“There are huge chunks of time in my childhood that I don’t remember.” Kate says.

“Maybe you were abducted by aliens.”

She gives me a look.  Her chin tilted down, her eyes high in their orbit.

“How about you, do you remember a lot?”

I look away and stare through the colored liquor bottles rising like mountains on the bar, greens and browns and blues. The East River lies still beyond them. A slow hazy July day rolls outside. If I were still drinking, I’d tell her about it. I’d tell her all about it.

Nixon is still president there. Every night, the news man talks about how gorillas are killing American boys in Vietnam. I watch them get pulled by their arms and legs through the jungle. The leaves in the jungle jump when the guns fire. This is all I know of the world. This and that Jesus died for me. I feel awful about this. Some years later when I have my first confession, I have to make up sins, because I can’t recall any. I don’t want to insult Jesus. There were battles in my kitchen too.

One of my therapists once asked me to map out the house I grew up in. That I didn’t remember. I remember the plays, but not the stage.

Sometimes I have dreams that are almost demonic, shit flying around the room. Some invisible heaviness sitting on my chest. The dreams have an evil air to them, a primal hopelessness. I’m always a child in the dreams. I banish it all away by invoking Jesus Christ. It works, in dreams at least.

Kate’s eyes are bright blue. I can see the mountains of bottles in her pupils, staggered like terraced mountains. Behind them the East River runs still and deep. Bill Clinton is the President.

“I don’t remember anything.” I lie. “Let’s talk about you.”