I remember, or seem to remember because, let’s be honest, memory is entirely fallible and even trying to jump back into it changes the composition as some foot stepping into a puddle, sending a constellation of ripples headed outward toward the edge, the thing itself becoming malleable, like all memory, like my first public memory, which is probably of The Challenger exploding and not of the time that I saw Lindsay Farr’s vagina in eighth grade, which was public but not the sort of thing that probably qualifies as “public writ large” because we were all in a hotel room and in eighth grade and a bunch of people were wrestling in the room and then suddenly, well, that’s at least one of my memories that doesn’t have much to do with The Challenger, but sex, anyhow, The Challenger, see, in memory my teacher pushes one of those old tv carts, this was the eighties, and we were all scared of nuclear disaster and the Soviets and religiously watched Rocky 2 or was it three, when Sly Stallone punches out the guy who kills his friend, Apollo Creed, who later played a character on Arrested Development that was always trying to get a stew going, but not as Apollo Creed, who doesn’t seem like he would like stew, anyhow, my teacher rolled in that television screen and fidgeted with it for a while, trying to make the picture a bit brighter and then he plugged the television in and oh my God, I just saw her right in the hotel room, but what was I saying, Yeah, the television is now rolling, and we’re watching all of us seven, eight? Who can say because the part I’m going to tell you next is that I remember The Challenger exploding and my teacher turning off the feed and rolling the television out of the room because, Holy Shit, those teachers just exploded, and we all watched it, and I’m not going to make it religious our anything, Tower of Babel and such, reaching for the stars because this memory of my teacher, which is, I’m just going to say here, a really core memory, like core as the bear I used to snuggle as a child, Apples, who I lost in college, but what was I doing bringing a tiny bear to college anyway, it was a kind of gag thing, the bear, but also, I still miss him, so was it a gag or was it real? But yeah, anyhow, my teacher, Mr. Barnum maybe, who kept a pencil behind his ear and had me in a lower reading group than I belonged in, which I’ve never forgiven him for, even now, all these years later, and it’s like how I don’t forgive myself for losing Apples in college, or for not living more in the moment because wow, Lindsay Farr is one of those girls, which was pretty much all of them who, I’m just being honest here, I’d have loved to have seen naked, and here it was, if briefly, the thing that I’d desired suddenly there like how those teachers, if it was teachers must have felt as they were climbing into the space ship that it was this moment and then poof, the whole mother fucking thing up in wreckage, which isn’t a metaphor, it’s what actually happened, but could maybe, also, be used, by a more skillful writer, to suggest metaphor, but here’s the thing I’ve accidentally been holding back this whole time, and why did Mr. Barnum have me in the lower reading group? I was reading two to three books a week by then, and him, with that goddamn pencil behind his ear, and he must have been what, twenty-nine, but he felt old like someone in a book, like he’d fit right in some story by Jack London, which is the kind of thing I could read then, White Fang, which is about a wolf, and Call of the Wild, which is about a dog named Buck, and see, I do remember things, but I don’t remember what happens to Buck, you know, memory being what it is, and I read that whole weekend and showed Mr. Barnum and got placed in the higher reading group because I could read like a motherfucker, and I showed him, he was real surprised, and he must have pulled that annoying pencil off his ear and scribble down how smart I was, even if, years later, I couldn’t remember what happened to Buck after they visited the Klondike, which is in Alaska, I think and anyhow, what was I saying, memory, and fields full of gnats and light through a grove of trees, and it turns out, I’m just whispering this to you, I don’t think I saw The Challenger explode at all. It’s not my first public memory; it’s a thing that was created by the story, and my mind just inserted the thing actually happening like that flash of skin when Lindsay Farr’s shorts were briefly pulled aside, and did I make that up too?

And it’s strange, you know, what the mind clings to, but now I’m wondering if it isn’t just as strange what the mind fabricates, what it creates in the place where real memory should be, and my teacher’s shoulders, and maybe it was Mrs. Wallace? Who was a real pain in the ass and once made me right my name on the board for pinching someone, but the kid next to me, Drew, had pinched me first, so you bet your ass I pinched him back even though I was a shy and quiet kid, I also wasn’t the type to let someone just kick my ass, which is also why I punched Mark McGinnis in the face in third grade and then by seventh grade I was afraid to do anything when Ivan Cockburn, that was literally his name, Cockburn, used to choke me out on the playground, and I’d sometimes see spots after he’d finished choking me, and I suppose in this story I’m kind of a victim, and I hate stories where the writer is the victim because I didn’t blow up across the coast of Cape Canaveral or anything, I was just kind of a pussy, which is the word, I’m sorry, we would have used back then, when Ivan was choking me out, and there is just this contrail and wreckage of memory to sort through, which, goddammit, I said no metaphors here, just the darkness as anyone tries to peer through the years and the only kind of shapes you can pick out aren’t made of anything at all? You ever have a memory like that?