Sunrise with Seamonsters by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux [Theroux, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

There is a bad dream which everyone suffers. It takes place in a large overbright room, filled with people going, "Quack! Quack!" You know every person in the room, and it seems incredible, because there are so many, big and small. Your whole populous past has assembled for a long night to torment you. I often get these dreams in distant places. I had them in Africa and Singapore, the Medford dreams in the tropical early morning.

The years fall away. The smallest figure in the corner has a name; one person's posture, another's ears, buck teeth, crewcut—it is all familiar. Face after face appears, most of them laughing and perspiring and poking fun. You wonder: What's the occasion? They know you better than anyone, and though you have only been subtly scrutinized you wake up feeling naked, because you have been judged. You have been reminded of what you are.

We like to think we have secrets. Childhood and early youth are full of them. Time passes, and the secrets are lost to us. But the high school reunion disinters the past and rehashes it, like that dream. Decades are pressed into a few hours. If it were not so brief it would be a nightmare. But it happens so quickly it is painless, and yet a shock, for no one changes so much that he becomes unrecognizable to his childhood friends. What shocked me there at the Hilton Inn, among the Class of '59, was the fact that I had kept my secrets so well they had become practically undiscoverable to me, and if I had not gone to the reunion I would never have known how I had made my childhood and high school days into a fiction.

It was not only the guns, the frog-sticking, or Humphrey's raft. Here was Patrick Shea reminding me of the time we made a canvas canoe, pushed it over a high steel fence at Spot Pond and paddled like mad to an island in the centre. This was illegal: it was a reservoir—drinking water! There were mounted police patrolling the bridle paths, but we escaped getting caught, and even pissed contemptuously into the reservoir before we made off with our canoe. Was this a youthful lark? No, not so youthful. I was about sixteen and should have known better. My older brothers said I ought to take up basketball.

For twenty years, until the reunion, these high school days had receded and become distorted in a haze that made retrospection bearable. I saw myself as bespectacled and bookish, a bit of a shut-in, boning up for the Science Fair. As the years passed I concocted a version of high school which was an intellectual preparation for becoming a writer. The version continued to elude me: I could never quite pin down how it had happened. I had done very little writing in high school, apart from the required essays about Julius Caesar and my "project" on Piltdown Man (the Piltdown Hoax went on hoaxing Medford, long after it was debunked in academic circles).

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