From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Winter 1997, Vol. XIX, No. 1
I should never have told Lin I planned to make my way into the past, for it affected the entire enterprise.
“You don’t do much that makes sense,” she said when she heard my idea. Lin looked over my shoulder at the ad in Bay News. “Chang! That is so foolish! Do something real.”
“People get results this way.” I slapped the newspaper. “I must find it. Here is a possibility.”
We were in the office, and she was about to leave for lunch—probably to the Sword House for Shanghai noodles, a dish she and I used to order together. We never ate together anymore.
“Call one person,” Lin said, “and ask for the phone number of another person and so on.” She opened a file cabinet drawer to remove her purse. “Reconstruct the information. Make an effort of some kind. Move forward.”
We had desks not quite across from each other in the office of Wu Associates, perhaps the third or at least fourth most successful of Oakland’s brokerage firms. Wu Associates Realty is twenty-four desks in a long room which had once been a beer hall but which always reminded me of an alley. Mr. Wu—an amazingly successful man—had installed these desks for his commission-only agents . . . so while we didn’t actually work for him, we did work in his space. To personalize my area, I’d stapled several computer printouts to the wall above my typewriter. One of them read: I’d Rather Be Sailing. Another: I’d Rather Be Scuba Diving. These were activities I intended to try some day. Under these I’d stapled another printout: I’d Better Be Working.
But I wasn’t working. At this time, the time of my conversation with Lin, my commissions were low. Since January 17 I’d been shut down completely, producing nothing. On top of everything I was constipated. I couldn’t even produce waste.
“You won’t accomplish much just sitting,” Lin said, and she took up her purse. The corners of her mouth were turned down—her mistreated child look. and I had dated for a while but we had trouble, and she eventually stopped responding to my requests for dates and now was engaged to be married.
“Listen,” I said, “in the Philippines scientists discovered an isolated tribe of primitives.” I didn’t want her to leave. I wanted to talk to her. I missed talking to her like a person. “This tribe had no word in their language for ‘loss.’ If a man lost his hatchet, he forgot he had a hatchet. He didn’t think about it.”
She made to leave. “I heard about that tribe.” She always claimed to know already the facts I tried to explain to her, but this time I kept talking.
I said: “If a person died in this tribe—a mother or father—soon their children forgot there was such a person. They forgot the entire concept of Mother or Father. Life went on.”
“That tribe was called the Gentle Tassaday.”
“It must be a gift,” I went on, “to be able to move forward like that without . . .”
“They were a hoax.” Lin opened the door onto the street and damp cold from outside came across the lobby, blew under my desk and over my ankles. I was not the caliber of commission-only agent who got a place away from drafts. She held the door open and allowed the cold in since she and I were alone in the office anyway; everyone else was at lunch or out producing results. “That tribe was a hoax set up to fool anthropologists,” she said. “I saw it on PBS.”
I didn’t like being wrong in front of her—someone I dated for several months but who ultimately stopped agreeing to go out with me but whom I still had to see nearly every working day.
“There is no tribe that forgets,” Lin said. “They just pretended to forget. More likely you’ll forget something you still have than something you lost.” She stared into me hard. “You talk and talk yet you sit there and do nothing”—and then she went out into the street to meet her fiancé for lunch. Her fiance was, of course, the very successful head broker, the owner of Wu Associates Realty; that is to say, Mr. Wu himself.
Kelly asked: “What exactly about January 17 do you want to know, Mr. Chang?”
“Everything. I don’t want to miss any aspect.”
Kelly was a professional hypnotist. It disturbed me she worked out of her house; but then it was a good house, up in Piedmont, and her living room was clean and nondescript like the waiting room of any doctor. “But specifically it is my address book I want to find,” I said. “My black leather address book and daily organizer.”
“Address book.” Kelly sounded disappointed. “Like one of those things . . . that you put appointments in, and phone numbers?”
“Every phone number. Every phone number of my life. Also addresses.”
“Hmmm.”
“Appointments. Properties and their costs. Outlines of paper flow for various transactions. January 17—eight days ago—was the last I saw it.” I swallowed. “I really need to know what happened to my address book.”
Kelly’s Bay News classified had been tiny but packed with information. She advertised hypnotherapy as well as “Karmic Encounters,” “Past Life Re gression,” “Future Life Progression,” and “Special Massage.” The ad promised friendly service and reasonable rates. “Lost lives, lost love, lost items… found.”
“I’ll be honest with you, Mr. Chang.” (Yes, her honesty showed, no question. She was a large girl, her skin was bad, but she was attractive in a way that smelled of clean soap.) “Honestly, I can attempt to take you back to January 17, but the results will be ‘iffy’. We’re talking about only a few days ago.”
“Eight. Eight days.”
“And because of the intertwining, spiral nature of time, it would be easier . . . far easier to reconstruct a day that you lived in your childhood. Or a life you lived in the Middle Ages.” She smiled at me. “Probably the best thing is: buy a new address book.”
“I appreciate your candor; however, in my foolishness”—I glanced down, ashamed—”I kept no other copy of the information in my book, so it’s not so much the book itself.”
“You had no backup?”
I felt like crying. I felt like telling her I was not a person who had backup. Lin’s fiancé, Mr. Wu: now there was a man with backup.
“Everything is in the book,” I said. “Since you are a discreet professional, I believe I can mention to you that I also haven’t been able to . . . go to the bathroom. I mean, since I lost the book. Can there be a connection?”
“Eight days?” This alarmed her. She considered. “Well, if you think about it, the human digestive tract also has a kind of spiral nature.”
“A-ha.”
She agreed to put me into a trance for forty dollars. “And that’s not a deep trance,” she pointed out. “A deep trance would be more like ninety dollars. A lot of money just to do January 17—which was a Monday, by the way.”
“Yes! That’s right!” I’d had to reconstruct the day by looking at a calendar and remembering it was the first day of the business week. I recalled my weekend hangover. Yet Kelly seemed already to have this information through special insight.
“I remember it was a Monday,” she said, “because I was out of town then . . . I went skiing. The lift tickets had this big seventeen on them.”
A skiing hypnotist!
“. . . and as I recall, there was a crescent moon.”
“Is that also important? No matter. I put myself in your hands. You already know more about January 17 than I can ever hope to.” I thought about it. “If you feel, perhaps, that the forty-dollar trance will be adequate, although the ninety-dollar trance might be a bit deeper, then I defer to your judgment.”
“All right . . .” ”
As long as you’re sure. As long as you’re certain that the forty-dollar trance won’t be of an excessive … shallowness . . . in order for me to locate my . . .”
I drew a blank then, uncertain suddenly of where I was, what I was going to attempt.
“Yeah.” Kelly crossed her big legs, held a pinecone before my eyes—a pinecone so large it seemed not of this world.
“Let us begin.”
Afterwards, I paid Kelly, and thanked her, and then drove home, darkness settling over the bay. Home for me is in Montclair—a front—gabled Queen Anne two-story off the MacArthur Freeway. I know I got a good deal on the house because it was sold to me by Mr. Wu himself, who is the top broker in the Bay area even though he doesn’t speak English. He was born for success. Mr. Wu escaped to Macau from Canton Province in a brave and difficult way (he swam) and now, at age forty-one, he was in Oakland: a prosperous man with twenty four commissioned agents in his office-people who brought money in for him even though he didn’t pay them anything at all.
And, he was about to marry Lin. Lin, who was an attractive woman and practical and who had been right. My experience with the hypnotist was not “something real.” The forty-dollar trance told me nothing.
So, like most week nights, I sat in the living room of my house, watched TV programs, and drank heavily. I walked to the bathroom every now and then, looked into the mirror with my head posed in various positions like I was having my picture taken for an industry magazine piece concerning top sales… or a newspaper wedding notice. A stack of periodicals leaned in the bathroom’s corner: Sail, Scuba World, Windsurfer. I was very serious about one day engaging in these water sports, but didn’t feel like reading about them just then. As for the bathroom itself, nothing came of standing next to the facility. I was still completely blocked. I went to the kitchen for bourbon, which I mixed with Coke.
I was in a situation.
On television a flying saucer wobbled against a starred background, obviously suspended by thin filament thread. This bored me so I went to the window to stare at the MacArthur Freeway. An elevated section swept in an arc before my house, divided the view of the sky from my front room nearly in half. The parkway had become familiar by now, but when I’d first moved in it loomed overhead like bad concrete fate. Since the loss of the address book, it had again begun to intrude on my dreams. A few nights before I’d had a dream of driving . . . driving up on the parkway in my car, when suddenly I fell through everything. I fell through the car seat, the floorboard, the road, and its steel girders . . . everything . . . until I landed—bang—up under the overpass.
In my dream I sat comfortably under the concrete arms and the thick growing vines. I could see the way the road was held together. I could see the huge threaded bolts with the nuts cinched over them hard, the cantilevered ribs that spread the weight of traffic over the broad surface. In my dream I realized such a carefully planned structure could never be anywhere except in front of my own house. I realized how Mr. Wu had meant for this feature to loom over me and my home: the red taillights of cars sweeping away as I sat motionless below. And I realized that a man who could swim out of the PRC with nothing but a garbage bag full of Ping-Pong balls for flotation, and yet become the third most successful real estate agent of the largest Eastern population in California, could never be me.
I left the window, sipping bourbon. It was very late. Still I didn’t go to the bathroom, though the Coke had caffeine in it which usually stimulates that sort of activity for me. How much waste could I accumulate? I began to think I should have gone to see a doctor rather than a hypnotist. And, the whole time, wandering through my house, I half expected to come across the address book; perhaps at its familiar place on the corner of the living-room credenza-its nearly translucent pages crossed with a fine grid. Numbers and addresses in columns of Chinese characters and lines of English. But, of course, it was not there.
Down on my hands and knees in robe and pajamas, I shuffled a stack of papers by the bed. Yes. Here. A letter from a friend who’d just moved. Allan wrote this letter to send me his new address, new phone, too. He wasn’t a good friend—a rather surly person, in fact—but without the address book, this letter made him one of the few people in the world whose position I could pinpoint with any accuracy.
When I dialed, the number seemed to go on forever.
“Allan,” I said. “I cannot go to the bathroom.”
“Shit.” The voice sounded thick and distant. “It’s two in the morning.”
I remembered then that my not-so-good friend had moved to Chicago—that’s why he’d sent the letter with the new address and phone number—and there was a two-hour time difference. I shook my head, trying to get clear on the concept. “Allan. I am the victim of a cheap trance.” I was still on the floor, on my knees.
“OK,” Allan said, groggy.
“And I was wondering what you were doing on January 17. Of this year.”
“Chang?”
“It was a Monday. And I just want to sort of collect everyone’s experiences. How they perceived that day. I want to form around myself a sort of aura. . . . ”
“Chang, is that you?”
I was impressed my friend could tell it was me, and from such a great distance, too. Perhaps all was not lost. “So far,” I said, “all I really know is that it was a Monday, and that a hypnotist went skiing. But all my Hong Kong numbers are in there—all the numbers of my past, my childhood, my cousins and half-cousins-—and those will be hard to reconstruct.” After so much sweet Coke and bourbon, I thought I was explaining everything rather well.
“Hong Kong? Numbers where? For Christ’s sake, Chang, what are you talking about?”
Good Lord. Was I the only person concerned about the address book? It seemed everyone else should be worried about it, too.
So I tried carefully to tell him how it had been no good. How everything had been just no good at all. I hadn’t ever gone into anything you might call a trance. Oh yes, my arms felt light and tingly, but that was it. And when I closed my eyes, I had the feeling I was leaning forward, though I knew for certain that I was sitting perfectly upright. Surely this didn’t constitute a trance. “For one thing I was preoccupied with the hypnotist,” I said. “Her voice kept disturbing me, like the way a fly might disturb you if you were trying to do a handstand. You know.”
“No.”
“And soft voice—developed for hypnotic purposes, I suppose. Then there was her candor: the thoughtful way she tried to save me money.” Yes—she had been thoughtful and reasonable, but I’d also been painfully aware I was getting only the forty-dollar version; adequate enough perhaps for quitting smoking or reconstruction of a past life, but I wanted an entire day! I wanted it recreated in detail so that I could watch events, pay attention, keep an eye on the address book and not remove my gaze from it until I was sure I understood its fate. Because it had simply disappeared.
Going back in the almost-trance, I’d seen—or had the feeling of seeing—that there was indeed a crescent moon on January 17. Also, I recalled that this was the day when hundreds were killed in a Japanese air disaster. Yes. Terrific. For this I’d paid forty dollars and gone into a state of arm-tingling forward tippiness. I could have gone to the library and looked those things up. I could have found those things about January 17 in an old newspaper. But what had I eaten for lunch on January 17? What socks had I worn?
“And what about the book, Allan? What about the book?”
“What book?” “And then,” I said, “I started remembering things that have nothing to do with January 17 at all. I started remembering things I had forgotten . . . about a girl I know, and what I said to her back when we had some trouble. Allan, I must find my way into the past.”
“Chang?”
“In fact, I’m just now thinking . . . that here it is only midnight. And there it is already two in the morning. . . .”
“Chang? My advice to you is: stay away from women.”
He was trying to change the subject. “Two hours difference,” I said. “So it’s sort of like I’m talking to you from the past already. Isn’t that right?”
“Stay away from that hypnotist and the other one, too. Women are nasty, brutish, and short.”
“But, if it is midnight here, and two there, aren’t I, then, already a voice from the past?”
“Women are unpredictable, unreliable, and a breeding ground for harmful bacteria.”
“Never mind, then.”
He yawned. “I’m pretty sure that you are not, literally, a voice from the past.”
Wrong again. I hate being wrong in front of my friends. My friends, all their names all in the book on the soft, gridded pages, all of them falling away like the last squeeze of a warm hand.
“Chang?” Allan said. “Excuse my asking, but have you lost your fucking mind?”
I saw Lin through the open door of the One-Hour Photo at Eighth and Franklin, and came behind her as she inserted her prints back into their envelope—time enough, though, to glimpse the photo on top of the stack. I recognized immediately the shoulder of the man who sold me my house, the successful man. Mr. Wu’s shoulder and forearm in a green, short-sleeved knit, and in the background: blue water. So these were obviously pictures of enjoyable activity.
Lin looked at me in surprise and for some reason I said: “I really miss you.”
“Chang!”
I felt dizzy. Probably these pictures she was picking up were of the two of them engaging in a water sport. I leaned on the counter and the saleslady at the One-Hour Photo eyed me with suspicion. “I don’t know why I’m saying this,” I continued. “I’ve been thinking about us together. We had many times that were good. Remember when we’d eat Shanghai noodles? And I’ve remembered other things—things I said to you in anger. I remember that last particular night. . . . .”
“Don’t talk like this, Chang.”
“I’ve had a certain experience which has caused me, inadvertently, to remember the night of our argument. I called you a good-looking babe, or something like that. And I said that you had been mean to me. It all happened so fast.”
She put the envelope of photos in her purse. She stuck her fingers in her ears. The One-Hour Photo counter lady said: “Can I help you, sir?”‘ in Cantonese.
“Is this a bad time?” I asked.
Lin looked ridiculous, stopping her ears like that, her arms out like moth wings. “Of course it’s a bad time! I’m . . . buying photos, and I have to make Xerox copies, and go somewhere. We can’t talk about this.” She walked to the door, and I followed her onto the street. With my hands in my pockets from the wind, I felt slouched over and small.
We got to a crosswalk. “I don’t see why this is such a bad time,” I said.
“You are always talking. Always trying to make yourself feel better at other people’s expense.”
“I’m not saying this to make myself feel better.” We were walking toward Webster Street by then on the uneven sidewalk. “If I wanted to make myself feel better I’d tell you to go to hell.”
“I won’t help you feel better about yourself. Good-bye.”
“Or I’d tell you to go fuck a razor blade, then.” This whole thing was making me angry. I was shaking. “That would make me feel better. But I’m not saying those things . . . and am instead seriously trying to compliment you. All of those things I’m remembering I said in anger . . . really, those were compliments, too.”
She went quickly from me and I gave up following. I stared into the scarred vegetables of a market stall basket. Unhealthy fumes rising. It was an awkward moment.
“And so you don’t want me to feel better?” I said to the injured shallots and yams. “You don’t want me to?”
“I’m worried,” Kelly said. “I’m happy to do it, but you seem a bit trance-resistant.”
I’d considered contacting another hypnotist—the Bay News was full of them—but it didn’t seem proper. After all, Kelly and I had a professional relationship. Also she was attractive and good-smelling and really seemed to care. Her rates were reasonable.
“I think I’d just be taking your money, Mr. Chang.” “I’m falling apart,” I said. “I have begun to date my life from the time of the loss of my address book. Do you understand? I now consider my life to have two periods: Before Losing Address Book and After Book Loss Event.”
She touched my shoulder. “Using the past is one thing, Mr. Chang. Abusing it is something else.”
“January 17. One day. It’s all I’m asking.” With the ninety-dollar trance we got a little further. The familiar arm tingling. Kelly’s voice guided me as if from a distance, like a radio program which keeps coming in and out from a background of static. She told me to concentrate on the seventeenth. I remembered that there was actually a mild earthquake on that day, in Los Angeles. Kelly told me that the earthquake could have important consequences for our search, given the intertwining, spiral nature of time—though I didn’t really understand the connection. Yes, and the plane crash in Japan, which happened on that day. Then—like a breakthrough—I saw it. I saw my breakfast: the breakfast I ate at the Kettle on Harrison Street on the morning of the seventeenth.
“Where is the address book?” Kelly’s voice as if spoken through gauze.
“I don’t see it.”
“Keep looking.”
“I see two eggs. Two sausage patties, coffee…”
“Look for the book!”
“Don’t yell at me while I’m in a deep trance!”
“You’re right, you’re right.” The disembodied voice. “You are dropping away. You are dropping away. . . .”
I knew where I was dropping—right into that memory which I both did and did not want, that thing which had happened a year before with Lin rather than eleven days before on the day of the earthquake and the plane crash and the loss of the address book. And I saw myself getting up from the bed in Lin’s room, and I saw myself shove her back onto the mattress. The crash of a glass candle holder.
I believe I shouted at this point: “No!” And Kelly was rubbing my cheeks.
“Go in there,” Kelly said. “Take off your clothes.”
In an adjacent room I wrapped myself in a sheet and lay face down on a table which had a hole provided for my head. The room smelled of lemon. Under the table, Kelly’s carpet was gold-colored. When she came in she switched on a boom box which sat on a crate in the corner—a 10,000 Maniacs tape played—and she rubbed lemony oil in her palms to warm it and then began what I supposed to be the “Special Massage.” Was this included in the ninety dollars? I watched the gold carpet and decided not to worry about it.
Although I was naked under the sheet and her hands were firm and knowledgeable, I wasn’t the least bit aroused by this treatment, not even when she rubbed my “footsies.” (That was what she called them. A professional, off hand demeanor, I suppose, developed for massage purposes.) When she rubbed my feet, I thought for a moment she’d break through the skin and actually start to caress the bones inside. A certain amount of arousal, yes, when she stroked my forehead. Only then. Odd.
She propped me in a sofa with cushions under my arms, waved a chain before me. A sliver of stone—like flint—swung at its end without turning, as if the flat face of the stone were trained to align itself with my own face. “For the rhythm,” she said. “That’s all. Nothing spooky about it.”
Still, I couldn’t say any of this actually put me in a trance. Yes, no question, we had a conversation. A very deep conversation. We discussed the old days. The good old days. Back when I’d been somebody; gotten things done; moved my bowels daily or at least nearly daily. Back when I’d had the address book.
“Will the trance be still deeper than this?” I asked.
“Good God.”
“I thought about trying another hypnotist, but that didn’t seem right.”
“Listen,” she said. Her soft voice pushing me forward for a while then trailing behind like toppled trees. The music in the background—10,000 Maniacs, I thought it was. Wait: I’d already had that thought. A flint sliver at the end of its very pale chain sweeping forwards and backwards. . . .
What was the use? Nobody knew. Nobody understood, or cared. If there had been a plane crash they would have noticed. Or an earthquake. My problems amounted to nothing for these people, and this seemed incredibly shortsighted of them. What were they spending their time worrying about if it were not the address book and what had become of it?
There were addresses in there of girls I’d known in high school, of boys I’d gone scouting with in the scrub paddocks of Lantau Island. These were important numbers in the world, as important as latitude or longitude numbers might be for finding a ship’s position in a dangerous storm.
The girls now were grown, and I occasionally heard about them through friends. One was a nurse; another the manager of a restaurant; another a nympho. I’d built rope ladders with those boys, and played soccer. We made spike fences from wild bamboo to keep animals away—even though there were no animals. Now those boys were engineers, salesmen, franchisers of pizza delivery enterprises. The most successful of them? Lon. “Lon got into digital papers on the ground floor,” I said to Kelly, my tongue thick and slow.
“Now we’re getting somewhere. When did you speak to him last?”
“I don’t speak to him. I speak to none of them.” My head was like a tube of ointment which someone was rolling up from the bottom. The thoughts came oozing. “I haven’t gotten in on the ground floor of anything. . . .”
Yes, the ninety-dollar trance was of a different intensity from the forty dollar version, if not of a different kind. After a while, rather than fall away, back and away from myself, I seemed to whirl inside—closer and closer. Close to that person I knew but didn’t have a great deal of respect for—because of familiarity; because I understood this person’s weaknesses and in efficiencies.
That Chang.
Always taking the long way home. Performing the nonessential. Why did he have to wash the car before he changed the oil? What was the point of that? Why did he iron his handkerchiefs? Did he think someone would check them for wrinkles? Chang: always taking care of the peripheral instead of the central. Was this to make up for something? . . . or just his manner? . . . the way he wanted to take care of things, to take care of people too because people were important?
The people in his book.
Maybe I’d never contact them again, even if I had their addresses. Many were a continent away. The fact was, they frightened me. What could I tell them? That I had a house under a parkway? That I was allowed to use a desk in the offices of Wu Associates? But these people had been important enough to include in the book at one time, and someday I might still call them—call them with news of a great future success. The thought that they could no longer be reached in the event of that possibility . . . that I could lose them . . . that they could lose me. . . .
Even those I could have located without the book I never bothered to call. My sister in Seattle—I didn’t want to keep informing her how badly I was doing in real estate. My mother in Hong Kong, who had given me the down payment for the house. I hated having to talk to her, to tell her always: “Things are well,” and that I would be paying her back soon. My father I hadn’t seen in decades; disappeared into the mainland. Lost.
Like Lin had been lost, right up in my face, the downturned, abused lips. “You are pathetic,” she was saying. “You are pathetic!” Very loud and annoying. I suppose she felt I was pathetic because I hadn’t swum from Canton Province to Macau, or because I’d come to the largest Eastern population in the United States—among people who had wealth and wanted property—and yet I’d made no money.
Because I wanted to sit under the parkway and look at its construction . . . because driving on it just had nothing to do with me anymore.
For whatever reason, or all of these, she felt it: I was pathetic, so she screamed this at me. I had been drinking and shoved her away. A glass candleholder broke against the wainscoting of her bedroom. She screamed more. Running, locking herself in the bathroom until I left her apartment. Some part of all of it had been unforgivable, and though I could see the whole episode play like a video, I couldn’t place exactly that moment which had been the crossing of this forgiveness line.
So if I couldn’t have her, just give me my numbers then. Just those. I wanted that data. Never mind the people themselves, I’d settle for their coordinates. Who were they eating dinner with? Who were they laughing with? It wasn’t me—it would never be me—but the numbers and addresses would be something—something to make a connection, all in one place. With that I wouldn’t ask for more. I’d work hard, build around that one thing, support and nurture it because why should I not?
“I still don’t remember anything about the address book,” I said. “No.” Kelly seemed distant. She held her stubby fingers to her lips. She pulled her mouth down at the corners.
“An interesting experience,” I said. I felt poisoned. I wanted to be helpful.
At this time I stopped going in to Wu Associates Realty.
Seeing Lin after these fresh memories would be painful, and it wasn’t like I was making any money there. I stopped drinking, too, for several days. Not out of any moral thought, but out of terror at the sound of the glass candleholder—a sound I’d pushed out of my mind but which had found its way back in; and also there was the sound of Lin’s voice: “You are pathetic!”
So I stopped drinking, but most especially, I stopped trying to find my way into the past.
I spent at least two whole days in bed, working very hard at not planning my next move. Then, one evening—restless—I dressed and went out. I walked under the gridded trestle which crossed my porch gables. The birds settling in to sleep in the treetops peeped like digital pagers going off. Every step I took down the porch stairs seemed to drop the temperature of the air by five degrees until I was standing, shivering, on the sidewalk. I followed the feeder of the MacArthur Freeway toward a nearby package store, hummed to myself, pretended to be cheerful. “Move forward,” Lin had said, and I tried to fool myself into thinking that this was exciting and possible.
The feeling was cramped and false and did not hold. The looming parkway ramp, covered on its underside with black vines and graffiti and thick air, swept to my left below a huge moon—a moon the size of a steamship. I looked up at the ribbed reinforcements of the parkway, the thick iron rods of the safety rails with nuts cinched tightly down on them. Going forward on the cracked sidewalk while looking up like that was difficult. To walk forward or to fall on my face, I thought: the difference between these two things was the difference only of the slightest placement of step. Just as to swim or to drown in the bay while enjoying a water sport would be the difference only of certain strokes made with the arms.
I remembered Lin’s downturned mouth and sad eyes and thought that to love or to molest was a difference only of gesture. I would either have to go back and deal with this or hide it away forever; put it behind me the way that those Gentle Tassaday—charlatans, Lin had said, actors—forgot their missing mothers, their missing hatchets.
So by the time I got to the package store I was in low spirits, and I bought a bottle of wine, to get at least a little relief from my thoughts. But I had no chance to open that bottle. I walked back for half a block, then began to run. I ran up the stairs and into my house, rolled the wine onto the carpet, dropped the keys on the credenza without closing the door behind, headed for the bathroom.
I will say only that it came out of me in rings and loops. It came out of me in round clods the size of eyes. The light above the mirror was a frosted streak as I thrashed around, everything falling out of me like time. At my elbow, on the uneven stack of reading material: a scuba magazine, and beneath it a copy of Wooden Boat; and under that—its corner barely visible—my black leather address book and daily organizer.
I took it up with shaking hands, fanned it open. Names in characters of two continents, cramped penmanship across filmy gridded pages. In the front of the book were appointments and properties, pages I wouldn’t need anymore, and I ripped out handfuls of these and wadded them up. But when those were gone, I needed still more, and so I started in on the names and numbers, too.
The book completely empty, and I as well, if not entirely clean. What could I do with the past, then, but drop it away?