Dedication

In a used bookstore 

on the Oregon coast,

I found, in a box of 

foreign language books,

an East German government directory

from 1974. I leafed through it,

testing out my high school

German, and then as my girlfriend

came around the corner, I showed

it to her and we laughed over the

randomness of secondhand

bookshops. Then I flipped a page,

and saw a black and white photograph

of a man who looked, not just like me,

but exactly like me, only some years

in my future, which was his past.

He had the same long lashed-eyes, the

same thin lips, the same facial structure.

He was me, in twenty years, still

fadedly handsome, in the square

wire-rimmed glasses of the time, 

as though I had dressed up in  

costume as a minor government

functionary and had my picture taken. 

My girlfriend's laughter stopped 

abruptly and she looked up at me, pale.

She was genuinely frightened, so I 

laughed again, but I was unsettled as well.

I bought the book and we went back 

to the hotel. She took a nap, and I opened

it back up, to his page. My rusty German

told me he was a deputy assistant secretary

in the Economic Ministry. He was married to

Hilde, he had three children. It was not merely

a likeness, it was uncanny how closely we 

resembled one another. It was not so

difficult to imagine myself as a 

dedicated socialist bureaucrat, 

even without the man's picture before me. 

I stayed up late that night, setting 

my drivers license beside his square portrait,

adding years to myself, matching us up

perfectly. He is an old man now, I told myself,

he is much changed. At home, I tried to 

find out anything I could about him, but

the biographical details of mid-level

East German appartchiks are not easily

found. Eventually, though, I came across

a database that listed Ministry personnel of the time

and found that he had died

on the day I was born, still in his post. My girlfriend,

skittish about spiritual matters,

demanded I throw the book out, but I couldn't.

I memorized his entry in the directory,

I became obsessed with him, I even

planned a trip to Berlin to see his grave.

My girlfriend left me, in no small part

because of him. I decided that he was like me,

a good man-in-progress beset by doubt, 

believing in his system, in the people around him,

blindsided by upheaval. I forced him into

the contours of my life, willed us to be similar.

Eventually, it evolved into coincidence, 

then something I rarely thought about, but a few weeks ago

my former girlfriend called and asked how

he and I were doing, and I laughed and said

I'm fine. I heard the slight tremor in her laugh,

and the quickness of her ringing off.