The kettle clicked itself off and I kept standing, because I could not remember when I had learned to wait for small machines to make decisions for me. There was a rhythm to the apartment that betrayed nothing—faded curtains, two mismatched mugs in the sink, a bookshelf overfilled with journals and novels I had not read twice. I moved through those rooms like someone returning to a borrowed body, testing the way a hand fit the edge of a table, the way light landed on the scuff of a floorboard. At some point I had convinced myself that forgetting was an annoyance, an occasional misplacement. In the kitchen a pen lay on the counter in my handwriting, thin letters looping as if after a long absence of practice. The pen’s cap was off and the end was blunted from pressing too hard. Beside it, a square of paper: words I recognized as mine—call Paul—followed by numbers I did not remember writing. I held the paper until my thumb crumpled the corner and felt the small, steady jolt that accompanied the realization that something in my life had been edited.
The photograph on the coffee table was worse. I had placed that frame myself; the backing had never been loose. On the glossy surface a woman I did not know smiled at the side of my face. She was leaning toward me, her hair tucked behind one ear, the sort of casual intimacy that implied a history I did not own. Someone, or something, had taken a knife to the other cheek of the image; fingertips of white paper frayed where a face had once been. I turned the frame over and found no note, no explanation. The glue line where the cardboard met the glass had dried into a brown crust. For a moment I thought about tossing the whole thing into the bin and walking away, letting the hole where her face had been be another successful omission. Instead I curled my hand around the edge of the frame and felt the faint resistance of glue and old salt, and then the urge to make sense of a thing that refused to be sensible.
I am precise by training, or at least I used to be. My work required that I catalogue how memory misbehaved in the lab—how a line of text could be smudged into a blank if prodded in the right place, how trauma could sequester itself in a pocket of time like a stone sunk into a riverbed. I had not expected those theories to become domestic habits.
There were other small dissonances that morning. A mug I did not own, thicker and too glossy, nested among my chipped ceramics. A receipt folded inside the pages of a book about sleep techniques; the date on the receipt was a month I could not account for. The key ring that hung by the door bore a new brass token, smooth and unmarked, that I certainly had not bought. I felt the familiar, distant preface to panic—an animal’s short calculation of proximity to danger—and I named it for myself: curiosity was safer.
I moved toward the bookshelf out of a kind of professional reflex, a scientist’s faith that objects could be interrogated. When my fingers found the spine of a well-thumbed behavioral manual, they brushed something that had been hidden between two pages. It was small and black and so banal that I felt embarrassed for being startled at its presence. Something that belonged to no ordinary day. It slid out of the book like a secret and landed in my palm.