EXCERPT

ONCE, A FEW YEARS AGO, I went for a walk in the neighborhood where I grew up. Past the elementary school, the drugstore where I’d been caught shoplifting, the house where a certain boy used to live, downhill towards home. The trees were leafier, the houses roomier and more attractive, than I remembered them. It was a summer afternoon, the sky untroubled, the air dusted with pollen. My unhappy memories had made everything seem shrunken and ugly, and by comparison the streets were like boulevards, vast and light-filled. But my chest tightened as I came within blocks of the house that had appeared relentlessly in my dreams over the past ten years. In the distance a small, middle-aged Chinese woman came towards me, grocery bags weighing down her thin arms. My parents had moved away from this neighborhood years ago, and I watched incredulously as this woman who looked like my mother came closer and closer. Could it be? In a moment the past decade vanished, and I was back inside the small world of that neighborhood, circumscribed by the school and the grocery stores and the house I lived in. There was nothing else. Downtown was an image of clustered buildings on the horizon, glittering at night. It might as well have been on another planet. It was as if I had stepped through a veil into another world, the parallel universe of the imagination, the one where everyone lives out their lives the way they would have had they made one choice instead of the other. I watched with dread as the woman with the lined face and the severe look in her eyes crossed the street and came within steps of me. I expected her hand to grasp my arm like a claw, to be dragged back to that house where, in my mind, the drama was still beig played. I should never have come back, never stepped through the veil into the old world with its magical hold over me. But this woman who could have been my mother walked right past me, continued on her way, and the black spell was broken.

I circled the house. It belonged to another family now, with their own daily tribulations, their private crises, their moments of gratitude and peace. They had changed the look of the house with a swing set, a satellite dish, toys in the front yard. It appeared untidy, the way my mother would never have allowed it to look. But still I excepted to see the faces of my parents in the living room window, round and pale and desperate. In my mind I would be there always, would always leave a part of myself behind in that place no matter how far away from it I tried to go. I found I could only walk past that house on the opposite side of the street, as if venturing any closer would pull me into its magnetic field, and I would be swallowed whole by the past.

In dreams, the protective filters fall away and the parables and metaphors are as clear as primary colours. It is a child’s logic that reigns in this nocturnal world, where nearly every dream takes place inside the structure of the parents’ house. The people in my life now, the situations that currently cause unrest, duplicate themselves and their dramas there. How have I gone over that house’s every detail as obsessively as my mother might do, crawling on her hands and knees the length of the carpet to gather in her palm any stray hair or crumb of dust the vacuum might have missed. In trying so hard to forget, to deny that other life, I have remembered everything, and it all comes out at night. The lights go up in that locked theatre, and every inch of that set has been faithfully reproduced.