Parker mistook my silence for something else.
“We understand that it might be difficult to obtain a ticket to Berlin, of all places, in the next few days. It’s become the center of the universe—everybody wants to travel here, history in the making, quite exciting, Mr. Foster, begging your pardon, I realize that your wife had joined the festivities and—but what I wanted to underscore was that the consulate might be able to assist you, the airlines have kept seats open for an emergency like this one.”
What emergency? How could he dilly and dally like that, offering me no real information, as he meandered on about wall peckers and festivities and the history of the universe. The man was an idiot, undeserving of an explanation regarding my travel impediments, that Dad or one of my brothers, someone else would have to go.
“Mr. Parker. My wife. Can she speak, is she conscious? Please, just a quick update, in case the hospital doesn’t answer.”
Parker contended that he was uncomfortable offering a medical opinion and there was a strict protocol for dealing with American citizens injured abroad, but seeing my stress—Mrs. Foster was ostensibly suffering from a case of retrograde amnesia, it was called. The physicians would have to elucidate their diagnosis, but basically, when she had awoken this morning—in perfect health, Parker insisted—she had no idea that she was in Berlin or why, not the slightest recollection of the celebration at the Wall or—or—or—here Parker began to stutter.
“So she doesn’t remember who she is?”
Oh yes, she remembered perfectly well who she was. Except that she thought yesterday was September 10, September 10, 1981, that is—she believed she was fourteen years old. And that made it hard to even find her husband, because she didn’t remember having been married. “She kept asking for her father, a Dr. Cameron Wood, whom we have identified as deceased, but fortunately she had a card with the address of her hotel and in her notebook we found your name and number in the States in enormous letters, inside a big heart, Mr. Foster, so we gave you a call—this call—as next of kin.”
I swallowed hard and asked him to repeat the day and year that Cam thought it was. Not because I hadn’t heard clearly the first time, but because I needed to digest what it meant. If her last recollection was from the day before I had shown her the photo of my visitor, if her accident had returned her to a time when she had not yet seen his face—well, that was proof he was responsible, he had sought to wipe out any trace in her mind of his existence to stop her drawing any closer to him, he had tried to murder her like he did my mother, he—but now was not the time to waste on Henri, that scum, now I had to tell Parker that my father would be in Berlin tomorrow, the next day if no tickets could be arranged.
“Because you . . . ?”
“I’m ill. I can’t leave my bed for now. My dad will ring you as soon I’ve had a chance to brief him on my Cam’s—on my wife’s condition.”
That night, Dad was on a plane to West Berlin. And the next morning, went straight to the Charité Hospital, where he conferred with the team of doctors treating his daughter-in-law. They recommended that she should not be made aware of the relationship in order to protect her from the shock of realizing that her father had passed away. The nurses had kept her in bed, far from mirrors that might reveal the face of a twenty-two-year-old woman to someone who believed she was a mere fourteen. The idea was to sedate the patient until her return home, where she could be eased into the truth.
Cam seemed puzzled to be in Berlin but too exhausted to be her usual inquisitive self, slightly concerned that her breasts seemed to have grown, that she had discovered more pubic hair than she recalled, that she felt heftier, more “experienced,” she said, but attributed that to her “accident,” which she did not show much curiosity about either. The doctors assumed that she’d accept any casual explanation for Mr. Gerald Foster coming to get her instead of her father. He should, in an offhand way, state that her dad had the flu and had therefore asked Mr. Foster to fill in for him—a way of starting to insinuate that perhaps all was not well with the father but not enough to trouble the patient. Waking Mrs. Foster up to her new reality was a task best left to her husband.
It was a task I had been readying for. She had arrived almost out of nowhere, out of the swimming dreams of my past, to rescue me. Now it was my turn to return the favor.
The doctors had suggested that there was an outside chance that she would recover her memory as soon as she saw me: instead of being stunned and dazed, everything would simply flood back.
“That could happen?” I asked my father over the phone.
“It’s a possibility. There have been cases . . .”
“And if not, how long could—?”
“Weeks, months, even years. It could even—but that’s not her case, they think. Something about the hippocampus and the lateral I don’t know what . . . The MRI and CAT scan showed no lesions—I can’t believe that Polaroid helped develop the techniques that are giving us hope that she’ll heal soonest. So let’s cross our fingers and pray that one smile from you, son, will do the trick.”
When I did regale her with that smile upon her return, it did not jog her memory. It did, however, provoke a smile back, and I felt uplifted, as if the sun had risen after many dark nights. Though barely conscious, she recognized me, of course—the last recollection buzzing inside her, she would confide later in a moment of intimacy, was from the night of September 10, 1981, when we had said goodbye after not making love, pledging to see each other early next morning to go to school together. And here I was, as promised, smiling at her, except I was changed, the features that the camera refused to capture had suffered the modification of time.
“My, how you’ve grown, Fitzroy Foster,” was all she said, coquettishly, as the men lifted her from the ambulance, gesturing for me to come closer to her lips, so she could murmur: “You’ll find that I’ve grown a lot since yesterday, as well, just wait and see what birthday present I have for you,” she whispered before she drifted off to sleep and up the stairs and I tucked her into the bed that she could not recognize even if she had bought it. Our wedding bed. The bed had the memories of our life together that she lacked. She thought—but how could she, did her body not recall how it had welcomed me, did the legs and sweat and sex not have a memorial of their own?—that she was still a virgin.
I tried not to despair. What would she have counseled? Look at this disaster as an opportunity, Fitz, that’s what. You can experience the joy of my loving you with all my cells for the first time, treat me as a fountain of eternal youth. You missed out, after all, on those seven years, even if each of us was fixated on the other, keeping ourselves pure—and now you’ve been given the chance to fill in those lost gaps. A great challenge. I’m sure you’ll be up to it. Remember, somewhere inside that fourteen-year-old mind is your wife and lover, waiting to be instructed in the ways of the world, ready to start all over again.
Except, of course, it wasn’t her speaking to me. It was me speaking to myself, sputtering, abandoned to a void that was dark and endless and empty, the void that she had dragged me from, that she could no longer save me from, perhaps not ever.
Once I ascertained she was asleep, I went down the same stairs of eight years ago. I had expected then to pick her up at her house and head to school together, so much I had expected until one click and a second and then a third one had made that future impossible.
“It could be worse, Fitzroy,” Dad said. He let that sink in. He was inhabited by the remembrance of Mom. My visitor had, at least, spared my wife. Maybe he had grown fond of her, maybe she had come so close to him in this last voyage, following in his footprints, that he resolved not to haul her into the blackness where he resided, from which he had been himself awoken—how? She knew, she told me that she knew how it had happened, who, when, where, why, she knew and maybe that was the reason he had silenced her. He didn’t want her to read me his story, was afraid that he’d be unable to find his way back into someone who now underst
ood him, excluded forever from my presence.
She had been wrong about his benevolence, his mere need to be recognized, commemorated. He must have panicked as she pursued his shadow ever deeper into the dark heart of Europe, did not approve that she had his measurements, detested that she was getting under his skin, into his eyes, had begun to look out onto the wide captive world through those vampire, puzzled, melancholy eyes of his. Fear, filled with fear, this Henri, with each promise of hers that she would claw him out, convince him with her own dark eyes sparkling like a midnight sun that he should abolish his mission, envious that she loved me so much that he would have to stop the experiment and fold his face back into nothingness or migrate to somebody who deserved to have their life devastated.
Back, back, back to where you came from, you demon, rotting in some European grave, or being eaten by fish at the bottom of an endless sea. You fell in love with her, you contemplated her through my eyes, couldn’t bear to murder her as you did my mother, and so you let my Cam live, left me with her and without her, damn you, damn you—but you’re already damned,
why would my curse or my pain matter to you, why would a ghost give a shit about stealing her soul and mine?
Crazy thoughts—what did I know of what he wanted, what did I know about him? Crazy thoughts, but when you lose someone as I had lost my love, lost our home, you can’t go on living if you don’t go a bit crazy.
This much, however, was clear to me in the midst of my madness and grief: whatever his plan, it was based on his occupying the center of my existence and attention, proving that he was still my lord and master. Whether he had a lesson of love to teach me as Cam seemed to suggest as her quest drew to its conclusion or whether he hated me, as I had been sure of from the start, in either case, he needed my cooperation to keep thriving.
I would ignore him then, shut him out of both face and body, I would take no more photos, not ever, not one more. I would not breathe any more animation into him. Without me, he was finished.
Only once—the day Dad brought her back from Berlin and waited for me to descend the fateful stairs—only on that one occasion, with Hugh and Vic as quiet witnesses, did I accede to another session.
It was almost as if Dad had been reading my mind, launched a preemptive strike before I could announce any drastic decisions.
“We need to snap a shot.”
“No,” I said, “never again. Let him stay there, in the dark, see how he likes it. No more passages, no more openings.”
“What if—?”
Dad didn’t need to finish the phrase. What if that ghoul was now satisfied? What if he had exhausted his capacity to emerge, had wasted his last energy on this horrible intervention? Or if Cam’s plight had softened his heart? What if my wife’s sacrifice had satiated his lust and cruelty?
Instead, Dad added: “We owe it to her. It’s the first thing she’ll ask when she starts to remember—and she will, the doctors are hopeful that—Fitzroy, she’ll want to know. Is he still around?”
So I succumbed to one more shot, gave Henri one more chance to spirit himself away forever, let Dad click yet another button on yet another Polaroid, one last time, I thought, watching the machine spew out its image.
He was there, of course he was.
Nothing would placate him.
I consigned him to death and oblivion.
If you want to return, you bastard, find someone else.
How to describe the next years?
There was, above all, the slow sweetness of watching Camilla Wood become Camilla Foster again. Unsurprisingly, she was a quick learner. Once she understood her condition, once she had mourned the passing of her father for a second time in her life, once she had wrapped her mind around what the mirror was howling, her irretrievable loss of years and experience, she simply set herself, with calmness and equanimity and self-possession—how could any amnesiac find so much strength inside?—to start all over again, a fourteen-year-old girl in the body of a fully grown woman.
“There are people who would kill,” she said, grinning, “to be in my shoes.”
At least her sense of humor had not vanished.
On the other hand, all the scientific knowledge she had accumulated from adolescence seemed to have evaporated. Heartbreaking to place in front of her—this was two weeks after her return from Berlin—a batch of her notes on DNA, molecular biology, visual memory. Her baffled expression—“I did this? I have a job at MIT and an internship at the Institut Pasteur, that’s in Paris, right?” But she was not one to give in to depression, that had not changed a whit. I eased her into science by focusing on her own case: we studied the brain together and she was an incredibly fast learner.
Her lesion did not appear on the CA1 field of the hippocampus where it should have shown up. But the doctors insisted it had to be a diffuse axonal injury, whatever that meant, and we took it from there, beefing up on where long-term memory is stored and the role of neurotransmitters, how the brain recovers from trauma and the self is formed and incessantly consolidated through what we remember.
“Why was I so invested in memory, especially of a visual sort, how it can be transferred genetically from one generation to the next?” she asked, looking at me with an innocence that made me feel guilty, soiled, so much older—centuries older—than she was.
I told her that she would have to find that out for herself. Best for her to reproduce the intermediate stages of her previous investigation as if she were unraveling each discovery for the first time. Jumping forward to the conclusion would only leave her confused. True as far as it went, my explanation, but a deeper truth was that if I established what had set her off on that path the morning of my fourteenth birthday, I would have to introduce my visitor and his phantasmagoric presence into her eyes and mind, and this I adamantly refused to do.
A strategy that had some snags, as I was to realize when it was too late to amend it. Perhaps a mistake to deprive her of the driving force, the obsession that had moved her away from the study of cancer and deep into the examination of how the image of a stranger could feasibly surface inside the boy she loved. Without this motivation the science seemed distant, abstract, tedious. She obediently read up, went through the motions, continued to be a whiz at chemistry and biology, but the spark had disappeared.
Fortunately, other areas of knowledge attracted her attention. Cam’s German and French were as excellent as ever, as were her motor skills, for that matter—but she now took a special interest in Spanish. Before she had come back from Berlin, I had carted up to the attic all the books about Tierra del Fuego and the voyages of Cook and Darwin, Magellan and Weddell, the material relating to anthropology and history. I had also concealed the useless list of suspects, the photos and reports sent from Europe, her messages and photocopies, and then unceremoniously dumped the whole bunch into boxes next to the picture of Victor Hugo that my accursed ancestor had snapped over a century ago. But I had not thought to secrete the Spanish dictionary and grammar book, and very soon she latched onto these and began to work on perfecting her command of that tongue.
“Why Spanish?” I asked.
“It will come in handy,” she said, and I felt a chill up and down my spine, a cold that ultimately settled in the pit of my stomach. Those were the very words with which she had justified urging me to study precisely that language. But I could not mention this without exposing why she had preferred me to do so, how she thought we might need that expertise if we someday traveled to Tierra del Fuego.
Not the only thing I hid from her.
Photos, for starters.
Dr. Dalrymple, who was attending her here in the States, had remarked that no surefire therapy for her condition had been found, but using photos was auspicious. There were cases where an image from the past had helped the patient’s capacity for recall. And we did indeed ply her with any number of pictures, with her father, then without him, of her graduation, snippets from her Paris trips—and had always drawn a blank, nothing ra
ng a bell.
I sensed that, on each occasion, she wanted to inquire about the absence of my own image from this ongoing collection, not even a shot of our wedding, she wanted to ask that question but had learned, who knows why or how, from what pit of wisdom, to steer away from it, believing me that I was allergic to photography, and that the family had resolved to simply keep me away from cameras—not from my Cam, I joked, the era of my Cam, and she laughed at the pun. Laughing, maybe, as a way of not admitting how mystified all these pretexts left her.
It hurt to fool my love, see how effortlessly she accepted every idiocy I mouthed, as if she were four rather than fourteen—that I rarely went out or frequented the places where we'd danced and partied with friends, that the most outgoing and expansive kid in school was now a hermit, that I had ceased to swim. If she had any doubts, she squashed them, entrusting herself to my guardianship. Very comforting, this love of hers, this confidence that I could protect her. But that was not my Camilla Wood, not the brash woman who had barged back into my life and spent the last year blazing a trail that she thought would liberate me from a demon that I now could not even name in her presence. Secrets, secrets, they were poisoning us like a sewer.
And yet, not all was dark and duplicitous, I am exaggerating, leaving out so much that I still savored.
Sex, I have said nothing about how our bodies rediscovered each other, I have not described how I slept chastely by her side, unwilling to let my experience of what we had done together overwhelm what she had forgotten. It was reasonable to be wary of forcing her into a relationship that another self, a future ego, had chosen for her. Repeating the respect in which I had held her that night before my fourteenth birthday, the abstention all the years after that, keeping my body sacred and clean as if it were a temple. And one night, as we lay there, each absorbed, I supposed, in each other’s thoughts, guessing what the other desired, she had almost unobtrusively slipped off her panties and met my mouth with hers and I wondered, as she invited me into her depths again, if this might not be what would return her mind to me as well as her legs and breasts and movements, afraid all of a sudden, at the very moment I thrust myself most privately inside her, crossed the threshold of her flesh and recognized that it was always different and always the same, afraid all of a sudden that I might be making a mistake and that our sexual initiation—the first for her memory if not for her body—could explode her mind, couldn’t her orgasm be like an electroconvulsive shock and permanently impair her recollection, make her amnesia worse?
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