=Promised Land=

So let's say we had a head injury and we'd been wandering around lost for thirty, forty years. You know, like Moses in the desert. I'm just saying. I'm just trying to explain what it felt like happened because what really happened isn't even close to what it felt like. Someone hit me on the head from behind; I never saw it coming. Maybe it was my father struck the blow, but lately I've begun to think it was really my mother. Maybe it was both of them, taking turns, for reasons I'll never know, reasons they might not know themselves. Anyway, I was left with no idea who I was. I tried to be a lot of people in the meantime. Put identities on and took them off again. Like clothes. The mirror never showed my unmasked face; my naked body always stood outside the frame. Wherever I was at, it was a walled city as far as I was concerned. The real me always sat outside the gate, mute, with a cardboard sign in its lap. The people hurried past, looking the other way. The dogs came over to me, though; they recognized me immediately. But as what? I'd no idea, not being a dog, and more the pity for that. When I was a child, like most children, I decided one day to run away from home and never return; it would serve them all right, I reasoned, not entirely without reason. On a street that couldn't have been more than four or five blocks from my house, I was already completely lost. Up until then, I'd lived a very sheltered life. I came upon a manhole cover. The word India was engraved on it, worked into the elaborate design. For years after I really thought I'd somehow walked to India. Those were magical days. But was my mistake really so ridiculous? Why couldn't I have been in India? I was lost, wasn't I?  When you're lost, India might as well be anywhere. That's how I thought as a child. When you come right down to it, that's how I think now.