Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

by Bob Smith

“Do us all a favor, will you? Don’t invent it,” my mother said. “And while you’re at it, take my advice and don’t become John’s partner. You don’t want any part of this family.”

  Taylor crumpled up his napkin, and Junior sprang to his defense: “It’s better to know about a problem beforehand so we can talk about and deal with it.”

  It had to be a better strategy than our old method, I thought, where we wouldn’t even discuss our problems during our problems. My father reached for his bottle of beer and my mother barked, “Tom!”

  “What?”

  “We have enough problems in this family without you drinking yourself to death. Is everyone in this family nuts?”

  “I have a few beers every now and then. I’m not an alcoholic.”

  “Not now you aren’t. But I can’t trust any of you.” She poked a thumb toward Junior. “He wasn’t gay last year!”

  My father appeared to think she had a good argument. In fact, we all did. My mother looked at Junior and shook her head. “I knew you shouldn’t have told Dad.”

  Junior poured himself a glass of wine, as he realized she was blaming his coming out for our father’s alcoholism. “That’s crazy,” he said. “He won’t start drinking because he found out I’m gay.”

  “How do you know?” she asked. “One follows the other.”

  My father pushed away his plate. “What’s crazy is that my son from the future came in a time machine to tell me I’ll end up drinking myself to death.”

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” I said.

  “Hard to believe?” my father said. “This pushes disbelief into new territory.”

  “You haven’t answered me,” my mother said to Junior.

  “Sue,” my father said, “if that was going to cause me to become alcoholic, I’d be drunk now.”

  “He’s handled it better than you have,” Junior said, trying to sound impartial and not accusatory.

  My mother turned on him. “So his drinking’s my fault? You’re blaming me for Carol’s suicide and now this.”

  She hadn’t meant to reveal Carol’s death, and understood that she blew it when my father dropped his fork on his plate.

  “What about Carol?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “It’s something else that’s all my fault.”

  My father ended our conversation about his suicide and demanded an explanation of Carol’s suicide. After hearing me out, he had many questions and asked how he could help. I answered, “By being alive and sober when she needs your help.” My response seemed to shake him. He put down his beer.

  “Neither of them’s your fault,” I said to our mother. “No one said that.”

  “You said I’ll say hurtful things to Carol and she’ll kill herself. Now you’re saying after he retires, when it’s just the two of us, he’ll kill himself.”

  My father looked at my mother. “It’s just the two of us now.”

  She glared at him as if he was deliberately trying to be stupid. “Not full time. You still have a job.”

  “You can’t always pinpoint what causes what in your life,” I said.

  “Yes, you can,” my mother responded bitterly. “At eleven a.m. this morning you showed up at my door and my life went to shit.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I didn’t want to feel I could’ve done something and didn’t.”

  “You’ve done something, all right,” my mother said. “You’ve made me feel I have nothing to look forward to except a two-for-one sale on caskets.” Her eyes narrowed as she thought of something. “Unless we need to buy three. Am I dead in twenty years?”

  “No, you’re still alive.”

  “I was hoping I wouldn’t be so I won’t know you.”

  “We’ll actually be very close.”

  She scowled. “I can’t wait for that.”

  I turned to my father. “I wouldn’t have said anything if I didn’t think it was important.”

  “I hope not,” he replied.

  “You haven’t told me what you think,” I said to my father. I was tempted to add, “About anything important to you. Ever.”

  His body tensed and I could tell he was furious, but he tried to conceal his anger with a smile.

  “What do you want me to say? Thanks for the heads-up that I’m going to screw up my life.” His use of “screw up” reminded me that I never heard my father use the F word. His self-restraint was old-fashioned in a way that I admired, although I had a momentary flash of resentment. From my point of view, abstaining from saying “fuck” in front of his children for his entire life had to take more willpower than quitting drinking.

  “I’m trying to help,” I said.

  “Well, you can’t help. It’s like telling me I’m going to have a heart attack. I can be on the lookout for it, but until I’m clutching my chest there’s not much I can do.”

  “You could quit drinking before it becomes a problem.”

  “I could, but I’m not sure I want to on your say-so.” He stood up from his seat. “Thanks to you, now every beer I have will have an especially bitter aftertaste.”

  I thought, This is great. Now he’ll die resenting me.

  “Your death really made me unhappy,” I said. “It made us all unhappy.”

  “Well, thanks for sharing that unhappiness,” he said before leaving the table. He went into the living room and sat in his chair and turned on the TV.

  “Unhappiness years before it happens,” my mother added as she stood up and began to clear plates. When Junior and Taylor tried to help she snapped, “Leave ’em.”

  I felt like a monster. It was a curse to be a fortune-teller, able to reveal people’s destinies, especially the people you love. I recalled that my mother had always been disdainful about people who check their horoscopes. She’d once said, “No one ever reads, ‘Tomorrow you’ll be diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease!’” And all this pain might be unpreventable if my father’s alcoholism was some unfixable genetic Make-Mine-a-Double-Helix doom. But my primary fear was that my father wasn’t particularly interested in saving his own life, because the subject didn’t interest him. He’d always demonstrated a wide-ranging lack of curiosity. My father wasn’t really interested in too many things besides his job as a state trooper, conspiracy theories, cars and his boat, football and hockey, and his family. And he checked in on his family like he checked the weather; if we were 98.6 degrees and wind was gusting from our lungs, that was all he needed to know.

  After my father’s death, I became convinced the number one killer among men is boredom. Most men stay attached to their lives by their jobs, families, and sex, but my father was a few years away from retirement, his children had moved far away, and while I refused to speculate on my parents’ sex lives, I couldn’t imagine they were still going at it like they did when they met in high school. It almost seemed some men leave their lives as if they’re walking out of a dull movie.

  My mother returned to the dining room and picked up the platter that had held the corn. Our eyes met, but she turned her head away angrily. It occurred to me that I hadn’t warned her about her early signs of macular degeneration and that she should start taking vitamin supplements to preserve her eyesight now. Fortunately, I gathered that it might not be the best time to bring this up. I tried to talk privately with my father later that night, but he stopped me with “I get it. I’m dead and so’s Carol. We’re done talking for tonight.” His tone of voice was adamant, and while I considered pressing on, I didn’t. In my heart I agreed with him. As I was getting ready for bed, I overheard from the kitchen my mother saying to Junior, “You better not end up like him.”

  “I won’t,” he promised.

  10

  OUR GOOD-BYES THE NEXT MORNING were awkward. My mother rose to the occasion and hugged and kissed all three of us after privately warning us to be on the lookout for Cheney.

  “He seems more mean than smart,” she said. “I’ve spent my life avoiding men like him and you sh
ould too.”

  Our father came outside while we were loading up the car and asked me how Camaros drove. It meant either he was no longer angry or had decided to pretend that he was no longer angry. With my father’s emotions, that was about as specific as you could get. When it was time to leave, I knew I might never see him again, and even though I felt like an imposter son, I said, “I love you.” Then he said, “I love you, too.” I could have burst into tears. Of course, I didn’t. I was standing in front of my father and my crying would have embarrassed both of us.

  Leaving Buffalo, we drove past the closed, desolate Bethlehem Steel plant that runs for miles along Lake Erie, the cold smokestacks reminding me of columns remaining standing after a temple has fallen into ruins. Taylor asked how many people once worked there. “I think thirty thousand in its heyday.” I expressed my wish that the steel plant would magically disappear, giving us the shoreline back. In the rearview mirror, Junior sulked, staring out the window while Ravi slept next to him.

  “In my time, they’re talking about building wind turbines there,” I added. “It sounds like it’s going to happen.”

  “Wouldn’t that be great?” Taylor said. “Buffalo’s bad weather finally turns out to be an asset.”

  “I think Buffalo will have a renaissance in the twenty-first century,” I said, surprising myself. I apologized again to Junior for not being as forthcoming as I should have been.

  “Well, is that everything? Anyone else dying that I should know about?”

  I tried to think if I needed to warn him about his skin cancer. Would it help if he was aware of it and sought treatment sooner? I’d never realized that so many awful things happened in my life. I guess I’d never really noticed. Life usually doles out horrible events in increments, allowing us time to slowly digest pain like an anaconda after a capybara meal. And in between there are a lot of good and great moments. Here I was giving Junior overnight delivery of his life’s low points without any of the highlights; no one deserved to have all of the worst events in his life revealed like guests at a surprise party.

  “Now what?” Junior said when I didn’t respond immediately.

  Even though he was a pain in the ass right at that moment, he deserved to have his youthful sense of immortality last throughout his twenties and thirties. He’d deal with his cancer when it arrived. I wasn’t going to tell him about it.

  Taylor sighed. “You’re like Santa Claus handing out lumps of coal.”

  “More like Santa Claus handing out urns of ashes,” Junior corrected.

  Their mutual rapport answered one question. I’d slept in the back bedroom by myself while Taylor and Junior shared the middle bedroom. I’d suspected they were going to have sex; all night they both had the expectant air of cats brushing up against their bowls. They must have hooked up, since they were behaving like a couple, each backing up the other.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything,” I said. “But I was afraid you’d become depressed if you heard everything at once.”

  “Well, it worked.”

  I felt the blood rushing into my face as we turned onto the exit for the Thruway.

  “What the fuck would you do in my place? Let Carol and Dad die because it might hurt your tender feelings? Grow up.”

  A snide grin appeared on Junior’s puss.

  “I don’t want to. I’ve seen the result.”

  Someone who shares your skin knows how to get under it.

  “Why don’t you go fuck yourself ?” I said.

  There was a moment of silence before Taylor began to laugh.

  “You guys could actually make that happen,” he said. “And it would be a first.”

  “If he wasn’t such a prude,” Junior said. “But now you couldn’t pay me to do it.”

  I started to laugh. “Well, I have more bad news for you. You’re not that great at flirting. You’re somehow coy and desperate at the same time. Not an attractive combination. If you’d just be direct and say, ‘I’m interested—let’s do it,’ that would get you laid more than what you’re doing now.”

  “Really?” Junior said. “Because I just got laid.”

  Taylor turned his head to address both of us. “Because of me. I took the initiative, and to be honest I wasn’t sure if you were really interested until we did it.”

  I guess you never outgrow your immaturity. I gloated that Taylor backed me up. Junior’s sulking seemed to intensify and I didn’t want to drive cross-county with that bundle of gloom in the backseat.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I said.

  Junior didn’t say anything, and I could see him in the rearview mirror trying to think of a response.

  “All right. You had to tell me.”

  I admitted that my news was an abyss of a downer, but told him I actually felt optimistic. I thought we could prevent their deaths. It seemed an obvious distinction to me, but Junior didn’t really get what I was saying. I struggled to explain what I meant, until I dropped the subject. I suddenly understood that my definition of optimism would be devastating to him. Being upbeat at forty-six was entirely different from looking on the bright side at twenty-six. At my age, being an optimist meant you were a hard-ass and would try to be happy and could be happy, even though you knew that horrible, truly devastating events would occur in your life. At Junior’s age, his dreams of happiness still possessed the win-the-lottery illusion that you could have it all without losing any of it.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out why Cheney visited us without doing anything,” Taylor said. “It doesn’t make sense. He must know something we don’t know.”

  “And if he can reappear and disappear with that bracelet,” Junior added, “he could just show up in the backseat here.”

  It made no sense, but I looked in the rearview mirror to reassure myself that Ravi was still hogging most of the backseat.

  “Maybe he thinks we’re going to fuck up his future,” Junior said. “Somehow prevent the Bush presidency.”

  “I don’t see how that could happen,” I said. “We’re going to drop off Taylor in Los Alamos then go see Carol. I think Cheney’s here to make sure we don’t fuck up the future in general.”

  I sped up. It wasn’t clear how much time we had before he showed up again, and we probably had three days of driving ahead of us.

  “Why don’t we do that?” Taylor said excitedly. “Why don’t we stop Bush from becoming president?”

  “Because we don’t have time,” I said. “Let’s save Carol first, then if we have time we’ll save the country.”

  “Okay,” Taylor said. “Explain something. You had to tell John about his sister and father. But why’d you have to tell me that you’ll break up with me because I become a Republican?”

  “You wouldn’t want to know that?” Junior asked. “That’s like warning you that you’ll get cancer.” I winced when I heard his analogy, but Junior’s comment reminded me that my political beliefs hadn’t changed in twenty years. Then I wondered if that was a good thing, and quickly decided they had changed. I loathed the Republicans even more.

  “Isn’t it silly to break up with me over my political beliefs?”

  “Not really,” I said. “What if your boyfriend turned Nazi or Communist? Would you be saying, ‘I know he exterminates people but he loves to cuddle’?”

  “That’s an unfair comparison,” Taylor said. “There’s a big difference between the Nazis and the Republicans.”

  “You’re right,” I replied. “The Nazis are better dressers.”

  “The Republicans believe in laissez-faire extermination,” Junior said, “giving Americans the freedom to suffer and die.”

  Taylor put on his sunglasses. Retro black Ray-Bans were in vogue then.

  “Not everything Reagan’s done is bad.”

  “Tell me one good thing he’s done,” Junior said.

  “He’s cut taxes.”

  “Mostly for the richest people in the country.”

  “It’ll trick
le down.”

  “You’ll end up in the gutter before you enjoy the benefits of trickle-down economics,” I said.

  “He’s tough with the Russians.”

  I caught Junior’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “John, in a few years, you’ll go to Russia and every Russian you’ll meet will tell you that no one believes in communism. You’ll leave convinced that communism won’t be around in twenty years, but you’d never guess it will be gone in five years.”

  They were astonished as I explained the end of communism, the liberation of Eastern Europe, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. I explained to them that it happened so quickly and, for the most part, bloodlessly that for a brief moment it inspired the whole world to feel cautiously hopeful that every event in history didn’t always have to end with a chorus of eulogies.

  “So not everything gets worse over the next twenty years?” Taylor asked.

  “No, some things get better.”

  Junior sighed. “Great. The whole world improves while our family tanks.”

  I hated to see him looking dejected.

  “It’s not all bad. You’re actually going to be very happy. You’ll fall in love, achieve some success.”

  “I know, I just have to get over my father drinking himself to death and my sister putting a bullet in her head. Other than that, everything will be dandy!”

  There was an understandable pause in our conversation after his outburst. Then Taylor cleared his throat.

  “So Reagan’s legacy won’t be all bad,” Taylor said. “He’s helping end communism.”

  His reverence for empirical reasoning never seemed to include political science.

  “This is why I want to break up with you!” I shouted. “Reagan didn’t end communism. Gorbachev and the Russian people ended communism.”

  Junior commented, “You sound kind of nuts.”

  “You sound obsessed,” added Taylor.

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought the same thing,” I replied, “but I’ve been hearing this same bullshit for twenty-six years. You’ve only had six years of it.”

  “Aren’t the Democrats just as bad as the Republicans?” Taylor asked.