Imperial

Journal

22 journal Now we’re on this tourist island and I am going to rent a golf cart. That would be a good way, a very good way, to start a novel. But this is not a novel, it’s my life. It must be written down so that later, when I’m old, barely able to walk around whatever fearful place I finally end up in, I’ll look in my journal and there will be my writing, my own hand, bolder and darker than the trembling scrawl age has dealt me. I will stand at the window looking at the new kinds of cars—mostly Chinese, I’m guessing— zooming past in a world I no longer get on any level. I will think about the 58-year-old self who rented a golf cart that day, his beautiful young wife beside him as he talked to a nice Mexican guy named Ernesto about insurance and late return policies, and not one of us—my wife, Ernesto, me— recognizing the enormity of this, the sorrow, the hugeness of the moment in all its beautiful ordinariness as it leaned so temporally, so irrecoverably against the void. And I will stand there weeping impotently. I can see it coming. Already I’m prone to saccharine effusions, and it’s only going to get worse with age. I write this down in my journal: saccharine effusions—don’t worry about them. Which will make my 88-year-old self smile, then weep all the harder. ...