The stroller was intact, its wheel still lying in a patch of marigolds several feet back. Nothing was missing from it except for a few energy bars and a handkerchief from the side pouch, which showed that somebody willing to steal had decided that the bulky vehicle was not worth the trouble. The blisters on Karen’s feet had spread to the thick skin of the sole, and she knew she wouldn’t make it back to the café unless she wrapped her foot up. Even so, she felt oddly good as she dragged the stroller behind her: a stranger watching from across the street might have described her as “full of purpose.” She felt as if Linda had said something that she herself had wished to say for some time. She had to find herself, inside herself, if she was ever going to feel connected again to the things she did all day. She thought about a friend she once had, who she no longer knew, and the long e-mails they used to write each other during their freshman year, describing at weekly intervals precisely how they felt college was changing them, as though logging this data meticulously could keep it all within their control. “I’m leaving you this trail of crumbs so you can find me and return me to myself if I wander too far away.” She couldn’t remember which one of them had written that junk line. Now her friend was living in Hollywood, a recovering heroin addict who never returned anybody’s calls. Last year she had stolen a mutual acquaintance’s car and tried to drive it out across state lines into Nevada to do who knows what. From the police station in the desert town she had used her one phone call to leave a message on Karen’s voice mail. It said: Hi, honey. Something wonderful’s happened. I finally figured out who I’m supposed to be. I’m beautiful and wise, when I say something it opens people’s hearts. The bad news is, I messed up, now I’m the wrong person. But still, I wish you could see me now! Peace and light! Karen hadn’t heard from her since.
She left the stroller outside, leaning on its empty titanium hub outside a drugstore, and limped inside. At the sound of the doors sliding open, the cashier at the counter looked up at her, then dismissed her immediately. The cashier was carving little marks into the checkout counter with a small, pointy pair of scissors in her hand. Karen limped past light-bulbs and window cleaner, full of possibility. Even here, in these boring and overlit aisles, her new good mood made it feel as though anything could happen: she could run into a friend or an ex-lover, she could receive an important phone call, she could have an important thought that would make her whole situation apparent to herself. She stood in front of the bandages and Band-Aids, taking in all their myriad shapes and colors — clear, nude, cloth-covered, breathably plastic, patterned with race cars and cartoon dolphins. She read the backs of the boxes: all the energy and force she would next use to find herself she directed toward this first decision, a practice decision. To her right, a man watched her, his hands in his pockets. He had a nice face with big teeth and ears. When you looked at his face, you could see right through it to the one he had as a little boy. It was easy to imagine him hanging upside down on a swing or standing in front of a rosebush, swatting at it with a broken-off stick. Karen saw him staring at her. She thrust forward a package of Band-Aids.
“Are you looking for these?” she demanded.
“Ah, no, sorry,” he said. He paused. “It’s just, I think I know you.” He had a look on his face like he was waiting for her to complete a sentence.
“From where?” Karen asked. She looked more closely at his whole person. He wore a white button-down shirt. She had always had trouble recognizing people she knew when they dressed up for work.
He named the college in Connecticut that she had gone to. He had been a film major — the film program had changed since he’d gone there, he told her, it used to deal in concrete skills, the mechanics of shooting and editing a film. Now it was mostly a place for people who liked movies to argue over the degree to which a given movie should be liked. Sometimes they invited him back to give a talk and he thought about refusing but in the end he did it anyway because if he could, in his brief thirty-minute talk, impart any advice on how one manipulates the substance of film, he felt that it was his duty. Karen nodded. She relaxed. With his patronizing tone and his floppy brown hair, he was just the sort of person she used to listen to at parties, trying to think of intelligent, psychologically driven questions to ask while she took small sips from a cup of lukewarm beer. She had always been interested in this type of person: in their arrogance, they reminded her of the stylized, opinionated person she might have become if she had been a man.
“How about you?” he asked abruptly, as if she had vanished suddenly and just now reappeared.
“Well,” Karen said, “I’m still writing.”
“That’s great. What do you write?” He had an interested but slightly lost expression on his face.
Like before, she wrote essays. She had written profiles of well-known people — actresses and an artist who sculpted glaciers out of man-made and toxic materials. She had written a long reported article on water sanitation. She had ghostwritten a book by a comedian whose awkward jokes about foreigners were obsolete; all that was left to him was to cash in on the stories he still had of performing with people whose more robust fame persisted to this day.
As Karen spoke, she saw that her old classmate was impressed by the things she had accomplished. She felt content. Talking about work had always made her feel more like herself. He asked thoughtful questions, and she answered them, taking up almost all the space in the conversation. Something in her was eager to expand, to monopolize, to be casually selfish in the way that others often were with her. She felt free, in an old, almost-forgotten way. The happiest week of her life had been in college, the summer after junior year. She had stayed in town working at the library, where she cataloged old, miscellaneous photos according to the objects or themes they contained: Fanaticism, Rhinoceros, Etiquette. At the end of August, students who had also spent the summer in town went home to visit their families for a week or two, but Karen’s family was on vacation. So she worked unsupervised in the frosty archive, and after work she jogged five miles to an old railway bridge over the river where she dangled her feet and looked down, watching trash and swaths of plant debris pass below her, borne by the current. When her mother called, she turned her phone facedown and left it there. She would call back several hours later, once she was sure her family was all asleep.
She talked and he nodded. Talking was easy, as it used to be when she was younger and as it would be again and again in the future. This town, which was foreign, would become home, and home would slip again into foreignness. It was only in this small sliver of her life that she would be lonely, and it would pass. But then Karen noticed that he was looking at her more intently than before. She looked away, a reflex.
“Listen,” he said seriously. “I’m glad you’re not still upset, but I wanted to apologize.”
“Apologize for what?” Karen asked.
“You know, for what happened that last year of school.” He picked a box of toothpaste up from the shelf, glanced at it, and put it back down.
Karen searched her college memories earnestly for times when she had been wronged. Most of her life, she felt, had been spent alone in rooms.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“For the video. I hear it messed you up.” Karen could tell he was annoyed that she was making him reassemble the whole situation in front of her in words. “The video of you,” he said, “the one I used for class. I know it seemed exploitative, but the idea was to implicate myself. About being male in the cultural moment of the sex tape.”