Imaginary Lives
As the universe expands, any point in space appears to itself as the center, from which all else moves away. That is an illusion.
There are fifty states and sixteen ounces in a pound and eleven positions on a football team—true whether you mean soccer or the other kind—and the head bone is connected to the neck bone and you have to move the chicken coop every day and don’t microwave metal and Odysseus built the Trojan horse and all men are created equal with the inalienable right to pass traffic on the left except in some countries where it’s the other way around.
Non, rien de rien. The tailor on the west end of Kingstown is a cheat.
Everyone says the Mona Lisa is very small but it’s pretty much the size you expect.
The first time you act is in fourth grade.
The community theater runs classes for kids on Saturdays, and at your brother’s karate class you see a poster.
LEARN TO ACT! FUN GAMES! You don’t really like games.
Games are unpredictable. They have rules you don’t understand.
You try karate but cry when the instructor punches a dummy.
Your mother signs you up for acting instead.
It is at the same time as your brother’s karate class so you have something to do and she can go grocery shopping.
Your mother hires the tutor and she’s from Surrey and before the end of the year you only talk to her in English.
She gives you books by Robert Louis Stevenson and you imagine an adventure in the Scottish Highlands with the deposed king, though when you eventually visit Scotland forty years later you’re driven around in a car and it’s beautiful but the romance isn’t the same.
You read in your bed late into the night as your father and his communist friends yell about the world downstairs.
One time your father lets you go with him to the pub, one not far from your old farm.
You’re not sure why, maybe he is being sentimental.
You are excited and when you approach the doors and hear singing inside you expect a night of friendship and camaraderie, but it is nothing like that at all.
Men piss and vomit in the corner. They yell at one another and then immediately soften before yelling again.
Everyone smells of sweat. When your father’s friends talk to you, they shout, tapping your shoulder so hard it leaves a bruise.
You are too young to drink but they let you try an ale anyway and you have a headache the next day.
You are always good at math and science so your mother expects you to be a doctor but you don’t much like working with people and you tell her you want to be an astronaut. Your father scoffs and says you have to be realistic and you never hated him so much as you did then.
You smoke cigarettes with your friends on bridges over the Seine and then throw the butts in the water to see which ones float away fastest, cheering them on.
You waste your summer at bars and cafés and walking along the river and sneaking into art galleries.
You don’t talk politics—that’s for your father.
At the cinema you like to watch American movies, which your friends hate. They are all dead now.
The acting games are simple. You don’t overthink them.
Try to act like an animal (got it, you’re a monkey), now try to tell the teacher you’re hungry (you’re a monkey, you just eat whatever you see).
You learn tongue twisters and short scenes and pick out props and costumes from a big bag the teacher brings with her each week.
The props mean nothing at first but then you decide what they are and suddenly you have a whole world, one you are in the center of, that you control.
At the final class, you and the other students perform a short play called The Great Meatball Mystery for your parents.
Your brother is mad because he misses his karate class. You play a waiter.
Sine equals opposite over hypotenuse. Turkeys are native to North America.
In their rematch Ali knocked out Liston in the first round.
There’s a goat herder named Harry on the south mountain who has three beautiful daughters and he still thinks they’re all virgins.
The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia.
An old-fashioned is four parts bourbon, one part water, two dashes of bitters, and one sugar cube, muddled, served on the rocks.
Your favorite café is on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, which was built by Napoleon III—the boulevard, not the café.
Don’t let quicklime get into your eyes when mixing mortar.
When she says, “Let’s be friends,” it means she never wants to see you again.
You don’t learn to drive until you move to America and you never really get comfortable with it.
Wendy does most of the driving and eventually Daniel, too.
You like Boston because the North End reminds you a bit of old Europe except in the winter when it’s so cold you can feel it even when sitting inside by the fire.
Wendy grew up in the cold and doesn’t mind it, but it reminds you of the camp.
On New Year’s Eve your parents throw a big party and invite all their friends.
A dozen different kids hang out in the basement as their parents drink upstairs.
You write a play, a one-act about a family that is attacked by a bear while camping, and try to direct all the kids in a performance.
Rehearsals are at nine o’clock and showtime is right before midnight.
You shout and yell and try to instill order on the production but no one will listen to you.
“This is going to be great if we all focus!” you say, because you know your parents will like it, will tell you they liked it.
But the little kids get bored and the older ones want to play video games.
There is no show and you spend the rest of the night crying alone in your room.
There’s a redhead named Viola at one of the pubs on the west end of town, and even though you pay her it’s really nice to lie down next to her and smell her skin and twirl her hand with your fingers and wonder how the color turned out that way.
She’s nice but the other apprentices tease you.
She has to be nice to you, they say, that’s her job.
But you can still like something even if you are paid for it.
You like the walls you build. She might like you, too.
Local stations are marked with a white circle and express stations have a black dot, though that doesn’t matter since the metro tunnels are flooded now.
What does matter is that blackjack is when you are dealt an ace and a ten-card and it is not illegal to count cards although you don’t know how to do that.
Your tutor buys you a copy of Tom Sawyer and when you read it you decide you like America.
You never learn to read, though you think your father knew how to.
You can’t change a tire. Actually, you can, because your father taught you how, saying you can’t live your life and rely on a man to do this for you, a surprisingly sensible sentiment for him.
You only like sushi rolls with the fake crab inside.
When the war starts, you enlist in the army and say goodbye to your parents and your tutor and go north, where you never fire a single shot before being captured at Sedan and sent to a camp on the Polish border.
You never see your parents again. They’re shot by an ambitious corporal on a road outside Paris for being on a list of known communists.
They shoot your tutor, too, just for being with them.
But you don’t find out about that for a long time.
Junior year your father’s taunts about being practical finally get to you and you change your major to biology.
There’s a bunch of classes you need to catch up on and so you overload and don’t have time to study for the MCAT.
When you bomb it, your mother is angry and your father unsurprised.
You think they should just go fuck themselves but you apply for graduate school anyway.
You don’t even really like neuroscience that much, but you have a hunch that when you study it you’ll be able to prove that people aren’t actually that complicated or interesting and then your parents’ judgments won’t intrude on your private thoughts.
The community theater does a children’s production of Winnie the Pooh, and you are cast as Piglet.
Most of the kids are older than you, but they actually care about the show and after some light teasing you become “their Piglet.” They tell you about all the good movies you need to see, the ones your mother never lets you watch but that the kids show you on their phones anyway.
You like Mafia movies and horror movies, especially ones you are too young for.
When the play is performed, you do two shows in one day and only forget a couple of lines.
Your parents take you and your brother out for ice cream afterward and tell you they are getting divorced.
The hardest you ever work, and the sorest you ever feel, is after digging the hole for your father’s grave. Carrying stone is nothing compared to holes.
The second book is much harder to write than the first book, because now your publisher is waiting on it and the fan mail is coming in.
Everybody is trying to get in touch with you, all the time.
Daniel talks now, too, and he’s always babbling about something but to your horror you realize you don’t know how to communicate with children.
Wendy is patient but you don’t think you ever really loved her and maybe you don’t know what love is.
You can’t write unless you are alone and it’s harder to be alone, to sit by your fire on cold nights and put words onto the blank paper sitting on your lap.