The Memory Thief (8 page)

He chanted my name like a mantra, like a prayer. Outside, the rain came down and down.

“Take it from me,” I say to Taylor. “Becoming reacquainted with your own life is not a process for the faint of heart.”

He makes an unintelligible noise around a mouthful of food. We're sitting outside on the patio of this pizza place called the Mellow Mushroom, which is sort of a foodie version of Alice in Wonderland meets Woodstock, complete with a giant fourteen-foot-tall mushroom that's visible from Oleander Drive. The pizzas here have funky names, like the Philosopher's Pie and the Magical Mystery Tour. Despite the kitschy menu, the food's pretty good, and they've got an impressive selection of microbrews. Also, Grace's band—Beacon Rubber Philharmonic—is performing tonight, and so Taylor and I are playing groupie. We get to hoot and holler and cheer. It's kind of fun.

He finally swallows his giant bite of Kosmic Karma and washes it down with a mouthful of beer. “I'm sure,” he says. “I can't even imagine, dude.”

Taylor cracks me up. He's a surfing real estate lawyer who regularly peppers his conversation with words like
awesome
and
rad.
And
dude,
of course. He's also a dyed-in-the-wool southern boy whose family has lived in Wilmington for generations—they own a huge revivalist mansion downtown that Taylor's told me is on the Historic Wilmington home tour every year. Consequently, he opens doors for women, says “y'all” without a trace of irony, and uses creative expressions like “in the short rows” to describe when he's almost done with a particularly onerous task. His good-old-boy exterior conceals an astute intelligence and a wicked sense of humor. I like him very much.

“It's exhausting,” I say, watching him cram another piece of pizza into his mouth.

“I bet,” he says, or at least that's what it sounds like.

“Especially on a practical level. Take my kitchen, for instance. Nothing's where I think it ought to be. Not the microwave, not the glasses, not the silverware. It took me forty minutes to make a grilled cheese sandwich yesterday, and then I burned it anyway, because apparently I don't know how to cook. It would have been nice to have known that before I almost set the house on fire, but oh well.”

He gives me a peculiar look. “You can cook just fine. You were always making these crazy meals for Grace. Like, gourmet and shit.”

“Well,” I say, perplexed, “I can't cook now.”

“That's weird.”

“Tell me about it.” I look up, in the direction of the small stage. Beacon Rubber Philharmonic only has three members—a guitarist, who's also the vocalist, a pianist, and Grace. She's radiant in a loose white dress, really into the music. I watch her draw her bow across the strings of her violin, watch her body sway. The song is “Satellite,” by Dave Matthews, and she's tearing it up. Her red hair isn't tied back, and it flies everywhere. She tosses her head back, so it doesn't cover the strings.

Grace is another puzzle. In the weeks that I've been home from the hospital, I can't shake that initial sense that she and I don't belong together, that something's amiss. I think she's beautiful, sure. I've gone to see Beacon Rubber play a bunch of times, and even I can tell that she is exquisitely talented. She's gorgeous when she plays, passionate. And she loves me. Despite this happy confluence of circumstances, my heart remains unmoved. This is a problem, especially since she is my fiancée.

Taylor follows my line of sight. “Everything copacetic with Grace?”

I haven't talked to anyone about my feelings for Grace, or rather the lack thereof. Taylor's question catches me off guard, though, and so I answer it honestly. “I don't know, man. I mean, she tells me things were going great. Hell, she said I proposed to her, and she said yes. But something just doesn't feel right.”

He looks confused. “You two've been together a couple of years, right? And you never mentioned any major problems to me. Granted, you never told me you were gonna pop the question. Then again,” he says, grinning, “maybe you've got a rich inner life you're afraid to share with Uncle Taylor, for fear he will mock you mercilessly.”

“Yeah, I'm sure that's it.” I take a generous gulp of beer. “Anyhow, that's not the point. The point is that here's this woman who knows me really well, right? And I don't know the first thing about her, other than what she's told me. How can I marry someone that I don't even know?”

“Ever hear of arranged marriages? People in the Third World do it all the time.”

“Don't be a dick, Taylor. It's a problem. She still wants to be with me. And I just feel crappy about it. Like I'm taking advantage of her.”

Now he's staring at me. “You've got to be kidding, Sullivan. She's hot as hell. She's into you, despite the fact that you're a walking freak show. Go ahead and get lucky.”

“It's not that simple,” I say, staring down into the remains of my pale ale. It's not that I'm not attracted to Grace. I am. When she kisses me, my body responds like it should, all systems go. But when I think about kissing her back, about taking it further, the laughing woman's face fills my field of vision, like she's standing in front of me. I end up backing away from Grace, telling her that I don't think being with her is a good idea, like a freaking virgin on prom night. Needless to say, this doesn't go over well. She's running out of patience with me, and I don't blame her. We've gone from seeing each other every day to going out a couple of nights a week, and I've managed to make at least one of those a group affair, like tonight.

While I tell myself that I'm taking the moral high ground by opting out of having sex with a woman I don't love—and who claims to be in love with me—I still feel like a complete ass. She looks so disappointed every time I turn her down, so sad. I have succeeded in hurting her feelings, as well as in making her cry, and, most recently, telling me that if I'm going to be so mean to her, she's not going to speak to me anymore. This may be for the best.

Problem is, not only am I supremely horny, but I'm also lonely. I spend a lot of time walking my dog—Nevada, a beautiful golden retriever who has been staying with Taylor and is thrilled beyond belief to see me. I think Taylor has been spoiling him, because every time I eat anything, Nevada sits down next to me, his heavy head in my lap, and stares up at me with these big, expectant eyes. Then again, maybe I've always fed him table scraps. Who knows? Not me, of course. I suppose I could ask Grace, but that just seems pathetic.

“I'll be right back,” I say to Taylor now, pushing my chair back from the table. “Smoke break.”

“I can't get over that.” He shakes his head. “You were always so anti. Used to show your students those damn PSAs where everyone was lying on the ground in body bags. Now it's like Philip Morris has you by the balls.”

Since I don't have a good response to this, I ignore him and make my way to the parking lot, where I dig my pack of death sticks out of my pocket and light one. Fucking filthy habit. Couldn't I have woken up with a more useful add-on, like a superpower or even an affinity for tofu? Instead I crave charred meat and am hell-bent on polluting my lungs. Fantastic.

I stand in the parking lot, blowing smoke rings so perfect you could shoot an arrow through them and trying to think about something normal, like the spackle and sandpaper I bought today to fix the holes in my living room wall. I live in a neighborhood called Carolina Place, not too far from downtown Wilmington. It's got sidewalks and a park and narrow streets lined with turn-of-the-century bungalows, one of which is mine—a yellow one-story with green trim. There's a porch, complete with the obligatory swing, and a deck out back. Grace tells me that I renovated my house from the bottom up, that I did most of the work myself. “So I'm handy,” I say, adding that to the growing arsenal of information I have about my life. Fake it till I make it, that's my motto.

Faking it is something I do a lot, especially when it comes to pretending that my life is all business as usual. School isn't back in session until August, which doesn't help. The days stretch out, long and empty, and I try to fill them with productive distractions. I go to the grocery store, take walks with Nevada, surf with Taylor and Jack, spend time with Grace. I helped Taylor build a fence for a Work on Wilmington volunteer project, stained Jack's new deck, took my mangled Harley into the shop to have it fixed. Right now I'm driving a crappy old blue Honda Accord, which I guess is all I can afford on a teacher's salary. I wish I had my motorcycle back already. It would be more fun, especially in the summer.

I try to keep busy, and to stay awake as long as possible, because every time I fall asleep, there's the dream. It doesn't matter if I sleep on the couch, the bed, the carpet. Every time, I wake up on my hands and knees, sweating like I've run a marathon, struggling for breath. It's gotten so that I'm afraid to close my eyes. As soon as I do, the mountain looms in front of me, massive, covered in ice and snow. No matter how hard I try to wake up, no matter how hard I try to tell myself I am dreaming, the scenario plays out: the climb, the fall, the lack of air, the images rolling one after the other, the lines of poetry—which I've looked up online. Marvell, like I thought. The weird thing is, I don't know any of the other lines of the poem, and I don't know anything about Andrew Marvell. And given that my knowledge of popular culture, of books and politics—of anything that doesn't have to do with my personal life—has survived the accident intact, this strikes me as peculiar.

As if all of this weren't bad enough, whatever personality I've managed to maintain is, at least according to Grace and my friends, a little bit off. It started with the cigarettes—American Spirits are my brand, there was never any doubt in my mind—and has spread to other things, like the type of music I listen to, what I'm good at, and even what I like to eat. Dr. Perry has told me that this can happen after traumatic head injuries, that it will fade with time. Which is all well and good, but it doesn't change the way Grace looks at me when I pull a bottle of Gatorade from the refrigerator or tell her I can't stand tuna fish, or the way Taylor scrutinized me when I sketched an impromptu, accurate rendering of Nevada catching a ball in midair—like I'm a pod person from the planet Amnesia.

I've started to feel like maybe there's another person inside of me, dreaming that awful dream and missing the woman and the little boy. It's crazy, I know. I have the oddest feeling that on top of losing my sense of self, I've become a stranger who smokes American Spirits and climbs mountains and draws pictures and knows Marvell. Which is impossible, of course. And delusional. And just plain creepy.

The end result of all of this is that my self-confidence is shot to hell. I still can't remember anything, which is, of course, disastrous in and of itself. Then the things that I do remember aren't real, and half the time I eat something, drink something, do something, or say something, I get the pod person treatment. Obviously, I'm not sleeping well. This can't go on, I'm sure of it. Something's got to give.

I've tried to convey some of this to the psychiatrist Dr. Perry recommended, with dubious results. I don't dislike Dr. Green. He isn't a bad guy, but he doesn't really seem to know what to do with me, which makes two of us. We've spent a lot of time talking, and he's tried everything in his little bag of tricks, from talk therapy to Ambien to hypnosis. I was hopeful that the latter would produce some kind of miraculous results, but no such luck. The whole time he was instructing me to envision myself relaxing on a sandy beach, I was half-tempted to break into the chorus of “Hypnotize,” by the Notorious B.I.G.—after all, I might as well make use of the one aspect of my memory that seems to be in great working order. I stopped myself just in time. He's doing his best. It's not his fault I'm such a crappy patient.

Instead, I told him about the dream, and he said that made sense, it's me externalizing my anxiety or some such bullshit. I told him about my new habits, the smoking and the drawing, and he said sometimes when you're in an accident like mine, other parts of your brain compensate for the ones that have been damaged.
Don't worry,
he said.
Everything will be back to normal soon enough, and if not—well, artistic talent isn't such a bad thing, is it, and I'll just write you a prescription for Wellbutrin.
And then he laughed, which I did not appreciate.

The next session we had, I told him about the sense that my life's on hold, that it seems like there's nothing to it. He said that was logical, that until my memories came back, it was natural that I'd be “a bit at sea.” This was not what I meant, exactly. It's not that I don't have things to do from one day to the next, or people to do them with. It's that all of this stuff seems to add up to nothing. The sense of happiness I had when I was climbing, the rush of love for the dark-haired woman and the little boy, those things have weight. Compared with them, my day-to-day life seems meaningless, just a bunch of hours strung together.

When I related all this to Dr. Green, he nodded his head. “Hmmm,” he said. “You're not working right now, are you?” I told him that I wasn't, that I won't be teaching again until the fall. His brilliant conclusion was that my life lacks structure—that if I were in a classroom, I'd feel a lot more inspired. He recommended that I give myself some time.

For all I know, he could be right. But when I think about getting up in front of a classroom full of high school students and talking to them about the American political system, I don't feel a thrill of excitement. What I feel, instead, is dread. I don't know if this is because I have no actual memories of teaching or planning a curriculum. I guess it could be plain old stage fright. The thing is, it's not working with kids that turns me off, it's the setting—the confines of a classroom, standing up in front of a group of students day after endless day, year after year. When I think about it too hard, I want to flee for the nearest exit as fast as my legs will take me.