the last book I ever read (Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, excerpt one)

from Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner:

But as I made my way up College Street, past the war memorials and the court buildings, the reality of Eva receded from me, or I thought of her as safe, singing along to “Anti-Hero” in an adjacent world. I was surprised to feel less upset about my phone as I walked, confident as I was that I’d have a new one in the morning. I was experiencing a withdrawal indistinguishable from mild intoxication, the landscape made strange, the stones stonier, by my being suddenly offline, incapable of taking pictures, sending or receiving data packets, sharing my location, getting a MyChart alert or a work email or a small toxic hit of news or shitposting; I was having an unusual experience of presence—more aware of silicates glittering in the asphalt, the little plumes of vapor that were my breath, the articulation of branches and their shadows on the sidewalk—but I was also walking into my past, because this was a landscape so dense with formative memories and events, and because only in the past would I be deviceless. If I had a working phone, I thought, I could take a picture of the front of the Providence Athenaeum on Benefit Street, where Poe courted Sarah Whitman, and send it to the forty-four-year-old Mia, but since I didn’t, I half expected to see the twenty-year old version of her leaning against one of the columns, fishing the blue American Spirits out of her messenger bag, her black hair—not yet streaked with silver—wrapped up with a yellow cloth.

As I continued up College, the ghosts gained flesh: that kid with the hooded sweatshirt who just passed me head down—had he looked up, he might well have been Arjun a few years before he fell from the window in St. Petersburg; the older woman in the long down coat leaving the List Art Center as I passed became Caroline Sharpe, a professor who told our class, after someone complimented her necklace, that she kept a cyanide capsule in its opal locket for use in case of nuclear war, a practice she and her friends had started in the late sixties, when they were students, and which had led me to half suspect that any pendant concealed poison. But it wasn’t just people: the light arriving from the stars was younger, too, the birds dreaming in the tree cavities were the birds of the past, growth rings had vanished from the trees in which they slept—and this time travel depended on my being prevented from checking on Eva or Googling “songbird life expectancy” or “Caroline Sharpe” as I walked uphill.