Passenger(65)

Mi amor, mi amor…





My eyes find their way across the street to the construction site. Fixed to the fencing, a placard that reads hanely construction floats through the fog. Hanely. I know it is possible to see the sign, the name, from my bedroom window. I have used it before as my own, adopted it, while trying to find my real identity. One of my many jaunts. One of my many odysseys. Because the city is full of names for the taking. And I have taken. The streets are lousy with them—Paul, Howard, Franklin, Charles, Madison, and countless smaller byways—because it is a city of the nameless, of the empty, of the wandering multitude who have no future because they have no past. Of homeless men in suits of bubble-wrap and electrical tape. Of nameless commuters filing on and off countless city trams.

Walking up the stairs to the third floor apartment, the entire building is silent. For once, I feel I am the only living soul in the city. I mount the second-floor landing. Here, the head of the newel post, the oversized pinecone, comes off in my hand. It had been broken by me on my first return, absent of memory. As I have most recently collapsed to the landing and pulled my legs to my chest, envisioning the long stretch of highway, too shaken to continue up to the third floor, I also took that walk before. Only I didn’t collapse to the floor that time. I grabbed the oversized pinecone and broke it loose, carrying it with me as I tumbled down the flight of stairs.

Upstairs, I enter my apartment. The windows are shaded against the light. Cave-cold, black as space, my breath is visible as I cross the floor.

How many times have I returned to this apartment without my memory, only to return again with it? I cannot remember…though not because my memory is faulty but, rather, because I have done it so many times now the exact number eludes me.

In the kitchen, the doors of the refrigerator are barren. Yet I can remember now the slip of paper I taped to the door at one point, saying:

If you lose your memory, know this:

You suffer from spontaneous amnesia.

There are notebooks in the bedroom.

They will tell you all about yourself.

I had written that to fool myself. To trick my already crippled mind. Because I have come back a number of times, each time trying to keep myself from remembering any way that I could. I had made up a history for myself in those notebooks. An attempt at starting fresh, starting over, starting new.

But in the end, there is no escaping the memory of memory. No escaping time immemorial.

Notebooks in the bedroom detailing a make-believe life with a make-believe name. To start over. To start fresh. Paul Howard, Howard Franklin, Franklin Madison…

I get rid of most of my clothes, most of my furniture, because those things eventually lead to other things. And those other things inevitably direct me down a path. And the path—the path always leads to the remembering. Which is when it begins all over again. So I buy new clothes—brand new jeans, new sneakers, a crisp white shirt—because there are no memories affiliated with these new things.

I clean out my bank account to buy the rundown apartment outright so I will leave no trace of rental agreements, no mortgage payments. I cancel my credit cards and shut down my telephone line. My utilities are addressed to resident and that is just fine. I have no criminal record so the police will not know who I am.

I can vanish.

I’m a ghost.

Soy fantasma.

The package I mailed last August. On my birthday. It was filled with the few belongings I’d kept from my son—toys, a pair of tiny shoes, that sort of thing. I mailed it to Madeline with no note, no explanation. I just wanted her to have it so it didn’t wind up in the Salvation Army or someplace. I just wanted her to have it before I stepped out in front of that bus.

In the yellow midday gloom of my apartment, I sit on the floor with my legs tucked under me, and look at the palm of my left hand.

The address, smeared to hieroglyphics, is still visible.





TWENTY-SIX





I leave a note for Nicole at the post office the next day, asking her to meet me after work at the Walters Art Museum café. Twenty after five, Nicole arrives. I am seated at a table by myself, my hands clasping a paper coffee cup. I look up as she approaches and she smiles at me. I can’t bring myself to smile back. She is not the first Nicole I’ve met in the past year and a half. There have been plenty of Nicoles—plenty of Clarences and Patrices and ceramic tile floor salesmen—and I have forgotten them all. Over and over. Only to remember them again.

“Hi.” She sits and, for the first time, I see she is wearing makeup. It is a new experience for her, the application crude and overindulgent, the way a ten-year-old girl might do it. “I’ve been doing more research on amnesia. I had some stuff to tell you but, well, I—”

“Say my name,” I tell her.

Her near-adolescent eyes search mine. “What do you mean?”

“You know it,” I say. “My name. I’ve told you before.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s Palmer,” I say. “My name is Palmer Troy. You know this because I told you once before.”

She can only stare at me, her mouth still frozen in the shape of her last word. She has been caught. She has been called out. Around her, the first floor of the museum granulates and turns black and white.

“I’m not angry,” I say. “I don’t even care why you pretended not to know me. Here.”