Editor’s Note

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Contributors

Cover art: “Night Dreams” :: Darlene Olivia McElroy

Each issue of FragLit, beginning with this issue, will include not only the writings-on-the-theme but also a small non-topical section. This section will feature up to five contributions, each piece consisting of a series of very short fragments, especially aphorisms. On the Contents page, a separator symbol will appear in between the sections. Carlos V. Reyes’ “Fragments on Fragments” installments will continue to appear at the bottom of the Contents page after the non-topical section.

There are 13 contributions to this issue’s “Haunting Memories” theme. The writings range from fragments of childhood memories to a piece about a very recent adult memory to fragments about memory loss. As I was rereading the pieces in this issue, the question arose: What is it about memories that can make them so haunting? Perhaps these contributions try to answer that question, or echo it in their own ways.

—Olivia Dresher

(1)

Your name is Chaos. That’s what your partner, Freedom, has been calling you for the last few days. You decided to take the name Chaos when you read a quote in a book you brought along on this river trip: “Give up control; live in chaos.” When you saw those words, you recognized the truth. We only think we have control. Look closely: Your sense of control is false security—an illusion. Better to live in chaos, because within chaos, true freedom resides. You are free when you realize that the YOU—you controlling everything—is fiction.

(2)

What would it be like if everything were washed away? You are drifting on the Green River in Utah just as you are drifting through life when suddenly you are caught off guard by a flash flood pouring in and changing everything.

Okay—this is where it gets good because on the tenth day of the canoe trip, you did not know that by the end of another bright, hot August day, you and Freedom would be stranded in a narrow red rock wash. You would see all of your possessions marching downriver away from you.

(3)

Back up. You haven’t seen people for days, and you’re glad of it. You wish you could go the whole fourteen days without seeing anyone. You scan the marvelous sky, observing countless shapes in the strong white billows gliding around in the sparkling blue. That’s when you see it: a strange formation building up over the horizon—a giant, inverted triangular cloud. It has horns reaching out from the two upper corners.

“Thunderhead,” Freedom announces, and you both watch it—way over there. You’ve been in lots of thunderstorms out here in the wild, and you think about the violence of this rising horned monster. Better get off the river and let it pass, you both think out loud.

You drift, no, you paddle along; better to speed up. Get where you’re going as fast as you can.

You both see an opening into a little side canyon on the left. A thick white sand ledge fans out in front of it. Behind the sand is a mini forest of tamarisk trees, and then red rock ledges steeply rise. You spy a dark, inviting pocket on the right hand side about forty feet up. Looks like an ideal place to sit while the rain passes.

Freedom ties the canoe so that the rope is securely looped around a big immovable rock. You both tamp the blue tarp around everything in the canoe and secure the tarp with bungee cords. It looks like a tight, safe package that won’t blow around in the wind.

Wearing only a long t-shirt, you climb out of the river bottom, pulling yourself up a couple red ledges, and there you are, inside the pocket, happy to be protected while the rain begins to pour.

Right now you and your partner are gleeful. You’re safe in the pocket, and the smell of rain enlivens you. You laugh, you talk. Freedom has brought a small daypack, and when the rain starts to blow into the pocket, you use the pack to shield your bare brown legs.

(4)

When did it change? At what moment did it change from fun rainstorm to danger? Perhaps when Freedom tried to count the seconds between the lightning and the thunder—and there weren’t any. The storm was right over your heads, somehow inside your heads, and you shrieked comically at first, and then choked on your breath.

“I’m worried about the canoe,” Freedom shouted. She struggled to stand up in the wind and peer around the corner to where it was tied. You followed her. The silver canoe was rocking gently—everything was okay.

(5)

Little do you know that this night you will be sleeping on that very sandstone ledge you are sitting on now. You will wish to God that you had grabbed your pack out of the canoe. And oh God—the blankets, the water, the food. Had you known, you would have unloaded it all into a safe haven. But you did not know. And you are about to answer your own question: What would it be like if everything were washed away?

(6)

“This is fear!” you announce. And you say it again, standing up with your arms out. The emotion is at once repulsive and attractive. Ah, you’re alive with incredible energy! The rust-red waterfalls are shouting off every ledge, roaring down this little crevice, rumbling and roiling to the river. Could the water come this high and fill your lungs?

Fear permeates every cell of your body as you witness the majesty of this fierce storm and the way the earth gives into it. A violent surrender. The tamarisk trees in the wash below are thrashing about in a mini cyclone. Water rushes off every ledge. The sandstone, the sky, the river, even your body is the same hue of burnt red. You’re all in this together and fear has blasted your heart.

Flash flood. Flash flood! And you think: what would it be like if everything were washed away?

“I’m worried about the canoe,” Freedom says again. She struggles into the rain so she can see over the edge. She comes back drenched. “It’s still there,” she says, but her voice is weak.

Your throat is clutched, red rock fingers tightening their grip.

Then you see the white sand bank below collapsing into a chaotic red churn. The trees are blowing down into the rumbling wash before slamming into the river. You are not in control. You are living in chaos.

And now you get up and burst out into the rain. You look down at the rushing water. And now you say it: “I can’t see the canoe!” And you know that you and Freedom have lost something vitally important. You could die from this. Exposure. Starvation. Dehydration. You crawl back into the pocket, shivering. Chaos and Freedom existing side by side. Fear arising and fear rushing through.

(7)

When the storm begins to loosen its grip on your little world, you both emerge from the pocket. Freedom climbs down to where the canoe was last seen while you crawl up to an overlook of the river.

That’s when you see it. Everything washing away: the red food bin, the blue water jugs, the black bedding bag—there they go drifting farther and farther. Can you not reach out into the racing current and get anything back? You call out to Freedom and she’s calling out to you to look at the massive waterfalls pouring into the river, but you can’t see them.

You can only see everything being washed away in a flash. The objects you think your life depends on all seem so peaceful out there marching swiftly in single file farther down the ancient canyon. A temporary eddy creates a merry-go-round for a hiking shoe, a wooden cutting board, a book in a clear plastic bag—the very book that said: “Give up control; live in chaos.” The book spins round and round. In the face of loss you chuckle over the book, saying out loud, “Farewell, my teacher.”

Meanwhile Freedom has torn herself away from the waterfalls and is down at river level watching the possessions rush away. She’s assessing the situation as the rain patters to a close. You climb down to her, and then you realize what she is looking at. The canoe is still tied up—that is, the rope is still tied around the massive rock. The other end of the rope goes tightly down, down into the opaque red water.

Now you get it. The canoe, stripped of almost all of its contents, has been buried. The ground has opened up and swallowed it in a deep grave—but that’s not quite right. It’s that new ground has been suddenly formed, and the canoe has become part of it.

Just looking at the muddy water you see nothing except the rope coming up out of it. Both you and Freedom hunch down in the water and feel around blindly. Together with considerable force, you unearth the blue tarp that was holding everything in. Yes, the tarp stayed hooked to the canoe while everything else was thrust out by the power of the churning flood.

Instinctively you know that anything you can save is vitally important. And look—the canoe itself is down there. There’s hope of getting it out. You both start blindly digging with your bare hands through the sand and thick clay.

There’s an oar down there, you can feel the end of it. If you have a canoe and two oars you can paddle on down river to the confluence where the canoe service meets you. Yes, you can get out of this chaos, can’t you?

You and Freedom dig and dig, but no. The task is enormous. There’s no way you’re going to dig up this fresh underwater grave with your bare hands.

Your eyes glide across the sky. Nightfall is near. You’re all wet and you have no dry clothes or blankets. Can you find a way to survive the night? You are dazzlingly alive with fear.

(8)

Climbing back up to the pocket, you and Freedom take inventory. Between the two of you, you have about a half liter of water and one granola bar. Water, of course, is the main concern. It is, after all, a 100-degree wilderness desert. Will you have to drink the muddy river which is now deep red with run-off debris?

You’re both wondering what you’ll do in case the storm returns, and you discuss how to create a tent in the middle of the night with the blue tarp.

You scan the sky. Fluffy whites are passing by, and the setting sun extends glittery rays to touch the now calm river. You laugh. You remember that during the height of the storm, you whispered, “Please God, help us.” In that brief moment you believed that there was a God, and that God could help you. Now those God-like rays create a remarkable beauty in the sky. A sign maybe. A sign that everything is helping you all the time—even if it looks like loss.

A wave of sorrow passes through your heart and you cry. The canoe trip as you have known it, the gentle drifting and wild nakedness unfolding layer by layer, is over.

Something else has taken its place, and while you do feel grief, you also feel a tremendous awe. You are in this moment and you know it.

Before you lie down on the red ledge for the night, you grasp the bottle and say, “I’m going to take one swallow of water.” You hold that swallow in acute awareness, meeting the sensations of the swallow from beginning to end.

How can one swallow of water bring you full force into authentic life? You feel lightning flash through your mind. Tingling, you lie down next to Freedom on the hard ledge and notice dreams wanting to arise. Throughout the night you open your eyes and feel mothered by the clear night sky, the planet Mars particularly bold in its caress.

(9)

What would it be like to be stranded in a tiny side canyon with no food and water, not knowing how this whole unexpected adventure is going to turn out? You know that in two days time you are to meet the canoe shuttle at the confluence with the Colorado River some eighteen miles from where you are now. If you are not there at the appointed time, would they come looking for you?

When you and Freedom wake up that morning, it’s cold—you start shivering at first light—but you know before long that bold, hot sunball will be up and you’d be glad to feel it.

Climbing down to the lower ledge you both scan the river. Quiet. No other canoeists in sight under a cloudy morning sky.

You both mindfully have one swallow of water, slowly, slowly, and half of the granola bar before going to work on the canoe. It’s still chilly when Freedom submerges herself in water up to her chin and starts blindly digging down to the inside of the canoe. You stand back, shivering. You wait for the sun. You are radiantly alive.

(10)

What would it be like if instead of resenting other river people who interrupt your peaceful drift, you long for them? You’d like to see some big, strong, noisy people appear, and together you’d all get the canoe out and you’d go on down river and get an early pickup.

You contemplate this scenario, look longingly upriver, and then slosh down on your hands and knees into the dark water to start digging. There’s the matter of digging out the inner canoe where you might even find more objects buried under the mud and sand, and then there’s the attempt to lift the 18-foot canoe out of its heavy grave. Freedom has actually unearthed a blue plastic cup and is using it as a digging tool (her fingernails now all jagged)—the two of you trade it back and forth, lifting cupfuls of mud from the inside of the canoe while the river current fills it back in. It’s all blind work—you can’t see what you’re digging at. You can only feel around and grasp the sand and clumps of gooey clay. That’s when you realize that the back tip of the canoe is wedged beneath an underwater ledge of solid rock.

(11)

River people are going to come by. In fact, you’re going to call out to tiny figures appearing upriver. “We need help!” you’ll call, and two, young shirtless men will glide in on kayaks and spend hot hours digging with you, lifting—no, just trying to lift. And they will feel defeated and perhaps ashamed that they can’t help you and must leave you stranded. No room in their kayaks for passengers. Their supplies nearly depleted, they give you a gallon of clean water, a half jar of peanut butter. Apologies.

That night you will lie down on the ledge with peanut butter in your belly. As soon as the sun goes down, you will fall asleep—exhausted—and when you wake up during the night, you will hear a strange animal crooning and you will see the night sky dancing with Mars.

(12)

After the second night on the ledge you woke up in the morning predicting something would happen. When the men reached the confluence of the two rivers at noon that day, they would alert the National Park Service. You pictured someone coming after you in a motor boat, puttering upriver only eighteen miles. Maybe the motor boat person would bring shovels and free up that canoe so you could go on your merry way. Or maybe you’d just have to get in the motor boat and leave it all behind.

That morning you and Freedom went back to work on the digging. You both felt like you were hearing motors in the distance.

“Something’s going to happen,” you said, but you realized what a vague statement that was and laughed at yourself. Something always happens—or at least appears to.

(13)

Yes, a motor sound is getting closer. You both stop digging and stare downriver. Nothing. You sit on the overlook dangling your legs and think about what you have lost: all your clothes, your good hiking shoes and Birkenstocks, your blue dome tent that protected you on so many journeys. The list grows: your glasses, your dental retainers, your six rolls of shot film, your precious notebook with ten days’ worth of journal writing, your crystal necklace. But most of all you picture the vanished food bin still quite full at the time of its disappearance. And then ten gallons of clean water in jugs: where did it go?

(14)

When the helicopter appears, Freedom is still down in the murky water digging and you are standing on the ledge looking up. Oh my God! The shiny helicopter circles you like a beautiful buzzard. You are at once embarrassed. Is your situation so bad that they had to send in a helicopter? Are they going to lower down a rescue rope and lift you out? You watch them and try to smile broadly. Can they see the expression on your face? How can you let them know that you are acutely alive? You don’t want to be rescued from this awareness.

You and Freedom nervously laugh back and forth when the helicopter disappears from view and the motor sound stops.

What does this mean? Have they determined that you are okay and have gone on their way to much more important crises?

“They landed up there somewhere,” Freedom says pointing to the white rim far above.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” you say.

“Listen,” she says. And you both listen hard as tiny voices grow louder.

And now you actually see them up high on the canyon wall: two figures, a small woman and a tall man, both wearing bright yellow shirts and green pants, carefully scouting their way down to the river.

They’ve come to rescue you. But do you want rescuing? Can you not live forever in your red rock awareness while accepting the generosity of passers-by? If they take you out of here, will you leave your awareness behind?

Yes, you are about to be led out—up, up to where the now invisible helicopter is waiting to remove you from the river’s edge.

(15)

It’s a dangerous hike barefoot, but you don’t care. What you care about is the rapidly changing situation. First you are there so close and connected to the red rock ledge and to the task of trying to free the canoe, and now you are suiting up in overalls and a crash helmet to board a rescue helicopter.

As the helicopter lifts off the ground, your body is flooded with exhilaration. You have never been in a helicopter before and you get a magnificent view. The massive Canyonlands spread out forever, and you laugh at your good fortune of being able to get this bird’s eye view of your now tiny world below.

The helicopter lands at park headquarters and you and your partner are met by a friendly man who will drive you back to the canoe service. This man, the helicopter rescue team, and the kayakers who stopped to assist you on the river, have displayed what appears to be genuine kindness. In your vulnerability, people have come forward to help, and you rejoice in the opportunity to receive their kindness.

(16)

You will sit at home and wish you were still out there on the red rock ledge. You will know that this attachment to the past can only bring you suffering, but the taste of acute awareness is still on your tongue, and oh, how alive you were. You will wake up in the night with dreams of roaring water and churning storms and you will recognize how your fear of death transformed into full force awareness. You will savor the memory of a simple swallow of water, the touch of bare feet on red rock, opening your eyes to the night sky. You will long to be alive again.

:::

I just saw a picture of someone I knew, briefly, for a short period of time, a long time ago. Just now he was in front of me as he is today, in a picture smiling and frozen in a family moment, uninhibited and not concerned that one day the picture would be on the Internet; he is unaware of my gaze. He always struck me as a magical person, it was in his eyes, and those eyes showed someone who always carried himself in a joyous state, as if knowing something others did not. I never told him this. It wasn’t something young boys did—talk about what was in each other’s eyes. But I remember that it was so and in the picture I can still see it. I wonder what it is? But at the same time maybe I don’t want to know definitively, to know that maybe it’s nothing at all.

I float back to when we were little boys playing in the neighborhood. We’d been running around, doing little boy things, on some supernatural adventure. I walked him to his house and just before going back inside for dinner he turned, smiled, and fixed me with his eyes, crazy lapis lazuli set in a face of burnished dusk. Like he knew right then, right then even as a child, that we would not be close friends and that we would grow older and become members of different tribes. It was in his eyes, a mystical ultramarine blue twinkle. I was that close.

I float back there, doing some kind of strange loop in through his eyes and back out. And find just now it was there again, that uninhibited stare. The twinkle, mystical and blue and I do not know him; do not know him now to return his message in a space that close again. I don’t know how to tell him I saw, I saw him when we were little boys.

:::

Tomorrow. Yesterday. Today. Now.
What did those words mean to me when I was young?
They meant time travel.
Even feeling Now felt like time travel.
Every time I said the word tomorrow or yesterday or today, my body would buzz.
I felt I was flying, flying back or flying forward or flying in place like a hummingbird.

::

The present instantly becomes a memory. I remember walking home from school one spring afternoon when I was ten, saying to myself: I will remember this. This is happening now but it’s happening over there in the future too, and it’s happening deep down inside me forever, over and over again. And I stared down at the curb and the street as I said this, while walking past the corner grocery store that was always dark inside. Fifty years later, I am remembering this.

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Woke up to the song “Today” (Jefferson Airplane, 1967) playing in the cells of memory in my body. That teardrop sound of the electric guitar, that slow gentle crash of the tambourine. That San Francisco sound, the sound of the times, the sound of longing. That sound that moved out in every direction and changed everything.

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Sitting in class in 5th grade on a hot and smoggy afternoon, waiting for time to speed up so we can go home. Watching the clock move so slowly that it seems it might be broken. Trying to watch time, straining to see it. Wondering about time, and when the clock’s hand finally inches forward a bit, it makes a sound, I can hear it, I can hear time. I keep wondering why watching time makes it slow down so slow. I wonder if it’s possible to stop time, but no, it isn’t possible, it leaks out even in the most present moment and takes you with it and yet leaves you behind somewhere.

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Thirteen years old. Practicing the cello. The feel of it resting against my chest, the smell of rosin on the bow. The curtains in the den where I practiced: they’d breathe in and out as ocean breezes came in in slow afternoon gusts.

The unprivacy of practicing. The sour notes exposed, loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Sour notes I tried to sweeten with vibrato.

It wasn’t real music, the music of practicing. But I didn’t really know what real music was. Though it seemed the real music was on the radio. Real music was the music I could abandon myself to, not the music I had to practice for school.

Real music was the music that would float into my bedroom from the living room late at night when I was eight years old and supposed to be asleep but couldn’t sleep. Real music was a wild ride, and when you were on it you were heading home. Real music was also scary music—“Carmina Burana,” “Night on Bald Mountain.” And real music was longing—Elvis Presley singing “First in Line” or the Everly Brothers harmonizing in “All I Have to Do Is Dream.”

What do you feel when you play music, I asked Kevin once, 30 years ago, when we paused between the songs we sang. I don’t have ANY idea what you’re talking about, he said, looking angry, as if I had just messed up a song by playing a sour note.

Music—the home that was far away from home. A place that felt like being lost and found at the same time. Music—the soundtrack to the unexplainable.

When I watch Yo-Yo Ma play the cello, when I feel the expressions on his face and fall into them like falling back in time, I remember asking Kevin what he felt when he played and sang his beautifully sad songs. When I watch Yo-Yo Ma express a gentle agony and ecstasy on his face as he plays “The Swan,” I feel him answering the question Kevin wouldn’t answer. But I also feel Kevin finally answering, because I remember his expressions being like that when he sang and played—a gentle agony and ecstasy.

When I was thirteen, I didn’t play music that moved me, not yet. But the music I heard, the songs on the radio that entered me unexpectedly, ambushed me and took me away. It was as if some huge, magical, prehistoric bird picked me up in its mouth and dropped me in a foreign place that became a primal home.

::

Straining for the memories, going back further and further, trying to find those that are hard to find. It’s like I’m trying to remember a melody from a long time ago. Memories are melodies in D minor.

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There’s a rich emptiness to memories. Like visiting rooms in an abandoned Victorian house. There’s an echo in the empty rooms. Memories are echoes. They call out, as if drowning. A memory calls out, rescue me.

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The loneliness of remembering. Like being alone in a crowd.

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Dreams are double memories—remembering a dream is a double memory.

For years, almost every dream I experienced took place at my childhood house, where I lived until the summer of 1958. Each dream was a memory-landscape that I’d walk through, but with new twists and turns, improvisations. When I’d wake up and remember the dream, it was like looking through a microscope to see the details. I was remembering the dream itself, in the moment, and yet the seed of the dream was a memory.

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The present and the past are twins, they have the same mother and father, they shared the same womb at the same time. But they play by slightly different rules. The present looks more like its mother, the past like its father.

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The past is a silent song that’s always being sung. I can’t always hear it, but I always feel the vibrations.

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1964, age nineteen. Breezy December afternoon. Walking on the Santa Monica pier, the smell of cotton candy and the sea. Stopping to listen to a young man standing near the merry-go-round, quoting Keats and Ginsberg.

He wasn’t a street musician, he was a street poet. A tall slender man with light brown hair growing long and straight, nearly covering his ears. He’d wave his hands as he spoke, as if he was the conductor of his own performance. I was the audience.

He wanted to impress me. The lines he spoke came from well-known poems as well as pieces of his own poems. “That’s one of mine,” he’d say after reciting a few lines he had written himself. Sometimes I couldn’t hear his voice, the music coming from the merry-go-round was too loud.

We walked to the end of the pier together. He had an accent. Maybe he’s from England, I thought. His face was slightly deformed—perhaps he had been in an accident or had a birth defect. He seemed unaware of his face, but he kept telling me that I was beautiful. He also told me that sometimes he walked alone on the pier and thought of jumping off. He was twenty-two, he said, and he didn’t believe in God.

He bought me a St. Christopher necklace at one of the little shops on the boardwalk, and he had my first name inscribed on the back with a swirly line added underneath. Then he ritualistically placed it around my neck. The ritual felt like an awkward kiss. It was busy on the boardwalk and it was getting dark. People bumped into us as they walked by, and the air smelled of hot dogs and mustard.

The next day I saw him on the pier again, reciting poetry. I was wearing the St. Christopher necklace he gave me. Later that afternoon he took me to see his room, as if he wanted to show me his soul. His room was in an old hotel on the boardwalk, about a block from the pier. His room spoke of solitude, it spoke of courage and desperation and reflection. He was an unpeaceful monk living in the city, a rebellious monk who lived for poetry and music.

Could I live like that, I wondered. Could I live in a tiny hotel room on the beach, with just a few books and records to keep me company. Could I live in an old hotel where dark rooms rented for forty dollars a month and the paint peeled off the walls, revealing old flowery wallpaper underneath. Could I live in a tiny room where the bathroom was down the hall and small puddles of water were always on the floor. Could I live in a hotel room where tunes from the merry-go-round could be heard playing over and over again, all day, every day, even from the stairs and hallways. Could I ever live a life like that, I wondered. A life like that in an old hotel that was half-way abandoned and doomed to be torn down in a few years, a hotel whose present was a fading past.

I looked out the ocean-facing window in his room and watched the seagulls drifting by in the air. He played Coltrane on his portable record player, and the jazz overpowered the tunes coming from the merry-go-round. I could feel time rolling in and out, I could feel the present vanishing into the past and then rolling back in again as the present, the way the waves of the sea kept rolling in and out and back in again.

:::

Now you remember, you remember how it begins. It begins on the steep wet streets of san francisco, where you are a u.s. navy sailor, on liberty from your ship in the bay. You are a very young man, eager to wander drunken down dark empty alleys, in north beach, or downtown, or anywhere, because you are newly a man, a sailor, & that is what you think this city is for, being drunk, & peering around edges, & walking where you should not walk, hoping that danger will find you, provoke your soul & your mind, & you will become wild & crazy, & write poetry nobody ever before dared to write.

::

You’re drunk & ready, & you ramble at midnight down a dark alley in north beach, in & out of pools of light, through the echoes of your own steps, & then you see the door. You swear & you will always swear that it is a door like no other door, ornate, heavy, exotic, & it is slightly ajar & there is dark beyond, & dark & a dark fragrance drift out & you know that this is a moment like no other moment, that this moment marks an intersection with the mysterious & the deadly & the holy, & that beyond the door is not merely someone’s basement.

::

But you are not as ready as you hoped & thought & you pass by & do not enter, & the door & that moment like no other will become only a story, not to tell but to know, & always with regret. But for awhile you go back many times to what you are certain is the same alley, in the daytime & at night, every time you are in san francisco, & there is no such door anywhere.

::

Now you remember, you remember how it begins. It begins on the steep stone streets of hong kong & it is a couple of years since you saw & passed by the door in an alley in north beach, & you are on liberty from your ship in the harbor. It is your last day & your last night there & you want to see victoria peak, which is still mysterious & undeveloped, & you were told you can see china from the top. So you go even though it is now night & dark & the night is filled with fog & a cold wind blows from the sea. You ride the cog-railway to the top & then climb a dirt road from the last station, & you pass tombs set into the hillside along the dirt road, & then you walk out on the wide & open top of the peak, onto a strange stone pavement, into the fog & wind & dark. Suddenly in the tattered blackness you realize you do not know how wide this place is, or even what it is, and that you are lost. You run back & forth in panic but now you cannot find the dirt road. You are filled with terrible ancient fear, & you remember the door in the alley in san francisco, & you are certain it is at that moment open, for someone else perhaps. Or you wonder if perhaps you did enter the door after all, because that is how the magic works, & this is where it has led, & you wonder what will happen to you now. Then you see the lights of the railway station ragged through the fog below & you are saved. But saved from what, you do not know.

::

& now you remember, you remember how it begins. That this story of the door is your most secret & deep story, & a metaphor for many cities, but especially san francisco & what it has meant to your heart, & why even now you peer around edges & wait impatiently for the cold & transforming breath of holy sorcery in your life….

:::

Sarah and I are staying at the Hotel de France, not far from the Eiffel Tower. We have known each other forty years. We met and became lovers in college. Then she got married. And divorced. And so did I. About five years ago—after losing touch for years—we ran into each other at Columbus Circle in New York City.

“Sarah!” I said, as she passed me by.
She turned around, blinked.
“I was just thinking of you,” she said.

::

The aura of first love, or young love, never leaves you. There is so much hope and pure good will and energy there that, later in life, after the romantic failures and disillusionments, after the hard looks in the mirror, you turn back to it, wistfully. You think, can I have this again? Can I have this kind of romance again?

::

After our encounter on the streets of New York, Sarah and I tried for several years to be lovers. We do love one another. But something isn’t quite working at a place where it needs to work. Eventually, we always end up arguing bitterly. Eventually, we are like the Greeks besieging Troy, with the same sense of ten years’ weariness and resolution to destroy.

We are both sixty now. An age where our rehearsal time is over. I think of Cavafy’s poem, where he compares our days to a row of candles. He says, “I do not want to turn back, lest I see and shudder— / how quickly the somber line lengthens, / how quickly the burnt-out candles multiply.” So we have come to Paris, as a kind of last chance at romance. If we do not find our love here, in this city that encourages love as the sun encourages blooming, then where else would we find it?

::

It rains and rains while we are here, but I don’t care. Paris! Paris! This gorgeous place. I feel I am a citizen of this city, by right of passion.

Sarah and I walk everywhere. I know Paris well—yes, I think I can say that. I am her guide. A man likes to be a woman’s guide in Paris. He feels worldly.

We walk away from the crowds in front of Notre Dame and cross the bridge that links the Ile de la Cité with the Ile St. Louis. Flowing around and about these two charged, elegant bits of earth is the Seine, a river that has probably inspired more artists to greatness than any other body of water that has ever existed on earth. Just gazing on it, I feel I am a better writer.

The odors of Paris. They haven’t changed. I’m so grateful for that.

The rain pours. We walk along the Quai d’Anjou on the Ile St. Louis. How rude is it to quote myself? I once wrote about Paris in bad weather. I still believe every word: “Bad weather brings out the lyrical in Paris and in the visitor, too. It summons up feelings of regret, loss, sadness—and in the case of the first pangs of winter—intimations of mortality. The stuff of poetry. And of keen memories. The soul aches in a kind of unappeasable ecstasy of melancholy. Anyone who has not experienced a chilly, rainy day in Paris will have an incomplete vision of the city, and of him or herself in it.”

::

When I was twenty-five, I lived in Paris for six months. It was a golden time. My best friend, Alex, and I—he still is my best friend, thirty-five years later—traveled around Europe together in the grandest of tours, for a full fifteen months. We stopped in Paris, because he wanted to live there for a while. I had never been. The gods smiled upon us and directed us to 43 bis Villa d’Alésia to live. It was a sculptor’s former studio, with high glass windows facing the little winding street deep within the 14th arrondissement, and a second floor that overlooked the large open studio space where the sculptor—whoever he was—must have chiseled away in times past. Were two young men ever so lucky? I look back on them now from this great distance with fondness and gratitude. Live, boys, I say to them across time, live!

::

A black man from Nigeria I once knew in New York had lived in Paris for many years. He said to me, “When you are lonely, Paris can be your girlfriend. She will be there for you.” And it’s true that Paris is a woman. She is round—the city’s form is round, as a womb, and the buildings have an embracing softness to them. New York is phallic, proud of how erect it is and how manly, with its almighty stiff skyscrapers. Paris has just one tall building, and that is such an aberration one ignores it. Every city is entitled to a single large mistake. Paris, hold me, enfold me, you beautiful woman!

::

I want to show Sarah 43 bis Villa d’Alésia where Alex and I lived in such youthful splendor. We take the métro to the Alésia stop, the next-to-last stop on the Porte d’Orléans line, in Montparnasse, deep within the Left Bank. We find the little street where Alex and I used to live, still quiet, still out of the way. I walk with Sarah, trying to recreate those times, making them, as I am sure so many wives and girlfriends have experienced on similar walks with their nostalgic men, a holy experience. “This is it!” We stop before a building and I point upward. “This is where Alex and I lived for six incredibly glorious months thirty-five years ago. This is it!” Sarah looks reverently upward. I do, too. But something seems amiss. Something detracts from this moment before this Parisian shrine. I squint. I peer. I see that this is 45 Villa d’Alésia, not 43 bis. “Wrong house,” I say.

Well, never mind. Just think of this place! 43 bis Villa d’Alésia, where we lived like Dauphins, Alex and I. Body, mind and heart, remember.

::

New Year’s Day. Sarah and I spent last night celebrating at a restaurant on the rue de Seine. It is a festive little place, owned by an American. When I think of rue de Seine, my mind goes to the poem of the same name by Jacques Prévert. And then I cannot help but think of her. Of Helena. Of the woman I fell in love with in Paris years ago and with whom I spent a year in the South of France, and who I should have married, and didn’t. My good, beautiful friend Deborah, who knew Helena well, said to me one day, some years after I had broken up with Helena, “I knew when you did that you were on a downward spiral. Helena is not a woman you leave.”

::

She was a raven-haired Dutch woman, tall, with a svelte high diver’s body. She had the bluest of blue eyes, mountain lake-blue, and I often fell into them, swimming in their azureness. She had devil-dark eyebrows that peaked at the edges near her nose and made her appear devious, which she never was. Her full name was Helena Groote, but everyone called her Helen. She had an exotic dark look that was so unlike her fellow fair-skinned blonde Hollanders. Her skin had a light Polynesian shading. It seemed there might be a jet of Indonesian blood in hers. She seemed more of the East in appearance, though she was Dutch down to her stubborn, frugal toes.

I met her at the Spanish restaurant at the Chelsea Hotel in New York. She and I were with a group of people gathered together for a reason I no longer remember. The patron saint of seating arrangements looked kindly on me that evening and placed me next to her. I fell into those lake-blue eyes, but managed to tread water long enough to say a few words to her. What was her name?

“Helena.”
“Helena?”
“Like Helena of Troy.”

She was in America as an au pair and worked for a family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Her two years were almost up, and she was about to return to Holland, her country.

Of the three or four correct decisions I made in my entire life, I made one that night. I asked for her phone number in New York and in Holland.

A year later, I was in Nice. I called her in Holland. I asked her, cajoled her, begged her, to meet me in Paris. “Nothing will happen!” I promised. “I won’t touch you! In fact, if I even think of touching you, you can zap me with an electric cattle prod. I have one. I’ll bring it.”

::

Everybody on this earth ought to be able to greet his or her lover or future lover at a Paris railroad station at least once. I stood waiting in the great vault of the Gare du Nord, with its partially-glassed ceiling and huge arrival board listing the northern European cities of departure: Oslo, Copenhagen, Brussels, Hamburg and Amsterdam. Europeans of all stripes were walking by me, and shabby, blissfully happy students from all over the world, and everything was spoken in French, and I was in one of the most romantic places on earth in the most romantic city in the world, waiting for her. Finally, her train eased into the station and into my life. She was there.

::

These feelings and memories you try to hide from the woman you’re with, but you can’t. Why can’t she let you savor these feelings of loves long past? Why does Sarah want to invade those memories and destroy them? Maybe because she knows, somewhere, that I don’t love her.

::

When I was engaged to marry Charlotte—yes, another great soul I left!—I remember walking with her along the Seine and showing her all my treasured places and, suddenly, in one Proustian moment, a huge grin on my face just because I was in Paris, I saw in her face a look of complacency. Though I couldn’t believe it (How could this be?), I said to her, “You don’t like Paris, do you?” I could hardly manage to say the words, so sacrilegious a thought were they. And I saw nothing in her look to deny what I said. “Not as much as you,” she said. The heart sinks.

::

Helena tried to resist, but she didn’t stand a chance—and neither did I—against the Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Ile St. Louis, the Place des Vosges, and a table for two at La Couple. Every stone, every door, every shop, every light seemed to conspire for romance. We stayed four or five days—yes, in the same hotel room—cheap, at her insistence—but there was no lovemaking. But I could feel her weakening, and me, too. Paris looked on, and nodded, and said, “Others far stronger than you have tried to resist my charms. Go ahead, kiss her.” And I did.

::

Sarah and I at the little restaurant on the rue de Seine, with ghosts lingering just outside, on New Year’s Eve. I can hardly say the name of the street, rue de Seine, without summoning up Jacques Prévert’s poem “Rue de Seine.” It’s in his book, Paroles (“Words”) that Helena gave me. In it, she wrote, “N’oublie pas commes belles les Paroles et nos paroles peuvent être, et sont!” (“Don’t forget how beautiful Paroles is and how beautiful our words can be, and are!”) But later those words turned bitter, and now I don’t hear them at all.

Sarah and I meet another couple in the restaurant on New Year’s Eve. She’s Danish, he’s French. They’re very merry, and we have a lovely time, but every once in a while, I’ll turn to Sarah, and I can see she knows this trip has not done what we hoped it might. At midnight, when we usher in the New Year in Paris, we embrace not with warmth and great festiveness, but out of obligation. These things are so clear. They cannot be hidden, not with all the clever words we can summon.

We walk back to the hotel. It’s stopped raining, at last. We leave tomorrow. We stroll past Les Invaldies, where Napoleon is buried, a big domed structure brightly lit against the dark sky like a huge white illuminated precious stone. That this city exists should be enough to make any person a believer—in something.

::

Sarah and I go to bed, but we don’t make love. The first few days we did. But now we are just bunkmates. In Paris! So we are left with something in between affection and friendship—but not romantic love. Even Paris couldn’t provide that for us.

We get up one final morning in Paris. There is that new awkward modesty you have between a man and a woman who no longer desire one another. I dress quickly and go downstairs to take one small final walk in this city I love. It’s sunny outside, and cold. I take a deep drink of Paris. Comfort me, Paris. Embrace me, Paris. I walk aimlessly. What does it matter? Everywhere it’s Paris. My eyes sweep around. A majestic place. You tried your best, Paris. You were everything you always are. It’s only me, Beautiful City. It’s only me.

:::

1

He’s Sadness
and thin,
scared,
confused—
a bird looking for its mother

There is no pill for this
not for him,
not for me

I give him a pear.
He eats it all—
bit by bit
until
it’s
gone.

2

Today I wheel him
to the window
where he points outside

and says:
He’s dying

I say:
Who’s dying?

He says:
That guy

3

More and more
he slips into himself
un-waiting for me to join him.
A man, still. The same face
hardly changed.

But for cognition and the lack
of affect
who would know
he won’t remember us—
when I leave.

4

His face is my grandfather’s
staring out from an old picture frame
a reminder that love is like the moon
waning into different shapes—
crescents, slits

5

Today when I walked into his room he was sitting in the wheelchair staring. His eyes were red, and I thought he had been crying; but there were no tears. He didn’t know me. I looked straight into him and said:

Hi Abe. I’m Esther. I’m your wife.

I’m Esther.

Really?

Really, I said.

And he was alive again.

6

He’s better today,
recognized me when I came in
took my hand and kissed it.

Later, he kissed his own hand.

He has a bruise,
and he kissed the bruise
as if he were a father caring for a child,
something like the day
he called himself He.

7

TONIGHT AT DINNER

A dish of pears
6 ounces of health shake
4 ounces of apple juice
The rest: spit out.
Chewing’s hard.
Swallowing
liquid’s easier.

To myself, I think:
I’m tired,
I want to go home.
But where is home?
Here, at the nursing
home or in that other place
where we used to live?

8

HE’S BEDRIDDEN

bedridden
bedridde
bedridd
bedrid
bedri
bedr
bed
be
b

9

He’s weak and tired
his hands curl into fists
they’re cold and clammy
his arms are cool
the rest of him is warm

he opens his eyes and says: We did it.
then falls back to sleep

10

How long
can a body do this?

Whose body am I talking
about anyway,

mine or his?

I’m not sure
I know
the difference.

11

Neither pear nor peach satisfy him.
He barely drinks the shake
and doesn’t understand the word Cookie.

But he smiles and holds my hand. He calls me Hon.
When I leave, I kiss him and say: Goodbye. Again.

12

Again.

:::

(The following selections consist of the first 20 fragments from the unpublished manuscript.)

1. Newspaper Photograph

You are looking at yourself.
A photo of yourself published in a newspaper clipping dated January 30, 1990.
The headline reads Missing Student.
It has been 15 years since you disappeared.

You were an “A” student who disappeared during finals week without taking your exams.
Says the article.
You look at this grainy image of your face.
Your eyes follow the concentration of ink dots, densely clustered to form your eyes.

15 years since you disappeared.

15 years your memory has been sculpting, painting, collaging, performing—creating these portraits and tableaux.

2. Triptych on Hinged Wood Panels

You hold your mother’s high hand, the hand which guides you, which allows you to hang your head in boredom and fix your eyes on the momentary ground before you as you walk, light-headed, light-hearted, as though on water, on the concrete stream of street flowing back toward home. You walk, entranced by the flow of the gray street beneath your green sneakers.

On this misleadingly clear March day, when the clouds are static and highly defined, and surrounded by a speculating sun, you lift your head, invent your game. You learn that as you hold your mother’s hand you can walk with eyes closed, and so do, but for only so long as you can stand it, until they open of their own accord, suddenly, randomly fixing your vision on the first person you see.

And you watch that person, without even a blink, until he or she has vanished into a little shop, has turned a corner, has slipped out of frame, or has shrunk to nothing in the distance behind you.

3. Comic Strip in Three Panels

You walk past a man sleeping in the gutter of your street.

You pretend that you have to tie your shoe, fall back from your family, with whom you are walking. You bend down on one knee, reach for your laces, make a mad dash to the street curb, where you lie in the gutter, out of curiosity.

For that fraction of a moment, you watch the variety of legs scissor past you from opposing directions.

4. Still Life with Possibility, pencil on paper

You are a white, American male, only son of an upper-middle class, white, American male and female.

Your father realizes the American Dream. He is a bank teller in high school. Your birth certificate states that he is Chief Clerk at 23. Then, manager, vice president, president. Of a bank. In retirement, he starts a bank on Miami beach.

You are born in New York City.

You are 1, 2, 3, 4, and you play.

You are 5, 6, 7, 8, and you go to school.

You learn about the American Dream in school. You can become anything you want to become, you and your classmates are told, and you are encouraged to begin your campaign for the Presidency of the United States.

Anything is possible.

For you, this is true.

Because of your father’s success, yours is more sorting process than struggle.

The sorting process of possibilities begins early and simply: police officer, fire fighter, or cowboy?

You are in middle school now, and you are asked which classes you like best: math, science, social studies, history, English, art, music?

In high school, you scan the list of majors offered in university catalogues.

Possibility pumps through your bloodstream. You spend days in the library, reading books on every subject that could possibly interest you, dreaming of your future.

You read about the life of a Tibetan yogin. You could parachute into the Himalayas. You fear heights. You could do it just that once, perhaps.

Too little American.

You read about parapsychology, clear the library desk of books. You place your pencil on the desk and try to move it with your mind. You are distracted by your teethmarks in the pencil.

Too much Dream.

The number of possibilities becomes increasingly unwieldy.

Time is running out, there are deadlines, you are reminded. You have to take the proper admissions tests, submit the proper applications. You must select your destiny and line up your steps for success. Sort faster, increase your processing speed, don’t read so much, become more efficient, practical.

You calculate your chances of winning the lottery based on the number of tickets you can buy with your college savings.

Too unlikely.

You are assured that the number of possibilities is finite.

Possibility electrifies your nervous system. You spend days in the library, inputting data, scanning for your own obituary printed on one of those pages.

5. Amiel, drops of water on a framed pane of glass

You skip school to spend days reading in the public library.

What you love about skipping school is the liberating feeling of not being where you are supposed to be, of being where no one, not even death, would look for you.

One rainy day, you sit before a colossal second-floor window, a book in your lap.

You try to piece together that quote from Amiel’s Journal about people being like raindrops landing on, trickling down, and subsequently running off a window, each drop quickly replaced by another.

You watch the current of black umbrellas coursing down the street.

They are propped up by people, people who likely believe in a god.

You realize that you too hold such a subconscious assumption.

Are you a theist?

In the distance, between rooftops, you see the believer as a funambulist working with a net named God.

Since the tightrope is a thread of the very fabric of the safety net, once the net disappears, as it suddenly has for you, the tightrope disappears with it.

You now find yourself wandering, stumbling through that miraculous part of the sky which touches the earth.

Are you an agnostic?

It’s true, as agnostics say, that even atheists claim a certain gnosis, knowledge; as you see it, however, atheists have a leg up on theists: How in good conscience believe in something when there’s evidence of nothing—that long, still corpse laid at our feet?

Are you an atheist?

More so than any other option on the menu, you suppose.

6. Dissections, a live performance

You select your course of study from the university catalogue menu of options.

Select Degree: Bachelor of Science.
Select Major: Biology.
Select Concentration: Genetics.

In high school you dissect earthworm, frog, and cat.

You remove the cat from its transparent plastic bag. The cat has rigor mortis.

You hold up the cat from under its midriff, like a toy airplane.

It looks like a flying Super-cat.

You peel off the cat’s face and look through one of its eyeholes.

Your score of 780 out of the possible 800 on the High School Biology Achievement Test is owed to the fact that a fair portion of it was devoted to the female reproductive system, a subject about which you have limitless curiosity.

At the university, you cut a little window into a chicken egg with a scalpel. Suspended inside the slime, the black dot of an eye, the rosy heart doing what hearts do.

You doodle circles and curves in advanced calculus.

After calculus, you read philosophy and flirt with women in the library.

You make a mental note of the resemblance between the hemispheres of the human brain and human buttocks.

7. Slide Show #1

Drosophila Melanogaster, the common fruit fly, is used to introduce biology students to the fundamentals of genetics; they are small, manageable, and reproduce rapidly.

You are commended on the deftness with which you press them between slides for microscopic analysis.

You peer into the microscope with one eye.

How like peering into a microscope is the gesture of a flirtatious wink, you think.

You recite to yourself The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock while you work.

You read it with both eyes open.

You memorize it with both eyes closed.

Dare Drosophila eat a peach?

Drosophila dares.

The Sex Song of J. Alfred Fruitfly.

8. The Last Supper, wall mural in egg tempera

You ponder the limits of the scientific method, its lack of romance.

At table, you have before you fetal pig in formaldehyde.

You yearn for the illumination of a candle-light dinner.

You reconsider the menu.

Beef, chicken, or fish—science, business, or liberal arts?

The waiter arrives.

You go a la carte—to a class in art.

9. Slide Show #2

The lights go out, and class begins.

You view projector slides of fine art in the otherwise unlit classroom.

You contemplate the similarities and differences between viewing these slides and your microscopic slides.

You prefer this dim classroom to the fluorescently lit science lab.

When you close one eye in this low light, it is to wink at nature’s most sublime creation—women.

10. Philosophy in the Bedroom

Your college life consists of two things, you realize: books and women.

Lyotard, Cioran, Heidegger . . .

Marina, Karen, Heidi . . .

Heidi Heidegger.

You flirt with women as voraciously and randomly as you read books.

The more you flirt with women in the university library, the more you see the campus itself as a library of women.

11. Beds, a gallery installation

You discover the beds beneath the women, how each bed has its own personality.

You consider compiling a descriptive list of beds: the most intimate detail—the lathe of the legs, the feel of the mattress—remembered and recorded; an inventory of the beds of friends, lovers, relatives, and all those beds you have been able to call your own, including your crib.

You mentally enter an otherwise white and empty gallery of beds, each bed with its owner’s particular lasting impressions, each, in their own way, in disarray.

Indeed, the conception of a bed or series of beds, however firm or flexible, wide or narrow, would provide a fine foundation on which to build our conception of its owner; the bed as object or concept figures profoundly not only in our daily lives but also in our deaths as we conceive of them.

Twin bed vacant but for the rhomboids of sunlight cast in through the bedroom window and the pillow with the hollow left by the head, the fitted white sheet a rippled desert—white bedsheet rippled by the body risen like a sudden gust of wind across an expanse of sand.

12. The Pyramids

You watch her approach from down the street, watch her pass and turn left around the sharp granite edge of a corner building—a bank.

In ancient Egypt the royal funeral processions followed a corridor which turned left at a precise right angle.

The turning of this corner was the ritualistic symbol of the disappearance of the dead into the invisible beyond.

You consider this turn and the turn of the young woman on the street related.

13. Portrait of a Painting as a Window

In art history class you are taught that art is a window to other cultures, to other eras.

You look at these windows, through them.

You imagine the histories of the cultures that produced them, the people of those cultures—their ideas, the routines and rituals of their daily lives.

You squeeze into a time machine constructed of slabs of flaking murals and rocky chunks of cave paintings, oil painting canvases sewn together serving as a roll-top roof.

You sit, looking for the controls.

14. Private Studies

You are intrigued by the private studies of artists:

George Grosz’s series of sketches of mice snapped in mousetraps;

Egon Schiele’s series of self-portraits masturbating;

Bruno Schulz’s Book of Idolatry, its procession of hybrid, man-beast, hydrocephalic dwarves, obsequiously on hands and knees, kissing the feet of statuesque women.

15. Vanitas, Vanitas, Vanitas

Books
Bubbles
Candle, guttering
Cards
Clock, hourglass
Crystal glasses
Dice
Flowers, cut
Fruit crawling with insects
Fruit rind
Globe
Gold goblets
Jewels
Mirror
Musical instruments
Pipe
Pottery, broken
Scales
Skull
Smoke
Weapons, armor

Skull on the table facing the mirror.

Odalisque using a skull as an armrest.

All are in the catalogue of vanitas painting iconography that you peruse.

The vanitas painting, hung in our living rooms to remind us of the brevity of life, of our own mortality.

Your initial shock at seeing books depicted in vanitas paintings, right alongside jewels, skulls, and rotting fruit. The vanity, too, of the pursuit of knowledge.

The catalogue reads like a dictionary of nouns.

Comprehensive.

16. “Life is short; art is long.”

But life is getting longer.

And art shorter.

17. In Defense of a Thesis

Attending the obligatory lecture:

An Analysis of Lemon Tree Root Fossils Discovered in Ancient Pompeii.

Your urge to escape such suffocation is Vesuvian.

18. Fitzcarraldo, the beginning of a film by Werner Herzog

You attend a free university showing of the movie Fitzcarraldo.

The main character, Fitzcarraldo, played by Klaus Kinski, works toward fulfilling his dream of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

In one memorable scene, Fitz is floating serenely along a quiet tributary of the Amazon in a steamboat that he has purchased for the voyage. As it steams upriver, it looks like a two-layer birthday cake with white icing floating past the dark green and lush vegetation of the jungle. Suddenly, from the depths of the jungle rises the sound of native drumbeats. In response, Fitz climbs to the top of the boat with a phonograph and plays a Caruso opera recording.

The surreal beauty of steamboat in the foreground, the jungle in the background; Caruso in the foreground, native drums in the background.

That night you dream that you are running around the university campus, dressed in fatigues and carrying a heavy shoulder pack, and sweating profusely under the hot sun. At every intersection, you see Klaus Kinski sunning himself in a beach chair. He is dressed in shorts, a white shirt, and sunglasses, his blond hair rivaling the sun.

You wake more tired than when you went to sleep.

Only by chance was the wild-eyed, wild-haired Kinski cast as Fitzcarraldo; the original casting had been Mick Jagger (yes, of the Rolling Stones), who abandoned the film for reasons you can’t remember.

A performance by Mick Jagger would never have inspired such a dream.

19. Portrait of a Window as a Painting

Curious about the day’s weather, you look toward your bedroom window.

It is a very still day outside, classically airless, like that of a painting by Poussin.

You stagger to the window, rest your hand on the frame.

The frame is thick, gilt, ornately carved.

A claustrophobic shortness of breath grips you; you realize that the window is in fact a painting.

20. Untitled #1, instructions for a performance art piece

Step 1: Buy a used green duffle-bag from the army surplus shop in town.

Step 2: Stuff it with clothes, put on your coat, pull the duffle over your shoulder.

Step 3: Look at your room, warm, lived in.

Step 4: Now look toward the window and back your way out the door.

Step 5: Walk down Main Street, stop to withdraw $300 from the ATM.

Step 6: Continue to the bus station.

Step 7: Flirt with the girl behind the ticket counter.

After she smiles, pauses warmly, and asks you where you would like to go, reply,

“Surprise me.”

“Well, how far do you want to go?”

“I have $35 for a one-way.”

“Albany?”

“It’s November. Maybe someplace more southern, a little warmer.”

“Cincinnati?”

“Cincinnati.”

:::

I saw her only the one time. The sex was good, but no better than I’d enjoyed with others during so many similar encounters. She spent the night, in the morning collected her clothes, dressed in the bathroom, left. There was the obligatory exchange of phone numbers, but I tossed hers in the trash as soon as she’d gone. That might have been the end of it had she lived; I have no way of knowing.

It was early that evening that I got the message, a voice on my voicemail asking that I call a Detective Josh Bradley at my earliest convenience. I dialed the number with a generic nervousness, having no guess about the nature of the pending conversation. He thanked me for returning his call, then asked me if I knew a Monika Braun. I said that I didn’t, then caught myself: I didn’t know her surname, I told him, but last night I’d met a Monika. My phone number had been found in one of her pockets, he explained, and that morning she had been murdered during a car-jacking. I was being contacted to see if I could help reconstruct her movements just prior to her death. As delicately as possible I informed him that she had spent the evening at my apartment. The approximate time of her departure apparently confirmed that she had been assailed while driving from my home to wherever she intended to go. He asked me if I would be available to come to the station if need be, though he doubted this would be necessary. I numbly queried as to whether they had apprehended the killer: they had. There had been several witnesses, and the stolen vehicle was spotted by a unit not thirty minutes later. I was thanked for my cooperation and was still holding the receiver to my ear as the line went dead.

::

I awoke the next morning with a thought of her—not about her death, but a detail of a moment with her: the feeling of her pelvic bone against my left palm as it rested on her right hip while we made love with her on top. I could easily join this to my overall conception of the evening, but that particular sensation seemed to have an independent existence for me, as vivid and present as when it actually occurred. At the time this did not seem strange. Neither did the memory I awoke with the following day—this one of her blinking once while looking at me just after she had inserted my number into her pocket and before we moved in for a valedictory hug—even as it remained with me in the same manner as the other continued to do. Although at some point I developed a vague conception that something unusual was occurring, it was not until about two weeks on that I articulated to myself what I was experiencing. By this point I was familiar with the rules of the elusive game my memory seemed to be playing: after every time I slept, I would find myself in possession of a new cognizance, recalled with an impossible precision that would not generalize with time. I told myself that this must be the expression of a subconscious horror of what had happened to her (for consciously I did not have a strong reaction, having known her on only superficial, carnal terms), that it would run its course, that it would pass.

After three months, I could no longer maintain my wishful self-deception and feared I was going insane. I began consulting with a series of doctors (general practitioners, neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists), then moved on to spiritualists of all stripes, then to supposed experts on the paranormal. I was supplied with a gamut of theories and subjected myself to all manner of curative measures (drugs, meditation, seances), none of which ameliorated my condition in the slightest. Meanwhile, I engaged in a variety of behaviors as hopeful purgatives. For a while I debauched myself to a formerly unimaginable degree, thinking this might blur all of my life’s sexual activity. When this failed, I turned to a celibacy, going so far as to disallow myself even onanistic pleasure. This, too, proved fruitless. I watched TV endlessly, I listened to music constantly, I traveled from place to place, tried every exotic food I could lay my hands on—in short, anything to saturate my mind and senses in the hope that my brain would be too overloaded to continue to hold on and add to my memorious storehouse of my time with Monika. My greatest success came during the brief period when I experimented with sleep deprivation. By this did I succeed in keeping new remembrances in abeyance, but it did nothing to the ones already accumulated (although, predictably, it wreaked havoc on all of my other mental functions). And, of course, I had to sleep sometime. Finally, I resigned myself to one of two fates.

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How many impressions can be made in a single moment? If you bring a violet to your nose, there is of course its aroma and appearance, there is the feel of the stem against your fingers; but there is also the light of the sun shining down on a part of the sidewalk that is visible in your periphery, there is your left heel pressing down on your sock against your shoe against the concrete, there is a beat of your heart and air entering your nose and lungs, there is the almost imperceptible breeze sounding in the pinna of your right ear. Although your consciousness attends to only a fraction of the data taken in, the rest are nonetheless registered and go toward creating your experience. And so how much variety can be yielded from half a day—even if half of that was spent in unconsciousness, and even if the input is confined to a single subject? How much is there that can be recalled from my six waking hours with this woman? I experienced a moment of true hopefulness when I realized that the answer is finite. But I was disabused of any thoughts of being relieved of my burden when, using my experience up till then as a model (over ten years by then, or in excess of four thousand permanent instances), I calculated that I would have to live to be very old indeed to have any chance of seeing an end.

A week ago I turned forty, and as I sat that night drinking a scotch before retiring, I did the math once again. If I live to be eighty and sleep once per day, that’s fourteen thousand six hundred ten additional fragments of my time with her. Fourteen thousand six hundred ten. Could that be all? I do not know. That’s less than one fragment per second, so it does not seem so. Already I hold so much more of those six hours than I would have thought possible of even the most important of my life’s events—and so it is easy to conceive of recovering what may have been lost, of what blanks there might be and that which may fill them in. Some morning I very well may awaken with the return of the feel of a strand of her hair falling into my mouth, its texture on my tongue. But she dressed in the bathroom, I left her to urinate at least once that I remember (so far)—seconds, minutes maybe, stretches of time in which I took in none of her. Fourteen thousand six hundred ten? Even if so, that is a long road to travel.

But that is the preferable destiny, the one in which an end is at least theoretically possible. The other concerns the way in which memory is thought to work: that every memory is not a replaying of that which was actually experienced (somewhat analogous to a frame of a film), but a recreation, the remaking—or even the out-and-out fabrication—of a past impression. Here the mind is performing a sort of fictionalization, something along the lines of “based on a true story”—and thus is not constrained to facts and their inherent fixity. In the permanent and delimited world of the true, if you were on your way to the store to purchase milk when you plucked the violet off the sidewalk, then that is that; but in the infinite world that allows for falsehoods, during one possible remembrance you are going to pick up orange juice, in another you’re on your way home, a gallon of milk already in hand. The possibilities for a just fraction of a second are limitless.

I tell myself that, just as my inviolable reconstructions of my time with this too-remembered woman do not conform to the conventional wisdom concerning mental retention, so neither do the workings of my memory where she is concerned—and so therefore I recall only input actually received. With this in mind, I sometimes fantasize about my last day of life in a distant, distant future. I imagine waking up that fateful morning with one last impression to be inserted among the rest, the final piece of the puzzle that, when completed, reveals the totality of my experience with this Monika, this absent companion whom I know better and better over time, and that I will recognize it as such. That day I will have what I had of her entirely. Perhaps this is what her spirit requires, and maybe it is only then that both of us can rest.

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