We drove to Long Island and stayed in a Holiday Inn and brought four William Gaddis novels and two yellow legal pads and seven Bic Cristal pens but no extra clothes. We didn’t leave the hotel for six days. When we got bored, we thumped the heavy books against the bed and coughed animalistic grunting noises into the heavy comforter. At night, we talked about the grand ambitions we hoped to achieve amid our horrific and terrifying nightmares. Mine involved a skyscraper in the center of a cornfield; yours, a city on the bed of a lake in the middle of the Arizona desert. In the morning, sharp white light cut through the scalpel-slice gap in the curtains beside the bed. In the afternoon, while you toiled away on a hotel treadmill in your street clothes, I wrote the word ingurgitate at the bottom of each page of my yellow legal pad. But I meant something else entirely, something I fear I will never possess the language to express to you in full.