“I’m so sorry,” he said. The hotel had changed ownership. Its records didn’t date back that far.
I expected as much. My story took place a mere seven years ago, but tracking down details of the Paris trip felt like trying to find the wedding jars from Cana. My old emails had been purged by Hotmail. My assigning editors had no record of where I’d stayed and no memory of the hotel’s name. I couldn’t find my credit card statements, having closed those cards years ago. I tried the bookkeeper at the magazine, who said she might be able to break into old records and find my receipts, but it required a password from someone on vacation. In this technology age, we talk about information living forever—as though an infallible archive is the burden we must bear—but we never talk about how much information gets lost. Whole chunks of our history can disappear in the blip of an HTML code.
“There was a guy who worked at the concierge desk named Johnson,” I said to the young man. “Does he work here anymore?”
Johnson, Johnson. He checked with a few coworkers. “Nobody here knows that name, no.”
I figured he was long gone, but I had to ask. I was afraid to see him again, but I also wanted to hear his side of the story. How I sounded to him. What he saw in my face. He called me once. I was at a fancy Thanksgiving dinner party at Stephanie’s, a few days after I got home, and to hear his voice on the other end of the line was like a hand grabbing me around the throat. I couldn’t figure out how he got my number. What the fuck, dude? What the fuck? After I calmed down, I remembered. I gave it to him.
“Can you think of anyone else at the hotel who might know this Johnson guy?” I asked the young clerk behind the counter.
The kid crunched his brow. “The concierge who works in the morning,” he said. “He’s been here for 25 years. If anyone knows this man, he will.”
I thanked him, and spent the rest of the day retracing the steps I took all those years ago, a guided tour of my own troubled past. I was relieved by how many of my memories were correct. Some details I had wrong. The sheets were scratchier than I remembered. The hotel door a revolving entryway, not an automated push.
As I walked to the Eiffel Tower, I tested my own recall. There will be a crêpe stand two blocks from here, I told myself. There will be a road that spirals out into paved streets. And I got excited by how good I was at this game, just like I was good at the childhood board game of Memory, where twinned pictures hide on the other side of square cards. Yes, the whole scene was exactly as I remembered it. The crunch of gravel under my boots. The November wind slicing through my coat. The flickering of the Eiffel Tower on the hour, thousands of lightbulbs going off at once. The gasp of the crowd. The kisses, the children lifted onto shoulders. It happened then, and it’s happening now. It happens many times, every day, and so I don’t quite understand why it gave me such a thrill to think: I was here once. I remember this.
I remember this. Why is a tug into the past so satisfying? Wise men tell us to live in the present. Be here now. Stand toe-to-toe with each moment as it arrives. And yet, I love to be pulled into the corridors of my past. That home where I once lived. That street I used to walk alone. Writers build monuments to our former selves, our former lives, because we’re always hoping to return to the past and master it somehow, find the missing puzzle piece that helps everything make sense.
I woke early the next morning to speak to Guillaume, the concierge of long standing. “There was a guy who used to work the night shift,” I said.
Guillaume listened as I explained in broad strokes, leaving out nearly all details. He shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose a few times. “Night guys, we don’t know them much,” he said. “People come in and out of here all the time.”
“Of course,” I said. “Thanks so much,” and I left before he could see that I was starting to cry.
Why was I crying? Why did I feel foolish at that moment? Maybe because I knew the unedited story of how that man came into my life, and I hurt for what brought about our intersection. Perhaps the trip felt futile. I had come all this way to track down someone who could not be found. Or perhaps there was tender sense memory in the spot where I was standing. I could remember standing at the same desk seven years before. How leveled I was.
I left the hotel, and climbed into a taxi that took me to an airport that carried me across an ocean and all the way home. I did not have the answers, but I had the satisfaction of having looked, which is sometimes the thing you need to move on.