The Moment (68 page)

Complete
.

Is anything in life ever complete? Or is it all lost and found? Found and lost?

My daughter—my only child—wants to get married. Of course, I will give her my blessing. Of course, I have the most profound doubts about the real rationale behind this decision. Of course, I wonder if, like the rest of us, she’s trying to make up for all that she was lacking early on in life. Of course, I feel guilt about that. And, of course, I temper this guilt with the understanding that we are pals, that we can talk, that we “get” each other.

“You’re still so alone, Dad.”

True—but I have known love at its most unbridled, its most profound. Lost and found. Found and lost.

What a privilege to have found it, if only for a brief, transcendent instant.

And now . . . ?

Now I am on a highway. Now it is as dark and cold a night as they come. Now I am a single vehicle moving northward. Now I am alone.

The road is wide and clear. Dawn will break in a few hours. Another day, another day. So many exceptional possibilities. So many possible banalities. Choice is everything—and choice is nothing. The story can turn out well. The story can turn out tragically. But the road is always there. And, like it or not, we have to travel it.

And how we travel it . . . and whom we find along the way . . .

Love is always the great search. For what is a road without some sort of concrete meaning? How can we plunge through the ever-diminishing momentum of time without someone to slow things down, make it all seem worthwhile, give some true import to the journey?

Petra. Meine Petra.

Will I be haunted by this forever? Will every highway I travel always resonate to those words? Because what we all so want I actually found.

And having then lost it all . . .

There’s the road. The new day. The things up ahead. The hope for something revelatory and profound. The thought that it may never come your way again. The need to tell yourself that life is about second acts. The imperative of moving forward. The solitariness at the heart of human existence. The desire to connect. The fear inherent in connecting.

And amidst all this, there is also . . .

The moment.

The moment that can change everything. The moment that can change nothing. The moment that lies to us. Or the moment that tells us who we are, what we search for, what we so want to unearth . . . and possibly never will.

Are we ever truly free of the moment?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to my very canny and smart editor, Sarah Branham, for being so canny and smart—and for helping me to immeasurably improve this novel. Just as I also owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Judith Curr for championing my fiction and relaunching me in my home country. At Atria, I also want to thank Mellony Torres, Christine Lloreda, Rachel Zugschwert, and Wendy Sheanin, not to mention the entire Simon & Schuster sales team—in particular, Adene Corns, Janice Fryer, and Stuart Smith, who have given me such outstanding support. My agents—Antony Harwood, Grainne Fox, and Richard Green—are also my friends (and that says it all). Susanne Gerber—my wonderful German teacher in Berlin and a great denizen of the city—served as the novel’s fact checker (but I take full responsibility for any misplaced umlauts). And most of all, I want to thank my children, Max and Amelia, for being so interesting, so thoughtful, and, yes, so nice (always an underrated virtue). They are the best raison d’être I know.