Renata Adler

A friend tells me he's had a really hard life, that he's suffered much too much, far more than most other people, and then looks at me to see if I believe him.

His eyes are quite blue, but the rest of his face looks like a piece of off-white paper that's been splashed by cold water and has puckered up in certain places.

I could see that his pretend life of persecution could turn into a pretend life of martyrdom unless I said something that pretended to be sympathetic.

This moment between us is like the moment a small bird hits the window. You're inside, sitting in a comfortable chair reading The New York Times, when the sparrow flies into the glass. The glass doesn't give in and the sparrow dies. You don't have to look, you just know the sparrow is dead.

This moment between my friend and I both happened and didn't happen like the way I explained it so that it's like an invention, a new form of fiction in which neither of us actually knows what happened to be true, to actually be the case, but instead we think it is the case and so it comes to pass.