And because the idea of replacing the old with the new was philosophically appealing, I approved the repairs. He replaced the oil and the hoses-”You don’t want leakage,” he said-and because he was an old friend, he threw in some fresh brake fluid.

He snapped the belts, which looked perfectly fine to me, but he replaced them. He took off the wheels to show me, with a screwdriver, the brakes or the shoes of the brakes, which he said needed replacing. “I can fix anything,” he said, and he raised the car up on blocks in his small garage near the Gowanus Canal. Since Mike’s job was to fix cars, he found a number of things that needed to be fixed. At first it fell off, but I added more tape and eventually got it to stick on a suitable surface just above the radio. I borrowed some electrician’s tape and taped the photo to the middle of the dashboard. And to mark my ownership of the car I took from my wallet a photograph of Anne, a shot of her in perfect focus, during a snowstorm, turning to the camera, the world behind her completely blurred. She would be like a beacon, and I would use the car to follow that beacon. I wanted to transcend its prosaic nature, and so I transformed the car from something prosaic into something transcendent, into a car that would find my wife. Without it, and without its attendant optimism, why would I think a high-mileage used car was anything other than a mass of sheet metal and rubber.

I believed my connection with Anne had been real and would continue to be real, and while this was a kind of pride, it wasn’t necessarily bad. The achievement of my desire became not only possible, but certain. As I sat on a wooden bench, waiting for Mike to finish fixing the car, I had the hope, but the problem with hope is its fragility, and because of this fragility, after a while my hope began to mutate into something else, something more substantial and secure.

When I say that desire breeds hope, what I mean is that desire contains within itself the seed of its possible attainment. Marjane Satrapi’s Peresepolis 2: The Story of Return Terror, Eros, and Animal: The Fiction of Heather LewisĪnt Farm 1968–1978, Berkely Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Brake fluid bomb