So the TV wasn’t the first thing. The scraps came first. Then Kate’s mother invited me to take the TV. I accepted the scraps and later I said yes to the TV because I wanted a TV and because maybe I felt guilty; if I can’t remember the girl who made a point to hold on to pieces of me, maybe the least I can do is care for her old set. I didn’t know I’d begin searching the static. I didn’t know I’d turn on the TV just to have the static keep me company—or to keep the static company, the impossible patterns in the crackling: dark hair and milky skin. Where Elle is statuesque, Kate is soft, amorphous, a feather bed to sink into, be consumed by, a cloud to vanish inside. In a few years Elle will move on to another lover and our time together will be tucked into the annals of relationships, fixed in the fattest section, titled “Wrecked,” which comes right after the second-fattest section, titled “Doomed,” but with Kate things are forever undefined, just beyond my grasp, and that is a closeness I will learn to treasure; clouds, unlike statues, will never shatter. I hit the TV’s power switch. The crackling shrinks like a blizzard drifting into the far night, and with a sudden flash-pop that reaches from the TV to steal away everything in the room to nothingness, the static disappears.
Mirrors, Held Close Together
Kate and Johnny both struggled with mental illness. They met, I’m told, through therapy at the local clinic. I’m also told that when Johnny got to the hospital and learned Kate was dead, he took to the parking lot and smashed—hammered—his head repeatedly against an ambulance until he was finally restrained by force. Then, just weeks later, he was found comatose in the bathtub with so many pills in his blood.
I don’t understand mental illness, none of us do, but our scientists are trying hard, as a start, to understand the brain. Sometimes I make the mistake of obsessing over the candied summaries of brain studies I pick up in the news. Consider these:
1. When a monkey watches another monkey use a hammer, the watching monkey’s neurons fire in the same pattern as the hammering monkey’s neurons—neurons firing in the exact same pattern in both monkeys: mirror neurons. Humans have mirror neurons in abundance. This is how we empathize, the scientists hypothesize, the hard wiring for our intangible connections with one another—the brain’s ability to mimic another’s pattern of neuron activity, just by watching.
2. Researchers at UCLA used clips of Homer Simpson to track the memory-making neurons of epileptics after surgery. When they asked patients to recall a clip they’d watched, the researchers realized they could predict which clip the patient would choose based on the activity in the brain. The experiment’s conclusion: “Spontaneous memories arise through the activity of the very same neurons that fired when the memory was first being made.” Your brain does the exact same thing when you watch Homer Simpson strangle his kid and when you remember Homer Simpson strangling his kid. One researcher described memory as “resurrection of neuronal activity”—as far as your brain is concerned, the original event happens all over again.
So why aren’t we always experiencing other monkeys’ memories? Because when the hammering monkey is remembering being watched as he hammered, his brain is doing the exact thing it was doing when he was actually being watched as he hammered: “resurrection of neuronal activity.” But … if the watching monkey’s neurons mimicked those of the hammering monkey’s brain during the original act of hammering, wouldn’t that neuronal activity include not just the hammering but also the sense of being watched? So can we conclude that when the watching monkey recalls the hammering, he is recalling the event as if he were the monkey with the hammer, the monkey being watched as he hammered? What have I not factored into this equation? Consciousness?
Humans have a unique awareness that our lives are stories that begin when we’re born and end when we die, says Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist and one of the world’s leading experts on consciousness. And because we know we’re going to die, we are not satisfied with merely surviving day to day. We want our personal story to mean something. To me Damasio has always sounded like a prophet: You’re constantly rearranging the narrative of your life. Amen. I feel stuck in the infinite rough draft and I can’t remember any of the previous drafts. When you tell your story to yourself, or to someone else, it’s going to be told not on the basis necessarily of the time course, but rather on the basis of how it was valued by you … You’re assigning value naturally as life unfolds and that’s this very important element for the construction of one’s narrative.
But then when you’re dead, someone else assigns the value, edits the final draft. From Kate’s obituary: “She was a volunteer candy striper … she volunteered as a Big Sister … helped with the local American Cancer Society Relay for Life … worked providing care for the elderly.… would often purchase personal items for them with her own money, read to them on her time off, and make them small crafts to cheer them up … often provided meals, clothes, and other personal essentials to the homeless and donated her time each Thanksgiving preparing and delivering meals to local people in need.”
Johnny’s obituary is much the same, citing the Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal as one of about a dozen military commendations he received: “He was employed as a mental health technician and respite provider. He was committed to the welfare of those he served. During the Thanksgiving holiday, Johnny and his fiancée, Kate, donated their time to help deliver meals to people who were homebound and in need.”
My generation, the one straddling X and Y, the blur of kids that melts the music-video phase into the reality-show phase of MTV, we tend to understand volunteerism as a necessary sacrifice for creating a quality résumé. We’ll help out so long as we know some other monkey is watching the performance. But Kate and Johnny seem to have helped others without ulterior motives. They had an excess of empathy, maybe a fountain of mirror neurons not totally overtaken by the selfishness of consciousness. In this way they were odd—mentally ill, maybe—remembering themselves as hammering monkeys, which is to say they saw great pain in the world and felt that pain and fought that pain as if it were their own. If humans are special because of an excess of mirror neurons, then I guess Kate and Johnny overflowed with mirror neurons; they felt the hunger of a homeless child and were compelled to act again and again. But when the mirrors in their brains caught each other’s glimmer and got to sparking all at once, they opened up an infinite reflection of emotion—she was joyful and he felt her joy and she felt his joy, or she was sad or afraid or mad and he felt her madness and she felt his madness, and the crescendo knew no end just as mirrors will always, when you hold them close, create an infinite tunnel to nowhere. And if this all sounds sort of precious, it is. I’m assigning value to the story of Kate and Johnny based on what I want my life to mean. I want it to be a love story.
Peach Sherbet
When Granddaddy died, he left behind Grandmommy and two freezers full of peach sherbet ice cream. His memory had begun to falter in that last year but the sherbet, of all things, did not melt away. For five decades, on special occasions, Granddaddy bought Grandmommy a gallon of her favorite ice cream. She rarely ate ice cream but the occasional peach sherbet made her happy. After his stroke, Granddaddy would hobble around the grocery store, up and down the aisles with no recollection of the necessities he’d come to buy. Then he’d spot the sherbet. Holding just the ice cream in his arms, against his chest like an infant because his hands were too arthritic to get a grip, he’d grin his big goofy grin until he got home and found the freezer already full of peach sherbet. Maybe once a week he did this, hammering another pink carton into a freezer already packed full of pink cartons. He could remember little until he remembered he was in love and then that memory was all-consuming—so much sherbet. Now that he is gone Grandmommy eats more ice cream, spoons away the stockpile, feels, nearly every evening, the need to enjoy a bowl.
The Gas Mask
I find my antique gas mask endlessly entertaining and I often try to involve Elle in the fun. What if there was s
ome Russian aggression, baby? What if this is the only gas mask and the world is destroyed except for us? I want her to say, Oh, baby. You should put on that mask and rock my apocalypsed world. I want her to say, Put that mask on me and put a baby in me and repopulate the earth with your exceptional seed. But she just stares at me and says, A gas mask won’t do shit if it’s a nuclear bomb. We’ll both die. Our skin will burn off, baby.
I reluctantly hang the mask back on my living room wall. The crinkly rubber hose that connects to the filter hangs down beside the window like the trunk of an infant elephant I’ve hunted and stuffed and mounted because I’m monstrous. Elle says I deliberately do odd things because I’m bored, but I guess the problem is my fear that none of this will be worth remembering, that it won’t have value in my narrative. Elle says I just want an interesting story. Yeah, that’s how the brain works, baby.
The guy who originally owned the gas mask was a high school music teacher, conductor of teenage noisemakers. Momma found the mask while digging through the trash as the man’s distraught daughter emptied his storage unit; he’d died in a nursing home after years of dementia-induced confabulation.
The gas mask was dusty but in otherwise pristine condition, like something he’d sent away for during the escalation of the Cold War because he was paranoid and Reader’s Digest was offering a mail-order special. But he stuck the package in storage and let it gather dust for decades because it represented fear. I wonder what story the old man might confabulate if he were still alive and I could remind him of the gas mask after so many years. I wonder if, like Clive Wearing, the only thing still functioning in the old conductor would be music. I wonder if he’d grab the mask and put it on and begin conducting his band—This is how we win the war, boys!—all of his parts clicking into place and the droop of his face invisible behind the mask, the hose flopping out from his head as he slams his fist to the downbeat—BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!—the wrinkly geezer all gas-masked and flailing out a frenzied, fraught, fucked-up understanding of himself as someone surely rooted in a meaningful narrative.
Pink Skirt
Several weeks passed between the day Kate’s mother offered me the old TV and the day I went to pick it up. During these weeks I often worried about the conversation we might have, if Kate’s name might come up and if we might talk about Kate and how I would tell this woman who only gave a damn about me because Kate held on to a few scraps, Your daughter was less than insignificant in my life. I have no memory of her. Thanks for the boob tube.
Kate’s mom was exceedingly gracious when I arrived and was not interested in grilling me about her daughter. She was just happy to do something nice for someone. Kate’s obituary, which I assume her mother helped write: “Kate felt that her purpose in life was to help others.”
I held the heavy TV in my arms and was on my way out the door but hesitated because I felt a bit like a criminal, someone taking something he didn’t deserve. I turned to Kate’s mom and said, Kate was real nice. I paused. And for some reason I will never be able to explain, I continued, I remember she liked to dance on the beach in pink skirts even when it was windy and cold. Kate’s mom put her hand on my shoulder and quietly said, Alright, and I loaded the TV into my truck and drove away.
Said the Psychologists
“Patients who confabulate are not deliberately attempting to deceive anyone. Some psychiatrists still assume that confabulation is an amnesic patient’s way of filling in lost details to save face. However, they really believe with conviction that what they’re saying is absolutely true.
“In fact, we may all confabulate routinely as we try to rationalize decisions or justify opinions. Why do you love me? Why did you buy that outfit? Why did you choose that career? The intriguing possibility is that we simply do not have access to all of the unconscious information on which we base our decisions, so we create fictions upon which to rationalize them.
“Nevertheless, it is an unsettling thought that perhaps all our conscious mind ever does is dream up stories in an attempt to make sense of our world. The possibility is left open that in the most extreme case all of the people may confabulate all of the time.”
Use but Little Moisture
Mark Twain received three patents in his lifetime, the memory board game in 1885 and two others before that. The first, in 1871, was a patent for a belt to be worn on the bottoms of shirts rather than the tops of pants. He called it Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments. He hated suspenders and wanted to rid the world of suspenders and this was his warpath, the shirt belt—a new way to hold yourself together. All of Twain’s patents were born of this infinite struggle to hold one’s self together.
His second patent came in 1872—Mark Twain’s Patent Scrapbook. This was nothing more than a blank book with moisture-activated adhesive all over the pages. Hard-core memory hounds could simply lick the blank page of their book and stick a scrap of their life into its proper place among all the other important scraps. The inventive thing here was the elimination of glue. Memories could be saved anywhere you could salivate. “Use but little moisture,” Twain warns. “And only on the gummed lines.” The many options when ordering your Mark Twain’s Patent Scrapbook included anything from a pocket-size of forty-eight pages for fifteen cents to a full-size, centerfold-ready two-hundred-page behemoth (made of three-quarters Russian cloth) for the hefty sum of five bucks.
For all of Mark Twain’s great writings and all of his wild popularity, he died knowing the scrapbook was his bestseller, accounting for nearly 25 percent of his book sales while he was alive—nothing but an empty journal with blank pages meant to be spat upon and filled with scraps and the only words are the initial warning: “Use but little moisture.” And what if the book that sold best during Twain’s lifetime wasn’t also his greatest satire: the whole country slinging drool in a mad attempt to never forget.
By all accounts Twain himself was a prodigious scrapbooker, compiling hundreds during his world travels. But only a few years after his Patent Scrapbook success he began to fret and toil over the intricacies of his memory board game. He grew weary of stuffing his pockets with scraps, grew dry-mouthed from spitting and licking, grew anxious about relegating memories to a single spot where they would grow brittle, as loogies always do, and disintegrate. He longed for a way to get those miscellaneous facts into his head, a way to stuff the slobbery book into the skull and have “all you know” at any time accessible as you recount the narrative of your life, accessible and interchangeable (the value of things always changing as the story evolves) and in the end the stickiness of “but little moisture” proves not too delicate or ineffective but too firm a connection for scraps, too rigid when the story must still unfold.
Mine of Her
Shortly after I received Kate’s scraps I started collecting my own and now I have two piles: hers of me and mine of her. Three years after the Toyota never returned from the mountain, mine is a pile still growing. I have twelve pictures of Kate and two pictures of her fiancé, Johnny, in his military fatigues. I have pages and pages of notes about Kate in her eastbound Toyota Camry and Johnny in the bathtub. I have obituaries and copies of guest books from the funeral homes. I have blogs written by her friends. I have a newspaper article from the year Kate was born about a superachieving candy striper who volunteered 750 hours in just two years. This is totally irrelevant except that Kate was once named outstanding candy striper of the year and so I keep it around, hoping it fits. How do you get to know a person you can’t remember, can’t ever meet? The article about the super candy striper says her duties at the hospital included “installing and removing televisions.”
I’ve printed files and documents and web pages and set them around the living room—articles on the coffee table and notes on the windowsill and obituaries on my wild red stallion. I’ve spread my piecemeal knowledge of Kate throughout a physical space—my living room beneath the fluke gallows. Now I wait for the collapse, hope to recognize bodies in the rubble.
Handling Sin
In the articles about Kate’s death I have circled one name several times—Sergeant Tingwall. Sergeant Tingwall was the state trooper who said he could never know the reason “she drove her Camry into another vehicle.” This is the closest any officer comes to publicly saying suicide in the days after Kate’s death. Most town officials dance around the word, but only because Kate’s intent goes a long way toward establishing who’ll foot the bill for the damages caused by her wreck, the expensive cleanup. But Tingwall’s succinct statement is a Rorschach test. Some days I read it and wonder if Kate’s final moments were criminal. Some days I’m happy she died with agency. Some days I hate that I know she didn’t. Sometimes I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice by caring about the dead at all.
Just over a year after investigating Kate’s crash, Sergeant Tingwall died when his helicopter wrecked into a mountain as he was trying to save a stranded hiker. His obituary shows up on a law enforcement memorial website and the first reply to the post is a succinct but ominous “I remember you…,” which makes me think the first guy to respond to Tingwall’s memorial is some perp with a sour memory of being collared a few years back. A memorial is at once a recognition of loss and a celebration of life. I remember you can be a compliment or a threat. Memory saves people and drives them mad and I suspect we’ve forgotten what it was really meant to accomplish. The first recorded use of the word memory, as we use it now, is in a fourteenth-century text written by the monk Robert Mannyng titled Handling Sin; Mannyng describes his book as “illustrating the vices and weaknesses of men.”
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