I’d always felt that the secret life is available, either on the chipped and lipsticked rim of a coffee cup or in a crumpled tissue’s faint smell of sex, in the smudgy fingerprints of a child’s frayed comic book or along the jagged flap of a crudely torn envelope. A single gnawed crescent of fingernail is a voice that can speak, in the same way our faces percolate with transformations, mutating into languages that invite and defy fluency. But where had this belief brought me? There were so many objects I’d lost, so many stories and people.
These past few weeks I’d brought my remaining objects to the park one-by-one, set them on this bench, and left them behind: the half-scissors, the single earring in the shape of a straight-back chair; a tiny plastic TV; and a nest of twigs and leaves with a clay bird nestled inside. Beside me sat my last object, a battered tape recorder and its fateful tape. Three times I’d brought it here and tried to release it, three times I brought it back home. If I knew how to find within me what would let it go, then today might be different.
So I waited, and took in the shadows at my feet, cast by the leaves of a nearby pin oak tree: spiky hands that grasped at each other. Beside them, a cluster of birch leaf shadows took the shape of dark water cascading over invisible rocks.
Steps on the gravel path announced a woman walking at a crisp pace, waves of dark hair at odds with that buttoned-down gray jacket and business skirt. But this was more than mere hurry: her steady gait seemed to keep her one step ahead of something unseen.
As she drew closer she stopped, took an elastic band from her jacket pocket, and ran her hands through her hair, gathering it into a single braid. I gaped at this uncanny echo of the story behind a single shoelace that I once owned. But this was a secret performance, the only audience herself, and somehow that innocent grooming would mark an impending defeat.
“Excuse me,” I called out, glad I wore no watch. “Do you have the time?”
“No I don’t, sorry,” she said, her hands held in mid-air. Then she waited, her face a mixture of curiosity and caution that surely mirrored my own, and she stood there as if expecting me to recognize her.
But I’d never seen her before, and she broke the brief silence. “I don’t know the time, but … I still might be able to help. It’s the middle of May, the twelfth? Well, based on those colors,”—she pointed to sinuous hints of purple and orange in the sky—“I’d say we’re cruising toward sunset. That would make it about 7:15.”
She still stood there, inclined to linger, expecting something from me. But before I could ask her how she’d learned to convert the sky into hours and minutes, she returned to her hair with that elastic band. So I reached for the tape recorder beside me and pressed the play button, to see how she’d respond, if at all, to the man’s desolate voice that rose in mid-sentence, speaking strangely moving phrases in an Asian language I knew almost nothing about. Drawn again to words whose cadences I’d once virtually memorized, I almost forgot I was sitting on a park bench.