id="ub48fe099-a480-5eb6-8147-06a7bbb4bfab">
CHARLES BAXTER
The Feast of Love
In loving memory of my brother
THOMAS HOOKER BAXTER
(1939–1998)
Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be.
—SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy
CONTENTS
THE MAN—ME, this pale being, no one else, it seems—wakes in fright, tangled up in the sheets.
The darkened room, the half-closed doors of the closet and the slender pine-slatted lamp on the bedside table: I don’t recognize them. On the opposite side of the room, the streetlight’s distant luminance coating the window shade has an eerie unwelcome glow. None of these previously familiar objects have any familiarity now. What’s worse, I cannot remember or recognize myself. I sit up in bed—actually, I lurch in mild sleepy terror toward the vertical. There’s a demon here, one of the unnamed ones, the demon of erasure and forgetting. I can’t manage my way through this feeling because my mind isn’t working, and because it, the flesh in which I’m housed, hasn’t yet become me.
Looking into the darkness, I have optical floaters: there, on the opposite wall, are gears turning separately and then moving closer to one another until their cogs start to mesh and rotate in unison.
Then
