“I am a man and I am not certain what that contains. It seems there is this face in the round, silver-edged shaving mirror. . . . There is this that can be seen . . . and yet, there is this other, this depth that reaches down behind the face, a darkness that roots in me like weeds at the bottom of a lake—occasionally I feel them moving in the murky waters.”

I am a man. My name is Ismael Cassius. I am, as I write this, a witness—an emissary—although other identities I wore for a while.

When first you met me, I wore a starched white shirt and a necktie. I carried a shoulder bag and a magazine, sometimes a bottle of mineral water, sometimes a pair of running shoes. I was a lawyer and, like you, I rode the number-seven city bus each weekday morning. The easy descriptions you learned early on: I was thirty-four years old, of some Italian, some Portuguese descent, from a family of lay people, factory workers, farmers, mostly, up state. I was living then in the city a mere diagonal three blocks from you. When first I met you, I gave you my name, Ismael, although you would seldom call me by it. I became Ism, Is, I, to you, in your delicate inky scrawl on papers, or in your soft voice off of your little tongue, your lilting pink tongue in your mouth, my Love.

I am a man and I am not certain what that contains. It seems there is this face in the round, silver-edged shaving mirror, and there is this topicality where others see me and where I function—where I button up the white shirt and place silver-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of my nose, where I go to the office and turn on my computer, or to the café on the corner for coffee, or the deli for lunch sandwiches, or to the gym where I run laps. There is this that can be seen and I can resist the rest of it—the other—and yet, there is this other, this depth that reaches down behind the face, a darkness that roots in me like weeds at the bottom of a lake—occasionally I feel them moving in the murky waters.

This topicality, Ismael: puts on a fat, gold wristwatch; tosses the crusts of his toast upon a folded newspaper; argues over paperwork at the office; lays, so often, his palms down slowly on the polished mahogany desktop. And beneath this surface, there is this lake, the lake of my human heart. I can be so clouded by these waters. I don't know where they come from, or what they carry in their low, relentless night turbulence. This lake, I—in an instance I turned from you, you who had otherwise held me so loyally in your gaze.