Diary: Barry Yourgrau, Three Stories

Katsushika Hokusai, Feminine Wave (1845)

Peril

A monster is loose in the neighborhood. There are orders to evacuate. A fist bangs on my door, a voice shouts. I open up a crack. It’s the building super. “You gotta get out—” he pants hectically. His obese face is shiny with sweat. “No thanks,” I tell him, “I’ll be okay.” He starts arguing, then abruptly turns away at the screams resounding from the floor below. He lurches off toward the stairs. I stick my head out the door a moment. I watch the super reach the staircase, and then scream himself, and start to flail. I pull my head in and shut the door quickly and throw the lock. I lean there, heart pounding.

Then I walk slowly back to my desk. I pick up my soiled earplugs. I fit them back in. In the vague, muffled distance I hear the cries, shrieks, roars, the frantic running that suddenly goes dead quiet. I just hunch at my desk, resuming notes for a set of tales I’ve been writing, for as long as I can remember, about a man who drifts around the world in a glistening soap bubble he has managed to blow for himself. It’s an enchanting life, this guy’s; but also fraught and precarious … floating continuously on the edge of catastrophe … of his fragile craft at any moment bursting at a perilous height.