2. THE STORY OF THE PASSPORT

It came back but you did not come back.

It happened as follows:

One day an envelope arrived,

bearing stamps from a small European republic.

This the concierge handed me with an air of great ceremony;

I tried to open it in the same spirit.

Inside was my passport.

There was my face, or what had been my face

at some point, deep in the past.

But I had parted ways with it,

that face smiling with such conviction,

filled with all the memories of our travels together

and our dreams of other journeys—

I threw it into the sea.

It sank immediately.

Downward, downward, while I continued

staring into the empty water.

All this time the concierge was watching me.

Come, he said, taking my arm. And we began

to walk around the lake, as was my daily habit.

I see, he said, that you no longer

wish to resume your former life,

to move, that is, in a straight line as time

suggests we do, but rather (here he gestured toward the lake)

in a circle which aspires to

that stillness at the heart of things,

though I prefer to think it also resembles a clock.

Here he took out of his pocket

the large watch that was always with him. I challenge you, he said,

to tell, looking at this, if it is Monday or Tuesday.

But if you look at the hand that holds it, you will realize I am not

a young man anymore, my hair is silver.

Nor will you be surprised to learn

it was once dark, as yours must have been dark,

and curly, I would say.

Through this recital, we were both

watching a group of children playing in the shallows,

each body circled by a rubber tube.

Red and blue, green and yellow,

a rainbow of children splashing in the clear lake.

I could hear the clock ticking,

presumably alluding to the passage of time

while in fact annulling it.

You must ask yourself, he said, if you deceive yourself.

By which I mean looking at the watch and not

the hand holding it. We stood awhile, staring at the lake,

each of us thinking our own thoughts.

But isn’t the life of the philosopher

exactly as you describe, I said. Going over the same course,

waiting for truth to disclose itself.

But you have stopped making things, he said, which is what

the philosopher does. Remember when you kept what you called

your travel journal? You used to read it to me,

I remember it was filled with stories of every kind,

mostly love stories and stories about loss, punctuated

with fantastic details such as wouldn’t occur to most of us,

and yet hearing them I had a sense I was listening

to my own experience but more beautifully related

than I could ever have done. I felt

you were talking to me or about me though I never left your side.

What was it called? A travel diary, I think you said,

though I often called it The Denial of Death, after Ernest Becker.

And you had an odd name for me, I remember.

Concierge, I said. Concierge is what I called you.

And before that, you, which is, I believe,

a convention in fiction.