Estimated Lexile Level: ~1100L–1250L

Ideal audience: 16+

Chapter One

The Bay Bridge

50… 60… 70… 80… 85… 88…89…90…92…96…

After that, I don’t remember much. Maybe a song playing low on the stereo. Maybe her hand reaching up to touch the side of her neck. Maybe I said something stupid. Or maybe I was quiet, for once, which would have been the stupider thing.

I just remember driving back from the city, under the Bay Bridge. That stretch beneath the upper deck where the freeway ribs throw bars of dark and pale across the windshield. Dark. Light. Dark. Light. Like blinking with one eye shut. The tunnel stretches longer than you think. Time slips in there. I’ve always hated that part, ever since 2008.

That’s when things started to blur. Not the road, but everything around it. Some people get sentimental about that bridge, talk about it like a monument, like something worth preserving. To me it has always been a bad omen. Something leftover. Something that should have been torn down but wasn’t, because nobody could agree on what to replace it with.

*

There is a particular cruelty to forgetting a person who was, only hours ago, pressed against you. The body retains what the mind discards. Your muscles remember the weight of someone leaning into your shoulder in a moving car. Your skin holds the faint electricity of contact. And yet the mind, that ruthless archivist, decides this is not worth cataloguing. It files the evening under ‘lost’ and moves on to breakfast.

You forget a woman’s name between the second glass and the morning. You forget the sound of a laugh that, hours earlier, you would have followed anywhere. This is not the forgetting of the dead. It is a small death inside the living. And the worst part is that it feels, in the morning, like something you did to yourself on purpose.

*

I must have gotten home after midnight. I was drunk, but not sloppy. There’s a difference, and at twenty-two I prided myself on knowing it. I remember opening the door, fumbling for the light switch, and thinking: don’t wake the neighbors. And she was there too. A girl. A woman. I am aware these are not the same thing, but I could not tell you which she was, because I cannot see her anymore.

She laughed at something I said. Or maybe I imagined the laugh. There’s a version of this story where I was charming, and a version where I was simply drunk enough to seem interesting. I prefer the first, but I suspect the second.

Ah, yes. The bottle. The Opus One I’d been saving for Jacob’s birthday next week. A bottle I had no business opening on a Tuesday night with a stranger, a bottle meant for celebration, for ceremony, for something that mattered. I opened it anyway. I poured two glasses. And this tells you everything you need to know about who I was at twenty-two: a person who would sacrifice a future pleasure for an immediate one, every time, without hesitation, and call it living.

*

Every glass poured is a message from your present self to your future self, and the message always reads the same: I don’t care about you.

At twenty-two, this is not cruelty. It is philosophy. You drink the wine. You let the stranger put Chet Baker on the stereo. You watch her move through your apartment like she already knows where things are, and something about this does not alarm you. It thrills you. Because at twenty-two, the most seductive thing a person can do is act as though they’ve already been inside your life. It suggests inevitability. It suggests you were always going to meet, and this apartment, this wine, this music, were always waiting for the two of you to arrive.

Of course, this is nonsense. But it is the kind of nonsense that propels you from the kitchen to the bedroom, and at twenty-two, that is enough.

*

I don’t remember her name. I don’t remember her face. I don’t remember much of anything after the second glass. But I know she was here.

I have never woken up later than a woman I brought home. Never. It is a small vanity, perhaps the smallest, but I clung to it. I liked to be the one already awake, already composed, already making coffee, so that when she opened her eyes the first thing she saw was a man in control of his morning, and by extension, his life. This is absurd, of course. But so is most of what men do for the benefit of women who are not yet awake to witness it.

This morning, though, the bed was still warm beside me. Still had that soft weight, the kind that fades in minutes. No glass on the nightstand. No note. Nothing in the bathroom. Just a careful absence, as though she had been erased.

I checked the front door. Locked. Deadbolt thrown, chain on. I don’t remember locking it, but I must have, because I always do. Except I also always wake up first, and I didn’t do that either. I stood there with my hand on the chain and tried to think of how a person leaves an apartment with the chain still on from inside.

There’s an answer to this. There has to be. I probably unchained it for her, half-asleep, and locked up again without remembering. That’s the kind of thing you do on autopilot. I let go of the chain. I walked to the kitchen. I did not look back at the door.

I checked the bathroom on the way. Pulled the shower curtain back. I don’t know what I thought I’d find.

Scraps remain. A laugh that clipped into staccato, each burst punctuated, like someone knocking. A smile too wide for her small mouth, almost comic, almost unsettling. Chet Baker on the stereo, and the fact that she put it on without asking, as if she knew the place, as if she knew me. As if she’d already been here.

And in the ashtray, a cigarette stubbed out halfway. I don’t smoke. I don’t own an ashtray.

It was sitting on the kitchen counter like it had always been there. Small, ceramic, dark green. I picked up the cigarette and turned it over. The lipstick on the filter was a color I could almost name but couldn’t, and the paper was bent where she’d crushed it too quickly, the tobacco spilling out one end like a wound left open. That stub bothered me more than the empty bed. More than the locked chain. Something begun but not finished, abandoned in my house like a message I was supposed to read but couldn’t.

I smelled it. I don’t know why. It didn’t smell like any cigarette I’d been around. Sweet, almost floral, like something from a country I’ve never been to. And for a moment, standing in my own kitchen holding a stranger’s cigarette, I felt something I can only describe as recognition. Not of her. Of the feeling that I had done this before. That I had stood in exactly this spot, holding exactly this object, asking exactly this question. The feeling passed. But it left something behind, the way a match leaves the smell of sulfur after the flame is gone.

*

My lawyer once told me I was a perfectionist. I laughed, because perfectionism implies care, and I did not think I cared about much. But he was right in a way I didn’t understand then. I did not care about achieving perfection. I cared about the feeling of things slipping past me. The unfinished cigarette. The woman I couldn’t remember. The Opus One I would never get back. These were not losses, exactly. They were violations of an order I could not name but needed, desperately, to maintain.

Kundera wrote somewhere that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. I read that at Berkeley, underlined it in pencil, and thought I understood it. I didn’t. I thought he was talking about politics. He was talking about this. About waking up in your own bed and finding that the night has been subtracted from you, and the only evidence it happened at all is an ashtray you’ve never seen and a chain still latched from the inside.

*

I got up. Rubbed my temples. Head pounding. Mouth dry. But at least I was home. At least I hadn’t crashed the car, which, considering the speedometer’s climb under the bridge, was not a certainty I could take for granted.

I looked out the window. The sun was just beginning to rise over the Golden Gate, bleeding in soft through the fog. The whole city looked hungover. The light was thin, cautious, the way San Francisco looks on certain mornings when even the sun seems embarrassed to be there.

I stood in silence. Bare feet on the hardwood. And the only thing I could think was this:

Who was she?

And why can’t I remember if I touched her?