You know how your life is just going along great, you've got the hot girlfriend and the fast car and the perfect apartment, you've got the job you can't even talk about with your friends because of how they just hate their jobs so much it colors their words green with bile, but god, yours, your job, it's awesome, it's like a giant guilt-free orgy with your clothes on all day long, you know how it's all going so great like that, and then one day you wake up and you think, out of nowhere, apropos of nothing, I'm going to die one day? You think, as if it were a stroke from the blue, One day there will be no me, and everything I've ever done and everything I've ever been will be for nothing. And suddenly, your brilliant life is ashes in your mouth, is wormwood and decay and rags on a corpse. And ever after you can't enjoy your hot girlfriend, who breaks up with you, or your fast car, which breaks down on you, or your perfect apartment, and those are the breaks. Oh, and you lose your job, but you knew that would happen when your boss asked you for a status report and you answered, "What does it matter?" and punched him in the gut. Tough break, though. You know how that is, when that happens?

            There's an app for that.

            Do you remember that time, in Vienna perhaps, or possibly it was Prague, with that girl, the one with the black silk dress that hid and disclosed her body like a magician's sleight of hand? How you danced with her all night in a café where a gypsy band played--so maybe it was actually Bucharest--and when the café closed, at some ungodly hour, you and she danced through the streets back to your pension, and made love for hours, both of you seemingly possessed of a supernatural strength and stamina and joy, and when you were done, you slept as if you were dead, slept for hours or possibly days, and woke, desperate to touch her again, but she was, of course, gone, and was not at that café, that night or any of the dozen or so after when you looked for her there, until you gave up, knowing that you would never see her again, except in your dreams, and that no one would ever touch your heart and your body like that again, so that ever since then you have understood every sadness? Do you remember that?

            There's an app for that.

            Do you ever think about how, late one summer evening, after your parents had gone to bed, your high school boyfriend, a big dumb gentle kid who played the trombone in the band, slid his big dumb gentle hand under your shirt, and you let him, because the summer was ending, and you knew you would never see him--not like this--again? And as that night wore on, you and he, bumbling and naïve, made love on the sprung couch in front of the big console hi-fi; you did not come, because he was in fact bumbling and naïve--it wouldn't be until your third year of college that you would have an orgasm--but it was wonderful and sweet, and when it was over, you felt that you loved him, and you always would, even when you had not seen him for many years. Because he was a big dumb gentle kid, he did not go to college, so his draft board shipped him off to Viet Nam, where a VC mortar shell, exploding at his feet, blew him out of his boots, his hands, his big dumb gentle hands, the first that had ever touched your breasts, coming to rest twenty yards apart from each other, hair crisped from the backs of his knuckles, skin charred.

            There's an app for that too.

            Your father raped you from the time you were four until you were twelve when, magically, he seemed to lose interest--in you, at any rate, because there was your little sister, but you didn't think about that, just as your mother never thought about what was happening to you; it was just easier not to. And when you escaped that house, you never went back, not all the time you were in college, not all the time in graduate school--and you did so well in both, because you were not interested in or distracted by any sort of romantic life; you had lovers, both male and female, but no one that you loved, and when they infringed, ever so slightly, on your solitude, you let them go without a second or even a first thought, because that's just the way you were. (Certainly you never told anyone the reason, and after a time you might have largely forgotten it yourself.) But then, finally, just before your 40th birthday, you met a man who fought for your attention without needing it, who just seemed to know when you would want him gone and when you would want him back, and both suited him fine, who fit you so perfectly that it seemed ridiculous not to trust him and to love him. No one made a big deal of it when you married in the Justice of the Peace's office in Daley Center, and your parents, with whom you had not spoken in decades, were not of course there. You could think of nothing more natural than finding yourself pregnant by that man, and you thought, throughout the pregnancy, how different a parent from your parents--from your father but even more from your mother--how protective of your child, you would be. And when your baby was born--a perfect little girl, ten fingers and toes--stillborn, you were devastated, and you cried for days. But you could not admit, not even to the man you loved, maybe not even to yourself, that you were perhaps a little relieved, because you could never be sure that you would be the mother that you hoped to be.

            There's an app for that, but it's still in development; expected release date: 5/2010.

            I walked past our old house last night; the windows were boarded and the weeds in the yard were shoulder high. It was exactly 2157 paces from my hotel room, and the same number, give or take, back. I burned 310 calories, making that walk.

            There's definitely an app for that.