Traveling centuries beyond my birth during the Age of Alexander, I discovered a land across the sea known as the United States of America. The political philosophies upon which that nation rose proved fascinating, but not nearly as much as the people they helped create—homo Americanus—especially that babe Hester Prynne and that dude Jeff Lebowski.

∼  Amaurón, Pilgrim's Progress: The Life of Billy P. Studge

   His elderly parents had given up. "Enough," they'd decided, "of the long, cold and especially dark New England winters." That seemed perfectly understandable to their son, who stood leaning in the doorway of his childhood bedroom. What made no sense to him, however, was the gnaw of discomfort he felt as he gazed into his nearly empty room. Were he younger, he wouldn't have budged until he figured it out. He was older now. His wife had begun telling him, with the slightest tone of congratulation, that he was more mature, to which he would answer "big whoop" just to prove her wrong. Truthfully, he recognized his dwindling stubbornness as another indication that he was gradually letting go of who he was in this life.

   A year passed before the answer came to him. He was weeding his vegetable garden when he heard the squeal of the braking school bus. He lifted his head with anticipation, but quickly realized that his grown children were not coming home. He looked up at the passing clouds, wiped the sweat from his brow, and understood that he'd never set foot in that bedroom again; that entire house would be closed to him forever.

   That possibility had never occurred to him.

   He knelt in the garden and remembered his only sister, Linda, trying to sound cheery that day. "Time to pack up."

   His only brother, Kevin, barged past them on his way to the curb with a green plastic trash bag. "Yep, time to get out. Leave nothing behind but your ghost."

   Shortly after, he found himself staring into the bedroom he and Kevin had shared. Its walls had been painted beige upon the advice of the real estate agent, who seemed well-schooled in the subliminal seduction of homebuyers, although she called it "asset enhancement." In a day or two the hardwood floors would be sanded and varnished, scouring and glossing away the trails he and Kevin had scuffed around the missing beds. Virtually empty, the room struck him as altogether too airy and bright. No longer anchored by the weight of their possessions, it seemed light and fanciful as it awaited the arrival of entirely new adventures.

   Everything that remained in the room belonged to him: two cardboard boxes, a child-size wooden treasure chest, and the low bookcase that seemed to prop up the window overlooking the backyard. He weaved to avoid the corner of his brother's un-made bed as he made his way to kneel beside the boxes. The larger one had block-letters in his father's impeccable hand, "College Books." He thrummed his fingers on its lid before unfolding its flaps. On top lay Skeeter's copy of The Golden Ass by Apuleius, which contained his friend's invaluable marginalia. How many times had he promised to return it? His hands dug deeper, unearthing stiff, yellowed paperbacks and bulky anthologies. There was The Ginger Man, just a decade or two overdue from the Randall College library.

   He closed the box and considered the wooden chest. It still bore the warning he'd painted, "My Stuff—Keep Out! This Means You!!" and his elegant signature, Le Duc de Grande Cascade. To its right was the solid black box he'd made to cover Kevin's contribution, "Turn Back Dorothy!"

   He opened its lid and picked up a compass from his Boy Scout days. It still worked! He withdrew a souvenir photo-pin of ill-fated Red Sox slugger Tony Conigliaro. Beneath it hung a red-and-white striped ribbon and a chain that secured a bat and glove of gold plastic. He took out two dice, rolled them in his hand, and pretended to throw them down a sward of green felt. He leaned forward to see the imaginary result and recalled Amaurón's seminal adage, "life's a pair 'a dice tossed." He pushed aside a microscope, a jackknife, and a transistor radio with an antenna that lacked an end-knob, so it could no longer be telescoped. It had been broken long ago.

   How old was that memory? What makes one memory any "older" than another? People allow their memories to evolve, so they are as fresh as today. Aren't they? He'd challenge his wife with that question later and confirm that she'd married a strange man, one who relished asking seemingly obvious questions that no one else did.

   "Long ago," he mused. "December 7th, a day that will live in infamy." Not so much, even for his generation, which felt the shocking senselessness of the universe firsthand with the Kennedy Assassination. His children had September 11^th live and in color. No wonder they had been bored touring the battlefield at Gettysburg during a family vacation. What was that to them? A few dates to be memorized for a test. Faceless names etched in stone. Did they bother to calculate that about eighteen times as many Americans died during those three days in July than on the September morning that awoke them from their childhoods? Did they realize that nearly as many people died in three days at Gettysburg than during the entire Vietnam War, which they never gave a moment of thought to, probably because hardly anyone else did?

   He closed the treasure chest and opened the other box, recognizing as he did that the passage of time somehow conferred permission to make light of the gravest tragedy: Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play? Apart from the landing, how did you enjoy your aerial tour of Lower Manhattan? A new tune to whistle past the graveyard; it was just a matter of time.

   He thumbed through a short stack of magazines, saw a Red Sox yearbook and wondered, will baseball still be celebrating Jackie Robinson Day in the year of 2525? People wouldn't still need to be reminded that we were all created equal by then, would they?

   He burrowed deeper for a certain magazine . . . where was it? In here somewhere, hidden away as it should be. Ah! He slid it out, realizing immediately that it was yet another item that belonged to someone else, Marc from across the street, who he hadn't seen in . . . "eons" seemed about right. He read the cover, Now It Can Be Told—must viewing (and perhaps reading) for the pubescent American male at one time. He flicked through its well-worn pages and then abruptly reburied it.

   He turned his attention to the bookcase, which was jammed with hardcover editions of boyhood adventure stories. His children had loved books when they were small, but their adolescence had been filled with screens of either pulsating destruction or inane text messages: OMG, UR-CWOT! He scanned the titles, which struck him as the house addresses of long-neglected friends: Mowgli, Dickon, Jim Bowie, Kim, Huck of course, D'Artagnan, Don Diego Vega—swish, swish, swish—and his favorites Wart and Merlin. Wicked and deplorable characters skulked inside other books: Flint and Fagin, Ali-Baba and the forty thieves, Captain Hook, and Duke Michael. He eyed the well-worn hardcover that encased the realm of the African Queen, the original "she who must be obeyed."

   The books beckoned, "Come out and play."

   "Out?" he asked them.

   "Of your world," they answered. "Come play in ours, again!"

   So he plucked King Solomon's Mines from the shelf and reached for the edge of his bed to hoist himself, but his hand fell through nothingness. He tottered back, quickly curled his legs under him, and sat Indian style. He felt the heft of the book, a gift from his neighbor, Mr. Hanbury. He remembered the older man passing it to him with hands made meaty and strong by work in his garden and the woods. He remembered those same hands turned asthenic years later—waxy with horrible blue veins and prominent bones—fumbling an amber vial of painkillers.

   He opened the book and thumbed the pages briskly. Dust flew and sparkled in the window light. He marveled at its dance. He shared its glee. It was free like Mr. Hanbury. Becoming dust wouldn't be so bad, he thought, not if he could ride a sunbeam with the old man and talk about what made the renegade Captain Blood so admirable. He'd welcome life as a speck of cosmic matter if he could listen to a baseball game on the radio with his grandfather, stretched out on the porch sofa in the twilight, waiting for the next pitch, believing that nothing mattered except the batter hundreds of miles away circling his bat—and the large, warm hand on his small shoulder.

   Baseball, always baseball, and that other ageless game of wondering what life would have been like if he knew then what he knew now. Imagine that.

   "Imagine!" he'd heard Mr. Hanbury implore while sitting in his living room. "Always use your imagination, it's your greatest gift. Imagine something and it's as good as real."

   Even as a young boy he didn't believe that.

   "I see that look on your face," said Mr. Hanbury, who paused to collect his thoughts. "Let's see, have you ever gone for a long ride on your bike, lad? Of course you have, you're always off somewhere! You're pedaling along and the next thing you know you've reached your destination. You remember leaving and arriving but nothing of the road in between! You wonder how you avoided the cars and made the correct turns, indeed, how you survived at all in the real world was it? How did you manage with your head living far away in another place and time?!"

   He knew better than to offer a quick-and-ready answer.

   "Reality flip-flops during such a journey," he continued. "The world inside your head grows real. The one outside fades away until it's no more relevant than the dream you had a fortnight ago. So who's to say which is more real?" Then he made a small gesture with his hand, offering another cookie from the plate.

   "The trick is to take the dream out of your head. Take it on a journey. Hook it on the handlebars of your bike right beside your baseball glove." He raised his bushy eyebrows and widened his eyes. "Put it right up front and pedal away!" He gave the boy a playful punch on the shoulder. "If you stop pedaling, laddie, you'll fall over. Your pride will wind up in the ditch." He looked grave and asked ponderously, "What would your parents make of that, lad?"

   "Lad" and "laddie"— no one but the proud Scot with the English surname called him that. "I'm no bloody Sassenach," he declared, glancing at his Gallic wife and adding, "if you'll pardon ma French, madame. I was born in the shadow of Stockport's crumbling mills, aye," rolling his R's for emphasis, "but I was raised hard by the links of Carnoustie." He asked excitedly, "If ye were born in a manger, does that make ye a horse?" He laughed loudly in anticipation of his pun, "Lord no!" The eruption startled his wife, who shook her head softly, indicating that she also thought he was a bit mad.

   Back in his room for the last time, the much older boy opened King Solomon's Mines and thumbed to the first chapter. He read the opening sentence—for the umpteenth time his mother would have said—and was astonished to discover words he could have written himself that day:

"It is a curious thing that at my age—fifty-five last birthday—I should
find myself taking up a pen to try to write a history."

NEXT SECTION: Chapter 1 - The Stork