Being Henry David - By Cal Armistead Page 0,17
press paper towels against to control the bleeding. I assaulted a guy in an alley. I came close to becoming Magpie’s property in his creepy, surreal world of street kids and drugs. I’m worried about Jack and Nessa, who are still out on the streets, in danger. And then of course, there’s that other detail—I still have no idea who I am.
Can’t stand it. Have to think of something else or I’m going to curl up into a ball with my hands over my ears and start screaming.
Walden. I open the book with shaky hands and start to read, will myself to get lost in this book that might hold some clues for me. Completely submerge myself in the world I’m on my way to see.
I’m a crazy fast reader and finish most of the book even before we reach Massachusetts. Of course, there are pages missing here and there because of Frankie, but I can use my imagination to fill in the blanks.
To sum up—if I’ve got it right—this Thoreau guy was tired of civilization and how people become slaves to their own stupid houses and possessions. To prove he could be happier without those things, he stripped his life down to the simplest things he knew and took off to live alone in the woods. It sounds like he was really happy and at peace when he was in the woods like that, living by a pond. Must have been nice.
The lull of the train, swaying and click-clacking down the track makes me sleepy. I close my eyes.
My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill.
The words appear like they’ve been etched on the inside of my eyelids. I recognize them as words I just read in Walden, but what the hell? Startled, I shake the words out of my head and stare out the window at the scenery, trying to clear my mind, just sleep. My eyes drift shut again.
I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
It happens again. Whenever I close my eyes, entire pages and paragraphs of the book appear in my brain like snapshots in an album. If I wanted to, I could recite whole passages of Walden to the people sitting around me. I really could.
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
Okay, so this is getting annoying. Maybe because I have so little information stored in my stupid brain, I can retain entire pages of the first book I remember reading. I guess that makes sense. Sort of.
I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
After playing around with this bizarre phenomenon for a while, it occurs to me that what I’ve got has a name: photographic memory. And I almost laugh out loud, right there in the train. I’m a kid with amnesia and a photographic memory. Can’t remember anything that happened to me before around midnight last night, but everything I’ve read since then is chiseled into my brain. Talk about a memory gone completely twisted.
“Concord, CON-cord!” bellows the train conductor as he whips my ticket stub from a clip on the seat in front of me. Pressing my face to the smudged window, I watch the town of Concord come into view, then wipe away my fog breath with my sleeve.
It’s possible that as soon as I step off the train in Concord, my whole life will come back to me in a rush. Or that somebody will recognize me and take me home. Would that be good or bad? Would I be taken to a house and family where I’m safe and loved, or will the police nab me on the streets of Concord? I have absolutely no idea. But I have to start somewhere. And this is it.
The train jolts to