A simple twist of fate

There had been, before either of them could have known that memory itself is forever conspiring against the sequence of events it pretends merely to preserve, an evening whose darkness did not so much descend upon the little park as seep upward from the earth itself, enfolding the benches, the trees, the hesitant gestures of two people seated side by side until the whole world seemed suspended in that peculiar hour when the last certainty of daylight relinquishes its claim and every face becomes half recollection, half prophecy — petals on a wet, black bough — and it was then, beneath her unguarded glance, neither promise nor confession but something older than either, that he felt, with painful clarity, the sudden living current running through the hidden architecture of his bones, only to discover in that same instant — as though revelation always exacts loneliness as its price — that he had already wandered onto one of those invisible roads from which no deliberate step could ever return him, and that somewhere behind him there existed another self, more purposeful perhaps, less distracted by wonder, who might have escaped what was even then unfolding.

Later they walked beside the old canal whose dark brine carried not reflections but fragments of vanished hours, speaking little because speech seemed incapable of keeping pace with the strange uncertainty gathering between them, an uncertainty neither entirely fear nor entirely hope, until almost without intention they crossed the threshold of a hotel whose bright electric sign, blazing against the thick night with an almost vulgar insistence, appeared less an invitation than an accusation, while the heat enclosed them so completely that it seemed not merely the weather but the accumulated breath of countless forgotten evenings pressing upon him, immense and irresistible, like some freight of destiny that had begun its journey long before either of them had drawn breath.

By morning the world had resumed its indifferent industry, and somewhere beyond the cracked window a saxophone on Clinton Street, distant enough to sound less like music than like memory attempting to become flesh again, drifted through streets where she passed beneath faded storefronts and weathered arcades whose tired awnings surrendered broken shafts of light, and, pausing only long enough to place a coin into the waiting cup of a blind beggar who stood at the city’s threshold with the patient composure of one who had ceased expecting miracles but still recognized their footsteps, she continued on without once looking behind her, as though the night had already folded itself away into that inaccessible chamber where all unfinished lives are stored.

He awoke into a silence so complete that it seemed to have erased not merely her presence but the evidence that another body had ever shared the room, the bed, the breathing darkness, and though he insisted to himself — with that peculiar stubbornness by which men attempt to command their own hearts through the mere repetition of words — that absence was a condition easily mastered, he found himself opening the window as if fresh air might contain an explanation, only to discover instead an emptiness which resisted every name he tried to give it, because it belonged neither to grief nor regret nor disappointment alone but to that deeper vacancy created whenever one glimpses, if only for an instant, the shape of a life that might have been lived and knows, with irreversible certainty, that it never shall.

Thereafter time abandoned all pretense of mercy, announcing itself in the relentless ticking of clocks whose measured certainty mocked his wandering, while he drifted through streets where even absurd companions — a talkative bird perched upon a shoulder, sailors filling the waterfront with rough laughter, vendors crying out to strangers, gulls reeling drunkenly above the docks as though tracing invisible circles around the ships forever arriving from elsewhere — seemed less implausible than the hope that somewhere among those endless comings and goings she might suddenly emerge, study the lines on his face — Don't I know your name — and choose once more the path that had so briefly converged with his own before diverging into distances neither map nor memory could faithfully recover.

And now, when those who have learned to survive by feeling as little as possible speak with practised certainty about the dangers of carrying too much inwardly, of allowing the hidden chambers of the heart to echo too loudly with longing, he listens without argument because experience has taught him the futility of defending what cannot be proven, yet somewhere beneath the accumulated sediment of years there persists the impossible conviction that she had not merely resembled him but completed some unfinished design within him, as though they had entered the world divided from a single origin only to miss, through some infinitesimal misalignment of seasons and hours, the moment appointed for their reunion, leaving him forever searching not for another woman nor even for another beginning, but for the imperceptible turning upon which an entire existence had once depended and from which all the remaining days had quietly, irrevocably flowed.

If there had indeed been a twist, as lonely men are fond of saying because a single turning appears more merciful than admitting the innumerable invisible motions by which every life is forever being remade, it was not simple, nor even fate, but something quieter and therefore less escapable: the slow convergence of forgotten ancestors, unchosen seasons, missed words, inherited silences, evening light upon water, the patient blindness of the old man at the gate, the indifferent labour of clocks, the persistent current beneath the canal carrying all unrealized lives toward that immeasurable sea where nothing is lost because nothing is ever wholly possessed, and where, perhaps, the two of them continue forever walking side by side beneath a sky that had not yet decided whether it was becoming night or remembering day.