[Later, when I was in the hospital, I would have a recurring nightmare that blocks of sunlight were being hammered into my head. The blocks were meant to contain insight, but when I looked, the sunlight was empty. That's when I would wake up in a panic, remembering that I did not remember.
It's funny, what the unconscious mind gets up to when we aren't there.]
1.
On the second Sunday in May, my housemate and I were in the kitchen, leaning over a boiling pot of ramen. "This changes everything" he said, adding a handful of Costco dried mushrooms with a flourish. "Gives it an entirely different flavor."
Suddenly my vision wavered. I thought at first it was steam from the pot. No, I thought. I remember. This has happened before. Deja vu? No, a memory I had once, of something that had never happened. It was as vivid as something so nebulous could be.
It had happened back in 2007, during that time of year when the weather was trying and failing to get properly warm. I was living in Victoria then, in the gold house, and on that day, I'd found myself pacing the floorboards, feeling haunted. A memory had come to me - it felt like a memory, anyway - very short, but distinct, of living somewhere else, another town, in another house, with someone I couldn't place. We were leaning over the stove in a steamy white kitchen. There was an impression of spindly space-age furnishings, table and chairs. We laughed, but there was a heaviness in the air, a sorrow, a sense of endings. The sort of regret that can follow you through time.
I'd fretted restlessly for an entire afternoon, wondering where such a mental image had come from. I couldn't relate it to anything I'd done, or any place I'd been. Yet the melancholy tugged at my heart as if had all been real. For what? For whom?
17 years later, I looked into the present and finally knew.
2.
The morning of the last Friday before I left Ohio, we were driving back from Perrysburg. I sat in the passenger seat, flipping through a copy of the Tao Te Ching. Anxiously, I closed my eyes and put my finger on a page at random. When I looked where my finger had landed, it was a phrase that said, "the fourth dimension of time."
Just as we arrived home, where Tricky the cat sat at the kitchen threshold awaiting our return, we felt something pass through the room. It passed through us, too. Tricky raised her head, alert to the invisible motion. A sort of convulsive shudder, difficult to describe. I said, "Did you feel that?" My housemate replied, "a ripple in time."
It was a little while before I remembered the phrase I'd picked out of the Tao Te Ching.
3.
At the end of May, after I'd flown back to Texas with Tricky in tow, I stayed in a motel - the name escapes me now, but it hardly matters - while I waited for some plan to evolve. I knew this motel, because barely a year before, my friend and now-former housemate had come to stay. I was meant to be thinking of the future, but the sweltering heat made it nigh impossible. Since I'd arrived in Austin, everything had seemed blinding - too loud, too hot, too psychically polluted to bear contemplating at all. Already I was harboring the germ that would nearly kill me, but of course I didn't know it then. Instead, I sat on the balcony that by chance overlooked the path that we'd taken a year before, my friend and me, traipsing along, winding toward a future - now passed - that had seemed so bright. If I looked hard enough, I could swear I saw the air shimmer as our shades passed by. Look closely and you might see.
...
In the hospital, these things came back slowly from the void where sepsis had left me. Time measured by the light out my window and salt-free meals brought three times a day. For a while it seemed I could let it drift away, all those memories, illness like a crossroads that time could not follow. I knew it would if I let it. I knew maybe I should. And yet I did not. And yet, and yet.
...
We did make it back to Ohio, Tricky and me, worse for wear, eventually. But the ripple in time I'd somehow escaped took her away. She died soon after, near that same kitchen threshold, and I cried and cried and cried. She's buried at the corner of the house where the wind catches the leaves, but sometimes I hear her pattering around at night, somewhere, I imagine, in the fourth dimension of time.
