Retrograde

  She breaks the clip off her pen and tries that; it’s thin enough, but too short for her to get a good grip on. She opens up the pen and tries the spring and finally the ink reservoir. Her nose is running and tears are already streaming down her face when she realizes that the lock has moved. One more turn and the reservoir breaks, but the mailbox opens.

  She gives a startled sob and pulls it open all the way, wiping blindly at her damp cheeks and nose with hands covered in thick blue ink. She hears footsteps behind her and readies all her explanations; she has the paperwork to back up her story, but she doesn’t want to look crazy.

  “There you are!” Doro calls from the bottom of the staircase. “Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anyone who—Hel, what happened to you? Your whole face is blue!”

  Sheepish, Helena takes her hand off the mailbox and lets the mail spill out. “I was crying and my pen broke. I just wanted to check the mail.”

  Doro’s expression is frozen between concern and amusement, the dimple in one cheek belying the line of worry across her forehead. “Oh,” she says, pulling a tissue out of her purse and handing it to Helena, “Good idea.”

  Helena dabs at her face until the tissue has a blue tinge. “What now?”

  Doro sighs. She looks tired. But someone has to know what to do, and Helena certainly doesn’t. “Let’s sort out your mail and then call a locksmith,” she says. “Luckily you have your ID with this address so they’ll be able to open the door.” Doro picks up a pile of envelopes from the floor and begins to weed the junk out from the actual mail. Helena returns to the mailbox for the last few things crushed into the bottom by weeks of mail being dropped onto them. She sees an envelope from her bank, her insurance company’s newsletter, a greeting card with no envelope and…

  “Doro,” she says, but her voice dries up in her throat and she has to say it again. “Doro, I don’t think we need to call the locksmith.”

  “What?”

  In answer, Helena reads the greeting card aloud:

  Dear Hel, I’m going to be in Manchester for a few weeks, so I thought I’d give your spare keys back. No use having them locked up in my apartment if you need them. Hope your weekend goes well!—here she’d drawn a winky face, maybe in reference to Helena’s date. Did everyone know about that?—Let’s catch up when I get back. Love, Julie.

  “Oh, that English girl who was at your birthday party?” Doro asks.

  “I think so.” For a brief instant, she thinks there’s a freckled face and an accent to go with that name, and then the image blurs. She remembers what she remembered, but she’s no longer sure of it. The experience leaves her breathless. She’s getting closer to something.

  They take a few minutes to finish sorting out the mail, to read the postcard Julie sent a week after her first note, glance at Helena’s bank statements and throw away all the outdated offers from the grocery store. They do these things not because they need to be done now, but because they need the time. To think, or, in Helena’s case, to try not to.

  Then Doro takes a shopping bag out of her purse, puts in all the important mail and offers Helena her arm. They leave her crutches beside the mailboxes.

  On the third floor, Helena gets another thrill of fear or excitement when she sees her name above the doorbell. Maybe if they rang instead of unlocking the door, another Helena Bachlein, just like her but totally different, would open it and welcome them into her uncannily familiar life.

  Doro opens the door but waits for Helena to go in first.

  The recognition comes before the strangeness. After all the suspense, all the effort to get here and the fear of what they’ll find, Helena enters a perfectly familiar room. There are her bookshelves, her bed against the wall, the two-person sofa with a folded newspaper on the coffee table in front of it and, in the corner, the little wooden desk where she sometimes works from home. The door to the bathroom, the kitchenette and the little nook overlooking the courtyard, with a folding table, two chairs, and that funny old picture of Port Louis.

  The first thing she’s really aware of is that she’s been here over and over again in all the dreams she’s forgotten in the past few weeks. She feels the terror of half-sleep, when the colors start to fade and the walls grow transparent, and you can’t quite touch anything. But the chair she collapses into, the table she rests her elbows on, are solid, opaque, and very, very real. She’s never been more awake, never more ready to believe she’s dreaming, or less able to.

  Doro is asking something but Helena can’t hear it through her sobs. She’s afraid of this place, of its ineluctable reality, all the uncertainties this one certainty creates. Have all her dreams, all her nightmares and the strange thoughts that crossed her mind between sleep and wakefulness been real? Has she dreamt the past few weeks?

  No, they were real. Doro was there in that other apartment with her; all of that was real, too. No matter how little sense it makes, both of these places, both of these lives are real.

  Her vision is a blur but she senses Doro leaving the room and coming back into it. She feels a hand on her shoulder and is surprised that it doesn’t pass right through her. But the touch holds and things start to move toward their new positions without quite clicking into place. Then something wet is pressed to her forehead. The cold shock of it stops her sobbing, and she sits still as Doro wipes her face with a wet washcloth.

  This is her chair, her table, her home, her friend; this is her life and this sobbing is her sobbing, the sobbing of ending a marriage that’s already been over for years, of parting from a life she gave up so long ago, of all these pains, fresh and imminent, aching within her like dread of things to come, burning like deep and recent wounds. She longs to sleep dreamlessly, to forget all that she remembers now, forget even having forgotten. She remembers leaving Joachim, remembers it until that pain is her only memory, until she forgets where she is.

  “It’s going to be okay, Hel,” Doro says, pulling out the chair opposite her. “I’m going to help you figure this thing out.”

  For just a moment, Helena wants to ask: Haven’t you done enough?

  JOACHIM

  Joachim slogs through the day, struggling to come up with catchy puns for a supermarket chain’s winter campaign. What’s the matter with him? He used to enjoy his work. Sure, some of the customers can be a pain in the ass, and the rush deadlines are exhausting, but when it came down to the fundamental work, it was something he really liked doing. Until recently, he had no trouble working twelve hours at a stretch when he had to. Now, the last couple hours of each day are unbearable. All he can think about is clocking out and going home.

  Home to Helena, he reminds himself. But is he really that eager to see her? When she’s on his mind all day, it isn’t exactly her he’s thinking of. Rather, he’s worrying about their past, and wondering what their future will look like. They aren’t quite happy thoughts.

  He is happy that she’s there. It’s nice to come home to someone you love, someone you know is happy to see you. But that’s another guilty thought—is she happy to see him, or to see anyone at all? He can’t make himself feel good about what he’s doing to her anymore. It’s gone on too long. And if he can’t tell by looking at her, his own symptoms should make it obvious: he’s sleeping poorly, distracted from his work, his mind constantly moving in the same obsessive circles. He’s begun to have absurd terrors, like some neighbor coming over and telling her she didn’t used to live with him, or her parents calling the police because she hasn’t been in touch. Even the happiness he feels in her presence has something of this terror in it.

  Then again, maybe he’s looking at it all the wrong way. It’s not Helena but this bizarre situation that’s wearing him out. The little trips to her apartment or office before and after work, the constant vigilance to make sure he doesn’t let something slip. It’s enough to do anybody in.

  Dragging himself to the kitchen as if his body were a dead weight he has to carry, he tries to tell himself that things will be better soo
n. Wasn’t Helena good for him the first time around? Got him to quit smoking, eat healthy, finally finish decorating his apartment, find a full-time job. But even as he tells himself these things, he knows that the weary anxiety he feels now is familiar, a fact he learned by heart during those months of fighting that wore them both to the bone.

  He closes the door behind him, relieved to find the room empty. He puts a cup under the espresso machine and presses the button without bothering to switch on the lights. It got so bad at a certain point that he’d go on arguing with her in his sleep, holding grudges for weeks about fights they’d never really had. Sometimes, the very gnashing of his teeth would wake him.

  She, on the other hand, slept more than ever toward the end. On weekends, she went to bed before midnight and slept until after noon, and during the week, she often came home from work and went to bed without eating. The last few times they could still bring themselves to try and make love, she either cried afterward or had to stop halfway.

  “I can’t help it,” she’d say. “I just feel so sick.”

  It was never clear to him how much of her upset was real and how much she was putting on to punish him. Maybe she didn’t know herself, and went so far out of her way to hurt him that she ended up damaging herself beyond repair.

  But as he leaves the kitchen, his thoughts brighten with the lights of the hallway, and he reminds himself that nothing is beyond repair.

  HELENA

  Helena has nothing to say to Doro the whole way back to Joachim’s apartment, nothing to say after a neighbor’s buzzed them in and Doro’s helped her up the stairs. Against her better judgment, she holds Doro accountable for what she suffered today, what it feels like she’s never going to stop suffering. She’s not sure if she’ll ever have anything to say to her again.

  “Will you be all right?” Doro asks. “Should I stay until Joachim comes back?”

  “No, thanks. It’ll be all right.”

  Doro looks relieved. Maybe she has nothing more to say to Helena, either.

  As the sound of Doro’s footsteps fades away, Helena tries to get a grip on things. It isn’t that she remembers everything, but the memories are close to her now, within reach. At the same time, it’s like trying to catch hold of a pack of stray dogs. She’s only got two hands, and as soon as she reaches for another one, the two she’s holding by the scruffs of their necks break free again.

  If only she could write it all down, map it out in some kind of elaborate diagram and put all the pieces in their proper places. But there’s no paper in her purse, not so much as a receipt to take notes on. Just her certificate of registration, and that won’t be worth much if she starts to draw on it.

  But the certificate is an important piece in the puzzle. A key fact that she both knows and remembers: She’s lived in that apartment for a long time. She couldn’t have named an exact date, like this document does, but she really had a sense of it when they were there, all the nights sleeping and mornings waking in that room, all her routines and habits.

  She remembers very little about moving in, but if she focuses on this precise point, she can recall a heavy weariness coming over her all at once, her body suddenly incapable of carrying even the small cardboard box she had in her hands. She just couldn’t take another step up the stairs.

  And then Magdalena was behind her, taking her by the shoulders, saying something stupid, like Earth to Helena, to make her laugh. She did laugh, to please Magdalena, but every movement damaged her, her body nothing more than a thin paper bag full of broken glass.

  Magdalena! she thinks with a sudden urgency, almost expecting her old friend to come up the stairs behind her now. Where’s Magdalena? Sitting down on her—or Joachim’s—doorstep, she tries to remember the last time she saw Magdalena. But she only comes up with a series of blurred images: Magdalena pushing her aside when she tries to help with the dishes, Magdalena pulling a ski cap over her long blonde hair as they come out of the movie theater—nothing significant. The very banality of these recollections suggests that they’re still friends.

  She can remember Doro now, and all kinds of anonymous faces moving through her life, faces she might be able to call by name if they were here now. Doro isn’t her best friend but the one she sees the most of, and the most reliable. The sort of person she’d call if she needed help painting the walls or moving.

  But she hadn’t called Doro when she moved into her apartment; she must not have known her yet. When did she quit her old job? It can’t have been long after her separation. It was probably because of her separation. She and Joachim met at that office, back when he used to freelance there. It must’ve been hard to keep going there, seeing their mutual acquaintances and remembering the first innocent flirtations in the kitchen or at her desk. Knowing she’d left him for good.

  And there’s the crux of everything: leaving Joachim. She remembers not only the blistering hatred and nauseous weeping of their final weeks together, but also her numb, cold resolution when she went to stay at Magdalena’s without saying goodbye. She feels that she could remember more, could dredge up all that time, but she doesn’t have the strength.

  The thing to focus on is the main fact: She and Joachim split up years ago. As far as she knows, they haven’t seen each other since. Which would explain why she barely has anything in the apartment, why the clothes he says are hers feel so unfamiliar. And why he’s gone to so much trouble to keep her out of touch with anyone who might tell her the truth.

  Now that she knows the extent of his dishonesty, she’s surprised how easily she was taken in: that absurd story about the flood, the phone and Internet connection being out for weeks, the long delay in making a doctor’s appointment, his going to her office five times a week to pick up and drop off her assignments.

  But how could she have known? She woke from her accident fragile and blank, and all the things he said seemed to make sense. They even sounded true. He must’ve practiced. It can’t be easy to lie with that much conviction.

  She closes her eyes and rests her head against the door. Why is the truth so exhausting, when the lie was so simple? She feels as if she’ll never sleep again, never be able to turn off her whirring, cranking, buzzing mind.

  The thought of sleep makes her wonder what time it is, and she gets out her phone to check. It’s not quite five, and her mind automatically starts to estimate how long until Joachim gets back, but she stops herself. Instead, she should figure out what to say to him.

  She extends her left leg and one of the crutches falls from its position against the wall with a cold, solid thud. She waits for the door opposite her to open, for footsteps to come rushing toward her from above and below. She has a feeling strangely akin to guilt, as if she were at fault for knowing what she does. She ate the fruit of forbidden knowledge, and now she’ll be cast out of this ambiguous paradise.

  Which is what Joachim’s been trying to prevent all this time. Has he been banking on her never getting her memory back? How long was he going to keep lying? He must be out of his mind.

  The problem is that she can’t quite believe he is. He created these illusions for her, not himself—otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. He must’ve taken her keys so he could get things out of her apartment.

  Is it all some kind of cruel joke? An elaborate revenge on her for walking out and not being in touch for so long? But he’s been so nice to her this whole time: What would the punchline be? Ha ha, Helena, I got you to believe that we’re still in love?

  So maybe this isn’t a trick, at least not a cruel one. Maybe he’s living this intricate lie because he likes it better than the truth. He must’ve seen her amnesia as a kind of tacit agreement, a willingness to accept his version of things.

  No matter what this turns out to be—madness, revenge, wishful thinking run wild—she has to confront him about it the minute he gets back. If she doesn’t, she’ll make herself complicit in his lies, an accessory to forging this cozy little world. The only quest
ion is how.

  JOACHIM

  Joachim leaves work early in an effort to convince himself that he really wants to go home. In a way, he does. But even without daring to think about it, he knows that what he wants most is to go home to an empty apartment, to close the door behind him and collapse in some dark corner. Not to have to keep a smile on his face or ask the right questions; just, for a few minutes, not to be seen.

  A train is pulling in when he gets to the U-Bahn station and he could make it, but instead walks slowly down the stairs, letting everyone else rush past. He pictures one of them bumping into him, knocking him down, his head bursting against the stairs like a water balloon. He’s so vividly aware of his thin red blood running down the litter-ridden steps that he’s surprised to arrive on the platform intact.

  He remembers this sense of dread from various living situations, apartments shared with roommates or girlfriends that soon developed into the grounds of an elaborate cold war. There’s no hostility between him and Helena now, but the feeling is the same: the desperate hope that he’ll get home and find the door bolted, the lights out, so he can slip into his room before anyone else gets in.

  But there’s no chance of Helena being out. Not today or any day. That’s what’s stressing him out. When’s the last time he was alone? He hasn’t had the place to himself in over a month. The next train pulls into the station, and he waits for the passengers to flow out, then wedges himself in among the sullen construction workers and teenagers eating döner kebabs full of raw onions. A woman with an oversized baby carriage makes a snide remark to no one in particular when he doesn’t get out of her way fast enough. At the last minute, a group of tourists jumps into the car, and he no longer has anything to hold onto. He struggles to stay on his feet between stops, borne up only by the density of passengers surrounding him. As if it weren’t enough that they have to stand so close together, everyone within eyeshot is staring aggressively, blaming him for taking up space, judging him based on his clothing, hair, age, face, and inability to meet their eyes.