Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 86
had never been so easily catalogued, but he had never faced with
such deep apprehension the fact that he did not know where he
was. He was at the head of a slalom trail, he was waiting for a train,
he was waking after a bad drug trip in a hotel in New Mexico.
“Hey, Tiny,” he would shout, “where am I?” Tiny understood.
“Falconer Prison,” he would say. “You killed your brother.”
“Thanks, Tiny.” So, on the strength of Tiny’s voice, the bare facts
would return. In order to lessen this troubling sense of other-ness,
he remembered that he had experienced this in the street as well.
The sense of being simultaneously in two or three places at the
same instant was something he had known beyond the walls. He
remembered standing in an air-conditioned office on a sunny day
while he seemed, at the same time, to be standing in a shabby
farmhouse at the beginning of a blizzard. He could, standing in a
highly disinfected office, catch the smell of a woodbox and
catalogue his legitimate concerns about tire chains, snowplows
and supplies of groceries, fuel and liquor—everything that
concerns a man in a remote house at the beginning of a tempest.
This was a memory, of course, seizing someplace in the present,
but why should he, in an antiseptic room in midsummer, have
unwillingly received such a memory? He tried to track it down on
the evidence of smell. A wooden match burning in an ashtray
might have provoked the memory, and he had been skeptical
about his sensual responsiveness ever since he had, while watching
the approach of a thunderstorm, been disconcerted by a wet and
implacable erection. But if he could explain this duality by the
smoke of a burning match, he could not explain that the vividness
of his farmhouse memory deeply challenged the reality of the
office where he stood. To weaken and dispel the unwanted
memory, he forced his mind beyond the office, which was indeed
artificial, to the incontestable fact that it was the nineteenth of
July, the temperature outside was ninety-two, the time was threeeighteen
and he had eaten for lunch scallops or cod cheeks with
sweet tartar sauce, sour fried potatoes, salad, half a roll with butter,