The Answer to the Riddle Is Me

by David Stuart MacLean

  I had no idea how to respond to the scarf or the book. I remembered the women. I had pictures galore of Ariel, and there were a few snapshots lying around of the other woman.

  Reconstructing our relationship through old e-mails and by way of stories from friends and family, I found out that while I was dating Ariel, her cousin, with whom she had been exceptionally close, died in a car accident. We were dating long-distance at the time. She was in Boston, and I was in Las Cruces. She cheated on me. I cheated on her with the woman who sent me the book. (“Right after her cousin died?” I asked. “Yeah,” my friends and family said.) Ariel and I spent the next summer house-sitting in Chapel Hill, and it sounded awful. We’d have friends over for dinner parties and end up screaming at each other in front of everyone. She went back to Boston and I went back to Las Cruces, where I applied for the Fulbright grant. I called her that November and broke up with her.

  And that’s when I had started dating Anne.

  Back at the shrink, I had some new thoughts and wanted to bounce them off her. I felt that memory was a cultural construct, all of it preshaped by commerce. In my teaching, my students were much better able to talk about movies and shows than they ever were about themselves and their experiences. My experience with amnesia was most real to others when I talked about pop culture antecedents. I wheeled my hands in the air, which is something I found I did when I was trying to say smart things. The only way I could get people to understand the experience of waking up to being me was to talk about the movie representations that weren’t like my experience. In order to talk about me, I had to refer exclusively to the not-me.

  The shrink listened to me. She folded her hands. Kept them in her lap.

  I continued. I talked about oblivion and how we only know it through the doorways, the bottomless pits that heroes balance above, the sarlacc pit in Return of the Jedi, a volcano holding a hole into which sacrifices are thrown. My hands weaved intricate designs in front of me as I spoke. I spun my wrists. I pointed to pockets of air as if my abstract concepts existed in that very space. I wanted the shrink to understand that nothing is always defined by something; that in order for me to understand my experience of nothing, I’ve had to become gnarled and ugly at my borders.

  I was really on a roll.

  My heart was beating fast, and I was flush with the sheen of ideas. This was real progress. I started to think that the shrink was going to go home and write papers about me. I wondered if I’d get any credit. What’d I say—“a volcano holding a hole”—a hole that is held? I’d have to remember that for later.

  I went on for nearly the whole hour. I was giddy with the brilliance I tapped into. I was amazed that I was paying for this. She should have been paying me. I quieted down and sat on my hands. I was prepared for a summative statement from her; it would come out like applause.

  She folded her notebook and shook her head. “You’ve done a good job of saying everything but how you feel,” she said. “Sadness isn’t something you get to get out of by being smart. You don’t get to outwit this. You will have to deal with the pain at some point.”

  I went home for Thanksgiving. Every time the plane pitched up and down, my chest tightened up. I wanted a drink. The movie they were playing was The Core. I decided not to watch it. Instead, I concentrated on making sure I continued to breathe.

  Leaking out of the headphones of every movie-watching passenger were the sounds of explosions and metal-on-metal grinding. The plane bumped up and down. I pressed my call button, but the turbulence was too extreme, and the flight attendants were all strapped in as well. We kept pace with the storm, and the flight would suddenly drop, and my stomach would enter my throat. I flipped open the window shade. It was all darkness out there. Chunks of cloud flew past the window, the little light on the tip of the wing bipped on and off, and I could see the wing bending as we flew. I kept waiting for it to snap off. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Hilary Swank and Aaron Eckhart pilot a digging machine to the center of the earth in order to deliver a nuclear payload to restart the suddenly dormant core. The cabin of their digging machine bucked and spun as they navigated rivers of magma and fields of diamonds. I watched the wing bounce up and down. The plane took a big bump. All of us lifted out of our seats, our seatbelts straining to keep us all in.

  My call button stayed lit, but the flight attendants stayed in their seats the entire trip. It was three hours of rocking and pitching and wailing and a sweaty Hilary Swank gritting her teeth, pushing the digging machine deeper and deeper into the earth. The sweat ran down my back, and I pushed my palms down my pants again and again to keep them dry.

  The clouds tore by like clawed cotton as we descended. We seemed to stay in the clouds for forever. When the city appeared, we were right on top of it. The dim Columbus skyline was surprised to see us emerge.

  I woke up not knowing where I was. The room was tight. The shadows were strange. Rows and rows of floating passengers were all around me, two tiers of them lined up and facing the same way. I was damp and on a mattress in the middle of these rows of people. None of them looked at me. The moonlight hit their outfits but didn’t reveal their faces. Something hairy brushed my hand, and I jumped.

  I hit at the walls, and a light came on. My parents’ dog looked at me worriedly, giant saucer eyes wondering what had disturbed our sleep.

  I was in Ohio. My parents had turned my old room into a closet, and I was sleeping staring up at double rows of clothes on hangers. This kind of thing happened to people all the time, I told myself. This wasn’t prodromal of anything except ordinary life.

  In the corner of the room were boxes full of comic books. My comic books. Thousands of them. I had left them here with my parents when I went away to college, and they had stayed in that corner ever since. I flipped through a few of them, hoping they’d get me drowsy enough to slip back asleep.

  It was five a.m. when it became clear that I wasn’t going back to sleep no matter how many old comics I read, so I went downstairs. My mom was up, watching one of the network morning shows while using a spreadsheet on her laptop to plan the day’s oven schedule for Thanksgiving dinner. I fixed myself some coffee and sat down with her.

  During a commercial break I asked my mom if I respected women.

  “You were raised in a house full of them. That’s for sure.”

  I told her about the woman at the Halloween party with the cat ears and what she’d said about my dropping Jenn on the dance floor and how that was illustrative of how I treated all women, including Anne, including the way I treated my own mom.

  She closed her laptop. “David, the real problem with her statement is that it makes it seem like you respect men.”

  “So I’m really just a jackass then?” I asked.

  “My son, the equal-opportunity jackass.”

  The new semester came, and Anne and I ended up working the same shift at the campus writing center. It was three hours, twice a week. Industrious kids with bad grammar made appointments with either one of us, and we’d walk them through subject/verb agreements and the differences between your and you’re. There was a lot of dead time, and Anne and I would spend it at our respective terminals, silently surfing the Internet. She was skinnier than ever. It was early February in Las Cruces, but she wore flimsy sundresses that showed the stark anatomy of her clavicle. From friends I had heard she was still swimming every day before she came to school in the morning, and three days a week she swam again before she went home. She carried that giant mug of water and trailed chlorine smell through the halls.

  Sometimes, Clark would come and sit with us on slow days. It was early in the semester, so not many students were scheduled. Clark’s wife, Tanya, had left him for another woman. I envied Clark; he was up-front about how miserable he was. He was drunk nearly all the time. At bars, Clark would bitch about his lesbian ex-wife, and some smart-ass would say that the exact same thing had happened to Ross on Friends. The worst heartache of his life, and a TV show had gotten
there first.

  Clark’s ex-wife worked at the used bookstore in downtown Las Cruces. The place was massive, an adobe labyrinth with meandering shelves that branched off into other rooms. It smelled of moldering paperbacks and microwaved enchiladas and was easy to get lost in. Clark’s ex-wife was dating a woman who also worked at the bookstore and who wore black T-shirts and carried a wallet with a chain on it. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to stumble on the two of them making out in Contemporary American Poetry M–Z.

  Clark, Anne, and I would sit there in the writing center watching the sun etch down the sky before hiding behind the mountains. The drunk, the anorexic, and the amnesiac. All of us in our own little separate pods of sadness.

  I don’t know when the two of them fell in love, but I was probably there to see it happen.

  The insomnia never stopped. I’d go a week and have perhaps ten hours of sleep tucked in here and there in half-hour segments. I didn’t want to go to a doctor, didn’t want to tell anyone anything anymore. I didn’t want more pills. I didn’t want to be diagnosed as crazy. Again.

  A video store up the street from me went out of business and was selling off its stock for two bucks a pop. I took a cash advance on a credit card and bought fifty or so tapes.

  I watched L.A. Confidential, The Terminator, Miller’s Crossing, Unforgiven, and The Fugitive over and over. I had a small combo TV/VCR that I hauled into bed with me, and I’d watch the movies with my big toe on the power button. If sleep was near, I’d pop the TV off. I’d start the next night where I left off. I watched the movies in slices. If I finished one, I’d get halfway through another before my big toe twitched and sent the screen to black.

  Amnesia. What it’s not like is Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight chopping vegetables and then suddenly chopping faster and faster, having the family empty the crisper to keep up with her sudden ecstasy of chopping, shouting to the cutting board, “I know how to do this. I must have been a chef.” And then throwing the knife, which sticks in the cabinet, and while it trembles, saying, “What? Chefs do that.”

  I found no secret talents.

  For me it was more like Scott Bakula from the TV show Quantum Leap, who keeps waking up in other people’s lives and figures out who he is by reacting benignly to whatever people say to him until he can get to a mirror and see who he looks like. Bakula always has a mission, to make something right, in order to placate the whims of some machine in the future that determines when and into what life he jumps next.

  Amnesia is not like Guy Pearce in Memento waking up to find his leg wrapped in gauze, then peeling it off to find a tattoo with a cryptic command. I woke and found a tattoo on my ankle. All my tattoo told me was that I didn’t like my tattoo.

  Amnesia is a lot like being Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall and dreaming of climbing the mountains of Mars with Rachel Ticotin, and then waking up in the arms of Sharon Stone, who acts like your wife for a while before she tries to kill you and you travel to Mars to talk to Kuato, who is a small man embedded in Marshall Bell’s stomach.

  No. That’s a lie. It’s not like that at all. But it is kind of like when Arnold sees a video of himself from the past, and the past Arnold is kind of an asshole mastermind whom the current Arnold hates. It is kind of like that.

  It’s not like Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity waking up in an ocean, either.

  My friend Bob Trace—the guy who took a fistful of acid in Berlin, gave all of his possessions away to strangers, and was captured naked in the subway and taken to a German mental institution—came home to the States and took care of his dying grandfather. When I finally got around to calling him, he told me that this was his recovery process. He returned to the States and occupied himself with sponge baths and medication schedules (his grandfather’s and his own). The house was in a rural and isolated area, and Bob went weeks without talking to anyone but his late-stage-dementia grandfather. He ended up watching Forrest Gump more than a hundred times. The movie became his touchstone, his two-hour-and-twenty-two-minute mantra. It was the handrail he clung to as he made his way back to mental health. I liked his technique but wanted to have a better movie than Forrest Gump, which is why I bought so many videos by auteur filmmakers. If I was going to be rebuilt by a movie, I wanted it to be a classic, preferably foreign.

  There are some people who, when they have insomnia, can make productive use of those hours, reading or knitting as they wait for sleep to show up. My insomnia is not that kind. It’s blurry, and my mind spins like a roulette wheel. I’m half-asleep/half-wild. I can’t read. But I was overly ambitious when I was on my knees going through the boxes of two-dollar castoffs. Movies with subtitles became just more reading. I’d get ten minutes into Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel or Fellini’s Fred and Ginger before I’d eject them and put in The Fugitive. Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble getting chased by Deputy Sam Gerard, played by Tommy Lee Jones—I didn’t need any higher brain functions to track that plot.

  Kimble’s wife is murdered by a one-armed man, but the cops arrest Kimble for killing her, and he’s sentenced to death. He escapes and goes back to Chicago to clear his name. He’s lost everything that meant something to him, but he’s going to continue to fight. For a vascular surgeon, Kimble is pretty streetwise. Kimble is a bruise of a man, but he continues his pursuit of the truth. He suffers; he endures. He’s Job.

  Sam Gerard is the stern US Marshal who chases after Kimble. He has one expression throughout the movie: steely exasperation. He’s a man whose sole emotional reaction to the world is frustration. He’s Eeyore.

  Kimble chasing after an old life and Gerard chasing after Kimble: Job versus Eeyore. If you take both of these characters and cram them into your brain at once, then you have what recovering from amnesia feels like.

  Watching a chunk of the movie until I fell asleep and then watching the remainder the next night made it seem like Kimble was always recovering his life, then losing it again. Kimble was shaking hands with Sam Gerard at the end of the film, and then moments later he was holding a gun on him inside of a dam. Kimble was confronting his nemesis in the banquet room of the Palmer House Hilton, accusing him of killing his wife, and then the movie would rattle and buzz and rewind, and there was Kimble, walking through a charity ball in his tuxedo, saving his beautiful wife from all of the other fawning doctors (“I was down to my last joke,” she says, thanking him). Watching the movie this way created a fugue state for Kimble. He was guilty and innocent and jailed and freed and escaped and caught and sentenced and vindicated all at the same time. The story didn’t matter anymore.

  With a twitch of my big toe, it’d all start again.

  The last time I saw my shrink I made a point not to be smart or clever or knowledgeable about my situation. I wanted to show her that I could learn, that I was cooperative, that I was willing to try it her way. That I was reachable.

  I told her about my dreams. I told her about the banal-mares, in which I woke up as other people who were on the clock and waiting for their shifts to end. I told her about waking up as a convenience store worker and the chunk of me that was missing in that dream, and how it made me realize how crazy random it was not just that I was me (the billion sperm to one egg; the insane odds against all my ancestors ever meeting each other), but also how, with the millions of electrical pulses in the brain that were needed to fire every microsecond, it was incredibly random that I continued to be me. I yanked tissues from the box and pushed them into my eyes. I told her that I was tired of having my biggest fear be not being me.

  “You know, convenience store workers serve a very important function in the universe,” the shrink said.

  “I know that,” I said, thinking that she was missing something. “People need gas. People need cigarettes.”

  She leaned in close to me and said, “Convenience store workers are the reincarnated souls of people who died in the Holocaust. They need the mundane nature of those jobs to make sense of what happened to them in their previous lives.”<
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  “Oh,” I said.

  And just like that, I wasn’t the craziest person in the room anymore.

  I hadn’t realized how tiring it had been to always suspect that I was the craziest person in the room no matter where I went. I stared into her eyes and was relieved of that burden. She was nuts. I recognized that. And because of this recognition, it was the first time I’d felt healthy in a year and a half.

  Even so, the next week I called and canceled our upcoming appointments.

  It was spring. I could tell by the progress of the construction across the street. The stick frames of the new houses stood naked in the wind. Men clambered around them, banging with hammers. I woke up most days having breathing problems: panic, cigarettes, and asthma—my chest was clogged. I’d spend the first half hour of every morning coughing myself clear. It was a Saturday, and the prospect of an unplanned day stretched out before me. I let Sally out and stood in my yard watching her search for things to eat. The men were working across the street even though it was a weekend. They were rushing to get as much done as they could before the summer rolled in and baked us all. My chest still felt tight, so I took a hit off my inhaler and then lit up a cigarette.

  For a week now, the windows of my house had been covered with giant blackflies. I called the landlord and told him that something had died in the walls, and he needed to take care of it.

  He asked me if I could smell anything.

  I told him no.

  He told me it was probably because of my dog and that it was my job.

  I told him Sally was exceptionally clean, but I knew this wouldn’t convince him and that I was never going to see him actually do work at the house.