The Confabulist by Steven Galloway Read Free Book Online Page A

shocked, and watched as she pulled out of the parking spot and drove away.
    My ears hummed and then I knew the problem was indeed that this had not been my car. I remembered that my car was in fact the blue Honda four or five spots down.
    The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became. I had never owned a green Chevrolet. I knew this. How, then, was I to square this knowledge with the fact that I had a clear memory of pulling into the lot of the grocery store and parking that green Chevy? How was it I could feel the vinyl of the seats, hear it squeak as I eased out of it, hear the thud of the heavy door slamming shut behind me?
    There were other, similar incidents. Small things. I tried to dismiss them, but each time they came with a memory, a recollection that I knew to be false but which seemed real.
    When I told my regular doctor about it, he looked at me as though I were lying. “You mean you’re remembering things that aren’t true?”
    Eventually, after numerous assessments that led nowhere, I was referred to Dr. Korsakoff. He ran a battery of tests. His office called me in for the results. And now here I am.
    Substance and illusion. Knowing which is which is difficult, maybe impossible. The audience in a magic act knows it’s a trick. They don’t believe the magician has magical powers. But they want to. They want the illusion to have substance, even if it’s a substancethat’s unknowable to them. The job of the magician is to nurture this desire, twist this desire, tease this desire. It must be made to seem impossible but also possible. There must be a moment when a logical outcome is made baffling and wondrous. If he fails to create this moment, then he is a failure as a magician.
    One of my earliest memories is of being maybe five or six and going on a picnic with my parents. I remember my mother in the kitchen making sandwiches, and helping her pack a basket with sweets and bottles of soda. My father carried it as we hiked to a meadow a few miles from our house. A bee chased me for a while, buzzing in my ears as it careened by, and I hid behind my mother in an attempt to confuse it. She laughed at this while my father pretended that the bee was chasing him, dropping the picnic basket and waving his hands in the air, mimicking my childish hysterics.
    We found a clearing and my father spread a blanket out on the ground while my mother unpacked our basket. The field smelled of dandelions, and above me there was one lone cloud that I tried to impose a familiar shape upon but it looked only like a cloud. I bit into my sandwich, the sharp tang of mustard on roast beef a puzzle in my mouth, and sat there warm and satisfied. I can still feel the cool breeze gliding across my forehead.
    Years later, when I was about fourteen, I mentioned this day in passing to my father and he stared at me, his face blank, and said that we’d never been on any such excursion. As sure as I was that we had, I knew better than to argue with him. I asked my mother about it, and she couldn’t remember that day either. “There’s no meadow like that within walking distance of our house,” she said, and the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. We’d never been on any other sort of picnic like that before or since. But I remembered it as clearlyas I knew my own name. Over the coming weeks I spent my afternoons combing the surrounding land for a place that looked even remotely like the spot in my memory.
    I still wonder if this memory is real or false, if it’s me or everyone else who’s wrong. Because that moment on the blanket is the happiest childhood memory I have. It has become the baseline from which I judge subsequent experiences. To this day the best thing I can imagine is sitting in the sun with your family, comfortably quiet and happy for the fleeting joy of being alive. Is this illusion or substance? What does it mean if this moment never happened?
    I wondered about this even before Dr. Korsakoff’s