Just to the east of the many graves of children of which I earlier wrote—all of whom, it now strikes me, according to a certain doctrine mentioned some pages above, deserved destruction—I saw a fenced-in plot, the wire a deeply rusted red. It was the only fenced-in plot in the entire cemetery. Inside the plot a stone stuck up a mere four or five inches out of the ground, so worn by time and the elements that no name could be read there. Nor hung any identifying marker from the rusted fence or its rusted gate. At the time of the death of the person who now lay there someone had so badly wanted them to be remembered, or at least to make a monument of or to their life, or even to provide them with some semblance of protection, that they’d had a fence constructed. Now only the fence and the unmarked stone indicated the fact that this now-nameless person had ever existed at all. About two months after my wife-to-be and I started dating, during the summer, while we sat on the stoop of the building where he then lived, my father explained to me over a couple of beers how much better sex was if one waited until one was married. Seven or eight years later one of my younger sisters told me she’d found out that our parents had not themselves waited, a fact which my father could easily have confessed but did not confess to me that night on his stoop while we drank. You can’t imagine how good it’s going to be if you wait, or so he who had not waited said. God, he told me, had designed things this way not only for a reason, His reason, but for our benefit. God has a plan for us, my father said. If we followed that plan, or so my father seemed to be implying, it would lead us to heretofore unknown pleasure. He could have called it the Pleasure of God’s Poon for Us. I think I’d likely have been better off if he had.

Last night, two days after having written the initial version of the penultimate paragraph above this one, I spent sixteen or seventeen dollars for the privilege of watching through a screen, in direct response to the money I transferred to her account via a small button, which allowed me to give her a so-called tip, a young woman who placed within her mouth a black rubber ball, which she secured via a small leather harness that went through the ball and tied together at the back of her head. The ball was two or three inches in diameter and rendered speech impossible. Spittle began to leak out of the corner of her mouth, some of the drops of which fell onto the small T-shirt which was the only article of clothing on her body. Earlier today, at dusk, after having lain naked in bed for more than five hours, during most of which time was spent reading The Magic Mountain, I put on sweatpants and coat and did a chore Elle had asked me to do. The chore was taking the trash to the dumpster, which is across the street from my building, at the opposite end of the building from our rooms. After tossing the bags into the bin I lit a cigarette and crossed the street, then walked slowly along the sidewalk between my building and the one across the way. Instead of turning right at the door of the apartment I share with my son and Elle, I continued on and up the slight rise into the small parking lot to the northwest of my building where I found myself looking up at the three pines which I have earlier so many times mentioned. To my surprise I now found only two pines standing there. The tree nearest my building was as it should be, but there was no tree on the other side of the one which for the five months I’ve lived here I have taken to be the middle one. Instead, this formerly middle tree, and therefore the Christ-tree of the three, if one considered them, as I have written, to be evocative of that famous scene of crucifixion, fifteen or twenty feet from the ground, bore a branch, as thick as the trunk, which pronged sharply to the west to form a crook that is best described as similar to that of a slingshot. This formerly middle tree, which when seen from my patio had seemed to be two trees, I now realized was actually one tree with two distinct trunks. Three smaller branches jutted straight out of the crook. These three all pointed northeast. The nameless girl whom I last night paid sixteen or seventeen dollars to temporarily render herself unable to speak while wearing only a T-shirt could not see me through her screen but I could see her through mine. My grandfather could see the remains of the boy. The remains of the boy could not see him.

Earlier this year, in the month before I moved with my wife and son into the apartment where we now live, that is to say in May, I began writing what I hoped would become a novel about a sexually inexperienced young man who, along with a voluble older friend, attempts to construct a resort (specifically a lodge, the details of which would be drawn from my imagined version of the one my father attempted to build but which burned down just before it was finished, in the spot where now stands the house of the rich man, which I have, though only in my mind, destroyed by fire) with money inherited from his dead father. In the novel this resort or lodge was to be explicitly devoted to acts of sex and sexual recreation, a sanctuary of sorts for sluts. I made good headway on the novel: ten thousand words appeared in that first and only month of its writing, the sentences arranging themselves in long paragraphs that moved through the text in a braided pattern that pleased me very much, folded together via a method I cannot now entirely recall, but which may very well have been the precursor to the method in use in this very text (perhaps God had a poon for me after all!). Due to various factors, among them the all-consuming act of moving itself, I was unable successfully to return to this novel-in-progress after we had moved into the apartment where I now sit writing these words at just after half-past one in the morning on the thirtieth day of November in the twentyfirst year of the new millennium, 1,987 years after the death of the man known by me for the first twenty-one years of my life as the Son of God, one part of the triune entity who created the world and the universe in which it hangs, suspended and rotating along an endless curve not unlike that of a cue ball struck with sharp English. I recently again attempted to take up the manuscript. In the first few days I found success in changing both the main character and his friend into a single character who happened to be a woman with many of the characteristics of the woman in the previous novel mentioned in these pages who spoke of writing a novel in two languages. This second attempt ended shortly after I had written a different version of a scene already described in the earlier pages of this account, of a writer standing at the precise spot in which they’d planned one day to kill themselves, or rather herself, although in that version, which was to be the new version of the novel abandoned back in the summer, I of course used different combinations of words arranged with altogether other architectural structures of syntax and grammar than in the version presented earlier in these pages, the chief architectural difference being that I made a more liberal use of the comma in the novel. (I have begun to weary of the comma and my persistent deployment of it in attempting to cordon off certain of my thoughts from other thoughts.) The other difference is that I wrote of the aforementioned writer standing in the spot where I long ago planned to one day kill myself instead of describing my actual self standing there in that selfsame terminal spot. I say that I paid her sixteen or seventeen dollars. She would’ve received only half that amount. The other half would go to the online platform that hosted her video feed.

All throughout the afternoon during which I have been revising the above paragraphs, fat flakes of snow have been falling like pieces of torn paper from the sky. When I stepped out for a cigarette about an hour ago one fell upon the space just within the crook between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, landing precisely on a scar at the base of my index finger, a crook which it now strikes me very closely resembles that of the previously mentioned Christ-tree, the snowflake melting within the space of less than a second, the drop remaining on the left side of the watershed caused by the ridge of the scar, raised at the age of three, as a result of the use of a foldable handsaw under the supervision of my father while cutting a branch: the branch wobbled and the blade jumped off it and into the meat of my tender hand, revealing for a split-second the gray flesh below the skin before the blood spurted out of it. Over these past three decades the scar has remained, and will continue to do so, I suppose, until the flesh falls away from the bone and there no longer remains any I attached to it out of which to scream bloody murder for my father. It strikes me now that this description of snow falling like pieces of torn paper has arisen in my mind out of the half-memorized opening page of a novel I first read many years ago, whose opening sentence describes the slow fluttering of many scraps of paper falling through the sky, and which astonished me when I first read it while sitting in the center seat of the empty center aisle of a plane which had lifted me high into the air from the city on the Front Range of the Rockies where I had boarded it and was bound south and east in the direction of my home state. Before buying the book in the airport bookstore where I found it I had just kissed a girl from the Pacific Northwest on the head, the first such contact of my lips with a female person to whom I was not related. I was seventeen and sure, as I read the novel’s monumental opening sentence in the empty-but-for-me middle aisle of that 747, that I had just experienced one of the most beautiful moments of my life, still drunk with the aroma of the girl’s hair and the softness of it against my lips as my eye followed the immense syntactical pleasure of the novel’s first sentence, which described those scraps of paper fluttering through the air as the result of one of the World Trade Center towers being struck by an airplane. I had met the northwestern girl at a two-week-long Christian apologetics camp for teenagers, which was located in an old hotel on the slope of a mountain not far from Pike’s Peak. The northwestern girl and I sat those entire two weeks at two adjoining desks—or, rather, not adjoining, for hers was a left-handed desk while mine was righthanded and so they touched. We wrote notes back and forth to each other during almost every hour of each of those fourteen days as various theologians attempted to inoculate us with their variously labored and often byzantine defenses of the faith, which tended to express themselves in the final analysis as some form of gotcha of the incorrigible non-believer. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen and the kiss on her head one of goodbye. I dreamed about this girl the night before last, in the sleep that followed my having paid the nameless young woman who was naked from the waist down for the privilege of watching her gag herself with a rubber ball on the other side of my computer screen. In the dream the northwestern girl was naked from the waist up. She spoke to me but I could not understand her, as if the world, or I within it, had gone mute. It was good to see her again. Toward the end of the dream, which no longer seemed to take place via the intermediary space of a screen, as I should say it at first did, but rather in-person, she sat down at a piano set against a wall in deep late afternoon light, the room filled with shadows, where she played a beautiful and melancholic tune which I could neither then nor now identify. Within the dream, which I had by then recognized as a dream, with the absolute certainty that only ever obtains in such oneiric circumstances, I somehow perceived she was playing this music for the express purpose of reminding me of the beauty she had brought into my life. When I woke, relieved of certainty, I was unsure why she’d felt compelled to do this. I no longer think of her often—perhaps a few times a year. I doubt she thinks of me at all. For most of my adult life I’ve believed that the entities that inhabit our dreams are only ourselves, just as I have increasingly for some time now believed that all of the characters and even the circumstances and landscapes and descriptions thereof in a fiction are always only the author—perhaps especially when they obviously aren’t. Part of what interests me here about my dream of the northwestern girl I have now not seen in more than a decade, is the sexual desire that I felt for her who was not her in the dream, but also was her, that northwestern girl herself, who was also part of my mind, which is but one part, as I wrote earlier, of the entity I generally consider to be myself. My desire for the character of the northwestern girl in the dream does not now seem to me a desire for myself but rather for another person, who exists nowhere now but in my imagination. But that is not quite right. The northwestern girl exists now as an entity in these pages, and as such has become, like the aforementioned novelist-character, a fiction. As she played the piano, which I now realize stood in a dream version of the house where my parents now live, which stands a little over a mile from where I now write these words at the wrought-iron table, my desire took on a melancholy, even dispassionate mood. What I wanted in the dream, or so I now think, writing this, was the experience of feeling what I had felt sitting at the desk pressed against her desk. But that is not quite right either. What I wanted was to feel again the sweet certainty that that seventeen-year-old version of me had felt on the flight home, reading that expansive opening sentence which so beautifully described one of the great disasters of our time, which itself set the heartbreak of our separation, that of the northwestern girl and myself, that is, in gorgeously tragicomic relief. (What creature more monstrous than a seventeen-year-old in love? While he reads of falling bodies he dreams of romance, and this failure, both his and that of the author who makes it possible, can be said to ennoble further writing. And yet: anything ennobling forms the foundation for future monstrousness.)

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Daybook will be published by Splice on April 26th. You can pre-order a copy here.

Nathan Knapp lives in Nashville, Tennessee. Daybook is his first novel. Twitter: @nate_knapp24