The situation was this: Bret’s ringing phone had woken him up just before daybreak. Jeff, his once fairly close, but now hardly close friend, sounding frantic, had asked him to meet him. Bret had said he would and asked where, and Jeff had calmed down enough to give him clear directions. Bret had dressed quickly and, not nearly awake enough to wonder whether he was being overdramatic, left his house as if fleeing a fire. While waiting for a light to change and looking at the directions he had scrawled on a scrap of paper he had found after scrambling across the hall to his study, he had realized that he had left his phone behind. Though he had imagined getting lost and feeling frantic because he was unable to contact Jeff, he had resisted the temptation to go back.

The plot of lakeside land and the dock came into view. Jeff was sitting on the dock, his legs dangling, his feet just above the surface of the water, his torso partly hiding the side of a leather lounge chair. A few yards beyond the chair, alongside the dock, lay a small sailboat loaded up with other things, none of which Bret could precisely identify.

He parked his car beside Jeff’s truck and got out slowly, his fear for Jeff’s safety having completely disappeared. But once he was standing up, fear in general surrounded him, caused by his notion that what he was involved in was no longer a situation, or anything else, for that matter. He couldn’t have said that he felt alive.

Jeff approached him, holding his arms out as if expecting an embrace.

“What the hell?” Bret said.

“I really appreciate this,” Jeff said.

“Appreciate what?”

“O.K., here’s what’s going on. A friend of mine—you don’t know him—bought a house across the lake, on the beach, and asked me to help him move. I picked up some stuff from his house—I shouldn’t have thought that I could fit the chair in along with everything else, especially since I’m going to do a second trip later today. Anyway, I need someone to keep an eye out for it until I get back.”

Bret wanted to ask Jeff when he had bought a sailboat, but let it go and concentrated on a more pertinent question. “So where is your friend?”

“Yeah, sorry—I know he should do it, but he had something he needed to do.”

Bret tried to laugh, but couldn’t.

Jeff continued. “Sorry—that didn’t come out right.”

Bret was lost—theoretically, that is. But rather than ask Jeff why his friend hadn’t just asked Jeff to take the things in his truck around the lake, not to mention why his friend hadn’t just hired a moving company, both of which Jeff probably had some absurd explanation for, as Jeff’s friend was probably as much of an oddball as Jeff, and rather than ask Jeff what the odds were of someone driving by and turning into a thief for the sake of possessing a used chair, he simply gave in. “No problem. I’ll do it.”

“I really appreciate this,” Jeff said again. And then: “I owe you one.”

Bret, wondering what the return favor could possibly be, tried to feel that he was doing something immensely important, but couldn’t.

Then he was standing on the end of the dock, watching the sailboat sail away.

There was nothing to do but wait.

*

Bret, walking in circles in front of the hoods of his car and Jeff’s truck, had no way of knowing how many minutes had gone by since Jeff’s departure. Trying to remember the precise year he had given up wearing a watch occupied Bret’s mind for only a short time, and he had to fight to not put stock in its replacement: the strange feeling that his whole life had been a failure. Of course, he knew he could get back in his used, clockless car and turn on the radio and search for a voice telling the time, not to mention listen to music, or the news, or a conversation between two people who weren’t waiting alone for a sailboat to return. But turning a key and then not moving just didn’t feel right.

More than for his phone and the access to the Internet that it would give him, he longed for a book to read. He pictured a battery-powered portable TV and told himself that oh yes he would turn it on if it were there with him.

There was nothing to do but wait. No, not even that. There was nothing to do.

To prove it, he even stopped walking and stood still in the presence of an uncounted number of undrawn circles, adding to his confusion by wondering why standing still couldn’t be considered doing something.

Thinking about what he would be doing if he was back home—grading tests while kicking himself for not doing it earlier in the week so his whole Saturday would be free, and while dreaming of being someone else besides a high school sociology teacher, and while wondering if it would be romantic, or too brazen, to call Jenny while she was away on a business trip and ask her out for a second date—not only occupied his mind for only a short time, but also ended up acting as the final push that sent it plunging into blankness.

*

Bret awoke to the fact that he was sitting on the dock roughly where Jeff had been sitting when he arrived. As if to physically admonish himself for sitting there forever, he scrambled to his feet and could have sworn that some kind of blood not from his heart rushed to his head.

Then he began the process of pacing from one end of the dock to the other, within the boundaries of empty solitude, feeling an urge to transgress in some way. The foundations of wanting love and having faith in being alive were like barriers to pure knowledge, not just knowledge, “pure knowledge,” a phrase made up of two elements without which air and water might not be possible.

What was he thinking?

He paused on the end of the dock and looked out over the lake. A quasi-religious fall took the form of a body, his if he was willing to admit it, floating just underneath the surface, as invisible as the denial of evil. He wondered if self-love could save him, help him rise above the ceiling of the sky before he got back home.

He resumed pacing and looked ahead to the continuation of pacing, hoping that it would clear his mind even of hoping, even though he liked how hoping made him feel like he was floating up and above, and up and above, over and over.

After a while, he understood that while he had had a hand in plunging his mind into blankness, clearing his mind was out of his hands. He couldn’t do it. There was something else he understood: Looking inward was like walking a long path away from his earthly prison. Even the last inch of the path would be part of the prison. He didn’t like the image of a prison, but it helped to not liken it to the image of a ribcage. Maybe self-love was a way of being the eyes looking down on him through the bars separated from each other by thin strips of ether.

For a moment, while pacing, he looked down at a sampling of the separate pieces of wood that the dock consisted of and saw skeletal pieces of selfhood gathering to a single point hidden under the sole of one his shoes, and then under the sole of the other. He continued to walk as if toward a complex action that would permanently take his eyes out of the equation.

Which added up to what? His five senses weren’t the four elements, just as earthly experience didn’t appear to reflect his true self. He recalled conjuring up a similar word a few moments earlier. “Selfhood” now struck him as odd, like a bag covering only the top half of a head.

It was as if there was no way to tell whether he laughed inside or outside. And when he got to one end of the dock again and turned around, it was as if his back was to the lake, just as it had been before he turned around.

His body and mind seemed to have constructed a structure, and everything outside of it felt to him like vanishing joy. At the same time, he wanted to replace himself with a love object, even a nonhuman dock holding up a mindless skeleton. Though he wanted to have as much will as the world around him, he felt free to turn that world into the world inside of him. But solitary greatness seemed to amount to any number, high or low.

What was he thinking about what he was thinking?

*

The hoods of Bret’s car and Jeff’s truck seemed to pass Bret as he passed them. He stopped, naturally, at a chest-high row of bushes, and looked down at a portion of it. The way the dull green little leaves didn’t exactly cover the light brown thin branches underneath them moved him for some reason that he wanted to strain to define.

Before he could begin, he heard a rustling coming from the base of the portion, some small animal, no doubt, making its escape from his presence. At which point he isolated one of nature’s ways and defined it as prompting its human subjects to take action in order to halt any stimulating or troubling thought.

Somehow, he went from there to considering how religions have a history of suppressing individuality, and as he concentrated again on the dull green leaves, he considered himself to be a bright green heretic, and, somewhat logically, went from being as little as a little leaf to being as tiny as an atom searching for a world to join. And still holding back in some fashion after it joined, its self-indulgence a sign of godliness, its self-exaltation the source of all light.

He looked up in order to see the nearest star by far, who could have taken the words expressing the second claim, especially “self-exaltation,” right out of his mouth, and then given them back to him. The cloud cover he saw appeared to urge him to start meditating, there being no way to actively pursue anything behind it, but wasn’t meditating what he was already doing?

Little clouds over the leaves was what he saw when he looked back down, each cloud and leaf as if mouthing to each other, over and over, identical versions of the way to express the pleasure of self-concern, as if forming a wordless incantation, like an impossibility shining with humility and subtle pride.

Whether he was suffering, or experiencing the strength gained from suffering, he didn’t know. Maybe it didn’t matter what the answer was. Still standing in front of the portion of the row of bushes, he felt that he was an exile from society who had been forced into an intimacy with majestic forests, one after another, who had no way out, who listened every time the soft grooves in the uneven bark told of how all-encompassing compassion had replaced relentless power dynamics.

Whether he was making sense, he didn’t know. His vision of the forests required imagination, when what he embodied was philosophy. Maybe it didn’t matter what the difference was.

*

Possibly, somehow, two maybes had prompted Bret to go back to the dock and sit in the chair, and sitting in the chair was what he was still doing, every few moments craning his neck and seeing the empty space to the right of the row of bushes, and then, through the empty space, the curtained side windows of a distant house.

While pacing the dock, he hadn’t really thought about the chair. In order to sit on it without clambering up over one of the armrests, he had had to pull it back from the edge. Yes, he could recall pulling it back, but it was as if he couldn’t recall pulling it back with hands. And now, craning his neck again, seeing the empty space before seeing through it, he wasn’t sure that he possessed eyes and even entertained the idea that flesh and blood passed him by when the day of his birth decided to choose itself.

And now, looking straight ahead again, he entertained another idea, that inwardness went further than not only flesh, but also blood, and kept out the world that was overwhelmingly hostile and alien to the self. Craning his neck, and then looking straight ahead, again and again, wasn’t like watching two tennis players engaged in an endless rally. The world’s game was to be in constant motion, while the self shaped hot wax and warmed up to its cooling end products. There was no question that he was making sense.

It was clear to him now that once the sailboat left, he had begun to regard himself as a refuge, when he was actually a source of power. Society came to him. Nature was dull, and not only that, it was terrifying, and his inwardness neutralized it, and not only that, it countered it.

He was almost ready to believe that he was God, and then his neck found itself craning in the other direction. The portion of the lake that he saw was neither terrifying nor dull, and its calmness could have been a conscious refuge from power.

Happy for it, he took his eyes away as the terrible spaces of the universe enclosed him, and as his self-analytical power began again to take stabs at soothing him.

Looking at a portion of the lake hadn’t protected him, and so mutability had taken him back to the process of the drive to be singular and undying and irrational. He didn’t know exactly what he was getting at, and yet he knew that the world was entirely knowable, the individual being a microcosm of it. Being entirely knowable didn’t cancel out inner complexities, in other words, and this was an idea, or a quasi-fact, that maybe got him closer to what he was getting at. Conjuring up the phrase, “universal individuality,” made up of two immense words, got him even closer, maybe.

At that point, he could have sworn that he had plunged, along with the chair, off the edge and struck dry ground.

*

Just as Bret hadn’t been able to keep track of the precise amount of minutes that had passed since not waving goodbye to his friend, he hadn’t been able to keep track of the precise amount of minutes that had passed since the abstract plunge. After attempting to go back over the whole time, he came away with the possibility that it had contained only one concrete detail from the realm outside his world, a tennis match, and then felt haunted by the possibility that all the thinking he had done would be distorted, or perverted, or both, whenever he bounced back into the real world.

But he needed reality, he needed outer complexities. He imagined a world exactly like the one he was in, where, despite the corrupt energies of society, he gravitated toward the idea that self-love required him to seek the help of others.

The idea of balance prompted him to stand up and teeter on the edge of the dock. Then he began pacing on it again, thinking about choosing solitude in the end, feeling at the point of exhaustion from failing to achieve balance, thinking about peeling away layer after layer of his common humanity before returning to his home.

He paused at the end of the dock and experienced a momentary illumination while concentrating on an imperceptible beam of light, longer, but as thin as, the handle of a tennis racket, reflecting off a motionless ripple near the center of the lake. Then the windless wind died down, and the match between one player was over.

*

Bret was still standing at the end of the dock, but instead of a lake, he saw a river, specifically a strip of sand between the edge of it and a fairly large rock, where he could stand or sit. Just as he couldn’t imagine the river flowing one way, then the other, he couldn’t imagine going back to pacing, putting more dents in the strip, even though the dock wasn’t made of sand.

And he couldn’t imagine seeing a sailboat in the far distance, coming toward him. He tried to connect being where he was to living forever and welcomed this addition to all of his lonely failures, which were the point of it all, the reason why living was an act of heroism.

He stepped farther forward and decided that part of this subjective religion was to contemplate his body sinking through the surface of the water and floating down until the paradox of faith injected air into his lungs.

Merely contemplating kept him alive, he felt, and felt that proving the nonexistence of any kind of divinity wouldn’t stop the surface of the water from feeling holy. A voice in his head saying that water had no such ability was the voice of authority and orthodoxy and mechanization, he decided, though he was in the position of not being in a position of power, of knowing that the engine of his car, his passage to other worlds, was as good as dead.

He couldn’t stop: Those other worlds comprised a country with a flag that made him ill at ease with the conformities of patriotism but wary of the self. His isolation represented the danger of democracy, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t see his individuality as a political act.

He had covered so much that he thought the far distance must, by now, be ready to reveal a returning sailboat.

He looked, and waited.

*

Like a river changing back into a lake, Bret went back to the chair and knelt on it and put his hands on the top of the backrest. His hands and his whole body couldn’t rest. He couldn’t let go of himself, and the fact that he didn’t want to didn’t fully disappoint him, since he wasn’t sure that letting go of himself was the key, wasn’t sure at all. Maybe the hero inside him had lost his way, but that hero was a madman who could still make a case for his pure relevance. And yet, having travelled into a storm of isolation, the two sides of him weren’t sure that they could return with news of all that they had learned, weren’t sure at all.

The two reduced to him. He wanted to return now, and not later, and this want was not only sinking his knees into the chair, but also sinking his whole body, as if the sailboat had sunk under the added weight of the chair and him, as if he had driven all the way to where he was not to be left behind, but to drown.

Arriving at that final thought led him to the realization that his life, this morning, at least, wasn’t really a story, and that the fleeting moments inside one’s self are always the real story, whether one is aware of it or not. Looking at one of his hands, and then the other, he came to the conclusion that they mirrored themselves and not nature with its contingencies and consequences. And yet they looked scared and healed.

His eyes began to close.

*

Bret awoke to the fact that he was sitting in the chair, slumped over, and that someone was standing next to it and speaking out loud. Through closed lids Bret saw the far distance and the sail inside of it utilizing the adequate wind. Then through open lids he saw far becoming near, and his friend, who was apologizing again, again fairly insincerely.

It didn’t matter. Jeff laughed at him as he struggled to rise out of the chair. He laughed, too, after the rising was done.