The Score

The man without memory remembered everything. He knew the dates especially for historical events that happened in The City, the name for the city of San Francisco. You don’t understand, I said to my friend, it isn’t that he doesn’t remember, it is that he can will himself to forget. Now that’s a gift most don’t have, I mean not if you’re not immoral or criminal. I mean, those guys might be different and I’m not talking different, just slightly. It’s the kind of willpower you mostly get with ballplayers you know, I mean when you watch them you know that they can just will most anything.

My friend says yeah, run right up to the hoop fast as you can, and then just before you shoot, relax the hands. What I’m talking about, I said, except this guy’s no ballplayer, way older and out of shape and it’s like what you said, full speed ahead and then nothing, not a jot of a night that you had a conversation that changed your life and even his maybe and where does it all go, I asked, watching Kobe put it right through.

I ask the man without memory if he will talk to me about what he says he doesn’t remember and he says it’s no use, nothing’s any use if you have to talk about it. The past is the past, he says. No use going over the past. I say, remember it was in the fifth year we were together and it was when we realized there’d be no time like the present and I’d get older, and then we’d just have the house and the dog even if we did get some other animals or something. I’ve seen other couples, I said, with more than one dog, three sometimes even in the small apartment, and walking them all in the park late on Sunday afternoons with the dying eucalyptus and the dust blowing up all around. Anyhow, even then we realized it would be later on soon enough, and then it’d all be carved out for us and we couldn’t change it. You know those decisions that loom as substantial and are, even if you pretend they aren’t and even if you pretend time will slow down because you want it to and you won’t be left high and dry. You want everything in slow motion like walking to school on a snowy day when you lived where it snowed and time just seems to keep on being the same time for a long time.

Later he takes me to the oldest bar in North Beach and we sit there surrounded by wood and glass and Cinzano, gleaming red from the highest shelf, and he tells me about the baths near the pier and about the old guys in rubber caps who plunge in the icy cold in the winter, year after year. Now those are guys, he says. I say, could we go back over it please, and he says of course first, first he says of course before he talks about how he lost his wedding ring on the edge of a washstand in a gas station in North Dakota where he remembers the exact town and the exact date and wanted to fish it out of the drain but the attendant said no. And I say something about how he’d said of course, but then the moment has passed and after this we get to watching the game on the TV overhead and we just think then about the movement of the teams from one end to the other and neither of us says much or remembers anything but the score which changes from time to time in the small square at the bottom of the screen.