Twain had not merely stumbled upon an early incarnation of trivia. He was already up to something much more desperate; hear the first notes of grave urgency in his game’s final instruction: “Waste no opportunity to tell all you know.”
Twain did not mean for us to sit around until identification was the only thing we could do with bodies in the rubble. He was aiming for us to furiously dig through bodies for one that is still alive, to go through the telling of “all you know” until you find that one truth worth the most points, the gasping memory at the bottom of the pile that you don’t even recall inviting to the banquet.
Living Room
My memory palace: crashed-up Kate’s TV with Granddaddy’s trunk as a makeshift stand. A mirror above the TV acquired from a neighbor who got it from an acquaintance who skipped town after trouble with the law. A pleather Barcalounger by the door, a Goodwill thrift-store find, a classic chair where men sat and smoked pipes, where cousins on holiday curled up two and three at a time, a chair that sat in some other house for thirty years—first as a trophy piece, then as Dad’s chair, then as Dad’s old chair, then as the chair there wasn’t room for anymore. Soon I’ll pass it on to an ex-con, who’ll say it sleeps better than a lethal-injection table, but for now I wear my story into it. Two handsaws, handed down from Granddaddy—one big, one small, both rusty and dull—hang above the one large window in the room; they are rusty from the sweat of Granddaddy’s palace toils. The smaller saw hangs from the same nail as a gas mask from our Second World War, acquired from a dead music teacher’s estate. Life-size cardboard skeletons hang around the room, five of them—Halloween decorations displayed but never stored away. Against the far wall is a futon bought for twenty bucks from a trailer-park grandma whose grandkids never pissed on it too much. Take this blanket, she said, cover up them stains. The blanket is green and smells pissed on too. There are always bugs in my living room. None of the doors or windows fit snugly in the century-old adobe walls that are pockmarked and mapped with continents of mud patches. The vigas that run the length of the ceiling are freshly painted but the spruce is full of nicks and holes and splinters from time and weight and maybe bullets because this living room was once a motel pit stop for Billy the Kid and his pals and all the copycat cowboys with guns and whiskey and hooting and hollering if there were whores but I bet mostly there was loneliness within these walls. The vigas dominate my living room, a dozen tree trunks resting atop the mud walls, fluke gallows they call them, because amid domestic spats maybe vigas seem a good place to hang oneself. But the ceiling sits right on the beams; there is no way to get a rope over them. They’re also called standing deads, which is the term for a tree that, in a forest fire, loses enough branches and bark to die but doesn’t get burned to the core. If the fire moves fast, many trees are left perfectly stripped, ready to cut down, to crown a living room as fluke gallows.
Centered in front of Kate’s TV is my red leather couch, a double recliner love seat bought at the Salvation Army thrift store. One side reclines perfectly but the other kicks out arbitrarily, like an unbroken horse angry at being corralled or saddled. I’ve got bruises on my shins from the angry bucking but the couch is the nicest piece of furniture I own—genuine red leather with no visible tears or stains. Everything is a bit classier with it in the room—the handsaws are shabby chic, the gas mask is historical high fashion, the skeletons are audacious in a time when popular décor strives for minimalism. Even the bugs seem more appropriate, attracted by the great, wild stallion of a love seat.
While jimmying with the reclining mechanism at the store, I found a Werther’s candy, only slightly sucked, buried deep inside the love seat. I made a scene of the discovery and got ten bucks knocked off the price even though my shrieks were largely born of awe about the candy’s immaculate preservation rather than disgust about its presence. Later I mention the discount to my girlfriend, Elle, as she digs her foot into the cushions to make room for me between her legs. She shudders and slides out from beneath me. We’re not fucking on a couch where some old man died, she says.
Elle’s right. We should pause to mourn the man who’d owned this sofa before—the grandfather who experienced the confusion of nodding off during the evening news only to wake and find the Werther’s candy he’d begun the long process of savoring had disappeared, not in his mouth or stuck to his chest or anywhere visible on the red leather surface, not even in the shallow regions of the cushions’ crevices his arthritic hands could still explore. The candy was there and he knew it must be there but for him the candy might as well have never existed at all. The grandpa died, the candy never found; I bought the couch and it became my wild red stallion of the living room, and if we could just get past the slightly sucked Werther’s candy and the infectious loom of mortality, then my wild beast might go a long way toward getting me laid. But there are things to consider when your furniture is used: so many stories accompany what I own—the hand-me-down things I use to make a home—that I’m amazed there is any room to live in the pressing crowd of secondhand specters, the rich and awful memories that are mine but not mine, the memories I may never have but am now living with, in this intimate space, the chilling tangle of others’ lives as Elle leaves me paralyzed on the couch, turned to stone by a writhing bouquet of half-known yarns like serpents still slithering from Medusa’s severed dome, and Elle’s shudder, the brittle sensation that spooked her away, that’s the gossamer crackling of shed skins, the static on crashed-up Kate’s television, the slough of so many head snakes crumbling to dust as I shift and sink into the worn cushions of my wild red stallion.
In the ceiling I’ve installed—bolted to the fluke gallows—a top-of-the-line LED disco light and a thirteen-hundred-watt fog machine that, once warm, pumps twenty thousand cubic feet per minute of dense white glycol vapor. These are the only things I’ve bought brand-new, the only possessions of which I am the original owner. When I turn them on, everything else in my living room disappears.
War and Interior Design
My granddaddy didn’t eat Werther’s candy. He sucked on peppermints, sometimes. I was seven and he was seventy and we’d play cribbage on a board that was an exact replica of the aircraft carrier he’d been stationed on as a Navy pilot during our Second World War. We’d play serious-as-war cribbage and suck on peppermints in his living room—a living room that was never rearranged after the day he and Grandmommy first moved in. Not permanently, anyway. And everything in that living room only ever belonged to them.
The baby grand piano takes up most of the room. A long couch on the far wall has a floral pattern modeled after flowers that never existed or only existed in the 1950s. Two rocking chairs are placed where they can never really get rocking, one in the corner by the couch and the other in the nook of the piano. Granddaddy’s easy chair is directly in front of a wood-paneled television that only receives, despite the giant antennas on the roof, four shitty channels. The easy chair has on its left arm what appear to be some of the first electronic buttons ever manufactured, buttons that promise a customizable back massage, which means only that you can slightly vary the speed at which it boisterously shakes your bones. The television always had to be louder than the seizing chair and the phone had to ring louder than the television and Granddaddy had to talk louder than everything else. Except when we played cribbage. Then everything was off. Everything was silent because cribbage, as Granddaddy would say, is not just a board game: it is a counting game. Counting is thinking and thinking requires silence. Well, alright. Everything would be quiet and I’d be counting and thinking and Granddaddy would take the long silence as a cue, every time. He’d jump out of his chair and start in: Them Japs didn’t know what they got themselves into, alright? I’d say alright and sit back. He grinned a lot when he was telling stories. He didn’t have a single straight tooth in his mouth. That went a long way toward his credibility.
First he’d swing the couch around so it was in line with the piano. Then he’d push the piano toward t
he hallway. Everything that’s not something is ocean, alright? His hands were always the planes: F4U Corsairs. They’d take off from the USS Floral Pattern Couch and head for the piano. The piano was always the Japs. He was always bombing the piano. Every now and then he’d drop a bomb on the easy chair and I’d run to hit the boisterous massage button for dramatic effect. He’d move every piece of furniture in the room to set the scene for a battle. He’d walk around real slow, from his chair to the couch to the piano and back again. He’d stop at the bookshelves when the brutal tale of war demanded heartfelt sobriety, put one hand on the shelf of Bibles like he was landing his plane for a quick sermon. This whole adventure would unfold for a few minutes until Grandmommy noticed: Aren’t you playing cribbage? Then he’d go back to his chair, back to his peppermint, back to counting and thinking while Grandmommy moved all the objects in her living room back to the heavy dust outlines they were always in the business of etching into the space around them.
I hated cribbage. I loved the aircraft-carrier game board because it might get swept up in Granddaddy’s story, but I could never make sense of the game—how the plugs were supposed to fit in the holes. I could never pick up on the patterns. I only ever played because there was always the chance a war would occur: Granddaddy in command of the furniture, the living room coming to life.
Said Mark Twain
“Any lecture of mine ought to be a running narrative-plank, with square holes in it, six inches apart, all the length of it; & then in my mental shop I ought to have plugs (half marked ‘serious’ & the others marked ‘humorous’) to select from & jam into these holes according to the temper of the audience.”
Said Others
Tennessee Williams says something about memories having music—every recollection precisely, beautifully scored. Someone else likens memory to a sack. A great big sack. No, wait. It was a purse. Whoever it was said that memory is like a purse—if it gets full, it won’t shut and everything will fall out. “Take heed of a gluttonous curiosity to feed on many things, lest the greediness of the appetite of thy memory spoil the digestion thereof.” That’s something. And then there’s Clive Wearing. Clive Wearing is best known for saying, What the hell is going on here?
Statuesque
I haven’t told Elle the story of my TV, of crashed-up Kate. Elle has a slight aversion to secondhand items—or doesn’t revel in them as I do. She is not like me, not a ragtag amalgamation of arbitrary acquisitions and fragments of stories. She is cut from a single slab of fine-grained marble, hips and cheeks and collarbone, hammered into elegant contours that are smooth against my face; she smells of chisel on stone, earthy sparks, fierce and ancient, the promise of something—anything—immutable. Elle has lost a father to suicide and a second father to cancer and lost to some other cancer the grandfather who raised her more than either father ever did and still she is statuesque. She holds herself together by never holding on to anything, especially loss.
Elle buys new things often and tosses old things often; she does not get attached to or worry about the narrative of an object and she absolutely does not tolerate clutter. Because she loves me, she endures my décor but she keeps the living room tidy. If an item is not an official and permanent part of the living room, then she is trying to store (or throw) it away. Her tidiness should not bother me but I’m often infuriated by her fastidiousness.
During Simonides’s lifetime, Greek artists began using marble from quarries on the isle of Paros to sculpt their gods because its translucency was reminiscent of human skin, because over time it became more resistant to fracturing, because they thought it might always hold together. Now we know that holding, the handling of that sculpted marble, is what ruins it most: the corrosive oils of our skin. Eventually Elle and I will cease to hold on to each other, forced to break and begin again after too much holding, but for now I lap up her promise; me and Simonides’s pals without any notion of aesthetic grandeur’s tendency to crumble.
I like my things out and spread around where I can see them and trip over them and remember that they still exist, all at once, in my living room. Elle’s greatest fear is that others will have to clean up after her if she ever suddenly dies, that she will be found broken apart in a disheveled living room like the corroded pieces of a forgotten goddess some archaeologist will never quite fit together.
I do not tell Elle of crashed-up Kate’s TV because I cannot remember Kate and because I fear it is a story in too many pieces.
Forgotten Ear
Clive Wearing got some kind of brain herpes and as a result he forgot that he had the ability to remember. I first learned about Clive when the famed neuroscientist Oliver Sacks wrote about him in The New Yorker, an article published a month before Kate died in the eastbound Toyota Camry.
Clive can’t make new memories, can’t remember much after 1967 except for his wife, Deborah, whom he married three months before he got the disease in the eighties. Deborah is an amazing woman—still married to Clive after two decades of his drawing blanks except for one thing: her. Every time he sees Deborah he believes it is for the first time in a long time: he shouts joyously, hops exuberantly, grins from ear to forgotten ear and kisses all over her face. He doesn’t remember anything about her or anything specific about their relationship; he doesn’t know her at all except for the joyous feeling that arises from deep within at every glance. I can’t help but smile as I watch film of this ecstatic greeting happen over and over, but then I frown and think of Kate and Johnny. Why is the most interesting, most memorable love always this tragic kind of love?
Clive’s short-term memory lasts a maximum of thirty seconds. Ask him a question and he’ll only get halfway through the answer before he trails off and forgets you’ve asked him anything at all. Seeing this is odd because he’s retained his intelligence—he speaks multiple languages and can compute complex math. He still plays music brilliantly. Before the amnesia he was a prominent conductor and pianist and one of the leading musicologists in the world. Also, he’s British, so to experience him seems initially like a Monty Python skit. You’re sure you’re being put on—his vocabulary is immense and his extensive academic knowledge (though briefly accessed) is evident and his tone is the epitome of British condescension and, my god, the way his fingers stalk and speed and pounce around the keys of a piano. But take a look at any one of his thousands of diary entries since the disease ravaged his brain and you’ll understand the severity of his condition—every page of every notebook has the same line written over and over, crossed out over and over, superseded by its slightly varied self over and over: “I’ve just woken up after a long sleep, I’ve just now woken up, this time I have really become conscious for the first time.” He can’t ever get to the second line of his diary entry for the day because his brain resets several times a minute. Oliver Sacks offers this grim diagnosis: “He no longer has any inner narrative.”
The only time this amnesia doesn’t interfere with his life is when he’s playing music or conducting an orchestra. Everything about Clive changes when he begins to conduct. All of his parts click into place so that he has actual posture and no longer seems tossed together and his face loses the droop caused by the relentless strangeness of things. He conducts with an intensity that suggests he understands that melody is the only thing he understands. Only in music is Clive able to perform as flawlessly as he did before the disease. And only in his love for his wife is he able to perform better. As Deborah tells Sacks in a letter quoted at the end of his article: Clive’s at-homeness in music and in his love for me are where he transcends amnesia and finds continuum—not the linear fusion of moment after moment …
Static
I’m staring at the television: the gossamer crackling. Even when it’s off, I stare, pondering the horrific way the TV came to anchor my living room.
Kate had threatened to kill herself several times before but never really tried—cried wolf—which leads me to believe that when she crashed into that SUV on the mountain, sh
e was truly afraid for her life, first sad with regret for saying things to Johnny she never meant and then genuinely afraid for her life. The Alamogordo Daily News reports, “She was not wearing a seatbelt and police do not know the reason she drove her Camry into another vehicle.” That doesn’t sound like an accident; drove implies such intent, dark and remorseless. But her obituary refutes the darkness, or at least the intent: “Kate, 21, passed away Sunday … in a motor vehicle accident.”
I care whether she really meant to die because I am now the owner of her TV. I care whether she really meant to die because of something I should have mentioned before: I have the scraps Kate kept of me. Maybe she had a crush, a high school infatuation, but I never knew, didn’t recognize her in the fancy frames when I claimed the TV and don’t, for the life of me, know the girl with dark hair and a bright grin and milky skin in the head shots from our yearbooks or the glowing photo from her obituary. I didn’t know her name when, shortly after she died, I got a stack of things from her mother: newspaper clippings, theater programs, snapshots—all pictures of me or snippets of things about me that might have been in my scrapbook. But they’re not in my scrapbook. I don’t have a scrapbook. These were things Kate kept—not a lot, not so many that it was an obsession, but just enough to be significant, to be passed along after death. I received the collection of papers without explanation as if they were personal belongings I’d lent Kate years ago, as if I should have anticipated their return all along, as if the whole lot of them weren’t unabashedly incriminating evidence about my role, however indirect, in the girl’s demise.
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