1. The End

I went home—after three hungry years, a dozen awful addresses, and too many leftover 60s prophets and 80s mental patients, and my father met me at the highway bus stop in his new-smelling imported car and announced, "You know, I've technically become a millionaire."

"Really?" I was impressed for a second. But as he began to explain his accumulated "net worth" while he was driving, I started remembering rooms I'd lived in with walls so thin that conversation could be accurately recorded straight through them, not to mention the ceilings and floors. I'd learned to be quiet the hard way, amid the lonely rages, rantings and passions of neighbors.

The last time I was home, before college, we too had argued over anything that would make matters worse. So I was relieved that things clicked into place at home. Maybe my parents were just grateful I hadn't gotten killed recently in any of my entanglements, which I won't even go into. It helped that we saw each other only in passing. I worked every grungy job I could stand, or I stayed out dancing until the clubs closed. Even so, I couldn't stick around long—I had a life to get back to, even then...But for a while I was happy to stay in the old house with the nearest neighbors fifty yards away, and they made no noise that the old oaks and apple trees couldn't absorb. I had missed the place more than I realized because I'd cut myself off from my past for so long.

I'd been living as Cayle, which was a role I'd written for myself to play, or improvise, really—even the pronunciation of "Cayle," rhyming with "isle," had happened by mistake. Nonetheless, I'd lived to faithfully record the spontaneous overflow of accidents, I mean life, in poetry. I always sought the truth, but I was living the autobiography of somebody else. I didn't lose my self-defining traits: my laughable skittishness, tragic shyness, and ectomorph body all remained with me in all-too-familiar forms. The problem was a void that also always stayed with me, and no knowledge or experience could stop its growth or counter its power to deprive me of everything.

Most stories end with death but I will begin there because I had to begin again in the ashes of having been somebody else. I had legally died, and I gradually learned what it means to be dead—in the bleak aftermath. I didn't even want to remember the worst things, but some of them came back on their own, even many years later. And as I wrote this story I found it isn't enough to go through Hell or Heaven or see the breath of God in the shape of someone's face. I still had to go back to Cayle, the self I was before, to learn what people really meant.

I am like that Samaritan with a half-dead body slung over his shoulder and banging on doors, a man whose story in its time seemed immoral, offensive, and even degenerate to the Pharisees and Sadducees. (Who wants all that on their front step?) But I've been both the Samaritan and the half-dead guy. So I came the hard way to bring this story to your threshold.