“Where? How?”
These had been strange years for her. Though I was the victim of that assault, she had also been haunted by the image. He came to her, that young man, at night, just before she fell asleep, those hovering eyes in the morning. And she had asked him over and over what she had asked me, but this time directly, who are you? And: Why have you taken Fitz from me? And also: How do you manage it? From where do you come? What do you want?
Just as his presence had shattered my life and twisted the fate of my mother, it had also fundamentally transformed Cam’s destiny. As a girl who had lost her mother to cancer at age five, she could remember being terrified and at the same time curious that someone she loved so much could live or die according to what tiny, invisible cells mandated in a body that had given her birth and milk and caresses. And how could it be that her father, a doctor, an expert, a researcher, had not been able to save his own wife? Since that early misfortune, in order to tame that terror, Cam had developed a magnetic attraction to everything relating to the anatomy of the body and its function. Biology and its attendant intricacies were already a vocation when my ailment had impressed itself on her, confronting her mind with a challenge that she had been preparing to meet since childhood. Something secret in Fitzroy Foster had removed him from her life, a secret that had to be tied to biochemistry and molecular biology in some way, of this she was increasingly certain as she delved farther into her high school studies, began to map out the mechanisms of cell signaling and protein molecules, ligands and peptides and many another name that meant nothing whatsoever to me.
“Your malady couldn’t be due to anything you’d perpetrated in your life, Fitzroy Foster,” she said to me, leaving her chair to sit next to me on the bed and taking my hand in hers—familiar with me as though we had been kissing the night before instead of seven years ago. “You were—perfect, well, maybe a bit perfectible, maybe you could improve your swimming technique, ha!, but about as impeccable a human as anyone could wish for. Cheerful and smart, a math whiz, nice to a fault, perhaps too nice, Fitz, not pressing me for sex, you know, when, hey, I’d have gone along, just needed one more nudge of encouragement. At least we’d have had that memory to keep us warm all this time. But maybe it’s better this way. Maybe that kept me going, kept me clean and focused. Knowing that this—this young man had not come because of anything you’d done wrong, a sin you’d committed, some crime, who knows what. And I don’t believe that he threw some dice in the other world and you ended up being selected by chance, no, there had to be a subterranean link. Something in your DNA, you understand, something in your family history, that was inviting such an incursion. Something transmitted to you by your forebears, embedded by them, sent on to you. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was to be my life’s work. If I could not have you, then I would do the next best thing: find the cause and perhaps, along with the cause, the cure. Rummage deep into how memory affects proteins and neurotransmitters.”
I watched her, dazed, amazed, utterly in love. I treasured every word dropping from her mouth into my ear and my memory—the very memory that held, according to her, the key to my condition. Entrenched in our genes, she said, are visual memories from the past that surface from time to time, visions that those who came before us witnessed and have communicated down the generations, just as the color of our skin and the slant of our nose and the delicacy of the fingers and a freckle on a precise spot of the cheek have been transferred, just as we know how to swim without having learned it because of the amphibian brain still pulsating inside.
“Each human,” she added, “contains within himself, within herself, all their ancestors, a trove of what was seen and heard and smelled and touched, residues of certain experiences that drastically impressed them, pressed into them, expressed who they were. We encompass in some tangle of our DNA the silent documentation of an incessant, hidden past. We can travel back in time, Fitz—all we need is to go inside ourselves. We can’t change that dead, distant past, my dear, dear Fitzroy Foster—but we can retrieve it. That’s what I believe. That’s why I’ve forged a career dedicated to the proposition that some ancestral memories never die.”
“And my visitor?”
“Is that what you call him? That’s interesting, there must be a reason why you chose that term, we’ll figure that out as well now that we have his image. Your visitor? Just the projection of a lost, underlying memory, affecting the way light reflects and refracts on your skin.”
“But how, how does he do it?”
“If I knew that . . . Maybe he changes the cells on your face for an instant—precisely when an image is captured, like his was, years ago. During an instant that is so infinitesimal, so indiscernible to the human eye, outside the spectrum of our senses, that we don’t realize it’s happening, can’t measure it yet. But this we know: somebody took that photo. An image burnt into that watcher’s nervous system so intensely that it lodged in his cells and was transmitted like liquid fire to descendants, eventually flaring into you. One of your forebears is responsible, I always thought. And your mother agreed with me.”
I had been reeling ever since I had laid eyes on Cam in her present incarnation, lurching like a drunken sailor from one revelation to the next, but this? Mom? Camilla had been in touch with my mother?
They had run into each other a few years ago at the Harvard Library. My mom had tried to avoid her, this lovely girl who had always been a favorite, suddenly cut off due to the family tragedy. I could see Mom hesitate, envision her assessing the danger of engaging with Camilla Wood, leading to the sort of disclosures Dad had warned against. Cam, not one to be thwarted, insisted on having some coffee and cake, for old times’ sake, and she even played the sympathy card, mentioning that she had no living relative left, now that her father, Cameron Wood, had died of cancer only a few weeks earlier, the same sickness that had taken her mother. Mom was not one to leave anyone grieving without solace, let alone the girl who had loved her unfortunate son.
Mom soon found out how difficult it was to keep the truth of that son’s plight to herself, when Cam pointed, once they were seated in the library cafeteria, at the books Margaretta Foster had just checked out. Amazon Indians? Photos from the nineteenth century? Would this have anything to do with what had happened to Fitz? And my mother denying any connection, flailing about for all kinds of nonsense to throw my former girlfriend off the track, until Cam simply said: “I know. He showed me the photo. He showed it to me and fled. He showed it to me and never returned my calls. Didn’t even acknowledge the message I sent with my dad. Listen. All I want is for you to tell me how he is. Nobody needs to know we ever met. But it will do you a world of good just to speak to someone about this and oh it will do me a universe, a cosmos, a constellation of good.” Typical of Cam, exaggerating, poetical, over the top. And convincing.
A conspiracy was born that day. They shared confidences, like the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law they had been destined to be, could well have been in the future if Mom had not trekked off to Brazil on that cockeyed trip. “I cautioned her not to go,” said Cam. “It made sense that there was an indigenous person in the past who had been photographed and was haunting you, Fitz, that fed right into my theory. But there were too many loose ends, things that didn’t quite fit. Unfortunately, I was right. Because your visitor doesn’t come from Brazil. He comes from Patagonia.”
I was trying to digest this when there was a knock on the door. It was Dad. We had already established that this was my sanctuary and that when I locked myself in—almost always, in fact—it meant that he was not to attempt entry. I did not mind, however, if he spoke to me through the closed door. I would choose to answer or not. In this case, he was aware that I had a visitor—not the male demon but a female visitor—and that this was a delicate moment for me. We had agreed not to celebrate my birthday anymore, another anniversary of anathema and damnation, but he did not want me to feel that he’d forgotten and thus his knock was
gentle and his voice even gentler as he informed me that he and the boys were going out for dinner. As the rest of the family had done for that occasion for the last few years, even when my mother was alive, given that the special meals she had kept cooking for me remained uneaten, cold, spoiling away uncomfortably at the table. Tonight, Dad added that they would be back late as they were going to the movies after the restaurant to see Rambo III. Undoubtedly, the decision to attend that film where Sylvester Stallone rescued some savage Afghan from malignant invaders was Dad’s considerate way of emptying the house for some extra hours so that I could freely spend them with the girl who had so unexpectedly resurrected herself, maybe he was crossing his fingers that something miraculous would happen on that day when I was coincidentally and magically coming of age.
“Have fun,” I said and he did not respond that I should as well, just murmured, “We love you, Fitz, the whole tribe,” and was gone, allowing me to turn to Camilla and Patagonia.
“Patagonia? How do you know?”
She had whizzed through high school and then studied physics and biology at MIT, graduating in a record three years and securing a job as a lab assistant at one of the university labs and also accepting a summer internship at the molecular biology department of the Institut Pasteur in Paris where she had been supervised by the great Dr. Daniel Louvard. He had been so intrigued with her thesis that memory and cell genealogy were somehow associated that he had invited her back to the Rue Vaugirard next year to pursue her research. I listened to all this and more, as she waved her arms around enthusiastically, almost as if she were swimming toward me through the vast water of time lost, not really minding that she was taking her time before divulging the origins of this carte postale, taking her time, teaching me to take mine, as we would soon be discovering in my bed—seven years of darkness and perplexity were coming to an end and Lord knows I had waited long enough not to be impatient. And indeed, she finally wound up her rambling about the centenary of the Institut and her advances in the field of intracellular migration and invasion—by triumphantly stating that “if he can invade you, Fitz, soon we’ll be able to invade him back if we find the right points in your protein structure,” especially now that we knew where he came from.
“Where he came from, yes,” I said. “I was wondering when you’d get back to that little detail, when you’d tell me. About Patagonia.”
She nodded, eyes misty with reminiscence.
“It was my last full day in Paris and I was on my way from my itsy-bitsy apartment on rue de l’Epéron, taking my usual path to the Institut Pasteur, down rue de l’Odéon where I’d tarry by the antiquarian book shops and browse when the fancy took me.”
And that morning—it was just four days ago, in fact—she had drifted to the very back of a store to sort through a tray of cartes postales and there it was, the image I was now holding, there he was, the man who had come between her and the boy she loved, returning to her life as he had returned to her dreams and dawning hours, scarred into her consciousness, there he was on paper and sepia, something she could touch and carry and examine and track and hunt down like a wayward cancerous tumor, a palpable sample of evidence from the outside world of history that antedated his incursion into Fitzroy Foster’s life and therefore her own, there he was, ready to be bought and transported across the Atlantic, back to the hemisphere where he had been born, the key to my freedom.
“How do you know he is—was—Patagonian?”
The owner of the bookshop was not in that day, but his son André was bristling with data, a clumsy way of flirting with her—“that got him nowhere, Fitz, though I do like it if you’re a bit jealous.” André informed Cam that this carte postale—all the rage in the late nineteenth century, like the cartes de visite lying in the next tray—most certainly depicted a Patagonian Indian brought to Paris along with ten other members of his tribe, the Onas. They had been exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle that celebrated one hundred years of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. The owner’s son—who claimed to be an expert regarding the iconography of the Belle Époque—had proceeded to sell her a unique and expensive catalogue of that centenary celebration of the French Revolution. In it could be read the story of how Eiffel had constructed his tower, along with many details of myriad pavilions from countries from around the world that were built on the grounds at the Champs de Mars adjacent to it.
Did he know, Cam inquired, the name of the savage in the photo or who might have taken it, as this information was cropped off? The name of the savage was of no consequence, André responded, and would probably not have been on the carte, unlike the photographer, who is often identified. In this case, there could be no doubt that it stemmed from the collection of Prince Roland Bonaparte—grandson of Napoleon’s younger brother, Louis—whose many séances with exotic races had circulated in diverse visual forms and formats during the late nineteenth century, some of which were available for purchase. Would mademoiselle care to have a drink with him at his favorite café opposite the Luxembourg Gardens so he could explain more about those photos, where they were published and how they could be consulted or acquired? And mademoiselle had thanked him kindly, but she had work to do as she was leaving Paris the next day, but would be interested in ordering material by post on this subject before she returned next year.
“So you don’t know his name?” I said, as if naming my visitor might make him somehow more familiar and release me from his grip.
“It wouldn’t be his real name anyway,” Cam said. “According to preliminary reading yesterday, the men who snatched such people from their habitat didn’t speak the language of their captives and, unable to even pronounce the original names, ended up calling them whatever came into their heads.”
“So he was kidnapped?”
“I’d be astonished if he’d traveled to Paris, all the way from the end of the earth, of his own free will. Does he look happy to you?”
He didn’t, he never had.
“So what do we do now?”
She answered by lowering the light and then lowering herself onto the bed and then lowering me next to her, she answered by unbuttoning my shirt and moving my fingers to unbutton her blouse, she answered by whispering into my ear that there would be more than enough time ahead to pursue the Ona invader who had separated us, but that now, just now, right now, our time belonged to us and not to him, there were many years to make up for, the birthday present she had intended to give me when I was fourteen was now ready for delivery and consumption, better late than never.
And made all the better by the savage disappearing during the hours that followed, I felt that he no longer existed, extinguished, so far from my attention that I did not give him a second or a third or any thought at all, not even to thank him for leaving me alone with Cam, retire so that we could explore our hungry bodies after so many nights calling out to the other, holding fast against death and despair, he was gone, he was not there as I entered Camilla and she enveloped me, he was not there in her depths or in our pleasure or in the fragile eternity of discovery that never seemed to cease.
Until she finally fell asleep like an orphan in my arms.
Not for me, to sleep. My heart was beating too fast, every cell that Camilla wanted to scrutinize and modulate seemed alive and radiant, my skin glinting with sweat, hers and mine, damp both of us as if we had rained on each other, drenched below and above, inside and outside, been swimming through the infinite ocean of the other. I watched her lips pursed by the breath that gentled in and out—and wished for nothing more than to keep this moment somewhere forever, fix it so I could return to it over the years to make sure it had really existed, was no figment of a fever.
And as that thought overran me with its desire, the mere idea of freezing the instant, possessing her over and over again with my eyes, was replaced by something more imperative.
What if I snapped a shot of myself now, right now?
Wasn’t it possible that my true face woul
d be restored to me? The visitor had arrived with my first sexual experience and remained with me during these unwelcome years of solitude. Now that I was twenty-one, now that a woman had shared her body and transparency and sighs, now that I was no longer alone to confront him, and shielded by Cam’s loyalty, now that we knew his identity, would he not be thwarted?
I rolled out of bed and walked, naked as the day of my birth, naked as he had been at the instant they had captured his image so long ago, I tiptoed to the penumbra of my desk, where my old Polaroid camera sat, as if awaiting the day when that machine and I would renew our relationship of trust.
I was forestalled from taking a self-portrait by Cam’s voice: “What is it, love?”
She was peeping open her eyes, a yawn exhibiting the sweet cavern of her mouth, flashing the teeth that had nibbled at my shoulder just a while ago.
She did not need me to explain my intentions. The Polaroid camera in my hands was sufficient. Trembling in anticipation, I passed it to her. And set myself at the exact distance he had been when somebody we had yet to determine had snapped the shot, at the exact distance and with my head slightly aslant and my arms replicating how his had hung, one of them by his side and the other crossed downward defensively. As bare as he had been, looking at the camera with what may have been a similar mixture of fear, puzzlement, expectation.
Before clicking the button, Cam hesitated. As my father had not done all those years ago on another birthday, oh if he had known what she now knew, if my mother . . .
“Are you sure?”
I nodded.
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