Centuries of June by Keith Donohue Page A

bicycle girls.”
    My face wore a befuddled expression, a look I have seen more than once in official photographs of myself, such as those required for a driver’s license or international passport, the kind of picture snapped at the subject’s worst moment.
    “The ladies and the bicycles,” the old man insisted. The furrows of his brow, carefully etched by decades of worry and frustration, deepened to a row of crevasses, and the blue of his eyes whitened to ice. “The naked women in your bed. You were about to establish causation, man. Surely, you are one of the most forgetful little bastards I have ever met.”
    His clues, verbal and visual, sparked nothing. Dolly rolled her eyes. “Mind like a sieve.”
    “Holier than a Swiss cheese,” he rejoined. “An empty beehive.”
    “A bucketful of holes.”
    Rubbing the bristly top of his hair, the old man was at a loss.
    Dolly assayed another. “He uses a salmon net when fishing for herring.”
    “Well done,” he said. Raising her fingertips to her lips, she played the coquette. On her left eyelid, the same third eye had been drawn, to match the old man’s. What antic games, I wondered, occur in my absence?
    He turned to me. “Your line, I believe, was ‘When I came home today, there were seven bicycles out on the lawn, glowing in the something something sky.’ ”
    “Mirrors to the sky,” I said. “On the chrome handlebars and bumpers, a million little suns reflected. But that’s all I can remember.”
    “The opposite of the elephant,” Dolly said, “who never forgets.”
    “A leaky cauldron.”
    “An unwound clock.”
    “The cyclical amnesiac.” He bowed.
    “Well played.” Now, she addressed me directly. “Whenever I lose something, I always retrace my steps beginning with the end and ending with the beginning. Or until what’s missing is found. Shall we look for your mind? What is the last thing you can recall?”
    Falling. My face smashing against the bathroom floor, a tsunami of blood sweeping across the tiles and washing against the white wall of the tub. “Checking the time on my watch.”
    “Good,” the old man said. “Progress. So, you arrive home this afternoon at eight minutes till the hour and there were seven bicycles heaped in a tangle of spokes and chains, and then what happened?”
    “I have never seen bicycles out in front of the house, but then again I am not usually here at that particular hour during the workweek, and I thought perhaps they belonged to some schoolchildren who left their bicycles and ran off to play. They looked chained and locked together, the bicycles, not the children, and there were no children. Nobody was about despite the fineness of the hour, the warm weather returning. You can feel the change in the air.”
    “The days are on the mend,” the old man said.
    Dolly patted his leg and deposited her hand upon his knee. “June. The birds and the bees, the scent of love a-bloomin’ yet again. Maybe you left work early because of an assignation?”
    “An illicit rendezvous with delight,” he said.
    “Love in the afternoon,” said Dolly, and the point was won.
    I was reasonably certain that was not the case, though this talk of love whipped another chain of images through my brain. A woman, surrounded by fireflies, and something I intended to do or say to her. Love, yes. I knew I was in love with someone I could not quite remember. On a spring afternoon when I opened the door of a taxi for her, she touched my arm and smiled when she got in and drove away. After shewas gone, she lingered in the air. A different story unfolded in the pea of my brain.
    “No, not a tryst. It was a day like every other single day. I was a bit fatigued and bored, nearly fell asleep at my desk, so having nothing pressing, I left the firm a little early. The bicycles waited in the yard in front of the house all jumbled together like a knot, and I just stood there wondering when the singing began—”
    “Singing bicycles!”