That summer, things stuck to him. He would arrive at the desk or window or bookshelf to find a small piece of paper clinging, as though brokenhearted, to one or the other of his bare feet. At first they were only notes he had left himself—“investigate spiderwebs,” say, or “buy milk” or “forget her”—but by the end of June his feet produced messages he did not recall, like “the lakefront smelled of quinoa today” or “you make a better door than a window.” By Bastille Day he no longer recognized the handwriting on the notes as his own. He began to save them in a coffee tin by his bedroom window, in case one day he happened to tread upon some indication of their provenance or purpose, but on the first dry day of autumn he found them all gone save one, on the back of a wilted receipt from a gas station in Oklahoma, that said simply “socks.”

2006