Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

by Bob Smith

  “Independent of a brain,” I sneered.

  Junior stepped forward awkwardly to shake Cheney’s hand. After the vice president said his own name, he jerked a thumb to the car we’d pulled up in. “I was glad you weren’t driving today after that DUI accident your friend Cliff had.” Cheney grimace-grinned, which made it appear that he found happiness excruciatingly painful. I’d never told my parents that I’d been a passenger in a car accident in college. It was during a visit to see my friend Cliff Briando at SUNY Brockport for a weekend of nonstop beer drinking and bong hits. No one was hurt when Cliff’s car hit a tree, but he had insisted we leave before the cops came. Our concerned mother now immediately asked Junior about it, pressing him for an explanation. He had to fess up.

  “Don’t be too hard on the boy,” Cheney advised. “It’s not a good thing, but it shouldn’t hurt his career plans. Nobody expects someone who sells Batman for a living to be perfect.” Cheney leisurely picked at the label on his beer bottle with a thumbnail. “Look, I had a DUI when I was young and it never damaged my prospects. And I work with someone whose wife went through a stop sign and plowed into a car, killing her high school sweetheart. She doesn’t talk about it, naturally, but she chain-smokes and suffers from bouts of depression.”

  Cheney glanced at me. He clearly was signaling we were the only ones here who knew that the someone he worked with was the president of the United States.

  “Well,” I said, “some people have car accidents while other people have hunting accidents and shoot their friends in the face.”

  He ignored my comment about his infamous hunting accident and suddenly turned toward my mother. “I’m sure you know about depression. You’ve been down, haven’t you?”

  My mother’s face recoiled. She rarely talked with her family about her period of deep depression twenty years earlier, and she never discussed it with strangers. “Yes, but I came back!” She hurtled the phrase at him. He had definitely pissed her off. Cheney’s use of the phrase “you’ve been down” struck me as odd and menacing; it was the exact phrase my mother used when she discussed her depression. Evidently, the vice president had background checks done on all of us and seemed to know everything about our histories.

  I stepped forward and shook his hand. He didn’t say anything for a moment, and then clearly grinned. “Nice to see you again, PigBitch479.”

  My mother’s blue eyes flashed. “What did you just say?” she asked Cheney.

  “It’s just a little joke we have,” he said genially.

  “Well, it’s not very nice,” my mother responded.

  I’m sure my face turned red. I’d only used that secret screen name once, one afternoon after Taylor and I had a fight in the morning. I’d found a large check he’d written to the Republican National Committee. He went off to work on his time machine, and during the afternoon my anger became horniness and I decided to have cybersex. The screen name I created had actually been a goofy homage to Taylor and myself since I was the slob or pig in our relationship and he was the bitch. Everyone standing around Cheney and me had a did-he-saywhat-I-think-he-said look of social stupefaction. I had to hand it to Cheney; he took a sip of beer, clearly enjoying that he wasn’t about to explain anything.

  “Nice to meet you, ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike—August 6, 2001,’” I replied.

  I thought that CIA warning should be shouted at him and Bush every day for the rest of their lives. I was disappointed that Cheney’s expression didn’t change. His ice-blue eyes continued to deny the existence of global warming.

  “Does anyone want a beer?” my father asked to ease the tension. “I’m just going to run to the store.”

  “I feel bad drinking in front of an alcoholic,” Cheney said with a nod toward me. “Summers must be hard. I work with a dry drunk and he gets mean every summer like clockwork. His staff and my staff just wish he’d have one Jim Beam and quit bustin’ our chops.”

  His comparing me to George W. Bush infuriated me. My mother and father looked at me with newfound suspicion. Their son was associating with someone who’d overcome his addiction to alcohol; this seemed forbidding to them. In our family, sobriety was the great unknown.

  “Oh, don’t torture yourself,” I said. “I’d rather have you drowning your sorrows with beer than waterboarding me.”

  The right side of his mouth twitched for an instant.

  “You’re a bodybuilder; surely you’ve heard ‘no pain, no gain.’ The same goes in politics and warfare.”

  The sun went behind a cloud, which seemed to signal that even it was afraid of him. Everyone was still watching us, but my mother picked up my father’s empty beer bottle off a table. She looked at me, then at the vice president.

  “If you stay out here drinking, you’ll be hit by lightning.”

  It was a warning to us, but it sounded like she was cursing Cheney. My father turned toward Junior. “Dick worked as chief of staff for President Ford. And Ford was a member of the Warren Commission.”

  “I hate to disappoint you,” Cheney said, “but Ford was convinced by the lone gunman theory.”

  “What do you think?”

  “Just because you have a lone gunman doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of hands pulling the trigger.”

  My father nodded in agreement. “Have you heard this story going around about this time machine? Supposedly the government’s been working on one for twenty years.”

  “That’s all we need. Liberal jackasses trying to change history.”

  “I know, it sounded a little nuts to me. But you never know.”

  “And you never will.” Cheney stopped smiling, which actually seemed to make him happier. His cheeks became rosier and his posture relaxed; it was like watching a thorn blossom.

  “I’ll be right back,” my father said. “I’m going to just run to the store.”

  He walked over to his large convertible, and as soon as he pulled away my mother turned on Cheney.

  “All right, get out,” she said. He appeared unsure if she was serious or not. “I mean it. Leave.”

  “Mom,” Junior said tentatively, which only irritated her further. He wasn’t trying to stop her, but just making sure she didn’t endanger herself or us.

  “We don’t know him and he’s calling our guests . . . names.” She turned to Cheney. “Get the hell off our property or I’m calling the police.”

  “I need to talk to these gentlemen in private,” Cheney announced, using his hands to indicate the three of us. “My daughter Mary really likes Wonder Woman and I thought they could help fill some gaps in her collection.”

  My mother appeared conflicted; she knew Junior could make some money, but she also disliked Cheney.

  “Your son has to make all the sales he can or he’s going to end up broke at forty.”

  That was it. She could express doubts about her children’s choices, but strangers couldn’t. “And what do your kids do for work?” she snapped.

  “They work for me,” he replied.

  “Figures. Too stupid to go out and do it on their own. Probably no one else would hire them.”

  I’d never seen Cheney angry up close before, but when his face turned purple I understood why he’d had four heart attacks.

  “My son doesn’t need your money now or then.” Mom’s blue eyes drilled Junior. “Do you need to talk to him?”

  “No,” he responded. “I don’t even know him.”

  “That’s enough for me,” she said. “Get the hell off my property.”

  Cheney picked up the satchel that was sitting behind a lawn chair. It was too small to hold a rifle but large enough for a pistol. If he made any motion to open it, I’d pull out my Glock.

  Cheney didn’t appear to be leaving. He stood grimace-grinning at us until my mother shouted, “Did you hear me? Get the fuck out of here.” Her voice quavered briefly. “I can’t believe you made me use the F word in front of company.” Cheney took his right hand and pressed a button on the watch he wore on his
left arm. Obviously, he had refused to wear a bracelet. Cheney vanished and our mother spun toward me, her blue eyes flashing. “What the hell is going on?”

  9

  COMING OUT TO YOUR MOM as yourself from twenty years in the future is a lot more difficult than coming out to her as gay. For one thing, my mother didn’t demand proof that I was gay: she took my word for it; but she accepted my identity as Junior-in-twenty only after Junior and Taylor vouched for me, and after I took a ballpoint pen and inked up my and Junior’s right thumbs and showed her that our prints matched. She thought we were kidding at first but then came around to seeming to believe us. Predictably, both of my coming out stories received the same response.

  “What are we going to tell your father?”

  We’d moved inside the house and were sitting in the large, sunny living room, drinking iced tea, while Ravi dozed in a patch of sunlight on the carpet. I was tempted to remind my mother she had said the exact same thing a year earlier when Junior came out to her. And my reaction was still the same. He’d handle the news better than she would. He already believed in flying saucers and ancient Greek supercomputers; his son traveling to the past in a time machine wasn’t much more of a stretch.

  She couldn’t take her eyes off my scalp. Her disappointment in my hair loss made me feel like a careless child. She noticed that I noticed her staring. “I’m sorry. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of her hair.

  Her next question was “Who was that?” I gave her a brief description and short history of Dick Cheney. I assumed she would find my story impossible to believe, but she had a less idealistic view of human nature than I did. She seemed to think a homicidal vice president was more probable than little green men.

  “What’s not to believe?” she said. “I know for a fact that he’s an asshole, and now you tell me he’s the vice president.” She smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I shouldn’t talk like that.” She habitually apologized for her cursing, and my sister and I always dreamed that one day she’d say, “Fuck! I can’t believe I swore again!”

  I didn’t tell her that Taylor would someday be the boyfriend with whom I would eventually want to break up. She would understandably become confused about whether she should love him now or hate him later. Her loyalty was always with me—she never sided with any of my exes—and her knowing that Taylor wasn’t permanently affixed to our family would make her begrudge him every time she sent him a check for his birthday, cooked him dinner, or offered him a second glass of wine.

  Our safety was her next concern. She wanted to know what we were doing and basically implied that the best way to ensure our well-being would be for me to immediately return to my own time. I couldn’t do that. Junior and I looked at each other. I didn’t want to tell her about Carol’s suicide, but then thought, since we’d all eventually feel responsible for her death, maybe the best plan of action would be to make everyone feel responsible for keeping her alive. My mother observed Junior and me glancing at each other.

  “What now?” she asked. It was a phrase that she used throughout her life as an acknowledgment of pending bad news while also an expression of her impatience to deal with it.

  At that moment I was disoriented about whose life I was leading: mine from the old present or mine from the new present? When my sister killed herself, I’d called my brother Kevin that night, and he had volunteered to drive in from Syracuse the next morning to tell my mother so she wouldn’t be alone when she heard the news. I lived in New York City and would undergo my own trial of driving to the hospital in New Jersey and seeing Carol’s body on a respirator with raw gunshot wounds poorly bandaged on both sides of her head. The next morning I would have to demand that the doctors take her off the respirator. But even during my ordeal, I knew Kevin had the more heartbreaking experience awaiting him, telling a mother about the death of her child. For a parent, contemplating the death of your child is taboo, unspeakable, and unthinkable; and before allowing that primordial fear, that saber-toothed black cat to cross your mind, you stop and think of something else, anything else. Even the most rational parents believe that thought is an ill omen. I felt distraught. Through a quirk of time travel, my brother’s horrible duty was now mine.

  “Fifteen years from now Carol will fall into a severe depression,” I began haltingly, adding, “like you did” not to hurt or blame her, but to suggest the magnitude of the crisis. My mother had struggled for years with severe depression, hospitalizations, electroshock therapy, and for a time she even wore a wig. She felt that she couldn’t take care of her hair, let alone care for four children and a husband. She did understand the comparison, because her skepticism changed into rapt concern. “And she’ll kill herself,” I added.

  I didn’t know how she’d react when I said those brutal words—with disbelief, tears, or even anger directed toward me. She looked bewildered; then her blue eyes shadowed and her expression became lifeless. She turned toward Junior. “Do you believe him?” He nodded and replied in a low voice, “I do.”

  “Not my Carol,” she muttered softly. She teared up before asking, “How did this happen?”

  I tried to clarify her question. “How did she do it?”

  “No. I don’t want to know that! What led her to this?”

  It would take a coroner with the insight of Shakespeare or Chekhov to write out the actual cause of death of a suicide. Everyone connected to the victim feels guilty. Each survivor searches his memory, questions his actions and inactions, wonders if doing one thing differently could have made a difference. Shrinks tell survivors they aren’t responsible for someone’s suicide. While that makes sense intellectually, it’s hard to believe emotionally because life demonstrates daily how our actions cause feelings that rule our lives. You can start your day in a bad mood after spilling coffee on a clean shirt, or begin the day feeling elated after discovering that you do have enough milk for one more bowl of cereal. We’ve all heard stories that illustrate the role happenstance plays in our survival, how someone missed taking the plane that crashed when he got stuck in traffic. After a suicide, every survivor measures everything he did or said with the same incidental life or death consequences. If only we’d done this or that, he or she might have lived.

  I described to my mother how Carol’s husband, Ed, would be in a car accident, how he’d have several back operations, how he’d go on disability in his early thirties, then become addicted to painkillers. And then how Carol would slip into a deep depression, feeling she had no way out. I held back on some things. Carol’s failed marriage played a large part in her death, and if my mother felt that my brother-in-law was endangering her daughter’s life in the slightest way, she’d turn against him now, immediately and irrevocably, creating a new set of problems.

  “Didn’t we help her?” my mother asked. “Did you? Did Kevin, Alan, and Dad? Did I?” She became agitated and seemed poised to board the next plane to California. I reassured her we didn’t see it coming. “Her last year was bad,” I explained. “She had been depressed for months, but she finally said that she was starting to feel better. On the day she died she called me three times. Asking me about little things. I thought it was strange but not worrisome. I asked her to come to my house for dinner that night. I really insisted, but she said, ‘No.’”

  My mother softened when she heard this and looked at Junior. “She loves her John.”

  I explained how when things got bad, I called Carol every day, asked her to move in with me—I almost said “us,” before I realized I would need to explain that Taylor would become my boyfriend. “I repeatedly told Carol how much I loved her,” I said, tearing up. It was a reversal of roles. I’d always been the one who called Carol asking for her help. She helped me buy my first car, rent my first apartment, and hire my first plumber and electrician. On some level it was difficult to imagine her feeling helpless.

  “I only figured out later that if you’re the one who everyone in your family go
es to for help, then whom do you turn to when you need help?”

  “What can we do?” my mother asked.

  Without sounding like I was blaming her for my sister’s death, I tried to think of a way to gently suggest to my mother that she could help Carol by not being so critical of her. I explained that we would all feel complicit with her death and that we had to be aware of what we said, because criticism could hurt her. My mother seemed to understand, but I had my doubts. My mother was sweet with her sons but much tougher on her daughter, just as her own mother favored her brother over her. My sister was also equally tough on my mother and never forgot a slight or insult. Carol once angrily mentioned to me, when she was in her late thirties, how my mother had not brought her a bouquet of flowers when she came backstage after the junior class show. In fucking high school. I was tempted to tell her that she and my mother should celebrate the twentieth reunion of her grudge, but I didn’t, since she was already furious.

  I shied away from confronting my family’s craziness. I was brought up to believe unconditional love is a complete surrender of all your moral, ethical, and aesthetic standards. It means never discussing open secrets, overlooking failings, ignoring lapses of judgment, disregarding irrational dislikes and outright prejudices, consenting to disastrous choices about love and hairstyles, and bestowing blanket tolerance for addictions ranging from alcohol to Xanax. (If, God forbid, someone in our family needed a guide dog, it would also have to be trained to look the other way.)

  I frequently received back-to-back phone calls from my sister and mother, each bemoaning the other one’s nastiness. It was frustrating trying to mediate a short truce between them before another battle started. Often there were times when negotiations were impossible, as they’d stopped speaking to each other. It always upset me and I would always try to persuade one of them to relent, but I also appreciated that by not communicating they were prevented from saying anything hurtful. It irritated me that they wasted their precious hostility on each other instead of directing it against deserving strangers like I did.