Late

Imagine with me. You are leaving your apartment with your friend, John. This whole scenario is being utilized to help me drive home an earlier point. John is occasionally too rowdy for your tastes. You wouldn’t describe him as a close friend. The word kindred spirit is not in your vernacular yet. But you’re aware that something is amiss. The two of you smell quite good, though in a masculine way. You’re wearing cologne that costs approximately forty dollars a bottle. The smell is nearly indefinable, littoral, but pleasantly so. It brings to mind childhood sandcastles—the slow march of the tide intent upon their destruction, the sand that sticks beneath your finger nails, and the blinding shafts of light reflected from white grains.

Repressed memories are often triggered by a taste, smell, or other relatively innocuous identifier that correlates to the lost memory. Apparently, even patients who discover that their repressed memories are fabricated can suffer serious post-traumatic stress.

Of course, any person who remembers childhood in detail knows that reality and illusion are closely wedded. It is not the boogie man’s existence that keeps you up at night, but the illusory fear that he might exist. The two are indistinguishable. I guess it’s assumed that we leave that sort of thing behind with the night light.


Your mother bought it, the cologne, for you this last Christmas on your previous girlfriend’s request, a girl who your family really and genuinely liked and approved of, which you counted, though not always consciously, as a strike against her. The facts of the break up are really neither here nor there, though you’ll occasionally remember her in years to come, perhaps in the bathroom late at night when your wife is sleeping—how seraphic her face could look wrapped in the early morning light. You’re already a few drinks in and are prone to fits of nostalgia while under the influence. You are on your way to meet some fine looking specimens you’ve happened upon recently. One in particular, Becky, is promising. You drive a sports car purchased by your parents. The longest you’ve held a job is three months—life guard at a local pool. Becky is at least in the top tenth percentile of attractive girls you’ve met. The car has only two seats. You don’t know how the evening is going to go, or when it is going to happen, but Becky and you are going to find yourselves alone, in the back of a group, talking quietly. You’re going to suggest that you go for a drive. She’s somewhere below the famous women who adorn magazine covers but a definite cut above your garden variety cute girl, who come in droves on college campuses. You are going to take a wrong turn onto an old dirt road lined by elms. You’re going to suggest that the two of you stroll through stalks of dried corn. You’re going to talk about your love for the attenuated quality of moonlight, the way it’s ringed in ice. You’re going to touch her cheek with the back of your hand, and then something is going to happen. Your step is light; the sidewalk has springs. It is at this point, in the full bloom of youth, on a pleasant, though crisp evening, benevolent appearing sky, no less than four readily identifiable constellations visible to the naked eye, with a space left between you and your friend’s shoulder appropriate for heterosexual males walking in concert, that it begins to rain vomit.

How much time do I have?

Thus, when these two fine young men, paragons of all the term entails, looked up and saw Julie, head lolling between the rails, she appeared to them, not prayerful, but like a Greek goddess, come to bring some awful retribution. So naturally they began to cast aspersion upon her in an attempt to ward off the unraveling of the universe that up until this point, barring a few setbacks, had been rooting for them.

Did you catch the part about the grain of sand or the way the moon was shrouded in ice crystals? This is the sort of detail that a patient might remember and cling to as an absolute fact, even if the fact is a fabrication. How? Diffracted light at an angle of twenty two degrees. The effect is actually an illusion. It doesn’t exist.