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I could barely get out of the car. I was soaked in sweat, clenched tight as a fist. He pulled away, leaving us standing by our packs in the desert heat.
    For a minute, as though embarrassed by something, we didn’t speak. Then we slipped on our packs and walked across the road to a store of some kind, where we treated ourselves to a cold soda. It was over.
    It’s not the experience that interests me here. The event itself, after all, was almost banal: two kids catch the proverbial bad ride, and don’t die. So what? What interests me is the aftermath, the effect.
    For almost twenty years, you see, I didn’t know there was an effect. We went on. We finished our soda, married, had children. Along the way, I began to write. We didn’t forget, à la Seifert, what had happened to us—far from it. We told the tale again and again. For twenty years we regaled new friends with it, tricked it up like a pet poodle and made it dance about, bored each other silly with it. In time, it came to have nothing to do with us. Although all the essential details were still there (altered just enough to spare ourselves the pain of an identical retelling), it had became a pose, a self-dramatizing tic, an amusing story recounted over dinner (“And that’s when he turned to me—by the way, what do you think of this wine?—and said…”).
    What I didn’t realize was that the thing itself had gone underground. And although it surfaced periodically, sometimes in ways almost laughably obvious, I remained oblivious to it. In a recurrent nightmare that visited me perhaps once a year—to take just one, particularly humiliating, example—I would be behind the wheel of a car, my wife beside me, when it plunged over the side of some impossible height: wind whistling against the steel, and a realization that there was nothing to be done, no way to live. And yet, through all those years, I swear I did not make the connection. I assumed, for some reason, that I had always had this particular dream. My blindness, at times, was comical. When the melodramatic ending of
Thelma & Louise
made me almost physically ill, I wrote it off as a token neurosis—my little burden—and thought nothing more of it.
    The lid did not come off the pot for seventeen years—until the day I found myself, so to speak, walking past the wall where I had expected to die. Unlike Seifert, however, I knew precisely where I was and what I was there for. Turning up the road from Lake Isabella, my wife beside me and our children in the back seat, I stopped at the cattle guard, then drove the road again. Slowly. By the time we emerged from the shadow of the canyon walls, I understood (no blare of trumpets here, no flash of revelation) the genesis of all those years of dreams, and knew, as well, that I was shut of them forever.
    Time makes liars of us all. The moment passes; our words alone are left us. An obvious truth. That our character can prefigure an event as well as be shaped by one, that reality and consciousness are mutually dependent, is, perhaps, less obvious. Did the twenty-eight-year-old Dostoevsky really quote Hugo while waiting to be tied to a stake and shot, as his comrade F. N. Lvov remembered a decade later? Did Jaroslav Seifert really remember a picture on a public toilet, then wonder idly what the people across the way were making for lunch? Should we see the letter Dostoevsky wrote to his brother immediately after the ordeal as an accurate representation of his thoughts those last few minutes in Semenovsky Square, or read the famous mock-execution scene in
The Idiot,
written some twenty years later, as the truest depiction of what he endured that December morning? Should you, finally, believe my retelling of the ride we caught that summer day in 1985, or accept my recollections of what went through my mind those few minutes? Should I?
    Yes and no. Every retelling is inevitably a distortion, but that does not mean it is without value. We can’t help but tell the