by Daniel Quinn
“Shit,” Norwood said, realization widening his eyes. “I died, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” Jasmine said, violating the very first principle of working with a “returned” spouse: avoiding talking about the death. She wasn’t supposed to mention the accident, Norwood’s broken body churned beneath a delivery van, his bike bent into a crescent shape. Norwood would get over grieving his own death sooner that way.
“How long have I been gone?” Genuine terror in his voice.
“Fifteen months.”
The technician scowled at Jasmine. “Could you stick to protocol, please?”
Displayed on the empty smartglass canister, Norwood’s heartrate began to rise.
“Oh, Jazz, baby—I’m so sorry.”
“Me too,” Jasmine said, biting back tears.
All the things she was supposed to say fled her mind, her tongue as recalcitrant as his.
“Come here, baby.” He sounded like Norwood on the few occasions he made it past a happy buzz and into the early stages of drunkenness.
She crossed the room but couldn’t bring herself to touch him.
“What happened to me?”
“We can talk about that later,” the technician said.
Norwood looked down at his thin body and laughed. “Jesus. Jesus H. Christ. I can’t believe this!”
Neither can I. His arm moved, shaky, fingers closing around hers. She found herself squeezing back, the way she did when he woke from another of his nightmares about the faulty circuit breaker and the fire that destroyed their first apartment.
“I’m here,” she said, returning to the script. “I’m here. You’re going to be okay.”
And despite everything, she hoped it was true.
~*~
After a day of physical therapy, cognitive therapy, memory work, and thirty minutes on the stationary bike, Norwood filled the tub to almost overflowing, climbed in, and closed his eyes. Jasmine worried he might drown and sat beside the tub, reading about the Feline Influenza epidemic in North Korea. The Chinese had moved in as a “humanitarian relief force,” though some speculated they’d spread the disease themselves as an excuse to topple the regime.
“Does the tub remind you of the growth tank?” Jasmine asked.
“I can’t remember the growth tank.”
“Your body can remember. There’s more than one way of remembering.”
Norwood’s eyes opened. “I don’t want to remember any of that. All that matters is this. Right now. The quicker things return to normal, the better.”
Normal. As if there ever would be such a thing. Norwood could remember the date of her birthday and their anniversary. He could remember her dress size (two sizes larger now than fifteen months ago), her favorite foods, and the last television show they’d been watching before the accident. He could remember almost everything in the last three years with uncanny detail. He could quote entire conversations verbatim.
He could remember everything. And nothing.
He couldn’t remember Carlucci’s, the restaurant where they’d eaten the night he proposed. Couldn’t remember their old college friends who they’d fallen out of touch with over the passing years. Anything lacking significant overlap with the last three years of Norwood’s life was lost, at least until the memory experts helped him integrate false versions of real memories. Worst of all, he couldn’t remember why they’d moved from Portland to Chicago after the fire.
Norwood pushed himself upright. Bath water spilling down his new-shaved skin. “We should have a baby.”
“A baby?”
“All this… it’s really put things in perspective. When I’m back to normal—three months, six months, a year, however long it takes—we should start trying. It’ll be good for us, don’t you think? After all the stress of… what happened?”
Jasmine fumbled with the bathroom door, needing to get away from him.
“Jazz?”
She rushed to the bedroom and locked the door. Buried her face in a pillow, crying without tears.
~*~
She refused to share a bed with him. She took up residence in the guest bedroom, sleeping as she had for the fifteen months she’d lived alone: at the very edge of the mattress, back facing the wall, limbs draped over a body pillow. Thinking of Norwood, wondering what he looked like that week, afraid to open the update e-mails from RevitaLife, to look at the images of his rapidly maturing body.
On days she felt brave or morose, she would open an e-mail, play a few seconds of the attached video. Norwood as a seven-year-old, concave chest, spindle arms. Norwood at fifteen, complete with pubic hair. Norwood at twenty, gangly, missing the layers of muscle she’d clung to in their first, shared apartment. The tireless Norwood who swept conscious thought away, gentle lips moving down the curve of her spine. Norwood at twenty-seven, the height of his athleticism, the year he placed in three different semi-professional races. Norwood at thirty-one—fourteen months in the tank—weeks away from delivery.
She’d watched him become himself as she’d once watched her unborn child sprout fingers, heart thrumming beneath paper-thin flesh. Her daughter took shape in her womb, growing at an infant’s natural pace. Forty weeks. For Jasmine, thirty-eight weeks, three days. Beautiful little mucus-coated Angelica, screaming at the indignity of birth, held in Norwood’s large, dark hands.
This, too, he couldn’t remember.
~*~
“Tell me how it’s been for you,” Norwood said, sipping fresh carrot juice from the extractor. He’d spent hours cleaning the juicer to get it working again—she hadn’t touched it since his death.
“How it’s been for me?” she said, stalling. She knew what he meant. He’d asked her the same question twenty different ways, far more curious about his missing fifteen months than the huge gaps in his memories of the past.
“It can’t have been easy.”
“No.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” She didn’t. Speaking to Norwood was like talking to some lesser version of the man she’d once loved. One with massive, inherent flaws that undercut their every interaction. And, if she were honest, she’d gotten used to living alone. No five-thirty alarm blaring every weekday morning, launching Norwood into his frenetic day. No race weekends. No mountains of musty, sweat-soaked gear filling the laundry basket.
“You’re shutting me out, baby.”
“Don’t call me ‘baby.’ I’m a thirty-five-year-old woman.”
“This isn’t going to work if you don’t let me love you.”
“I didn’t ask you to love me, did I?”
Norwood set down his glass. Rubbed his too-thin face with his too-thin fingers. “You lost me for fifteen months, but I remember you like it was yesterday. One moment I’m going out on a ride, the next I wake up with the wrong body and a wife who won’t touch me.”
Her curiosity got the better of her resentment. “What do you remember about the crash?”
“Getting to the train, taking Des Plaines Avenue north. That’s about it.”
“They don’t show you the body like they do in TV shows and movies,” Jasmine said. “You know, the white-draped thing behind a sheet of glass. A nod to confirm it really is your husband. It doesn’t happen like that.”
“How does it happen?” Norwood asked, a strange, far-seeing look in his eyes.
“I didn’t get to see him—you—until the morticians had done their work. But I saw the blood smears on the concrete and the mangled bike. And that… that was worse.”
“I’m sorry, baby.”
“You keep saying that. Sorry. It doesn’t change anything. You can’t make up for leaving me alone. You’re back, but you’re not really my husband.”
Norwood came to her, stroked the side of her arm. “I am your husband. And we’ll get through this. With time, we’ll get through it.”
Jasmine looked him in the eyes, summoning the ugliest part of herself. “How are we going to get through this? You can’t
even remember the fire.”
A shadow of recognition flitted across his face. His brows angled into a V-shape. “I remember part of it… I remember the alarm, and wet carpeting, and the door that wouldn’t open—”
“That’s your stupid fucking dream,” Jasmine said. “It didn’t happen that way.”
“Then tell me how it did happen.”
Norwood doubled in her wet, blurred vision. “I can’t believe you can’t remember. Don’t you get the implications of that? You didn’t think about it. You blocked it out. For three years. You chose to forget.”
“What? What did I forget?”
“Our daughter,” Jasmine said.
~*~
The fire originates behind the circuit breaker in the basement of the two-unit. Frayed wiring contacts aging wall studs. Sparks flash, and a hungry orange tongue of flame licks at the walls, melting wires, fuses popping like gunfire. The flames rise, devouring the out of code, wood-paneled ceiling. They spread through first floor unit, melting the landlord’s acrylic blinds, turning photos in frames to ash. Norwood wakes, the air heavy with oily smoke. He can’t see anything, each breath a struggle. Through the bedroom window, emergency lights whirl. Water comes, from every direction at once, plunging him beneath an icy coldness. He’s drowning in both water and fire. Sucked down, body numb. Jasmine’s incoherent screams sear through his consciousness, louder than the fire department’s sirens. His body burns, lungs full of water stopping him from vocalizing his terror. Swallowed by orange-yellow, he goes down, deep beneath waves of molten liquid, engulfed by unspeakable fear.
Jasmine watched the dream play out on the VR headset provided by RevitaLife. It allowed her to access the recordings made by Norwood’s implant. Mundane moments, Norwood applying lotion to his water-chapped body, the two of them cleaning the house, countless conversations about errands, meetings, coordinating their life together. Moments of intimacy between Egyptian cotton bed sheets. She sped through the more-or-less happy days, finding black moments when their words sang in the air. Judgments, criticisms, grievances, studied and examined, argued back and forth.
All of it was there for her to explore.
Most troubling of all were the mosaics of images and impressions created when Norwood recalled memories from outside the three years of time recorded by the implant. Their ephemeral quality and transience captivated and frightened her. She thought of memory as sequential, logical. Like a closet containing well-ordered containers, each filled with something distinct. Delving into Norwood’s memory shattered that illusion. The implant made precise records of events as recorded by Norwood’s consciousness, but they were not, strictly speaking, factual.
The cognitive therapist explained that every time the brain recalled a memory, the memory reconsolidated. Repeated remembering could cause retrieval induced forgetting; the more the brain tried to remember something, the more inaccuracies and outright omissions it introduced.
However, no amount of retrieval induced forgetting could explain Norwood’s apparent lack of memories of Angelica. She poked and prodded him with the details of their daughter’s short life to no avail. He’d lost her. Forever.
~*~
Norwood gained twenty-three pounds in forty-five days. His frame filled out and his walking transitioned to running, then to interval training. He marked out a weekend in nine months’ time, his first triathlon in what he’d started calling “the second half” of his life.
Jasmine returned to work, dutifully answering the questions of those curious about Norwood’s return. When she came home at night, she slept in the guestroom. Every day it became easier to imagine she’d never lost him in the first place. Except for the coldness that washed over her when she looked in his eyes, knowing that behind their shine and inherent charm lay a great black emptiness. Angelica lived inside her and always would. But to Norwood, she’d never existed.
Jasmine spent more and more time outside the house. She filled her weekends with volunteer work at the library. Taught reading classes on weeknights. Norwood wouldn’t return to work at the university for another six months. His job, according to RevitaLife, was to regain as much of his lost memory as possible. He treated memory work the way he did athletic training and spent long hours behind the VR goggles, going over memories synthesized from their social media histories, digital photos, and video clips. Sometimes he asked questions about details, patching holes, filling blank spaces. But he never asked about Angelica.
Weary from a long day of work followed by an evening of teaching, Jasmine found Norwood sitting on the sofa, lit only by the wall-sized OLED television, VR goggles resting on his knee. The television screen transitioned from a picture of their wedding—Norwood in a tan suit with an ochre pocket kerchief, she in a pink-pearl evening dress—to Norwood out of the saddle on his racing bike, streaking for the finish line.
“Hey baby,” Norwood said.
“Why are all the lights off?”
Norwood stretched, head rocking from side to side—a familiar gesture. “They were hurting my eyes.”
“You’re spending too much time behind those goggles.”
Norwood patted the empty sofa cushion beside him. “Take a load off.”
“I need a shower,” she said.
Norwood lifted the VR goggles and turned the shiny exterior like a mirror, his face reflected in the glossy surface. The TV shifted again, this time to a photo of Jasmine holding a basketball, laughter in her eyes. She’d played in college, and held an unbroken record in one-on-one matches with Norwood.
“Do you remember that?” he asked.
Jasmine raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one who can’t remember things.”
Norwood smiled. “I know. I’m asking you to tell me about it.”
“I’m not your memory therapist,” she said, immediately regretting the ice in her voice.
Norwood set the VR goggles on the coffee table. “You’re not giving me a chance. Can’t you see I’m trying?”
“I can see.” He was trying. But all his trying couldn’t fix the crux of the problem. He’d let Angelica go. He must have done it on purpose, probably to cope with his pain. She understood, but couldn’t forgive. If it were simply a choice, she’d make it. But it wasn’t like that—steel encased her heart.
Norwood stood and came to face her. Reached for her hands. She let him hold them, her fingers limp inside his. “Why don’t we have any pictures of Angelica?”
Her breath caught in her throat. The TV shifted again. A shot of her and Norwood standing on a black sand beach in Hawaii.
“There are no pictures of her, not on the TV, not in the digital files. I can’t find one anywhere.”
Jasmine’s eyes watered. She slid her hands out of his. “I’m taking a shower.”
“Baby?”
She fled to the bathroom, let soothing streams of hot water course over her, breathing in steam. Let the heat sear deep, expunging the irrational fear swimming inside her chest. Her eyes felt puffy, swollen. She realized she’d been crying in the shower. Crying for her little Angelica, lost to Norwood. She’d removed all the photos years ago. It was too painful to run into one, mixed in with all the rest. She’d saved them in the cloud, where she wouldn’t stumble across them, where they wouldn’t obliterate her composure again and again and again.
She’d have to dig up the login and password for Norwood. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? He was trying. At least he was trying. Tomorrow she’d get the photos for him. Tonight she needed sleep.
~*~
She dreamed Norwood’s dream. The fire spreading through the two-unit. Water-soaked carpeting. Screams in the darkness. She woke in a cold sweat, alone in the guestroom.
She slid from beneath damp sheets, unlocked the guestroom door, and padded barefoot to the master bedroom. Norwood lay on his back, an arm thrown up over his face, hiding his eyes. She climbed in beside him. Ran a hand down his chest, his strange stomach without a hint of a belly-button. Norwood had opted out of
the cosmetic surgery to create an artificial one. He stirred, but didn’t wake.
She felt his abdomen muscles, then down beneath his boxers. Curling pubic hair. His sex, hot against her fingers. She curled herself against him, lips on his neck, breathing in his scent. “I want you back,” she whispered, speaking to the husband that this all too believable fake would never be. “I want you back.”
Norwood rolled toward her, his large hands pulling her against him in his sleep. She let him hold her like that, unwilling to sleep for fear of dreaming, until the first hint of morning light shone through the vertical blinds. Then she lifted his hand, freed herself, and returned to the guest bedroom. She lay on her back, staring at the dark ceiling, until Norwood’s alarm blared, signaling the start of another of his grueling days of training.
~*~
“When can I get access to those photos?” Norwood asked. A week had passed, and she never quite found the right opportunity to locate the log-in for the cloud storage backup.
“Tonight,” Jasmine said, filling a travel mug with coffee.
Norwood poured something green and fresh-smelling from the extractor into a mason jar glass. “Why not right now?”
“I need to get to work. We have a big project—”
“They can wait. Let’s do it right now.” Norwood took a large gulp of the green liquid. “I want to remember her face.”
Jasmine squeezed her eyes closed, imagining Angelica. Pouty lips, fat cheeks, dressed in a yellow onesie. “I can’t.”
Norwood picked up her phone and shoved it into her hands. “Yes. You can.”
“I’m going to be late.”
“So what? You’re there early all the time. You stay late. You can go in late once in your life.”
“No,” she said, slipping the phone into her suit jacket pocket. “I’ll do it tonight.”
Norwood grabbed her arm, spun her back to face him. “You blame me for not remembering, but you won’t give me what I need to try. That’s not fair. More than that, it’s mean.”