My Name Is Memory

  We’ve become so used to modern plumbing we practically consider it a right to have a hot bath at the turn of the wrist, and it’s easy to forget what a luxury it once was, but it was. I found a piece of soap in my saddlebag and handed it to her with some ceremony. It wasn’t much of a gift, but it felt like the right way to send her on to her new life.

  I was going to leave her in privacy, but I hated to miss her pleasure. “Should I go?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “You should stay.” She took off her dress and underclothes without shame or shyness but without any coyness, either. I watched her set one foot, then two into the basin and shiver with delight.

  I can make you happy, I thought.

  I realized I was watching her with the knowledge of what was coming. I wanted to commit her to my memory more deeply and concretely than any other thing. I wanted to take in every bit of her so I could keep her with me for the long haul and so I could find her again. I studied her feet, slightly turned in, the pretty design of her rib cage, and the way she held her head forward. I knew her hair and her coloring and her shapes would be different next time, but the way she wore her body would keep on.

  She slipped all the way in and dunked her head under. She came up smiling, and her skin was a lighter shade. She lay back in the tub and let the water settle and smooth around her, reflecting the colors of the sky.

  “Come sit with me,” she said, and I sat on a flat rock on the rise just above her. It was a beautiful view.

  After she finished she ordered me into the bath. She watched me undress with proprietary boldness and scrubbed my back with deft fingers. I dunked my head under and felt only the silence and her hands. Each of these moments was a pearl on a string, one prettier and more perfect than the next.

  “I wish you were in here with me,” I said.

  She gave me a long, full look. “There are many things I wish.”

  “We’ll bathe together someday,” I told her with a heave of contentment.

  “Will we?”

  “Yes. Someday you’ll be free. Then I will find you and we’ll be as happy as this.”

  She had tears in her eyes and suds on her fingers. “How can that be true?”

  “It might take a long time, longer than you imagine, but someday we will.”

  “Do you promise me?”

  I looked at her and made another fateful choice. “I do.”

  When I was clean she washed our clothes and laid them out to dry. We had no choice but to huddle under the blankets and cling to each other bare-bodied and -souled until the sun came up and our clothes were dry.

  We ate the last of our food and rode out of our reverie and on into the village where she would begin her new life.

  I didn’t dare kiss her when we were naked under the blankets and burning with lust. I waited until we could read the shapes of the dusty village on the horizon before I stopped the horse and pulled her off. I held her for a long time. Even then I didn’t mean to kiss her. I was too committed to preserving her lawful innocence. But then I saw that a kiss would serve her better.

  It was a sadder, more tearful, and more serious kiss than it would have been a few hours earlier. I savored the feeling of her body for the last time with a heavy notion of what was to come. I knew what I’d taken. I knew what I’d get to keep, and I also knew the price I’d pay.

  I LEFT SOPHIA in a tiny village where the houses were built into the sides of the hills. I put her in the care of an older woman, a widow, who was all too happy to take Sophia and call her niece. I knew this woman because she had been my mother once. I knew I could trust her. I left Sophia with money and what I hoped would be the safety of a new identity.

  “I’ll see you again,” she said to me. Her face was resigned, but I saw tears, too.

  I agreed sincerely and ardently, though I didn’t mean it in exactly the way she did.

  “You’ll come back here someday.”

  “I promise I will.”

  By returning to Pergamum about a week later I knew I was taking a risk, but I didn’t want to back down. I couldn’t move away. I wouldn’t become another person. There’d be time enough for that. I told my mother I would come back, and I did. I found my brothers. I settled them with her in her small house. I gave them each money and a few items that would be easy to hide and hard to steal. I did each of these things with a sense of finality, as I look back.

  Leaving my mother’s house on the third night, I can’t say I was surprised by my brother’s ambush. In hindsight, it would have been surprising not to see him following me into a dark street. It happened quickly.

  I was prepared for a face-to-face confrontation, but he was angrier and lower than that. He struck from behind. He put a knife in my back and again in my neck, and I died painfully.

  As I died, I felt the end of that life much harder than I expected. I found myself hoping my mother would never know what happened to me. I thought I was prepared for death, but I wasn’t. Only as I bled away did I understand all that I was losing. I was losing Sophia and my family and myself, too. I would no longer be the person she trusted and loved.

  I never had so much to lose. I never lived or died like that again. As much as I longed to get back to her, a part of me hoped that this, at last, would be the end of it.

  IT WASN’T THE END, of course. It was, as Winston Churchill might say, the end of the beginning. I went back to that small village near Cappadocia to find her again. But I was eleven, traveling all the way from the Caucasus on my own.

  I was just relieved to find her there. The widow had died, but Sophia was safe. She was kind enough to invite me into her little house and feed me tea and bread and honey. There was no sign of any husband or child, but there were lovely weavings on every wall and surface. I knew she had made them. I recognized our joint history in the flowering trees from the garden in Pergamum and the beautiful horse, the Arabian, on which we had ridden to this village.

  She sat across from me at a little wooden table. The candlelight and the fabrics made it feel like the inside of a jewel box. I was with her and looking at her and also a stranger to her and missing her painfully. I saw her through old eyes and felt old things, and my child body didn’t know what to do with them. Rarely have I felt a disjuncture between memory and body as confusing as that. I don’t know what I wanted from her. She was the same person, and I was different.

  She asked about me, naturally, and as I talked she was struck by me; I could see that.

  “How do you know my language?” she asked me, puzzled.

  “I learned it as I traveled,” I said, but she didn’t look entirely convinced.

  I wanted to tell her more, but I couldn’t. I didn’t make sense to anyone. I knew that. It would make her instantly distrustful and remote from me, and I ached to be close in the old way.

  She said I should stay the night and be on my way the next day. The blanket she laid out for me was the same one we had slept under together when I was older and she was younger and she was my brother’s wife. I was not equal to the smell of that blanket.

  She sat with me on the little pallet and rubbed my back with great tenderness, almost like she could remember. Because I was eleven and lonely and holding far too many memories, I cried into my arm and hoped she didn’t see.

  When I looked upward in the morning light I saw the old curling piece of parchment pinned on the wall. It was the sketch I’d made for her of my baptistery mosaics. The garden and the apple tree and, of course, the snake.

  “Who made that?” I asked her, pointing to it as she fed me a breakfast that must have used up most of her pantry. I always hated asking false questions, but I couldn’t help myself.

  She looked at the drawing thoughtfully. “A man I knew,” she said, looking down.

  “What happened to him?”

  She shook her head, and her face contorted. She braced her chin to keep it steady.

  “I don’t know. He said he would come back here someday, but I am almost
sure he was killed.” The sadness in her face was as much as I could take.

  “He will come back,” I told her tearfully.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know if I can wait any longer.”

  I realized what I had done, and I was ashamed. I had given her false hope. She had believed in me, and I had disappointed her. She couldn’t see the canvas as I could. It was selfish of me to promise her something she couldn’t see.

  “He didn’t forget you. He’ll find you again, but it might take longer than you thought.”

  She looked at me oddly. “That’s what he said, too.”

  I WENT BACK to Sophia’s village for the last time when I was nineteen. I was bursting with intention to prove to Sophia who I really was, that I really had come back as I’d promised. I planned to live with her for the rest of our lives. I was ready and armed to combat her every doubt and protest. I prepared the words to convince her that the difference in our ages didn’t matter. I spent years and miles rehearsing these conversations and dreaming of all the lovemaking that would follow.

  But when I got there I saw that the craggy hillside was blackened in places, and a new, larger house now stood where her little house had been. Most of the village was newly built and unrecognizable. I finally found the priest in his stone church, one of the few familiar structures.

  “We had a terrible fire,” he explained to me.

  I could barely listen as he told me how they’d lost most of their houses and almost half of the villagers.

  “What about Sophia?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  I went back to the site of her house and found the new occupants. “Was there anything left from the fire?” I asked them desperately.

  There was nothing. Aimless, I went into the desert, retracing the route I had taken with her from Pergamum, but on foot and alone. I felt the bending weight of my memory as I walked. She was gone, and everything she’d touched was gone. Her weavings, the blanket, my sketches. All of it was lost without a trace. It was up to me to carry it forward or let it be gone forever.

  ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA, 2006

  DANIEL WAS TIRED. Too tired to change out of his hospital scrubs before he threw himself on his bed. He’d just come off a three-day shift during which he’d slept for a total of forty minutes in a chair with his head on a table and a TV blaring The Newlywed Game a few feet away. There were regulations about how hard you were supposed to work a resident, but the VA hospital didn’t pay them an excessive amount of attention.

  He never complained about it. He liked being there more than he liked being home. He liked old people and he liked veterans, and because he was specializing in geriatric medicine, those were the kinds of people he spent his time with.

  Home, in his present case, was a one-bedroom apartment in Arlington, Virginia, with a view of the parking lot. He always thought he would get himself a real house in a beautiful place. God knew he had the money. But he always got shitty, temporary places with month-to-month leases. This one had a full stove, but he hadn’t turned it on yet. It had three closets, but two of them were empty. He had a big plasma-screen TV and a cable package that entitled him to see virtually every football, baseball, basketball, and hockey game played at every hour of the day. And other sports, too, but he wasn’t as interested in those. Except tennis in the middle of the night when the Australian Open came along.

  He’d skipped college altogether this time around. He’d skipped the first two years of medical school, too. He faked transcripts from both when he “transferred” to George Washington for his third year. That was about a month after he’d hoped to drown himself in the Appomattox River and failed at it. He was a sucker for more. He had too much to lose to commit suicide well.

  GW had been happy to take him. It was remarkable what you could get away with if you had the audacity. He wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t known he was reasonably prepared.

  He had graduated from several colleges and universities in the States and in Europe. He’d gone through medical training more than once. Dozens of times, if you counted everything he’d learned about herbs and folk medicine through the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. And those were surprisingly helpful to him. It was funny how the old practices always came around again.

  It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.

  That was always a source of amazement to him, the blind devotion to making things new. People didn’t seem to realize what a slender edge they stood on in human history and that every person before them stood on that same edge, thinking it was the world. If they were to look back they would see quite a landscape spreading out behind them, but mostly they didn’t.

  The building superintendent had taped a recycling poster to his apartment door, and it made him laugh. There was a burst of enthusiasm for recycling every so often, but it usually didn’t extend to the heart or the mind. It was usually limited to tires or bottles. He was pro-recycling, all right. What if people knew they were recycled? Would that change anything?

  There were a few basic things he sometimes wished he could tell people. Maybe he’d write an advice book someday. He’d educate them on recycling and also point out practical things, such as how every moment spent worrying about commercial jet crashes or shark attacks is a moment wasted.

  DANIEL COULD NEVER fall asleep when he wanted to. No matter how tired he was. His brain would start to fixate in some direction or other. Usually in the direction of Charlottesville, Virginia, where Sophia was conducting her life in peace, he hoped—a peace he would surely not enhance by turning up in the lobby of her dorm, as he sometimes dreamed about.

  Someday he would approach her again. He often fantasized about that moment. Someday he would know the right things to say to make up for last time. Someday he would call her with a quick question or send her a humorous e-mail or casually jot a message on her wall, and she would not be horrified by it, because by then the disaster of their last meeting would feel as though it was far behind them. Someday was the thing he had, because it was a lot harder to ruin than today.

  Sleep was going to have to catch him unawares if it was going to catch him at all tonight. Hence the large TV and the cable package.

  He hauled himself over to the couch, armed with his trusty remote. The Lakers were in a play-off series against the Spurs. It wasn’t a deciding game tonight but still good to watch. He settled down into another episode of the Kobe Bryant show with a certain feeling of relaxation. He considered the story of Kobe. Not a brand-new soul but a young one, he could tell. Those often were the best athletes. They’d been around long enough to see the big patterns but not long enough to be encumbered by them. There were exceptions, of course. Shaq was fresh out of the box, and Tim Duncan, he was pretty sure, had been going on for centuries.

  Somewhere around the end of the third quarter, during a long stretch of ads for cars and trucks, he started to doze off. When the picture shifted back to the game, he blearily tuned in again. The camera hung obsequiously on the big courtside celebrities for a few seconds. That was all right. That’s what they did. His eyelids started sinking again, when he suddenly caught sight of something. He sat up. He blinked his eyes to clear them and leaned forward. He felt an awful tingle in his extremities.

  There was a man just behind the courtside seats in the second row. He was tall, with a flashy jacket and a careful haircut. He might have been handsome if the look of him hadn’t turned Daniel’s stomach. He wore his body stiffly, like an expensive suit. He was in profile now, talking to somebody. He had glanced at the camera for only a second, but that was enough. Daniel felt the adrenaline hit his bloodstream so hard it felt as though his eyes were vibrating in his head.

  He had never seen this man before, but he knew him wel
l.

  LATER, HIS BODY settled down. The agitation of the first sight gave way to a feeling of vague seasickness as he tried to process it. It wasn’t just the sight of Joaquim or the reminder of their history that was jarring. It was the fact that Joaquim remembered it, too.

  Having spent hundreds of years so sharply alone with his own memory, it felt bizarre for Daniel to be in any kind of proximity with another person who knew the things about the world that he did, who even remembered some of Daniel’s early lives the way he did. If it had been any other soul, it would have been a comfort.

  Daniel thought of the last time he had seen Joaquim, just a glance in a village square in Hungary in the thirteen hundreds. He’d already learned by that point that Joaquim also had the Memory, and he’d been on his guard, but Joaquim had shown no sign of recognizing him. Daniel kept expecting him to turn up much closer at hand—his uncle, his father, his teacher, his son, his brother again—as significant people often did. But unlike most things he dreaded, it hadn’t happened. At first, Daniel expected, it was because his former brother’s basic misanthropy held him up in death for long periods of time. If there was ever a soul that died apart—far apart—it was his. In lighter moments he’d pictured Joaquim zagging randomly around the globe, turning up here in Jakarta, there in Yakutsk.

  Much later, Daniel had learned that Joaquim had begun to bend the rules of leaving and coming back. It was a chilling notion. Daniel didn’t know how he did it; he’d learned it from a mystical soul, his old (really old) friend Ben, and how Ben came to know these things he never understood. But Daniel could well imagine that Joaquim wouldn’t stand to wait his turn, or put up with starting again as a powerless infant. He wouldn’t tolerate the impotence of childhood time after time. He was geared toward revenge, and he wouldn’t leave the hunt for his enemies to chance, though he probably would have found them faster if he had.