It was almost twenty years ago now that a stranger took my photograph. This had never happened before, not that I knew, and it has not happened again since that night. The photograph was taken in Manhattan, in the upper hallway of a hostel on Amsterdam Avenue. There was a telephone mounted on the wall, and I was talking to my mom when a woman came down the hallway. She gestured with her camera, holding it up not quite to her eye, in a polite demonstration of what it was that she was asking to do.
I have no memory of the moment when she released her shutter. I can remember feeling embarrassed by her request, confused, but I think she took the photograph. The encounter lasted only a few seconds. After she was gone, I realized what she had seen. She had come toward me along the opposite wall and had stopped at precisely the distance at which the scene before her was most compelling. She took my photograph because I was there inside of a photograph that she had discovered.
I was sitting on a wooden chair in a hallway that seemed somehow to be darkened by its lights, as if the lights were kerosene lamps or the fixtures were blackened by the corpses of insects. The wallpaper was a lacquered brown and my hat was brown and my clothes and shoes were varying shades of brown. The telephone’s yellowing case was mounted to the wall and the spiraled cord was a loose, diagonal line traveling from the wall to my ear. The moment she released the shutter was like the pinnacle of a chiasmus, with her attention forming the ascending slope and mine, a perfect mirror of hers, the descending slope. She had noticed the quality of light and the color scheme and the telephone’s cord, and after she walked away, I, in sequence, noticed the telephone’s cord and the color scheme and the quality of light.
To watch a stranger take a photograph is itself an intimate experience, but the intimacy is voyeuristic, and vicarious. A stranger lifts her camera to her eye and I want to walk behind her and look at the world over her shoulder. I am the secret witness of that moment when a stranger’s eye is caught, when the shutter opens and collects her enchanted corner of the world. But that moment of twenty years ago now was, from where I sat in my chair, not at all about a photograph. It was a lapse in a great system of privacy.
Strangers must have taken my photograph before, even if only by accident. It is endlessly probable that I am somewhere in the background, distant or near, of hundreds, thousands—I have no real sense for a number—of strangers’ family photographs. But for the lone exception of that woman in the hallway, I have never caught any of them out. I was one part of her aesthetic discovery, and therefore one part of a privacy, an interiority, a future memory, that she disclosed to me. Her camera was an occasion that she carried around with her, outside of herself, in her hands, and without which I never would have known that I had been noticed.
It is rational to assume that I persist in the minds of other people, even strangers. I am the subject of some remarkably banal moment, embalmed by a camera, or by the autonomous part of someone else’s memory. And yet I don’t feel this to be true. To believe that I am remembered in this way requires volitional perseverance against all instinctive doubt. I could never know, and so I don’t. The closest I have come to knowing was in that hallway.
I notice you because I am carrying a camera.
I notice you because you are noticeable.
I notice you as if because, a short while later, I will remember you.
We notice and remember perfect strangers. We notice them because they are there, the populace of our attention, but we remember them—or, we do not forget them—often for no obvious reason at all. In his short story “Unforgettable People,” the Japanese novelist Doppo Kunikida suggests that a truly unforgettable person is not a loved one, but a stranger. Our parents and children and siblings, and our dearest friends, we remember these people because we love them. Our love wouldn’t dare let us forget them. “But then there are others,” he writes, “—complete strangers—to whom we are bound by neither love nor duty. Forgetting them would imply neither neglect of duty nor want of compassion. Yet these are the very ones we can’t forget.”
Circa 1991 or ’92, an old woman I didn’t know and would never see again asked her adult grandson I didn’t know and would never see again if he wanted to read the sports page of her newspaper. This question was posed at a McDonald’s in Redmond, Washington. I was five or six years old. Her husband, the man’s grandfather, was also there, and the three of them read their chosen pages of the newspaper while they ate. There was nothing remarkable about this moment, nothing that could possibly champion it against the prospect of total obscurity. The old woman and old man are likely gone by now, and their grandson, if he is still alive, could be older than either of my parents. The moment happened, and that is its virtue—and I—not I, but some part of myself over which I have no control, have chosen to spare that moment and those people from oblivion.
I remember nothing else from that afternoon. I do not remember if I was in town with my mom or with my dad, or if my siblings were there. I have no memory of what I was wearing or what season it was. The possible years, ’91 and ’92, are guesses vaguely informed by an emotional texture in that memory that I can associate with a particular era of my childhood. But I remember with great clarity the old woman’s short, curly hair and the falter in her voice. I remember that her grandson, whose name was Jim, and whose name I can still hear in the old woman’s voice, wore a gray tee shirt a size too large.
From the perspective of a memory like this one, the memory has no interest in me. It senses that it can survive in my head. I shouldn’t remember those people, yet I do, and because of this, because they are uselessly present to me, they seem like a gift.
Consider the various opposites of this kind of memory. I have looked at my daughters and son with a determination to remember them, to memorize each of them the way I might a psalm. A special loveliness erupts out of the usual loveliness, and I look and look, and so I remember. Or, my attention is enlisted by someone else, is dared. I was thirteen or fourteen when I set out with a friend from his house on a night walk. The air was cool and the street was dark and that darkness was lush with freedom. He took a bite from a green apple that he had brought with him and, as he chewed, he told me what a perfect memory he had. Wanting to demonstrate such perfection, he told me that he would throw his apple into the air and that he would remember it, among all the apples of his life, forever. The apple soared high into the dark above our heads, and it turned back toward earth, and we watched it come. He let it fall past us. It shattered against the pavement. Year after year, I resisted the temptation to ask him if he remembered it. Then one year I asked. He laughed at my question. He didn’t remember.
I remember a woman sobbing by herself on a bench at the airport, though I am not sure anymore which airport it was. She wore an iridescent skirt and I remember her knees, which were not in themselves memorable, except that she was crying and so her knees were naked twice, once on account of her skirt and again on account of her sorrow.
I remember a man accompanied by a dog in Waldport, Oregon. The daylight was nearly gone and that lonely figure and his companion were far up the coastline from me. They looked like darkness poured into different shapes. The man walked with his shoulders raised against the wind, as if to shelter his ears, and with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat. His dog might have been a shepherd of some kind, German or Australian. I remember the point of a nose, the bush of its coat. The dog maintained, as dogs tend to do near the ocean, a misshapen orbit around its companion.
I can choose to enlist this man and his dog and consciously fold out from that primary glimpse of them the details of a home toward which they must have been traveling at that shadowy hour of day. I can break them out of their looped eternity and send them home. The man, as yet, is an atmosphere, a feeling, a glint, habitable to a small selection of discrete atmospheres, feelings, glints. I can describe his hands, hands that I borrow as if by timeless accident from a certain classmate of mine I spoke to just a couple of times more than a decade ago. Those hands were hard and brittle and lean and masculine, and they are suited to this man on the beach on account of the wind and the darkness and his plea for home. His dog sleeps on a large pea green pillow beside a sliding glass door, and the pillow was laundered once and so its stuffing has dried into clumps. These details are not lies nor indulgences, nor impositions, not entirely. They are truthful possibilities inherent to and chosen by that initial glimpse of him. They could be other details, other hands, but not any other hands. They must be with the grain of him.
I don’t wonder about him reflexively, or about any of these very ones we don’t forget. I don’t wonder where these people were in the moments before I saw them or where they went in the moments after they departed my attention. My mind, separate of me, doesn’t wonder. The grooved eternities these familiar strangers live in my mind are what these familiar strangers are.
A few days ago, I watched my wife, Emily, try to squeeze a drop of antibiotics from a tiny bottle into her infected eye. The infection originated in the eyes of our eight-month-old son, Peter, and Emily’s aversion to a drop entering her own eye is no less impossible than his. I watched her hold the tiny bottle above her eye, lid flinching, as if she couldn’t guess the moment the drop would fall. She stood up onto her toes, then, up toward the bottle, accommodating its position in the air, and at that moment, the sight of her called to mind for me exactly this behavior in another person. Circa 2005 or ’06, when I was a student at the University of Washington, I was walking from one class to another when I saw a young man stand up on his toes, up toward a bottle of eyedrops. He was there inside or just outside the shade of a long squared archway. In memory, he wears a yarmulke and black shoes and very white socks, which I could see that afternoon only because he was standing up on his toes. The cuffs of his pants levitated upward from the laces of his black shoes, and his socks shone, and his eyelid tensed.
I had not thought of him in a long time, but I could remember having thought of him since the day I saw him. When he returned to me a few days ago, he came not only as himself but as a familiar stranger, one whom I could remember having remembered at least once before. It may be the case that he lives in my memory only on account of such memorable details as his white socks and the very public difficulty he was having with that bottle of eyedrops. But I do think of him as an unforgettable person, of a kind with those people at McDonald’s and that man and his dog on the coast. Having included him in this category, I will likely think of him more often, and without so exact a prompting as Emily’s replica of his behavior.
What interests me about these unforgettable people is their elusive permanence, or permanent elusiveness. If I try to go looking in my memory for an unforgettable person, wanting, for example, to add another scene to this essay, I won’t find anyone. I can’t go looking, I can only wait, and, when they come, if they do, I can merely take care to add that person to my list. I am their theater, their anonymous host, and they are my fleeting agnostics. They know nothing of the seconds-long eternities they lead in my memory, upheld not by me but my mind. Neither they nor I have much of a say in any of this.
_____
Some years ago, Emily and I were driving a rented car along a highway that wound through a jungle of astonishing density. When we came out from the long, green darkness of that jungle, a departure as sudden as light, we pulled off the highway onto a rutted aisle of grass between two patches of corn. There was a white house on a hill above the corn, and the jungle was there behind it all. A swing had been hung from the branch of a large tree in the yard. Emily and I walked up the hill to the house so that Emily could knock on the door and ask if she could use the swing. I don’t remember who answered the door. A few kids came out from the house a moment later and watched Emily swing. I don’t remember their faces, or if they were boys or girls. They seemed to be intrigued by the sight of this strange adult woman swooping through the air.
We were away from our car only a few minutes. Driving in reverse, I felt a strange tension wind itself as if around one of the back tires. I swung the car slowly out onto the highway, aimed it down the highway, and then I drove forward. The car stuttered, then suddenly there was a loud knock, a release, and then a great fast feeling of release, and the car sped forward.
I saw him then in the rearview mirror—a boy on the road.
It was as if some hammer clanged my vision. I saw the boy’s severed expression, lapsing across his face, his head spinning, his head tumbling away. The highway tremored into many highways, then reconciled itself into one. Inside the car, the mirror was very still, and the boy was waiting.
Emily screamed, and the pitch of her scream determined in my mind the scope of this tragedy. Now the car was silent. We drove back up the highway, into the monstrous certainty of his death.
But the death was no death. Our bodies were suddenly flush with warmth.
He was a boy with a coconut for a head; a coconut with no boy for its body.
The relief was as loopy as any horror.
The boy’s face returns to me as often as if I had known him. I can still see his last expression, lapsing there across his face that never was. But his mother, whom I never never-saw, I remember most vividly. The mother of a boy who did not exist exists somehow herself. I can still see her by her sorrowed posture. She stands in a doorway, and the frame of the door is white. Her face is cast down to the kitchen floor and her body is propped up in her sorrow by the door’s frame.
_____
I remember this boy for a shocking reason, so he is not precisely unforgettable. I remember him because I remember what it was like to kill him. For a few moments, I endured that version of a life. I survived him. He was nothing more than a death, but now he is a boy, come out from that death, born from it. I remember him though he does not exist, at least not in the way that I exist. He is a fiction, composed by my adrenaline. And like any unforgettable person, he is, in his own way, a beloved excess. I could have killed a less vivid individual. What I mean is that my fear could have gotten by on much less. My fear need not have given him that brutal expression, nor a loving, barefooted mother, nor given his mother a white doorway in which to support herself in the first moment of her grief.
I could make it through a day, and therefore a life, without ever thinking of that boy or his grief-stricken mother, or thinking of that lonely man and his dog wandering up the coast. What is the nature of these displays of excess? The human mind is strange, slightly antique, maybe. The mind’s tuning serves a specific purpose, call it survival, an ambition long since achieved, and now here, at this futuristic moment in time, the very mind whose reputation lies in its ability to recognize patterns and to make judgments has realized that it can apply those very same towering instincts to the project of collecting stamps. Foolish, fat muscle, chastened by nothing, set loose from all constraint and all meaning by its own engorged complexity. The mind is plainly capable of more than what is required—though only, and just as plainly, if we exclude from any definition of requirement the baseline excesses of the most commonplace joy or love. Say instead that my mind is an excess adequate to the world’s excess. All my life, the world and my mind have been engaged in a conversation about a variety of strangers, a conversation that I enjoy but don’t entirely understand, and in fact my enjoyment has everything to do with the limited scope of my understanding. Such knowledge, as the psalmist says, is too wonderful for me.
I remember strangers I never knew, even a boy who never lived, and this habit of memory, this habit of mind, seems to me like it can be understood as the joyful, callous opposite of a mind baffled by dementia.
My mom saw her father for the last time in 2016 in Centralia, Washington, at her mother’s funeral. She had not seen him in more than a decade. He laughed gently, kindly, when she said hello. His laughter was familiar, a shushing in swift descent. He had seemed always to be surprised by his own laughter. His laughter would call him inward, into himself, into a kind of privacy momentarily fashioned for him in our company. She embraced him, and she burst into tears. He didn’t remember her.
I would have been fourteen or fifteen when I last saw him. The visit took place a few years before his forgetting began, and many more before he died.
Across those latter years of his life, I traveled for various reasons north and south along I-5, always passing Centralia there on the right or there on the left. I glanced many times down the street that could be followed to the unseen fact of him, a fact believed so hard and for so long that his death, finally, seems a thing that I have been instructed to believe.
For my siblings and for me, his forgetting was always a secondhand tragedy, a heartbreaking thought, never a feeling, always held off from our hearts by the primacy of his estrangement from our mom. Even our own estrangement was secondhand. His name was Jack. He was born in St. Louis in 1932. He married my grandmother in 1954, and he came home with her to Washington State, to Centralia. He and my grandmother were married for nearly thirty years. They were divorced three years before I was born.
He was gentle and kind. My mom loved him, and so I loved him, and when she missed him, I missed him. He had always been there, and then, quietly, he was gone. Their estrangement, vivid in its appearance but obscure in its meaning, became a point of devotion for me. I had loved my grandfather by tracing the contours of my mom’s love. All the loves in my life were learned this way. He had taught my mom to throw a baseball, and I had been taught by his arm in hers. I asked her once what ever happened between them, and the answer she gave seemed almost not to exist anymore. A nothingness seemed to preside over the distance between them.
Familiar people drift away, and, remembered from the novel distance of unfamiliarity, they acquire the stark vividness of strangers. A stranger has nothing to lose. Any stranger I notice is necessarily traveling toward me, entering my life by way of my attention. Jack receded along the same line. The effect of his estrangement was a kind of dementia for us all, my siblings and me. He was atomized into a set of brief and vivid loops in our memory. He was now a quality of laughter and the appearance of his hands, the gentle warp of his smile, the gentle slump of his shoulders. And soon his own mind mirrored our loss. He forgot the appearance of his daughter, and yet his chest could remember just how he used to laugh, and his tongue, I have to imagine, just how he used to enjoy a meal, how a bite of food might have still set him humming quietly to himself.
In the photograph of him that I love most he stands next to my mom. She is young, maybe nineteen or twenty, and so he would have been in his forties, nearing fifty. She wears a silk dress and he wears a suit and a tie. It is nighttime. They seem to be at a party. And he looks more or less like I remember him. My mom is the surprise of this photograph. She is astonishingly pretty, and in this lovely glimpse of her face, I can feel the loss of him. She, so young, is a glimpse of his own youth and strength. He looks as if he exists that night for no reason but to relish his own faultless pride. He is proud to be standing next to his daughter, his beautiful, grown-up daughter. The thought of losing her, not once but three times—to estrangement, to dementia, and then in death—none of this is anywhere in his expression. Memory has no place in the night of that moment. She is there with him, relieving him of the need to remember her.
_____
I have wondered if, after my mom is gone, I will remember her imperfectly. I know that I will. But I wonder to what extent the joys of having known her so well and for so long will merely feel like a height from which I have fallen. I know that I will always remember her hands as clearly as I remember her father’s, but the memory of her hands will be there among countless other memories of equal vividness. She will blur for being irreducible to a few glimpses. She will blur because my love for her and my knowledge of her has structured her according to a set of different laws. My grandfather slipped away from us, and in doing so, came to obey the laws of those very ones we don’t forget. Jack was vivid for being a stranger. Emotional distance mimics physical distance, and dementia mimics anonymity.
An unforgettable person is, by definition, a stranger who appears before us at a precise distance. Vividness cares nothing for warmth or intimacy. If I am in the kitchen with my mom, she is not vivid to me. I have no use for vividness in that moment. Her presence rebukes even the most detailed memory. She becomes vivid only when she slips away, when she gives her attention to someone else, or to a book, or, even, when she gives me so much of her attention that she becomes, almost, an icon of herself.
She is vivid to me in old photographs in part because those faces no longer exist. I see her many faces and I want to salvage each one of them. A description salvages a bygone face, even a face adequately captured in a photograph. But if I were to write a description of my mom’s face as it is at this moment in our lives, my description would be more like a mask than a conjuring. A prosthetic for an arm not lost.
A person exists as a feature in a landscape until the moment she looks at me. My mom is continuous with the floor, the counters, the windows, my dad, my siblings, until she looks at me. Until that moment, my attention can do nothing to remove her from this landscape. It can only embed her in that wider vividness. But when she glances at me, there she is. A requited glance removes us both from the landscape. I am looking at you and you are looking back at me. Our attention, one to the other, has cast everything else into the periphery.
Something like this happened to the movies, once. We see something like this relationship between subject and landscape in the consequences of Hollywood’s decision, in the middle of the twentieth century, to widen our screens. Shane, a 1953 Western, was the first movie shot in 1.6:1. The shape of the screen was no longer suited to the shape of the human face. The new screen was suited to landscapes. We locate our familiar stranger in a landscape. He is an item in that landscape, where before, in 1.3:1, he seemed almost to be looking back at us.
Estrangement returned my grandfather to the landscape, and his dementia locked our front door. He is that shadowy figure at twilight wandering up the Oregon coast. The distance is cold and eternal. If I were to see my mom from so great a distance, I would never forget that glimpse of her. If she turned to face me, the distance would still be too great. So we begin walking toward one another, and we walk until we both come to what feels like two doors in the air, the entrances into a meaningful proximity. Up until we enter through those doors—I can remember you, I can remember you, I can remember you . . . Now here we are, warmth, hello, hello, and all of this I will forget.