When I awoke, a few hours later, my Cam was next to me in bed, holding the manuscript she had written over two years ago, and that I had misguidedly left open on the blankets. I was about to stutter an explanation, apologize for subjecting her to the violent act of meeting her former self, searched for words that could afford some sort of context for suppressing them for so long, when I realized that no excuses on my part were necessary.
Sufficient to see her face, her old smile, the usual buoyancy in her eyes. And understand that—“Yes,” she said. “It’s me. All this time it’s been me.”
SIX
“There’s one thing that’s truly terrifying in this world and that’s that everyone has his reasons.”
—Jean Renoir, The Rules of the Game
Of course it was her. Of course she had been there all the time. And of course the answer had been staring me in the face all these months, to use her past voice to cure that amnesia, and only the relief flooding me drowned out the reproach that it could have been sooner, the day she had been brought back on a stretcher from Berlin, if only I had not been so consumed by hatred.
She saw in my face what I was thinking and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. It was never about me. It was a test for you.”
What did she mean? What test? And why tell me I didn’t understand, instead of celebrating, whooping in wonderful 1992, rushing to my dad’s room, rousing Vic and Hugh so we could break open a bottle of champagne? She was back and that was enough, that—
Cam carefully set aside the blue folder and the manuscript and took my hand in hers. “There’s something you need to know.” And then started patiently, in excruciating and twisted detail, to tell me about the accident and what had followed.
Nothing new, at first, in her tale. She had indeed suffered from the diagnosed retrograde amnesia due to that chunk dislodged from the Wall, awakening in the Charité Hospital thinking she was fourteen years old. And when my father had walked in, she took his excuses at face value, certain her own dad awaited her at home. Dazed and confused, she had welcomed, she said, some drugs that put her to sleep.
Upon opening her eyes a few hours later—and here Cam paused for the longest while before plunging on—when she awoke, well, she had remembered everything, her whole life, including those last hours in the hospital.
She had healed herself.
I interrupted her, startled, a dreadful bird gnawing at my stomach, bleeding me with questions.
“But—but—why didn’t you—if you—if you—these two years, we’ve—you lost your memory again, right, right away, right? When you came back here you—I mean, you didn’t recollect a thing, you still—I mean—”
“No, Fitzroy. I had total recall, even that I’d been afflicted momentarily with amnesia. A bit of a headache, my neck hurt like hell, woozy and disoriented, but entirely myself, twenty-two years old, married to the wonderful Mr. Foster junior, the bride who had just concluded the mission we had planned, all the pieces of the puzzle in place—or almost all of them, I had yet to pass through Zurich—the same person I am now, my identity, memories, love intact.”
I stared at her in disbelief. Disbelief was better than anger, than the humiliation starting to poison me in its toxic glow—impossible that she had been fooling me, us, the doctors. Even to contemplate that she could have perpetrated such a cruel hoax caused me a distress and grief that bordered on insanity. To deliberately allow me to believe she was ill, knowing how my mother’s death had disarmed me, no, it couldn’t be.
I stood up from the bed. Violently wrenched my hand from her hand. I stood up because I felt like slapping her. Oh God. I had just recovered my wife from near death and I felt like slapping her.
“Sit down, Fitzroy Foster,” she said calmly. “I deserve to be heard.”
“Deserve? Deserve? You don’t—you don’t—”
“You think it was easy? You think I did it to hurt you?”
“How the fuck do I know why you did it?”
“Maybe you’d like to hear why. Sit down.”
I obeyed her. Damn it. To be so in love with her that I sat down and gave her a chance to explain what admitted no explanation, could never be justified.
If Cam had taken my hand again, I would have rejected her, perhaps even have dashed out of the room. Forever. But she made no such attempt.
Her voice simmered with tranquility, as if she were telling me the result of an experiment in her lab.
When Cam had awoken in that Berlin hospital bed and realized that she was cured, her first instinct was to press the buzzer for the nurse to summon Jerry so he could relate the good news to her husband, who must be out of his mind with worry.
“Yes. I was, of course, I was, I was going crazy—for you to be sick like that and me not able to travel, comfort you. Oh God, why, why, why keep up this sham for so long. How could you?”
“You had already been through the worst, the shock of the accident, the fear I might die—but that was over, I was coming home, one day more or less wouldn’t matter. You know how I love surprises. I wanted to see your face when I told you I was well, enchanted that you’d think it was the sight of you that had cured me. The more the idea buzzed around in my head in that quiet hospital ward, the more I savored the strategy. Give you all the delight in saving me. That you should do for me, bring me back to life, what I had done for you. As if we were swimming together again, not in a pool, but in existence itself.”
“What? What are you talking about? Swimming apart from each other, that’s what—”
She smiled at me with a tenderness that would have mellowed the heart of—of—I searched for someone cold and conniving and genocidal—of Julius Popper. How dared she smile at me like that?
“Listen, Fitz, please listen. If you thought you’d woken me up from my amnesia, it would be great for you, that’s how I saw it, a way of activating you, putting you in charge after so many years of being passive. Preparing you for the next stage, now that our research phase was over. Like in science, darling. First comes the discovery, say, of a gene that causes cancer, then comes the more arduous adventure of getting it out of the laboratory and finding ways to apply that breakthrough to something real, make it into a medicine, so it can liberate us from our past.”
She was talking as if I were some sort of chimp in one of her experiments—and I told her so in an icy voice.
“That’s unfair, Fitzroy Foster. Though I’ll admit I was curious, you know, to see how you’d repair me, what parts of my life and yours you’d reveal in order to help me remember. I only intended this to be for a short while, a few hours, maybe not even a few minutes. It was meant to empower you, darling.”
“Well, it didn’t, your stupid experiment. And my dad and brothers and—you must have realized pretty soon that I had no idea how to heal you, that I was lost without you, your guidance, your—oh what’s the use? If you didn’t call your little game off once it was clear that I—if you didn’t understand then—”
“Because I was baffled, that’s why. I never anticipated that you would react by lying to me, treating me as if I couldn’t deal with your past or my past, as if I were—as if I were a child or a savage or—”
“That’s not true. I was just trying to protect you, from pain, from nightmares, from—”
“From him, Fitz. You wanted to protect me from him. Saw a chance to get rid of Henri, lock him out of our existence, start from zero, don’t deny it—as if everything that had happened to him, everything we learned since he made his appearance, didn’t matter. You decided to erase him!”
“Damn right! Mom felt sorry for him and he got her killed. You felt even more pity than she did and what did he do? Almost dispatched you! Why not use your accident for something good? Wasn’t that our agreement, that we were doing all this to get him to leave us alone?”
“I don’t think that’s what he wants, Fitz.”
“What he wants, what he wants! Again, like the
first day I showed him to—who is he? Who is he? Your question. Well, you found out and what did it get us, huh?”
“I wasn’t wrong to be inclusive, draw closer to him. And I kept on waiting, since the day your dad flew me back from Berlin, for you to also realize it. Waiting for you to take out the photos, show them to me, open the drawer where you hid all my material and the folder and read my own words back to me, at least respect my work that much. Waiting, waiting for you to bring me into your life, the life we made together. But you were scared.”
“And that’s when you should have cut this madness short, stopped playing with me.”
“No. You had to get there on your own.”
Again, I felt the impulse to hurt her, shake her till she fully recognized how harsh she’d been, wake her up—wake her up?!!—to what she’d done.
“So now he’s—all this, even this latest bit of insanity—it’s all been for my benefit. Is that what you’re saying, that it was all for my benefit? You know what’s really indefensible? He’s turned you against me. You grew too close to him. So close there was no room for me. I should never have let that happen.”
“There you go again. As if you can control him, what he means, any more than you can control the image of his that keeps cropping up. He’s not going away, Fitz.”
“And when were you going to tell me all this? How long did you intend to wait?”
“First, my dear, stop—just stop pretending that this depended exclusively on what I did or didn’t do, as if you were innocent of prolonging this misunderstanding. I gave you every chance to come clean. What was one of the immediate things I asked to see? Your family album. And you started with your claptrap and evasions, then proceeded to feed me nonsense not fit for an imbecile. About not liking to go out, not having any of the friends we had shared in 1981, oh, do I have to repeat all those fabrications? You were so glad I was behaving like a good little girl that you never even wondered why I was so gullible?”
“Well, yes, I did wonder, I thought it was, well, endearing, sort of—I loved that you trusted me and, hey, I knew you’d get over it soon, I thought, I prayed it was temporary.”
“And I thought, I prayed your reaction was also temporary. He can’t keep this up for more than a week. But you did. And I just followed your lead. Remember who was in the driver’s seat, Fitz. Up to you how long the journey lasted.”
“I trusted you!”
“And I trusted you! Trusted you to reach the right decision, never imagining it would take over two years. But once I’d dug this hole for myself, I was determined to persevere. And you know what? It ended up being all for the better, that’s what I began to realize.”
“Oh no, now you’re going to say it was good for us, for me? All this shit we’ve been through?”
“Think of this, Fitzroy Foster. Think of what would have happened if I’d come home from Berlin, told you I was all right, and the next night or that very night we’d have—I’d have read my report to you. It would take a few hours—how long did it take you to—?”
“Three hours.”
“There you go. Three hours. You’d have listened, we’d have hugged each other as if all our problems were solved, my research all neatly packaged, everything tied with perfect ribbons, but you’d be no closer to him than before, you wouldn’t have suffered to get there, paid your dues.”
“You said we had paid our dues.”
“I was wrong.”
“The hell I’ve been through, losing my—losing you, seven years of desolation, that wasn’t enough, you had to add an extra two years?”
“What was worse, Fitz? Having to live with that image imposed on you forever, or having to live without me? What was worse?”
“Losing you,” I said. Reluctantly, because I didn’t want to agree with anything she declared, anything she was arguing. But it was true. There had been nothing worse.
“Losing me,” she said, flatly, without crowing over her victory. “So you hadn’t really been through hell. You hadn’t touched the depths of Henri’s experience. I don’t think you have yet, maybe you never will, I certainly will never even approach true knowledge. But at least now you are closer.”
She was insane. And completely unrecognizable. He had put her up to this. Something far more perverse than what I had originally thought. If he had simply stolen her from me with a piece of crashing stone, then at least she would have remained intact, pure, innocent. But to then resurrect and persuade her not to tell me, keep me in the dark, that was truly evil, to devise ever more dire punishments for someone he’d never met. Would he never be satisfied?
She looked at me, saw through me as if I were water. Oh, how I had missed that look, what she had concealed during these months of agony, clouding her vision of any trace of the deep wisdom with which she steered through reality. “You’re blaming him again, Fitz.”
“Oh, he’s not to blame now? Now he’s a saint? Like you?”
“A saint would never have done such a terrible thing to you, my love, so no, I’m not, far from it.”
“But you think he’s a saint?”
“I really don’t know anything about him. Maybe he did put the thought in my head. Maybe he does want to screw you over. Or that was his initial plan: seek revenge inside the body that brings together the two rivers that defined his life, the Petit stream and the Hagenbeck stream. But here’s what I’ve been thinking, and boy have you given me time to meditate—maybe he evolved once he got to know you, realized you might be a portal, believes that, given the right environment, you will understand his message. Maybe he’s testing you, your capacity for forgiveness.”
I latched onto that last word like a drowning man.
Forgiveness? Forgiveness?
Unforgivable. What she had done to me, to herself, the years of happiness she had filched. Unforgivable. The word I threw at her like a stone, like a wall, like a bulldozer.
As usual, she had an answer.
“Like what they did to Henri? Because if that’s truly unforgivable, then he’ll never let you go. Why should he forgive what your ancestors did to him, out of greed, pride, ambition, curiosity, indifference? What right do you have to demand it? Are you better than them?”
And so it went for a good while as the first day of the new year stretched past dawn. Everything I sent her way was like a boomerang. She had acted selfishly? So had I. She had excluded me from her life? I had excluded her from mine. So it went, so it went, until I had spent myself, could feel the quagmire of my resentment being drained drop by drop, bog by bog, discovered that the only thing I wanted was to take her in my arms and make love to her and fall asleep when she fell asleep and no more nights as the guardian of her dreams, I had prayed for her return and she had come back, wasn’t that enough?
No. I had one more question and I did not want to ask it and I did, I had to. More of an accusation than a question, because I knew the answer, I feared I knew the answer, I feared the answer.
“You enjoyed yourself, Camilla Wood? Watching me sink into misery, desperate for your advice, shut off from the source of all comfort, you enjoyed that?”
She took her time responding, as if she had been waiting for many months for someone to ask this, brooding about it in the loneliness of her own hours.
Then: “Yes.”
Just that word. And then: “I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to. I wanted to hate myself for turning into this spectator of your anguish. I discovered that inside me there was this dark, demonic self. It was a relief, not being as perfect and flawless as you made me out to be. Being more like them.”
“Them?”
“Petit and Hagenbeck and Virchow and Jacobsen and Saint-Hilaire and even like Julius Popper. Maybe I wanted to cast off my feeling of smug superiority—oh me, I would never do something like they did, I hope at least I wouldn’t. I told myself that I persisted in this experiment out of love for you, but the truth—I think something in me relished wielding all that power, unburdening myself of that i
mage you have of me, that I’m oh so impeccable.”
I was shaken to the core and yet, and yet, had I really expected that our relationship would always be like that morning when we had coordinated our swimming, together, together, before even one word had been exchanged? She had always been too good to be true. To accept that there might be, that there was, a twist in the fabric of her personality might be an obligatory, unavoidable step in the difficult process of becoming an adult.
Or was I simply rationalizing, suppressing my rage because I couldn’t stop loving her, because I had been itching to shout hallelujah since I’d awoken to find her by my side just as I had seen her when she had left for Europe two and a half years ago, because the other alternative was to live forever in shadows, to lose any future, all hope.
I was at a crossroads. For the first time in my life.
Up till then, everything had just happened to me, as if I were a mere receptacle. Even before Henri. Coasting along since my first breath, drifting from one birthday to the next, what the family album exposed, from event to event as if every problem could be resolved like an algebraic formula, cruising into adolescence with the confidence that someday I’d understand what life was all about, rebelling just enough against my parents to give myself the illusion that I was determining my fate, whereas I was really just fulfilling whatever plans they had laid out for me, kindergarten—oh what a cute little monkey—elementary school—our monkey is growing up!—middle school—I guess we can’t call you a monkey anymore, Roy—and high school. And me next to the Arc de Triomphe and in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, not knowing what I was seeing, what had darkened any of the places I passed through, museum visits and swim teams and baseball games and parties, even Cam—even her, like everything else, an accident that befell me, nothing actually of my own doing, bothered slightly by that excessive normality—but not bothered sufficiently to break out and do something original, become someone else and other and unrecognizable, surprise myself. Perhaps that act of solitary sex, my first real choice, something I could take full responsibility for.
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