Second Person

What you love about it: The thick wooden planks of the walls, so dark a brown they seem perpetually wet, soaked through, as though tugged from the wreck of a ship long sunk, hauled to the surface and then the shore, transported by wagon or train or brute animal strength across the great plains of the country to be reformed, pressed into service—still dripping, still drowned—as the walls of this Midwestern bar. The cool, silver surface of the bar itself, swirled and burnished steel, the way it reflects—dimly, as deep water would—the lights that hang on long cords just above your head, the way it reflects those lights but nothing else (not your fingers, not your eyes). That there is no mirror behind the bar. This is not that kind of place.

You love the sheet of floor-to-ceiling plexiglass that separates the bar from the street, the way it bows, slightly, when you press against it, flimsy as a certain kind of life. In winter, you watch the snow blow sideways and pile up, filling the parking spaces, spilling over the sidewalk. The snow leaves no room for people or their machines, their machinations. Air slips through the window like a ghost, and the seats nearby grow cold. In summer, they're sun warmed, fought over. In summer, the door stays open.

Year-round, a thin border of ice runs the length of the bar, embedded in its back edge and kept fresh by unseen technology, a reminder—memento mori—that winter is never gone long, not here. This strip is meant to keep the glasses cool; you're not sure if it works, but you love it nonetheless. Others dig hearts and initials into the rime, scrape it away with credit cards. Once, you arrived to find the imprints, impossibly small, of a baby's feet. You scratch "Go Sox" in its sparkling surface once a week or so, from April to October, though you're hundreds of miles from Boston and the ice grows back over everything. Anything you write is soon devoured.

You write at the bar, or read, in the midafternoon on weekdays when there are plenty of seats. You take up three—your books and notebooks, beer and food—at the bar's far end, where no one minds. Between sentences, between thoughts, you can watch the sports analysts silently shouting at each other on one of half a dozen televisions. You can grow oddly invested in their unheard arguments, while your mind remains on the pages before you. You feel foolish if those pages remain empty, if your pen stops for too long. You feel held accountable, anonymous as you are. Your goals grow simple, physical: fill a few pages, finish a beer. Who knows what might come of them? This—this is what you love, and why. This sense of possibility, sitting still.

True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out—you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.

—HENRY JAMES

What you love about it:

You don't, to be honest. You find it cowardly or lazy or something in your own work, though you adore it in others: Lorrie Moore's early stories, Richard Siken's poems, the essay by Michael Paterniti that begins, "Go with him. Go out into the feed yards with Jack Hooker." Even then, however, it is not the voice specifically that you love but what those writers do with it, their humor and panic and pathos. The voice—the second-person point of view—is part of a larger whole, and you worry that your work lacks that largess.

Still, this is how you write at the bar, slipping into this voice unconsciously as you make notes and expand paragraphs. Never the third person; that would be a lie. You are far too close for that, far more intimately acquainted (though what does intimacy mean, if it is inescapable?). Sometimes, however, a note or paragraph begun in this voice will...