The Memory City

Chapter One
An Ignoble Battle of Wills

I SET THE PHONE SPINNING on the glass table with my idle hand, the cascading notifications now a swirling blur. More pings from Rick, which I was ignoring on the grounds that Rick was a spectacular asshole. I went back to my book, and the screen subsided into blackness.

It was all very well for Rick, who never bothered to respond to any of my attempts to resume communication after however many weeks, months, or decades had elapsed in our lifelong frenmity. For ages, I’d played along with this pattern. Rick would call, I’d respond, we’d have an exchange, get together. But if I texted the next day with a follow-up joke—nothing. If I left a message two months later—nothing. Then a month after that Rick would text, as if nothing had been said in between—and I’d come running.

In my heart, I knew I was being a baby. But I’d inherited this grudgeful obsession with reciprocity from my father and could not seem to shake it, even though I was perfectly aware that this behavior was not even personal on Rick’s part: he was famously like this with everyone, due to being a titanic, world-class asshole. Yet I was still smarting from having contacted him a week ago with an invitation to have coffee and—nothing. The void. The abyss. The asshole.

“When Neuroses Collide,” I muttered aloud, recrossing my legs.

In any case, the frequency and insistence of Rick’s current voicemails and messages were belied by their bland contents, which were, essentially, hey adam. If Rick’s aged mother were dying or something, he could say so, though what I could do for Rick’s aged mother in that sad event was difficult to imagine. Well, get torrentially drunk with Rick, is the answer there.

This kind of barrage coming from my old friend was unusual but not unheard of. Occasionally, after weeks or months of sphinx-like silence, he would roar back to life, usually in the throes of some random new obsession. And therein was part of the reluctance to engage I felt now (beyond petty revenge for his recent ghosting). It’s not that Rick was a crackpot or conspiracy theorist, he was merely a scholarly enthusiast, intelligent and persistent, if not always strictly logical, but generally these crazes held less interest for me than Rick wanted them to, and it was frustration and irritation all around, especially in the last few years, since Rick’s life had blown apart.

Am I the asshole? I pondered for an abstracted moment before once again turning back to my book. Part of my mind was indeed reading the words on the page: I would recognize them later when I forced myself to reread it, having absorbed nothing. Shouldn’t I be encouraging him? In many ways, whatever this was about, it seemed to herald a renewed engagement with life, or some overly-intellectualized attempt at life, anyway.

I did wonder how Rick’s aged mother, Renate, was holding up. I’d always liked her, although her exotic German accent had been difficult for a teenager to parse. But the cookies she baked were exquisite, and their East Bay home—I realized this more clearly later—was of a somewhat higher class than my own family’s house, spacious and inviting, commanding a majestic view of the San Francisco Bay and the city itself, from high in the Berkeley hills. Now she resided in an expensive assisted-living home across the river in New Jersey. Rick’s late father, Jake, a Jew with not the most Jewish-sounding surname, Massey (“Anglo-Norman,” Rick had once explained—but Jews have all kinds of names), had met her while in the army, stationed in Germany after the war.

Another text came in, or probably it was the second notification for the first text, before it gave up on gaining my attention; the phone had spun away and landed facing away from me, so it was hard to say.

Eventually I spun it back around to check, but only because there was a non-zero chance it could be a reply from Claire Daitch, a woman with whom I’d gone on what I’d thought to be a promising date the other night. It was ridiculous to be in your fifties and still be waiting by the phone, getting the silent treatment you were at the same time meting out to your oldest friend.

No matter the mode or the technology, human communication remained a dispiriting morass of conflicting impulses, it seemed. An ignoble battle of wills.

dude! came the next message, this time a Twitter DM. I gazed down at Rick’s avatar, some obscure symbol he had once explained but I had forgotten utterly (it was impossible to keep up with the esoteric rabbit-holes and byways Rick was forever scurrying down), this mysterious sigil surmounting my notification screen like the escutcheon of some disgraced kingly lineage.

The battle of wills raged on for another day, the theatre of war moving among email, text, Twitter, and voice. This would have sent Kurt, the third of our group of Bay Area expats, into a fury: he was endlessly irritated by Rick’s habit of threading a single conversation through all these different platforms. He even hated it when Rick introduced a different topic on the same email thread. “That should be a new email!” he would scream. I don’t have Kurt’s mania for consistency, however, and am often amused by some of these quirks of Rick’s (though this was not one of those times).

These current well-spaced salvos all retained that annoyingly jaunty, casual vibe, casting me, I felt, as the insensitive, cold-hearted monster.

“But next he’ll show up here at daggers drawn,” I remarked to the large window at the front of my apartment, which looked down from one floor up onto the endless traffic of First Avenue.

Hey man, what’s up? I finally forced myself to text, the most neutral expression, on what I considered the most neutral platform: I certainly wasn’t going to phone this mad-headed bastard.

I put the phone down with a decisive thud. “Now?” I intoned ominously to myself, in well-rehearsed mockery of a favorite TV cliché, “Now . . . we wait.”

I fully expected Rick, having worn me down to embittered supplicant once again, to let me twist in the wind for another week. But no, he responded right away.

can u meet?