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The Shape of Distance On the wall hung a poster of German terrorists from the early 1970’s. I pointed to a bearded man in the center and told her it was me. Martin X, I said, like Malcolm X, only not black or a panther. She wanted to believe me but I had no proof. Dark sunglasses consumed the man’s eyes, eyebrows and upper cheekbones. Little of me today could she match with the younger version of me then. It’s the only picture they had of me, I said, as I was never caught, thus the reason for a wanted poster. I popped a pain killer and lit a cigarette. The man to my left, I told her, was killed in Dusseldorf a few days before the poster came out. The man to my right fled to Prague and from there to Strasbourg, where the last I heard he was painting watercolors of the Maginot line and selling them to tourists. The whereabouts of the rest I had no idea. At the time, our past was of little concern, and of our futures, we had no doubt they would be cut short. I asked if she wanted a brandy, to which she raised her palm and shook her head. I poured myself a glass and watched it swirl in my hand. On a low oak table stood a chunk of broken concrete the size of a man’s torso, silhouetted by front-window sunlight. Painted in yellow on the facing surface was the lower half of a peace symbol. I told her this was brought to me by a young German who identified himself as a student of the revolution. This piece of the Berlin Wall, he had said, was a gift to me from his generation. He said they knew of me and recited my work in coffee houses and grottos. He didn’t seem to understand, and I didn’t see reason to correct him, that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the end of the revolution as we knew it. I told her I couldn’t see things in three dimensions, something to do with faulty depth perception. Everything appeared to me as triangles, squares and polygons, and only in fog, when things farther away were made less clear, could I perceive depth and distance. She wanted to believe me but without the vantage of my own head it was difficult to grasp. All things are dimensional, I said, from mountain ranges to particles of light. Only absence is without dimension. I held my hand beneath the lamp and pointed to the absence of light in the shape of my hand on the table beside me. A shadow contains no particles, I said, because it is absence of light, and thus the only thing we can truly say has two dimensions. I suppose it’s a lot like memory, she said. I lit another cigarette and in silence finished my brandy.
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