My Name Is Memory (13 page)

WHEN I THINK of my days as a sailor, I always think of a dog I once knew in Venice named Nestor. He was a street dog, a mutt, and I used to feed him between voyages. He was a smart dog. He always met my ship and greeted me, no matter how long I’d been gone. One time we brought him aboard the ship to eat rats on a voyage to a couple of plague-stricken ports in Spain, and he did his job splendidly. I really loved that dog.

He must have lived to an extraordinary dog age, because after I died I was born again, right in the city, and when I was six or seven years old, I wandered to the docks to look for old friends. Who did I see there but Nestor. He was old and arthritic, but I knew it was him. And amazingly, he knew it was me. I am certain of it. He sniffed me. He wagged his tail so hard you would have thought it might come off. He licked me, played with me, asked for treats in the same old ways. That was one of the happiest experiences of my long life. I felt like a miniature Odysseus, remembered by someone at last.

Sometimes I find myself wishing that dogs lived as long as people do. I think my life would be considerably less lonely. But Nestor died not long after that. I went to the docks often as I grew up in that life, hoping I might see Nestor in his new body, as a new, young dog. But I was never able to identify him. By now I know that dogs, like most animals, don’t have individuated souls. They have a group soul, if you can properly call it that. Bees and ants make a good illustration of the idea. They carry the wisdom of their kind with them, which is a privilege we do not have. But it makes it almost impossible to recognize them from life to life.

I sometimes think, and Carl Jung would probably agree, that an early version of man, maybe Australopithecus or Neanderthal, did have some kind of group soul. I think the true ascent of man, the moment when humans divided irrevocably from apes and other fellow creatures, occurred with the birth of the first distinct soul. And much unhappiness ensued.

HE WAS ONLY half on board with his plan but going along anyway. He feared seeing her. He hoped to see her. Hope was the thing you picked to happen, and fear was the thing you picked not to happen, and often with him they blurred.

Since he’d seen Joaquim on TV he’d been thinking about Sophia constantly. Granted, he always did that, but it was her safety he thought of now. Over the last two years he’d kept track of her remotely, highly conscious of her whereabouts but stalling his reapproach, afraid to get too close and cause more damage. Now he needed to see with his own eyes that she was okay. One of his worst fears was that Joaquim would somehow find her and do her harm. One of his other worst fears was that Joaquim would somehow find Daniel, and Daniel would unknowingly lead Joaquim to her. Daniel was torn between those two things, the desire to protect her (and, admittedly, be near her) and the fear that his presence would put her at greater risk.

Joaquim’s cruelty forced a few limitations, it seemed. He had a version of the Memory paired with a deeply grudging nature, but he couldn’t recognize a soul from one body to the next. “He can’t see inside people” was how Ben put it. But his cruelty also offered Joaquim advantages—body stealing, for example—and Daniel had the troubling sense that Joaquim was gathering these advantages over time.

Daniel parked near the hospital and walked up the lawn to the rotunda with a feeling of admiration. The place was old by the standards of this country, and bore the stamp of a mastermind. He wished he had been in the New World in the age of Thomas Jefferson. It was one of his favorite periods of history, but he’d been spending an odd, short life in Denmark at the time. Most of his lives suggested overarching coherence and some identifiable mark of his will, but once in a while he’d find himself somewhere like Denmark, among strangers.

He’d studied and read Jefferson’s work extensively. He even thought he recognized the man once, in 1961, on a Freedom Ride down to Oxford, Mississippi. Daniel had bought an iced tea and a bag of peaches from him at a roadside stand. The man introduced himself as Noah. He was old and tired, working the same land, he told Daniel, where his grandfather had been a slave and his father a sharecropper. Daniel couldn’t be sure it was Jefferson, because he had never seen the great man in person. He’d known him only from drawings and portraits, which weren’t entirely dependable for distinguishing a soul, though much better than photographs. But Daniel felt it strongly and intuitively. You could still see some quality of him in Noah’s eyes.

Noah was soul-tired by that point. It was probably the last of his lives, Daniel guessed, the final turn of his remarkable existence. It made sense to Daniel that as the lover of Sally Hemings and an ambivalent slave owner, Jefferson would come back as a black man before his circle would close. Noah never would have guessed who he had once been. And though Daniel had been tempted to mention it, he didn’t. It was a strange source of loneliness, knowing things about people they didn’t know themselves.

Daniel felt a drop of sweat go down his spine. The air was so humid you could smell it and hear it and touch it and see it and nearly chew on it. He hated to feel the sweat soaking into his best shirt, the white linen shirt she’d given him almost ninety years before when she was Constance. It had belonged to her grandfather, the viscount. He kept this shirt from one life to the next among his most treasured things, and wore it only rarely because he wanted to preserve it. When she’d first given it to him, it was too big for him, and he figured the viscount was a giant, but he’d grown so big in this life, it barely fit. He’d never been so tall before, as he was in this life. He’d worn the shirt today because he loved it and because he thought, in spite of it being a little stretched, it looked good on him. (He was rarely vain, but his body was twenty-one, and once in a while it got to him.) But the main reason he wore it was because he hoped, irrationally, that it might remind her of what he meant to her once. All these years later he could smell his old sweat and fever, and the smell of the great old house where she’d once lived, the polish and wax and a faint antiseptic hospital smell. And somewhere nested in all that was the barest, most fragile trace of her. Not just a representation of her but her. That was really why he loved this shirt.

Daniel suspected that smell was his only extraordinary sense in this body. His own version of a superpower. He was Smell Man, or maybe The Nose. His ears weren’t extraordinary. He knew many songs and could play quite a few instruments, but that didn’t mean his ear was always great. It had been good and even excellent in a few bodies and frustratingly bad in others. He used to think that over time he could overwhelm his body’s limits with pure will and experience, but it didn’t work that way. In fact, over time he became more convinced of the simple biology of talent. There were gifts only a body could offer, and a great ear for music was one of them.

His eyes weren’t extraordinary. He could identify a huge number of things by sight, but that was only because he had seen so much of the earth’s surface under so many atmospheric conditions. He’d been a sailor in more than one life, crawling over the watery earth, minute by minute, in those places where time had the least effect. But his eyes weren’t always very astute. He’d been a truly good artist only twice. A good eye was another thing you couldn’t take with you.

Touch was a rudimentary sense, not so variable and not likely to get better with repetition. If anything, repetition made you feel a little less with each touch. As he saw it, anticipation and habit were two of the nastiest parasites of old souls and long experience. They fed on repetition and crowded out your eager senses over time until nothing felt new anymore. There were things he wished he could touch for the first time again.

Smell and taste, of course, were sister senses. More like Siamese twin sisters, with the first having most of the organs, including the brain. The second sister was built for pleasure and the occasional bitter warning. But it was smell that carried memory. He’d done enough work in neurology and even recent reading in neuroscience to know how simplistic his concept was, but that was still how he thought of it. Smell was like the wormhole connecting you to the other parts of your life. Memories of smell didn’t fade, and they short-circuited your entire psychology—they didn’t tunnel through endless experience or get loaded down by any part of your conscious mind. They stitched you instantly and fully to your other times, without regard to sequence. It was the closest thing to time travel on this earth. If he had to point to a place to explain his unusual abilities, it would probably be his nose. He’d had many of them over the centuries, and his gift of smell stayed with him through all.

He walked down Alderman Street, past the stadium and toward the dorms in Hereford College, where she lived. Here was where he might see her. This was where she lived and walked. His mounting adrenaline gave each of the sounds an extra boost. The drone of a mower. The rush of the trees. The trucks on a highway beyond his sight. This was her place, and the closer he got to Whyburn House, the more he imagined it was full of her. Her sidewalk, her pollen, her sky. The people in the direction of her building all wore her face for at least a moment.

It was hard for him, he realized, to picture her how she was now. He tended to picture her as Sophia and then let her image evolve in his mind as though in stop-motion photography. But she stayed on as a kind of amalgam, dissolving and resolving through different versions. It was hard to hold on to her as she would be right now if he saw her on the sidewalk. Her body was smaller this time, he thought, her bones lighter and softer. Last time, as an old woman, she’d had freckles and veins and spots on her hands, and now she was washed clean again.

He thought of the first time he saw her in this life, on the sidewalk with Marnie when she was fifteen and wearing those shorts. She was as radiant as if she had been chosen by the sun. That was before he’d moved to Hopewood, before she knew of him at all.

He thought of the time he’d watched her in the ceramics studio a couple of months after he’d arrived at school. He hadn’t meant to stalk her. He’d gone to the art building to sign himself up for a printmaking class, and when he couldn’t find the teacher he’d gone wandering. He was standing in the annex between two studios when he realized the lone figure at the kickwheel was her. He meant to say something and not just stand there, but he was paralyzed by the sight of her, and by the time he could think again he’d let too much time pass. She didn’t look up. That was partly what caused his paralytic trance. Her foot urged the flywheel, the clay spun in a shifting mound, her hands moved in hypnotic symmetry, the sun was filtering down through dirty windows, and her eyes were focused on something he couldn’t see. She had clay up to her elbows and all over her shirt and flecks of it on her face and in her hair. He was struck by how deeply absorbed she was in the moment and by the helpless sense he had that he couldn’t reach her there. He was struck to admiration by the terrible state of her shirt.

He thought of that night at the high school and her in the light purple dress with the little purple flowers in her hair. His blood rushed high and low as he felt his hands holding on to her. She was certainly as beautiful as ever this time. Maybe it was just in his eyes, but her smile was a revelation. Although very young children were kind of homogenous, people pressed their souls into their faces and bodies fairly quickly in a life, and more and more deeply as they aged. A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting. He used to think that fairness would dictate a conservation of physical beauty over the life of a soul, but it didn’t work that way. Fairness turned out to be a human construct, and the universe had little use for it. Sophia had more than her share of beauty.

And today. What would he do if he saw her? It was a fantasy he’d played several different ways. Would she stop and know him? If she didn’t, would he stop her? What would he say? Would it be enough just to see her? He told himself it would. He just wanted to look at her and know her life was marching along under the same arch of time and space as his. Even that would be a comfort, a kind of intimacy almost. Was it wrong that that could count as intimacy?

She lived with Marnie on the third floor of Whyburn House. He’d done the research to know that and not more. If he found out more he felt like a stalker, but if he did too little he’d wander around like an idiot. He didn’t want to slant the knowledge too much in his direction. He didn’t want one more inequality between them. Mostly he wanted not to know and to be surprised. Some sad part of him wanted it to be like a regular boy meeting a girl and falling in love.

She lived here in this red brick building. Her glass double doors, her nonskid floor covering. Her mail slot. One of them had to be. You could feel the giant air-conditioning system fighting its battle for her.

He’d lived in a dorm once, but he couldn’t get used to it. It didn’t have the functionality of a barracks or a monastery, say. It had the arbitrary and mildly coercive feel of social engineering. And this one was mostly empty, which underscored the impression. He greeted the guard at the desk and glanced down at the sign-in sheet. It had one name, not hers.

“ID, please,” the guard said.

“Sorry?”

The guard turned down his buzzing radio. His tag said his name was Claude Valbrun. “You need to show an ID if you’re not a resident, and you’re not a resident, because if you were, I would know you.” He wasn’t the least bit unfriendly. He said it with evident pride.

Flustered, Daniel took out his driver’s license. “I-I’m not—I wasn’t planning on going in the building,” he explained.

“Then what are you doing here?”

Daniel stopped. It was a good question, and he couldn’t answer it.

The guard pointed to the phone on the wall past his desk. “Even if you just want to use the house phone, you still need to sign in.”