I Was Real Once

Once, I was in the city of Manchester in a country called England in a hotel called Mint in a mint green bar with Nancy, with derek beaulieu, with Eduard Escoffet, with Moniek Darge, with Christian Bök, with Helen White—and the important person in this story is Helen, who made the observation.

Helen, sitting across from me at a tiny round table, with Moniek at her side and Nancy at mine, leaned across the table and said, "You are not real. You are not supposed to be real."

"What?" I thought or said, but in the middle of the spoken stream of her thought, and she continued, saying words in a certain order, words I do not recall exactly but words that I display here as if I can reproduce them perfectly.

"You are not real. You are a person from a blog, from another place, and Nancy is a character in that place."

And then I knew what she meant. As a child, I always pondered just how real any person could be when I was not in that particular person's presence, and I realized that I never felt the reality of anyone I was not with at a certain point in time. Only by co-inhabiting the same space with another could I believe in that person's realness.

"Right now you are real, but you will go away and stop being real again. And you will be a character on a blog."

So I was real once. I was right there, and unavoidable and thereby palpable and thus a necessary and incontrovertible fact. But no more. Now I am a cipher, a set of letters laid out in rows, words upon words, still images, signs of what a person might be, signs in space of what a person in personal space might be, and someone, either fictional or historical, who makes signs to prove his presence but signs of no stability or surety, signs that could not be believed, the equivalent of signs in a dream telling you you were never sleeping even though it was only sleeping that let those signs appear.

We are sleeplings, and we dream our world into existence. We cannot believe it is here, cannot prove it is here, wonder if we are nothing but thoughts floating free in empty space, though still looking for a place, a place to be, to be from, to go to, a way to be real, even though we know that is impossible.

I thought I was real once. Then I turned five and the tables turned on me. The yellowjackets descended in a stream out the bottom of a hive and came after me, and I ran from the woods as fast as I could, all the way through Virginia, faster than their stingers could fly, to a yellow house the color of yellowjackets but without the black stripes, and my cat Nicky broke his tail in a fight at night, and my father snipped the tail off at the break. This was before we took Nicky with us to Portugal and left him there. This was before I lived in Canada, before Barbados and Bolivia, before Ghana and Morocco and Somalia, before West Germany. Before I lived in DC, in the south, before New York State, before Syracuse and Horseheads and Johnstown and Rotterdam and Schenectady. (But after California.) Before I found myself at the Text Festival one evening in early May of this year, at the beginning of this very month, and learned, once again, that I am not real, but just an apparition, just a machine set to play words at a certain time, just a memory of something that never actually happened, even though we can't quite believe that it never did, even though we remember it so sharply that it takes our breath away.

ecr. l'inf.