You have to wonder, sometimes, what kind of madness it takes to put culture into a context resembling sanity. She walked up and down the street, as if she were looking for something: a lost cat, perhaps, or maybe spectacles, an old book, returnable bottles, a particular land-mark. Jimmy says her name’s Samantha, or something like it. I said I don’t care, that was, must’ve been sixteen years ago. Before all this started to make sense. But I have to back up or you’ll have no idea what I’m talking about.

Back then she was very pretty, you wouldn’t say attractive because who would be attracted to her, but she was pleasant to look at and had a wonderful face, but for it being tilted down towards the ground and with that lost look in her brown eyes, not that you’d ever know they were brown what with her not making eye contact with you, ever, but you seemed sure they probably must’ve been brown, that was the type of person she was. All times of day you could see her, though not consistently; maybe she’d be inching down the street at 9:30 in the morning, not really lumbering, no word really suitable to her pace, slow but not at all torn, not indicating any imperfection, any mental lapse, and maybe you’d see her walking down the street at noon, lunchtime, or at 3:30 in the afternoon, or after six o’clock in the evening, or at midnight, any time, really.

And it was bothersome because you couldn’t really tell that anything was wrong with her, and you wanted there to be something obviously, something patently wrong with her so you could write her off as crazy, as that crazy woman who’d go walking down the street; you wanted there to be something transparently wrong and malignant on her person so that you could maybe laugh it off, tell others about her in a roundabout sort of way, through anecdote, and laugh amongst yourselves as you heaved collective sighs of relief that you, at least, were perfectly sane in your thoughts, that at least you were put together, rational.

You wanted this to be the case so that you could feel a slight shudder as you watched her walk past your house. I longed for that particular shudder. And what did you know about her? Did she have family, where was it, where did she grow up, what did she think about as she ambled, waltzed down the street and was she lonely, did she ever worry about those times she would walk down the street at two o’clock in the morning, maybe about being assaulted or raped or struck by an automobile or worse; did she worry at all? As a child you’d had the directness, the complete and utter lack of tact that might’ve allowed you to ask questions like these, but you didn’t quite have the words for them, you hadn’t yet wrapped your mind around the concepts and so the questions went unasked. And then as you grew older, a certain wariness set in and you began to have second thoughts about these questions, and then about the second thoughts themselves, and you began to trace everything back to the moment you set eyes on her, not even that, but back to the moment your mind first entertained the possibility that someone like this Samantha might exist in your world, coexist with you, that you might have things backwards, back to that moment.

What moment was that? It must’ve been years before you first saw Samantha. These questions build up, and then you go on walks, thinking maybe you’ll see her and she’ll suddenly reveal to you the answers to all of the questions that you can’t quite come to terms with, but of course you almost never meet up with her, which is to say that you almost never actually catch a glimpse of her while you’re walking. You ask other people, do they remember her, you remember, that crazy woman who was always walking on the street, looking for something. Well of course they did, everyone does. That crazy woman that everyone knows isn’t really crazy, but something else. That thing that no one really has a word for, but is desperately wondering after, trying to comprehend. Linguistics fail. Stories work their way into your cognitive frame, into your memory: people who, at one time or other, may have actually spoken to this allegedly crazy woman who wasn’t really crazy, people who managed to sit down and have actual conversations with her, overcoming their own trepidation, their own passive attempts at defining reality. These stories depend entirely on the teller; in some Samantha has a lisp, stutters, has some sort of abnormality in her speech that justifies your attempts to categorize her outside the boundaries of ordinary, everyday sanity and rationality; in others, of course, she speaks perfectly normally, she has no abnormalities whatsoever, except maybe that she is too perfect and doing this thing, this aimless walking, that bothers everyone who knows of her, because they have no context with which to understand her. You have to wonder whether or not any of these stories are real, though. I’ve gone sixteen years without even really finding out what her name is, or who she is at all. You half-expect to see her face on the television screen, on one of those programs for people who’ve disappeared and other mysteries that people hold near and dear to their hearts, things people enjoy thinking about because they’re so strange; you expect to see her face on one of these shows, Samantha Young, her name is in this idea, fantasy, and the mystery is solved because she died four years ago, and all along that was the real mystery. But in reality you still see her walking down the street from time to time, looking for something, who knows what. Years pass and you find yourself face to face one day. It’s June and you’re walking from where you parked the car to the restaurant where you’re to meet up with the rest of your dinner party. And then you run into Samantha, there on the street. ‘What are you looking for?’ she asks, smiling, and gets into a car and drives away.