Passenger(25)

That little pink tongue sets down momentarily in the center of my palm.

The world seems to stop.

“Oh shit!” Clarence shouts, slapping his knee and bursting out in a laugh. He’s hysterical over the television show.

Then: a Martian gibberish of jumbled Chinese shouts up from downstairs, to which the young girl holding my hand readily replies in a foreign tirade of her own. She sounds like a spoiled child shouting at her mother. And maybe she is.

Nonetheless, the moment is broken. The tongue has retracted and the young girl drops my hand like a dead fish. Wide-eyed, I stare up at her—and she smiles at me. Not fifteen, I think. More like twelve, maybe thirteen.

She says, “Go.” She says, “Backward.”

I shake my head. “I don’t understand you.”

“Backward,” she says. “Fine. Fine.”

Two minutes later, Clarence is driving me back to the St. Paul Street apartment, mostly listening to the radio and playing percussion on the steering wheel. When we pull up out front, Clarence doesn’t shake my hand or smile or clap me on the shoulder or anything. Clarence only bops his head to the music as I open the passenger door to climb out.

“Maybe you a racist,” Clarence marvels, more to himself than to me. “Wouldn’t that be something, Moe?”

“I’ll see you around,” I say, and gather the gumball machine from the back of Clarence’s pickup.

Clarence honks once as he pulls out into traffic, and it starts to snow.





PART II





TEN





If you have no memory—no sense of self—then you will not know if you have ever been happy or sad, frightened or content, proud or modest. And you therefore would be unable to experience these things without some hinge, some nexus, to the past. If you cannot remember being happy, how will you know what happiness is or when you have found it again?

In grammar school, did you tug on the pigtails of your crushes? Did you fall fast in love with a college beauty and make love to her in her apartment for hours and hours and hours until the sun came up? Was it the way she looked at you that caused the sweats, caused the shivers, caused your knees to weaken? Showers together; sharing a cigarette on the lanai. Hearing her say, They call it a lanai in Hawaii, but it’s really just a porch, a goddamn porch. Did she break your heart and leave you hopeless and wrecked—leave you to get drunk at the stone pub down the block and cause your grades to suffer, threatening your college career with failure? Did you pine over her, and hate the fact that you sometimes saw her holding the hand of someone else? That you wanted to kill yourself, or her, or him, or all three of you?

Or maybe you never broke up. Maybe you fell in love and had a life and had a child and had it all.

Maybe all those things happened. Or maybe none of them did. The saddest part is: you are not sure.





*





The snowfall lasts for two days. By the time it lets up, the city looks new and clean and dreamlike beneath the fresh snow. Past sins are forgotten under the blanket of white while the evidence of man is no more. Footprints accumulating in the frozen crust are the footprints of infants wandering through an Edenic tundra.

I do not leave the apartment for those two days. Instead, I watch the snow come down through the windows, watching it erase the city below. For whatever reason, the snow has brought with it the full brunt of my dilemma and I am crippled beneath the weight of my condition. I spend a lot of time in bed, staring at the muted light of day bleeding across the ceiling. In the shower, I stand beneath the spray of scalding water until it grows cold and causes my red skin to pale and tighten and swell into knobs of gooseflesh.

You know I am alive because of the scattered assortment of half-eaten Chinese food cartons in the kitchenette. You know I am alive because of the occasions I crack open one of the windows to let in the frigid winter air, just to circulate the mustiness of the apartment. If viewed from the outside world, perhaps through the frost-and-grime windowpanes, my hunched and staggering shape suggests that of a hermit lighthouse keeper, but the movement of that hunched and staggering figure is still testament to my living existence, no matter how pathetic it might be. You know I am alive because, at least once, you will be able to hear my sobs over the rush of the showerhead in the cramped little bathroom.

In those two days I spend much time staring at the gumball machine as well. I keep it at the foot of my bed for a while where the sunlight strikes it through the single bedroom window. Then I take it into the living room and set it beside the front door and sit cross-legged on the floor to watch it. I feel this is important. I feel this gumball machine belongs here, somewhere, and if I can just find the right place for it then things will begin to snap into place. There must be a place for it. So I move it. I relocate it to every spot in the apartment, every available square inch on the floor, in every room, even the closet. I set it in the bathroom while I watch it as I sit on the toilet.

One book suggests hypnosis to stir suppressed memories.

One book suggests bombardment of associations to rekindle memory, like looking through picture books of different cities and countries, of famous landmarks and famous people.

One book suggests the amnesia may not be amnesia at all but, rather, a mechanism induced to protect the conscious mind against past traumatic events.