Yes, those are the words he uses: mnemonic and critical mass.
While Billy is washing our laundry in the bathtub, and hanging it to dry on wooden folding racks he has erected by radiators, I return to my new room. Like my actual mind, it is not entirely empty, because the yellow car is still there in both. I hope to fill the room with objects that match the flotsam and jetsam retrieved from other portions of my brain, which are still shut off from my consciousness. Of course, I have no way of telling whether my memories have been permanently erased, but if a few small items have already made it through, then others might follow.
I close the door and turn off the chandelier. The window provides enough dim light. I sit down cross-legged on the floor in the center of the room, and close my eyes. The car in the palm of my hand weighs next to nothing, as a key weighs next to nothing yet can open castle gates or unlock the launch buttons of nuclear missiles. Why does this little toy mean so much to me? I sense that straining to recall the reason won’t help, and could even make it harder. It is important not to push. Simply resting with this single solid prompt may be the answer to it all.
What else do I remember?
Mittens! I am wearing mittens. What color are they? Beige wool, woven in Scandinavian patterns. My boot tops have red rims. My cries are those of a child. Ten years old, eleven?
At the bottom of the pond, only two or three feet below the ice, are countless colored leaves. And broken bottles covered in slime. Green circuit boards from computers.
Into my mind’s eye flashes a new scene. It is no longer winter. It is autumn, and an old bearded man in checkered shirt and suspenders is standing beside a woodpile, holding an axe. He lifts the axe in both hands and brings it down on a computer sitting on a chopping block. Again and again he smashes. He is enraged, snarling, gritting his teeth on ugly words. He picks up the pieces and hurls them into the middle of the pond. He grabs a black bottle from his trouser pocket, puts it to his mouth, and clamps his teeth on the cork, which he pulls out and spits onto the ground. He tilts his head back and gulps down the bottle’s contents. When it is empty, he shoves the bottle at me.
“Here,” he growls, “cash it in for a two-cent refund.”
I am frightened by his mood but glad to receive the bottle. On its label is a sorrel horse.
My eyes fly open. Jumping up, I run out into the corridor and down the hall, enter our apartment, and go through the doorway to the hidden room of the mind. There on the wall is the primitive painting of a sorrel horse, and beneath it the words Benny’s Vermont Dark Ale. Beneath this, in small print that I had not noticed before:
Benjamin Uffington Brewery
Tadd’s Ford, Vermont ~ est. 1799
The giant’s voice erupts behind me, startling me: “This seems to have caught your attention, Francisco.”
“Where did you get it?” I ask him.
“At a church rummage sale in Harlem. Why? Is it a clue?”
“I d-don’t know. It might have triggered a real memory. In my mind I just saw an old man drinking from a bottle with this label—a brown-horse label. On the other hand, the painting might have induced a scene in my imagination.”
“Which do you think it is?”
“I’m not sure, but the scene in my mind seemed so real.”
“Mmm, dreams are like that too.”
“And so are real memories. But the trail ends there, Billy.”
“Then there’s only one thing we can do.”
I look at him.
“We visit Vermont,” he says, his eyes shining at the prospect of another adventure.
It takes a couple of days for Billy to search for a hired driver with a high-ceilinged minivan. He thinks it’s better we don’t ask Hal 9000 to do the job. In a secondhand bookstore he finds a map of Vermont. In the public library he does some research on New England breweries.
While he is putting together our plan, I spend long hours sitting in my room of hidden memories. The horse painting is now hanging on the wall. The yellow car is on the windowsill. I sit on the floor, waiting, waiting for voices in empty rooms.
For a time I listen to the subdued echoes of car engines, garbage trucks, police and ambulance sirens, the occasional thumping of Billy’s sock feet in the hallway, or his boots on the stairs going down to the street entrance, his boots returning an hour or so later. I nod into a half sleep.
“Here,” growls the voice of the old bearded man, “cash it in for a two-cent refund.”
With this I am wide-awake, feeling a stroke of fear. I see his face now, thrusting the bottle at me. His mouth twists bitterly, his eyes snapping with hatred.
“You killed them, you little parasite!” he roars.
Now the fear becomes terror and I back away from him. His face dissolves.
I open my eyes. I am sitting alone in the room, my heart racing.
I close my eyes.
“You love your tragedy,” says a woman’s voice. “You love it more than you love me.”
I cannot see her face, only a feminine hand, young, a ring on its wedding finger, thrusting a piece of paper at me. I take it and look closely. On it is a photo of New York City’s skyline, and below it are numbers:
09-11-20-01
The paper dissolves, the hand dissolves. I shake my head to clear it of these phantoms. I leap to my feet and pace around the room. I am angry now. This is not a memory! Not a real preamnesia memory. My subconscious has taken the paper the jackdaw pecked in my self-portrait and conflated it with imaginary scenes that are no more than manifestations of subliminal emotions.
“Get out of here! Get out of here!” I yell.
I am pounding the sides of my skull with my fists when Billy comes into the room and finds me.
“Are you all right, Francisco?” he asks in a subdued voice, his face worried.
“I’m all right,” I whimper. “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m fine.”
“Have you got a new clue?”
“No. Yes. I just realized something. I found out that my mind plays tricks on me.”
He chuckles. “Now, that’s a fact. Happens to all of us. You just have to spot the tricks.”
“It cheats! It lies!”
“Sometimes it embellishes to evoke a deeper truth.”
“What!”
“It tells us stories so we understand things better.”
“Billy, I don’t have a story. And I don’t think I want one anymore. But one thing for certain, we are not going to waste our time on a trip to Vermont.”
6
The mystic mountains of Vermont
Our driver is a lady in her late forties. I can’t see her eyes through her sunglasses. Why is she wearing them before sunrise? Her expression is neutral, as if she’s content enough to have the job but not overly excited about it. She is chary of words. Her ponytail is gray. The lip of her New York Yankees baseball cap is low over her brow. She is wearing dark-blue janitor’s overalls, with the logo of a winged bus and Icarus Rentals stitched on the breast. An incongruously large Swiss watch adorns her thin wrist. Her salmon-pink sneakers manipulate the pedals as if they were part of her body, requiring no thought.
The vehicle is a fairly new, white, eighteen-passenger van, which she drives without haste or impulsiveness. I am sitting beside her in the front seat. Billy is in the very rear on a wall-to-wall padded bench that allows him some comfort, his arms stretched out along the back cushions, his legs extended down the center aisle.
On the dashboard sits a small glowing screen with an animated map that is constantly changing. As we maneuver our way northward out of Manhattan, the machine speaks a few times in a tinny Japanese accent, and then the driver turns down the volume. At a red stoplight she removes her sunglasses and flicks her eyes again and again at the rearview mirror, doubtless watching Billy. The light turns green and we glide forward.
“The fast route or the scenic?” the woman asks us.
“The scenic, please,” Billy answers.
“I’m Rob
erta,” she says out of nowhere.
We tell her our names.
“Uh-huh,” she replies and inserts wired plugs into her ears. I follow the wires to their source in the console, where a vivid orange bar of light silently registers the fluctuations of strong music being played, inaudible to Billy and me.
We are in Connecticut by the time the sun comes up over Long Island. Roberta puts her sunglasses back on. We leave the main highway at New Haven, turning north toward Hartford and Springfield. There are more and more farms along the way, and the land is rising. Soon we are in the Connecticut River valley, following beside the water, hills to the right and the left, gold light on the western slopes, numerous woods with pale-green budding leaves, mares and foals in pastures. There is heavy southbound traffic, commuters heading toward the larger cities, but our lane is relatively open, the cars moving at a good clip.
I do not know what lies ahead of us today—a breakthrough or another disappointment. I am feeling a mixture of expectancy and apprehension. Even so, the greenery and vistas spreading all about us have a soothing effect. I turn around to see how Billy is doing. He is gazing at farms and fields and forests, his chin tilted high, eyes happy. This is the second time he has left New York City since his accident, years ago, the first in a season of warmth. He catches my eye and smiles.
He opens the paper map on his lap, bending over it, squinting.
“The Appalachians, Francisco,” he says, pointing ahead. “North of here they get higher. Fewer and fewer people too. Though you might see Iroquois running through the trees. Maybe a few colonists firing muskets at redcoats.”
As long as I’ve known him, Billy has been more or less perpetually cheerful, his frequent laughter ranging from hearty to light. But he has never joked or quipped until now.
I turn around to show him my appreciation, but he is already back to his map. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you would see nothing more than a friendly jock relaxing after a game. You would think: Nice guy. And beneath the thought, unstated, possibly even subconscious, would be the summarization: Dumb.
How very little I have considered his life. Preoccupied by my own problems, grown accustomed to his endless generosity, have I slipped into an attitude of entitlement? There’s another word for it, I think. Yes—narcissism.
Maybe that’s too harsh. You break your arm, and the arm demands attention. You break your mind, and the mind demands attention. But at what point does the attention become obsession? When does the fixing make the problem worse? I don’t know when. I don’t know anything, really. I return to watching the trees.
We stop for a break at a town called Brattleboro. We all get out of the minivan to stretch our limbs. The hills have become soaring round-top mountains covered in thick woods. Vermont is to the left of us, New Hampshire to the right. There are a lot of birds winging and singing in the treetops. I inhale deeply, astonished by the air’s sweetness, its purity, its organic perfumes. The river rustles in my ears.
Billy offers me a sandwich from his shopping bag. I eat half a meatloaf on rye. He eats two whole ones. Roberta declines the offer. She walks off a ways and talks into her cell phone. Her voice is loud; she is giving instructions about the care of a cat—to her teenage offspring, I presume. Then she is talking to a friend about a bowling date. Then she is reporting to her home office. She lowers her voice for this one, but the word giant wafts toward me. Fortunately, Billy has been jogging down the highway and is just now turning around to head back in our direction. Roberta is making another call—the subject matter is “sleeping around” and “morning-after pills”.
I have noticed this social norm on the sidewalks of New York. People use cell phones as if these instruments are magical erasers of other living creatures. With the tap of a button, humanity dissolves into nonbeing, or at best is frozen into an abstraction. Conversations of the most intimate sort are publicly broadcast without regard for who may be listening, the willing and the unwilling. On a busy street, there is so much of this happening that you are never quite sure which phrases belong with other free-floating fragments.
Two days ago, I returned to the art gallery on Fifth Avenue. The Metropolitan Museum of Misplaced Memories, Billy calls it. I went alone, because I wanted to inspect, without distraction, the jackdaw’s paper in my self-portrait. The painting was unchanged. As before, the skyline of the city and the mysterious number stirred in me profoundly uneasy feelings.
Walking home on Fifth, I noticed that the avenue seemed unusually deserted. Then I realized that it was after seven o’clock in the evening, with most of the businesses closed and office workers gone. Exactly at the moment I passed the entrance of a soaring glass skyscraper, a woman came out through its doors and walked rapidly a few paces behind me. In a single glance I had taken in a lot of details: late twenties or early thirties, incredibly beautiful, blond, slender, long legged, and fit, wearing gold jewelry, a tailored black suit, and high heels tapping the concrete in a determined manner. She carried a leather valise with gold initials on it. A lawyer, I thought, or a rising executive.
Though I could hear her heels swiftly closing the gap between us, I refused to turn around to gape at this vision of splendor. Nearer and nearer she came, a cloud of exotic fragrance enveloping me. As she passed me on the left, her arm brushed mine, and she breathed throatily, “I love you.”
I veered slightly to the right and increased my walking speed. But to no avail. She kept pace with me, and again came the passionate “I love you!”
In split seconds I analyzed the situation and discarded a number of options. Life is not fair, I began. She is too beautiful and powerful. You will adore her and become enslaved. She will manipulate you. She will break your heart. You will break hers. Your handsomeness, such as it is, means nothing. You are mentally ill. You are a clock with a broken spring. You are destitute and a beggar. Et cetera, et cetera.
As vistas of devastation opened before me, I was about to break into a sprint when suddenly she pulled ahead. Then I noticed the cell phone in her left hand, pressed to her ear. And the last thing I heard before she disappeared around a corner was, “Kiss the kids for me, honey, I’ll be home at eight. I love you!”
Billy is huffing and puffing beside the van, doing post-jog ligament stretches. Roberta folds up her cell phone, pockets it, and pops the audio plugs back into her ears. We all take our seats. The journey resumes.
At White River Junction we turn off the highway and head northwest on a secondary highway that weaves its way into increasingly rugged country. Now and then we pass old farms and homesteads, a cupola-topped barn with a copper weather vane flashing in the sun, occasionally small villages that must have had greater populations at one time. Our second rest stop is merely for a short bathroom break in the bushes. While the others are thus engaged, I walk on a few hundred yards to a crossroads hamlet of six houses, all in various stages of disrepair. In the village square stands a life-size bronze statue of a Civil War soldier, commemorating the fallen of that place—about sixty young men. Surrounding and encroaching on this community, once so vital with potency, with hope, the forest devours its memories.
Roberta and Billy pick me up where I stand contemplating the names, the forgotten lives. A few miles farther on, we turn right onto a paved route that heads into wilder woodlands, following it for a while until we divert onto a series of narrowing roads that take us more or less in the direction of north-northeast.
Shortly after 1 P.M. we come to another village. As we decelerate, we pass a hand-painted sign, “Welcome to Odium!” We crawl past four houses and a gas station with an archaic red pump, an Out of Order sign tied to it with baling twine. Seconds later we are leaving it behind, and pass another sign, “You are leaving Odium. Come again.”
Roberta checks her dashboard computer.
“Some of these places aren’t on the GPS,” she says, “but it looks like Tadd’s Ford is. It’s a mile ahead.”
The van goes over a rise and dips dow
n into a fold in the mountains, entering a serene green valley with a patchwork of farms and woods, a cow in a meadow, and a creek meandering through the fields. At the bottom of the hill, we come to a sign that informs us we have arrived. To our right is the village proper, perhaps ten or more houses, a mixture of old architectures, some with Dutch roofs, some with high peaks and the spikes of lightning rods rising from blue ceramic orbs. The sidings of sheds and homes are wooden shingles, either whitewashed or unpainted. There is a single gas station and corner store, its outer walls decorated with rusty sheets of metal advertising Coca-Cola and cattle feed.
Across the street is a log building with a covered country-style porch. A sign on the roof tells us it’s Myrt’s Cafe. We park in front of it. There is also a Post Office sign in its window.
Billy and I get out of the van and tromp up the steps to the front door, leaving Roberta standing by the van, tapping on her cell phone. Billy ducks his head low, and I duck too, since the makers of the cafe designed it for people shorter than both of us. The door opens to the sound of jingling bells. Inside, we note the post office wicket directly before us. Three freestanding tables with chairs are positioned to our left, beside the front window. At one of these sits an elderly man in a checkered work coat and matching cap, reading a newspaper with a cup of coffee beside him. He looks up, holds us in his gaze for a time, then looks down and resumes reading. It seems that a giant entering his personal environment makes no impression whatsoever.
Stretched diagonally across the wall behind him is a bobcat pelt. Beside it are crossed snowshoes. Colorful quilts in clear plastic wrappers hang from the rafters. Across from the window, a serving counter with spin-top stools runs the length of the room. Leaning over it on the working side of the counter is a lady who appears to be in her late seventies, and might even be a hearty octogenarian. She is reading a paperback book. Her gray hair is finely braided and wrapped around her head, held in place by bobby pins. She wears wire-rim spectacles and a flowered print dress under her apron. She looks up slowly, loath to leave what she is reading. Perusing us, she pauses over Billy, and straightens her back.
The Fool of New York City Page 9