What He's Poised to Do

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing at all.” I looked through the book I had taken from the library. The city of Blantyre, named for the birthplace of the explorer Livingstone, was in the highlands, which may have strengthened the resemblance. It was surrounded by four mountains whose names I committed to memory—Soche, Ndirande, Chiradzulu, Michiru—and which I imagined as a vocal quartet performing on a street corner: first tenor, second tenor, baritone, bass. There was a joke there, but I didn’t reach for it. The book had some pictures, including one of a woman standing out in front of a small bank, facing away from the camera. She looked just like you. I shut the book and put it away so that you wouldn’t see it, and then I did what I had been waiting days to do: I took a nap. I dreamed of you when you were a little girl. You had your pigtails on and you were telling other girls jokes that were labored and earnest. You were trying to be better. You always were. Ten years from now I want to be holding you in my arms and kissing you while we listen to our children playing in the next room, and to do that I have to be newly born so that I am no longer so young. Isn’t it strange that a man can be newborn after he’s been around a while? I hope you don’t misunderstand what I’m doing with this trip. On the plane I will say prayers because I don’t like flying and also because I am trying to find the divinity in many things. On the plane I will cry because I have doubts, and then I will take the s off and have doubt. On the ground I will stay in my hotel the whole time except for quiet walks on the street. On the ground I will spend the nights reading until I understand and spend the mornings looking out the window. Let’s move forward twelve days, to when I will come back to you with my heart recharged and my vision restored. “I will reconnect,” I wrote in the note I will leave for you, and I imagine that when you read that you’ll lean forward, eyes bright. Even if you don’t understand the way I made the decision, understand that I want to be able to be the way I need to be for you, to make you laugh and make you want to laugh some more, and I just don’t see that happening if I stay around here too much longer.

WHAT WE BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PRAISE (Miami, 2010)

THEY TELL YOU TO PLAN FOR CHANGE, BUT WHAT THEY REALLY mean is to plan for time, whether it changes things or not. As a result of family business, I was recently called back to the town where I grew up, a flat and sunbaked stretch of suburban south Florida. In the years since I left town, much of it has been torn down or overbuilt. For most of the two days I spent there, I felt more dislocation than location: the squat white shack where I traded in the faulty rental car had once been a veterinary practice, the firm handling my uncle’s probate was housed in a glass-and-steel tower that rose up from what was once a strip mall anchored by an optometrist and a sandwich shop. The third day in town, already bored by what was new, I undertook a tour of deliberate nostalgia. I drove past my high school, past the park where I had played Little League, past creeks I fished and trees I climbed and even the house of the first girl I had ever loved, whose last name I didn’t remember and whom I had been too afraid to approach until junior high school, when it was too late. I parked across the street from the house and wondered who lived there now. I backed out, drove away, made one left turn and then another. I was looking for the real estate office where my mother had worked one summer, only to quit in tears after a fight with the office manager; instead I came upon a small tan building that I recognized for what it no longer was: the law firm where I had worked one summer during college. It had occupied only a small corner of my life, that job, but it was dense with implication. The building looked exactly as it had then, but because time had passed and, by passing, shifted nearly everything within me, the sameness of the place was more shocking than any change I could have imagined. I got out of the car and scrutinized the nameplates to the left of the main glass doors; the names were unfamiliar enough to comfort me, but I was still not entirely comforted. As I pulled away, I glanced in my rearview mirror and imagined that I saw myself there, standing by the glass doors. It was a highly theatrical arrangement, and it drew me in, by degrees, until the present was far behind me and the past was present.