Looking for something to read tonight, I turned to the shelf of books I've bought over the last few years but haven't read; random books I needed to buy, not knowing how long they'd lay untouched in my living room or the trunk of my car. In the mood for a longer book, but nothing so dense as Foucault's Pendulum, I grabbed Red Earth and Pouring Rain by Vikram Chandra. I couldn't remember buying it, though I've known I've had it for a while--how long, I couldn't have said; I could vaguely remember starting it, once upon a time, then losing track of it right away--for what reasons, I can't say.
Tonight, about thirty-odd pages into it, I found the receipt from Border's from the day I bought it. Not thinking much of it, I set it on the end table next to me, and went back to the book. Then I went back to the receipt. Some vague curiosity about whether I'd bought anything else when I'd bought Chandra's book, some other book I might enjoy reading, the way I'm enjoying Red Earth and Pouring Rain, if I gave it a second chance.
The other book I bought that day was White Noise by Don DeLillo.
I can't remember reading White Noise without remembering when I read White Noise, and as soon as I remembered reading White Noise, a book I probably shouldn't have been reading when I read it, I saw the date printed on the receipt: 09/09/01.
I remember sitting on the patio of the Arabica coffee shop near Case Western Reserve University the night of September 12, reading DeLillo's book by setting sun and dim outdoor lamp lights, reading about chemical clouds and shifting society. I was sick with the differentness of everything. Even as I knew that time and circumstance were doing things to my head as I read the book that weren't entirely healthy, I was enthralled with the book, and I couldn't stop reading it. While anybody with half a brain cell was looking for some kind of escape, those first days after, something that might make them feel better, or at least okay, but definitely not worse, definitely nothing emotionally or intellectually taxing, there I was, fascinated with the patterns in the dirt on the walls of the rabbit hole's tunnel.
It was a strange, powerful time. I suspect I shouldn't have read DeLillo's book when I did. I also suspect I had an immediate perspective on the book that nobody before, and nobody after, will ever have. Clouds on the ground; static in our brains.
Had I known three days earlier what I knew then, would I have still embraced it? Would I have still bought it? Would I have bought anything that day, would I have handed a clerk at Border's my debit card at 4:21 PM on a Sunday afternoon, signed my name on a slip of paper, taken unwitting pieces of my personal history away with me in a plastic bag? Would I be here today, right now, reading a book I don't remember buying, which I bought forty-odd hours before the entire course of my nation's history took a sharp, dodgy turn?
Where does the time go, when it's not being marked by a register receipt, lost between the pages of an unread story?
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