Los Angeles has been called the City of Dreams; also the City of Angels; Jim Morrison called it the City of Lights, but to me it was just a city. I often say that I’m originally from New York, but that’s not true. Although I did live in New York for a number of years, I was born in California, near San Diego, and for that reason Los Angeles has never been a dream for me, just a city, a city to live in. Nathanael West called it the City of Death, and maybe it was for him, but for me, at the moment, it was something else. At the moment I was walking along Vermont Avenue, alive in a way I’d never been before, alive to my senses and the world streaming in through my senses. I’d detached who I was from the web that had organized my world, and although a sense of self is a wonderful thing, as I walked along the sidewalk that morning, listening to the sounds of the cars, and the birds, and the occasional voices, I didn’t need any mediation between me and the world.

I’d parked my car in the post office parking lot, so it must have been a weekend day. Not that weekends meant anything to me. Not that anything meant what it normally meant. I was walking along the street, the sun in the sky, and I passed a bank where people were getting money. I didn’t get money. A white butterfly, or possibly a moth, flitted in front of me. The bookstore I liked was across the street, but the idea of reading symbols on pieces of paper seemed ridiculous. I was walking past a tree, and if I wanted to read something I could read the tree. Not read, but see, in the tree, whatever I wanted to know about the world. The tree was alive and the plants planted in front of the bank, they were alive, and under the sidewalk a root of the tree was pressing up, lifting the sidewalk, and I placed my foot on the section of cement, balancing first on that foot, and then the other, walking along like that until I came to a corner.

Across the street to my left was another corner, and I aimed my mind in the direction of that corner. I stepped off the curb, placing one foot on the black asphalt of the street. I heard the sharp wail of a car horn and then, a half second later, a car passed in front of me, inches from my chest. The car and the horn drove away and a woman with a baby stroller said something to me. She looked worried. “I’m fine,” I remember telling her. She probably thought I was crazy, stepping in front of a moving car. “DÃ³nde vas?” she said, and why did she want to know who I was? “DÃ³nde vas?” she said again, and then she pointed to the stoplight. “Esta seguro,” she said, smiling now, indicating that now I could walk. And I saw no cars coming, so I stepped off the sidewalk, telling myself I was fine. I crossed the street, and I could see people sitting outside, in the sunshine, in front of a Starbucks store. It was a coffee store, with tables, and that’s what I wanted, I thought to myself, not a coffee, but a place to sit. Not in the sun, so I walked in through the glass doors. It was cool, and warm, and there were people. I was amazed by the people, so intent on their work or their conversations. There weren’t any vacant chairs so I sat on the floor, legs crossed, my back against the wall. I assumed people were watching me, but that’s what I like about a city. Nothing is strange in a city. A man and a woman were sitting at a nearby table. The man was eating a cookie, and although there was music in the room, it was background music. Noise. And it mingled with the music of the noise of everything else. A man to my left was looking at his computer. A potted plant with long green leaves was to my right. Then the woman at the table stood up, the man ate the last of his cookie, and the woman positioned a bag on her shoulder. When they left I went to their table. No one seemed to notice that I wasn’t eating or drinking or using the products being sold. From the table I could see the whole room and the light of the room, coming from the street and the overhead bulbs and the people. I noticed the light given off by people, by their bodies. It wasn’t a blinding light, but I could see it, see them, and it was something I usually didn’t see. I’d never noticed so much light before, and music. The air conditioner seemed to be playing music, but no one was moving to the music, and I suspected that only I was hearing it. And seeing the light. And the raisin. A folded, slightly scrunched-up piece of tissue paper was still on the tabletop, and on the paper there were crumbs from the cookie, the oatmeal cookie, and along with the crumbs was a raisin. The raisin had been baked, so it was doubly shriveled, and I thought maybe I’d feel sorry for the raisin, shriveled up, left behind, unwanted, but the raisin wasn’t sad. It wanted nothing. Or maybe it wanted to be eaten. I hadn’t eaten for a while, and not having eaten, I could feel my empty stomach. And although I liked it empty, I picked up the raisin. And when I say light was emanating from the raisin, I don’t mean actual light. It was more like glowing. The raisin was glowing with its raisinness. And when I say the raisin was talking to me, I don’t mean actual speech. But by virtue of its raisinness and its luminosity, I got the idea that I should eat the raisin. I was holding it between my fingers, and there was the music of the world swirling around me, and the light bouncing off the objects around me, and bouncing off of me, back onto the objects of the world. I looked at the raisin, large and dark, with a sugar crystal clinging to its skin. The raisin contained an entire world, and I put that world to my lips, opened my lips, and let the raisin fall onto my tongue. I held the raisin in my mouth, feeling my saliva surrounding the little black seed, and then, with my front teeth, I bit the raisin in two. I could taste some sweetness when I did, and I let that sweetness slide over my tongue, and the idea of my tongue reminded me of Jane. I imagined her cheeks when she smiled, and then I bit the two halves of the raisin so that now there were four halves, or four parts, and I let my saliva and the raisin—it wasn’t a raisin anymore—mix in my mouth, and then I positioned the raisin back on my teeth and I began chewing. And the thing that had once been a raisin sent sweetness into my mouth, and when I swallowed I could feel the sweetness of what was no longer a raisin, but was now something else, something transformed, and I could feel it seeping its way down my body and into my body, and I could feel it, in my arms and legs and brain even, the nourishment of it, the sweetness and life, and man ist was man isst, I thought, and like an elixir coursing through my arteries, it was flowing through me, altering my blood and the cells that were fed by that blood, and I don’t know how long I sat at the table, but at some point I looked up and I realized that yes, the world was still there.

Jane was standing on the deck—taking in the view of the San Fernando Valley—when her phone rang.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” I said. She didn’t recognize me at first.

“Where are you?”

I was sitting in my car on some street. “Where are you?”

“Watching a movie,” she said.

I asked if I could visit her, she told me later, that later would be better, and we agreed to meet at a cafÃ© on Sunset.

I found a place to park and when I walked into the restaurant, Jane was already sitting at a table. She had her back to the window, and I sat across from her, facing the window.

She was wearing a sleeveless dress, and I felt like raising my water glass and making a toast, to the dress or to her, and I was thinking about what exactly I wanted to toast when she said, “Not with water.” Apparently you weren’t supposed to make a toast with water, but since my glass was raised, she raised hers. It had a piece of lemon floating in with the ice, as did mine, and we touched the rims of our glasses. I’d heard somewhere that when you raise a glass it’s considered polite to look at the person, so I looked at her, and for a moment she looked at me, and then we drank.

I ordered a chai with milk, Jane ordered an omelet with fries, and I noticed that, when she ordered, the table rocked slightly. When I jiggled it, I could see which leg was causing the wobble, so I grabbed a paper napkin from under my knife, folded the napkin, and bent down. I was kneeling under the table, my head under the table, lifting the uneven table leg and placing the folded napkin under the leg, when I saw her face poke down. She was looking at me.

“Better?” I said.

“Better,” she said.

And that’s when our food came. We sat there, eating and talking, like something we’d done a thousand times, but now it seemed…

“How was your day?” I said.

“What I did?”

“Or later.”

“Do I have plans, you mean?”

She moved a small vase of flowers to the side of the table and then slid the plate of french fries to a point equidistant between us. We ate french fries together, and when they were gone, all I could think to say was “You look different,” because she did.

“Than what?”

“What I imagined.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I guess.”

Then we paid the bill. She drank the last of the water from her glass, placed it on the round water mark, exactly where it had been before, and when she looked up, I saw her eyes and the life that seemed to spill out of them onto her face.

“Shall we go?” she said.

She stood up and then I stood up, and she announced that her car was around the corner.

In the Hitchcock movie North by Northwest, Cary Grant plays a man who’s mistaken for a spy. At first unwittingly, then grudgingly, and then, when he meets Eva Marie Saint, with a kind of relish, he actually becomes a spy. Near the end of the movie Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are chased to the cliff above Mount Rushmore. Below them are the faces of the presidents, staring out over the visitor center, and beyond that, to the Great Plains. Martin Landau, part of a gang of actual spies, is trying to kill them. He’s chased them to the edge of this cliff where they slip somehow and fall off the cliff, and they’re hanging on to the stone face of whatever president it is. We can see Cary Grant’s fingers holding on, and we can see Martin Landau step up to the edge of the cliff and place his foot on Cary Grant’s fingers. We can almost hear the bones in his hand crack, and he might easily fall to his death, but Cary Grant keeps holding on, and there’s a struggle and at the end of the struggle Martin Landau is the one we see falling downward into space, getting smaller and smaller, until eventually he disappears.

I followed Jane, past the cafÃ© tables and out into the sunlight, into the dry air and the evaporating clouds. We walked together around the corner and up the residential sidewalk, walking between the lawns, underneath the palm trees. When she saw her car she stepped into the street and was walking in the street and I was on the sidewalk. She walked to her car with her keys in her hand, and then, electronically, she unlocked the car doors. With a gesture of invitation she said, “Are you coming?”

In her gesture there was ease and grace, and although the gesture itself could have meant any number of things, the beauty of the gesture was its tone. Her tone. They talk about dreams having a tone, and although I wasn’t dreaming, I thought I knew what her tone was.

Theoretically I would have stepped off the sidewalk, onto the soft grass, and walked to the passenger door of her car. Theoretically I would have learned, from what I didn’t do before, how I would now move toward happiness. I would walk to her passenger door and I would open it. It would have been very easy. But instead of doing that, I stepped over the grass and off the curb, and I walked to the street to where she was standing.

“You’re not coming?”

I was standing on the asphalt, looking at Jane and the palm trees lining the street behind her. I was inside my body, in with all the millions of habits I’d spent my life creating. Her invitation was an invitation to be in the world and to see the world in a new way, to see her in a new, and therefore unknown, way. Going to my car and driving off alone, that was already known, and I felt the lure of the already known. She opened her door and stood by her door, holding the door with her hand. I was about to tell her about my car, that I was parked in a different residential neighborhood, in a one-hour-only zone, and I could feel myself about to speak, but as I was about to speak, instead of speaking, I remembered something. I remembered Cary Grant in North by Northwest reaching across the brow of one of the presidents, taking the hand of Eva Marie Saint, pulling her off the face of the president and into his arms.

I’m standing in the street, the image of Cary Grant in my mind turning into an image of Steve Martin, then turning into a single thought: If I’m going to become something, why not become something with Jane. She’s looking at me and I’m looking at her, and the distance between us is like an ocean. And I’m thinking about the ocean, and about how water, when it flows down a stream and enters the ocean, is doing the necessary thing. I see Jane, wedged between the door and the car, and it’s as if I can see myself. I see myself turn to my right and take a step. I take one step, then another, watching myself as I walk away from the place where I’m standing and the skin I’m standing in. I watch myself walk around the back of the car, onto the grass and across the grass to the passenger door. Part of me is standing on the asphalt, watching, and part of me walks to the door. It’s unlocked, so I open it. We both get into the car at the same time, and then she closes her door. I look over at her, fitting into the cushion of the seat, her hands in her lap, the steering wheel in front of her. The keys are in the ignition. She’s looking through the car window, and the light is diffuse but sharp. We’re both aware that I’m looking at her, and then she turns to me and looks at me. I see, as if through my eyes, and I see her entire face. I see the contours of her cheek and the shine on her nose and the freckles below her eyes. I can see her eyes looking into my eyes. She’s looking into my eyes but she’s seeing the person behind those eyes.