“The swimming pool, as I remember it, was just about the largest thing I’d ever seen,” I explained to Martin while he positioned a neck pillow between his head and his leather chair. A square of dusty light from a ceiling window glowed on his office floor. “Of course I was rather small at the time.”

For a period, when I was five or six in Upstate New York, my mother would take me to the YMCA once a week for swimming lessons. Memories of this time had been lately appearing with unusual vividness, and I recounted them to Martin as simply as I could. In one, I sat in a car in the parking lot, the sky already dark, eating a banana. In another I toddled, in my soaking swim trunks, through a wood-panelled sauna filled with tangled fog, into a septic weight room. So saturated were these mnemic images that I initially mistook them for crumbs of a recent dream.

“The topography of this second memory is a little askew,” Martin observed. “Why would you need to pass through a sauna to reach the weight room?”

I agreed, and launched eagerly into a theory on how the YMCA’s terrain might’ve been arranged. Martin, who rarely asked direct questions, interjected suddenly, “And are any strong emotions attached to the swimming pool? Did you feel afraid?”

I considered this. There was indeed the ghost of some sentimentality lurking in the scene, but I didn’t think it could be usefully described. “Not really,” I said. 

We discussed the subject further and I left the session feeling, as I often did after analysis, like the previous fifty minutes had been spent rotating in a microwave. 

At home, Charlotte and I had lately moved around the apartment on opposing orbitals. If I appeared in the bedroom she’d float into the bathroom. I found this development unnerving, as I was completely dependent on her company. I’m timid, with few friends and a stifled social appetite. Charlotte, on the other hand, was bright and outgoing—an upbeat and vigorous theatre actress. I found it hard to speak in her presence. 

“You’re like a floating pair of eyes hooked up to a huge humming brain,” she’d once said. The remark left a wound, though I think she’d meant it lovingly.

We’d been invited that evening to a dinner at her agent’s townhouse near the river. As our cab crossed the bridge I glimpsed the currents below and once again fell into a limpid reverie: I waited in the lobby of the YMCA for, I suppose, my mother to finish her laps. I shoveled nobs of white-cheddar popcorn into my mouth. This was a treat I was allowed only on days I had swim class. 

I wandered off to look for my mother. A force pulled me between concrete hallways slick with the sheen of condensation. I slipped into the women’s changing room. It smelled of perfume and saline. Bare feet made wet slapping sounds on the tiled floor. A shuffle of midlife women peeled their one-piece swimsuits from their torsos, revealing the bristly contents of their thighs. As a child I was androgynous, with long golden ringlets, and could’ve been easily mistaken for someone’s young daughter. I couldn’t remember finding my mother there. 

The cab arched a slow descent down an exit ramp.  

“None of your silence tonight, ok?” said Charlotte, interrupting my little retrospective.

I agreed that I would be gregarious and chatty, but as soon as we arrived, I knew I was done for. I was handed a drink and herded into a large parlor, where a coterie of young professionals perched like refined parrots on couch arms and in fashionable chairs. I felt chilly and unmoored; caught up in the strange, affectless clarity of my memories. Long stretches of conversation passed without my comment or remark, and as my silence fattened I could see Charlotte becoming desperate and embarrassed. I wanted to please her, but found it impossible to focus on any subject long enough to contribute. As we were leaving, in a last-ditch move, I gestured to the hosts’ wooden bookshelves, which I’d been pretending to inspect all evening. “Is this beech?” I said.

The cab ride home passed in further silence. Charlotte’s torso was twisted in a way that looked terribly uncomfortable, but which allowed her to face entirely away from me. I tried to imagine her thoughts, to sneak into the drift of her consciousness. We had both, in the past, been capable of such gentle intrusions; but that night the force of my own reminiscences outcompeted everything else. I looked at the back of her head, the notch where her spine split into her shoulders. In my mind I stood on the diving board, watching through the window at the pool’s far end as snow came mutely over the parking lot.

After Charlotte moved out, I continued to see Martin for a long while. Our conversations shifted away from my memories—the torrent of which had subsided—to my present romantic troubles. 

*

Many years later, having left the city, I was preparing for my annual Christmas visit with my parents, who still lived in my childhood home. It would be gloomy in that wing of the country, and I dreaded the cold orange evenings with my elderly parents and their silent shuffling.

When they met me at the airport they looked meek and desiccated, like two eroded stones. People have these years, during which the preceding decade’s aging happens all at once.

As we drove up the barren interstate I recognized landmarks, and, in the back seat of the station wagon, I felt the vague but sudden possession of my childhood mind. We passed the Sheraton, a mirror-glass hotel tower, which was surrounded by bulldozers and workmen.

“They’re blowing up the Sheraton,” said my father.

By the time we reached the house it was night and my parents were tired. They went immediately to sleep, and I sat on the couch under an antique reading lamp. The place was messy, with stacks of documents strewn over the dining room table. We’d employed a cleaning woman for a while, Tara, with whom I was friendly as a boy. I’d look forward to her visits, and rode around on the vacuum cleaner while she pulled it through the house. 

I surveyed the darkened interior, and began thinking about this woman, Tara. She had been stern and regal with a bouldery, totemic face. I wondered what’d happened to her. She’d stopped coming to the house, and a material chaos had been loosed in her wake. I couldn’t remember seeing the house clean since. Had she retired? A slight uneasiness reached me from the messy table. I was prone to disruptive episodes of nighttime anxiety and, fearing such an onslaught, I went up to bed.

The next afternoon I wanted to walk in the woods. My mother suggested there might be an extra pair of snow boots in the basement. Rummaging in bins of sheets and miscellaneous vacation supplies, I discovered a pair of swimming goggles: translucent green eyes with a clear rubber ring. They produced a rocketing effect identical to the one the Sheraton had produced the day before. I took them upstairs. 

“Why do you still have these?” I asked my squinting father. “Doing a lot of swimming these days?”

The substitution—goggles for snow boots—had jarred me. I felt an immediate need to leave the house. I gave up on the walk, and decided instead to drive into town. The sky was solid gray and a heavy mist was easing itself over the mountain ridge. I slithered around the empty country roads, turning absently down state routes and passing cold parishes. 

Feeling lonely and slightly miniature, I switched on the radio. It was tuned to a local public access outpost, and a hypnotist was reading a monologue. 

“You’re standing on a frozen lake at night…

“Behind you, the stream of a highway throbs in quarter-note pulses, beats of wind as car after car whips by…

It was an odd choice, I thought, to put a hypnotist on the radio. Didn’t they know people were driving?

“Something radiant and white comes swimming from the lake’s bowels…

The voice was curiously similar in timbre to Martin’s. I imagined him sitting next to me in the passenger seat, listening, shifting his head up in his mannered, slightly superior way. He’ll be thrilled to learn I’m hearing his voice in such a fraught scene, I thought. Then I thought, almost tearfully, I’m cracking up. 

I felt a cavernous distance from my life. My surroundings, though I’d moved through them prolifically as a child, seemed then like an opaque screen placed there to conceal something from me.

The voice prattled on, describing a bizarre drama in which an angel comes out of a lake. It was unlike anything I’d heard before on the radio, and in my listless state it flustered me.

I tried to focus only on the road, the casual sway of the station wagon. 

I turned and turned, making what I experienced as mindless decisions. Left at the stop sign. Right after the train tracks. This continued until I realized, suddenly and slightly sick, that in fact I’d been moving with unconscious precision. The flat roof of a gas station and the quadrilateral sprawl of parking lots peeled out of view, giving way to the brick facade of the YMCA. Curiously, though the sight of the building caused a deep sensory flinch, I didn’t stop. I tore through an intersection, and, storming down a sleepy lane, I was startled by the sight of a house I recognized: a white clapboard two-story. Out of some deep-sea trench crawled the remembrance that this house had once belonged to Tara.

I strained to determine, as I pulled over across the street, how I knew this. What took shape was a continuation of the memory I’d recovered spontaneously on the bridge with Charlotte. During my short swimming career, there had been one occasion on which my mother couldn’t pick me up. I’d been forewarned that someone else would come get me, and had anticipated this aberration with considerable anxiety. I had waited in the lobby, as I recalled on the bridge, but it wasn’t for my mother. It was for Tara. She’d been asked to fetch me.

I got out of the car and stood, transfixed, in front of the house.

A light was on in an upstairs window, and behind a drawn white curtain I could see blurred silken movements. In the space between blinks I recalled the house’s interior—warped hugenesses of human shadow against the walls; black-trousered legs on a staircase. The memory expanded piecemeal, trickling in. I had waited at Tara’s a rather long time for my mother to come. I watched television on the couch. Tara’s husband, a long mustelid of a man, came prowling in the living room. He took Tara to the kitchen and I heard a rising fuss, hissed criticisms and retorts revving like race cars. There was more to the scene, but it was dark and riddled with obscuring ink. My fluorescent visions of the pool, I realized, were the product of some cognitive misdirection. They were not so significant themselves, but instead lay beside a memory of deep significance. I thought of Charlotte and wondered, briefly, if the problem of my silence had in fact been arranged long before I met her.

I returned to the station wagon unsatisfied. Had something happened to me in Tara’s house? Or could the memory’s terrible resonance really be explained by something so simple as a missed pickup? There are innumerable benign tremors in one’s past, I thought, which, simply because of their divergence from the routine, stay in his mind forever. I drove off and gradually turned my thoughts to other, more immediate matters. The mist had climbed fully over the mountain, and flurries of snow boiled in the beams from my headlights. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead.