I am a man of a thousand faces and identities. You may have guessed at this before, but I’m telling it to you now so that you know for sure. It’s my job, albeit a job that I’ve chosen, to be ten people on any given day; sometimes that many people in an hour. Meet me in France, and I am making cheese in a humble village. I don’t know much about the world. Laugh at my quaint dialect, my rustic inflections. Meet me in Toronto, and I am wearing a hockey jersey. Ask me the forward line, and I’ll tell you. Believe that I care more passionately about the game than politics. Meet me in Washington, and I will bore you with the intricacies of policymaking. Understand that it’s difficult to make laws. See how one must write them thus and such and file them in the right desk drawers.

Is there a real me? Of course, if you’ll explain to me what is real.

Foremost, I’m an observer. I write things on a computer and email from one of a thousand addresses to one of a thousand other addresses, to a complete stranger that I don’t know. Or least, if I know him, I don’t know that I know her. I am these thoroughly unremarkable people in order to watch, and to write, and to change my clothes and do it again somewhere else.

This is my job.

This is also my life. You know of course that men and women who excel at something in their personal lives generally find professions based on that pre-existing aptitude. I have an aptitude for copying, like I copied that last sentence from an old field manual. I am good at being everyone because I am good at being everyone to almost everyone. I read the odds and see that most people believe they know me, while a few others understand they don’t know me all that well, and a slim few understand they don’t know me at all.

You’re now in the last category. Ignore what you think you know, and grasp what I’ve told you instead. The slim few. So far, it’s just you.

Smart as you are, you’re going to ask me questions I can’t answer, and meta-questions that don’t even have answers. For instance: if I’ve told you that you can’t trust me, how are you to trust me in that? But then, that question isn’t a matter of trust, but a matter of language. I am an Irishman telling you the Irish always lie. I am God making a rock heavier than I can lift.

I’ve learned one thing about trust: it isn’t given, and it isn’t earned. You can’t trust someone who hasn’t earned it, but you can’t earn the trust of someone unwilling to give it. Thus the issue at the heart of the question — trust — is as much a matter of language as the question itself. An abstraction two layers deep.

One of my identities likes to play philosopher.

You think you know, but you don’t, not really. Can you even know that you know what you know? Does that sentence even make sense? Is anything at all more than illusion? We all function as if reality is reality. Functionally, the question of how we know is meaningless beside the assertion that we do, in fact, know; we must assume that.

But I’m asking you to assume that you don’t know, but that it’s possible, that you can in fact know the real me. The real me is that thing inbetween waking and sleeping, when the me that suppresses and molds me is too groggy to function. The real me is when you punch me in the face as hard as you can.

As far as I can see, you’ll find a French cheesemaker, a Canadian hockey fan, and a bureaucrat in those moments. And in those moments you’ll find in yourself those things as well.

For all I know.

I am fluid, like you are fluid. This is how people grow apart, because men and women are not like trains on a track. They are like currents in an ocean, if you’ll pardon the simile. And job be cursed, the only way to stay in sync is to watch carefully, to be deliberate.

You’ll find, one day, that you are more like me than you used to be. Then, I think, you will find the real me, because the real me is you.

Tags: fiction