My name is Brent Robison. I like to write fiction, although the definition of that term can be pretty slippery. I’ve mixed a lot of so-called “true” events from my life into my fiction. It’s a fun game to play. For instance, I recently began a new first-person story that uses an old meta-fictional gimmick: the protagonist’s name is the same as the author’s.
 
My friends in this small town where I live all know me as a writer, and most of them know I didn’t grow up in this area of New York state, nor even on the east coast. They know I moved from the west. But, except for my wife, not a single one of them knows the real story.
 
See, I’ve created a persona, and I perform it well. I’ve told everyone that I come from generations of Mormons and lived in Salt Lake City, Utah, before moving to New Jersey in the late eighties. I’ve told them I left Mormonism, divorced my first wife, and moved east to start a new life.
 
These are lies.
 
The truth is a little more strange.
 
My earliest memory, one that I’ll never forget, is of being awakened from sleep, summoned up out of warm subterranean darkness by a hand on my shoulder and a man’s voice. I blinked slit-eyed and wondering at a blazing crescent of light until it became the sun rimming a faceless, silhouetted head. He made unintelligible noises at first, noises that slowly assembled themselves into words that I understood. My fingers felt grit wherever they touched. I was thirsty. I did not know where I was. I knew nothing.
 
The man was a hiker, a weekend wilderness explorer. He had found me asleep, lying naked in the sand at the foot of a cliff in a remote desert canyon in southern Utah, far from any road or town. No clothes, no supplies, no footprints, nothing to even begin to explain me. I was a young man then, perhaps in my early twenties, I was told. My exact age was a mystery, along with my name and my entire past. I learned later that the year was 1974.
 
The hiker and his wife, both schoolteachers in Salt Lake City, became my first longtime friends, almost like parents to me although only a decade older. I withhold their names now to maintain their privacy. They gave me a home away from the institutions that became my residences the first few years. They taught me. Not merely about practical functioning and necessary facts, but about kindness. I will be forever grateful to them.
 
I never regained any memory of what had happened to me before waking up that day. I spent many hours with many doctors. My body was scanned by machines and tested in labs: brain, of course, but also thyroid, liver, kidneys. Testicles, colon. Motor function, reflexes, pupil dilation, again and again. Sleep studies, dream analysis. I was interviewed by reporters and interrogated by police. I was poked and prodded, coaxed and coddled, drugged and disbelieved… and, finally, forgotten.
 
Occasionally, during those early years, my teacher friends took me to their Mormon meetings, and encouraged me to meet young women there. I enjoyed a few conversations, but I found the environment stifling. I vastly preferred the Saturdays when they took me to the mountains or the desert. I never grew tired of seeing the Wasatch Front in every kind of weather, ridges of brown and deep green sloping up and up to snow-streaked granite peaks that towered over the city, jutting into dramatic skies of pure azure or billowing white. Then, when we drove up the long canyons and hiked rugged trails into the humming silence and the infinitely rich, living detail of those rough crags and grassy meadows and sweet piney glens and vast views, I found myself speechless with ecstasy. The same thing happened when we went south to the desert, where eons of wind and rain had sculpted stone into shapes like liquid frozen mid-leap, skyward, everything painted rust and bronze, standing up like the ribs of the earth against a vast blue dome, and where the golden light of sunset could turn the most harsh and dangerous wilderness into a glowing, fantastic dreamscape. These are the places where I felt born.
 
But then, with dread, I would return to the sterile cubicles where the quest for my identity went on and on. With all that research, still no one ever explained the initial anomalies: I had a full command of American English but appeared to know very little about current American culture. I didn’t know who the President was but could talk about art and literature and philosophy with more than common familiarity. I loved solitude but smiled easily and could rise to genuine, enthusiastic conversation, even in groups. I exhibited no symptoms of mental illness.
 
Yet, I was often treated as mentally ill. In one California hospital where I spent a month, there was a patient who never stopped talking. He called himself Frank and claimed he had a unique condition.
 
“Anamnesis, man. I mean, these doctors never hearda that shit cuz they don’t know Plato. But I do,” he ranted. “Anamnesis -- it’s the idea that we have knowledge from past lives, and learning is just re-discovering that knowledge inside our minds. That’s me, man. I’m rediscovering being an Aztec priest who cut out the hearts of holy virgins!” I stayed away from Frank. Soon I was sent back to my handlers in Utah as the probes continued.
 
I must confess: I was not a willing research subject. I was a fast learner and quickly began to pretend I knew more than I did. I was a successful adaptor and a skilled liar, and I lied to anyone I didn’t trust. What did it matter to me whether they learned something they hoped to learn? I just wanted to live my life.
 
Who am I? Yes, of course that question was of deep, burning interest to me, but I knew it was my question alone, not theirs. It was a lifelong journey I was on, to create a self.
 
My two benefactors understood. They helped me invent an imaginary identity, something ordinary and believable, and once the medical/legal system had given up and spit me out, I became that man -- a mask to wear while the internal investigation continued. One Christmas they gave me a 35 millimeter camera with two lenses and a tripod. I quickly discovered that I could sometimes come close to capturing the perfect way the light streamed across the land. Not always, but I was happy to keep trying. My new identity now included “photographer, aspiring.”
 
Before the turn of the decade, I was able to get a job in downtown Salt Lake City, stocking shelves, handling inventory, and eventually serving customers. That was where it seems my life in the civilized world began -- in the crowded, two-floor jumble of Sam Weller Books on Main Street. I loved it. I was a regular working man, a bit of an outdoorsy loner, sure, but with a few casual friends. I found it easy now to tell my practiced lies about my past when necessary, but mostly I avoided the subject. And boxes of color slides had begun to fill my small apartment, product of the hours spent happily tromping the wilderness. By 1984, with ten years behind me, I was feeling whole.
 
One day I was stocking shelves and a book that had been in our inventory for some months caught my eye for the first time. It did more than catch my eye; it riveted my attention and I didn’t know why. The cover showed a bold woodcut of a mountain in amber and burgundy. I stood for an endless ten minutes of forbidden idleness, entranced as I leafed through the pages and gathered the gist of the contents. It was the true-life account, mostly through letters and a handful of woodcuts, of a young artist/poet from Los Angeles, an obsessed, romantic adventurer who disappeared in 1934 at the age of twenty -- disappeared alone in the southern Utah desert, without a single trace ever being found. The book was by W.L. Rusho and was titled Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty.
 
I bought the book that day and I still have it on my shelf, one of the few that later made the trek with me from west to east. I read it in a weekend, then I read it again. His passionate, articulate descriptions of western landscapes and solo adventures were compelling to me. In a deep way, I understood Everett Ruess.
 
But there was something else. I was also interested to learn that although he was born in Oakland, he had spent part of his childhood in Brooklyn and in Palisades Park, New Jersey. This struck me because for the previous month, I had been haunted by recurring dreams that woke me in the darkness, woke me not with emotion or story but with stunning pictures vibrating in my mind’s eye. As far as I knew, these were images of something I had never seen with my physical eyes. Glittering, jagged, chaotic yet orderly. Monumental and, amazingly, manmade. The skyline of New York City.
 
I began saving money and making plans. In 1987 I said goodbye to my Utah friends and rode a series of Amtrak trains for three long days across the great emptiness of America to Penn Station, NYC.
 
Poverty in a fleabag hotel was eventually relieved by a job at the original Barnes and Noble store and a studio sublet. Dawn, golden hour, midnight, I was out on the street with my camera, and the hidden portfolio grew.
 
I confess that beauty came to me in entirely new forms in New York City. Not just dazzling cityscapes and fine architecture. Women. I had never seen such women. Everywhere: sidewalks, parks, museums, diners. For five years I was fully engaged with experiencing, consuming, reveling in female beauty -- a better-than-college education that gradually taught me about Relationship with a capital R. I was a late bloomer learning that beauty and kindness, beauty and love, beauty and happiness don't automatically go together.
 
Some months of celibate lonerhood followed. It was the summer of 1993 that I was roaming Central Park and passed a woman sitting on a bench reading a book. She looked up as I walked by and gave me a lovely, surprising smile. A half-hour later -- I couldn’t help myself, that smile was an irresistible magnet -- I went back and sat next to her.
 
“Whatcha readin’?”
 
“Amelia Earhart -- a biography.” She showed me the cover. “It uses a lot of her notes and journals from before she disappeared. Her own words, her passions. It’s good.” And then she smiled again.
 
That’s how I met Wendy. Her secret story will remain her own. Before two years were gone, we had fled the city for the silence, clean air, and green forests of Woodstock. Beauty all around, and more made by our hands. She flew inner space and intuited the conjuring of sculptures shaped like perfect masks. I captured autumn blaze, diamond-spiked snow, dripping woods, until gradually my pursuit of beauty turned from image to word: a vagabond for language, a seeker of story. And parenthood took us arm-in-arm into its ineffable realm of double-edged delight.
 
Years accrue, each more like the last. Now, on the top shelf of our big bookcase, between stone bookends, are those two volumes that brought us together: Ruess and Earhart, true tales of long-past mysteries, utter vanishings without which, it seems, we might not exist.
 
I have become a senior citizen of this alien planet without ever knowing my origin. This is my memoir. Now you know the truth.
 
 

© Brent Robison 2018