Shutter Island

by Dennis Lehane

…must we dream our dreams and have them, too? —Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”

time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me, in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.

If time for me really is a series of bookmarks, then I feel as if someone has shaken the book and those yellowed slips of paper, torn matchbook covers and flattened coffee stirrers have fallen to the floor, and the dog-eared flaps have been pressed smooth.

“But do we lose our past to assure our future?” Chuck flicked his cigarette out into the foam. “That’s the question. What do you lose when you sweep a floor, Teddy? Dust. Crumbs that would otherwise draw ants. But what of the earring she misplaced? Is that in the trash now too?”

waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.

The idea is to obfuscate. Confuse the listener until they believe out of exhaustion more than any sense of truth.

“Baby, why you all wet?”

Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.

How did anyone know where faith developed? One moment, it wasn’t there, the next it was. Teddy had known men in war whom he’d trust with his life on a battlefield and yet never with his wallet once they were off it. He’d known men he’d trust with his wallet and his wife but never to watch his back in a fight or go through a door with him.

He looked across the dark flat stone, one cheek pressed to it, and only then did it occur to him that Chuck wasn’t up there with him.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he whispered. “I love it because you gave it to me. But truth is, it is one ugly fucking tie.”

Cawley didn’t look startled. He didn’t look scared. He tapped his cigarette against the side of the ashtray in front of him and said to Teddy: “Why you all wet, baby?”

“Baby,” he said, “why you all wet?”