took a pen from my pocket and, at the top of the first page, wrote, “Who am I?” I felt foolish.
I stared at the blank page until the flight attendant broke my trance by offering me a beverage. She served me with a bright smile and then continued down the aisle. I took a sip of coffee and was about to snap the notebook shut, but stopped myself. This was ridiculous. I should be able to answer the question I had posed.
But even after I had finished my coffee, I was staring at a blank page. The flight was almost four hours long. I had promised myself I would write something before it was over. Maybe if I couldn’t describe my “authentic” self, I could think about times in my life when I felt I really knew who I was, when I felt aware of my life, when I felt I was living just as I wanted to rather than how everyone around me suggested I live.
The first thing I wrote was “story time.” It seemed like a strange moment to highlight because it wasn’t a single moment or even a single time. And it was so, so long ago. During all the years of my childhood, we had a family ritual. Once dinner and baths were out of the way, my mother would take my sister and me into one of our bedrooms. The three of us would climb into bed, and Mom would begin to read. When I was tiny it was picture books. Later it was short novels, and then, eventually, long tomes, like Kidnapped or Gulliver’s Travels. We kept that up longer than I would ever have admitted to any of my friends. There was something about those times as a child, however, that acted as a touchstone for me. No matter what had happened during the day, what trouble I had got into, what fights Kira and I had had, what disasters had befallen me at school—in that hour on the bed at night, my mother’s soft voice reverberating in the air, the sound of Dad downstairs banging around the kitchen as he cleaned up, my sister’s contented breathing filling in the spaces—everything fell into place. I knew who I was and where I belonged.
Next I wrote about a more specific memory. “Hiking with Annisha in the Rockies,” I put down. That was just before we got married. Climbing the Grassi Lake trail outside of Canmore, a town in western Canada, we had crossed a small creek. Annisha was following me; I reached out to help her across. When we got to the top of the trail we gazed at the landscape surrounding us, the mountains that encircled us. Then I looked at Annisha. I remember so clearly that I was overcome with the feeling that this improbable place was exactly where I wanted to be, exactly where I should be at this moment.
Of course, back then I couldn’t imagine the feeling that overcame me when Adam was born. That was my third point. I remember thinking, while holding him as Annisha dozed in the hospital bed, that my place in the universe was forever defined by this small baby. I was a father. And I always would be. There was a certainty about it that was sobering and yet comforting.
And finally I wrote, “Fuel-injection design trial run.” It seemed like an oddly technical, professional event to follow Adam’s birth, but there it was. The first independent project I had completed at work. Juan had asked me to take a crack at a new fuel-injection system. “Don’t just tinker with the previous designs,” he said. “You’ve talked to me about doing things differently. So do it. Start from scratch. Rethink the whole thing.”
I worked for months on that design. But it hardly felt like that. I would sit down at my desk in the morning and barely move until it was six p.m. I would get out of my car in the evening, stand in the driveway and wonder how I got there. I was so consumed with ideas, overcome with energy. I got up in the mornings itching to get to the office.
When I eventually presented my drawings and schematics to Juan, he looked thoughtful. “Well,” he told me. “There’s really only one way we can find out if this will work. Let’s build it.”
So we did. Then we ran it. Eventually we put it into a vehicle. And we drove that car. I didn’t sleep at all the night before. Watching the car speed around the test track, I could almost hear my heart ringing, like a chiming clock.
Four things. That was enough for one day. I closed the book and shoved it into my pocket. I leaned my seat back as far as it would go, closed my eyes and tried to sleep.
AS SOON AS I got into the terminal at Charles de Gaulle Airport, my pulse started to race. The lineup at customs seemed interminable, the wait for my bag an eternity. When I burst through the glass doors in front of the cab stand, I sped to the first taxi like a kid running for an ice cream truck. I love Paris, and I was eager to start walking its streets.
But the cab ride into the city was slow. It was about six p.m., the expressway thick with traffic. Unlike my time in Istanbul, this felt oddly familiar. I was surrounded by commuters: drivers watching the road with only half-hearted attention, their minds congested with thoughts of their day—what they had accomplished and what they would face tomorrow. That should have been me, only on the other side of the globe. Instead, here I was, a passenger, chugging through a landscape that was familiar yet foreign, the wall of gray suburban high-rises lining the highway reminding me that, in a city of millions, I knew no one.
Julian had told me that I would be staying at a hotel on the Champs Élysées. But I didn’t want to get out of the cab when it pulled in front. I almost told the driver to keep going. Nothing appealed to me more at that moment than the thought of driving through the Paris streets until the sun set—the lights of the Eiffel Tower twinkling in the background everywhere we went. Julian, however, had said that I would be meeting with a man named Antoine Gaucher, but he couldn’t tell me exactly when. Antoine, he said, would leave a letter for me at the desk, telling me where to meet him—and I supposed that Antoine could be waiting for me even now. After all, Julian had said, “Antoine is an interesting individual. It may be an unusual meeting.”
As the cab drove away, down the Champs Élysées, I pushed myself through the doors of the hotel. The lobby was crowded. Dozens of people in business clothes, their name tags around their necks, lined up in front of the reception desk, with more of the group gathered in clusters throughout the lobby. Near the concierge’s desk, a small girl sat on top of a suitcase, sobbing. A haggard-looking woman stood over her, digging in her purse for something. The lobby was reverberating with shouts, laughter, chatter and tears.
I guess the flight, the ride from the airport and the noise had worn me down a bit because by the time I got to the reception desk, I was no longer thinking of the bright lights of Paris but rather of a café chair and a stiff drink. When the clerk handed me the key card and said “Room 1132,” I snapped.
“No, absolutely not,” I said. I wasn’t even trying to speak in French. “Nothing higher than the fourth floor.” The clerk looked at me quizzically. “I can’t …” I said, then stopped. I didn’t want to explain myself.
The authentic me? Well, here’s a bit of authentic me. I’m claustrophobic; petrified of small, cramped spaces. And that makes elevators a challenge. Not too many people know this about me—I’ve made climbing the stairs seem like part of my dedication to a healthy lifestyle. Juan started referring to me as “the Stairmaster” after I’d climbed the stairs to an eighteenth-floor hospitality suite at an automotive convention. But the truth was I’d rather appear sweaty and winded in front of my colleagues than panic-stricken.
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