My Name Is Memory (23 page)

I was aghast. I was silent for a moment. “Is that what he does?” I asked.

She nodded with so much seriousness that I realized why I had been summoned. This was something she needed me to know.

“How does he do it?”

“He kills them first,” she said simply.

I had never heard of that. I had never thought of that. I didn’t know it could be done. “How do you know?”

This was a pointless question to ask her. The longer I knew Ben, the more extraordinary he became. He had recognition, precognition, and everything in between. He seemed to contain the omniverse, with or without the structure of time. And his knowledge wasn’t limited to his experience in the world, as far as I could tell. Once I read a poem about a man with an imagination so great it became the story of the world, and it made me think of Ben. But you couldn’t ask him how he knew things.

“Are you sure?” I asked, also pointlessly. “Maybe you are wrong.”

She fixed her large, feeling eyes on me. “I wish I was wrong.”

She’d said that before—when she was Ben. Then, as now, I wanted her to be wrong and had little hope of it.

“I haven’t seen him in a long time,” I said. “Not for six, seven hundred years. Even then he didn’t recognize me.”

“’Cause he can’t see.” She twisted around on the bars. “He can remember, and he can steal bodies, but he can’t see inside.”

“What do you mean? He can’t recognize a soul?”

She shook her head. “If he could, he would have found you already.”

For a while I watched her swing on the bars. She wanted to show me how she could swing all the way across like Tarzan the Ape Man, and she made me pay attention and not look at my watch or glance at the road behind me through all her tries until she finally got it.

As it got dark I walked with her toward her house.

“I have candy,” she said. She pulled out a packet of Chiclets and unrolled the top. “You can have one.” She pulled out exactly one tiny green Chiclet and held it out to me. Her hands were so sticky and snotty that I didn’t want to eat it, but I took it anyway. “It’s actually gum,” she said with satisfaction.

I nodded. She reached up for my hand and held it as we rounded a corner.

“I live there,” she said, pointing to a small one-story house identical to all the others on the street.

“Okay,” I said. I watched her in pure wonder. How did she carry the story of the world, with all its troubles and pains, in her small head and still manage to act like a little girl? I didn’t understand how she could be so much like an ordinary child.

She looked up at me, knowing my mind, as she always did. “I like to be ordinary, because that makes it easier for my mom,” she said. I watched her tuck her Chiclet packet carefully into her pocket and run home.

DANIEL HAD BEEN able to find her latest and last housing placement online. In a couple of months her life would become unpredictable again. She would graduate, presumably. He didn’t know what she would do next, and he wasn’t in a position to ask her. It was almost sad, the joy it gave him to see her name in the little letters on his bright screen. It was absurd the amount of pleasure he had in copying her name and address on a piece of paper in his most careful handwriting. Not even her real name, just the one she had for now. It meant she was alive in the same world as him. She was where he expected her to be. She was safe.

It was sad in a different way from the anxiety and despondency he felt when he lost her again.

His life had become contemptibly simple, he sometimes felt. He was happy when she was on his grid, troubled when she fell off it. And she did fall off it—for hundreds of years at a time. Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.

I could see her, he told himself. I know where she is. I could find her easily if I wanted to.

It was a wan reassurance. It was an aspect of himself he distrusted. Part of the danger of living so long, knowing you were going to come back and back again, was putting off your life until you never lived it at all. Just so it was possible. Just so long as you could, you never actually did. Just so you didn’t ruin it.

That’s why he drove by her house in Hopewood three different times over the past summer but didn’t stop or knock on the door. That’s why he sat on a bench outside her dorm last November, freezing his ass off for hours, but didn’t call out to her when he saw her rush by. That’s why at night before he fell asleep he checked her Facebook wall for a picture or any update to her status but didn’t disclose that it was he who was her friend.

And though the piece of paper made him happy, it was not actually enough. He carried it with him for a week and a half before he got into his car and made the drive back down to Charlottesville.

He took a day off from work. He wore a fedora he’d kept from the nineteen forties. He wore a pair of sunglasses he’d picked up at a Target two days before. It seemed important to be invisible, but he realized he was more like a caricature of someone wanting to be invisible. He wondered if in fact he wanted to be noticed. If not by her, maybe by someone who might know her and say to her maybe that night or tomorrow: “Remember that weird guy from high school? Daniel something? I saw him on campus earlier.”

What would she think about that? Would she think about that?

He waited for her on a bench on a path not far from her dorm. Judging from the map, it was the one she would use to get to most of her classes, and she had to pass by eventually. He held the newspaper and read not a word of it. He would have made a horrible detective, he decided.

The first dozen or so people to pass each triggered a jolt of possibility. After the first hour he had to calm down. If for no other reason than because his body had released all of the adrenaline it had.

Two hours later he’d begun to disbelieve in her very existence. It was kind of remarkable, after all the millions of hours he’d lived, that two of them could seem so long. When she finally came, he almost missed her. She wasn’t the way he expected. She wasn’t with a chattering group of friends as she often was in high school. She was alone. Her head was down and her focus so inward he almost didn’t recognize her as he watched her pass and walk away from him. It was her walk, linked in subtle ways to her earlier walks, and yet it was slower and less mindful of the world around her. The hem had fallen on the back of her dark red corduroy jacket. The lining drooped down, and little threads dangled. It made him sad to look at it.

He got up and walked after her at a reasonable distance. Her light, slippery hair was wound up in a rubber band. The part of her hair, in this life and before a line of certainty, now zagged here and there across her head. Her bag drooped off her shoulder. Somebody threw a ball across her path, and though he startled, she barely noticed it.

He waited outside Bryan Hall until her class was done and then followed her on a beautiful winding route through the gardens, past the rotunda, to the library. He followed her up to the second floor and tried to keep his distance as she made her way into one of the quiet study rooms, blocked by a glass partition. He could follow her there without her seeing him. And though he was tempted by that, some part of him held back. Her remoteness made it harder to barge in on her. The word rang a little in his head. “Remote” was the word people often used about him.

He passed rooms of students staring at computers. It was a lovely, crisp sky outside, about the best kind of weather that Charlottesville offered, and yet the windows were shaded and all these able-bodied young people, the flowers of the species, were hunched over their screens. For some reason his mind flashed to the olive groves in Crete during the harvest festival, a pulsing mass of young and beautiful bodies. He thought of the thrum of testosterone on the decks of ships returning to Venice, the number of babies conceived and diseases traded those first nights home. He remembered the campus of Washington University in St. Louis in the late nineteen forties and all the parties and blankets draped over the lawns on sunny days in September. He might have thought this generation was just more studious than those, but a quick survey around the room showed most screens devoted to Facebook and YouTube and various bloggy news sites. You ought to get out more, he felt like telling them.

He found a table off to the side where he could see her. She didn’t open her bag and take out her books but sat hugging it on her lap, staring out through the glass. It didn’t look as though she was staring at anything.

Evening came down around them as he gazed at her and she gazed at nothing. Her face was lovely to him in its sadness. He wished he knew what made her look that way. He wished he had any faith that his interruption could be a boon to her. He took the tentative steps of empathy. He could see they led a long way off, but he couldn’t see exactly where.

He wanted to see her, and he wanted to be near her. He didn’t want to lose track of her for a moment. But he had a deep insecurity about interacting with her. He wasn’t good at it anymore. What could he offer her? A long and happy life? He’d never had a long life, so that seemed unlikely. Often he’d found ways to cut off lives prematurely, but even when he hadn’t, he didn’t last very long. And happiness? He’d had a little, mostly with her. He wasn’t good at that, either. He could take happiness from her, but could he give any?

And what about children? They were a natural and sizable ingredient in a long and happy life, and he wasn’t any good at that, either. It’s not that he wasn’t good at sex—he was more than capable, maybe even good at it, though he hadn’t had much practice recently. But he had been around for well over a thousand years, gotten to sexual maturity most of those times and had sex when he could, almost entirely in the era before birth control. He’d never understood why it didn’t ever result in a baby.

Some people seemed to do it effortlessly and often. Think of all the times a guy got in the back of a car with a girl whose last name he didn’t know, and suddenly, presto, he was a father again. Were those men worthy in some way he wasn’t?

He used to tell himself he’d probably fathered a few kids and just didn’t know about it. But he didn’t really believe that anymore. Somehow he knew it wasn’t true. He’d had too many chances where if it had happened, he would have known. It wasn’t simply something he hadn’t done. It was something he couldn’t do. And he didn’t know why.

Early on he figured he would eventually happen into a body with a couple of good working balls that made lively sperm. And by now he knew that he almost certainly had. The balls weren’t the problem. It was him. It was some unaccountable impact he made on his body every time.

Maybe it was because of the Memory. What if it was inheritable in some way? Maybe God recognized his error and couldn’t quite fix it but had taken measures to make sure not to repeat it, either.

He stood up and went to the glass that separated him from her. He put his hand against it, and then his forehead. If she looked up now, she would see him. She would probably recognize him. If she looked up now, he would go to her. If she didn’t look up, he would leave her alone.

Don’t look up.

Please look up.

He remembered the last night he saw her, at that hideous party. He remembered it with a feeling of shame, as always. He had caused her only distress then. Could he offer anything better now?

He watched her for as long as she sat there, until the windows were dark, but she didn’t look up. He didn’t go to her. He stood there with his own complexities.

He had thought a lot about her safety, but he had forgotten to think about her happiness.

I
did manage to die a natural death in the battle of Khe Sanh in the spring of 1968. I was killed by artillery fire near the end of that bitter siege, just before Operation Pegasus reached the base in April.

I was next born into a family of teachers in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. We lived in a house near a large pond where the geese came for the winter. My grandparents, my mother’s parents, lived right down the road.

In 1972, when I was four years old, we moved to Fairfax, Virginia. My father became superintendent of schools. I remember being sad to leave the geese and my grandparents, my grandfather Joseph especially, who loved airplanes as much as I did.

I shared a bedroom with two brothers, and I had the luck of being the eldest that time, so I got to set the tone for how much and how hard we beat each other up. One of them I had served with in the Great War, and the other was a fresh new soul. He was so hyperactive as to be a blur at the dinner table, but he was remarkably inventive, especially when it came to firecrackers.

My mother had been my first-grade teacher in my life immediately before, and I had loved her for her story voice and her juice and cookies. She read science-fiction novels and grew prizewinning dahlias, and she was a wonderful mother, one of my very best. When she scratched my back or told us stories at night, that’s what I thought: You are one of my very best.

A sort of miraculous thing happened a few months after we moved to Virginia. We were sitting in church, all five of us. I remember my youngest brother was still a baby. I was staring at my small loafers, which dangled about a foot and a half off the floor. I paged through the prayer book and read some of the parts in Latin. This is typically the juncture in my lives where I start to remember and process my old lives at a rapid clip. I didn’t remember about knowing Latin until we started at that church, because our old prayer books in Alabama didn’t have the Latin.

There was a big space on the pew next to me, and on the other side of that space was an older woman, about fifty, and an even older woman on the other side of her. I thought by the way they sat together that it was her mother. I looked at her carefully. She had gray hair and a dark blue dress with a little belt. She had stockings and practical, round-toed brown shoes. She was a bit square-looking, and I remember being drawn by the web of veins on the back of her hand, how they were blue and how much they stuck out. I wanted to touch one, to feel if it was soft or not. I moved a little closer to her.