6. Memory

Amazing, how many people you meet, even if you’ve lived as I have. Of course, you forget most of them. No, that’s not quite right. They become like one of those files the FBI or some other group of snoops keeps. Pictures of them are stored somewhere in memory. There’re very few you’d ever have any reason to recollect. And when you do see one of them again—always in the most inevitable, which is to say the least expected, time and place—it’s a surprise.

If I or anybody’d thought more about it, the women who came to mother’s funeral are precisely the ones one would’ve expected. Which means, of course, they all surprised me. Mrs. Littington—where did she come from? And the woman who seemed to recognize me by the door to the bathroom: I never would’ve expected her to leave the patch of grass people called her lawn. As for the others: They seemed to exist only on this block, along the streets bounded by the parkway and the cemeteries—an area just away, but a whole neighborhood away, from the train tracks. And, it seemed, those women wore only pastel-colored housedresses or stretch pants and baggy blouses. If they went to church or some other worship place, they always seemed to wear the same hues of washed-out lace and linen they wore to some school dance, to a graduation or one of those terminally immemorial events of those women’s youth. Those clothes always seemed to fit—or, more precisely, not fit– the same way, no matter how much weight they’d gained or lost.

Then again, Mrs. Littington doesn’t look that much different from the way I remembered her, and I remembered her because she didn’t look like the others. The others also looked more or less the way I remembered them. I guess that’s because they seemed like old ladies when I lived on this block.

There they were: photos pulled up from some old image bank. Like the ones that flash on the television screen of some actor thirty years past his last role or some athlete who retired before his kids were born and nobody knows what he’s done since. They die, and it takes everyone by surprise, even though they’d “valiantly fought cancer” or some such thing.

Funny—when I came back to this block, I didn’t know how she died. For a time, I knew she wasn’t well, but she’d never talk about it. Which isn’t to say that she never complained. Oh, there were the stories about people who lied, who were supposed to know better but didn’t, about someone—usually a man—who screwed something up she probably could’ve, and should’ve, done herself.

It was usually the men. They, the ones who didn’t finish a job, who left before doing so, who showed less loyalty to their women and their children (which they denied responsibility for, while boasting of their ability to make them) than the average housecat. Men, sometimes coming, usually going. A few, the women remember. Me—none. When you don’t know your father’s name, it’s hard to find any reason to remember any other man’s. You don’t expect other men to stay, and you may not stay, either.

For a long time, I hadn’t left anything or anybody on this block but mother. Not even a fragment, a memory of me, except what mother held. I don’t doubt that she thought about me as much as she said she did, but I wondered what exactly she recalled. Whatever it was, it had less and less relationship to the person with whom she spoke on the phone with every conversation we had. Soon, whatever image she had of me won’t have anything to do with me, with the person I’ll soon be.

And what were those women thinking when they looked at me? Could it be the child, the teenager, they knew? That’s hard to imagine: too many years have passed. My size, my shape, even my voice, has changed since any of them last saw me. And, as I said, my transformation is not complete.

5. Struggle to Life

Soon—if I survive—I’ll’ve completed the transition that began years ago but didn’t commence in earnest until recently.  It’s not a matter of things going as planned:  Nothing ever does, especially on this block.  Which, of course, means that the inevitable happens.

What, if anything, had mother planned when she met that man whom I saw –just me and him—the last time I was here?  About him, I can state two facts with certainty:  He fathered me, and he left.  Could she have foreseen either event?  Could anyone?  I only know, from what I’ve heard, that her family “warned” her about him.  Did she ignore them, or did she simply not hear them?  In any event, I don’t think she envisioned his flight.  If she could’ve foreseen it, would she have spent that night, that day, or any other time with him?  I don’t think she’d’ve taken the time with him as a dare, or as a way to defy and cheat death (as the young so often do) or authority.  No, she wasn’t that kind of girl.  I guess she never could’ve been.

But she ended up like the women who attended her funeral—and, in fact, every other woman who’s lived and died on this block:  Alone, unless she was in the company of one other woman, and no more.  And there were only a few women who could sit next to her, and whom she would’ve wanted by her—only one of them at a time, of course. She probably wouldn’t’ve liked this funeral any more than she liked any other gathering.  But she wouldn’t’ve tried to stop it: She’d’ve known she’d’ve had as much chance of stopping the rain.

When I was growing up, sometimes she’d lose her temper.  She’d yell at me and toss things across the room.  But her outbursts never came when I expected them, like when I flunked math again or some teacher wrote yet another note about me doing something or another, or even when someone on this block—one of the women who ended up taking turns kneeling by her casket—accused me of taking possessions from, or teaching curse words to, their kids.  Or, for that matter, of teaching them anything at all.  Somehow, I seemed to be the easiest one to blame when their kids started talking about sex sooner than they should’ve—that is, as long as they were living with their mothers, on this block.  Well, I guess it made some sense:  There weren’t any men here to take the fall, and I was older than the other kids, or at least it always seemed that I was the oldest.  And I didn’t have any younger siblings to whom I could impart my wisdom, or corruption.

I don’t now, either.  I don’t know that anything I’ve learned, or am about to learn, will be useful for anybody else.  The change I’m going to make, soon after we bury mother, is one neither I—nor anyone else—can prepare for.  No one’s prepared to bring a new being—or, more precisely, to complete the transformation that brings a new form of life or life in a new form—into this world.  Expectant mothers have classes, and other less formal encounters, to tell them what they’re going to experience.  Sometimes their friends, mothers and sisters shower them with gifts of food and clothing for the soon-to-be-born.  But nobody can prepare them, not only for the physical pain and struggle they endure, but also for the transition they’re about to make.  In most cultures, they believe that such a transition makes a girl into a woman or a woman into a lady and have some sort of ritual for it.

Whatever they call the transition, they know it’s inevitable and irreversible.  Which means, of course, that it can—and sometimes does—kill the one who embarks upon it.  Of course, no man has ever had to, or wanted to, undertake such a journey.  (Journey:  How quaint the sound!)  Actually, no man has ever skirted death from a life within his own body.  For him, death is death is death—whether it’s from cancer, a bullet or any other projectile strikes at the walls around the moat of his life forces.  If he escapes one kind of death, there are other kinds:  all sorts of collisions and other accidents.  But they are all the same kinds of death, really.

Occasionally a man dies to save a life already present.  But that’s not the same as, it’s not even comparable to, dying in the process of delivering a new pair of eyes and ears and a new voice into the world.  Perhaps I won’t have to do anything like that, either.  But no man has ever faced such a possibility.

All I know with certainty is this:  Either I will die, or I will live as someone different from the person who left this block.

There’re some rooms I’ll never enter again:  Some because I won’t need to; others I won’t want to see again.  Some of my old clothes, I won’t wear again.  I’ve bought some new ones, and others have been given to me, but I don’t know which ones will be right for me.  And I don’t know that I’ll wear again what I’ve worn to mother’s funeral.

After the changes all the women at my mother’s funeral have made, many years before the funeral—and after the ones I’ve made, and am about to make—you don’t eat the same things, or in the same way.  Some women binge on certain foods when they first become pregnant and never eat them again once their babies are born.  Someone told me I might experience something similar.  Sometimes you need additional, and unusual, substances to support the life you’re about to create and sustain.

Until about a year ago, I’d never eaten an avocado.  Now I can’t get enough: I don’t know whether it’s because of the taste, which I like. I know there’s nothing like breaking open that hard, almost barklike, shell and opening up to flesh that’s almost fluorescent—soft and cool at the same time, the taste an echo of its color.  And swallowing it is a unique experience:  It goes down smoothly, but not with the cloying unctuousness of olives.  I still eat olives, but lately I’ve begun to eat them with peppers.  Will I want to eat avocados, olives, peppers or anything else I eat now once I leave the hospital in the outfit I’ve chosen especially for that day?  Will I want to wear that outfit?

For that matter, I can’t even say for sure that I’ll get away from this block once I’ve buried mother.  That’s what I planned to do, but I have to be careful, and keep my eyes and ears open.  There are plans, and there are the lives we bring into this world—and this block.

4. Stories of Men and Women

Nobody’s a hero; nobody’s decorated.  Nobody’s remembered…at least not the men, anyway.  Now, with my mother gone, I hope that nobody here remembers me, either.  It’s a privilege I could’ve claimed for myself the day I left, no matter where I went next. 

But of course I didn’t have to.  That may be the one advantage I have as a result of growing up here:  that I’ve never had to claim privilege; I’ve never had to pull rank on anybody.  Or at least I’ve never felt any such need.  You might say that I’m not impressed with people or with anything they do; I’m even less awed by men and their stories.  This isn’t to say I fear no one:  I simply know how one can or can’t or will or won’t do what, and to whom or what.

So there’re lots of things I’ve never had any use for.  Like most of the things they tried to teach me in school—or more precisely, most of the things  they were supposed to make gestures of teaching me and I was supposed to make them think I’d learned—and everything I heard in church.  The canons of the academies and monasteries echo thousands of lies and even more exaggerations and misrepresentations.  No one you ever meet is like anyone you read about in any history book or in any epic tale, whether it’s Beowulf, The Deerslayer or All Quiet on the Western Front.  The ballads I had to hear and the paintings we looked at in textbooks and on school trips to museums were all about generals, emperors or mystic visionaries:  about solitary men leading lonely young men to their deaths, in the fields or in the trenches or at their own hands.  No man like any of those characters ever came from this block—or, for that matter, like any other blocks like this one that I’ve seen or heard about.

Who’s ever written an opera about a woman and her cat?  Or a woman and another woman, or a woman and her children?  About the latter, there’s the story of Mary and Jesus.  Of course:  two people who never could’ve existed on this block.  Not only is he to good to be true, she…well, let’s say she contradicts one of the few relevant facts that’s ever been taught in any science class!

Why can’t we have a religion—if we have to have one—based on a story of a woman and her cat?  At least someone could get that one right, I think.  I don’t believe anyone could ever set down the story of a woman and her child, and whenever anybody’s set down the story of a woman and a woman, it sounds like a man’s fantasy.  (Trust me. I know the difference:  I’ve had lots of time—and more opportunities than anyone should have—to learn.)

But about a woman-and-cat tale: If someone could write it, that person is not me.  I’ve never kept a feline, at least not long enough to have such a relationship.  The one time I had one—a gray, smoky shadow I never named—I ended up giving him to an old woman.  It just didn’t seem fair to make that cat dependent on someone like me; it was no more fair than my dependence on my mother for so much of my life.  Since then, I’ve avoided making any need for me in any other living being.

Even if I’d had a cat, a child, or any other permanent companion, I couldn’t’ve written about me and him, her or it.  Maybe if I’d stayed in school, I’d’ve learned how to put some experiences—my own and others—on a page, or even between the covers of a book.  There’s so much I’ve never learned. As a kid, I asked myself, “Why should I?” So I could write the kinds of things they made us read? I wondered.  Or to play what they told us was music, or how to say their prayers?  I never could understand why I should learn how to do such things.

Now, I have practically no education, and as far as most educated people are concerned, I’m illiterate, or close to it. Still, I’ve managed to read a bit outside of school.  I’ve even finished a few books, a couple of plays and a whole bunch of poems—something I never did while I was in school.  I’m not going to explain or analyze anything I’ve read:  Anything I could say about them isn’t that important and probably has already been said.  I don’t know.  Maybe I’d’ve stuck with school or “done something with myself” if I’d known, while I was still in school, that those pieces of writing existed.  Let’s just say that they’re not about war heroes, and they’re not the sorts of things that give men excuses for believing that women are neurotic.

I don’t think anybody on this block has read about them.  Living here isn’t like being in one of those books-and-brunch neighborhoods.  I don’t think even Mrs. Littington– who’d seen more of the world than most of us and spoke at least two languages–ever read them.  (I can only hope that she didn’t have to read some of those really awful books and even worse translations they tried to shove down my throat:  The Bible, for one.)  As far as I know, the male gender has produced three real poets—at least, when it comes to writing about other men.  One of them—who actually could write about women, too—wrote Othello, The Tempest and Macbeth, and of course a whole bunch of sonnets.  Another wrote some great poems and Les Miserables.  And, finally, there’s the one who wrote Don Quixote.  I’ll  pass on all the rest.  Just for once, I want a story about a woman opening—or closing—her window.

3. Survivors

There’ve never been any statues, plaques or other monuments on this block or any of the others around it.  None of the streets around here, including this one, has been named for anyone who lived or died on it.  Perhaps it’s just as well.  After all, building a statue or naming a street for someone who’s not here is just about the last thing a neighborhood with cemeteries on either end of it needs.

Some of the gravestones always seem to have flowers in front of them, or wreaths on them, even though nobody seems to visit them.  In fact, I can’t seem to recall anyone at either cemetery, which is the reason I went to one of them before going to mother’s wake.  I’d hoped to have, finally, the one thing I always wanted while on this block: a moment alone, one in which I wouldn’t have to suffer in the isolation of forced company.  Nobody’d demand anything of me, not in the form of a direct question or from silence.  There’d be only names, ignored or forgotten, on stones on which the dead were set, set by the dead.

Or so I thought.  I’d fallen, momentarily, into an old habit—looking downward at an oblique angle, but not quite at the ground—and saw, not a name, but a pair of dates:  August 5, 1967—June 18, 1992.   The date of my own birth, and the date on which—according to the state, at least—I died.

The body, supposedly, was found almost a year later.  So close to this block.  But on the other side of the tracks, where they curve away from this block, toward rows of subway cars waiting with their doors opened in the city railyard that separates this block and the neighborhood from endless rows of abandoned bungalows that splinter into the sea.

On one of those streets—which I never saw in all the time I lived on this block—actually, just underneath one of those streets, in a space that couldn’t even be called a cellar anymore because two floors of the house had collapsed into it—someone found strands of hair, a few more of rope and a six-inch long strip of duct tape.

I never found out who was walking and prodding through remains of the house that day, or what he was doing there.  For that matter, I really shouldn’t’ve assumed, just now, that the person was male.  I assumed so only because nobody was living in that house at the time and in the nearest habitations—this block and the ones around it—there are only women.  At any rate, you can depend only on the women to be on this block.  The men were off someplace doing the things you heard about, then forgot.

But I know one thing: the gender of the dead person.  I know: I saw the name on the tombstone.  Yes, that tombstone: the one with my date of birth.  And, as far as anybody knows, the last day I spent in this world.

I forgot to mention: There was an old leather wallet that broke apart like a cracker when the police examiner opened it.  Empty, except for a driver’s license: mine, supposedly.  Or so the police believed, and probably still believe, if any of them still think about it.  No Social Security card, no credit card: the person identified by the driver’s license never had them, or any military or criminal record, as far as the investigators could tell.  Current address unknown.  Last known address: this block.

It’s not so hard to fathom that the victim had my name: There was, I suppose, some bodily similarity between him and the young person I was when I lived on this block.  Only two other people had physical traits that bore any resemblance to mine.  One—the man who fathered me—hadn’t been seen by anybody on this block in years.  I never even knew him.  And mother.  The one thing that surprised me was that the police never spoke to her.

At least, I don’t think they did.  She never mentioned it to me, and never asked what I may’ve known about it.  Then again, she might’ve known after all: For years after I left, she never asked my whereabouts, only that I had enough to eat and some place to stay. Whatever she knew, I don’t think she’d’ve told the cops, or anyone else.  In one of our phone conversations, she said, “You’ll come home again when the time is right.”

As for that body: I can’t tell you exactly how it came to have my proof of existence on it.  Since leaving this block, I’ve lost, sold, given away and thrown away more stuff than I can remember, or want to remember.  Especially—yes—around the time of that person’s death.

When you leave this block, the things you used to keep in your wallet, pocket or purse lose whatever meaning they had.  This is not the same, of course, as losing their usefulness: about the only way you can get a place to stay or something to eat without using the things you carry is to offer your body, if someone’s willing to take it.  Or, once you learn a few tricks, you use them: You offer, but you don’t give.  I may not’ve learned much, but I can say this with certainty: You are a free human being when you no longer have to tease, tempt or titillate anybody to get through another day.  Until that time, you’re just turning tricks for somebody.

That’s what I did for years—for ages, it seemed—after I left this block.  Mother never asked how I got enough to eat or a place to stay, and I don’t think I’d’ve told her unless I’d moved on to something else.

I’ve heard plenty of women call each other “whore” or “slut.”  But those words are mainly perjoratives, like “faggot” and “wuss” are when men use them in reference to each other.  No, that’s not quite right.  There is no parallel for one female accusing another—without proof—actually, no, imputing the world’s oldest—only—profession—onto another member of her part of humanity.  They’ll—We’ll—say it to tear at one another, in situations when “bitch” won’t do.  However, I still haven’t seen one woman condemn another for actually using what may have been the only means she had at some point in her life to feed, clothe and shelter herself, or anyone who may’ve depended on her.

One man may honor, or even revere, another man who’s killed.  Has killed—emphasis on the past tense.  Men who’ve killed may get citations, medals and sometimes even statues in parks with their names on them.  No woman has ever been exalted in quite those ways.  But, like the has-been killer, the woman who’s sold herself is not dishonored by her other women—as long as the deed’s been done, finished, out of sight, and out of mind, as they used to say.

But while men can forget the killings they or their comrades have committed by pretending there was some purpose or honor to them, every woman knows the compromises, the accommodations other women—or they themselves—have made.  And—again, I have no way of proving what I’m about to say—they accept it or at least tolerate those collaborations with, or concessions to, the other side because, well, a survivor doesn’t condemn what another does to survive.  Sometimes the survivors don’t even ask.

2. The Women

There was a time, I know, when I didn’t know any of those women, even though I can’t remember it now.  I’d forgotten them, or simply hadn’t thought about them, for a long time.  Perhaps I’d’ve never thought about them again unless—well, unless my mother hadn’t died.  Of course, it had to happen some time.  A few people in this world can predict such things, supposedly.  Do they plan their lives accordingly—that is, do they plan more than I do, or more than almost anybody else does?

When you wake up in the morning—or whenever you wake up—all you actually know is that you have a certain amount of time—though you don’t know how much, exactly– ahead of you.  Seconds, minutes, hours…how many days, how many years?  You can’t know for sure, and really, it has nothing to do with the amount of time you’ve passed. A young man will die today; his grandmother could live to see his grandchild, whom he’ll never know.  Happens all the time on this block.

Or you come back and the men are gone.  To where, almost nobody knows.  I can—perhaps I will—tell what happened to at least one.  I may’ve already mentioned one, Adam. He’s the only man I ever knew, or knew me.  He was on this block longer than any other man, I think. When I was hot and thirsty, he gave me cold sodas.  When I was bored, he told me stories, most often about himself.  But he never recited them with that vacant, faraway look you see when someone’s telling you a story he or she could’ve told any number of other people who’d never listen.  It seems that most of what men have told me, they related in that absent, absented monotone I’ve only know one woman to use when speaking to me.

She’d come, by way of Venezuela, from some other country, to this block to “conquer America.”  She was gone not long after she came; mother knew I wouldn’t ask about her because she wasn’t willing to talk about her—whether from lack of information, I’ve never known. None of the other women mentioned her, either, as if they knew enough not to.

Word was that she’d come her to meet husband number three, four or five.  Or that she’d never been married to number one or two, or had never divorced them.  She’d had two sons in Germany, a daughter in Macedonia or some other place nobody on this block had ever seen or cared to see.  One son had denounced her to the police, supposedly to get out of compulsory military service in some country.  Then the same son wrote her a letter begging her to come back to Denmark—or Sweden, or wherever he was living after she’d left him,  Her daughter wouldn’t speak to her because she was “at that rebellious age”; a week later she was seven and pining for her mother.

She’d come to this block long after Adam’d died—long, anyway, in that seemingly eternal expanse of childhood as it is spent on this block.  Somehow I think he’d’ve been the only man who wouldn’t’ve been charmed by her and her talk of “amore” and “espirito”.  He might’ve been the only man who wouldn’t’ve cared when she hiked up her skirt as she gesticulated toward the god that gave her “la force,”

1. Here, Mother

When, exactly, did I leave?  I probably could pinpoint a date when I first crossed the boulevard, the parkway or took one of the buses or trains, if I spend enough time recollecting.  Or maybe not.  Will I remember the day, the month, the date of the funeral: today’s date?  I just might, simply because it’s hers.  But after today, I’ll have no reason to remember most dates, even my birthday.   It’s been a long time since I’ve been under anyone else’s command, since anyone’s had any authority over me.  Which is not the same as having influence, or even power.

One who can make your decisions for you, who can decide whether and where and how you live, gains authority only through desperation and imposition.  Another person can lead you to or from any place you may consider home: that man or woman seizes or gains power from you.  Someone else still helps or nudges you to decisions, from what color sweater you’ll wear today to the career or lifestyle you choose: that person’s influences derives from your dreams, wishes, fantasies and tears.

For years, I’ve spent most of my time alone for many years, and I haven’t been bound to any schedules.   Once I left her home, I never went back to school and stayed on jobs and in rooms or apartments only until I couldn’t, for whatever reasons,  anymore. So, no-one’s had any authority over me for a long time.  Mother was one of the last people, if not the last person, to have any authority over me

Some would say that’s the reason I’ve come to the funeral.  Maybe.  After all, now that she’s leaving, I may never again have anyone to respect.  Matter of fact, I can’t think of anyone I respected besides her.  The nuns would stroke my hair and pinch my cheeks, then smack them.  The teachers in public school couldn’t lay a hand on me.  But some of them are masters of glances, if they’ve mastered anything at all.  And the gestures:  the wave of the hand, the curl of the lip, as if they could wish away some odor they’d always tried to avoid.

Sometimes they’d say, “I suggest that you…” Whatever followed, it could just as well’ve been, “Get out of sight.”  I’d’ve obliged them if I wouldn’t’ve run afoul of the law for doing so.  Actually, I stopped going to school long before I’d passed the age of compulsory attendance.  That is the one good thing about authority, or anybody who has it over you: that you can drop out of its and their sight.  Once they’ve noticed that you’re gone, there’s nothing they can do about it.

Power’s another matter: You can’t break its hold without engendering some sort of rage, which can turn suicidal, from or toward you.  You run from that; you have no choice.  Not only that, you can’t look back, not at the force, or the ones who use it.

But aside from respect, what’s brought me to her wake and funeral?  Something, perhaps, that even if I couldn’t recall it, it recalled me.  It reposed in those velvet walls, in the silk lining of the casket, with her.  It lies within the folds of her yellow blouse, folding and unfolding around her face, descending from eyelids clenched against the cold.  Yellowish rays, disconnected from their sources, spreading throughout the room—and the faces, the shoulders and into the eyes of the women who came today.

Foreword

This was told to me by its narrator.  It seems that we had been circling about, and glancing away from, each other for decades before we finally spoke face-to-face.

For the next three years, we would meet nearly every week in a coffee shop where neither of us could reasonably expect to meet anyone we knew.   Every one of our conversations revealed something that shocked, infuriated, saddened or surprised me.  Even more unexpected was the humor, sometimes unintentional, always ironic, that crept into our exchanges.  The tone of our conversations—or the narrator’s monologues—became more somber during our third winter. Then again, almost everything around us, it seemed, grew more solemn.

One stiflingly hot day the following summer, we both knew, though neither of us said, would be our last meeting for a long time.  I can’t recall any other time when knowing something left me feeling so anxious.  I felt something was about to change in my life; perhaps this person for whom I had become a repository (if not a confidant) felt the same way.  But one might say I had selfish interests:  our meetings were, by then, one of the few constants in my life.  I was about to enter into all matter of uncertainty and I was about to lose one of the few rituals, if you will, I’d ever developed without any prodding from anyone else.

On the other hand, my confidant (I have no better term) was used to change, if I were to believe what I heard.  I had no reason not to.  That might have been the most surprising thing I learned.

Anyway, we fell out of touch for a couple of years.  During that time, friends, family members and other people who were in my life while we were having those weekly conversations dropped out of my life.  There were deaths; others had faded out of my life or simply left.   When we re-connected, my confidant exchanged stories of our losses and, as expected, of new experiences.  I am surprised at the amount of empathy, or at least the lack of judgment, I received.  I wonder whether I reciprocated .

Some time after the New Year, we lost touch again. There was no “falling out” or other confrontation; we simply dropped out of each other’s sights for a year or so.  Then, the Friday of a Memorial Day weekend—an unseasonably hot and preternaturally clear day—we once again bumped into each other in the company of strangers.  There was one more thing to be said—about yet another death.  I heard it after promising that I would not reveal my confidant’s name to anyone or tell the story you’re about to read to anyone who would “take it the wrong way” or “make too many assumptions.”

I still don’t understand that request, but I am honoring it as best I can.  I have done my best to convey the story I’ve heard over these past few years, in the language, tone and voice I heard, so that no one will misunderstand.  Each “chapter” of this book is a session with the narrator; the titles are all that I added. 

I have undertaken this task not only out of a sense of honor, but in the realization that I was—if you’ll indulge me a cliché—hearing my own story, in some way.

I don’t know whether I’ll hear from my “friend” again.  Even if I do, I’m not sure the story will change much.  There will be new names, new places, and changes in our bodies—all things that happen with the passage of time.  I can’t tell you how any of our stories will turn out.  I know only this:  In the end, there are only people because along the way there are only those stories whose endings we don’t predict because they follow their own immutable, if sometimes mysterious, logic. 

Those peoples and stories are, ultimately, what the narrator of this book gave me over the years.  And they are all I have presented because I can’t offer anything else.  They are this book.

My life is about to change again.  How, I don’t know.

Thank you,

The recorder of this story