by Ronald Malfi
“Come on,” Clarence says, already climbing out of the truck.
“Where are we going?”
“Inside. Take your gumball machine, too, ’less you want someone to glom it, man.”
So, like a fool, I lug the gumball machine into the Chinese restaurant. Heads turn as we enter. We must look like quite the pair. But they seem to know Clarence—a Chinese man in a tall chef hat waves to him and Clarence waves back and actually executes a pretty decent moonwalk—and they soon turn back to their work.
“Come on,” Clarence says, and saunters toward the back of the restaurant, ducking beneath the lazy swing of paper lanterns.
There is a narrow passageway covered by a drape of oriental tapestry at the far end of the restaurant. Behind the tapestry, a set of stairs files up to a second floor steeped in shadow. Overhead, lights flicker in their casings. It is like the set of some bad horror movie. I follow Clarence to the second floor, the pedestal of the gumball machine thumping against my shins with each step. When we reach the top, we are standing before a long corridor veiled by a beaded curtain. I am out of breath.
“Clarence—”
Clarence shushes me. Out of nowhere, the junkman has adopted a piety typically reserved for monks.
I pursue Clarence through the beaded curtain and down the corridor. There are plaster molds of dragons fixed to the walls. A door at the end of the hallway stands half open, emitting a warm tallow glow into the hallway. Clarence goes directly through the door, easing it all the way open with one hand, and I follow, the gumball machine still banging against my legs.
It is a small, dark room, lighted only by the shifting, dancing glow of a television set. A slim, young-looking Chinese girl sits on a futon watching MTV, the volume turned all the way down. Posters of various pop idols fight for space on the wall above her head. She is dressed in sweatpants and a loose-fitting Backstreet Boys halter-top through which the vague nubs of underdeveloped breasts protrude. Her hair is long and as black as a sunless galaxy, straight as a razor and parted perfectly down the middle. Her features—her body—are delicate to the point of fragility.
“Hey, Fortune Cookie,” Clarence says, and the words sound nearly blasphemous.
The girl turns and looks first at Clarence then at me. I am shocked to see she has a dead eye, milky and gray and turned toward the ceiling. She might be fifteen years old.
“Jesus,” I murmur.
“Sit down,” Clarence tells me, then immediately drops to an Indian-style position on the carpet himself.
I set the gumball machine down and follow suit, folding my long legs under my buttocks.
“I know you a skeptic, Mozart, but Fortune Cookie, she can tell you things.”
“Clarence…”
“Come on, now.”
“Hello,” says the girl. Even with that one word, I can tell she is heavily accented. “Name. Please.”
“I don’t know,” I tell her.
“That’s the problem,” Clarence interrupts. “He don’t know who he is. We was hoping you could tell us something, baby.”
“Hands,” says the girl. She leans forward on the futon and holds out both her own hands, palms up, one on each knee. “Please.”
I extend my hands and, somewhat hesitant, place them in the palms of the girl’s. The flicker of the television against her skin makes her look translucent. I cast a glance at the television and see a bunch of teenagers in bikinis frolicking around a pool.
“Heavy,” she says. “Went. Go.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t…”
“Went,” she says. “Go.”
I look at Clarence for help, but the junkman is watching the television, enthralled.
“Went. Stay.” The girl turns over my left hand. In the glow of the television set, I can see the address still written on the palm. “Find. Go. Stay.”
“Aw, shit,” Clarence snickers, grinning at something on the television. “Oh, hell, you see that, dog?”
“Stay. Find. Go. Went. Heavy.”
“I don’t—” I begin again.
“Find. Find.”
She draws my hand up to her face so she can examine the address more closely. Her one good eye scrutinizes my palm while the other floats toward the ceiling. A coy smile overtakes her lips and, despite the dead eye, the girl is suddenly beautiful. She brings the hand even closer to her face and I anticipate her nibbling on my fingers. But instead, she forms an O with her mouth through which she pushes a tiny pink tongue. She brings the hand nearer still, until the tongue hovers just above my palm. I am aware my hand is shaking. Sweat has broken from my armpits and rolls down the nape of my neck. The television light flickers in her dead eye.
“Believe,” she whispers.
That little pink tongue sets down momentarily in the center of my palm.
The world seems to stop.
“Oh shit!” Clarence shouts, slapping his knee and bursting out in a laugh. He’s hysterical over the television show.
Then: a Martian gibberish of jumbled Chinese shouts up from downstairs, to which the young girl holding my hand readily replies in a foreign tirade of her own. She sounds like a spoiled child shouting at her mother. And maybe she is.
Nonetheless, the moment is broken. The tongue has retracted and the young girl drops my hand like a dead fish. Wide-eyed, I stare up at her—and she smiles at me. Not fifteen, I think. More like twelve, maybe thirteen.
She says, “Go.” She says, “Backward.”
I shake my head. “I don’t understand you.”
“Backward,” she says. “Fine. Fine.”
Two minutes later, Clarence is driving me back to the St. Paul Street apartment, mostly listening to the radio and playing percussion on the steering wheel. When we pull up out front, Clarence doesn’t shake my hand or smile or clap me on the shoulder or anything. Clarence only bops his head to the music as I open the passenger door to climb out.
“Maybe you a racist,” Clarence marvels, more to himself than to me. “Wouldn’t that be something, Moe?”
“I’ll see you around,” I say, and gather the gumball machine from the back of Clarence’s pickup.
Clarence honks once as he pulls out into traffic, and it starts to snow.
PART II
TEN
If you have no memory—no sense of self—then you will not know if you have ever been happy or sad, frightened or content, proud or modest. And you therefore would be unable to experience these things without some hinge, some nexus, to the past. If you cannot remember being happy, how will you know what happiness is or when you have found it again?
In grammar school, did you tug on the pigtails of your crushes? Did you fall fast in love with a college beauty and make love to her in her apartment for hours and hours and hours until the sun came up? Was it the way she looked at you that caused the sweats, caused the shivers, caused your knees to weaken? Showers together; sharing a cigarette on the lanai. Hearing her say, They call it a lanai in Hawaii, but it’s really just a porch, a goddamn porch. Did she break your heart and leave you hopeless and wrecked—leave you to get drunk at the stone pub down the block and cause your grades to suffer, threatening your college career with failure? Did you pine over her, and hate the fact that you sometimes saw her holding the hand of someone else? That you wanted to kill yourself, or her, or him, or all three of you?
Or maybe you never broke up. Maybe you fell in love and had a life and had a child and had it all.
Maybe all those things happened. Or maybe none of them did. The saddest part is: you are not sure.
* * *
The snowfall lasts for two days. By the time it lets up, the city looks new and clean and dreamlike beneath the fresh snow. Past sins are forgotten under the blanket of white while the evidence of man is no more. Footprints accumulating in the frozen crust are the footprints of infants wandering through an Edenic tundra.
I do not leave the apartment for those two days. Instead, I watch the snow come down through the windo
ws, watching it erase the city below. For whatever reason, the snow has brought with it the full brunt of my dilemma and I am crippled beneath the weight of my condition. I spend a lot of time in bed, staring at the muted light of day bleeding across the ceiling. In the shower, I stand beneath the spray of scalding water until it grows cold and causes my red skin to pale and tighten and swell into knobs of gooseflesh.
You know I am alive because of the scattered assortment of half-eaten Chinese food cartons in the kitchenette. You know I am alive because of the occasions I crack open one of the windows to let in the frigid winter air, just to circulate the mustiness of the apartment. If viewed from the outside world, perhaps through the frost-and-grime windowpanes, my hunched and staggering shape suggests that of a hermit lighthouse keeper, but the movement of that hunched and staggering figure is still testament to my living existence, no matter how pathetic it might be. You know I am alive because, at least once, you will be able to hear my sobs over the rush of the showerhead in the cramped little bathroom.
In those two days I spend much time staring at the gumball machine as well. I keep it at the foot of my bed for a while where the sunlight strikes it through the single bedroom window. Then I take it into the living room and set it beside the front door and sit cross-legged on the floor to watch it. I feel this is important. I feel this gumball machine belongs here, somewhere, and if I can just find the right place for it then things will begin to snap into place. There must be a place for it. So I move it. I relocate it to every spot in the apartment, every available square inch on the floor, in every room, even the closet. I set it in the bathroom while I watch it as I sit on the toilet.
One book suggests hypnosis to stir suppressed memories.
One book suggests bombardment of associations to rekindle memory, like looking through picture books of different cities and countries, of famous landmarks and famous people.
One book suggests the amnesia may not be amnesia at all but, rather, a mechanism induced to protect the conscious mind against past traumatic events.
This last one troubles me the most.
Then, on the second day, as the final afterthoughts of snow float about the tops of the buildings, I realize that I am losing my mind and need to get out of the apartment.
In my canvas coat, I step out into the third floor hallway and shut my apartment door behind me. One of my neighbors is shuffling back toward his apartment, reading a newspaper. He is a paunchy, wide-faced man with a complexion like pumice in a ratty bathrobe and slippers.
“Hello,” I say, staring the man down.
The paunchy man’s eyes shift toward me and register my existence. Without a word, he vanishes back into his apartment, leaving me alone.
Because maybe I don’t exist at all. Maybe a lack of memory equates to a lack of past, a lack of being. And without a past, can there be a present? A future? Can I exist if nothing was there before me to accommodate my existence?
A white city. A flood of strangers. All of us. Sinless in our anonymity.
Homer depicts Odysseus as a man of countless disguises and many resources.
You know I am alive based on my willingness to exist.
I think, therefore I am, says Descartes.
After a time, I think about what the young fortune-teller has said—Go. Backward. I take this to mean I should backtrack: visit in reverse the places I’ve been as far back as my mind could remember. Whether this is what she meant, I do not know, but I find myself growing claustrophobic in the apartment on that second day, so I need to get out.
This is it: my first snowfall. The city is different in the snow. The buildings look closer together, as if hungry for the warmth of proximity, and the streets are messy with clumps of slush, gray from exhaust. The potholes are puddles. My ghost-faced reflection appears each time I hurry past a shop window. I do not humor him with acknowledgement.
Can I be happy? Here, now, in this state, from here on in? If nothing changes and the memories refuse to return, can I be happy? What is happiness?
I cannot answer these questions because I do not know what I believe. And when you don’t know what you believe, it is impossible to define the world and everything in it. Stacked, cube-like, a system of building blocks, a ladder twist of DNA…a network of ideas and ideals, of moralities and immoralities: a wasteland trudge. Is it possible the destitute children of Mozambique long for plasma televisions and hybrid cars? Do they cry out in Portuguese screams for celebrity tabloids and million-dollar sports contracts? This is what I have been coming back to all along. Can I be happy if I don’t know what happiness is? I make powerless the age-old argument of nature versus nurture, because I have neither—no family who has contributed to the unique design of my DNA; no lifetime of significant events that force me to believe one thing over another. I am the human equivalent of those cutout paper people, the same person repeated over and over and over again, joining hands with itself. I am a human repetition, a child’s paper cutout. Shoot me with bullets and they soar, uninhibited, straight through me. Stab me and you are stabbing smoke, knifing a waterfall.
Is happiness solitary, personal satisfaction? Or is it the gratification one gets from being part of a larger, societal whole? Being one paper-man in a long link of paper-men?
I have no idea.
Go, I think. Backward.
I stand in the wet-snow street outside the Samjetta, shivering in the cold. My bald head is growing numb. The doors are closed this morning against the cold. Of course, there are no memories here except for the ones I made on that first night. I think of Patrice and how angry she was leaving my apartment. I think of the hulking, inhuman shapes of the patrons who would not even acknowledge me until I started playing the piano. In the center of the street, I watch the outside of the Samjetta until, with a bang, the front door swings outward and a young woman I do not recognize leans out. She dumps a pail of soapy water into the snow then, dispatching a suspicious glance in my direction, vanishes back into the tavern. The soapy water must be hot; waves of steam rise up from the snow where there is now a sinkhole.
I move on.
The Middle Eastern sandwich shop slumps halfhearted against the buildings on either side of it. The neon lights behind the grated window reflect in the sidewalk snow. In the daylight, so obvious, it looks embarrassed of its existence, looks like it pulls back from the sidewalk to hide itself among the bigger buildings. I have been walking now for quite a while: I now walk like a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, thumping along. My soul feels depleted; I am a vapor, a ghost.
I think, Therefore I am.
Inside, it is just the elderly Middle Eastern woman and me. In all these days she has not moved from her position behind the sandwich counter. Amazingly, she is still stapling receipts. And the prerecorded sitar music still resonates in the hidden wall speakers.
An illogical fear grips me…and I cannot help but wonder if, despite the fresh new day and the fallen snow outside, it is starting over again. I am stuck in a loop, a record skipping in a groove. A single link in a chain of paper-men. I fear if I ask for a turkey on white, the woman will tell me the deli is closed. No sa’wich now, she’ll say.
Scaling lengthwise the rack of magazines, I reach the deli counter. I stand, shuffling from one foot to the other, letting the suffocating warmth of the cramped little deli thaw my frozen toes, my bald head, the tips of my fingers and the crescents of my ears.
“Hello,” I say to the woman behind the counter.
Yellow cataract eyes dart in my direction then look back at the handful of receipts.
I say, “Turkey on white. Please.”
She is watching me now from the corner of her eyes, trying to make it appear she does not see me, that I do not exist. I fight off the urge to yell boo! Then fight off the laughter that follows.
“Yes,” says the woman, stuffing the receipts down beneath the counter. “You,” she says, her familiarity with the English language economical at best, and taps a bony finger against the
sandwich board behind her. But not just at the sandwich board—at the dollar sign that precedes the price. She remembers me. And I am relieved.
“Oh, yes,” I say. “Yes, yes. Sure.” I take money from the pocket of my jeans and slide it across to her on the countertop. “See? This time—yes. Sorry.”
I watch her hands make the sandwich, and there is an art to her movements. This woman might be one hundred years old, her brown, long-fingered hands looking battle-weary and arthritic, the fingernails like tiny little nubs, and she watches me—not the sandwich—throughout the entire process. To avoid her stare, I glance at a refrigerated unit housing various bottles of sodas and water and juices. Even something as simple as selecting a drink is a puzzle, an enigma. I feel myself struggling to come to a decision. Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, Sprite, 7-Up—I have tasted all these in the past. I know I have, although I don’t know when or where or with whom. But I am familiar with how each one tastes. Still, I can formulate no preference. It occurs to me that preference of taste hinges solely on memory—that we like the taste of one thing over another because of what we subconsciously associate with that taste. It is the same with smells, perhaps more so: that some smells are good because they remind us of good things while other smells are bad because we associate them with things that are bad. But when you have no memory—no catalogue of senses through which to compare—you have no preference.
Funny, the dilemma of choosing a beverage.
Funny, all of it.
So I select a bottle of water, because it is the cheapest thing in the refrigerator. That, and the sandwich, leaves me with twenty-three dollars—all that remains of Clarence Wilcox’s fifty bucks, after yesterday’s splurge on Chinese food.
Thanking the woman, turning to leave, I am ready to go back through the door…but freeze when my eyes fall on the gumball machine by the door. I remember seeing it on my first visit to this shop, but now it draws me in. There is an importance to it. I approach and caress the bulb of the glass. I watch my reflection, distorted in the curvature of the glass, stare up at me. Inside, the little colored gumballs seem to want to tell me something. Yet no matter how hard I listen, I am deaf.