Mostly I remember the wrong things – obligations, fears, petty grievances – the things that sustain my present misery. But sometimes a fragment of experience emerges from the morass like a shiny bit of metal in the mud. Not in the chance way that memory so often seems to resonate through everyday life but as something I’ve been trying to get back to, as if beneath all the layers of amnesia lies some secret entrance, some unexplored territory, that leads out to a luminous world. A place lit by a giant moon floating in a hot summer night sky. From the railing of a balcony I peer out at a treeless stretch of cement that I know as Par-kavenue, which in the daytime is a wall of sound full of great grinding noises from the car repair shops across the street, the roar and screech of traffic, the rumble of freight cars passing over a trestle (that marks the horizon – and for a year or two until the start of school – the known extent of my universe), along with ragged bits of radio music and the off-key shouts of mothers and the call-back of their kids from the unbroken façade of triplexes on my side of the street, with their external staircases dangling like rope ladders from the second floor. But in the moonlight everything is ghostly and still: nobody stirs, the traffic has gone to bed, the windows are all darkened cavities. The hour is forbiddingly late, as if somehow the boy sitting on the second storey balcony had slipped through the cracks, escaped the attention of a father already wheezing in his sleep and a mother ironing laundry and boiling down a chicken on the stove. Or maybe the heat had woken the boy up and he had been lifted from clammy sheets next to his older brother who still sleeps the privileged sleep of big boys, lifted in his mother’s meaty arms and deposited outside to cool down and keep still while Old Suspenders from next door, parked on a kitchen chair on his side of the balcony, would agree to keep an eye on him. And almost at once the churning in his chest stops as his fingers cling to the black railing (that only stays cool for the few seconds it takes for it to absorb the heat from his body) and his eyes reach out into the immense bowl of the night, like a sentinel on the lookout for secrets in an alien world. The old man puffs away on his pipe, sometimes he laughs to himself, sometimes he hacks up a cough that crackles and hisses like a piece of tortured meat in a frying pan, but for the boy none of this intrudes on the night because what is behind the railings belongs to the familiar constellation of faces, rooms and smells that mean home, which can, it is true, still hold surprises and delights (in magical places under the kitchen sink, in the closet of his parents’ bedroom, in the jungle of table and chair legs in the dining room) but all of whose mysteries hold no terror because they are not really unknown so much as not yet known, like the crumbled bits of chocolate bar that almost always can be found deep inside a pocket of any of his father’s cavernous coats. But the night is beyond that, beyond the indoor world that can be mastered with palms and knees red from crawling, beyond even the outdoor world of daylight, of friends (people we like who belong somewhere else) and games and ice cream and rain; the night is the world of everything else – tall, vast, invisible. And somehow from within that world a giddiness insinuates itself, a gentle rocking that ripples down the staircase and through the street and buildings, an undulation in the air just below the threshold of stillness. It sets the old man’s chair creaking as if he and the boy were gently bobbing on a boat while the rigid geometry of the street dissolves in the tangled magic of an underwater world where the rope ladder staircases sway like tentacles, waiting for strange, encrusted creatures to grab hold. The boy wipes his forehead and clings even harder to the railing to keep the giddiness from making his head nod and his eyes droop and his body float away high above Par-kavenue. And soon that’s where he is, drifting slowly, effortlessly, over the trestle by the moon as enormous fish swim past, swishing their tails under the tops of lampposts and gazing blankly into windows, their lipless mouths nuzzling the panes and emitting silent syllables.
Laughter wakes him. Not the old man’s but from up the street, two or three houses away. At first all he can make out is an unfamiliar shape, a horizontal bridging two verticals descending a staircase (which, thinking back on it in later years, looked a bit like one of those school-play horses with two kids inside the costume). But soon what comes into focus is a trio of figures: two men carrying a woman in their upraised arms. The laughter is coming from her, high-pitched and out of control, as though she were being tickled to death. Hooting from the men keeps rough time with her squeals, and when they’re midway down, the man in back pulls up short and then the two of them start swinging her over the railing as if they were going to fling her down, which ratchets up her laughter to screaming. This is a kind of terrific game the boy has never seen before – childish abandon indulged with adult omnipotence. As she gets heaved and hoed, her hair thrashes about and her dress billows out like a parachute, uncovering her long legs, moonlight-limned and wriggling. (Those legs – did they become a fixture in his mind? In adolescence, when parts of female anatomy became a sort of badge of masculinity – one had to declare oneself to be a ‘tit man’ [the vast majority] or a ‘face man’ [more refined] or a ‘leg man’ [vaguely effeminate] – he chose the latter, mostly, he supposed, just to be different but maybe also, without knowing it, in homage to this moment of revelation.) When the acrobats finally descend from their trapeze, the beautiful maid is planted, unsteadily, on her feet and the last glimpse the boy has of her is wrapped up in the cobra arms of one of her carriers before they all climb into a car with metallic green fins and, an engine vroom and tire squeal later, are swallowed up by the night.
The memory stops there. The rest of the night, and many nights and days afterwards, are a blank, or rather whatever there is that presses against the opaque membrane of amnesia is so indistinct and disjointed as barely ever to coalesce into an image, a feeling, a face. But what I also remember is being haunted by this memory, of dreaming about it in my sleep or reliving it on some moonlit night in the dead of winter when frost had robbed the staircases and balconies of their magic, or even in later years when we had moved away to a better part of town where the stairs were inside and the streets a lot quieter. Haunted by the feeling that I had been given a glimpse of a wonderland, but also haunted by the elusiveness of its meaning. And the more I tried to figure it out, the more elusive the memory became, like a chameleon caught in a beam of light. Nothing different happened, the vividness was still there, but all the valences shifted from light to dark – laughter turned into screams, pleasure to torture, embraces to constraint – so that almost imperceptibly a different ‘memory’ emerged, more lurid but also, to a prepubescent boy, more appealing. But not the truth, even if in many ways it made more sense. Not the truth because it betrayed the marvel of that night, the radiant holiness of delight that had descended those stairs, coarsening it through caricature and projected anxieties. We betray so many things in growing up because it is hard to hold on to radiance with such small hands, and we get so little help.