It is assumed that the last stitch in a rug somehow touches the first stitch as the final word in a sentence or poetic line reaches back into reading time and provokes meaning. In film, the last image recalls the first.
In my room, for example, I have a leather pouch filled with coins: six, it may be true, old silver dollars mysteriously minted. I don’t, however, know where this room is any longer.
I do know that each of those coins may contain four other circles and a triangle whose vertices are ABC. ABC each form the center points of three of the internal circles relative to the super circle that forms the coin, whose center is S’. When I think of the coins, I consider the implications of symmetry, and when I think of the lacework of rugs, I think about the magic of sentences.
It may be true that the penny I handed across twenty years ago has found its way back to me. Or a forgotten face finds its way back. Example: I met an old friend in Mexico City. Of all places on the intersection of 5 de Mayo and Bolivar.
He called me by name and I stopped, thought about it, and said his name back and shook his hand. He said, “What a wonder to see you here of all places.”
I said, “Yes, it could have been Chicago.”
He said, “I was there just last week” and we laughed. We had coffee. Five minutes into our conversation, I felt alarmed by his alienness. I felt an ominous feeling of estrangement and displacement, as if I had suddenly come into contact with someone who might kill me at any moment. Every nostalgic word he uttered, every name he spoke, every incident he narrated made me shake. I felt the need to run.
I flew home the next day. I sat on the couch and considered the photographs I have on the walls, the northwestern wall behind which a river flows. On the couch, I couldn’t shake the fear that I had felt in that Mexico City cafe, seated with that stranger. These photographs, these faces and other artifacts in them, belonged to another man. This other man had crept into the house behind me as I’d entered with my bags and leapt into the den without my noticing. I felt the geography of fear. I felt suddenly that the intruder was standing behind the couch and that he had a knife in his hand.
The feeling of intrusion was strong enough to make me turn. But when I turned I saw nothing, no intruder, just vague outlines of things, triangles, rectangles, an empty kitchen.
