‘The Beginnings of the Ends of Beginnings’

A fragmented fancy

I have no imagination to speak of at all. Isn’t that a little perverse? I don’t have fantasies and I don’t seem to think about the future. Thus I have never been worried in the way I notice most other people are for most of the time. It’s not that I have a choice, or that not thinking about what doesn’t exist yet is a particular power. I just can’t think about it, and so the past owns my mind completely and I sit in parks and play games and smoke profusely with a certain sense that since I’m not going anywhere everything I’ve left behind will catch up with me eventually and I’ll be tried and damned for having failed to see it all coming. Oh well. Let something new happen for a change, I say.

Wait, sorry, that might have been too broad a statement. I do have one faculty that slightly compensates for everything. I’ve only discovered it recently but I get the feeling it’ll keep your attention. At 48 I’ve only just started having dreams. Previously, for all that time, I would merely fall in and out of momentary darkness before carrying on with my life. I didn’t tell anyone because, to some extent, I enjoyed being a blank slate. Now, three or four times a night, my life re-presents itself to me in the form of scenes, and these are always, for whatever reason, the ends of my relationships. I’ve been in too many arrangements to know exactly when these will stop occurring, but what’s so strange is that they all reach a certain point where what I can remember actually happening transitions into a space of lucid dreaming. So I’ll be watching myself crying into Genevieve’s soft shoulder on her peach-toned bathroom floor in 1993 and she’ll whisper in my ear, tenderly, crying herself, that even jazz serenades end eventually and that we’re both more attracted to other people even if we might not consciously think so and at the moment in the melodrama when the image would usually fade and die, I realize I can take over, I can talk to her again, and she too now knows that I’m just a tourist in our mutual memories and so I lean over to kiss her and she laughs a little and appreciates my keeping her as she was in this moment so firmly in mind for decades. Then I’d ask how she felt, what 1993 was like for her, where she thought she was going next, and she’d try to answer me.

The only recurrent figure has been Carmen, predictably. I think we got engaged because I loved her name so much. We broke up on our honeymoon because she realized that I valued her name slightly above her, and she took this as a sign that any other Carmen could bump into me on the street and summarily replace her. When I asked her how many Carmens she thought were just hanging around waiting to stumble into my life, she asked the flight attendant if she could swap seats with anyone. We were three hours away from landing in the Seychelles. I’ve returned to that moment thirteen times already. The attendant never ever comes back. Carmen finally relaxes into her seat and turns her eyes to me, and I remember that I also married her because in such moments she looked creepily like Lauren Bacall. We always pick up where we left off last time, touring through every year of our lives before we met each other, describing how we fell in love with whatever we fell in love with (besides people), and asking how we could’ve so easily got married just to so easily separate in turn. Last time I was bored enough to realize I could tell her I was basically from the future.
“I was wondering… Can you- do you know that I’m just dreaming this?”
“No, I thought I was dreaming this. Isn’t this my dream?”, she puzzled.
“Well if it is, it’s mine too. I’m in my bed twenty-five years from now. We never kept in touch so I don’t know where you are.”
“I think I’m asleep sixty years from this. I’m sleeping alone in my flat on the 175th floor and I’m also here talking to you, near the Seychelles.”
Then she began to introduce me to the future I hadn’t expected.