My Name Is Memory

  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.

  FAIRFAX, VIRGINIA, 1972

  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.

  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.