On my own and left to my own devices, however, imagined selves could be so deeply inhabited as to replace the boy imagining them, accruing the details not only of storylines but personal histories: on the overgrown banks of that backyard ditch and stripped to a pair of shorts and no shoes, I might be an Indian brave cut off from his tribe by the movements of Custer’s army, trying to read daylight stars to find my way to safety while also making reconnaissance of the enemy’s location; a pirate from England, the only survivor of a shipwreck caused by the necessary mutiny which grew out of hand, living flotsam who kissed the earth once he washed ashore, only to be taken prisoner by local authorities who then made him a slave (I named my pirate Edward Bonney and even construed an ersatz pirate costume from ripped trousers and an old wine-stained tuxedo shirt of my father’s that was several sizes too big, a bright red bandanna wrapped around my head). Before the movies introduced us to Indiana Jones, I was an archaeologist named Clifton Banks, scouring the ditch for fossils while keeping hid from the primitive tribes who protected their ancestral land. This guise sank so deeply into me that it influenced my actual dreams. In one that recurred for years I stumbled into an extraordinary discovery there in the drainage ditch behind our house. Beneath the riprap stone of culvert ballast that we neighborhood kids deployed for the construction of small dams, I uncovered a hidden cave entrance. I slithered along a narrow passage—too narrow for an adult—to where the cave opened into a great hall, and on the walls there the skeletons of several dinosaurs, many never seen or recorded before, stood out perfectly preserved as if in amber, mutedly aglow as though beneath recessed museum lighting, so long undisturbed that even the pores of flesh could be made out embedded in the stone. The long hallway narrowed and seemed to close and then open again the deeper I wandered, an endless honeycomb of rooms reaching farther back in time with each successive cavern, the animal history of the earth portrayed in its walls as clearly as that poster remembered strung beneath the ceiling on three walls of my first-grade classroom.
A world underground and the possibilities to be discovered there proved a longstanding fascination. Maybe because the district in which we lived appeared so orderly, planned, every house with its eighth-of-an-acre lawn drawn with clipped boxwoods or taxus hedges and punctuated by a single oak or maple or holly, each house itself a slight variation on the ranch split-level template. Years would pass before I came to suspect that the real curiosities occurred in the lives of the families who resided behind the doors and bay windows of all that bricked and shuttered sameness. At my young age, though, what lurked out of sight and worthy of exploration lay under everyone’s feet. That’s where all the adventure awaited. Many times I dipped into the cabinet where we kept useful necessities for the eventual power outage—the usual thunderstorms or even strong winds could be counted on to return the neighborhood to the nineteenth century several times every spring and summer—and grabbed the flashlight along with replacement batteries (because you never knew how long the batteries in use would last), taking care to shut the drawer carefully so that it didn’t appear disturbed in case my mother swept by. I didn’t want to field questions of what I was doing with a flashlight in the middle of a summer day.
Then I would venture out alone into one of the many culverts embedded around the neighborhood, these concrete tunnels which in my imagination transformed into the interior of a lost ziggurat, a labyrinth to be searched for the treasures of a people mysteriously disappeared. Surely someone must have lived around here before the area was developed—didn’t people live everywhere, all the time? So went my thinking. It was a small step then to enter those dark passages that connected one to another, slink past the scribbled and sprayed graffiti beyond where the light gave out, and slip into a maze of cold concrete, the useful bandanna now wrapped over my mouth as protection against the moldy air. For hours I crawled or else walked hunched over into the darkness, guessing at my location by the faint light falling through the intermittent curbside grates, junctions walled by what seemed to be ancient red brick. No real reason why behind this desire aside from curiosity and a vague awareness that such adventures would be forbidden by my parents, and might not even be exactly legal; but I wanted to see.
You confront your fears when on your own in the dark. Throw a stone and it disappeared, clacking away without much of an echo. The rumble heard distantly and rushing closer could be a flash flood raging forth or a truck roaring by overhead. Switch off the flashlight and remain absolutely still, squatting at the knees and listening to a silence more absolute than ever imagined, take in the darkness so complete you cannot see your hand in front of your face, not even after several minutes of waiting for your eyes to adjust; only the memory of what was seen before extinguishing the light gives any idea of where you are and what’s around you. Even though you hadn’t been taking particular note of where you’ve been or where you were headed, your mind presents a map like an opaque blueprint and you find that just so very interesting, and wonder if everyone’s brain works the same or only yours. Consider what you would do next if you dropped the flashlight now, or found that it won’t turn back on. See how long you can go without freaking out before testing the switch. Try not to think about the possible difficulties of finding your way out.
Always the important moment came in which I recognized having reached a certain point where retracing my steps without getting lost still presented a plausible option; there were junctions everywhere down there, different tunnels, different directions to select. After a few such decisions it seemed unlikely I could make my way back without getting lost. I would pause a moment and replay where I’d made a right turn, where a left, always with the comforting picture in mind of how the distant light would look at the culvert’s mouth—faintly perceptible and infinitely small at first, then growing into a riotous beacon as I imagined scrabbling my way nearer. I say “imagined” because it had to be, I never saw this actually happen. Never once did I turn around to go back the way I came. For whatever reason the flashlight beam kept pulling me forward, a separate tunnel would present itself, and then another one and then another, and I moved ahead with the faith that an exit would be on offer when an exit was needed, a pliable manhole cover or loose grate waiting at the ready for when I made my way out.
Clifton Banks never made any discoveries of lasting note among the detritus scattered around down there. In those long pauses with the light turned off he would think of his children at home, of his wife who had argued with him not to go this time, that she had a bad feeling about him going to this unknown and ancient place. He would think of his family and wonder what they were doing at that exact same moment in which he hardly existed, breathing bad air through his trusty bandanna. He thought of his colleagues at the university and his uncertain position there, not confidant that he had their due respect despite that the department’s very existence owed much to the values of his earlier discoveries. He sat in that absolute dark and wondered what the likelihood was, should he die right now, that any-body would ever find him, or know what had happened to him—and he didn’t mind the prospect of this, it seemed fitting in a way, though he knew it would crush his youngest daughter Bettina, who believed he ruled the world.
My faith in finding a way out was always rewarded. There the story would end, as I regained my place in full sunlight and open air on some unfamiliar street, sometimes with an audience of other kids struck still by this person crawling out from underground, no longer the intrepid explorer but just another twelve-year-old in need of a shower once he figured his way back home.
•
There were other selves with lives as detailed as Bonney and Banks and Indian braves—a soldier in World War II (always in that war, never the more recent Vietnam, which seems odd to me now; maybe because of the landscape difference?), a traveling pianist with a taste for the blues; my mother claims that I used to regale her with stories of my life as a teenaged girl who had been killed in a car wreck, telling her about the boys I’d liked at school and my father’s job at a supermarket and totally weirding her out, though I have no memory of this at all.
The purpose of these selves and their stories—if “purpose” is a legitimate term to ascribe to them, and not simply me dispatching a meaning to them out of some need—probably has to do with figuring out the story of who I was. Which I submit as a primary cause in creating fiction at all: by throwing ourselves into other lives, we can get to the truth of who we are.
The question then becomes how to account for where these other selves