In a minute, nothing we’ve said to each other and nothing we’ve done with each other will ever matter again.

I don’t want her to go. We’ve just made love: spontaneous, unexpected, volcanic, in the way that sometimes occurs between people who are usually more cautious, more guarded, more moved by rational calculation than whim. We met in public, in a park, and for her, at least, the charm she beheld in me was nothing that, coming from another human being, would have driven her from the usual schedule she held herself to in such things. The charm I beheld in her came too late for me for me to turn around and march in the opposite direction, perhaps saving her. In a few minutes, my nature will exert itself, and that will be a shame. But I insist on my lack of malice. This was, as far as these things can be measured, real: two random souls, separated by fate and type, who happened to meet and spark a connection supremely unfortunate for both; two people, for lack of a better word, though that word has a different definition for me than it does for her. We were both people. But she was a human being and I was not.

For anyone else, this could have been the beginning of a great love story, but of course it won’t be. Apologies have always been pointless, and so, for the most part, I have learned not to offer them, but sometimes the people I come across touch me in ways that I’m normally too jaded to feel, and so I tell them, as I tell her out of context, that I’m sorry.

She says what comes naturally. “Sorry for what?”

A few minutes later, she is gone. I am dressed and out on the street.

The air outside smells sooty, and for a moment I think of the ash as her cremains, though that’s not of course what’s happened. She is not contained in the odor of the burning; she has not burned, nor is she burning. The soot is more than what’s left of her. Her name was, and never was, Marisa. She was, and never was, an artist, twenty-seven years old, sustained by a trust fund. She had, and now never had, dirty blonde hair, hazel eyes, a raucous laugh interrupted by a hiccup, a sweet voice with the slightest touch of gravel, and thin lips with one feature that fascinated me, a skin tag that one day would have been intersected by permanent smile lines. She told me, and never told me, anecdotes about her life that, unlike most anecdotes people tell about their lives, came to points. In our few hours today, I knew that in some world, somewhere, I could have loved her for a lifetime. The tragedy is not that her story is over, but that it never happened, and that all the stories she told are now fiction.

It is a tragedy, but an unavoidable one.

All my tragedies are unavoidable ones.

They are also temporary ones.

This has not been a murder.

The air is sooty, and some of what I smell is the remains of newspaper. There are still newspapers. I remember the days before them, because I have been around longer than most nations, and it seems that I will experience the days after them, because the form is dying and I will long survive it. People will remember newspapers. They don’t become imaginary like people do. They don’t fade away and become nonevents, their place taken by whatever would have existed had they never come along. They are something that is, that will, when the last one dies, become something that once was. I am not responsible for what will happen to them. In the meantime, somebody is burning newspaper. It is part of the ambience of the day. I cross the street, hopping over a puddle that is the footprint of snow a week or so old, another thing that though gone has still left traces, like Marisa has not.

I am that summer, erasing the recent wintry past.

Marisa lived, and never lived, on a cross street of townhomes, many of them brightly painted, a few yellows, a few greens, a few other colors that I might be able to identify if it occurs to me to categorize. They may have been other colors once. There certainly weren’t always leafy plants in pots, crowding the sill of that one, and that sleeping cat, fortunately for itself not noticing me, has not been a resident in all the days and nights since its residence was built. The bulge in her belly suggests she is pregnant, and noticing is dangerously close to liking her. That is not a nice thing to do to a cat. Accordingly, I look away. It is a close call, one of many I have in the course of any given day. Life in a world with that cat and with that cat’s progeny will go on, and in this way I touch a life in the way I best can: by not touching it, by permitting it.

It has been a few minutes since I told Marisa I was sorry.

She said, “What for?”

We had just both spent a day and night enjoying one another’s company, energized by the fresh, spontaneous chemistry between us. We did not collapse into bed. We sat on the rug, on two sides of the long coffee table, using the two angled couches as backrests. We talked, her about her likes and dislikes, her career, the origins of the dark wooden statues that filled whatever part of this room wasn’t shelving teeming with books. I returned memories that I presented as coming from my life, that had come from others, but which no longer belonged to anyone who had ever lived on the planet Earth. She had a way of sitting with one leg bent and her knee pressed tight against her breast, hugged as if like an outcropping that she needed to cling to, in order to avoid being carried away by tide. It was an unconscious display of emotional need, but an endearing one, and I mourned a little, even while smiling at her, showing no sign of the grief that came from knowing that she would soon vanish from the world.

It would be so easy to think of myself as Death.

But I am not Death.

I know Death.

Death is the sudden aching void.

Death is the absence that cannot be filled.

Death is the corpse.

Death is the grave.

Death is the aftermath of a life lived.

But what if the life has never been lived?

Not at all?

That is the thing I am.

I am erasure, not cessation.

I said, “I apologize too much.”

“So do I,” she said. “I bump into inanimate objects and tell them I’m sorry. They somehow never appreciate that.”

“I hate that about inanimate objects. They’re bastards.”

“They’re the worst. But tell me. Why are you sorry?”

How could I tell her I was sorry because I liked her?

She thought I was a man. There were a few minutes, at the start of the thing, when I thought she might have thought I was a woman, or maybe somebody unaligned, but no, she thought I was a man; she said something, finally, to clue me in. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. I am anybody I need to be. To a child, I may be another child. To an adult, I may be another adult, a generic one, or even a particular one who amuses them for some reason. I process to occasional people as just “Friendly Stranger.” Sometimes I am foggier. Sometimes I am just a target of friendliness, the urge almost everybody has to connect even when there’s nothing to connect to.

I am potential. I am the spot in the earth that makes hair stand on end, just before it calls the gathering lightning to itself. Sometimes it is a pretty spot. Sometimes it is not. Sometimes it has character. Sometimes it does not.

To Marisa I was someone worth getting to know. A potential bed partner, to be sure. A potential long-term lover, certainly. Not just a stranger to scratch an itch and then forget forever. Her instincts had found me attractive and so she had said hello, her smile broad, her gaze wary only in the sense that nobody can be sure that their instincts have steered them correctly, into the orbit of a good person and not a monstrous one.

I am both monstrous and not.

I am monstrous in the sense that if you meet me, if you like me, if your gaze does not slide away from me without any active engagement, if you speak to me, you will soon be gone.

I am a good person in that I want to be your friend in the time you have left.

I told her it was just a stupid thing to say and that she should never mind.

“You’re mysterious,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“And creepy.”

“I hope not.”

“I like some creepy. Just not too much.”

I said, “Okay, then. I just hope I fall within your threshold.”

We had been together a long time, hours, an unusually long relationship for me. It had even survived a couple of pee breaks for me, a brief period of actual sleep. That was almost unheard-of, but not quite. Sometimes it was over in seconds, once or twice in days. It helps if we are not apart for any significant length of time. Once, I was in a jail cell with a man who had strangled a neighbor’s pet dog. Why he did this I still don’t know. He was certainly not a pleasant man. But we were in close confinement and so there was no moment when I walked away, or he did, and so we got to spend an extended period of time together, something that I did not consider a privilege. Ultimately, the universe shifted, and I left, and he was behind me, still in the cell, shouting something rude as I turned the bend of the corridor. The world is not lesser for him being rewritten to nothingness, not in the same way that it is lesser for Marisa being gone, and never having lived.

I am not Death.

I am existence exercising its right to second thoughts.

Those who vanish after I know them vanish in whole. Every mark they made in the world goes away. Every word they spoke is erased and unspoken. Every friendship they ever had is rewritten with emptiness. Every vandalism they did to the fabric of the world is undone.

Parents, siblings, friends, and lovers forget them.

Offspring no longer recall their origins and consider themselves orphans.

Nobody lives in that apartment where she and I made love. Nobody ever did.

She offered some additional interrogation. I did not begrudge this. “I’m sorry” was an odd thing to say. But I can be persuasive when I want to be, and she was soon mollified, and so she melted into my shoulder, teasing more sleep, offering more love. This was, I thought, the first act of a love story, and I wished it could be: Permanence would be a novelty. As sometimes happened, I concentrated on her solidity, the realness of her, the mysterious complicated history of her, the kindnesses, the heartbreaks, the neuroses, the paradoxes, the grace notes that made all human beings too difficult to summarize within even the longest books. Were it possible, I would have held on to her by sheer will.

I am, of course, not a creature of sheer will.

I am not a monster with malice, nor a creature who can decide what goes away.

Here I am out on the street, in a world that no longer counts her among its population, on a street where she will no longer sleep behind one of the windows. I see an older woman, fat of neck, gray of eyes, leaning on her sill, nod at me as our eyes meet. Does she nod? Yes, in the sense that strangers can meet one another, recognize each other as human beings, acknowledge one another with a gesture confirming that yes, they see one another. Maybe in another minute she’ll tell me it’s a nice day. Maybe I’ll say yes, it’s a nice day. And maybe nothing will happen to her, because that interaction is fleeting even for me.

It is when a relationship persists for even a few seconds longer that the terrible thing happens.

And then, sometimes, if I like the person about to be excised, I stay, keeping them around for as long as I can.

It’s the best I can do.

I am out on the street, my time with Marisa just a few minutes behind me, my little moment with the woman in the window about thirty seconds behind me. I am nobody. I am a towering giant of a man, frightening to contemplate, forehead bulging from giantism. I am a dwarf woman, disabled, hobbling by on a little cane. I am a bratty child, looking for trouble to get into; leering, proud of myself, thinking mischief is the best possible use of my time today. I am a twisted wreck in a motorized chair. I am whoever I am wanted to be, and the central irony of my existence is that if it were up to me I would either be one, or none, of the above.

It is because I am looking at my feet that I see the yellow tennis ball as it rolls into the side of my shoe.

I stare at it.

Do the people who manufactured this ball know that it will be an instrument of fate that, for one person at least, will change everything? Because I can feel the potential. I can understand the moment. I am the second hand on an analog watch, forever sweeping the dial, marking all events whether irrelevant or momentous. If a second hand could understand that the moment it passes is death for someone, would it possess a sense of responsibility or would it know that it is only an irrelevancy?

A boy says, “Hey, mister, can you gimme that ball?”

Unwillingly, I look up. And there they are: a boy, about ten, and a girl, about five, sitting on the five steps leading up to a townhouse’s front door. They are brother and sister, their resemblance to one another profound, marked by button noses and natural frowns of concentration. Their front walk is behind a locked gate, and their ball has bounced away from them, escaping their little pen via the gap between rails. I am mister, a responsible adult, one of many strangers in this world who they should not speak to. I can hear their mother warning them, do you know what kind of people walk the streets? But she has not warned them of me in particular, and all he has asked me to do is throw a ball.

They have parents. Grandparents. People who shaped entire lives to accommodate them. Parents who in a few minutes will have two extra rooms that never had toys in them, lives that have suddenly been edited of all complications that went along with children.

I pick up the ball and lob it over the gate. It bounces once before the boy catches it.

“Thanks,” the boy says.

“You’re welcome,” I say.

The girl smiles, revealing a gap in her teeth.

I walk away.

I mourn on a daily basis, not just for the Marisas, but the Eugenes, the Bobs, the Anyas, the Siddiqs, the Carissas and the Toshiros. But I am not monstrous. The lightning does not hate the spot it strikes. The lightning is just responding, as it must, to potential.

The last time I met a creature like myself she sat on an opposing park bench, at the moment, like me, nobody in particular: a hole in the world, the vague outline in a place that might, at any moment, contain absolutely anybody.

I call that one “she” out of convenience. “He” and “It” and “Them” are all equally appropriate. We, the things like us, are like so many of the beings who call themselves people, prisoners of the way we’re perceived, and we were at the moment, perceiving no one but each other and being perceived by no one but each other. What we saw was possibility, empty but raging.

We conversed for about half an hour, the kind of pointless, vacant conversation two people have when there is no chemistry between them, when they are inert to one another: blather about current events, about the weather, about whatever bullshit there’d been on TV recently, on those rare occasions when we experienced the luxury of being in an enclosed place with a locked door and no other human beings who needed to be accommodated. We usually only get that opportunity when the human being was already gone and we were not yet ready to move on.

On that occasion when we met, the companion of my own kind said, “It’s such a relief to talk to someone and not feel the stakes.”

“Yes,” I said.

Did I like her? How could I? She was nobody. Like I was nobody.

We were only somebodies when we were with those whose needs we reflected.

This is the terrible thing about being one of us: Sometimes, we prefer being nobody.

In my last seconds with Marisa, who no longer exists, who no longer ever existed, she tasted her morning breath and said, “Ewww. I’ve gotta go brush.”

I said, “Got an extra?”

“I think so. What do you want to do for breakfast?”

I said, “I’ll take you out for pancakes.”

It was, of course, an empty promise, because she would be gone by breakfast. But at least she had the promise of pancakes, anticipation of that and of more time with me, the discovery she had made, the discovery that she thought she was going to continue to make. It made her smile. It was one of many, many thousands of smiles that were about to disappear even in retrospect, that would reduce the brightness of this planet where we lived by the precise warmth of her presence.

She said, “I’ll hold you to that.”

And so she toodled off to the bathroom, closing the door behind her, and I listened for the sound of water running in the sink, but that never came. I perceived what followed as a visible flicker. She had vacation photos on the wall: on the nearest wall, six of them. And then five. And then four, the ripples of her absence spreading outward, to every friendship she’d ever had, every effect she’d ever had on every life she’d ever touched, every jostle against any stranger in any crowd. That townhouse, is it available? Hmmm. Our records say it is. No, I don’t know why nobody ever claimed it. Our records say that it’s been vacant for eight years. Didn’t you have a roommate in college? No, I didn’t. I don’t know why. I was never assigned one. I guess I was just lucky. No, we only had the boy. We’d hoped for a daughter and even had a spare room to raise her, but somehow it never came to be.

Marisa had glanced at the mirror and for a moment marveled at what she could only explain as some kind of optical illusion, the towel rack on the wall behind her still somehow visible, through a head that somehow did not block it from view. That’s strange, she thought. And then she no longer thought that, had in fact never been around to think that. Just as, a few minutes later, the little boy and girl on the stoop no longer had a yellow tennis ball, because they had brought the tennis ball and then had never brought the tennis ball. The universe adjusted itself. I walked away.

I continue to walk away.

I continue to encounter others.

I continue to mourn.

I am the moving finger, unwriting.