Free The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky

I’ve never heard before, “I’m not going back until I’m faculty. Full faculty.”
    2010 |  Why is my memory so patchy? Why can’t I remember better from those times? It infuriates me. All I have are fragments, bursts of sound and taste and color.
    If you asked me what I did in 2001, I’d say M and I lived for a semester on the thirteenth floor of a high-rise in the heart of Greenwich Village. I’d say our golden retriever, Beau, died after a two-year-long bout with kidney disease. Say we drove his blanket-wrapped body up to the Provincetown house, where we buried him in the front yard, as Arden, his older brother, watched solemnly, paws crossed out in front of him, by the edge of the pit M dug. Say we bought a one-bedroom apartment on West Sixteenth Street. Say we moved into that apartment exactly a week before the towers fell, before we had a TV or any furniture except for a bed. Say that I was afraid to breathe too deeply lest the dust (bones? ground-up plastic?) get trapped in my lungs. Say restaurants were still serving people on sidewalk tables in December: the warm weather wouldn’t let go in spite of the trauma in the atmosphere.
    But if you asked me about what I was doing in the middle of the eighties? The middle of the eighties is a frozen hole, volcano deep. I had a pretty good record of leaving crappy jobs behind. I was afraid of becoming that kind of feckless young person who took a job then quit it instantly. But the bigger story was that I’d managed to finish my graduate degree in English. I’d brought a project to completion, but I was scared shitless about what was to come next. I wanted to become myself, but there wasn’t even a self to work with. I went to the Cherry Hill Library to research editorial assistant jobs at the Village Voice. I dreamt about the men I never touched. I was in suspension mode, moving through my own life as a burglar might move through an empty house, with gloves on, careful not to leave any fingerprints behind.
    And maybe that’s why I don’t remember a thing about Denise’s wedding—the time of day or year. I think I might have played the guitar. Joey might have played the trumpet, but that might have been another wedding. I don’t remember her dress, whether it was long or above the knee, white or not. Was there lace? Don’t remember a thing about her vows. Or the reception afterward, talking to her parents, her sister, her brother, Austen—or even Lisa, who must have been there, too. Don’t remember who sat at my table, whether it was an important table, or whether I was off in some corner, with the single, unattached people: the punishment table. Don’t remember thinking that the days of long phone calls might be over, not to mention the nights of talking and making jokes till four in the morning.
    2010 |  Off the north coast of Haiti, the sea floor buckles. The coral reef rises through the surface; vast tracts of once-productive farms plunge. This has happened in all of a month, since the Port-au-Prince earthquake. The video I’m watching is shot from a small plane. The coral reef looks like a moldy green cauliflower head, a single oak grows a mile from the revised shoreline. It’s already drowned, already salt-burned. The thinking goes that the Port-au-Prince fault, dormant for a hundred years when it flattened Kingston, will need to release pressure soon. It is not so far-fetched to think that the next quake will trigger a tsunami the size and scope of the Sri Lanka tsunami. The announcer relays this information in a voice both portentous and stagey, though he sounds as if he’s trying to keep the staginess in check. It would take fifteen minutes to reach Jamaica, a half hour to reach Cuba, one hour to reach the coast of South Florida. As to whether a warning system is in place for such an event: Humans are pretty good at not learning from the mistakes that have already befallen us. We wouldn’t be able to bear it if we’d braced ourselves for