‘A journey the length of which is both indeterminate and determined by you.’
Preston liked that, that he might be the ultimate judge of how long his own journey lasted.
I arranged some flowers, bought from the Egyptian woman on the corner, placing them lovingly into a crystal vase. There are too many, too many flowers, too many leaves. The scissors are sharp enough to cut off the tops of some of the flowers, the brightest ones that overshadow the rest. That looked better, as Preston swept the floral debris underneath the table. The vase looked muted, the kind of tribute he would see gracing the pages of the style magazines he sometimes bought to gaze at others peoples lives.
As he ate his Chinese - he had given the delivery boy a five-dollar tip, he was feeling good tonight - as he ate it he remembered with a mixture of teenage rebellion and adult embarrassment the time his mother had caught him lifting a pile of her underwear in the laundry room. He wasn’t doing anything with it, just enjoying it, so different from his experiences to date, and his mother was innocent in her response - ‘You wondered what they were?’ – that the incident was minor, yet it remained with him. It was moments like that that he remembered most vividly when he struggled now to recall her face to memory, rather than happy family occasions. Jonathan would understand that, he would help him with the faces of his youth, the memories that he wanted to live by.
I want to remember father with affection as well, but his face contorts into the images of stern chastisement, as though the ghosts of his death have passed over leaving just an angry residue behind. I want, Preston thought, to have the whole memory batch restored. He went to bed that night praying Jonathan and his weekly session would remedy the deficiency.
Before he went to sleep Preston remembered the girl he had taken once for a Chinese meal when he was young. It was his birthday and he invited her and she came. She drove, as he didn’t have a car. He asked her in for coffee when she brought him home and she accepted. He could remember her knees and the texture of her stockings, even her fashionable boots, but he couldn’t remember her face or her name. I didn’t kiss her because in the restaurant she had had some sauce on her lower lip and I couldn't stop thinking about it.
He surfaced in a clear blue sea with water lapping around him, his eyes blinded by a fierce white heat and his throat burning. His limbs were heavy in the swell of the sea and his brain screamed to him that he was drowning, floating into unconsciousness. There was feasting at the gates of Rome as the legions were returned from the sacking of the cities of Arabia and the treasures were glorious; gold and silver, and precious stones as large as the first so it was rumoured. Clothes woven in every colour, slaves brought into the city blacker than any shadow; they had to be clothed in white togas so they could be seen in the darkness of the night. There were horses with fine intelligent faces, with spirit and strength that would pull the chariots of the racers in the next games. The wild animals in the cages were proud, fierce with anger at their capture; lions that would rip the flesh from the captives in the show ring. The young girls were light brown and soft, with dark flitting eyes that promised passionate fire. That night there would be celebrations throughout the city as the soldiers drank and sated, shouting their pleasure to be home again to mother Rome after the battles. They would shaft their women folk until their thighs dripped blood and the wine and the meats drugged them into coma. In the Caesars palace the commanders of the forces were taken before Caesar to report the final victory that added to the glory that was Rome. Preston entered the palace with them, seeming to follow them through the scented gardens, past the open courtyards into the interior of Caesars private rooms. I struggled against the tide but my arms were leaden, sinking below the surface, legs thrashing aimlessly in the waves. The man on the throne was Caesar, but there was someone with him, whispering into his ear; it was a man but his face was diverted. Caesars voice held scorn despite their brave news, his voice selfish, mocking, holding no praise for the commanders for their victories, nor interest in their prizes. The men searched his eyes for understanding but there was none; the cold blue eyes were like the vastness of the ocean, deep and unforgiving. The commanders shuffled their feet in their confusion and longed to get to their wives who had waited for them through the six long months of the campaign. Still Caesar would not release them from their torment; he began to berate them for cowardice, threatening them with punishment for their behaviour. As the man at his side continued his whispering so Caesar escalated the catalogue of imagined crimes, and the irrational insults grew in bile. Suddenly Caesar stood from his throne, seemingly propelled off it by the whispering man, and moved to a side of the room where red velvet drapes were pulled across an archway. Caesar pulled the drapes aside and the men wept when they saw what lay inside. Their wives were tied upside down on immense stakes thrust into the ground, their skin flayed from their bodies and left hanging down from their torn and bleeding shoulders, falling over their faces like strands of pink raw hair. Their voices were the exhausted mews of drowned kittens. The commanders turned to Caesar and began to exact revenge. They did not notice the whispering man slip away unseen, his face hidden behind a jester’s mask. For a moment Preston thought the mask would slip, but it stayed firmly in place, until the man got to the edge of the room when he tore the mask…
Preston awoke screaming, the tangled sheets clinging to his legs like survivors from a shipwreck. He was wet, and for a moment he imagined he was in the sea of his dreams, finally drowning from the blank memories of bodies without faces, people without names. Then I realised I had wet myself, actually soaked my pyjama bottoms, and the under sheet. I don’t think I shall mention that to Jonathan.
The week until my next appointment day went quickly as it always seemed to now. Preston was making breakfast on the morning, slowly and leisurely, as the appointment wasn’t until noon. He toasted some muffins and brewed a fresh pot of coffee.
As he waited for it to finish he performed a mild dance around the apartment, singing mutely and pirouetting shyly as though even now the faces of his youth were peering at him from behind his very own curtains. He felt as if he was performing for Jonathan, already, before the grand weekly performance. As he danced he glanced at the photograph on the coffee table. He knew it was clever of him to have cut out the small image of Jonathan that he had found in one of the City magazines – Jonathan and his wife were quite the people to know on the social scene it seemed – and to have pasted it over his own face so that his body now housed Jonathans face. The picture had originally been of Preston and his parents but he had cut them out; Jonathan and his parents was not an image he had any memory of so he didn’t want a photograph of it.
After eating, washing and dressing he began his inventory to allow safe exit. The listing of his possessions and their place in his life had begun quite late in his teenage years but he drew comfort from it even now. True it became wearing after a while but he had learned to précis it so that it didn’t always need the full list to satisfy. He would list his washing things and their location, then his clothes, then his books, records, and so on. He would often divest himself of possessions; such as the book collection he remembered selling so that the list remained manageable.
The path to Jonathans door was as smooth and safe as ever, now it was so familiar.
I remember when I was about fifteen and obsessed with female nudity, which of course I had never experienced. My favourite trick, and she began to tire of it quickly, although it added to my education, was to wait until mother was in the bath, and though I tried not to think about it, she must have been naked, and then I would bounce a tennis ball against the wall outside the bathroom door, in the manner of that actor in that war film when he gets put inside the solitary cell; I can’t quite recall his name, but he looked like...no his face has gone for the moment. What Preston did was wait until the ball knocking against the wall must have really irritated his mother enough for her to jump out of the bath, open the bathroom door and tell him o
ff. Then, just for a fleeting second of paradise, did he see female nudity, in the form of a quick breast, and on one glorious occasion an unadorned lower part of her body.
Jonathan’s receptionist was not as friendly as she might have been, although that was nothing new. Preston thought she must have resented all these people coming in to intrude upon her time with the great man. She was obviously having an affair with him, that was what important people like him did with their spare time. You would have thought she would have maintained a happier façade as she was being given the privilege of his attentions. Perhaps she wanted more than that, but there was his wife of course. Preston thought that if he were sleeping with Jonathan he would probably resent the wife as well.
An early dream I might share with him today was at junior school when I was about ten. Our teacher was a young woman, far younger than the other teachers I had had up until then. Mrs Robson her name was, and I was in love with her. She wore her skirts a little shorter than she should and I thought several times about dropping my pencil onto the floor to get a better view of them, but of course I didn’t do that. Instead I let my feelings out, and I knew then that was what I was doing, in dreams. Preston was aghast at the violence of the dreams, as he was a pacifist, even a coward where physical matters were concerned. He would dream he was a terrorist and he would capture the teacher after shooting all his classmates. He would then pin her spread-eagled on the walls of the classroom and gradually rip her clothing off. He couldn’t remember her face as the clothes were torn off, she might have been frightened but he hoped she was ecstatic. When he tried to recall the dreams her face was always obscured by her long brown hair, or by blood.
‘You can go in now,’ the surly receptionist was saying. Preston gave a look that should have told her she would spread-eagle well on a wall but which she didn’t even notice.
‘Preston,’ Jonathan greeted him like an old friend.
Preston shook hands limply and, keeping his eyes firmly on the carpet, sat in his usual chair, waiting for the moment when he would lay upon the couch. It was a leather couch, in darkest maroon in keeping with the rest of the décor. It wasn’t comfortable, it made his back stiff, but it acted as a release for his memories. More than that, it was beginning to add names and faces to those memories so that he knew, he just knew, that within a short while, he would have a fuller, if not completely full, bank of memory.
‘Memory is the life blood of our past; it feeds our exertions for the future.’ That was how Jonathan had put it once; I could remember it exactly because I wrote it down when I got home.
‘So, how would you say our sessions are progressing, Preston?’ Jonathan was saying.
Preston, murmured something that he thought sounded like, ‘fine, they’re really helping.’
‘Do you think they are helping? I’m not so sure. If I’m to help you, you know you really have to trust me…’
‘Do, I do trust you.’ Preston was nearly certain he spoke the words, rather than just thought them.
‘…Without trust between us I can’t delve where I need to delve. Unless I get there, to that central core I can’t help whatever it is you want helped, you know Preston.’
I wasn’t sure there was a central core, not one that had any substance to it. Perhaps once there had been a chance that a deep inner strength might have developed but now it was too late. All I needed was to wallow in my recollections, but without faces, names, even locations sometimes, it was like living off someone else’s past. I felt as if I had borrowed a past from a time library and the loan period was running out; without a renewal I would be left with zero memory, and Jonathan had to understand I couldn’t cope with that.
‘I am ready, Jonathon,’ Preston said, in my deepest, and strongest, voice.
He waited until I was on the couch and I could hear him, crossing one leg over the other. I knew he would smooth out the fold in the crease of his pants leg, making himself comfortable before he joined me on my journey; although this had truly become our journey.
‘Have you had the dreams again?’ He seemed to speak directly into my brain, and I wasn’t even sure if he had opened his mouth. ‘The ones where the face is nearly revealed?’
‘I dreamed once when I was about thirteen and my music teacher had kept me behind after school two weeks running for only getting 30% on his test each week. I dreamed I hid in the park across from the school and aimed a high velocity rifle through the wire fence and shot him, silently through the head, straight through his thoughts of quavers and Bach.’
‘Can you see his face? Now while you tell me that story.’
I couldn’t. My voice cracked as I admitted I couldn’t.
His name, Preston?
I can’t even remember his name, although he was later dismissed for offences against young boys, I remember that, but none of the boys at my school, the report said.
And then I was swimming. I struggled for air, but there was none below the surface. The clear blue waters closed over Preston’s head and he fought the pressure on his lungs; there were lights above the surface but he was falling into darkness. He opened his mouth to cry for help but there was only water; he swallowed and felt the cold enter his mouth like a release. Ahead his blinded eyes saw a single beam of light and he pushed his tired limbs towards it. There was a train moving over rusted tracks and he was on it. There was a cattle truck enclosed on all sides and he was wedged against a rough wooden door. The stench of the truck was appalling, crowding into his senses. The truck was filled with men and women and children huddled together in mute despair, clothed in tattered rags, some even naked. They mumbled incoherently to each other in a language he couldn’t understand. Some stood, but most sat or lay where space allowed, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder, unable to move. Eventually the train rocked to a halt and the wooden door was flung open revealing the harsh sunlight of the day outside. Soldiers in grey uniforms herded the people from the train, into lines along the track, separating the sexes and the ages. Then they were loaded onto open lorries and driven into a bleak countryside, along roads pitted with craters and strewn with the debris of bombed vehicles. The lorries pulled up outside the gates of a large wire-fenced compound where armed guards stood alert in watchtowers, and shabby wooden huts stood forlornly waiting their next occupants. As he stepped from the back of the lorry Preston realised where he was. The gates were open and the soldiers marched the prisoners into the compound where they stood in ragged lines for inspection. Preston was in the front row. He watched the soldiers stand to attention as the camp commandant approached, the bristle of fear and respect apparent in each of them. Preston had no wish to meet the cold blue eyes, or even to see the face. How did he know the eyes were blue? Would he see the face, at last? He broke ranks and began running. Shouts echoed in his ears as he ran, he heard shots fired and dogs began to bark, but he ran until the blood pounded in his head and his legs began to falter. Then he saw the water ahead, the clear blue sea. He ran to it and dived in. As the water enveloped him the shouting and the pursuit stopped. He surfaced moments later and felt the relief of floating on crystal clear water. He closed his eyes and breathed in the sweet air; he floated for hours it seemed. When he awoke there was the stench of decaying flesh in his nostrils. He looked around him and saw with surprise but little fear, that the water was crowded with floating bodies; as far as he could see the dead and mouldering corpses bobbed up and down on the wave caps, the whole surface of the sea covered with bodies, each one face down, faces hidden. In the distance a thick black cloud was rolling over the waves, moving with the grace of a bird in flight, but he knew that the smoke held…
‘Come back to the moment when you knew the camp commandant, Preston.’ Jonathan said, and for the first time I felt his presence like an intrusion rather than an addition.
‘No,’ Preston said. ‘I want to know what’s in the smoke.’
‘The eyes, Preston. The face, that is what is important. Trust me. Who do you think the face belonged to?
’
Almost impatient now, over his obtuse denial of the obvious, and his constant interruption of my memory. ‘Me, of course it is me!’ I all but shouted the answer he wanted, the one he must surely already have known. I was the face eluding my thoughts, the anonymous face shrouded out of my own memory.
His laugh was more jarring by far than I could have imagined. My doubts, so familiar to me, began crowding in on Preston, like a crush of people.
‘I knew that was what you would think.’ His triumph lacked the professional calmness Preston had come to associate with Jonathan.
‘Of course it’s me…it has to be me…’
‘Look, Preston.’
I looked at him, directly for the first time this session. His face was different from the one I held in place from my knowledge of him. It seemed molten, as if it was impermanent and was about to take on a different guise. As this thought lodged in Preston’s mind the face of Jonathan Sterling slipped away into the crevice of past life and father’s face appeared in its place. That stayed on Jonathan’s shoulders for seemingly an eternity, until my mother’s face replaced it. Then that too dissolved into forgotten lapses of loss and my brother’s, my uncle’s, my teacher’s…every face I had ever known flashed before me on this mans body while time stood still, the confessional room warm cosy and secure no more as the memory pot spilled over and faces poured out. Not faces alone, because for each one Preston was able to put a name, a name and an occasion when they occurred in his life.
At the end, because all memory has a limit, Preston closed his eyes and the tears that rained upon his face were warm but sad. All the names, all the faces, were back with him, and he would never let them go again.
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