Since that day, I’ve made a habit of keeping that little bag packed. When I still lived at home, I kept it under the bed, a secret from my mother. It stood by the front door after I moved. You would know my home—or to be precise, the place where I was staying—by a small bag packed and ready by the door.

Not just a change of clothes or two, but books as well, mostly collections of short stories plus digests and essays. Big books, the long novels, were beyond me; I had the powerful and unshakable conviction that the house would be raided before I’d gotten a quarter of the way through, before I’d be done with the introduction. Unshakable, I say, and furthermore, one that expanded to all areas of my life. I came to prefer contract work, for instance, getting paid per job, and refused any regularity in my income or my hours. My whole existence revolved around a single imperative, and to disregard it would leave me struggling to breathe: I must be able to go away at any time without feeling that I was leaving a thing behind—work, possessions, people, not even unread pages in a book.

Learning to cook was out, for instance. I had no time, though I had all the time in the world. Inside me, that other clock was ticking, a constant warning against attachments. I never ate main courses but subsisted on appetizers. Like my life, I often thought: an assemblage of side plates but never the big dish; a little money, a little love, a morsel of success, but nothing that ever defined me.

That said, the first time I was ever happy with a job was at a seaside restaurant in the far north. They say the kitchen’s the hardest work there is, but I was happy. For hours I did nothing but stand at the sink and wash dishes. Wash wash wash, dishes without end, as though they had the whole world dining there. Nobody ever asked more of me than to keep on going. Nobody expected me to be imaginative or inventive or to “make a suggestion.” Nothing asked of me and nothing given, either—and it was part-time too. Five seconds after I was done for the night, I’d be in the street and free as a bird until the following afternoon. I was a cog in a machine, and how happy I was. Just a working part: no responsibility for the past, no need to worry about the future. Guiltless, conscienceless, un-responsible.