IT WAS GOOD TO SEE HIM. Seeing old friends address nagging questions about which we sometimes otherwise feel uneasy: Am I the same person I was when I was young? Are my earlier selves still safe somewhere inside me? Is there a thread somewhere that connects the past to the present, or is everything more chaotic than we’d like to think?
Everything is not more chaotic. Our younger selves are still around, waiting for somebody to invite them out to play. Our conversation hit a manic note early and stayed there; it was intoxicating. We remembered monster movies, and we remembered the regal stature of Planet of the Apes, above any other media franchise for an easy six months. He dredged up a few details I hadn’t carried with me on my own journey—some game he said we played in his backyard that involved a moat and a defensive line of guards whose spears were tipped with poison—but there was, between us, a note of the real. I get paid to inhabit personae; it was nice to feel like I was easing into something whose outer existence could be confirmed by another living soul.
His idea, he said, had been that we’d go to Milpitas together, and I could show him the place from which I’d written to him when we were young, and he’d tell me about his own time there a little; and from there we’d continue to San Luis Obispo, and catch each other up on the events of the last—thirty-five years? Forty?
I had specifically left leeway in my schedule to extend my time; it takes years working a job that involves travel to learn what a gift flexibility can be. Why not, I said, it will be fun.
* * *
IT IS DISORIENTING to inhabit, even momentarily, any space that has played host to one or more primitive drafts of the self you’ve now become. There can be pleasure in this, as in a reunion. There might also be fear, dread, horror: soldiers seeing old barracks, freed convicts driving past the prison on their way to work. To have left a place once is to have left something behind; by staying away, you can have the question of whether you do or don’t want to see that thing again answered for you. But learning to stay away is a discipline; and I was reminded, as I set my navigation for the address of the duplex in which I had lived when I was seven years old, that the essential quality of any discipline is consistency in practice. It’s easy to undo the entire effort. You just have to relax.
And, in fact, I had no problem remaining calm as we rolled down the freeway to Milpitas in my rental car. Gage navigated from memory, peppering me with questions about the brief season I’d spent in the town about which he’d written his next book—the book he’d been working on, he said, for quite some time now. Was I there when they built the freeway expansion? Did I have any recollection of any local scandals? Had I known a guy named Anthony Hawley?
The only people I knew were kids, I said.
Yeah, kids, Gage said.
I had no sense memories of the off-ramp, or of anything we saw on our way into town—or, if I did, they were strictly general: a vague feel for the terrain, an odd variant of déjà vu that didn’t feel entirely trustworthy. It wasn’t until he saw the name of the street I’d lived on when I was seven and told me to turn left onto it that the jolt landed. Although our time as a family here had not been a happy time, I had good memories of the place; I’d known a few close friends. We remember our childhood friends with fondness.
He pulled up in front of the place. The streets in Milpitas are slow, and my rented Toyota didn’t really stick out. So this is monster theater? Gage asked me. Where’s your bedroom?
It’s in the back, I said, we can’t see it from here; and I flashed briefly on nights I’d stayed up late, watching movies I’d write letters to Gage about the next day. In the shelter of a glowing screen, after everybody else in the house is asleep, you can imagine yourself shielded from the hard realities of the outside world. Sometimes, if the movie you’re watching is good enough, you can even suspend disbelief entirely, and discern some mystical quality of protection in the doings of the good guys, and the bad guys, and the monsters.
I have to say, I said, I hope this isn’t too weird, but this is kind of special. Those letters about the monster movies, they were a connection for me back then.
Yeah, he said. We looked at the old duplex through the windows of the car. It was kind of ratty, but no worse than that. You learn to find the stories you need when you’re a kid, right? You learn to find the stories you need.
* * *
I CAN’T SAY what that moment meant for Gage—maybe something, maybe nothing—but for me it positioned us in relation to one another. For him, Milpitas had, until recently, been a place he’d only known about from secondary reports—secondary reports from the distant past, at that—and from the one time it made national news. For me it was a childhood home, albeit one inhabited only briefly. To gaze upon a childhood home through adult eyes is to engage in an act of disenchantment. Great doors grow small. Turrets vanish. Emblems fray. Even if the time spent within any given set of walls was, when the days are reckoned together, brief, it’s in the nature of childhood to gild all surfaces it touches, to magnify things. One should revisit such places only after having done some hard calculations: What are we willing to trade for a clear view of things? What are the chances we’ll regret the bargain later on?
These were my thoughts as we hit the highway again, bound for San Luis Obispo. Three hours to go. Three hours is a long time to spend in close company with someone you haven’t seen since you were six, and if we hadn’t taken the detour through Milpitas it might have been weirder: but now we had a nexus through which to direct our conversational passes, and the time flew by. We spent the hours establishing timelines, trying to trace a coherent arc across our paths. When Nixon resigned, were you still in Milpitas? No, that was during that weird summer when I was back in SLO, I only saw you two or three times: but was that the same summer when Evel Knievel jumped the Snake River Canyon? No, that was before you left. Before I left! I said. We saw that together? Neither one of us saw it, it was closed-circuit.
But I could swear—
Gage appeared to be listening for a specific frequency as he waited for me to finish my sentence.
It’s weird, he said, how many things you might swear to, right? When it was actually different from what you remember, when you don’t really know at all.
* * *
GAGE DIDN’T LIVE ON OUR OLD STREET. He had his own place now; his mother lived a short drive away, still lived in their childhood home after all these years. He lived in a part of town of which I had retained no childhood memory: maybe I’d seen this neighborhood back then, but it wasn’t part of the San Luis Obispo I carried around in my mind, so it seemed oddly unreal to me, like a simulation of a place I knew, a place newly hewn from a known quarry and dressed up to look vintage.
Behold the, uh, perilous keep of Chandler Castle, in all its, you know, pomp and splendor, he said as we got out of the car, in the same dry tone that seemed to be his governing note as an adult. It was somewhere between self-deprecating and grandiose, and his sentences tended to run together, riding a speech rhythm always a little ahead of its own beat. I’d noticed, as we spoke on the drive down, that I tended to agree with him reflexively whenever he came to a stop. Some combination of tempo and register seemed, tacitly, to demand this. It was a neat trick, if that’s what it was.