Amnesiascope: A Novel by Steve Erickson Page A

enough time can pass that she can’t turn it right side up again. We had dinner. We didn’t make love. I held her and she slept in my arms. “I’m not expecting anything,” she lied when I left.
    That night after I got home I had one dream after another, each connecting into a long tunnel at the end of which I could see the past. It was an insane night, everything in turmoil, the turmoil of Lauren revisited in the midst of the turmoil of Sally. In the weeks that followed she left a number of messages, which I answered only after deliberate and growing delays. Leaving the country on a long-planned vacation, she phoned within hours of returning; it was a week before I called back, gracing her phone machine with an excuse so feeble it infuriated even me. Her reaction, on my machine the next day, was as startling as it was brief: “I’ve been thinking,” she said carefully, “we’ve had a long history together. A very long history.” And then she paused. “I don’t want you to ever call me again.” And then she hung up.
    I told you, I don’t let anyone off the hook anymore. The woman took eleven years to decide she wanted me back. I took a week to return her phone call—and she never wanted to hear from me again. So I didn’t call, as she had said not to, though I suspected she didn’t really mean it; and six months later I received yet another message on my machine, one she was obviously reading from something she had written out, an extraordinarily bitter piece about what a liar I was. And the love of years before, when I loved her more than I had ever loved anyone, when she changed forever how I loved people, exploded, its shrapnel still hurtling down the years of my life. I knew she was terrified now, alone and alienated from a past that was embodied by a husband to whom she had sacrificed everything. Now she was living with the horror of having made the wrong choice; when I couldn’t unmake it for her, she hated me. “It’s been a year since you asked me never to call you again” I finally wrote her. “I’ve often thought it was a mistake that I didn’t anyway. I’m not writing now to get in the last word on anything; if you really believe my love was a lie, I don’t think there’s much I could say that would change your mind. But after a year it’s become too much for me to live with and not answer it: though for the time being it may have become necessary for you to believe differently, I had to write and tell you that if there are ways in which time has changed or misled either of us, or if we both wound up letting each other’s love down, my love was real, and I always knew yours was as well, and I think deep down you know it too.”
    Well, perhaps. I don’t know what’s real about love anymore, except that the last thing I want is to sound cynical about it. Perhaps you have to get to the end of your life to know what’s real about it or maybe, as my mother did with my father, you have to spend a life with one person to know how real is the turmoil of love as opposed to how glib is the turmoil of romance. I sent Lauren the letter and a week later it came back, unopened; I still have it, sealed in the envelope with the postmark, as though sometime I expect to have to produce it for a judge or jury, to prove that it really exists, and that I really made the effort of writing it. Lauren called yet again, months later, getting in one last cut: “I guess,” she said, “I stayed with Jason because at least he was honest.” And maybe you really believe that, Lauren. Maybe for the moment you’ve convinced yourself that’s true, so I won’t try and convince you otherwise, except to say you’re going to have to spend a lifetime convincing yourself of that one, because you couldn’t convince anyone else for two seconds. He abused you, he cheated on you, he lied to you on a daily basis, and you still stayed with him , and it isn’t my fault . It breaks my heart, and I’m as sorry as I can