My Name Is Memory

  “Now you are Lucy. But before.”

  “Before what?”

  “You should find him if you can.”

  “How can I find him? I talked to him once. I don’t even know him.”

  “Yes, you do. Don’t tell me that lie.”

  Lucy yanked her hands away. “Can you stop this, okay?” Lucy heard the tears of her own confusion, the sound of herself betraying herself. Since when did a psychic scold you? She wrapped her arms around her body. She had to stick together.

  Esme opened her eyes and looked at Lucy as though surprised to see her there. She blinked a few times. She and Lucy stared at each other as strangers. “You should find him because he loves you,” Esme said faintly, coming back in stages.

  It was worse with Esme’s eyes open and fixed on her. Lucy didn’t want the words to land where they landed. But they did.

  “I don’t even think about him anymore,” Lucy said, half hoping Esme would be willing to make a deal and forget everything that had just happened. It was weird for both of them, she knew. And Lucy had yet to pay her.

  Esme looked at her with a sharp reproach. She didn’t look like a twenty-something-year-old person with too much green eye shadow and a desire for her payment. She looked like the oldest judge in the world. “How can you even say that?”

  Lucy shook her head. She wished she weren’t crying. She wished she could keep pretending that she had no fear and no faith in any of it.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and she really didn’t.

  NICAEA, ASIA MINOR, 552

  I told you about the girl in the village near Leptis in North Africa in my first life. My second life started roughly thirty-one years later in another part of Anatolia. Lives tend to cluster, you know. This second life was uneventful in external ways, but in my mind it was extraordinary. It started normally enough. I didn’t know yet what I was.

  But as soon as I was old enough to think—or old enough to remember the thoughts—I thought of the girl in the little thatched house. I saw her face in the doorway. Later I saw the flames and I understood what was happening to her and what I had done.

  I thought of her every time I closed my eyes. I screamed at night. I cried in my dreams. I began to think of her in the daytime, too. I was probably only two or three years old and not old enough to understand my guilt or shame or the significance of her face to me. But I experienced the pure horror of it every day, almost as if it were happening to me.

  I had a kindhearted mother in that life, but even she got tired of me. I lived in another world. I couldn’t let it go.

  The kind of memory I have is extreme, but many people have some small degree of it. I once knew a boy in Saxony whose family lived a few doors down from mine. One day when he, Karl, was very small, his mother came by with him to deliver something or borrow something—I wasn’t paying attention to that part—and he saw my knife, my prized possession. I was probably ten or eleven at the time, and he was not even three. This tiny kid could barely talk yet, but he followed me into the garden, desperate to tell me how he was stabbed three times through his ribs by a thief, a footpad, who accosted him on the road to Silesia. He saw my confusion and wanted very badly to make me understand. “Not now, but before, when I was big,” he kept saying, holding up his arms to make the point. “When I was big.”

  He lifted his shirt and sucked in his belly to show me the jagged birthmark along his rib cage. Needless to say, I was fascinated and astonished by all this, and I asked him many questions. I thought I had discovered a kindred mind. When his mother came to fetch him she saw his animation and gave me a long-suffering look. “Did he tell you about the thief on the road?” she asked wearily.

  Soon after that I went away. I began my apprenticeship with a smith in a village several miles outside of town. I didn’t see Karl again for five years, but I thought of him hundreds of times. When I did see him I immediately asked him about the stabbing. He looked at me with interest but only the faintest recollection.

  “The thief on the road to Silesia,” I reminded him. “The scar on your chest.” This time it was me who was desperate to convince him.

  He looked at me and shook his head. “Did I really tell you that?” he asked before he ran off to play with his friends.

  I’ve learned since then that it’s not that unusual for very young children to have memories from their old lives, especially if they suffered a violent death the last time around. Or maybe the violence gives them a more urgent need to communicate. Typically they express old memories as soon as they can talk and keep pressing them for a couple of years. And typically time passes and they get further away from their death and their parents get spooked or just fed up. The memories fade, and they put them aside. New experiences fill in. By the age of reason, at seven or eight, all but a few have forgotten and moved on.

  This is fairly well documented, and I’ve followed the research carefully. There are scientists who have compiled thousands of interviews and case studies of this kind. But the good ones are naturally reluctant to say what it really means, and who can blame them? I, of all people, know how futile it is to try to make rational people believe.

  My case was different. In my case, as I grew older my memory grew stronger and filled in. The more capable of reason I became, the more I remembered—little things and big things, names, places, sights and smells. It was as though my death was a long sleep, and when I woke up and reoriented myself, it all came back. I didn’t remember these things as happening to someone else. I remembered them happening to me. I remembered the things I’d said and the ways I’d felt. I remembered myself.

  By the age of ten I knew I was different, but I stopped talking about it. I knew I had been alive before. I didn’t need to convince anyone else to know the truth of it. Mostly I was sorry that other people didn’t remember the way I did. I wondered if they had old lives to remember, or if it was only I who came back again. I wondered if I was an error of God’s planning that would be fixed at the end of my life.

  I guess I still feel like an error of planning. I’m still waiting for it to be fixed.

  With every life it starts more or less the same. My mind is a blur of infant’s murk and then, sooner or later, I see her face in the doorway. She becomes clearer and more present, and then I see the flames. I try not to get so upset anymore. I know what’s coming, and I think, Here I am again. Every life I start with her, my original sin. I know myself through her.

  CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2006

  “WHAT’S GOING ON with you?” Marnie whispered to her on the way out of the trailer.

  “Nothing.” Lucy wouldn’t look up. She shut the door carefully behind her, making sure the lock caught and sealed the strange air of that place behind her. Jackie and Soo-mi were standing by the car.

  “Was it really that bad? Why won’t you tell me what she said?”

  “It was nothing. Just a lot of nonsense.” It was difficult to lie to Marnie. There was no possibility of it if she met Marnie’s eyes. She kept her head down.

  The sky was dark, but the light coming through the window from inside the trailer illuminated the roses. There were plastic ones wound through the grubby white trellis, and as she studied them Lucy realized there were real ones, too, beautiful pink Celestials crowding against the plastic ones for sunlight and space.

  “What kind of nonsense? Are you upset?”

  Marnie wasn’t just pestering her. She knew Lucy and sensed the real disturbance. It made it harder to push her away but also more necessary.

  “So it turns out I love the water,” Jackie reported. “And also I am my own best guide.”

  “Hey, I’m my own best guide,” Soo-mi said.

  Marnie was trying to remember. “I think I might be my own best guide, too.”

  “Is that worth twenty dollars?” Jackie asked.

  “Maybe not, but does your energy run deep?” Soo-mi asked.

  Jackie laughed. “Oh my God! My energy does run deep. What are the cha
nces?”

  Marnie was staring at her, and Lucy realized that it would be appropriate to laugh. Or smile at least. She tried. “Do you mind driving back?” she asked Marnie.

  “No.” Marnie plucked the keys from her hand. Marnie was agreeing to let her hide for now.

  Lucy sat in the front passenger seat and leaned her warm head against the cool glass as they drove.

  “So, Lucy, are you your own best guide?” Soo-mi asked her, aware that she had fallen out of the conversation.

  “No,” Lucy said, so tired she could barely lift her head. “I don’t think I am.”

  LUCY SLIPPED OUT of Whyburn House after they got back. She drifted around the dark campus. Most people were at parties or packing up their rooms. Some people had already left. A few were probably still finishing papers. She walked up Jefferson Park Avenue to the Academical Village. She passed over the lawn and into her favorite of the west gardens and climbed up onto a serpentine wall built by her oldest crush, Thomas Jefferson. She yearned for a breeze or a few drops of rain. Something to change her.

  She unfolded herself and lay down on the top of the wall, curved. She was tired but scared to go to sleep. Daniel had a way of finding her in her dreams, and she felt almost sure he’d do something to unsettle her tonight.

  No dreams tonight, she instructed herself. That worked surprisingly well. From the time she was nine and watched a terrifying show about sharks, she’d warned her sleeping self off nightmares, and it had worked. Beginning at the age of sixteen, writing her term paper on Jane Eyre, she asked for dreams to bring her ideas or understanding. It worked sometimes.

  Sophia again. A war. A hospital, where she cared for him. These were some of the bits and pieces that lay deep in the middle of her, disconnected from experience or conversation or memory. It seemed wrong that they could exist outside of her, too.

  Was she crazy? Had she imagined the whole thing? Madame Esme had said absolutely standard things to the other three girls. Had she said standard things to Lucy, too, and Lucy had conjured them into something fantastical? And while she was questioning her sanity, Lucy had to ask herself, was Daniel a real person? Or was he the romantic fiction of a girl who’d been desperate for a handsome stranger to come along?

  If you worried you were crazy, was that any indication that you were not crazy? Or less crazy? She’d settle for less crazy at this point.

  Later, in her dorm, Lucy took a shower. Sometimes that could change you.

  “Will you talk to me?” Marnie asked, as Lucy perched on her bed that night, still wrapped in her towel.

  “I’ll try.” Lucy picked the orange polish off her nails. It was fun to pick if you had two or three coats of it on, but Lucy had one thin coat, and she dug and scratched at the nail bed with no satisfaction.

  “Is Daniel a real person?” Lucy asked.

  “Daniel? Your old flame Daniel?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think so.”

  “You remember him, right?”

  “I more remember you talking about him.”

  “Do you ever wonder what happened to him?”

  “Not much. I recall some weird rumors. But I did wonder what happened to you at the last party and why you stopped talking about him.”

  Lucy nodded. She looked around the room. Although it was a different room from last year’s, it was essentially the same room. Blocky pine furniture, same bedspreads and pillows and filthy, fuzzy rug and mugs on desks and chairs and mess everywhere. Different books but in the same places. Same Pink Floyd paraphernalia on Marnie’s side, and on Lucy’s side the same couple of old clay pieces from high school, Sawmill’s terrarium, and the same two framed pictures: one of her and Dana when they were little in front of the Boat Pond in New York City and one of her parents in black and white, standing in front of the rotunda on their wedding day.

  “After that you switched your love to Thomas Jefferson,” Marnie recalled. “And though long dead, he’s actually given you a lot more in return.”

  Lucy didn’t disagree.

  “I thought maybe you finally gave up on Daniel and decided to move on, but now I’m suddenly thinking that’s not the whole story.”

  Lucy shook her head. “I saw him that night. I talked to him.”

  “Talked to him?” Marnie looked doubtful. “You shared words? More than two? He said some of them?”

  “Yes. Many words. He said most of them.”

  “Really.” Marnie sat up cross-legged on her bed. She put her pillow in her lap. She didn’t look tired anymore. “What did he say?”

  Lucy didn’t have the wherewithal to untangle it and present it straight. But she needed to let some of it out. “Can you promise me something?”

  “I don’t know,” Marnie said honestly.

  “Can we put this back in its box after we talk?”

  “We can try.”

  Lucy sighed. “He kissed me.”

  “You are kidding.”

  “No. I can’t really believe it, either.” She put her hand to her head. “Sometimes I think back and I wonder if I remember it right.”

  “You couldn’t forget that, could you?”

  “No. No. But it was a strange night. I felt like I was losing my mind. He said there was something I was supposed to remember. He kept calling me Sophia.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know who you were. Was he drunk?”

  “Well, sort of. Probably. I was a little bit drunk, too. And I kept asking myself that question—did he know who I was? In one way I felt sure that he did. I felt like he knew me better than I did.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, it all seemed familiar to me. Some of the things he said were things I have thought of before. Or dreamed about.”

  “Lucy, I can’t believe you didn’t tell me this.”

  Lucy shook her head. “It really scared me. I didn’t want to think about it, and telling you would have made it real. I started having terrible panic attacks that summer—do you remember?”

  Marnie nodded. “I still wish you’d told me.”

  Lucy dug at her thumbnail. “I knew you thought I was wasting my time with him. The way I acted was irrational to begin with. I admit it. But this was a bit much. I felt like my fantasies detonated and my head exploded. I still wonder if it even happened. That’s how strange it was. Either he’s crazy or I am.”

  “I vote him.”

  “I know.” Lucy leaned back. Marnie knew how to give her a hard time, but she also knew how not to. Lucy rubbed the back of her head against the wall, knowing the tangles were going to get tanglier. “And then tonight, this Madame Esme. I really wanted her to be a fraud.”

  “I really wanted her not to be.”

  “Maybe she was a fraud. Maybe our energy runs deep, and that’s that. I hope so. But she said other stuff to me.”

  “Like what?” Marnie’s face was gentle. Lucy knew she wouldn’t push.

  “That name again. Sophia. She was talking about Daniel and that night and kind of judging me for not listening to him and trying to understand what he was saying.”

  “How do you know she was talking about Daniel?”

  “Because she said so.”

  “She said his name?” Marnie’s face gave away the slightest alarm.

  Lucy nodded. “I know.”

  “They don’t usually do that. Do you think she could possibly know him?”

  Lucy shook her head against the wall. “Who knows? Maybe.”

  “It would be a weird coincidence. But maybe that explains it.”

  “There were other things, too.”

  “Like what?”

  “She said things about Daniel that were familiar to me. Images I’ve had or things I’ve dreamed for a long time. Even longer than I’ve known him. Like about him not being able to breathe. I had this picture of me leaning over him and knowing that he is dying. I never told Daniel any of that.”

  Marnie shook her head slowly, thinking. This was their spot, facing each other across
the small, crowded room, each sitting cross-legged on her bed. This was the perch from which they ran their world.

  “She said I should find him.”

  “You should find Daniel? Why?”

  “Because . . . she said he loves me.”

  “She said that?”

  Lucy nodded. It gave her some significant feeling to say it, but the feeling was not the same as pleasure.

  “God, that woman was selling me deep energy, but she was selling you crack cocaine.”

  “You don’t think I should?”

  “Try to find Daniel?” Marnie thought some more. She shook her head. “I don’t know.” She bunched her pillow between her hands. “Do you want to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You look miserable.”

  Lucy nodded.

  “There are two possible things to do.”

  Lucy nodded again. She didn’t trust herself to say anything more. She liked that Marnie could take over.

  “You could try to find Daniel, and see if there’s anything going on there. Or you could put this whole conundrum back in its box and try to forget about it.”

  Lucy didn’t think very hard. “I’d like to forget about it.”

  CONSTANTINOPLE, 584

  My third life began and ended in the great city of Constantinople, and though it was poor, brutal, and short, it contained one momentous first: I recognized someone other than myself from an earlier life. And of course it was the girl from North Africa.

  People had been familiar to me before that moment. I had begun to think I probably wasn’t the only one coming back around. There were certain people I felt sure I knew from before. A much younger brother of mine reminded me naggingly of a dead neighbor. But I hadn’t learned how to recognize a soul yet or even understood that you could.

  I was about eleven years old, and I was standing at a vegetable stall in a market near the Bosporus. I was poor then. I don’t think I once wore shoes in that life. There was some commotion a few stalls over. I saw a procession of strong-looking servants carrying a thing like a litter. I ambled over because it was exciting. I followed them at a little distance. I knew if I got close they would swat me away like a roach. But I wanted to see.