“Café Loup,” by Ben Lerner | The New Yorker

“I started to narrate my choking to myself, as if transforming it into a story would keep me connected to a future in which I might tell it.”

Save this story Save this story Audio: Ben Lerner reads. When I became a father, I began to worry not only that I would die and not be able to care for my daughter but that I would die in an embarrassing way, that my death would be an abiding embarrassment for Astra—that in some future world, assuming there is a future, she will be on a date with someone, hard as that is for me to imagine, and her date will ask, “What does your father do?,” and she will say, “He died when I was little,” and her date will respond, “I’m sorry,” hesitate, and then ask, in a bid for intimacy, how I died, and Astra

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