Lemon Trees — Avoidance of — 1,947-8

What will it be like when your life has an index?

It was the numbering scheme that bothered me. I could handle the veil of mystery being drawn back. I could handle seeing Death — Esophageal cancer — 7,812. But why page numbers? Why not dates?

My boots were up on the patio. I was chewing a pillowy muffin, sipping tea. It was a warm fall day. But I was frustrated. I needed to find out what page I was currently on. Muffin had a lone entry, p. 419. I was well past that page. The last time I had positively confirmed my location was almost six months prior. Hernia operation — 1,791. A painful day of hospital curtains. The surgeon spoke to me after the procedure and clapped my shoulder. She knew what she was doing. It was a relief to see no other entries for Hernia operation.

What volumetrics of my life had passed since then? Some days contained so much: singing and love and hot food. Others were bare, the scraping of rakes the only object of focus. I felt as though I were in a thought experiment. The past week I’d watched the paint dry on my neighbor’s porch. Porch swing — 1,411. No, that was after the surgery. Paint fumes — 5,970. Too far in the future. Suddenly the idea of leaving my neighbor’s porch scared me. To step into a tiny, parceled-out fate felt foolish.

My friend Dean ran over, breathing hard. He took my life’s index, photocopied it, then spent a painstaking week putting it in chronological, not alphabetical, order. Birth — 1. Colic — 1-2. Crawling — 3-4. First word — Parental argument — 4. And so on. My God, I threw the revised version back in his face and slammed the door. Dean seemed hell-bent on controlling me. Whenever we went out to dinner, he said, “Let’s share a bunch of dishes,” and then he selected all the food without my input. He sucked the orange dipping sauce off his fingertips. 

Seligman, Dean — 719-33, 801, 1502-12, 1711-82, 1793-4, 1952. A few mentions after my surgery, then once more, then never again. Had I, with this incident, just kicked him out of my life for good (p. 1912)? Or was this era of our friendship empty, was this just a minor episode between him and me (p. 1793-4)? A third possibility: Dean remained in my life past p. 1912 but left no noteworthy impressions. Dean in the background. Meeting for wan tea now and then.

What brand of philosophy was steering me? Nihilism? Fatalism? Neither merited an entry. Zoroastrianism — 2,411. All I could think to do was take a walk. Of course I wanted to walk with Dean, my sounding board for the better part of the past year, but I worried that if I called him up, our time would be over. 

So I walked alone. The street sloped beyond my driveway, heading west toward the Pacific. At the top of the hill was a statuesque lemon tree, catching the lacquered finish of the afternoon sun. It looked too perfect. I stepped backward from it carefully, keeping my eyes on it in the event it had a message for me. 

Yet each thought of the tree, each thought of Dean, might have been its own event, or the prelude to an event, or the loose ash of a burnt memory. I was overcome with nerves. I had always been nervous. My grade one teacher had pulled me aside on a wintry day, grabbing me by the scarf, and said, “Quit being this way. You’re going to worry yourself sick.” Indeed she had outlined my whole life with that pronouncement, from beginning to end, A to Z.