Memoirs and Misinformation
Page 22
His memories were reels of celluloid, slowly dissolving. He panicked. He rushed to review and preserve them. He closed his eyes, searching through the vaults of the self for frames of what he was. But the damage was beyond repair, the rooms and holds flooded with salt water, the memories lost, except for one…
When again he looked up, his father, Percy, was sitting beside him, wearing his navy suit, the only suit he’d ever owned, and his favorite blue velour clip-on bow tie.
“You’re okay, my boy,” he said, gently taking his son’s wounded hands, all pain subsiding as he whispered into his ear: “There is one spirit guiding all things. The universe, one verse. The stars and the sea and the wind through the wheat fields. And us, you and me. Once through flesh. Now through memory. See? I’m in you and you’re within me.”
“We are each other.”
“Yes. We’re not separate, not how it seems.”
Carrey smiled to think he’d ever thought he was a person at all. What a ludicrous delusion. What colossal labor. How exhausting, to be a self. To keep the Ponzi fed, with words, with feats, with playing at exceptionalism. He went to hug his father, but the phantom was gone. He was alone, head dangling over the side of the half-deflated raft, eyes clenched shut against the sun.
Desperate for proof of sustained being, he probed the inside of his mouth with his swollen tongue, popping a molar loose from his gums. Which didn’t bother him in the least, because he was utterly sure, as he let the tooth fall from his mouth into the sea, that whatever this body was, it wasn’t him.
Here, in circumstances beyond dire, his mind, as in a confession, revealed the truth of what he actually was, and as his was the only mind in the world, and its perceptions of reality in that moment the last recorded impressions of his species—the woods and the tree falling silently in it—his feelings in the dinghy were, by full force of all the logic they seemingly defied, the grand totality of all human truth, the final strand of a battered species’ narrative. And the truth, dazzling and majestic, is that he was not a man in a stolen rubber skiff.
He was everything. Which was hard to define, the mind, at that point, drawing off last traces of final calories. But he was wholeness, and wholeness was him. He felt it so totally, the integration, interaction, and reconciliation of all things. The space in which all occurs. Wholeness freeing, occupying, his entire mind, a soothing word, absent of jarring syllables, a soft exhale. Wholeness, not separate from the stars, totally and joyously—
The snowcapped Himalayas. The island of Manhattan before the fall. The Mississippi River and the glaciers that carved the Great Plains. And time, too, all of it. And all beyond it, truth and falsehood and light and dark and Dick Van Dyke falling over an ottoman and lovers sharing first kisses in convertible Thunderbirds on hot summer days and wishes blown on dandelions by children in those blessed spaces of time where people looked to the future with hope and the rings of Saturn and distant galaxies and soft-serve ice cream, a tear of joy brimming in the eye, the last bit of water remaining in this body crawls slowly down its cheek…
Soft clouds were now passing over a slightly less menacing sun, down on the temporal plane, above the tired and broken body, drizzle rousing what life remains in that husk, water and light…
He reached for a name that no longer mattered, the sound he had known himself by.
And a voice that seemed to come from the rain whispered—
Shhhhhhhhh…
Acknowledgments
A special thanks to all those who helped us along the way: Dan Aloni, Ann Blanchard, Paul Bogaards, Ray Boucher, Jane Carrey, Percy Carrey, Ruth Curry, Jeff Daniels, Jackie Eckhouse, Linda Fields Hill, Gary Fisketjon, Eric Gold, Ginger Gonzaga, Alex Hurst, Chip Kidd, Debby Klein, David Kuhn, Marleah Leslie, Tom Leveritt, Sonny Mehta, Jimmy Miller, Nicole Montez, Tim O’Connell, John Rigney, Dawn Saltzman, Jackson Santana, Gemma Sieff, Jean Vachon, and Boing!
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Jim Carrey is an award-winning actor and artist.
Dana Vachon is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.
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