Susu, in his public life, was something of a god of the sun and of darkness. He would collect dung and roll it around into perfect spheres on the ground. He laid eggs in the perfect darkness of the center of a round ball of dung until his offspring ate their way out of the dark. In Mitzraim, the Egyptians believed that the figure of the artist was to be a something which emerged from nothing, as the scarab beetle’s offspring emerge the dark balls of waste.

But they believed the artist must also have a social function, as the artist eats the waste in order to turn it into new bodies. Susu likewise wanted his practice to be in relation to the social. But to Bibi, his analyst, he admitted that his greatest desire was to make art that was perversely private, that was even ideologically and structurally opposed to public life. Stuck between wanting the Egytians to like his art, and wanting to speak to the Jews of Egypt, but not the Jews of Zion, he produced less than he would have had he worked under the notion of never being seen at all.

Today we walk and run in the desert. At each mile the horizon is a mile further off. Between the eye and the horizon the distance never changes, and though there are variations, variations in the stretches of land, the lake of dark sand. The variations are no more to us than the sign of repetition, the possibility of perceiving a monotony that went into the bones like the fever of the plague. It is born of itself, this desert, it is born by itself and ends in itself, like so many faggots fucking. We are fucking in the desert but we are not fucking. We are waiting for home to arrive.

Here we begin to form the Idea of Oneness. We, the Jews, became aware on the first day after walking fifty miles into the desert of this Idea of Oneness. And we were engulfed by it on the second day after having covered another fifty miles without anything having changed. But is it true, as Pasolini wrote, that thereafter the Jews had no other idea than that, the idea of oneness? Is it true that the Jews became engulfed with the monotonous oneness, and that from then on the desert was like a dream that allows no sleep and from which one cannot waken? Is it true that the “habit” of the idea of Oneness which the desert assumed in the senses, projecting itself like something that does not change in the inner being of whoever crosses it and without being able to emerge from it any longer (although it is entirely open) and however great the efforts he makes cannot forget it even for an instant—the habit has become almost a second nature, coexisting with the first and little by little corroded it, destroyed it, took its place?

Just as thirst little by little kills the body that suffers from it?

The Jews became sick with oneness, sick and overwhelmed, writes Pasolini.

Eventually they came to an oasis, and the village of a tribe of a different race was there.

I walked in the desert before you came and wrote to you of the desert. I disagreed with Pasolini’s conception of the Jews wandering in the desert on teleological grounds, but I admitted to you that the image of the Oneness seemed to be the birth of cinema, and to locate oneself as a Jew at the birth of cinema was perhaps better than considering oneself a feminine material upon which that idolatrous figure of Christ has been cut. We spoke of our suspicion around the visual beauty of the metaphor of the desert, and about the fact that the real desert is the breeding ground of sand roaches and pit vipers among other forms of life for whom the land is incorrigibly plural.

The days and the nights passed, Pasolini wrote, and so too did our days and nights pass.

But for what reason, he asked. To cover and uncover a single oneness, which was there in order to be covered and uncovered without anxiety across long twilights full of a melancholy that is completely without sound, he answered. But that oneness was not in fact an object, rather it was a master with will. It was Hashem, who was willful, but in the eyes of Pasolini, as passive as nature herself. She had abandoned himself to the rhythm of the days and the nights, and she was one for whom there was complete unity between symbolic time and the physical light of the sun moving across the sky and below the horizon. It was Pasolini’s error to feminize her, I said.

Oneness can’t be gendered. I wasn’t sure of this, but I said it anyway. I wasn’t sure if I could justify it. All I knew was that we wanted to be the same, and I had often assumed this meant becoming boy together. “Boy” was something adjectival for Susu. Sometimes I imagined it had a visible physical quality, like the coloration of an animal’s fur, calico or black or fawn. The idea of being boys together became the idea of wearing fur coats together, or wearing the same print: hunting camo, army camo, digital camo, or traffic cone orange. Sometimes even blue gingham.

Susu went west, I went west. Before then we had twinned each other in the habit of running. I was going west largely in order to run, and I supposed he was running too, running from his car, running to his car, running from whatever lodging he had booked along the way. However much running and Susu had been inextricably linked in my mind, I thought of him not at all, while in Colorado, with which I felt myself to be in a uninhibitedly monogamous relationship.

We twinned each other in running, both knowingly and not. I knew from a website for runners the exact mileage, pace, and route he had taken each time he set out for a training run. Since my profile was public and attached to my name, I wondered if he’d see that I had started running after a nine month break only after he became my patient. But I didn’t need him to look me up on the site for him to know I was a runner, as only a few weeks in, he and I saw the other approaching from opposite directions along a narrow stretch of the East River running path. That morning had been my first on the East River; I was shocked by the success of my “stalking.”

But in Colorado, he ceased to exist for me, so wrapped up in the landscape of my mind I had become, so that Susu became ambiently and omnipresently present, like T.S. Eliot’s description of the “third voice” (neither “first” nor “second”), that I could no longer identify the outlines of his body in my conscious imaginary, as if I had finally found a way to swallow him whole, much like a python, the animal I most immediately compared him to. He was a perspective that was everywhere present in my eyes and body as I trained myself on various scenes, the scenes I saw as I was running, to the extent that when I came back, sated with the west, sated with the running body I had trained up till that point to traverse 50, even 60 miles a week, I no longer had the will to run, nor the will to admire or like or feel the hot infatuation that had been building with him for months. Did I become blind? Or iron deficient, or merely overtrained?

Recently I dreamt I missed the Jersey City 5K, which I had signed up for when Susu was still real to me. I dreamt that it was October 5th, and I had incredulously asked myself if it was not possible that October 5th was tomorrow. Or if it was possible that the race had not yet begun in spite of the fact that all races begin in the morning of the assigned date. I dreamt I missed the race because I am already missing the race, insofar as I am not running interval sessions and workouts, insofar as Susu no longer suffuses my perspective, insofar as I can’t bring myself to even get past the image of running a loop of Prospect Park. Susu, where art thou?

I had been with someone, I had been dating someone real, someone I slept with and spent time with outside of any professional framework, when Susu first walked in through the door. My running took its first nosedive during that first week of separation from the boyfriend, whom I affectionately called Cherry. And it was at this time that I realized that with the end of the time with Cherry was the end of the infatuation with Susu. My running and my lack of interest in Susu continued to stagnate as I met a new boy named Andy whose name I could not like. I had matched with him on a dating app when I was in Colorado, and felt predisposed to forming a new connection with someone “of the west.” I saw a photo of him hanging like a gecko off, all four limbs attached to the overhang of a pockmarked boulder in Arizona, and this was enough for me to make a move. We soon spoke for several hours about our experiences of the West.

With this substitute for Susu I began to fuck. I was dissatisfied and returned to another lover and cheated for a while, in a dramatic triangle not worth recounting. In the mean time, my pace kept on dropping, my heart rate kept on rising. I certainly felt very little enduring emotion for Susu, who became more vivid and almost lascivious in his delightful descriptions of races he ran and of his workouts. This did not inspire any changes in my running habits; instead I began to climb more. Andy was most pleasing to me when he was climbing and trembling, and watching me climb, which he claimed made me look especially hot in his eyes. I liked that he was observing my growth and providing advice, and becoming more accountable to himself in his own climbing, which had diminished during the six months of travel that had directly preceded our encounters. I began to grip the sides of the bed differently when I lay on it, feeling its edges to be the top of a climbing wall made horizontal. I felt his body as a collection of strange jugs and crimps and slopers, of things to grip onto without gravity weighing me down.

Then there was an essay I wrote about running, which I worked on fastidiously during this time. My burgeoning and doomed attraction to Andy inspired me to make something finished that I might share with the world, and my failure to satisfy Jerry had further impelled some attempt to explain what I had been escaping from through running, and through my infatuation with the fantastical patient of mine. And though I have since erased it, I remember almost everything, as I remember everything Susu says in his sessions, or at least everything he says may return to me.

One of the notable claims made in the essay was that running represented a “disavowal of personality,” and that in this sense, and only this sense, running felt like an act of rebellion. Otherwise, it was absolutely anti-rebellious. It contained nothing but rote obedience to the demands of the ego and superego; only insofar as it represented a “disavowal of personality” did it represent anything insurrectionary. Disavowal of personality meant that I would no longer participate in an economy by which the interesting quality of Bibi’s personality was exchanged for someone else’s pleasure, a pleasure which was alone interesting to Bibi, but which ultimately just lubricated the relations between two subjects who were thinking awry, thinking aslant, one wanted something like the plenitude of domestic life built together, the other wanted nothing but the fleeting tenderness of friendship expressed through tangents and curveball reunions.

It was the boringness of running, the character of corporate discipline inherent in the activity, the project management of it all, which gave Bibi the strongest sense of edification in what was otherwise a flimsily constructed hobby. Was the crush on Susu also a flimsily constructed hobby, then, given that it had been the true source of Bibi’s desire to run? Surely it had been, or was becoming so. Bibi could no longer muster a desire to run, for she did not love Susu “for real.”

It was not long after she had returned from Colorado that Susu sent her a photograph. The photograph was of an idea he had constructed over the course of months in analysis with Bibi. Its subjects were the coffin he had constructed, the very pretext for his own journey out west, and himself, and a landscape. The coffin lay in the middle of a landscape, while Susu sat beside it, his back was turned to the camera, evoking the classical Rückenfigur of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea Fog. Bibi did not know how to respond to it emotionally.

Susu became a fictional character to her from then on. He became a character in a painting, a character in a photograph. When she forgot him, she figured, she (or he) had become pregnant with a new fictional version of the other. And when he came back, she noticed that she felt something different, something new: little fictional emotions. She felt a fictional shock when she saw the photograph. She felt the fictional pangs of a father: Susu was sending her photos of their newborn child right from the hospital, and she was now not just a parent, but a father. Bibi was no longer a lusty young woman sitting before her handsome maiden, but the father to a child!

He had once described to her a project he had done around the idea of the Jews wandering in the desert, as Pasolini wrote in Teorema. Without knowing where it had come from, Bibi found the chapter from the book. From her giyoret perspective, it was wonderful in its simplicity.

Then she wrote essays on the particular anthropology of Jews in the western states: Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah. She ran ultramarathons and interviewed all the Jewish runners. She very nearly met Susu’s uncle at a track and field event, and almost interviewed him before stepping away and reconsidering. Bibi realized she could send the manuscripts to Susu and allow him to publish them all however he wanted to. She could use a fake name.

No one would have to know it was me, his analyst, who built the pyramids with Susu.