Passenger by Ronald Malfi Page A

everything.  And while the city does not seem completely foreign to me, I have no specific memory of this place.
    *     *     *
    The Light Street branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library sits at the intersection of Light and Ostend, three blocks from the crowded Cross Street Market.  The library itself is unassuming and, on this late afternoon, quiet and empty.
    Inside, I sit at a computer terminal toward the rear of the library and summon the Internet.  What I type in the search box is the single phrase, “spontaneous amnesia,” and I watch as the Web pages accumulate.  I search through a half dozen sites, but find nothing of substance.  I cannot even tell if it is a legitimate medical condition.
    Alone in the library, I think about what Clarence said—about having a clean slate and having no regrets.   Regrets are what make us who we are, I think now.   Regrets are the reason we are constantly changing.   Does my lack of regret make me stagnant?  Am I frozen in time?  I wonder, From here on in, what choices will I make?   Because my choices thus far have been poor.  I think of Patrice and her saggy, married breasts, of the swirling lava city and the sobbing behind a locked bathroom door.  People spread themselves thin, like beard stubble clogging drains.  Swirling in inevitable infinity.
    I also read up on the CIA and government spies.  Because I could very well be a spy.
    I could very well be anyone on the planet.
    Because I do not have any identification, I cannot get a library card.  So instead I smuggle a number of textbooks out under my coat, and no one is the wiser.  These are textbooks I feel may enlighten me on my condition.  They have enigmatic titles like Sleep the Mind and I Dream Awake and The Overactive Inactive.   I steal a paperback copy of Homer’s The Odyssey  as well.  Because, in a way, I am on my own odyssey.
    Despite the cold, I am sweating through my clothes by the time I walk halfway across the city back to Clarence’s apartment.  I have no real desire to help Clarence work today but feel some nexus to real life in my commitment to do so.  In the face of manual labor, I may find some self-worth, some personal substance. Ripened fruit to be picked.  So I wait on the front stoop until an old pickup truck, leprous with rust and belching black plumes of exhaust, chugs around the side of the building and shudders to a standstill out front.  Two bleats on the horn summon me to my feet.  Without expression, I climb into the cab and am immediately overwhelmed by the aroma of marijuana and Slim Jims.  Clarence, grinning behind the wheel, punches the pickup into gear and pushes the shuddering vehicle through the intersection.
    “You look sick,” says Clarence.
    “Maybe I am,” I say.  “Maybe I’ve got some terminal disease.  Maybe I’m dying right now.”
    “Man, that’s a downer.  You think?  No, dog.  Have a smoke.”
    Clarence passes me a joint.  I examine the smoldering twist of white paper and smell the sweet scent of the burning weed before bringing it to my lips.  I inhale and erupt in a series of coughs that causes Clarence to chuckle and retrieve the joint from my pinched fingers.
    “Maybe you never been high,” says Clarence.  “Maybe you even a cop.  That’d be something, huh?  Old Clarence chillin’ with the police.”
    “I’m not the police.”
    “How you know?”
    “I guess I don’t.”
    “Or maybe you the meanest mother around.  Maybe you done shit make me turn white.  Maybe you the worst kind of white boy.  You know what I’m saying?  Like, black dudes, they bad, they fuck you up.  But white dudes—I mean, you ever see a black dude choppin’ people up and sticking ’em in the freezer, eating they skin and shit?  That Jeffrey Dahmer psycho shit, I’m talking ’bout.”
    “I don’t think so.  I don’t have it in me.”
    “Maybe not now,” says Clarence, “but maybe you did before.  Maybe right now you just can’t