A Fragment

Am bone-tired and headachey and a little spent from finishing the draft of the second Felix and Boo story. For tonight a wisp of a memory for no apparent reason. It just popped into my head.

An image: I am lying on the floor holding a book above my head, reading. I often choose, still, to lie on the floor to read--a habit begun in the days when my parents kept our drafty colonial house cold in the winter and I would lie on the heating vent--but in this image I am 22. It is my first job. I work in publishing, as an editor, and I love it: I may be one of the few people I know who thrive on office life, which is ironic, considering I have not worked in an office in a very long time.

I shared my office space, my first year of work, with a bitter, funny, insecure red-haired guy named Daryl, whose passion was ska music and who played the saxophone in a well-known ska band when he wasn't being rude to people on the telephone. Most days at lunch I would go outside, either alone or with one of the other young editors or to meet one of several college friends who also worked downtown in Boston. But sometimes, when I was reading something especially good, or just in the mood, I would walk up to the very top floor of the elegant Beacon Hill brownstone the publishing company I worked for was fortunate enough to own, and quietly close the door behind me.

It occurred to me once that I could have lived up there; no one would ever have known. Hundreds of years before it became a sort of forgotten storage area it had probably been maids' quarters. Light streamed in the thick original window panes and onto the carpeted floor; someone had put down a carpet in a pale neutral color, a beigey-pink. Dusty boxes were set by a few of the walls, along with stacks of paper and a couple of outdated computers, but I don't think most of the other people who worked in the building even knew the floor existed, or if they did, they'd never had the temptation to go there.

I don't remember how I discovered it, but one afternoon, at my lunch hour, when I was headed out, I thought of the door on the fourth floor, the door that I knew must lead to a staircase, as the building had a fifth floor, if you thought about it. You could see from the street.

So nothing special. I just remembered this tonight: reading up there by myself in a beam of sunlight, the absolute quiet when the door was closed, the sense of a place or a time out of time. And then, the deliberately quiet walk back down, the careful closing of the door behind me, the re-entry into the office, the summons for someones birthday cake, a meeting, Daryl's desire to have me hear a riff that we both knew I wouldn't understand on his headphones.

And writing this, ending it now, I smile, because it has actually, unexpectedly opened a number of doors, other memories from this time, this office, this age. But tomorrow is, if we are lucky, another day.