Vincent Barry A Lot Like Limbo “The unconscious can snuff out a meaningless existence with surprising swiftness. . . .” Jung said that. I read it in therapy. My wife insisted I go after she caught me in the kitchen in a torrent of sobs, and I blurted out everything about the girl. A girl I knew a long time ago has come back, is what I said, just like that—both the girl and the way I said it, and a lot more. I didn’t mean physically—for all I knew the girl was dead, in which case I just knew I’d have to go back and throw myself on her grave—which I also told my wife. . . . I meant in memory—but just as real. She’d returned two days earlier, the girl had. *** I had been idling at the computer at the time, scanning the online news
when bango! a headline caught my eye. It was about a shooting, of a cop. That wasn’t what grabbed me, though. It was the dateline. “Lakewood, NJ.” The word froze me—“Lakewood.” I mean it shut every thought out of my mind and—well, it held me is what it did . . . tight, like it would never let go. And I just sat there. . . . I don’t know for how long— just staring at the word . . . spellbound. I’d met the girl there, you see—at a dance. She went to college in Lakewood. But I wasn’t thinking of that at the time—I mean I wasn’t conscious of it, of her or the dance or anything like that—not when my fingers, as if attached to a hand possessed, typed L-A-K-E-W-O-O-D. And even afterward, after the word appeared in the search box, I just sat there— “unhurried, unflurried, unworried,” as James once wrote of a