My Name Is Memory

  It was a bitter thing to see him again after all that time. Daniel had been tempted to think that Joaquim’s soul had finished, but of course not. He had too much hate to be gone for good. Daniel imagined Joaquim using his memory for the sole purpose of grinding out his vendettas over the centuries. Who knew how many he had.

  It was grating to see him in a body he did not deserve. It was sick to think of how he’d done it and what had become of the man who did deserve it. Daniel had no way of knowing what Joaquim was up to. But he had a bleak sense that it was dangerous for him—and dangerous for Sophia, if he ever found her.

  OFF THE COAST OF CRETE, 899

  At the turn of the tenth century, I was an oarsman sailing under the banner of the doge aboard a ship in the Venetian fleet. I hailed from the countryside to the east of Ravenna at the time, and like many boys in that part of the world, I dreamed of the sea. The Venetians were the finest sailors on earth, or so we believed, and we had good reason to. I joined my first crew at fifteen and sailed for twenty-one years on warships and merchant ships until I went down in a storm off Gibraltar.

  We sailors expected and rather hoped to die at sea, so it was just a question of when. I had a fine, long run, and it wasn’t a bad death, as compared to many others. I’ve drowned only twice, and the second time, with the novelty of it removed, I hardly minded at all, to tell you the truth.

  Our routes took us primarily to Greece and Asia Minor, Sicily and Crete, and occasionally to Spain and the north coast of Africa. These were glorious places then, especially when you approached them by sea. As I’ve said, I keep the nostalgia minimal, but as the centuries pass, the brutality of that life falls away and I am left with the vision of sailing into the Grand Canal at dusk.

  It was a fairly routine voyage to the Cretan port of Iraklion (or Candia, as we Venetians called it) that I want to tell you about. This was early in my career. I was still young and lowly in the naval hierarchy and suffered long shifts on the oars and more than my share of night watches.

  From one voyage to the next you saw the same characters again and again, but there were always one or two new ones. In this case there was a sailor even younger than I, probably fifteen to my eighteen. I had noticed him not because of anything he said or did but the absence of either. He kept his mouth shut and did his job assiduously, but he watched and listened intently to everything around him. With him there was no ennui, no irony, no sass, no braggadocio—the staples of ordinary seamen. He had large, intelligent eyes, strangely complex in an otherwise innocent face. His name was Benedetto, but the men called him Ben or Benno when shouting orders at him or mocking him, and those were essentially the only times he was addressed.

  The first few shifts we did not exchange a word. But I felt his heavy eyes on me when I talked to the other hands. I could tell how he listened. By about the fourth or fifth shift he was my only companion on the foredeck, and I was struggling to stay awake, so I started up a conversation.

  “You’re an Italian, no?” I asked in the low Italian vernacular we used on the ship.

  He looked at me before he answered. “Yes. I was born south of Naples.”

  “Good wine country,” I said irrelevantly. I’ve never been good at small talk and I’d never been to Naples, but he seemed tongue-tied and ill at ease. How little I knew.

  “And you are Italian also,” he said after a long silence.

  “Ravenna,” I said with some pride.

  “And before that?”

  “Before that?”

  “Where did you come from before that?”

  It was an odd question, and I wondered if he suspected I wasn’t quite from Ravenna proper. I had more interest in status back then, I guess. “I was born three leagues east of the city,” I said a little defensively.

  He nodded. There was nothing urgent or demanding in his manner. “But before you were born three leagues east of Ravenna, where did you come from?”

  I was struck mute. I still remember how the thoughts streaked around my head. I had been alive many times by that point. I knew how strange and even freakish I was. So much of my deeper life was conducted in the remote part of my mind, it never occurred to me that another person could get near it. Was it possible he was like me? Did he remember things? I was so accustomed to hiding these things that when I opened my mouth I literally could not put the words into the air.

  Ben looked at me curiously. “Was it Constantinople? I know you must have spent some time in that region. Maybe that was earlier? Greece, perhaps?”

  I tried out his words in different ways. Could they fit an ordinary interpretation? “I have not sailed to Constantinople . . . in this fleet,” I said slowly.

  “I don’t mean as you are now, but before. I, for instance, was born in Illyria before Naples, and Lebanon before that.”

  I felt my breath catch short. I wondered if I was actually awake or even alive. Sailors loved to talk about enchanted stretches of the sea that made a sane man mad. I suddenly worried I was being tricked. “I don’t know your meaning,” I said slowly. My voice sounded so stretched I barely recognized it.

  Ben had the least tricky face you’ve ever seen. “You must. I have met only a few like you . . . like me . . . a very few. And I have come down on this earth many times. It is possible I am mistaken, but I don’t think so.”

  “Like you?” I said cautiously.

  “Like me in that you remember. It’s rare, I know, for people to remember past their birth. With some it goes back only one life or two, and for others there are only bits and pieces. But yours goes deeper, I suspect.”

  I looked around to see that we were alone. I looked up at the moon and the stars to be sure of my relationship to them. “It does go deeper,” I said.

  He nodded. There was no triumph in his eyes. He never doubted it. “Half the millennium. Or more?”

  “That’s about right.”

  “Where did you start?”

  “I was born first near Antioch.”

  “That makes sense,” he said, gazing past my head to the east, where the sun was just beginning its climb out of the ocean.

  “How so?”

  He shook a thought away and refocused his eyes on me. “It’s almost dawn.”

  What he meant was that our replacements would arrive at any moment. His face conveyed sympathy. He could see that it was worse torture for me to end this conversation than it had been to start it.

  “How did you know?” I asked. “About me?”

  “I can’t really explain,” he said. His eyes were no less direct. He wasn’t meaning to be evasive. “I just . . . knew.”

  And that was my introduction to the extraordinary capabilities of Ben, and the near impossibility of getting at them.

  BEN IS VERY OLD. I don’t know how old. Sometimes I think he is like Vishnu, holding the entire story of human experience in his mind, but I’m not certain even he knows when he started. He told me once that his first memory was the lapping of the river Euphrates, but he is more impressionistic than factual in these kinds of recollections. If he does hold our story in his mind, I’m afraid it’s been entrusted to a poet rather than a historian.

  “It’s all metaphor, finally, isn’t it?” he said to me once in his wistful way.

  “Is it?” I asked, in my fact-craving way.

  He is so old that his memory works differently from anyone’s. Even mine. Later he became a great fan of Lewis Carroll. (He also loved the Upanishads, Aristophanes, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Tagore, Whitman, Borges, E. B. White, and Stephen King, to name a few.) One time when I was pestering him about how he knew something that he couldn’t possibly know, he quoted the following line from Carroll: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.”

  He once told me he thought his first name had been Deborah, but he didn’t seem sure of it. I asked him if he’d like me to call him that, knowing how important my name had become to me, but he said no, he wasn’t Deborah anymore.

  Ben and I sailed three
voyages together, one right after the next, and had the opportunity to talk about a lot of things. The third and final trip was to Alexandria, which prompted from Ben a wealth of funny and fragmentary observations about Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra, as well as Ptolemy, her pesky younger brother who was also her husband. I discovered it didn’t do any good to try to understand the mechanics of his past or his memory in any literal way. A direct question never begat a direct answer. (“Tell the truth, but tell it slant” later became one of his favorite lines from Dickinson.) But to listen to him talk was a feast of odd and fascinating information.

  He had the sunniest disposition of any sailor I knew and the keenest devotion to its lowly labors. I never saw a man more absorbed in tying a knot. Probably the worst experience of my life on the sea was hearing Ben beaten bloody by a couple of drunken spearmen on a dark reach out of Thira. He never had the right temperament for a sailor.

  After that third voyage he disappeared, and it was several hundred years before I saw him again, but first we shared a conversation that has stayed with me even more than most.

  On a slow night a hundred or so leagues off the coast of Crete, I began to tell him about Sophia. And once begun, there was not much I kept to myself. I began at the fateful beginning and told him about each of our meetings. I can’t describe how thrilling it was to be with someone like me, and how little of myself I shared with most people. I dashed back and forth through my long history without having to make any explanations or apologies. I felt like a pianist who’d been forced to play on a few white keys in the middle, finally allowed to run his hands all up and down the keyboard.

  I finished my story with our most recent encounter, with me as a child in her tiny cliffside house in Central Anatolia, but it was the part of the saga involving my brother, Joaquim, that Ben kept coming back to. He asked me to tell those parts again and again.

  I got tired of it. I wanted to talk about Sophia, not my brother. But Ben wanted every tick of the story, starting with the feud in my first life and dragging me through each detail of my stabbing death more than two hundred years later. He closed his eyes as though he was seeing it for himself.

  “Mercifully it’s done,” I said finally. “There’s no reason to think of him ever again if I don’t have to.” Life was long for people like us. Long enough to smooth away the tragedies. That’s what I thought at the time.

  Ben was crouched over, his forehead in his hands. He was rocking, sort of; I didn’t know why. He was acutely empathetic, I knew, but this was a bit much.

  “Ben, it’s not so bad. It’s one life of many,” I remember saying, ready to move on to a new subject. “We go along. We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.”

  Ben lifted his head finally. He looked at me carefully. I was accustomed to this look, but it was darkened by something I hadn’t seen before.

  “Do you think he forgets?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I trust you forgive, but are you certain that he forgets?”

  “I’m sure he’s long gone,” I said quickly. “He’s been dead at least a hundred years. I haven’t run into him in a new life as yet, but I’m sure I’ll have that displeasure sometime in the future.”

  I hoped my lightness would lift the troubled look from Ben’s face, but it didn’t. I was starting to feel uneasy. “What do you mean?” I said again.

  “Are you certain that he forgets?”

  “Everyone forgets,” I said, almost combatively.

  “Not everyone.”

  “Not you or I, but everyone else.” I stared at Ben, desperate to see some sunniness return to his eyes, but I couldn’t find it. “Do you know something?” I said, impatient and frustrated. “If you know something, tell me.”

  “I don’t know, but I think,” Ben said slowly. “I think about him, and I don’t think that he forgives or forgets.”

  “Why do you think that? Joaquim gave no sign of it. He lived like a man with no history at all,” I argued. “The Memory is rare, isn’t it? In almost five hundred years you’re the only person I’ve encountered with it. And you, who have no knowledge of him, think he has it?”

  I think I wanted Ben to be angry at me in return, but he wasn’t. I wanted him to argue, but he didn’t. “Do you think anyone knows that you have it?” he asked. “Do you think your brother knows about you?”

  I stood there with a growing sense of dread. Joaquim was present for those cataclysmic events of my first life. If I could trace my memory back to that time, why shouldn’t he also have it? I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t argue with Ben. I didn’t want to think through what it meant for me and for Sophia, wherever she was.

  “I hope I’m wrong,” Ben said, and his eyes were compassionate. “But I think he remembers.”

  Often, over the years, I’ve hoped Ben was wrong. But unfortunately, as far as I know, he never is.

  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.

  CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2006

  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 adva
ntages—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.