The Book of Maybe

I will begin this by saying I am not beginning this. The first line is a middle, the second line is the prologue, and somewhere in the closing paragraphs you will find the title page with all the signatures—mine, yours, and the one we share when we both blink in the same sentence. I am not writing about myself. I am definitely writing about myself. You are not involved. You have been involved since the comma after “begin.”

I used to live in a town where the library kept two copies of everything: one to lend and one to deny. If you asked for The History of the River, the librarian would slide you a volume bound in blue and insist the river had never existed, had never cut the town in half, had never ruined the barley and the beets. The blue book was heavy with maps. The denial copy was heavier. I read both at once for a while, turning pages with one finger in each book, learning how to hold two currents in my lap without getting wet. It was a trick my great-uncle taught me, the one who built the bridge and then didn’t.

He built the bridge in spring. He built the bridge in winter. He constructed the middle first, the ends last, the trusses in a dream, the rivets with his teeth because his hands were busy blessing the water. He refused payment and deposited every coin. The town toasted him with beer, which he drank, which he refused, which he poured into the river where fish rose belly-up to sip the foam. The bridge stood for a century in one telling. In another it never stood at all; it lay down in the river like a tired horse while everyone pretended to step on it, to cross. My great-uncle was a man and a rumor, which is to say he was loved and corrected in equal measure. His name was Christopher or Krys or the short, impossible Chuf, a syllable that insisted on rushing out with breath and then vanishing.

I am not family-proud. I have no stories like that. There’s a notebook beside me with his handwriting in it. The first page says, “Do not begin with me.” I obeyed by starting here.

I should say the town was on the coast even though it was landlocked. We had gulls. We had a tidal schedule posted outside the municipal building. Twice a day the wind rose, the dust smelled like salt, and the wheat leaned as if contemplating a bath. The school canceled field day for low tide. People complained about the corrosion of bicycle chains. And yet if you dug with a shovel, you found nothing but the usual undersoil—clay, quiet stones, worms undecided about direction. This made the town argue about metaphors until late at night, when finally someone would stomp the floor and say, “The coast is a feeling,” and then someone else would draw a map over the tablecloth that showed how all roads eventually end at an edge, which is coastline enough. I am opposed to this sentiment. I agree with it completely.

Some days, when the coastal air arrived without water, we went fishing in the square. The old men cast lines into a fountain that was dry except for the coins and the stubborn patience people fling before they go pay the gas bill. We caught nothing and told stories about it. I once reeled in a license plate that was both yours and mine. It read: MAYBE.

I am trying not to give this a shape. I am trying to give this a shape. If I begin to circle a theme, tug my sleeve.

The first person I ever loved had two names and one face. On Mondays and alternate Wednesdays, they were Iris, and they insisted we travel by maps we’d never use. On all other days they were Rowan and wanted to stay home, specifically in the corner of my kitchen where the floorboard complained about the weight of our not-arguing. We argued constantly. We never fought. We put together furniture that did not require assembly and returned furniture that did. If you ask me now which of their names is real, I will answer yes. When I think of them walking away, they do it in four directions: toward the door and then toward me, then upward slightly as if a staircase had grown out of the air, and down into their pockets for the keys they left behind, which I found later inside the freezer, under a bag of peas that must have belonged to neither of us and everyone.

This is not about them. I just wanted you to know there was once a clock in my kitchen that ran fast when we were happy and slow when we pretended we were not happy and stopped entirely during a thunderstorm—a storm we watched because there were no windows. The landlord called them skylights. The sky disagreed by staying out of reach.

You will have noticed by now the looseness in how I handle facts. That’s a feature I admire in others and fear in myself. I am precise when I describe the wrong thing. I can tell you exactly how many steps there are between my front door and the neighbor’s cherry tree (thirty-seven, unless you are late), but I cannot tell you which year we learned to boil an egg. It was the same year the river did not flood, although we stacked sandbags and ate sandwiches and waited anyway. The town thrives on preparedness, which is to say we keep a drawer full of batteries for devices that don’t need them. The drawer makes us feel like people who are not surprised even as we cultivate surprise as a crop, watering it carefully until it sprouts and ruins the onions.

I want to write about the Device because you want me to, because I don’t remember it, because I remember everything around it. It arrived on a Tuesday or a celebration or during inventory day, when all the clerks count the customers and the customers count the clerks and everyone agrees to exaggerate. The Device was round and square and broom-length and pocketable. It made a small noise that was either the sound of distant rain or the word stay pronounced by someone trying not to be seen. People took turns. We queued up with our coins and our skepticism, one of which we returned afterward for a full refund. When I say it showed you every memory you had misfiled, you must understand that memory here means receipt, and misfiled here means cherished. The Device was a loss-and-found tender. It kept returning us to ourselves, and of course we hated that. It was very popular.

I never tried the Device. I tried it twice. The first time I was given the taste of a particular apple from the year when apples were noisier and unclaimed. The second time I saw myself crossing the bridge my great-uncle did not finish, waving to a version of my mother who had been born elsewhere so that her entire face was an elsewhen. She waved back and continued to scrub a jar that wasn’t dirty, which is how you keep jars clean in the long term.

If I am contradicting myself, it is because the town taught me that every fact has an echo, and sometimes the echo arrives first. If you speak into the past, the future answers. This is obvious. This is nonsense. Still, whenever tourists asked what there was to do, we said: “Listen for something that isn’t the thing.”

I have a friend who collects errands. She writes them on slips of paper and keeps them in a jar labeled To Whom It May Concern. On foggy mornings that are not foggy, she draws one and completes it to the letter: “Buy two eggs from a tall stranger.” She accomplishes this by standing in the bakery and complementing people on achieving their heights. She has an enviable life because it never becomes a plan. If you took away her jar, she would become someone who collects missing jars. The jar would never get away.

Once, during a month that had thirteen Thursdays, I took the inland ferry. There is no such thing, obviously; this is a riverless place with tides. But they announced it on the radio—the ferry schedule, the way the horn would sound if we believed—and drought was severe enough for boats to grow from the ground like mushrooms, each with a captain’s hat sprouting on a seat. I boarded. The deck was a plank with a polite sign: CAPACITY 1 AND/OR EVERYONE. The boat refused to leave while leaving, so the scenery moved instead, rolling itself up while we stood still. This is how you know a journey has begun: the town re-shelves itself at the wrong call numbers and the librarian opens the denial copy to the exact page where your name appeared, having forgotten never to include it.

The inland ferry took me past the apartments that were once a factory that are now apartments again. On the fourth floor a woman watered a plant that cupped her hand like a bird. She waved (this is a town of hand-wavers) and then made the sign for rain, which here means there’s a potluck tonight, bring a jar. I waved back and held up my ferry ticket. That meant: I’ll try. Or it meant: I won’t.

You must not hold me to the potluck. I went and I didn’t. The table had three pies and a thesis about huckleberries. Someone put a chessboard on top of a casserole and declared checkmate. I provided the empty jar Iris/Rowan left. We filled it with jam we had not cooked yet, fruit that had not agreed to be fruit, and a recipe that ended with “serve at once or in winter.” When I tasted it, my tongue disagreed with the season. The taste was last Tuesday, huddled beneath a windowless skylight, thrumming with thunder that was either about to begin or had been over for years.

I am avoiding the bridge. Let me avoid it by telling you about our train station, which operates on both standard and subjunctive time. Half the departures are listed as if. If you had arrived at nine, you would be on Platform B now, boarding the train for a city where bicycles are held legally responsible for bad weather. People queue for trains that should have been. We show tickets printed in italic. The conductors punch invisible holes and say, “You just made it,” or “You just missed it,” and then look relieved when we look relieved. Not everyone participates, but those who don’t usually wait on the platform with their arms crossed, scolding a locomotive that declines to materialize. The worst day is when the if-train arrives and the everyone-train does not. Children cheer while adults frown, tallying up the occasions they could have been better.

One afternoon I boarded the conditional express for a childhood that might have included a lake. It smelled of algae and cut grass and sunscreen applied by an aunt who was at once benevolent and liable to instruct you on the proper folding of towels as if your future hinged on it (it does). On the train I sat beside a woman reading a book of maps that showed only errors: lakes where land is, land where lakes are. She said, “I’m from your future,” and I said, “I’m from your past.” We were right simultaneously. We talked until the train stopped at a station where the sign read NOW but kept being replaced by another sign that read NOT YET. We stepped out and stood on gravel that felt official. I did not know what to do with my hands. I decided to be the one who names things and pointed at the sky, calling it usable. She agreed and disagreed and we wrote that down.

When I came back (to the same platform, to a different decade), the librarian had put up a new shelf labeled MEMOIRS IN WHICH NOTHING HAPPENS, and the shelf was empty and brimming. I added a jar.

The bridge: I said I would avoid it and therefore I must cross it. Or avoid it better.

On the day it did and didn’t fall, the town arranged itself into a picture that could be framed in a relative’s hallway—the good china in the foreground, the people strategically arranged to prove we had faces. My great-uncle stood with a hammer in one hand and a violin in the other, because he was an honest cliché and honest clichés are the only ones that work. The mayor or the person who always acts as the mayor even when they are only in charge of lemon bars cut a ribbon twice. Everyone cheered; everyone prepared to be disappointed. Children asked if they could watch from underneath, as if the bridge were a firmament. He nodded, and then he didn’t, and the children collapsed into a pile of attention, which is the safest thing to do in any public space.

When he struck the final something—the note, the nail, the invisible—the bridge hummed. I am telling you it hummed. The denial copy insists it did not, but a hum is the exact sound absence makes when people expect presence, and we are all very good at arrangement. The bridge did not fall. It did not stand. It did what most important structures do: it hovered at the height of belief. People crossed by agreeing to cross. I crossed by saying I wouldn’t. It held. It didn’t. Years later the bridge was routine, predictable, the kind of miracle that costs nothing and therefore is easily overlooked. We argued about tolls we did not pay, about whether we should erect plaques for events that vanished. The bridge became a line we drew across the air, and you could measure children’s growth by their ability to jump and meet it with their fingertips. We are generous with markers. We are stingy with marks.

I have a photograph of the bridge that shows only the river that isn’t there. It was taken by the friend who collects errands. She titled it: Successful Attempt at Failure. I keep it on my wall behind a calendar of months that reorder themselves according to how useful you feel. February gets bold when you remember to eat breakfast. June sulks until you file your taxes. September takes roll call and notes who answered with a voice that was not their own. This morning it called my great-uncle’s name and three people said “present,” including the cherry tree.

Perhaps you are wondering what sort of person writes this down and calls it something like a story. I will not answer that. I will answer it by leaving a list of items on the table between us:

• A jar without a lid that contains the sound of Iris/Rowan laughing at the wrong part of a movie
• A ferry ticket with a stamp that reads: Validated Whether or Not
• A map of the places where there used to be maps
• A recipe for giraffe (do not worry; it is a cake, and the giraffe was imaginary, and the cake is) that calls for “two cups of forgiveness, sifted, or table salt”
• A pair of shoes with suspiciously new soles belonging to a person who never left
• The denial copy of The History of the River, annotated in a child’s handwriting: “Yes it did,” accompanied by drawings of fish who look like punctuation marks debating their own functions

You will take one of these and it will not be yours and it will be yours. When I was young and already old, I wanted nothing more than a principled inventory. I thought if I made a good enough list the world would stick to it. Then I met Iris on a Monday (or Wednesday) and the list began to scribble notes to itself in the margins, and I felt relief like new weather arriving by train.

I said earlier that I am not writing about myself. It was an honest mistake. If you want, I can pivot and make this about you and the day you learned that “later” is a place and not a time. You went there. You came back with a souvenir you cannot show anyone because it keeps changing shape and confessing it was always your idea to begin with. You put it on your dresser. It keeps rolling off and becoming a marble under your foot. You both curse and bless your future self for leaving hazards like this. You are careful. You are careless. Every step is plausible.

The Device—yes, let me contradict earlier contradictions—did exist. It still does. It sits on a shelf at the thrift store between a basket of cables for machines that forgot themselves and a porcelain polar bear whose fur has been represented with such furious detail that you want to apologize to the sculptor for dirtying it with your looking. The Device no longer costs anything. It requires exact change. The cashier who is also the pastor and a part-time science teacher will not tell you how to operate it because that would ruin it, and because it has only one button and the button is labeled however. You will carry it home and place it on the table and it will switch on when you tilt your head to remember the name of your neighbor, and then it will begin to show you the vault of your etceteras, opening drawers you did not know had been installed.

The Device shows me a bus stop at dusk where I am both waiting and arriving, both unlucky and lucky, both deciding to quit and deciding to begin. It shows me Iris holding two paper cups of tea, one extended as a question and the other extended as the same question, which is not really a question at all. It shows me my great-uncle teaching me how to look at water that thinks it is road. It shows me the librarian stamping the denial copy with the word Accepted. It shows me the inland ferry ticket clerk (there is one now; she wears a hat that refuses to be uniform or unique) saying, “Both ways are forward,” and I say, “That can’t be true,” and she says, “It isn’t,” and we are both relieved.

Sometimes the Device is a mirror. Sometimes it is a refusal to mirror. I look into it and see the kitchen clock restarting because thunder remembered to keep its promise. I look into it and see the corner where we didn’t argue, well-worn as a prayer rug. I look into it and see this paragraph, already written, already revised, the words clearing their throats, embarrassed to have been caught practicing sincerity. I am resistant to sincerity unless it is performed by a dog who thinks it is stealing when actually it is retrieving. If I had a dog, it would be named Not Yet. When I called it, it would come at once.

I could tell you there was a catastrophe. That would give shape to the ramble, offer some spine for the softer organs. I could say the bridge fell and took with it a subset of us whose names we could not agree on. I could say the river finally flowed where the denial copy insisted it wouldn’t and that everything became too wet to carry home. I could say Iris left and then returned and that neither counted as loss. I could say I broke the Device and discovered it worked better as shards.

All of this is accurate. All of this is wrong. The catastrophe, if you insist on labeling it (I do; that is what labeling is for), was learning that things survive therefore make demands. The bridge survived being possibility, and so it demanded maintenance. The maintenance was belief. The belief was boring when you had to show up at the committee meeting. The committee meeting was Tuesdays or celebratory or during inventory day, and people entered minutes into the record with the same reverence and carelessness with which one might bandage a child’s skinned knee, not because the blood matters (it does) but because the attention does (it does more). We took turns being against and for the bridge. We put up a sign that read: Closed for Opening. We applauded it with seriousness. We stayed home and wrote letters to the editor and then never sent them because the editor had become a pigeon who carried only afterthoughts.

I promised you an ending on the title page. The page is here, at the beginning, which is later. I will offer several. Choose the one that makes you braver or smaller or more like the person you pretend you are not pretending to be.

Ending A (Documentary). The Device proved to be a hoax and therefore worked. People accused the inventor—who was my great-uncle, who was my neighbor’s daughter, who was a committee—of fraud, and then thanked them. The town’s economy stabilized around the sale of denial copies, which we exported to places with actual water. The bridge, made of scaffolding and gossip, attracted tourists who came to watch their own certainty fluctuate. We put in a gift shop called Nevertheless where you could buy a jar that already had what you would fill it with. Iris/Rowan opened it. They waved when you left and then waved when you arrived, refusing to choose.

Ending B (Apocryphal). There was no bridge, only a plank and a polite sign that changed depending on who read it: CAPACITY 1; CAPACITY 0; CAPACITY ∞. The town moved its coastline to a better location, one with more available light and a nicer sense of gratitude. We forgot to miss what we lost because we never held it long enough to teach it our names. I met a woman on a subjunctive platform and we agreed the word usable had been the error all along, that what we needed was a sky that did not require purpose to be valued. We failed to prove it and so believed.

Ending C (Confessional). I made up my great-uncle. Or I renamed a person who existed so he could do the things I can’t admit I have done: build and unbuild, accept and deny, hum at the exact frequency of community and escape. I changed the librarian to make her kinder. I gave Iris two names because I couldn’t stand how one slid away from me like a rushed apology. I did not ride the inland ferry or I did, but what does it matter if the scenery moved and I didn’t? I am a person who collects errands and then completes them out of order: forgive, sleep, explain, take out the recycling, resurrect, misplace, trust. I am not asking for absolution. Or I am, and you can leave it on the table with the jar and the map of errors, and if I am gone, keep it. It looks good on you.

Ending D (Administrative). The town council voted to rename the bridge As-Is. All votes were counted twice: once for and once against. The mayor baked lemon bars that tasted of correct forms filled at the correct window. The drawer of batteries finally powered something: a lamp whose bulb was convinced it should have been a pear. We ate under that light and said: look how everything we wanted refuses us gently and persists anyway. The denial copy was retired to the children’s section, where we teach them to argue with footnotes first and then with kindness.

Ending E (Personal). I am on my kitchen floor, sitting in the corner we didn’t argue in, and the thunder is doing what it does best: practicing leaving while arriving. The clock is fast again. I am exactly who I told you I wasn’t and someone else besides. The Device has been unplugged. It hums anyway. I hold the jar with two hands to keep it from telling me the obvious: that we keep what we keep by learning how to put it down.

You see how endings are only pauses that have learned better posture. I could go on. I will not go on. Let me add only an appendix, because all books of any integrity apologize for themselves once. Mine will do it now: I am sorry for saying we when I meant I and for meaning you when I said I and for forgetting that we is not a trap, it’s a ferry. I am sorry for building bridges I then refused to cross and for crossing when I should have stood on the shore and waved. I am sorry that memory makes such a believer of me when I’m trying to keep doubt fed, and that doubt finds me anyway, wagging its tail, named Not Yet, crashing into my knees.

Here is the bibliography:

• The laughter of a different apartment through a shared wall, with gratitude
• A bag of dried beans that took three days to forgive me
• The smell of a tire swing that remembers the leg it bruised
• The way a city map folds wrong and still tells you where you were
• The word enough in bold italics
• The denial copy, stamped ACCEPTED, returned with thanks, overdue

I will end by beginning again: This is not about me. It is a local history of maybe, written from the middle, by someone who remembers the coast and forgot the water, who contradicted themselves enough to become plausible, who knows you are reading and not reading—both forward, both true.