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Soon it was my turn, and my father got on. Man of few words.

“We told you not to call here anymore,” he said.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“I haven’t called in . . .”

I tried to put it all together. How long? Measuring time had become almost impossible. There was nothing to do but make a stab at it.

“ . . . three weeks.”

“We can’t give you anything more. Our own savings are nearly exhausted. You need to start thinking about how you’re going to get out of the jam you’re in without calling us every time it gets worse. It’s you who is making it worse. Understand? Think about what you’re doing!”

I could see the people behind me in the pay phone line leaning in toward the bad news, excited to get a few tidbits. Their own bad scrapes were not nearly as bad.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’ve told you before,” he said. “Don’t raise your voice with me.”

His own voice defeated, brittle.

“Put Mom on the line!”

“Absolutely not.”

“Let me talk to Mom!”

Then some more nonsense about how I had caused my mother unending sorrow, that it was her nature only to sacrifice, but I had squandered this generosity, had stamped up and down on it with my callousness, my American callousness, as if my family had not overcome innumerable obstacles to get me where I was. I made the selflessness of my heritage seem like a deluded joke. I had dishonored him, etc. etc., by my shameful activities, etc. etc. It was as good as if I had died during the blast.

A bona fide patriarchal dressing-down, of a sort that I thought I had left behind long ago. I was watching the faces of the people in the line behind me, and their faces were reflecting my own face. Incredulity. Confusion.

“Dad, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Listen to me.”

“You can’t call here every day with your preposterous lies. Your imagined webs of conspiracy. We won’t have it. We are exhausted. Your mother cannot get out of bed, and I am up at all hours frantic with worry about you. How are we supposed to live? Get some help!”

I smiled a befuddled smile for my audience, I replaced the receiver. In midstream. Of course, I hadn’t called my parents recently, hadn’t called them the day before, or the week before, or the week before that. Hadn’t called them often at all. My crime, in fact, was that because of shame about where I lived and what I was doing I didn’t really call anyone anymore. So what explained the circumstance?

I looked at the next guy in line. A melancholy African-American man, with a fringe of gray hair and eyeglasses patched with some duct tape. It was beginning to rain, of course, and I saw an obsidian blob splatter the surface of his glasses.

“I guess I just called them,” I said. “I mean, I guess I forgot that I called them.”

He pushed past me.

To forget was threatening now. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with a forgetter. A forgetter meant just the one thing. A forgetter had abscesses in his arm, or a forgetter had sold off the last of his possessions and was trying to sell them a second time, because he had forgotten that the apartment was already empty. The highest respect, the most admiration was accorded those with perfect recall— that was part of the diachronous theory, or if it wasn’t yet, I predicted it would soon be part of that theory. Geeks with perfect recall would get up in public settings, with a circle of folding chairs around them, and then, in front of an amazed audience, these geeks would remember the perfect textures of things, Ah yes, the running mates of the losers in of the last eight presidential elections, let me see. And the names of their wives. And weather on election day. Massive fraud would be perpetrated in certain cases, where these perfect-recall geeks would, it turned out, have needle tracks, just like the rest of us. Ohmygod! They were doping, and they would be escorted out into the street, in shame, where again rain was beginning to fall.

Which is why when I got back to the armory, and found the package on my bed, I felt that pornographic