is no longer classified as a planet, and/or has been demoted to a “dwarf planet.” Our stuff keeps being redefined by experts, in celestial cases by astronomers. Since I “don’t understand,” I stick to fundamentals, reading for instance about Heath Ledger, avidly I might add, simply to find out whether he and Michelle Williams—with whom he struck up a love affair, ultimately marrying her, and having a child with her, while playing the other gay guy in Brokeback Mountain—were still together. No they are not; they separated recently, confirming my notion not that Heath is gay (necessarily) but rather that he had hoped to offset any impression that he was, and who could blame him, when he would be viewed universally in a film so starkly, so movingly, so straightforwardly and unapologetically, homosexual. The article was one of many I read in the World’s leading newspaper—a great number on subjects I never considered reading while living in the World—in bed every day. And I clipped them exhaustively, every so often looking out a window with a view. We liked the windows here, with big sliding glass doors; and the fireplace, and a round bush outside, dense with countless little red leaves. I was still far though from being able to enjoy anything when my attorney Warren called me, about money surely (the attorney here on Pluto said to me, after I asked her when the closing was, “All we want is your money”—implying that there was no need to be physically present) and I told him I was very homesick. Trying to be helpful—he is actually an old friend—he said, “Correction, what you mean is that you miss your old home.” Okay, whatever. One night when Ingrid was away in the World, having driven a U-Haul to pick up more things from her office, I played Castaway—you know, the one-man Tom Hanks film where he works for FedEx, his plane goes down, and he becomes stranded on an uninhabited island for four years—tearing up one of our FedEx boxes to cover this bedroom window, a ground level opening. On his island, Hanks has to invent fire, and a companion. He paints a face on a soccer ball from a FedEx box that washed ashore with him following the plane crash, and calls it Wilson, after the soccer manufacturer. The film is worth it for the scene in the surging ocean after Hanks has finally decided to build an escape raft, and Wilson, tied to the top of a pole, having got loose and drifted away, makes Hanks start screaming, “Wilson…Wilson …” tying his raft to his ankle, plunging through surf and underwater to reach him but to no avail. Ingrid and I had to sort of invent fire here on Pluto. I once had a fireplace in southwestern Massachusetts, my first house away from the World, a situation much more isolated than Pluto. I lived there, no other dwelling in sight, a crick river across from a sparsely traveled country road, sometimes alone, for five years. The women would come and go, not looking for Michaelangelo, and I often made it impossible for any of them to stay, or stay very long. I remember having a cord of wood, but not building any fires, although I’m sure some were. And Ingrid never had a fireplace anywhere. In this transition, we’re staring into a well-constructed fire, the andante or adagio over, lost in strands of flame that mingle and leap away then mingle again and curl around a log and vault upward and do all these pyrotechnics in their mesmeric fluorescence. Then we began chasing sunsets on hilltops and into valleys, brilliant streaking reds pinks and oranges, sinking into deep mauves and glowing crimsons stretching huge lengths of sky, none of which the astronomers have ever found in their hubblescopes. It’s the landscape, stupid, I tell myself, that I loved here. And my mother drew me to it in the early nineteen sixties when she kept my children during summers in towns with lakes, and I would drive up in one of my poor writer vehicles to see them on Sundays. I had a dream here one night about my mother whose name was Olive. A woman kept reappearing who turned out to be another illegitimate child of hers. She looked like Olive. I was getting ready to approach her and ask her who her father was when I woke up. Another character in the dream was GW Bush, a miniature version, like five foot three inches tall. He looked otherwise precisely like himself, and was always smiling when he saw me. In one part of the dream he was being whisked off in a tiny gray armored car, like a tank, all closed. I “don’t understand” the dream at all, and was soon diverted by a square picture of tree shadows dancing in sun on the bed. Meantime, I knew Pluto was dying because the leaves in their curled brown brittle death rattles were flying helplessly from their sturdy sticks. A paradise of yellows and breathtaking reds were heading for mulch. The tiny red ones I liked so much on the bush outside were desiccating themselves. We’re surviving yesterday. I look for the evergreens. And linger over a bunch of everflowers, brought by Winnie in a small pot of earth. Trees, denuded, are now our bookcases, assembled by Ingrid and covering walls floor to ceiling just like at home in the World. And trees of the beech variety are covering our floors. That was the first thing we did: have three hardwood guys come and tear up the thick, extremely offensive, neither green nor gray wall-to-wall rug. Now of course we can’t see the scrumptious new floor for the boxes. A woman across the way says she still has stuff in boxes after five years and since she can’t remember now what was in them, it doesn’t matter any more if she unpacks them or not. This is an appealing option. But our eleven thousand books make great decor on the walls, once wrested from their boxes. And anyway, room must be made for a new couch. Yes I went out with Ingrid miles away to a remote gigantic Jennifer convertible chain store, feeling certain I would see ONE couch there that would be practical, comfortable and aesthetic. Ingrid of course saw nothing. But she reluctantly agreed with my choice, a tweed pale mellow queen that you can sink into—and with extra certification as a pauper’s couch, very inexpensive the day after Black Friday. So for the moment we won’t fight over her Danish antique—as long as she finds a place to hide it.