attention to learning the language of this country. Or perhaps he’s returned to his home country after being away for many years, and is confident that he’ll be able to fit right in again, as if he’d never left. Either way, the visit/return doesn’t go very well. He loses his luggage, and no one can tell him where to find it. The security people give him weird looks and eventually toss him out of the airport still luggageless. He can’t believe what’s happened, and he searches for his hotel in a daze. When he finally finds it, the doorman hops off his stool and won’t let him in. To his surprise, he can’t understand most of what the doorman is saying. Even more confused, and slightly dizzy, the man walks away from the hotel with the doorman still yelling at him. The narration of the story is getting progressively more fragmentary and difficult to understand. The man walks for a long time. People give him a wide berth and sneer at him as he walks by. Without realizing he’s done so, the man begins remembering what the city used to be like. He examines the memories carefully, one by one, like a paleontologist examining a freshly unearthed skull. Suddenly everything comes back to him in one intense deluge of recollection. So strong are these newfound memories that he can actually smell the greasy aromas of old restaurants, noxious clouds of ancient cigarette smoke, can actually hear the smallness of the older city, the reduced din of voices and traffic, hustle and bustle pleasantly absent. Then he stops. He has no idea how long he’s been walking, or how far he’s gone. He looks up and sees a street sign. It reads, “Anselm Blvd.” He recognizes the name of the street, though he doesn’t know how. The same greasy aromas that assailed his memory are wafting up from somewhere down the street, the smell carried on eddies of an unfelt breeze. He turns and walks down the street, humming an old and familiar tune. These are only two. They are my life, approximately. R Page 43
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