. . . We moved from doctor to doctor assembly-line fashion. Our last hurdle was a psychiatrist. “Do you date?” he asked me. Thanks to Margaret, I gave him a confident yes. He waved me on. Ah, such are the refinements of my profession: We’ll take anything standing, but weed out the queers. Lars Davidsen was nineteen. Unless there had been something between him and Lisa, Margaret Lien was the only girlfriend he’d ever had. Before he left Minnesota for the first time in his life, he called her at her dormitory on the campus of Martin Luther College to say good-bye. I did not tell her of my dreary state of mind. We just chatted. But, if I have anything resembling a soul, Margaret’s voice of that evening will certainly be part of it.

WHEN I ASKED Inga about the Inside Gotham article, she said it hadn’t appeared, and she was hoping it had been dumped. “I’m sure they’re not really interested in what I had to say, and maybe they didn’t get anything juicy from other people, so it probably won’t come out—too boring. It’s ironic, though, because in my book I try to talk about the way we organize perceptions into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, how our memory fragments don’t have any coherence until they’re reimagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense. But then, that woman isn’t interested in the problem of consciousness and reality. She doesn’t give a jot about philosophy. These journalists actually believe they can get the real story, the objective truth, or tell both sides, as if the world is always split in two. At the same time, ‘reality’ in America has become synonymous with the rank and sordid. We’ve fetishized the true story, the tell-all confession, reality TV, real people in their real lives, celebrity marriages, divorces, addictions, humiliation as entertainment—our version of the public hanging. The crowd gathers to gape.” After this speech, Inga paused. “You know who she made me think of?”

“No.”

“Carla Screttleberg.”

“Your tormenter in the sixth grade.”

Inga nodded. “The ache has never gone away. She got all the girls in on it. No one would speak to me, or, if they did, it was to say something hurtful. I hadn’t done anything to anyone. I found it incomprehensible, and yet those months are blurry now. I see bits, not wholes, parts of the school building where something cruel must have been said, a stairwell, a hallway, the classroom, my desk, chalk drawn on the cement to play foursquare. All saturated with general misery. It’s as if my sadness soaked the architecture. I can tell you a story about it, and I wouldn’t be lying, but would that reconstruction of events be real or true?”

“No—just true for you now.”

“When it happened to Sonia, I felt desperate.”

“But it ended for both of you.”