Several years ago, I decided to create an ironic occurrence rather than a tragedy, a cautionary tale rather than the wretched injustice it really was. This is a neat trick, this business of utter detachment from everything less than great that goes on, this position of being perched on a cartoon drawing of a crescent moon, looking down at all the lonely people, all the stupid ones with their souls so foolishly close to the linings of their coats. What my friend did was catch a virus from the air. This is true. This is, in fact, the only aspect of the event that remains unequivocal. I now suspect it was hantavirus—the strain that is passed along from even the most remote contact with rodents—but there was never any concrete evidence of this. Like a tuft of dandelion seed, this virus wafted into Brian Peterson’s body as he walked down the street or sat by a window or perhaps even slept in the bed he’d purchased from Jensen-Lewis, the bed with the Ralph Lauren sheets for which he’d fastidiously shopped at Bloomingdales—“fabric for living.”
