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the next two weeks I binged on memories to keep from letting the pain sink in. I went to the Himalayas and gambled in Vegas, I slept with porn stars and got wasted with celebrities, I drove in stretch limos through Hollywood and sat on the beaches of the world watching sunrise after tropical sunrise, beaming one after another memory, until one morning I found myself in the early light, dehydrated, shaking and sweaty, without a clue of who I was.
    Did I have parents? Were they both still alive?
    In one memory I recalled attending their funeral. In another I pictured them tanned and happy in L.A. And in yet another I remembered our childhood home in Tibet. I scrolled through my phone, my grip sweaty and slippery, until I found a number listed as Home.
    A woman picked up on the third ring.
    “Hello?” she said, her voice distant and unfamiliar.
    “Mom?” I asked. “Can I come home?”
    *   *   *
    MY LIFE SINCE leaving the memory business has mostly been recovery and learning to forgive Quimbly. I work to get my memories straight. I’ll recall my parents’ death, envision myself as an angry teenager, smoking cigarettes in the Rockies after their funeral. Then I’ll hear the floor squeak above me, hear my mother in the kitchen, listen to my father cough before he lets the door slam, and I’ll remember that I never lived in Colorado but grew up here in Brooklyn. I live in my parents’ basement again, like when I was a teenager, and I never smoked cigarettes, merely spent my daylight hours in this subterranean darkness programming computers.
    I got a job at a coffee shop in the neighborhood, where I help curate the art on the walls and brew lattes for the kids who’ve settled this outpost of New York City. And I work on my letter to Cynthia. I sit, pen in hand, trying to remember what love felt like. I miss you, I write. I’m better now. I want to make real memories together.
    Quimbly saved me, there’s no doubt about that. Had I never fallen in love with Cynthia, she never could’ve left me; had she never left me, I never would’ve stopped beaming. Typical, though, that even Quimbly’s acts of kindness were sadistic. It was when I’d finished my letter that I finally understood what his going-away present had been. After sealing my pages into the envelope, I picked up my pen to write Cynthia’s address, and had no clue where she lived. Every memory I had of her involved my apartment, the bistro, or walking the streets in winter. Hadn’t I ever seen her apartment, I wondered. And then, before I could stop myself, I realized I’d found the edge. Light poured through the cracks where stories of her family should’ve been. It came streaming in from the hallway of my old apartment, which had never been clean, but was a dark, curtained cave filled with take-out containers and an unmade bed. The bistro where we ate never had a name; the Chinese takeout never had fortune cookies. And yet, all the other details had been masterfully placed by Quimbly, every memory bunched together to form a life that had never happened. I sat there in the coffee shop, the light fluttering behind my eyelids, feeling my heart sail off the edge of the world.
    Love scars memories, even if it was never real. When I walk the streets I think: we walked here together, she used to touch my arm like this, and the pain of white emptiness sets in. You can’t get rid of memories; you can only try to ignore them. I’ve been weeding through my old memories, finding the edge of the world in one memory after another. I was never in France or Tokyo, have never seen the California redwoods or swum in the Caribbean, and I’ve never made love with Cynthia. All the same, I keep working on my letters to her. I tell her I can still remember her skin against mine as we slept, the light in her eyes when I’d open my apartment door for her, and the sound of her voice, telling me, over and over, just how much she loved me.

 
    HEARTLAND
    MY SON IS doing