BACK TO THE FUTURE
Boston. Later that day.
Cold marble.
That was the first thing I felt, the chill spreading through my shoulder blades. Then the voices came, indistinct and impatient, and the world slowly sharpened into two police officers standing over me.
“Sir, you need to leave the premises. Now.”
The other officer, a rather rotund man, kept repeating the same question. “Identification, sir. Do you have any identification?”
I got to my feet and gave them my name, patting my pockets for my wallet. I explained that this was my penthouse and that there had been some mistake.
Then I looked down at myself.
The ruin of a dark suit hung from my shoulders, stained and frayed at the cuffs. Split shoes. I had never seen any of them before.
Confusion turned into panic. I pushed past the officers and strode toward my bathroom, and they followed, shouting for me to leave immediately.
Everything was gone. The Guayasamín originals. My toiletries. The Tiffany floor lamp Rachel had given me for my birthday.
I turned on the tap, splashed water on my face, and looked up.
A stranger stared back at me from the mirror: gaunt, bearded, his hair long and tangled, his eyes older than mine had no right to be.
That man was not me.
I screamed.
Then the officers were on me. Shouts. Hands. “Face down! On the floor!” I was shoved to the tile, and cold steel closed around my wrists.
They patted me down for weapons and drugs and asked whether I was carrying either. One of them began reciting the Miranda warning from a memory that had clearly seen better days, and even then, I appreciated the irony. Miranda was one of the first cases I had studied in law school. But to these men, I was no respectable attorney. I was a drug addict, perhaps a thief, who had somehow wandered inside the impenetrable walls of the well-to-do.
At the precinct, I was booked for resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer (apparently, pushing the rotund one aside counted), and breaking and entering. They strip-searched me and locked me in a crowded holding cell. A few hours later, every charge was dropped. Even the officer I’d pushed let it go.
The explanation was almost funny. I had crashed into an open house. The realtor showing my own penthouse to prospective buyers had called the police.
My penthouse was for sale.
Why? I sat in that cell trying to work it out, and nothing made sense. It was the first of many questions I could not answer.
When they released me, the police returned my personal effects. There was almost nothing to return, only two things: a bracelet of small wooden beads I did not recognize and a folded sheet of white computer paper.
Without knowing why, I wrapped the bracelet around my left wrist. Then I unfolded the paper.
Two words, in my own handwriting.
Mt. Shasta.
I asked the officer at the front desk whether I could make a local call. She handed me the receiver and dialed the number I gave her: Rachel’s. A recording informed us that it had been disconnected.
I walked out of the station without identification or money, with the bracelet on my wrist and the folded note in my pocket. I felt like a refugee.
Hunger drove me to St. Catherine’s House, a homeless shelter a few blocks away, where at least the meal was free.
On its steps, I stopped. The night was black and cold, and a group of men huddled around a bonfire built in a metal garbage can. One of them looked up, smiled, and waved me over. I strained to make out his face in the dark. Something about the way he stood unsettled me.
I kept walking.
Inside the shelter, a strange feeling came over me: I knew the place. I had never set foot in a homeless shelter in my life, yet the sights, the sounds, even the smells seemed familiar, and I couldn’t shake it.
Standing in the food line, I was struck by an absurd sense of freedom. No mortgage. No insurance premiums. No car payments, no tolls, no status symbols, no appearances, no future. To be open to whatever the moment brought, without a worry in the world, seemed a life of indescribable luxury.
The feeling lasted until someone handed me a bowl of watery chicken soup. My stomach, it turned out, was still pining for beef Wellington and baked Alaska flambé. Not to mention a long hot shower and fresh clothes.
I carried the bowl to an empty table near the wall and sat down. One leg of the table was shorter than the others; every time I moved my arm, a little broth slipped over the rim.
“Here. Lift your end.”
A young woman stood opposite me, holding a folded piece of cardboard. I raised the table slightly, and she crouched to push it beneath the offending leg.
“Try that.”
I rested my elbows on the table. Nothing moved.
“An improvement,” I said.
“Best table in the place now. Mind if I sit?”
I shook my head.
She set down her bowl and tucked a worn duffle bag beneath her chair. She looked about twenty, perhaps a little older, with pale blonde hair gathered into several loose braids and golden freckles across her nose. Her dark-blue sweater read “I LOVE NEW YORK.” There was a streak of white paint near one cuff.
For a while, we ate without speaking. Around us, chairs scraped the floor and someone at the serving counter called for more bowls. I was grateful that she had no immediate interest in how I had arrived here.
“You’ve forgotten something,” she said at last.
I looked down at myself.
“Bread. They keep it at the end of the counter.”
“I didn’t see it.”
She held out a paper napkin with two rolls on it.
“Take one.”
I hesitated.
“I can get another,” she said.
“Thank you.”
The roll was hard at the edges, but I had eaten half of it before remembering my manners.
“My name is Xavier.”
“Claire.”
She smiled and dipped her bread into the soup.
“Do you come here often?” I asked.
The moment I said it, I heard how it sounded.
“That came out badly.”
“A little.”
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant.” She smiled again. “A few nights. Long enough to learn about the table.”
I glanced at the bag beneath her chair.
“Are you staying here?”
“For now.”
There was nothing embarrassing or defiant in her answer. She said it as casually as someone telling me which hotel she had chosen.
“I came east for a job at a little inn in Maine,” she continued. “They were getting ready to reopen. Reception, cleaning, whatever needed doing. There was supposed to be a room included.”
“Supposed to be?”
“The owner ran out of money. Unfortunately, he waited until I’d painted two bedrooms to mention it.”
She rubbed the white mark on her sleeve with her thumb.
“I came down to Boston because I thought finding another job would be easier here. A room costs a lot more when it doesn’t come with the work.”
“He didn’t pay you?”
“A little. Most of it went on somewhere to sleep.”
“Did you have anything in writing?”
Claire stopped with her spoon halfway to her mouth.
“What?”
“The arrangement. The wages, the accommodation. Did he put any of it in writing?”
“A letter. Why?”
“You should keep it.”
She considered me for a moment.
“You sound very certain about that.”
It was the first thing I had felt certain about since leaving the police station.
“Keep the letter,” I said.
“All right.”
She went back to her soup without asking me to explain myself.
“Will you stay in Boston?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I lived in San Francisco for a while. I’ve been thinking about heading west again.”
“Another job?”
“Eventually. First I’d like to stop spending the money I’m supposed to be saving.”
I looked around the room. A man at the next table was carefully wrapping half his bread in a napkin and slipping it into his coat pocket.
Until that evening, I would have assumed I knew how people ended up in a place like this. Claire’s explanation was uncomfortably ordinary.
“What about you?” she asked. “Do you have somewhere to go tonight?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing useful came out.
There had been an apartment. There had been a woman whose telephone number I knew by heart. I could have described my bedroom down to the grain of the marble floor, but I could not tell Claire where I would sleep.
“I’m not sure.”
She put down her spoon.
“Are you all right?”
“I don’t know that either.”
A cart struck the edge of a nearby chair with a sharp metallic bang. I flinched, and my sleeve caught the bowl. Claire steadied it before it tipped.
Her eyes fell briefly to the beads around my wrist. Her hand remained against the bowl for a moment, then she withdrew it.
“There’s water by your elbow,” she said.
I took a drink. She waited.
“Something happened to me,” I said. “I can remember things, but they don’t seem to belong to the life I’m living.”
It sounded worse aloud.
“This morning, or what I thought was this morning, I knew where I lived. I knew what I was supposed to do.”
“And now?”
I looked down at my clothes.
“Now I’m here.”
“Is there anyone you can call?”
“I tried. The number doesn’t work.”
She nodded slowly.
I expected more questions. My address. My family. Whether I had been drinking. Instead, she picked up her spoon and gave me a moment to eat.
That small courtesy nearly undid me.
“There is one thing,” I said.
I took the folded paper from my pocket. I had opened and closed it so often that one corner had begun to tear. Claire waited while I smoothed it against the table.
“Mount Shasta,” she read.
“Does that mean anything to you?”
“It’s in Northern California. I’ve been through that part of the state.”
“What is it? A town?”
“There’s a town by that name. And a mountain. A volcano, actually.”
I stared at the two words.
A volcano. As a boy, I had sworn never to go near one.
“Xavier?”
“It’s my handwriting.”
“Do you remember writing it?”
“No.”
I turned the page over, although I already knew there was nothing on the other side.
“I had it with me. That and this bracelet. Nothing else.”
“Perhaps you wrote it so you wouldn’t lose the name.”
“I seem to have lost everything except the name.”
She let that pass without trying to make it sound less terrible.
“How far is it?” I asked.
“From here? Nearly across the country.”
“I have to get there.”
She leaned back slightly.
“Tonight?”
“I don’t know. Soon.”
I looked again at the words, trying to summon a road, a building, a face. The effort produced only a dull pressure behind my eyes.
“I can’t explain it.”
“You don’t have to explain it all right now, man.”
“What if there’s nothing there?”
“There’s a town,” she said. “We could start by asking.”
I looked up.
“We?”
“I could come with you.”
She said it quietly, leaving the suggestion between us.
“To Mount Shasta?”
“I was already thinking about California. Going with someone would be better than going alone.”
“You barely know me.”
“We’ve repaired a table together. That’s a start.”
Despite myself, I smiled.
“Look, I don’t have a car or enough money for two tickets across the country. It would take some figuring out. But I know how to travel cheaply, and you look as though you could use some company.”
“You’d go all that way with a stranger?”
“I’d go west with someone who offered to help me get my wages back before asking me for anything.”
“I didn’t actually offer.”
“No. You were very careful about that.”
For the first time that evening, I laughed.
Claire smiled, but she did not press me. I considered what little I could offer her: no money, no transport, and a destination I could not explain. Yet the thought of her getting up and leaving was suddenly harder to bear than the thought of the journey.
“I would like you to come,” I said.
“All right.”
“Provided you understand that I have no idea what I’m doing.”
“I figured.”
She nudged my bowl toward me.
“Finish your soup. We can work out the first part while you eat.”
I picked up my spoon. The soup had gone lukewarm, but I was hungry again. Across the table, Claire pulled her bag closer with her foot and settled into her chair.
Two words kept pulsing in my mind like a heartbeat.
Mt. Shasta.