especially as a model for the humanities and social sciences, since some aspect of your fate is carried in code from another's body to yours, though the body's not a stable foundation, as it reflects human ideas about it. It is, in a sense, both transparent and opaque, since, with study, like my dermatologist, you could read its signals, though a brain scan, an MRI, may be read differently by neurologists, whose knowledge is imperfect, or the object of their knowledge remains defiant, the sum greater than its parts, the parts in need of and subject to interpretation. Genetics proposes that people aren't merely the sum of their parts, which somehow reassures me, we're bits and pieces, and parts of bodies no longer have to be the bodies' own parts, heads might be grafted, and there could one day be full-body transplants. Human beings lie in shreds of DNA in laboratories, studies for the future, designs for betterperforming bodies, like car models in Californian and Japanese labs.
I like the kitchen helper's legs and his clear skin. He has good color. I have a strong sense of design and color, as my father did, but when I was young, I didn't want to go into his business, though by the time he sold it, over my protests, like the house I loved, I contemplated joining him and my uncle, since looking at weaves and warps and studying color combinations satisfies me in ways other activities don't. I like history, but it is slow. I am fast and quickly lose interest in things, and some people, and this dismays me, but I start and stop many reasonable pursuits. If I travel, I often take in where I am quickly and want to be somewhere else, though I'm aware that once in another place, I will feel similarly, so being where I am now, which I have come to not for the first time, isn't for the sake of novelty, but rather for a less novel form of discovery or a pursuit of knowledge that requires my foreswearing certain adventures that might take me far from myself, but I find it almost impossible to quit my mental meanderings, though I've arrived with a goal and want to make headway, like a person sailing in life toward a destination, hoping for accomplishment. I haven't a passion for one thing only. I vacillate and gain or lose enthusiasm, and like a Don Juan might in love, I'm lost to the singular pursuit, disappointed that nothing is compelling enough, that I lose interest, or always want something else or more to sustain it. But mostly I lose my way to it because I'm easily distracted, the way another resident did. He stayed a short time, as he was permanently adrift, since nothing fully animated him or gave him reason to live, and he said he would have wanted to have been a philosopher, since it was a calling, he told me, higher than any other except the priesthood, if he'd had the concentration or the energy. But instead he learned and mastered carpentry and became a devoted member of his church choir. He also muttered once that he was beginning to enjoy the luxury of impotence, something I'd never heard a man claim before or since, and, when he did, he gazed into the distance over my head. I thought I understood his melancholy, since it could have been like my own, though not about that type of impotence, but he also seemed foolish gazing into the distance, assuming a pose that might indicate a depth he didn't actually possess. It was an attempt, though, to signify the pursuit or impossibility of headway. But, then, I'm also aware that I may encounter a person who could change my life or an idea that could undo others I hold dear, which was reinforced by the card reader, and I want to believe his prophesy, and I do think that, while destinies are not carved in stone, I have a fate, that which has already been written, not alone by me but by forces bigger than myself, like an ocean's mindless waves, since I believe that about the most important things in life human beings don't have much choice. I am making do, unmaking too, being as watchful and free as I can with what I've been horn into.