What happened next is a memory as vivid as anything imagined. Through the Plexiglas I watch as a man walks through a distant door, turns to the guard, and holds his hands out for the cuffs to be unlocked. The man wears the same chambray shirt and blue jeans all the inmates do—Angola blues. He is older than he was on the tape. His glasses still just as thick. His ears jut out from his head, the mark of Bessie’s drinking so long ago.
He is thirty-seven that day. But as he walks down the corridor toward me in my memory I don’t see him as thirty-seven. He is the baby being lifted from a slash in his mother’s stomach, lifted through the cut-out moon in the cast. He is the brown-haired boy with freckles and buckteeth, who crouches over the roots of a yellowwood tree and talks to a black-and-white picture he holds in his grubby hand. He is eighteen, sitting in his friend’s pickup truck, the stars an explosion outside, and he sucks on the sweet glass neck of a bottle of schnapps and tries to get up the courage to walk into the mental health center and speak the name for what he knows he is. He is twenty-six, and his arm goes tight around Jeremy’s neck. Jeremy’s legs kick so hard in the air his boots fall off. Then the boy’s body falls limp, and as the boy dies the man becomes a murderer, who he now will always be. He is forty-nine and he writes the last page I have in the files, a note so new it hadn’t yet been put into a box like the others, but was handed to me loose by a clerk. It is a letter to a judge. “Well you know I do family research and I greatly enjoy it!” He has spent many years finding his ancestors’ records, he writes, but there are still holes in the story. Can the judge please help him dig back further?
I know that need. If he goes back far enough, maybe he’ll understand.
In this memory, I wear my too-heavy suit. I am twenty-five in the visiting room, but I am also three, and my grandfather’s fat palm slides over my mouth. Eight, and my hands stick together from the swing-set polish and I laugh. The air smells of turpentine and cut grass. I am twelve and I close my eyes and rise onto my tiptoes to make my dress twirl—and when I open my eyes, my grandfather is watching me, staring frankly. Sixteen with a can of black paint, trying to write myself a new life on my bedroom walls. Thirty-seven and standing for the first time on what used to be the crushed shell of the Fuel Stop, determined to go where the past is, go there so I can leave it behind and find my way home.
Waiting, as the man walks toward me, I flick my tongue over my lower lip. An old habit. I do it, I feel my lips wet—and then I shudder in recoil, the same way I do every time. Because I know this gesture I do unconsciously. It’s what my grandfather did when he was concentrating on a drawing. I watched him do it when he taught me to draw. I carry the memory somewhere inside my body I can’t control, can’t even access to reach inside and edit the memory out. I still want to edit it out. I still want to be free of it. But I know I’m bound in ways I’ll never see, never understand. We carry what makes us.
Across from me, Ricky sits down. The problem of this day, the problem of this meeting, the problem that starts this story inside me and the only way it can end it is this: The man who sits down across from me is a man. He’ll never be all one thing or the other. Only a story can be that. Never a person.
So I try something new. Not turning my back to the past, not fleeing it, but extending a hand. I say to the past: Come with me, then, as I live.
“Hello, Ricky,” I say.