Floating Staircase (41 page)

I stood there by the edge of the water for some time, letting the sun warm my back and shoulders. Cream-colored water lilies drifted across the surface of the lake, cartwheeling lazily over the reflection of my own face.

Kyle was here. The realization was like a car crash, an explosion. Kyle was
here.
I could taste his memory in the air, could catch the fleeting scent of him on the passing breeze. Dropping to my knees, I leaned over the rocky edge of the lake and brushed the lilies off my reflection. The water was so cold I could feel my bowels clench. My image rippled and glittered and after a moment reassembled itself again. It was me—only me—staring back at myself. Still, I did not move. I held my breath, not wanting to exhale and disturb the water. I wanted to see him so badly. But it was me, only me. I recognized my eyes, my freshly cut hair, the structure of my facial bones beneath my tanned skin. I recognized the slightly crooked bend to my nose and the faint dimple on my chin.

Only me.

Crestfallen, I crawled away from the water on my hands and knees. I couldn't bring myself to stand, not just yet. Then I laughed. It tumbled out of me, uncontrolled. And with it came tears that dropped straight from my eyes into the bright green grass. Laughing and crying, laughing and crying.

I'm sorry, Kyle. I love you, Bro.

But I didn't have a dimple on my chin.

I was you.

I sprang forward and nearly dumped myself into the lake. Staring over the side, I once again faced my reflection and scanned the face, recognizing everything I'd always known about me . . . yet catching, in flickering flashbulb images, details that were completely foreign to me . . . emotions that did not exist in my catalogue, expressions that I did not possess in my reserve . . .

“Kyle,” I whispered.

I was you.

And who's to say he wouldn't have been? Who's to say he wouldn't have been me?

I was you.

“Yes,” I said, seeing him,
seeing him,
the laughter unavoidable now, my tears spilling into the water and dispersing the reflection, “yes, yes you are, yes, yes you are, yes, yes—”

Something like three months later, in a bright little studio apartment in San Diego, I was accosted by an urge. Without thinking, without reservation, I stood and went into the bedroom. I knelt on the floor and felt around inside the clapboard trunk at the foot of the bed. When I found the notebook I was looking for, I carried it, along with a ballpoint pen, out onto the porch that overlooked the Gaslamp Quarter where, in the promise of a fading summer, I began to write.

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