There were glimpses of stories, retold as memories, nothing more. He barely remembered being a child. He could place houses his family had lived in, streets that he used to walk home from school on, the vast southern sky of the 1970's. School. The background radiation of a mild life.
He would return to neighborhoods where he once lived and everything appeared foreign, strange, faded, unbelievable as a place, as if nobody had survived. Impossible but familiar, old houses leaning on defeat, barely lit, life-size polaroids of themselves. The houses appeared as pictures of the past. The failed dashboards of old cars splintered by the sun crowding the driveways. They were hopelessly beyond insuring, though few outside the banks ever said so; cracked, worn well past pleasure, useless. Nobody ever suggests demolishing. The land is worth even less without the house, somehow. You would need to destroy them all, and everybody refuses to agree. The eye knows more than the bricks, much more than the owners.
He could not recall the feeling of having ever been a child, only the occasional prodigal detail, a memory of a memory, told in reverse.
There were people from his boyhood, everywhere it seemed. They all had stories, ones they relayed with comedic conviction and recurring pleasure, undiminished by monotony. For him, it was all of waning interest, though he often smiled anyway. He could no longer pretend to care. Something had gotten the better of his narcissism. He knew even less about the mystery that had prevailed. Time, he guessed. Even the stories were beginning to seem as if they were from a previous life.
How many can there be, between here and there? How many can fit? - He asked himself.
The stories were hopeless, crowded by repeated tellings, as if each had to be stored separately, hidden methodically from view. The past was a chaos collecting. The music of a few merry-go-rounds, all at a fading distance, all menacing in their reluctance to disappear, to evaporate into silent darkness. It was like listening to someone recount the events of their own recent dreams: torture. The teller, marveling at the mind's abilities when left unguarded, informed by sleep androids, bemused by the very presence of self.
For him, there was a dullness to it all that he could not shake, but to do so was what seemed needed. Though he knew that one can hardly shake the dreams of others.
He wondered if he was once an arsonist, or perhaps a pyromaniac.
When he was thirteen he aimed a pellet gun at a distant bird.
.
