My Name Is Memory (24 page)

My baby brother, Raymond, started making screeching sounds, and the lady turned her head. I expected her to get the frustrated look that people with gray hair in church often got when babies started crying, but she didn’t. Her face was pink and not frustrated.

And suddenly I realized I knew her. I was only just getting to the age of recognizing people from older lives, but I had already started a couple of years before having my dreams about Sophia.

It felt as though there was an explosion going on inside my head in very slow motion. She turned back to the front of the church, and I desperately wanted to see her for longer. My mother hustled to the end of our row with Raymond in her arms and went out the back of the church to let Raymond do his yelling outside with the cars and the birds. I slid closer to the lady. I was practically in her armpit by the time she looked at me.

I remember my four-year-old astonishment. It was Sophia. Her eyes were watery and sad, and her skin was loose and speckly, but it was her. I thought of her when I had last seen her, when she was Constance. She was so young and pretty then, and now she wasn’t, but I knew she was the same. Amid the astonishment was also confusion, and it took me a few minutes to figure out what was wrong. Thinking back to myself a few years before when I was a grown-up doctor, before I died, I remembered expecting that either she would be very old and still be Constance or she would be very young—like me or even younger—and somebody new. I didn’t think she was supposed to be a person in the middle who I was pretty sure wasn’t Constance.

Are you still Constance? I wondered doubtfully. It was actually easier for me to identify that she was Sophia than to ascertain if she was still being Constance or not, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t. So I tried to figure out how it happened. As good as my memory is, it is hard to make great use of it amid the disorder of a surprised four-year-old mind.

When you are four it’s easy to forget where your body is and is supposed to be. As I was determinedly calculating, I had slid myself against her. When I realized how much of myself I had pressed into her, I looked up and saw she was still looking at me. If I was confused, so was she. If I was calculating, so was she. At the time I thought it was maybe because she knew me in some way, but I think it more likely she was just confused to have an unknown four-year-old worming his way into her armpit.

She was confused, but she accepted my presence. She put her arm around me. I realized my father was craning his neck toward us, looking confused as well. I saw her nod to him as if to say it was fine.

She squeezed me, and I felt myself relaxing into her. She put her hand over my round stomach.

I felt some disappointment. I was certainly aware of it. But because of my physical joy to be near her, I experienced it in an almost dutiful manner, for the sake of my previous older self and my future older self. That was something that always started early with me—a wordless feeling of loyalty to my old selves. Sophia was supposed to be young like me this time and not old and big, and I needed to figure out why.

“I guess you must have died young last time,” I told her in her rib.

Of course there was disappointment. But I was four and she was holding me, and when you are four, the pleasure of the body is hard to puncture with the displeasure of the mind.

I touched the vein on her hand, which was indeed so soft it disappeared under my fingertip.

WE WENT TO the church in Fairfax for another year or so. I would find Sophia and scurry to sit with her every time. My parents called her my special friend and once invited her over for lemonade after church, and she said thank you but no, she had to take her mother home.

Eventually Molly, my mother, got tired of what she said were the sexist sermons at that church. She found a hippie church in Arlington where the priest sang his sermons accompanied by an acoustic guitar. I recall there were a lot of songs from Godspell. I actually preferred the new service, but I was miserable not to see Sophia. I think my father was frankly relieved. He thought my attachment to her was weird. When I made a fuss about finding out her telephone number and calling her, I did not get much adult assistance. I called her Sophia, but when it came to looking up her number in the fat phone book, I realized I didn’t know her actual name.

I took the bus to the old church when I was nine, but she wasn’t there. I did it every Sunday for two months, but she didn’t go there anymore. I didn’t see her again until 1985, when I was seventeen.

My maternal grandfather, Joseph, from our old street in Alabama, was dying. Molly, my mother, decided to put him in hospice close to where we lived. She’d already lost her mother suddenly to a heart attack, and she wanted to be able to take care of him. I went with her to see him. I wasn’t as much moved by my feelings toward him as by my mother’s feelings toward him. Her grief was thick all over the house. I remember thinking to myself, It’s all right. It’s not that big a deal. You’ll get another one. And yet somehow, even though it was the kind of thing I told myself all the time, it didn’t seem exactly right. As long as I had been around, as much as I carried with me, I wanted to think I knew better than Molly, but I really didn’t. I didn’t know anything about love compared to Molly.

I kept thinking about Laura in the playground in Georgia, being ordinary for her mother. I was struck by it in a sad way, and I wasn’t even sure why. I hadn’t thought much about playing a role in anybody else’s life. I was so eager to play myself every time; the others were just rotating through the bit parts. Because they forgot and I remembered. That’s what I figured. They would be lost soon enough, and I would keep going. The best I could do was hold on to them after they forgot themselves.

Not that I didn’t do my duty; I did. I made sure my mothers, all but the few who left me or died before I grew up, had food and basic comforts. I made sure they were looked after when they were sick or old. The money I stockpiled I used for them more than anyone. But I didn’t think too much harder than that. In a life like mine, you get a lot of mothers, and you lose a lot, too. You don’t so much appreciate the getting, but you mind the losing. After the first few losses I learned how to weather them better. One mother out of many was what I always told myself.

But I saw in my mother’s grief how she loved her father. She didn’t love him because he was her father, she loved him. She loved the kindnesses he had done her, the times they spent together. There was nothing abstract in the way she loved him or any of us. You can get a new one, is what I thought, but I guess in a deeper way, I knew she couldn’t.

THE SECOND TIME I visited hospice, I inadvertently peered into a room a few doors down from Joseph’s and saw a deteriorated lady propped up in a bed. I walked about twenty more steps before I realized I knew her. I retraced my steps and looked at her from the doorway. It was Sophia. Never had I seen her like this. She was the same as she was in our old church but older and sick. After I’d said good-bye to my grandfather, I went back to her room.

I sat with her for a while. I held her hand. She opened her eyes and looked at me. They were rheumy. I knew they were Constance’s eyes and Sophia’s eyes, but I resisted seeing them that way. Some part of me was staring down a big grief, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I had the strangest sensation of lifting up and away, until everything on the ground got smaller and smaller and I could see the big patterns instead of the small, troubling pieces.

You won’t be like this for long. You’ll be young and strong again soon, I was saying to her over and over in my head. It wasn’t for her sake but for mine.

I visited her twice more and sat with her and talked to her about all kinds of things. I think I might have done all the talking, but I also think she was happy to have me. An irritable orderly told me she asked every day, several times, if I was coming back. She had no children or grandchildren, he told me. I was about the only one who came.

One of the days she seemed more alert, and she kept looking at me in an odd way.

“Do you remember me?” I asked her.

She looked at me carefully. “I remember there was someone with your name.”

“Do you?”

“From a long time ago.”

“Someone you knew?”

“Not really knew, no. I was waiting for him. My mother said I was foolish, and I was.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was a girl in Kansas City, before my father died and we moved east. We had a nice time then. Lots of parties and plans. I was a romantic soul, but my mother said I enjoyed my imagination more than any of the real boys. And that was a disappointment to her.”

I could see, now, the loneliness that wasn’t just from being old, and the reality of her began to sink in. All those years when I was trying to find Constance, picturing her getting old across an ocean, she was growing up like me, a couple of hundred miles away. I thought of Snappy the pigeon. I couldn’t find her because she was dead.

I hadn’t understood the full tragedy. I was a teenager, as selfish as a two-year-old, and there’s no getting around that. I had always wished she would come back with me, and she had. At least she had tried. I was waiting for her and she was close by, waiting for me. In her way, she remembered.

Sophia’s old eyes were watching me, and I hid my face from her. She didn’t even know all we’d lost. “He was waiting for you, too,” I said. I had disappointed her.

“I was always foolish,” she said.

I stayed there as long as I could, my thoughts churning. I stayed until they kicked me out, sometime after ten that night.

I came back the next morning, and I told her about the old things. I held her hand for hours, and I told her about our ride through the desert. I told her about the Great War and her being a lady of Hastonbury Hall and how it had been turned into a hospital and she had taken care of me there. I called her Sophia and told her I loved her. I always had. She was asleep by then, but I needed her to know. I was scared I would lose her for good this time.

BY THE END of the third visit, I knew what I was going to do.

“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m coming, too. We’ll come back together.” That’s what she’d wanted to do before, when she was Constance, but I’d said no. This time we’d do it. This time it was her life that was spent and mine that was young and promising. I was the one who could see to the other side. That made it easier.

“This is going to be our chance,” I said to her.

I was sorry to give up such a life. I was especially sorry for it because of my mother, Molly. She would lose her father and her son in one short stretch, and I knew—or at least I would have known if I let myself think about it—that it would be devastating to her. But I had a strategy for weathering the losses, and it didn’t involve a lot of thinking.

I wished I could tell Molly that it was what I wanted, and that I would come back soon. I wished I could make her know it was all right. But another voice inside my head had a different idea. She loves you, it said. She doesn’t want to lose you, and it’s not all right.

I knew in my heart it was so, but I managed to ignore it. I was young and stupid, and in a big hurry to get to Sophia again. How else could I have done it? It’s amazing the things we take for granted.

There was a big part of me that resisted Molly’s love. I even had the effrontery to think I succeeded in it. It was hard enough to cling to one person from life to life. It was hard enough to have one person you loved forget you every time. Maybe Ben was capable of holding on to the love of an infinite number of people, but I could barely hold on to one.

I went to an infamous corner in D.C. on a winter night before my eighteenth birthday. I don’t think of that night very often, but I confess I do think about what happened the night before. It was the first time in a very long time I thought enough about a mother’s feelings to try to say good-bye to her. I won’t attempt to describe the things she said or the way I felt. As Whitman wrote, they scorn the best I can do to relate them.

I’m not very good at living meaningful lives, but I try to make my deaths meaningful, when I can. I try to use them to benefit some person or cause in some small way, but that time I was too young and in too much of a hurry to think of a way to do it—other than scaring the shit out of a few drug addicts.

I went to this place near D Street, I think it was, near the 9:30 Club, where I used to go to hear music sometimes. I found my way to a room off an alley where the addicts went. Not the happy pot smokers but the serious users. I brought enough cash to make an impression. I found my druggie Virgil, a desperate woman in her thirties with an arm that told the tale. I promised I’d buy for her if she found me the best, strongest stuff. She had the idea it was habitual with me, and I didn’t correct her. It was her needle, her excitement, her fingers tying the band around my arm.

That was the only time I ever took heroin, and it will be my last. I guess dying of it is no way to start. Maybe I angered fate by doing it. It wasn’t suicide, but it was about the closest I’ve gotten. It was cheating, a way to avoid it on a technicality. I’d hoped my sheer fervency to reunite with Sophia would get me back fast, and thankfully it did. It wasn’t death I wanted. That much was clear to me in my dying moment. I wanted life very badly.

But when nature offers you one of her true gifts, there’s a special punishment for those who throw it away. I did come back again, but if you believe in these things, it probably explains the mother I was dealt in my subsequent life.

T
he next mother I was born to was an addict. I was apparently an addict myself as a newborn. It seemed fitting. She was probably a newer version of some desperate character I had known in an earlier life, but I was too young to place her by the time she took off, which was when I was about three. I was found alone in the apartment by a neighbor. I think I’d been on my own for a couple of days, and I remember being very scared. When you are three it’s harder to see the big picture.