Passenger(26)

This last one troubles me the most.

Then, on the second day, as the final afterthoughts of snow float about the tops of the buildings, I realize that I am losing my mind and need to get out of the apartment.

In my canvas coat, I step out into the third floor hallway and shut my apartment door behind me. One of my neighbors is shuffling back toward his apartment, reading a newspaper. He is a paunchy, wide-faced man with a complexion like pumice in a ratty bathrobe and slippers.

“Hello,” I say, staring the man down.

The paunchy man’s eyes shift toward me and register my existence. Without a word, he vanishes back into his apartment, leaving me alone.

Because maybe I don’t exist at all. Maybe a lack of memory equates to a lack of past, a lack of being. And without a past, can there be a present? A future? Can I exist if nothing was there before me to accommodate my existence?

A white city. A flood of strangers. All of us. Sinless in our anonymity.

Homer depicts Odysseus as a man of countless disguises and many resources.

You know I am alive based on my willingness to exist.

I think, therefore I am, says Descartes.

After a time, I think about what the young fortune-teller has said—Go. Backward. I take this to mean I should backtrack: visit in reverse the places I’ve been as far back as my mind could remember. Whether this is what she meant, I do not know, but I find myself growing claustrophobic in the apartment on that second day, so I need to get out.

This is it: my first snowfall. The city is different in the snow. The buildings look closer together, as if hungry for the warmth of proximity, and the streets are messy with clumps of slush, gray from exhaust. The potholes are puddles. My ghost-faced reflection appears each time I hurry past a shop window. I do not humor him with acknowledgement.

Can I be happy? Here, now, in this state, from here on in? If nothing changes and the memories refuse to return, can I be happy? What is happiness?

I cannot answer these questions because I do not know what I believe. And when you don’t know what you believe, it is impossible to define the world and everything in it. Stacked, cube-like, a system of building blocks, a ladder twist of DNA…a network of ideas and ideals, of moralities and immoralities: a wasteland trudge. Is it possible the destitute children of Mozambique long for plasma televisions and hybrid cars? Do they cry out in Portuguese screams for celebrity tabloids and million-dollar sports contracts? This is what I have been coming back to all along. Can I be happy if I don’t know what happiness is? I make powerless the age-old argument of nature versus nurture, because I have neither—no family who has contributed to the unique design of my DNA; no lifetime of significant events that force me to believe one thing over another. I am the human equivalent of those cutout paper people, the same person repeated over and over and over again, joining hands with itself. I am a human repetition, a child’s paper cutout. Shoot me with bullets and they soar, uninhibited, straight through me. Stab me and you are stabbing smoke, knifing a waterfall.

Is happiness solitary, personal satisfaction? Or is it the gratification one gets from being part of a larger, societal whole? Being one paper-man in a long link of paper-men?

I have no idea.

Go, I think. Backward.

I stand in the wet-snow street outside the Samjetta, shivering in the cold. My bald head is growing numb. The doors are closed this morning against the cold. Of course, there are no memories here except for the ones I made on that first night. I think of Patrice and how angry she was leaving my apartment. I think of the hulking, inhuman shapes of the patrons who would not even acknowledge me until I started playing the piano. In the center of the street, I watch the outside of the Samjetta until, with a bang, the front door swings outward and a young woman I do not recognize leans out. She dumps a pail of soapy water into the snow then, dispatching a suspicious glance in my direction, vanishes back into the tavern. The soapy water must be hot; waves of steam rise up from the snow where there is now a sinkhole.

I move on.

The Middle Eastern sandwich shop slumps halfhearted against the buildings on either side of it. The neon lights behind the grated window reflect in the sidewalk snow. In the daylight, so obvious, it looks embarrassed of its existence, looks like it pulls back from the sidewalk to hide itself among the bigger buildings. I have been walking now for quite a while: I now walk like a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, thumping along. My soul feels depleted; I am a vapor, a ghost.

I think, Therefore I am.

Inside, it is just the elderly Middle Eastern woman and me. In all these days she has not moved from her position behind the sandwich counter. Amazingly, she is still stapling receipts. And the prerecorded sitar music still resonates in the hidden wall speakers.

An illogical fear grips me…and I cannot help but wonder if, despite the fresh new day and the fallen snow outside, it is starting over again. I am stuck in a loop, a record skipping in a groove. A single link in a chain of paper-men. I fear if I ask for a turkey on white, the woman will tell me the deli is closed. No sa’wich now, she’ll say.

Scaling lengthwise the rack of magazines, I reach the deli counter. I stand, shuffling from one foot to the other, letting the suffocating warmth of the cramped little deli thaw my frozen toes, my bald head, the tips of my fingers and the crescents of my ears.

“Hello,” I say to the woman behind the counter.

Yellow cataract eyes dart in my direction then look back at the handful of receipts.