Amnesiascope: A Novel by Steve Erickson

and back again.
    I’m not really so angry that no one told me sooner. I’m the world’s biggest coward myself in such situations, and figure it isn’t my responsibility to bring the news that someone else should have brought, just because I happened to have had the bad luck of being in the time and place to have heard it. I’m not even so angry that Sally didn’t tell me. The truth is that, even though Sally should have been the one to tell me, I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it from her. I would have felt the need, for either her sake or mine, to find an eloquent or graceful way of expressing my feelings, when I wouldn’t have felt particularly eloquent or gracious. My rage about the whole thing—and it is a rage, no one should have any doubt about that—my rage about it isn’t that I’ve been waiting for Sally to come back to me, because I haven’t, or waiting to go back to her, because I wouldn’t, but that this marriage is a lie; and while in a world of liars I’m a liar too, this lie is too profound for even me. I last saw her a year ago. She was in town and came by to leave off some things that were mine that she had never gotten around to returning, or that I had never gotten around to wanting back; when I answered the door her face was still that mix of anger and guilt and sadness it had been since I left—or was she the one who left? Down at the corner café, as the flames of the third ring began rising over the hill, she asked, “But why is it I mess everything up? And how is it that I messed us up?” and when she said it, it was with the same deathly sadness that was on her face almost five years before, when we were at the beginning rather than the end, sitting in a little bar on La Cienega and staring out the window. “Another man,” she said quietly then, meaning me, naturally, “that I’m going to make miserable.” I laughed it off, not having a better response. I didn’t have a response this time either. The part of me that could never be unkind to her wanted to give her an answer: “Well, you did the best you could”—that sort of thing. Take her off the hook. But I don’t take anyone off the hook anymore. So I had no answer for Sally. Guess the silence must have been devastating. Maybe it was in that silent moment that Sally’s marriage became inevitable. We finished the coffee and left, before the heat of the backfires in the distance became too unbearable.
    I once loved a woman named Lauren. Now in retrospect there seems a very clear connection between Lauren and Sally, though they could not have been more different, and though there were ten years between my knowing them. Sally dark, Lauren light, one a singer and the other a child therapist, holding in common only their confusion. When Lauren finally went back to her husband, many things about me weren’t the same after that, and some things were dead a long time. For a long time after Lauren there was no believing in love, not the love that makes you a force of nature; for years after she went back to Jason, every now and then she would call to say hello, and I couldn’t hear her voice without turning inside out. I never blamed her. “Well, you did the best you could.” I knew, and still know, that nothing she did was out of malice, but rather turmoil: which of us always knows our heart so well, or follows it so bravely? And then, a full decade later, just after I had left my own wife and fallen in love with Sally, the phone rang one night and it was Lauren. I don’t think her husband had been out the door—or her life—all of five minutes before she called me. And I couldn’t see her then, not with my own marriage in shambles and a new love affair I hadn’t even begun to decode yet. So over the next two years we talked, and finally I went to see her after things fell apart with Sally; she was living near the beach, and at the first sight of her in the doorway I knew someone can turn your world upside down and then