It must have been 1983. I abstractified the window to a big slam of heat and went straight for the book right below it.
I remember the book as being hardcover with a pale blue jacket meant to represent the sky. I don't remember the title. I don't remember the author. I do remember the store, a ridiculously tiny incense-scented singularity within the Omega Institute of Rhinebeck, New York. This was in the days before they air-conditioned Main Hall. It was a somewhat more raw place back then, with actual hippies rather than the well-spoken and well-meaning professionals whose numbers were increasing by the time I stopped going. In 1983, there was still the sense that anything could happen.
People around me say I don't read, but what they mean is that I don't obey. I don't dutifully turn to page 1 and go from there. Nope. I look at the middle, I look at the end, and then I start hopping around in between. There's actually a word for this, it's called "poaching." To me, it makes a text infinitely bigger. Joss Whedon once said that his idea of the perfect movie was to assemble random cuts of interstitial video from Final Fantasy VIII with music from Evanescence. When you poach on a book, that's what it turns into--immediate cataclysms with thunder in the background.
So I poached on that sky-blue book under that big face of heat in that place where anything could happen. In those pages, anything did. Christa was a runaway and she found Luke, who was kind. A dangerous fantasy, which, as long as you can tell the difference, makes it the only kind worth having. To be so vulnerable, to go from such pain to one single point of acceptance and decency--my heart raced.
At the end she stops the car and goes to a pay phone. When her mother answers, she says, "It's Christa. Yeah, Christa Perretti, that's who I am now."
I closed the book, put it back, and left the tiny store.
I've never been able to find it again. Sometimes I almost wonder if I dreamed it. Omega was a place for dreaming, after all--a place, at that time, which was made of dreams. Not the typical kind, but the odd, waking kind you get from tofu-eating hippies who move from tentground to tentground. I wonder where they are now.
