"Memory occludes its foundation," she said. "And goes scudding off like paper clouds on balloons and wires. Doesn't that bother you? It's a delicate trick to hang all that stuff on some silly love story."
"Two people sitting on a hillside can't thread mistiming into narrative?"
"Can't help but...," she said. "That's the pitfall: falling into the service of some sequence. You started at the beginning, I noticed -- the earliest, I mean -- and continue as if there were a plot."
"...Which eventually leads to two people sitting on a hill," he said. "No, I disagree. You're supposed to like just the stories, and the process of their telling."
"I do," she said. "Past as fiction, in counterpoint to present. Fine. But, it's better when the two get closer. You invited me to keep you honest.
"And you don't have to sell me on story telling," she added. "That, and repartee, is the only device you're allowing me. It makes me feel quite disembodied."
--from Seeing Lily by Brian HubbellIf, outfitted with a mule train carrying only the works of Jane Austen and a magnetic resonance imaging machine, the Geodetic Survey instead had been commissioned to map the bountiful wildernesses, flash-flooding box canyons, and oblique strike-slipped ranges that divide the psychological landscapes in a modern coming-of-age, Seeing Lily might have been one valiantly incompleted transect.
Within the metaphor of a love story, and through the tropes of reunion, video, and petty auto theft, this novel of errant manners reincarnates Solomon and Sheba -- protagonist and muse -- each possibly no more than story-tellers in the other's imagination, stereoscopically cross-linked between the contemporaneous indignities of middle age and another concurrently unreliable recollection of themselves as earnestly amoral youth.
Under the overarching implicit threat of constant infidelity, concrete elements of their mutual circumstance emerge, apparently intact and unassailable in close-lens detail, only to hang scintillating in fractal portent and then dissolve from scrutiny, each resisting every insistent charge of memory to substantiate as either shelter or enduring benchmark against the greater tectonic landscapes of pathos and unsettled imagination.
