I was younger than my brother, more malleable. I wasn’t dyslexic. With the right discipline, with the right care and affection, Susan thought I could be redeemed. But I knew, too, that I was on spec. At any moment I could be returned to sender. Susan made this clear. Infractions brought penalties: too many and I would be kicked out. I lived with Susan as long as I stayed in her good graces, on sufferance. Susan reminded me that I would have to pay my way through college. After graduating from high school I would be on my own, if I lasted that long.
Living with my sister Susan was complicated and difficult. There were also basic things to attend to, beginning with a transfer of guardianship so I could attend public school. This involved my sister Marie, who had been granted custody by the court. Forty years later, Marie still feels guilty she did not take me in. Marie has always been the dutiful daughter and sister trying to repair the world. As an adult, she has rescued a drowning man and resuscitated a newborn child who was, literally, delivered into a toilet. She looks after everyone except herself. She tells me that she had four kids of her own to take care of; I know also that she wanted to go back to get her GED so she could go to college and become a nurse, a dream she had held close to her heart since recovering from polio in the 1950s. What we do not tell each other is that she feared taking care of me. Marie had seen too much. Both of us had. I was a liability, a potential threat to her dreams of a solid, middle-class life.
There were basics to learn, like regular bathing, clean clothes, table manners, going to sleep at a decent hour. Susan brought me to the doctor for my vaccinations, and to the dentist, followed by repeat visits. More than a dozen cavities needed filling. I remember the Gulf sun against my swollen, numbed cheeks while I sat on a wood pier casting my rod toward the horizon.
I also learned the costs of being saved, knowing I had been saved conditionally. Forever looking forward, Susan never asked me about my life in New Orleans, or the time I had spent with my father in Mississippi and then in California. She did not, could not, know what had happened. I was too young to tell her—the language did not yet exist—but young enough to want someone to gather me in their arms.
A silence grew up around my sister’s disinterest in my history. She provided a different story. New Orleans was the past that I was not supposed to talk about, that I was, in a sense, supposed to forget, except as a kind of haunting punishment I would be returned to if I did not behave. She never asked about, did not want to know about, my white-trash experiences of hanging out in bars with our mother, the bad clothes and the ill-health, all the sex. There was a choice. Live with my sister and renounce my old life, or return to New Orleans.
SIX
TUNISIAN NIGHTS
“THERE. THERE IT IS. SEE?”
Susan’s finger glided across Africa in a maroon volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I stared over her shoulder, unsure what exactly she was pointing to amid geography’s jagged lines and country colors floating in a sky-blue ocean.
“There. Right there.” Her fingernail tapped the page. “That’s where we’re going.”
TUNISIA ran right across the country, beginning in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains and ending in the Sahara Desert—the land was so small it could barely contain its own name. Tunis appeared next to Carthage, then Al-Qayrawan, Sfax, Gabès, and beyond the vast Sahara Desert with its oases and wadis and the Niger River bending into golden sands. My eye wandered northward to Italy and to Europe, but I was drawn back down to Africa, following the continent past the equator nearly, it seemed, to the bottom of the Earth.
I learned that in parts of the Sahara Desert the sands are as soft and fine as talcum powder. During a great storm the sirocco picks up a piece of Africa and settles it right around the world. A thousand miles away, someone sweeps the desert from their home beneath a blood orange morning sun.
I celebrated July 4 on a beach near La Marsa, tossing myself in the sea and playing touch football while trying to avoid the balls of tar that blackened my soles. The beach was a twisting strip of white at the bottom of an olive-colored hillside, formed as if the earth had tumbled into the sea following some epochal struggle. Compared to the Gulf’s flat, muddy waters and indistinct pine stands, the Mediterranean had such life to it, endlessly rolling waves and waters swirling around rocky knobs and a sharp, salty taste that left your eyes stinging and red and your hair matted stiff.
Joe had been stationed to the American Embassy in Tunis, the capital. The Nixon administration considered Tunisia a moderate force in the region, particularly compared to neighboring Libya ruled by the radical and eccentric Muammar Gaddafi. Joe’s job entailed advising the Tunisian Air Force, which at the time consisted of a mere handful of planes. We rented a house in Carthage near the sea. The market town of Le Kram lay just to the south. On Saturday mornings we returned with fruits and vegetables and freshly plucked chickens. I would buy sandwiches of tuna, olives, onions, and red hot harissa on bread that left my jaws weak from chewing; they were my Tunisian po’boys. In the other direction Sidi Bou Said with its air perfumed with jasmine, secret courtyards behind ornate doors, and along a zigzag of cobblestone paths, red bougainvillea reaching along shimmering whitewashed walls high above a crescent bay. From my bedroom I listened to imams beckoning from the minarets and the rickety small train chattering its way to the capital, Tunis. At the top of the hill an Orthodox church, close by a Roman amphitheater. I tramped past Hannibal’s port, imagining ships filled with elephants and soldiers, and through the Antonine Baths a short walk away along a sea that tossed ancient mosaic tiles into the sand and seaweed. Friday afternoons a man appeared at the house, thin with a stubbled face and a fisherman’s skin and a basket of fresh sea bass, gray sole, rouget with their large gelatinous eyes, sometimes even a lobster or two, always an octopus slunk away at the bottom. There was a stand not more than a hundred yards from the house with pyramids of lemons and oranges, potatoes and green beans, and leeks and lettuces filled with a fine, gray dirt. We would sit on the veranda eating artichokes, rushing through the leaves to get to the bitter heart. On a small Hibachi lamb chops sizzled over a rosemary-scented fire.
And everywhere history. In Carthage I walked upon the wreckage of civilizations, shards and other bits and pieces of the past strewn everywhere. Some were there by resolute chance, a tile stranded on the shore or the curled ochre lip of a vase discarded a millennium ago, others according to a desire to record, preserve, and supplicate posterity, hoping that some god or some man might one day care. I would learn that Phoenician immigrants created the town in the ninth century B.C.E., turning Carthage into one of the Mediterranean’s most fabled commercial hubs, ruled by a Council of Elders and a tribunal Aristotle discusses in his Politics; I would read about how Carthage fell to the Romans in 146 B.C.E. following a three-year siege, destroying the city before rebuilding it into one of their most important ports, connected to a vast network of roads and aqueducts that reached north into cork forests and vineyards and south into what is now the edge of the Sahara Desert. There were ancient marble quarries to explore, where columns half emerged from the stone, as if the workers one day had picked up their tools and vanished. In the third-century A.D. amphitheater at El Djem, I became a heroic gladiator wielding a sword before an audience of thirty thousand.
I emerged into memory beneath Tunisia’s butter-yellow sun, as if ancient history could somehow counsel a boy’s troubles, or there was some solace in knowing the world would not slip into oblivion and despair and that the future lay precisely in the bridge we build between present and past, between life and loss. I was twelve, about to begin seventh grade. Tunisia seems as clear as yesterday: the names of teachers, friends, even of people I never met but only heard of; riding bikes along narrow hilly paths; steak au poivre in Bizerte; couscous near Gabès; searching for rifle shells at Kasserine Pass; a month fruitlessly scanning the early evening sky for Comet Kohoutek as it slumbered disappointingly beneath the horizon. I remember camping near the beach at Cap Bon
eating merguez, a spicy lamb sausage, with an old man whose language I could not understand. But we were cold and hungry, I had not caught a single fish from a day of casting into the surf, and the two of us sat by the fire where the sausage crackled.
Now I am staring at the furrows of the man’s face, which are as deep as the past. Now I am driving with Edward, his sister, and his mother, a small woman, brunette, with fast, slightly wild eyes. We are headed to Sidi Daoud, a tiny fishing village that is mostly empty except for that one month when the men go out in their old wooden boats with nets that dip into the sea nearly a hundred feet down, much as they have since Roman times. A man in a small skiff spying the bluefin tuna that have traveled southward from Sicily signals the moment when it is time to close the nets. The boats draw closer. Bluefin tuna, silvery white and as quick as sprinters, dart from one end to the other. The nets become the corpo, the “death chamber.” Now you can see the bottom of the nets, and the water becomes confused and roiling, like rapids, except that you are out in the middle of the sea. The men leap into the corpo with their hooks and begin lugging the fish into the boats. The water, churning with the muscular fish and men, turns bright red until all the fish are dead and in the boats, and the blood washes into the sea, flowing toward Libya.
All these memories, so rich in my mind even now, seem drawn with an artist’s palette of colors against the blank canvas of earlier childhood. The New Orleans past appears bleached or gray in contrast, as scattered as my father’s photographs in a cardboard box. Only by delving into other people’s lives has a semblance of order become possible, a continuous narrative, one year following the next, history a prosthesis for lost memory, and only that.
Neuroscience invites me to consider how this all unfolded inside my head, why one past feels as if I could touch it at any time, while another seems forever just below the horizon of memory. I know now I was saved at a biologically auspicious time. During adolescence the brain undergoes significant structural changes similar to early childhood’s neural evanescence. The hippocampi, which are so important to the formation of declarative memory, enlarge considerably, as do other areas of the brain. There is neural growth and both the elimination of cortical synapses and extended myelination, as if the brain were renovating its basic wiring one final time.
Scientists have neat terms to describe these changes and especially the relationship between memory and neural development, such as “long-term potentiation” and “coincidence detection,” the ability of certain neurons to create or strengthen connections with other neurons, and the process by which neurons create associations between distinctly different inputs. Philosophers all the way back to Aristotle have speculated that the mind somehow is capable of forming a lasting connection between two or more stimuli. Two things happen in space-time, which we detect and assign an association. Contingency becomes causation. These associations can be exquisite or sickening, the smell of coffee in the morning goes with a lover’s attention, the sound of a car backfiring with a comrade’s death. Memory’s enigma is that it leaves us with the sensation of time passing but also, and simultaneously, with the feeling of traveling backward so that some distant past suddenly seems nearby.
We now know something of how this works within individual cells and even at the level of molecules. The hippocampi are important in integrating information spatially and temporally; in a sense they order experience in space and time. Destroy parts of the hippocampi and rats get lost in a simple maze. Scientists speculate that the hippocampi play a kind of record-keeping role in registering the present and organizing it into the past. Memories get the mark of time. Hippocampal neurons seem especially flexible and adaptive. They are also susceptible to destruction. Severe depression quite literally wounds the hippocampi, leading to all sorts of memory problems as well as difficulties knowing where one really is or just how time is passing. Experiences of what happened an hour ago, the embrace of a loved one, the color of flowers one has tended all spring, a child’s smile, fade away as if passing through a weir. Some have described depression as being lost upon a nondescript sea beneath a diffuse light where there is no horizon. One is hopelessly adrift while at the same time there is also that persistent awful tugging as if Earth had acquired a new mass and gravitational field, an unbearable heaviness of being that leaves one lifeless yet filled with pain.
Luckily, this area of the brain retains its neural potential; certain antidepressants help stimulate the changes within the hippocampi, which scientists believe may explain why it takes a number of weeks before one begins feeling their positive effect. The creation of associations, the making and strengthening of synapses, is an ongoing process. Working in tandem with the prefrontal cortex, the hippocampi allocate memory to other areas of the brain tied to emotion, cognition, and language, though we know painfully little about how these networks emerge and the degree of their complexity. What seems clearer is that the process is contingent within a general framework and order, a peculiar and ever-changing combination of chance and necessity.
Human brains display remarkable similarity. Every neuron has pretty much the same features: a cell body, dendrites that receive signals, axons that send them on their way to other cells. Look more closely, say, using an electron microscope, and everything suddenly becomes different. No two dendrites are the same. Little spines protruding from the dendrite often make synaptic connections with nearby axons. Many dendrites themselves are constantly changing. And with this radical particularity, utterly distinctive connections are made, remade, or destroyed—vast differences created within generalizable patterns.
This happens on an extraordinary scale in childhood and in adolescence. There are as many neurons as there are stars in our galaxy. Each neuron might have anywhere from one thousand to ten thousand synapses. In other words, inside our heads are upward of a hundred trillion different connections, a universe of possibility that poses among the most profound challenges to neuroscientists.
Our brains are thus astoundingly complex. But the important point is that they are also historically constituted. The lives we lead are part of us. At birth, our nervous system is very undeveloped. The brain is especially small compared to its adult size. We grow immersed in relationships and surrounded by all sorts of environmental stimuli that influence changes at the cellular level. Recent research on the adolescent brain suggests that in subtle but powerful ways cultural norms may shape neural processes. What is deemed important and the ways in which we are raised as children and adolescents have neurological consequences. History quite literally changes the shape of our brains.
The past makes us, and we make history, though never according to conditions we choose. My mother’s suicide attempt is an indelible part of me. But memory endures because of the creation and strengthening of synaptic terminals, so that the past becomes, for a minute or for a lifetime, permanent within our being. Memory is less a photograph of something gone than a story created and endlessly renewed, revised, or forgotten. It isn’t arbitrary either, nor some imaginary concoction … and certainly not a facsimile of what really happened. Like language itself, memory (the exception being so-called false memories) contains within it the trace of the real, a fragment of the past that comes to us like some glass found along the shore, freshly broken and still sharp, or softened by the sea. We stand there holding it, wondering from whence it came, what meaning it may yet hold.
One result is a sense of history, or historicity, and its tribulations. The past is gone yet we inhabit it. It seems distant, and then suddenly we have the sensation of memories cascading over us. We begin to feel that we have existed in a world we did not quite make, and that world resides within us. As adolescents we compose stories of our selves, histories of who we are, how we are different from our parents, how we might be tomorrow or many years hence. It is a way of making experience sensible, discerning our life’s plot, which requires us to think forward and backward. We observe the world and observe our very selves. We begin stringing ex
periences along time’s thread, begin telling a story, claim a world as our own. No wonder adolescence is a time of memoir, which explains the genre’s popularity in junior and high school classes as well as all sorts of record-keeping, from diaries and incessant gossiping to school yearbook prognostications.
“This is who I am because of these desires, experiences, memories,” we seem to be saying. Amidst all the commotions and disquiet of being a teenager, wanting to be distinctive but anxious about being identified as different, an “I” somehow emerges and begins making appointments with the future.
I imagine neural connections proliferating alongside earlier scarring or connections that could have been made but were not. The clarity and richness of my Tunisian memories is so different from the scarce recollections of living with either of my parents. The issue is not that time’s passing has rendered cloudy what once had been clear—at least not only this. Twelve years of life in New Orleans, Mississippi, and out West remain irreducibly jumbled. Siblings seem like figures from a dream, real but also incorporeal, the traces of some dark history. I cannot remember much except for those intruding memories I wish I could forget. Facts discovered in adulthood about my young years remain ephemeral. For a short time they sear, and then disappear, leaving me doubly searching for secret stories of childhood lost. I cannot even remember the notes I have taken of my life, names, places, happenings around which I have managed to append a date, sometimes an hour, even a minute, forty years past—histories written and then just as quickly fading away.
History Lessons Page 15
