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Do you know what time it is?
He told me it's 9:38, he looked so much like me, I could tell that he saw it, too, we shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter? I just told myself the time, and I'm thinking of your mother, how young and old she is, how she carries around her money in an envelope, how she makes me wear suntan lotion no matter what the weather, how she sneezes and says, "God bless me," God bless her. She's at home now, writing her life story, she's typing while I'm leaving, unaware of the chapters to come. It was my suggestion, and at the time I thought it was a very good one, I thought maybe if she could express herself rather than suffer herself, if she had a way to relieve the burden, she lived for nothing more than living, with nothing to get inspired by, to care for, to call her own, she helped out at the store, then came home and sat in her big chair and stared at her magazines, not at them but through them, she let the dust accumulate on her shoulders. I pulled my old typewriter from the closet and set her up in the guest room with everything she'd need, a card table for a desk, a chair, paper, some glasses, a pitcher of water, a hotplate, some flowers, crackers, it wasn't a proper office but it would do, she said, "But it's a Nothing Place," I wrote, "What better place to write your life story?" She said, "My eyes are crummy," I told her they were good enough, she said, "They barely work," putting her fingers over them, but I knew she was just embarrassed by the attention, she said, "I don't know how to write," I told her there's nothing to know, just let it come out, she put her hands on the typewriter, like a blind person feeling someone's face for the first time, and said, "I've never used one of these before," I told her, "Just press the keys," she said she would try, and though I'd known how to use a typewriter since I was a boy, trying was more than I ever could do. For months it was the same, she would wake up at 4 a.m. and go to the guest room, the animals would follow her, I would come here, I wouldn't see her again until breakfast, and then after work we'd go our separate ways and not see each other until it was time to fall asleep, was I worried about her, putting all of her life into her life story, no, I was so happy for her, I remembered the feeling she was feeling, the exhilaration of building the world anew, I heard from behind the door the sounds of creation, the letters pressing into the paper, the pages being pulled from the machine, everything being, for once, better than it was and as good as it could be, everything full of meaning, and then one morning this spring, after years of working in solitude. She said, "I'd like to show you something." I followed her to the guest room, she pointed in the direction of the card table in the corner, on which the typewriter was wedged between two stacks of paper of about the same height, we walked over together, she touched everything on the table and then handed me the stack on the left, she said, "My Life." "Excuse me?" I asked by shrugging my shoulders, she tapped the page, "My Life," she said again, I riffled the pages, there must have been a thousand of them, I put the stack down, "What is this?" I asked by putting her palms on the tops of my hands and then turning my palms upward, flipping her hands off mine, "My Life," she said, so proudly, "I just made it up to the present moment. Just now. I'm all caught up with myself. The last thing I wrote was 'I'm going to show him what I've written. I hope he loves it.'" I picked up the pages and wandered through them, trying to find the one on which she was born, her first love, when she last saw her parents, and I was looking for A
I wanted to cry but I didn't cry, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room, ended our suffering, they would have found us floating face-down in two thousand white pages, or buried under the salt of my evaporated tears, I remembered, just then and far too late, that years before I had pulled the ribbon from the machine, it had been an act of revenge against the typewriter and against myself, I'd pulled it into one long thread, unwinding the negative it held—the future homes I had created for A
Do you know what time it is?
The first time A