Blackout_ Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget - Sarah Hepola

awake. I stopped despairing for what I didn’t get and I began cherishing what I did.
IN NOVEMBER OF 2013, I flew back to Paris. It had been seven years since I staggered into that gutter on
the wrong side of 2 am, and I had left the city saying I’d never return. Classic drunk logic: Paris was
the problem, not me. This is what drinkers do. We close doors. Avoid that guy. Never go back to that
restaurant. Seek out clean ledgers. We get pushed around by history because we refuse to live with it.
I wanted to go back. I wanted to find out what I could. There were only two people on the planet
who could help me backfill the events of that night, and Johnson’s was the only name I knew.
Entering the hotel again was like walking into a snapshot in the pages of an old photo album.
There was the gleaming white stone of the floor. There was the plate glass window. And there was
the ghostly feeling: This is the place.
“I stayed here once, years ago,” I told the guy behind the counter. He was young, accommodating,
and spoke perfect English. I asked him, “You wouldn’t be able to tell me the number of the room I
stayed in, would you?”
“I’m so sorry,” he said. The hotel had changed ownership. Its records didn’t date back that far.
I expected as much. My story took place a mere seven years ago, but tracking down details of the
Paris trip felt like trying to find the wedding jars from Cana. My old emails had been purged by
Hotmail. My assigning editors had no record of where I’d stayed and no memory of the hotel’s name.
I couldn’t find my credit card statements, having closed those cards years ago. I tried the bookkeeper
at the magazine, who said she might be able to break into old records and find my receipts, but it
required a password from someone on vacation. In this technology age, we talk about information
living forever—as though an infallible archive is the burden we must bear—but we never talk about
how much information gets lost. Whole chunks of our history can disappear in the blip of an HTML
code.
“There was a guy who worked at the concierge desk named Johnson,” I said to the young man.
“Does he work here anymore?”
Johnson, Johnson. He checked with a few coworkers. “Nobody here knows that name, no.”
I figured he was long gone, but I had to ask. I was afraid to see him again, but I also wanted to
hear his side of the story. How I sounded to him. What he saw in my face. He called me once. I was at
a fancy Thanksgiving dinner party at Stephanie’s, a few days after I got home, and to hear his voice on
the other end of the line was like a hand grabbing me around the throat. I couldn’t figure out how he
got my number. What the fuck, dude? What the fuck? After I calmed down, I remembered. I gave it to
him.
“Can you think of anyone else at the hotel who might know this Johnson guy?” I asked the young
clerk behind the counter.
The kid crunched his brow. “The concierge who works in the morning,” he said. “He’s been here
for 25 years. If anyone knows this man, he will.”
I thanked him, and spent the rest of the day retracing the steps I took all those years ago, a guided
tour of my own troubled past. I was relieved by how many of my memories were correct. Some
details I had wrong. The sheets were scratchier than I remembered. The hotel door a revolving
entryway, not an automated push.
As I walked to the Eiffel Tower, I tested my own recall. There will be a crêpe stand two blocks