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"  When Michael died, his ribs collapsing like a spider&amp;#039;s legs around his heart, there was just time enough for him to accept that nothing could save him and to comprehend what he was leaving behind before he cast it all loose, all the things he had witnessed and stored away over the course of a lifetime--the memories he had formed, the habits he had mastered, the information he had accumulated--watching it rise up and fan away in the oncoming current like so much fine clay silt: the pleasure of having his scalp scratched, for instance, and the poise he felt when he was walking with particular dexterity through a crowd, the smell of dust burning off a lightbulb and the sandy texture of the tooth polish his dentist used, all of it gone, either vanished or vanishing, along with the way a peanut would part along its seem when he rolled it between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, and the mouse-like shriek a chunk of Styrofoam would give off when he tore it in two, and the odd little dance that a drinking straw wrapper would do when he bunched it down the table, expanding in a style that reminded him of those boxes of black pellets he had occasionally bought for the Fourth of July that would turn into long gray snakes of ash as soon as he put a match to them, and orange ring embers traveling down their circumference like a plate spinning on a stick, a sight that never ceased to draw his attention, just as certain tastes and certain scents never ceased to draw his attention--coffee, bacon, raspberry, black pepper--as well as certain pieces of music, rock songs from the years just before he was born, mostly, but also ballads from the age of big bands and panel radios, with melodies and vocal flourishes that seemed to immerse him in some impossible channel inhabited by his brain and his body, moving sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, but always joined to the other by the accompanying rhythms of his heartbeat and his breathing, the drums and the bellows, so that he was never too far beyond reach of himself, never truly transported, at least not as some people were capable of being transported, his college girlfriend, for instance--his first--who liked to plug her headphones into her stereo and sit with her eyes closed and her legs crossed in one of the building&amp;#039;s thinly padded dorm chairs, irretrievably lost to him until whatever CD she was listening to had ended with that scrambled electronic whistle he had learned to recognize, after which she would lean back and roll her neck as if she was awakening from a long sleep, turning to him with a regal look of satisfaction on her face, as if to say, &amp;quot;All right, now you may speak,&amp;quot; which had seemed so charming and sexy the first time she did it, and later so very frustrating, and later still, when the whole elaborate show was only a memory that occasionally occurred to him while he was driving to work or waiting for some bartender to top off his drink and he had not spoken to her in many years, so charming and sexy again, so that he experienced a sudden sharp longing, like a splinter lodged under his fingernail, to go back and find the boy he used to be and shake him for all he was worth and at least, at least, make him tell her so, a longing that in truth was not at all unusual for this and was certainly not restricted to this one incident, nor to this one girlfriend, nor even to this one era of his youth, however valuable it might have been to him, but seemed rather to be the one great encompassing desire of his life, reaching from his first glimmer of awareness to the moment that had only now passed, when he took the corner at sixty miles an hour, ignoring the caution sign with its twin yellow lights blinking above and below it, because he was in such a hurry to get home, where his couch and his television and his answering machine were waiting, but also simply because it was a joy to feel the road passing beneath him like a tape unwinding from a spool, a joy he could never resist, especially when he was recovering from a period of sickness, a sore throat or a cough or a fever, say, caught up in that short span of days when he was not quite better but could sense a natural strength gathering inside him--stretching its limbs and filling its lungs, nearly ready to take over--and he knew that he could stop being so cautious with himself, which was exactly how he had felt when he woke up this morning and his head was clear and his skin was cool, and the cat was sleeping with her forelegs propped on his chest, and he realized that he would be well again soon, if not today then almost certainly tomorrow, and that he would be able to resume his life of speed and vigor and improvisation, the only portion of his life that he was truly willing to recognize as his own, even though that portion had begun to shrink with the years and it was not at all hard for him to envision a time when he would feel ill more often than he felt healthy, but that time was not yet, he told himself as he sat in the wreck of his front seat, that time was not now, notwithstanding the fact that a gray cloud was passing suddenly over his eyes and it hurt him to breath, and that his clothing felt heavy on his skin, and in spite of everything, he could not help wishing that he had been given the chance to witness certain events one more time, little episodes of the material world that he ought not to have cared about but did, like the chattering noise a coin made when he sent it twirling around on its edge and it gradually came rolling to a stop, or the streamers of sparks that cigarette butts throw off when they were flicked from the windows of moving cars at night, or the way the water that flowed from the faucet in his bathroom changed pitch as it grew warmer with the weightless slipping sound of a reed flute, which was just one of the many things he must have learned to notice during his childhood, that slowly climbing trail of days, and yet could not remember learning to notice, so that as an adult he sometimes stood perfectly still for a moment as he was supposed to be washing the clown&amp;#039;s mask of soap off his face and wondered how he had come so far, how he had changed so much, without forgetting entirely who he used to be, the same thing he wondered when he arranged the bills in his wallet so that they were all facing forward in a single squared-off block, from Washington through Lincoln and all the way to Jackson and Grant, or when he lay in bed with a woman after sex, his arm tucked beneath the fold of her breasts, his knees pocketed with a slight, somehow consoling imperfection in the backs of hers, feelings the ponderousness of her body beside him and so coming to think of the ponderousness of his own, his arms and his legs, his guts and genitals, the hundred cumbersome pieces of a self which seemed in all the best moments of his life, the moments of high delight and fascination, as if it ought not to have weighed anything at all, so that he viewed it as one of the great perversions of existence that he could not simply shuck off his body and be free, like a chunk of dry ice subliming into vapor, and continue through the years with all the ease of an animal, the kind of creature that inhabited itself so gracefully that its bodiless ness, which never quite genuine, became a matter of instinct if not of reality--the leopard, for instance, blending so skillfully into the mottled shadows of the underbrush, or the spider, displaying the slightness of its legs and their sudden animal avidity as it clutched a fly to its abdomen, or the goldfish, flickering in oranges and brasses through the glassy waters of an ornamental pond--all three of which had mesmerized him ever since his first visit to the zoo on the arms of his mother and father, when he had eaten a corn-dog and cried at the sight of the alligators and watched his big sister racing ahead of him in her jacket and her new pink sneakers, and which had continued to mesmerize him later, when he was in high school and would find himself paging through the pictures in his biology textbook during the unspent minutes at the ends of his other classes, and later still, after he had taken up his adult life, when he would stay at home to watch nature documentaries on television with his friends or his roommates or his lovers, all the people he had gathered around himself out of need and out of love, of course, but also because he understood somewhere deep in his heart that there was no way--no way at all--of going back to the days when everyone he knew was bigger than him and wiser than him and by some accident of fate alive and on the earth, waiting within the casing of their lives to prepare the way for him, so that after those days had passed the memories he had accumulated began to seem like cords of woods he had stacked in preparation for winter, a winter that he had now realized he would not live to see, and though he suspected that the loss was one he ought to regret, he was surprised to find that he did not regret it, perhaps because there was no longer any time for regret, or perhaps simply because he was passing through one of those rare occasions when the world suddenly seemed to become so much richer and he himself so much more fully immersed in it, as when he opened his mouth to yawn and some membrane of fluid he had not even realized was there popped in the back of his ear and uncovered all the quiet things around him, the smallest engine ticks and the tiniest birdsounds, along with a thousand chinks and taps and sighs he could not trace back to their original source, but also one of those occasions when the world seemed to twist and shrivel in on itself like a spent match and he noticed what was happening to him as if from a great distance, like the time he forgot the lines he was supposed to be delivering in the school play and found himself thinking, &amp;quot;I would hate to be Michael right about now,&amp;quot; though maybe that was something he had only dreamed, or the time when he heard his ribs fracturing with a surprisingly delicate noise against the steering wheel, as though someone had taken a handful of wax crayons, lined them up between his fingers, and with one gesture snapped them in two, though maybe that, too, was something he had only dreamed, if it had not in fact just happened, shortly before he noticed the taste of copper rising in his mouth and the smell of his life, thirty-four years&amp;#039; worth of colors in his eyes and brushes against his skin, seemed as he sat there trying to lift his hand to his face to have been filled with a warm unwavering light that flowed as peacefully and beautifully as a window looking out on a sunlit clearing, a light he only wished he had been able to perceive while it was flowing through him, so that he might have understood how much there was to celebrate in his life and where the strange sense of comfort that overtook him just as he was dropping off to sleep came from and why it was that he felt so good sometimes, so happy to be alive, in the face of all the doubt and remorse and pain in the world--there was just time enough for Michael to touch on each of these things and leave them behind, like a breeze combing its way through a field of grass and flowers, before his heart stopped beating and he felt his awareness of the world peeling away from his body, reaching further and further into the open air, one last bit of it stretching at its bond, tightening gradually to a thread, and then breaking free and passing through the windshield and the buckled metal of the hood, through the concrete embankment and the cold winter air, sailing into the pine trees that rose in a cluster beyond the road, where a few starlike flakes of snow were starting to fall, until finally it was all gone, every bit of it, everything he had ever known or believed he had known, experienced or believed he had experienced, and he was no longer there. He was somewhere else. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a2190/esq0207fable/>