The Sudden Appearance of Hope

Parker: Who Is He?

Surprisingly funny, talkative (he talks because the alternative is silence), passionate about music to the point of obsession, kind to strangers. Today I have seen him chat to a homeless man from the Bronx for half an hour, grill a waitress about the history of her tattoo, perform coin magic for a pair of marvelling five-year-old twins on the train, entertaining them while their mum comforted a shrieking baby. A show-off. Fearsome in his hatred of the news in the US, dismissive of politics.

Flashes of melancholy, sometimes laughs too loud, too high. His opinions often flare into certainties — an insistence that the Tale of Genji was written during the Kemmu Restoration, and he sulks, proper sulks, for ten minutes when I prove him wrong. Envious of celebrity to the point of contempt, bitterness inflecting his words. “They’re just people,” he says, “just fucking people”, and yet his knowledge of who said what and who was seen at what party is encyclopaedic.

Erudite, to the point of obsession. Am I the same? I can’t help but measure myself by him, the only equivalence I have ever met. Constantly on his phone, constantly double-checking the world around him. We order pancakes; he looks up the history of maple syrup.

Nanabozho, he says. Trickster god of the first peoples, credited sometimes with the invention of maple syrup. At the Sugar Moon, first full moon of spring, the tribes of the north would celebrate the coming of warmer days by tapping the trees, collecting sap until the rising temperatures of the forest made the sugars less sweet, unpalatable.

“How many cultures,” he muses, “so far apart, have gods that delight to play tricks.”

Today you met someone like you. You cannot remember him, but here is his picture. He has a note just like this one, and you are to meet again at 10 a.m. at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

We met at 10 a.m.. He came up to me, a nervous man with mousy hair I had never seen before. He had my picture on his phone, grinning at the camera, giving it a thumbs up, his face pressed in from the side of the frame.

“Hi,” he said, holding out his hand stiffly. “I got a note from myself telling me to be here to meet someone I can’t remember ever meeting before.”

“Hi,” I replied. “I got the same thing.”

His eyes widened in fear and delight, and then he’s talking, just talking, non-stop for nearly an hour, maybe two. He wonders how long we’ve been meeting like this, if we’re already the best of friends, tells me about his life — has he told me this already? — wants to know everything about me, how I live, how I eat, how I keep myself sane.

I tell him about taster classes, speed dating, card counting at the casinos, and am briefly surprised when he replies, “I go to prostitutes, so much easier. Once you’ve found one or two who you like, who you know will be good with you, then it’s just better and so much more honest, I mean, more honest for us both, than me trying to pick up some date in a bar.”

Perhaps he’s right; I don’t feel anything either way. Cautiously, I admit that I have sometimes done a little thieving, and steal his wallet while he’s distracted by a family squabble on the other side of the rose beds. He exclaims in wonder at this, and finally admits, “I just rob people.”

That’s when he shows me the gun, small and dark, hidden in a holster underneath his arm. “It’s okay!” he exclaims, at my expression of horror. “No one ever remembers being robbed, I mean, it’s just like they dropped their wallet or something.”

“Have you ever killed anyone?”

“Jesus, no! Jesus!”

And now I wonder: do I believe him?

I have no memories of him on which to construct a pattern of his truths and lies, but in much the same way that I see how it is logical to seek sex with a hooker, I can also see how someone in our predicament might find it easy to make their living with a gun. Perhaps I read too much. I must examine myself as thoroughly as I examine him, if I want to make this sort of judgement. Yet, in that I have no other resource than these words now by which to remember him, I feel I must write it down: this is the thing I feel, these are the questions I have. Remember them.

He’s funny, he makes me laugh; when was the last time I actually laughed?

“You gotta laugh,” he says. “It’s the best thing you can do for your health.”

In the evening we go to see stand-up, and after the first fifteen minutes of not being very impressed, I found that I was laughing until my face hurt.

Today you spent the day with someone you cannot remember. You have agreed to meet him again at 10.30 at the Coney Island ferry.

… at Grand Central Station

… at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

… at Times Square

Tonight we had sex. It seemed something we should do. It was fine. Now he’s sitting on the bed writing a letter to himself, explaining the day that has been and everything that has happened, before we forget. It’s 4 a.m., and I just want to sleep. I find it hard to gather words, and am so afraid of putting my pen down, closing my eyes, killing everything that today was.

Would we be friends, lovers, were we not what we are? Two asthmatics meet in a room, will they stay together simply because they are asthmatic? Do I like Parker? Do I like him?

The address of someone you cannot remember, in case you ever need him.

Today we agreed not to see each other.

Dear Hope

My name is Parker. I hope that you have letters about me already, which you have been keeping, as I have been keeping photos and letters about you. I hope that you are favourable in your report of me. I don’t know you — today is the first day we have ever met — but I see from pictures and notes that we’ve met many times before. I think the days that went before have been wonderful, but I cannot remember you in them. I wanted to write to you, before we part, so that there is something physical of me in your hands, which you may remember when I am gone.

How stupid it must seem that I want to tell you things about yourself; I know that I have known you, and yet cannot know you. I am very frightened of what you know about me, of what you have written down. I could tell you the contents of my own letters, my accounts of everything that’s passed between us… but they’d only be words describing words, and that doesn’t feel fair.

You said a thing, when we agreed to go our ways, that I am desperate to remember. Look, I’ve written it here, and I’ve written it on my hand, and I’ve written it in my diary, and I’ll write it on my phone — I will remember it, because it seems to me the way in which you live your life. You said that, since the past vanishes with memory, all that we can live in is now. Remembrance is an act of looking back, and we do not exist in the past, except here, in these letters and photos. Even reading these is not an act of remembrance, because I write now. I hold your image now. I re-read these words, now. I look at you, now. I close my eyes, now. I exist only now. Only my thoughts, the thoughts that I have in this present moment, they are the prism through which all else travels, and even the past, even memory, is remembered only now. We exist in the present tense, and even our futures will one day be the past, and the past will be forgotten, and so only now remains. What matters, therefore, is not hope for things to come, nor regret for things passed, but this action in this moment, these deeds, this now.

Hope — I have lived a complicated life. Can a thing which is forgotten change a man?

I hope it can. Hope, for hope, in hope, of Hope.

I don’t know how to end this letter. Should I say that I love you? I don’t think that would be right. I think it is inappropriate, so I will leave it,

with very best wishes,

the one and only Parker