And with that she walked back below decks, and he stood up
in the brisk sea breeze and reflected on the conversation. He smiled inwardly,
and it manifested itself as a slight smirk on his face. He didn’t know whether
he had her or not, or whether she was worth having. These things could only be
known after painful weeks or months of prosecutions and interrogations. Right
now was the best time, the beginning, before things had started to go wrong. He
tried to remember exactly what she looked like, but couldn’t. He had a habit of
not making eye contact when he spoke. He found the gesture too intimate for his
purposes. He liked to keep a distance. It was always safer that way. A pod of
dolphins breeched along the side of the water and the grandmother and her
grandchild ooohed in delight.
That was the trick, or so it seemed to him. He smiled at the
woman and her child passing by. Everyone seemed to him as a collection of
stories that were oddly put together. Ask a man how he got to work, and he’d
tell you a story about his breakfast, his subway ride, his battle with other
commuters. Ask that same man how he came to be married, and he’d tell you a
different story, one in which he was a hero, or a buffoon, likely both. Ask
that same man after his divorce how he came to be married, and he’d tell you a
story about a lot of different days than you heard about the first time,
dramatic days, quotidian days, days that seemed to have very little to do with
those days he’d only told you about a couple of years before, which is to say,
he’d attempt to give to you a coherent picture of who he was right then and
there, standing in the break room drinking his coffee and relating the latest
news of his life to stave off the soul-sucking boredom of office work.
People were wellsprings, and inventors, charlatans and
sweethearts, all of them. It was really a matter of taking all the stories that
people tell themselves, and making them into a coherent whole. It came so
naturally in life, in fact, it was essential to healthy living. The people who were
unable to immediately form pictures of themselves standing smartly on street
corners in just that same suit with good reason were the sort that should be
avoided. It was common practice to take the loose threads blowing through our
minds and weave out of them a tapestry that suits the image of ourselves that
we’ve created in our minds. If there was a nugget of real truth in the Bible it
was the bit about idols. Every man and woman, or nearly every one, worshipped
at the idol of self, constructed a sculpture, thinking it was made of stone
when really it is made up of sand, of days past, loves gone, sunsets
experienced and sunsets that only occurred in pictures, and we take the sum of
those past days and pretend as if they are all relevant to the very solid image
we have of ourselves. And yet again, that image could be shattered, he knew he
could jump off the prow of the ship, get sucked under, drowned, and suddenly
people would go back to his life and try to piece it together in an entirely
different way, they’d scour his blog entries and Internet history looking for
clues as to why he’d been so depressed, perhaps it had been over some girl, all
that time recreating his life with just that touch of possessiveness that
people could resist when they were still alive. It was Woolf who compared art
and life, but it turned out to not be true that only a life lived well was
artistic, everyone was an artist, constantly recreating themselves on the basis
of pasts they no longer remember, and stepping boldly into the future as if it
were known, and would bring them some happiness.
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