Fixed Cycle
“There’s good self-consciousness, and then there’s toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”
–David Foster Wallace
He can only see the pattern. First a piece of the off-white expanse, and then the black zig-zags snaking upward, and at last a sliver of his face in the faded gold foil that descends in a straight-edged column over every fourth line. [...]
