When I started college, I planned a double major in literature and psychology. It almost seemed wrong to me that they were separate disciplines, because there was so much of each in the other. That was before I learned more about the distinction between the mind as the seat of the soul, and the brain as an organ. In my second year I decided to focus only on psychology, because—oddly enough—of the professor who hadn’t let me use my anecdotal research, on people’s earliest memories, for a term paper. Although I thought she was being unfair at the time, I began to understand that she was trying to make me understand the beauty of psychology as a science. And she did. In my junior year, I worked as a lab aide for an assistant professor who was convinced that memory could be transferred from one animal to another. He was trying to reproduce experiments from the 1970s in which researchers trained one set of rats to avoid dark spaces, then injected a peptide (scotophobin, from the Greek for “fear of the dark”) from those rats into an untrained set of rats. Supposedly, the untrained set would become afraid of the dark strictly by virtue of the injection, thereby proving that memory had been transferred between brains.
It turned out that this particular professor was a cokehead—he ended up having to abandon the experiments, and losing his job, when they found him stealing cocaine from another researcher, who was testing its effects on monkeys. And the scotophobin theory had pretty much been debunked twenty years earlier, so nobody picked up where my boss left off.
But I was hooked. If it was possible to see the process of memory taking place in a sea snail’s nervous system preserved in a petri dish, didn’t this suggest that there might be more secrets of the human mind to be uncovered, if we studied long enough and hard?
My first exposure to the vagaries of memory came from the story of the Russian Anastasia, and the idea that a person could forget, entirely, the foundations of her life. I remember watching the old Ingrid Bergman movie, Anastasia, with my father on a Saturday afternoon, the winter I was twelve. I was supposed to have a piano lesson, but my father convinced my mother to cancel it so that I could watch the movie with him. We sat on the couch together and ate graham crackers as we watched Yul Brynner trying to persuade Helen Hayes, as the Empress, that Ingrid Bergman was really a member of the imperial family. My favorite part was when the Empress finally believed that the woman presented to her was her long-lost granddaughter—she flung her arms around Ingrid Bergman and welcomed her back to the family. At the end of their emotional embrace, the Empress whispered, “And if it should not be you, don’t ever tell me.”
“God,” my father said, suspending a quarter of graham cracker in front of his mouth. He ate them that way, split along the cracker-folds, to avoid spilling crumbs.
“What does she mean?” I said. “’Don’t ever tell me’?”
“She means, if Ingrid Bergman is lying to her, she doesn’t want to know.” My father put his cracker down instead of eating it, and this seemed to me a gesture of deference to what had just happened on the screen.
I put my cracker down, too. “You mean, she doesn’t want to find out the truth?”
“Not if the truth is what she doesn’t want to believe.” My father put his hand on the back of my neck and squeezed. It was a touch he saved only for me. “Not if it’s too painful.”
Aristotle believed that memory was located in the heart. He said the brain was too cold, too bloodless, to nurture emotion and thought.
But in the past ten years I’ve taken tremendous solace from studying the brain’s functions connected to memory. Sometimes, when it seems that my feelings might overwhelm me, I close my eyes and picture what an emotion actually looks like: an intricate confluence of cells and chemicals, proteins dancing in a round. In the year after my father and Meggy died, I found a peculiar comfort in the embrace of science and its hard-edged, solid-sounding words—hippocampus, anterograde, fugue.
In January, six months after the deaths, I took the entrance exams and applied to graduate-school programs in experimental psychology. I always stress “experimental”—the scientific branch—because if I just say psychology, people assume I’m a therapist. At parties they start asking me questions about their own therapies—how the shrink won’t say whether he’s married or not, or if he has any kids, and do I think it’s fair of him to withhold such basic information, when he expects the client to spill her guts?
Or, if it isn’t therapy they want to talk about, it’s dreams. What do you think it means, my landlady asked me, when she saw “psychologist” under Occupation on my rental agreement form, that I keep having dreams about cows with no faces? Over and over, the same dream every night. Well, one time one of them had a face, it was my ex-husband. But usually there’s nothing—just this big, blank white space where the eyes are supposed to be. It was after this encounter that I began saying I studied the way the brain works, whenever somebody asked.
Although I knew I had scored well, I believed when the acceptances came that I had been let in because the admissions people felt sorry for me. I felt guilty about having used Meggy—my loss of her, and our father’s obsessions—in the essay I submitted with my applications. What else could I write about?—they asked, What made you interested in the study of the mind?—but I was aware, as I wrote it, that mine was a story that would get noticed.
So I pictured the review process for graduate school this way: the committee members sat around a table and examined files, and when mine came up they murmured, “Oh, yes, the murder-suicide,” and out of pity and benevolence, they let me in.
In my essay, I wrote that along with the feelings you are forced to endure when something changes forever the good world you have known, there is a little bonus thrown into the bargain by God. It’s not worth a fraction of how much it all hurts, but at least it’s something—the expression you see in somebody’s eyes when you tell them your whole story or a piece of it, and what is reflected back to you is the small comfort of the truth they understand then, that you are set apart by your suffering. That feeling is something you come to expect and depend upon. And, yes, to use, when you need it, when the words—my sister’s dead, our father killed her—are not enough to hold onto, they are a fact floating through the gray water of your day, sinking like soap to the one place you will never reach.
Ruthie and I were roommates for three years, until to her surprise she fell in love not with John F. Kennedy Jr. but with the woman in the next cubicle at work, and they moved to San Francisco. Since then I’ve lived alone, except for Bill Buckner, who is nearly thirteen years old. He and I stayed on another year in the place Ruthie and I had shared, and then, when the rent got too high, I found an apartment in a house outside the city, near the Cambridge town line.
I earned my doctorate at the university five years ago, and now I have a junior appointment here. I teach a seminar on the science of memory, and spend a lot of time on research. Usually my partner, or co-investigator as it says on the grants, is my colleague Ben Sokol, who went through the graduate program a year ahead of me.
Although he’s never told me directly, I know Ben hopes one day to discover evil. A compartment in the brain like the ones for art or calculations; he believes it can be located and identified, crouched behind sympathy or lust. His grandmother was at Auschwitz, one of the dozens of child twins allowed by Josef Mengele to survive so that Mengele could try out different things on duplicate gene sets, surgeries and injections and other experiments as they suited his Nazi whims. Ben’s grandmother came out from the liberation with a tendency to faint, from the transfusions. Her twin sister grew a beard for the rest of her life.
Although he tries to hide it, I can tell that Ben is nervous about himself, how the effects of those dark tests near the chambers might have seeped into his blood. It’s why he eats so carefully; why he avoids the rat labs and wears earmuffs into spring. He carries a pocket mirror in his backpack, along with his books, and a couple of times I’ve caught him peering close at some new blemish when he thought nobody could
see. He reminds me of my father in his cautious, thoughtful ways. When I met Ben, I thought there might be something more between him and me than friendship, but then he started dating a postdoc in the biology department, a woman named Helen who doesn’t look anything like what you’d expect of an expert in the sex life (“reproductive behavior,” on the grant applications) of tobacco horn worms. They got married within a year, and this made sense to me. I didn’t really expect Ben, or anyone else for that matter, to love me the way people believe they can be loved. I don’t know whether this comes from my father’s suicide and his murder of Meggy—from the conviction that if he had really loved us, he couldn’t have done what he did—or from finding out that you can’t, after all, trust what you thought you could.
I go on dates sometimes, and I sleep with some of the men to make myself feel normal. But after the third or fourth time with the same person, I find some reason not to see him again. It’s too frightening, that feeling of losing control. I’d rather be lonely than scared. I guess I believe that someday the balance will tip in the other direction, and I’ll try therapy again.
Or I won’t; maybe I’ll just keep busy until everything’s too late. It’s odd how our brains are constructed—isn’t it?—giving us flashes of truth and then, thank God, allowing us to forget what we’ve seen in that split second the window was open. All I know is that right now, even after so much time has passed, there are days when it’s all I can do to look at the photographs on my dresser without falling back into bed.
And yet there are moments—hearing one of my nephew’s voices on the phone, for instance, or feeling sun on my face through the trees—when I know it is possible not just to survive, but to live. I don’t remember this all the time, but I remember it often enough, and if it isn’t precisely hope I feel, it’s a close enough cousin.
Ben and Helen are my best friends in Boston, and their daughter Catherine is my godchild. She’s five now, and I spend a lot of time—weekends, holidays—with their family. Catherine has fine black hair that has never been cut, and she likes me to braid it. When I do, I close my eyes and think about Meggy. I imagine myself brushing long, soft handfuls away from my sister’s forehead, gathering it into bunches, and weaving it into braids. There is an over-and-under rhythm to braiding which the fingers, once fluent in it, never forget.
Sometimes when I open my eyes it gives me a start to see my hands twining through Catherine’s hair, because I could have sworn it was Meggy’s. I love my little sister as much as I ever did when she was alive, but her presence is fainter to me now; it makes me sick to admit it, but she’s grown more distant, she floats farther from my shore. I have not seen her or hugged her or touched her in more than twelve years. She would be twenty-seven now; when she was little she used to say she wanted to be a nurse or a cowboy when she grew up, but I can’t imagine her as an adult. Of course, I remember what she looked like—I almost slipped, just then, and said what she looks like—but those visions go in and out of focus, over time.
Ben and I have made a name for ourselves, at least as young researchers go, in the memory-disorder field. A year or so ago, we published a paper about a forty-seven-year-old man whose wife had come home from grocery shopping one Saturday to find him twitching and unconscious on the kitchen floor. In our study we call him Pete, though that isn’t his real name. When Pete woke up in the hospital, he thought he was twenty-three, and he didn’t remember a thing about the intervening years; he thought he had a baby, when his son was actually twenty-five, and of his sixteen-year-old daughter he knew nothing at all.
The doctors couldn’t find any neurological damage or injury to the brain. In the course of our research, we conducted interviews with just about everyone in Pete’s life, and found out that just before the onset of his amnesia, he’d learned that people at work were beginning to be suspicious about the qualifications he’d listed on his resume—which he had, in fact, been fabricating since he graduated from college and began his career. Based on the interviews, and the tests we did on Pete, we made a pretty good case for the hypothesis that his amnesia was due at least in part to his unconscious having taken over and—by erasing his memory for the years he had been, essentially, a fraud—saving him from having to face this discovery.
Pete’s case has been a godsend for Ben and me, the perfect experimental subject just when we needed one. It would have been impossible to write our paper based on theory alone. A lot of people in our field reject psychogenic theories about amnesia out-of-hand; they insist on physical sources, even of psychic pain.
It always amazes me when I hear this, because it makes perfect sense to me that there could be something so intolerable that the mind, in its infinite complexity and with every beneficent impulse toward its host, would take care of the problem by simply eliminating what refuses to be borne. It can’t be chosen, but (Ben and I believe) some of us have the capacity to lose track of the thoughts and memories that make life—as we would experience it, otherwise—impossible. My father didn’t have this gift, but I think my mother does. Of course, there’s a trade-off, which wouldn’t be worth it to most of us; in Pete’s case, if he’s telling us the truth, he’s had to give up most of his conscious history as an adult. We still haven’t determined why, but we’re working on it.
And, of course, we have our doubts. As much as we believe our own theory, it just doesn’t make gut sense that a person could lose, or put away somewhere inaccessible, the majority of his life. We’re like kids in nursery school who have been informed of the death of a classmate’s mother. We know it must be true because adults are crying, but our hearts aren’t stretched enough, yet, to allow a loss so large. We look at our friend and know it is some trick we will understand later; that it didn’t really happen, because no one could still be breathing whose mother wasn’t, too.
Then we learn about survival, how breath and life go on. We learn how people manage, even if it means giving up what they have come to count on, like sanity and love.
I’m not sure how much my mother sacrificed for her peace of mind, if she has any. All I know is that what she surrendered did not belong only to her.
We test Pete at three-month intervals; our grant pays for him and his family to come to Boston from Cleveland for a week at a time, so we can update his progress. So far, he’s only been able to acquire new information since the amnesia. He’s never remembered anything from what he calls the gap.
But one rainy afternoon in November, as I’m sitting in the cafeteria grabbing a sandwich while Pete takes a nap, Ben comes in and sits down at my table with a grin so outsized that I see people at the next table noticing it, too.
“What?” I say, dropping egg salad on my napkin. “You look like a retard.”
“Enough with the political correctness,” he tells me, pulling my square of carrot cake toward himself.
“What are you so happy about?”
“You will be, too. I was just upstairs with the daughter—”
“Whose, Pete’s?”
“Yeah. I always forget her name—Kali? Some goddess name. The one with the nose ring.”
“You think those hurt when you blow your nose?”
“I asked her. She says no.”
“You would.”
“Well, it was just idle chatter. At least, I thought it was, until she started telling me this. I didn’t have time to call you, it would have interrupted the flow—” He pauses to take a bite of my cake. “Hm,” he says. “Needs carrots.”
“Would you tell me what she said, already?” I slap the sleeve of his lab jacket and he holds his hands up, feigning fear of further attack.
“Okay. So listen to this. She was the only one in the room; they took Pete out for some blood work, and his wife was down here getting coffee or something.”
“Yeah. I saw her.”
“So Kali’s standing by the window, just looking out at the rain, and I ask her if she’s okay. I figure she’s going to say fine, right? but instead she says No, no
t really, and she has to tell me something.” He makes a little drumroll with his fingers on the tabletop. “You know how we were looking for something besides the fake resume that Pete might have wanted to forget?”
“Yeah?” I let the word rise on a question mark, feeling chills dimple my arms.
“Well, Kali was snooping around in her father’s desk, and she found a letter from some girl—some woman, I guess—claiming that he was her father. She’s the same age as Pete’s son, twenty-five, and from what she wrote, Kali figured out that Pete must have had an affair right after he got married.” Ben pauses to take another forkful of frosting.
“You’re kidding,” I say, because this—if it turns out to be true—could be further evidence of why Pete’s memory went back to the age it did. Our theory is that in certain types of amnesia, the patient’s mind returns to a time before the stress, or stresses, that might have caused the amnesia in the first place. We think the person goes back to a safer, happier time of life.
And the letter from his illegitimate daughter could give us a clue about what precipitated Pete’s condition. “When was the letter dated?” I ask Ben.
“This is the best part.” He leans in closer to deliver the pièce de résistance. “Three years ago, June seventeenth.”
And Give You Peace Page 23