"The Curfew," Jesse Ball

Today I read a book by someone I know. To call him a friend would overstate it, but we’ve spent time together. He’s always intimidated me but not in an unpleasant way, and not through any conscious effort on his part. He is simply apart – naturally so.

The main way we would spend time together was playing poker. It was a small group of us – five or six guys, all around 24. This was almost a decade ago. We would play for small stakes: $10 to play, $5 a big pot. But at the time – first jobs, new to the city – it was just enough to be meaningful. A $10 or $20 loss would sit in your stomach until morning. It was a thing that we could do that made us feel like grown-ups, some agency in our lives.

Jesse was a fantastic player. He was unpredictable. When he would enter a hand you could feel it, but still you felt like this time you might outsmart him. It would rarely happen. Always he would walk away the big winner. But no one begrudged this. He liked us fine and clearly enjoyed the company, but his mind was simply somewhere else.

For a few months he moved to New Mexico or Arizona and was a blackjack dealer. I wasn’t aware that he was doing this, that this was happening. But one day he reappeared and said that he had been dealing blackjack in New Mexico. This made plenty of sense. Our lives felt smaller.

He married an Icelandic woman. There is some relation to Bjork in some way, a fairly direct one but I’ve forgotten the particulars and it would make this to be something that it is not. I have never met this person but I imagine her to be steadfast, reserved. Very intelligent. Big, specific thoughts spoken late into the dark. A woman like that.

I say all of these things about Jesse, talk about him in this way, but know that it is not particularly my place to do so. These are simply the things I remember and I want to record them here. This small backstory.

Jesse has written three books. The second was called Samedi the Deafness, and it was a strange, fragmented novel about a stranger in a strange land. But the story was different from that. The way the story was told was lightly sketched and highly explained. Emotions and moments are detailed very plainly and with effort, and in their directness there was epiphany, but all else was void.

It’s been a while since I read it but I remember being moved by it very much. Afterwards I sent Jesse an email telling him how much I loved it, and he responded kindly. I sent another message, this time offering a theory about what he was trying to say. I don’t think he ever responded. Despite my disappointment I liked that.

This new book, The Curfew, the one I read tonight, is similar only it aches. There are a few pieces of art that actively make me want to be in a very deep love, an infinite horizon. “Ache,” “actively” – these are specifically chosen words. This book is one of them.

It’s a lonely book. A very lonely book. It is parsed, with spaces poetry-like. It overflows with sadness and love that is protective of others but most of all itself. The point of the love is the love and that is a very fragile thing in a dangerous world and that very much includes this one.

These are words that get used so often when people mean heartache and desire. Yearning, wanting, that aching thing again. All of these are right, except imagine that they are being defined for the very first time to mean precisely this thing. They mean all around you is a world that you are of and you have feelings about not particularly one way or another. But inside of that world is this other world, this other thing that does not make you special because many people have this feeling, but one that is special anyway precisely because it is yours. That kind of love.

This feeling makes the world smaller. We pair up, find happiness, look inward, both inside our own minds and hearts and then into our partner’s and then, finally, into that space that is created together. That space.

There’s beauty in this. I am particularly attuned to this love, I feel. But at the same time I fear its reductiveness. It makes the world special and mine but the world should not be mine. It just simply isn’t true, and the attractiveness of that falsehood brings anxiousness.

I’m sitting on an airplane having just finished it and I am overwhelmed with this understanding. I’ve had these feelings before. Most have been during autumn, a walk at night and the wind picks up through the trees and there’s that extrasensory thing that awakens and you travel through yourself and see the dim outline of truths that one day you will discover.

That’s what this book is. It’s called The Curfew. It’s written by Jesse Ball. Read it. Find love.