Paramnesia.
"Someone's in their head." Michael teased when i announced i was leaving for a walk. I hadn't had much to say that night, everything seemed leaden and colored that way: i needed to leave the house. I decided to return their video, and walk to the library to return my books. That's - what? 33 blocks plus 25 blocks? Should be enough. I said goodnight. It was 12:30, everyone was going home.
"My head? But I live there, Michael." He seems to disapprove. I tell Megan to worry if i'm not home by dawn.
As always when walking i run two minds at once: one musing, noticing, one rehearsing for encounters, attacks that i've been trained to expect. It's somehow strange that it hasn't happened yet. One mind is admiring the density of leaves, the other is kicking out at an assailant and shouting. There's no one on the streets. Maybe i'm dreaming. I'm singing songs someone else wrote, this hardly takes mind at all, it's part of breathing. I'm running like fingers over all the signs and surfaces i pass.
Cutting through a neighborhood, i pass a white house - simple design, like a clapboard church, tall narrow windows, stone steps - and i have a memory. Driving the streets slowly, inspecting each house, looking for a particular one, and this house coming into view. "Is this the one?" I ask, or someone asks me. I'm trying to remember. Is this the house? Who was i with?
Suddenly i remember this wasn't something that happened to me. This is a scene from Alice in the Cities. The lost photographer and the lost little girl, that world of vivid images and homelessness. It's almost one o'clock, and there's a melancholy Wim Wenders light, i admit. My mind has a vocabulary of others' memories and visions. It is not so small to be in my own head.