Recapitulation Read Online Free PDF Page A

renewal. He had seen them plain, living, solid, as unchangeable as history. They
were
history. That Pathé newsreel must be preserved somewhere. He could go to the archives and borrow it and project it and turn his momentary hallucination into actual images. Just before the boys appear on camera, President Calvin Coolidge has been crowned with a warbonnet by some tame Sioux in the Black Hills. Just after they pass out of sight beyond the bank corner, a forlorn family will start picking through the wreckage of their home in a tornado-struck Oklahoma town.
    Je suis une chose qui dure.
So said Henri Bergson, whom hehad probably not thought of since reading him as background for a college paper on Proust half a century ago.
Je suis une chose qui dure.
I am a thing that lasts.
    But not, it was clear, unchanged. New shapes took over from old ones. Memory had to be—didn’t it?—a series of overlays. I remember, therefore I was. I was, therefore I am. I both contain and commemorate myself. I am both grave and gravestone.
    Mason had left Salt Lake sick with hatred of Jack Bailey. But grievance and injured vanity did heal, and other recollections seemed to have lasted almost as well as the grudge. He wouldn’t mind seeing Bailey again, if only out of curiosity. And if Bailey, then certainly others, the ones who once made his world for him, Joe Mulder especially, who all but created Bruce Mason.
    Would he call Joe? Of course, why not? Though if he was still alive, as he might not be, their meeting could be an awkward effort by two strangers to reconstruct one another from memory. He had a vision of himself ringing a doorbell and being confronted by some old baldhead or some grandma with a hearing aid. “Remember me? I’m Bruce Mason, we used to know each other back in the nineteenth century.”
    The prospect both daunted and intrigued him. He had often enough imagined coming back and restoring all the relationships, filling himself in on all that had happened in his absence. But now that he was here, it did not seem an easy thing to do. He made himself another drink before he checked the telephone book.
    Then he had it open, his finger went down the M’s, and suddenly there it was, the name, even the same address, Joe’s parents’ house, which for two or three years had been more home to him than his own. Delighted, he hunted for a pad on which to write down the number, found none, and ended by fishing out of his jacket pocket the slip that McBride had handed him. He scribbled the number on the back of it, shut the telephone book, told himself that he might as well make this other call, too, whoever it was. Then he turned the slip over, looked, turned it back. The number was the same on both sides.
    Adrenalin went through him. He made a short, incredulous sound of laughter. Right in the same house, as if waiting! Whilethe absentee tried to make up his mind whether to restore old friendship, the stay-at-home acted as if it had never been broken. But it was a woman who called. His wife, presumably. It struck Mason as not completely protocol that the instant, infallible restoration of contact should not have come in Joe’s own voice.
    Just the same, nothing in a long time had given him this much pleasure. It made him, in fact, slightly giddy. He took a little impulsive walk across the room. The stiffness of the long drive lurked in his muscles. His skin had glazed over in the air-conditioned chill. As he sat down on the bed he had an unsteady moment, a darkening of the sight. Then it cleared. But it had lasted long enough to check his dialing finger. Wait, wait. A gap that wide couldn’t be closed in a minute. There would be plenty of time after dinner. Call him then.

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    In the old days the Roof Garden had been open, with awnings and pots and planters and the smell of freshly watered flowers. Now it was the Sky Room, enclosed for elegant dining. The sun had found clouds to hide in, and the windows were unveiled. Below his