When you change the center of the world, people tend to get upset. Certain people do. When you change the center of the world, certain people recognize your distance and try to expose it with hypothetical questions asked among friends across a coffee table. If you were on a desert island, who would you want with you?

I am on an island and I have things with me. Like all the important books. Things you take with you when you want a reminder of things before you started over.

It is not as hot on the island as you would think. Because it is always night. This makes it hard to read books on the island. This makes it hard to carry out the things you’d need a light for.

But you don’t need a light for everything. And this is why people ask the question.

Everyone knows and no one says. That the choice has nothing to do with who can catch fish or smash open a coconut. Still, people publicly justify their choice. I’d take so and so on the island because they can build a tent, or so and so was a boy scout, or I wouldn’t kill so and so because so and so doesn’t annoy me all that much. These explanations are crucial. Because they make the choice practical and not wrong. They make the choice about different things.

At a dinner party two and a half years ago I told Genevieve that I was changing the center of the world.

We were in a laundry room. It was dark. Genevieve pulled me in. She closed the door, moved her hand over my mouth. Like a game or something.

I can’t see, I said. Turn the lights on, I said through her hand on my mouth.

She held me in silence and cried because of the way things were. Because the lights were off and there was nothing for us to do anymore.

No man is an island, is what Genevieve said to me once, before bed. I found this strange. Because I didn’t respond when she said it, and this seemed to counter her point.

We fell asleep.

Three days and two hours later I awoke on the island. I awoke at night alone. Which meant I had successfully changed the center of the world.

Certain things I remember.

Like the shaving bag, unzipped and spilling over onto Genevieve while she slept, because I dumped it out there. Genevieve did not wake. She did not move.

Her arm was outside the comforter. My shaving cream bottle had rolled out and fallen next to it. To the arm. This made me laugh, out loud or not. Either way.

How strange, I said to myself. Because it was just that.

The shaving bag, of course, came with me to the island. It traveled there in the trunk of my car, and I kept the radio soft to hear it fall over on itself with the motion of the car. It would hit against the sides of the trunk when I stopped, and the noise required a look back, to establish the source of how things were happening.

For twenty minutes I drove to the island. The car stopped four times. I looked back at the bag three of those times.

Let me have this luxury, is what I thought the fourth time. Because I wanted to see what was happening while the bag was hitting against the sides of the thing that contained it. Still, I held back.

Like her head. Her head slammed itself against the living room wall so she was bleeding. I had found her with her pants down photographing the television.

I asked why. Why are you doing that, is what I said.

It doesn’t quite matter whether you go or stay, is what she said. And about this, she was right. Going still meant carrying myself there, my bones crossed at the arms in the shape of a person. Staying meant living with it. The weight of what I was to lose by not carrying a body along.

It was then that we moved to the sleeping quarters, but it was daylight and we left the light on, to double expose the circumstance. And anyway, it was different.

I slept on the couch that night with my eyes open. When my lids started to close I moved to the bedroom for the things I meant to carry. I stayed in the room while I packed. When Genevieve didn’t notice me leaving, I looked for ways to wake her.

I kiss her face. I throw my things on the bed, which is no longer wet, but still retains its color. A shaving set balances on her arm, which is severed from her torso. The arm is loud and bloody. I want to take it with me – the arm, the shaving bag - because I may need a sense of history on the island.

In the car, the fourth time I look back: I see how the shaving kit has attached itself to certain things. I see a spot of blood on the corner of the black leather case. Hard to see, but there. Inside the case, I have the pile of Polaroid film I found Genevieve with, along with some other things. The film was shot at one minute intervals – time-dated in pen in the corner – so there are twenty photographs chronicling an episode of The View.

After her head hit the wall, I waited for more blood to let and watched the face of Barbara Walters become a ghost. What was a white blank Polaroid became a profile, and then a final color rendition, as I held the corners of the film, open to the air and noise.

And so the face of Barbara Walters – through a lens, on a television, now in a shaving bag – found its way to the island, contained in the circumstance of other things. Genevieve came in parts, or in full, or not at all. Either way, I was there, and I was awake. It was night and it wasn’t loud anymore.