May 3, 2003

• Exercise 3, part two: Write a half-page to a page of narrative, up to 350 words, which is all one sentence.
  
  I cheated again. I couldn’t keep the sentences going, just like in the Marquez one, so I made up for it by having two different stories. First I did this:
  
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  He looked over the checklist — the helicopter, the bowling balls, the torrential flood — and it occurred to him that this list was like the surrealist poetry he and his friends had constructed in their college years, and he wondered where his scrapbook of those times had gone to; he was making a mental checklist of places to look for that scrapbook — in the drawer of the desk in the study, in the credenza behind the office desk, in the storage room — and it occurred to him that he was making another list that might possibly be another surrealist poem if only he could remove them from their obvious connection such that they were as strangely connected as the first list.
  
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  WEAK. Then I continued the story from before:
  
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  Standing frozen I couldn’t move a muscle except for my heart pounding, my lungs beginning to grate against the inside of my chest in desperation, for I was still holding my breath and could feel the explosion beginning with the red feeling in my belly; my lungs and the red feeling became one with each other as I stood there frozen looking at the very thing I wanted most, my heart pounding, flopping like a fish out of water, a salty, briney feeling between my chest and my ears somehow, around my neck like a brace, a cast, a tight corset, and I felt myself inhale, and I heard the scream begin.
  
  It was outside me, a wail, something far off, something someone else was doing, as if through cotton or through a brick wall, and there was a slow realization that the wail was coming from inside the red, salty feeling, inside me, through me and filling the room with a piercing howl of force that surprised me even more; the howl grew louder in surprise, and I heard no gap in it when I paused to breathe – it reverberated, flowed through the room like a torrent, a tornado, a hurricane and she woke and stood in the eye of the storm, her eyes fixed on me in horror, and I could see it clearly, as if it were noontime and the harsh sun were pouring through the window with such force as to break the panes of glass.
  
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  Yes, I’ve had panic attacks.

  • 4:20 pm
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