My Name Is Memory

by Ann Brashares

  Daniel felt a drop of sweat go down his spine. The air was so humid you could smell it and hear it and touch it and see it and nearly chew on it. He hated to feel the sweat soaking into his best shirt, the white linen shirt she’d given him almost ninety years before when she was Constance. It had belonged to her grandfather, the viscount. He kept this shirt from one life to the next among his most treasured things, and wore it only rarely because he wanted to preserve it. When she’d first given it to him, it was too big for him, and he figured the viscount was a giant, but he’d grown so big in this life, it barely fit. He’d never been so tall before, as he was in this life. He’d worn the shirt today because he loved it and because he thought, in spite of it being a little stretched, it looked good on him. (He was rarely vain, but his body was twenty-one, and once in a while it got to him.) But the main reason he wore it was because he hoped, irrationally, that it might remind her of what he meant to her once. All these years later he could smell his old sweat and fever, and the smell of the great old house where she’d once lived, the polish and wax and a faint antiseptic hospital smell. And somewhere nested in all that was the barest, most fragile trace of her. Not just a representation of her but her. That was really why he loved this shirt.

  Daniel suspected that smell was his only extraordinary sense in this body. His own version of a superpower. He was Smell Man, or maybe The Nose. His ears weren’t extraordinary. He knew many songs and could play quite a few instruments, but that didn’t mean his ear was always great. It had been good and even excellent in a few bodies and frustratingly bad in others. He used to think that over time he could overwhelm his body’s limits with pure will and experience, but it didn’t work that way. In fact, over time he became more convinced of the simple biology of talent. There were gifts only a body could offer, and a great ear for music was one of them.

  His eyes weren’t extraordinary. He could identify a huge number of things by sight, but that was only because he had seen so much of the earth’s surface under so many atmospheric conditions. He’d been a sailor in more than one life, crawling over the watery earth, minute by minute, in those places where time had the least effect. But his eyes weren’t always very astute. He’d been a truly good artist only twice. A good eye was another thing you couldn’t take with you.

  Touch was a rudimentary sense, not so variable and not likely to get better with repetition. If anything, repetition made you feel a little less with each touch. As he saw it, anticipation and habit were two of the nastiest parasites of old souls and long experience. They fed on repetition and crowded out your eager senses over time until nothing felt new anymore. There were things he wished he could touch for the first time again.

  Smell and taste, of course, were sister senses. More like Siamese twin sisters, with the first having most of the organs, including the brain. The second sister was built for pleasure and the occasional bitter warning. But it was smell that carried memory. He’d done enough work in neurology and even recent reading in neuroscience to know how simplistic his concept was, but that was still how he thought of it. Smell was like the wormhole connecting you to the other parts of your life. Memories of smell didn’t fade, and they short-circuited your entire psychology—they didn’t tunnel through endless experience or get loaded down by any part of your conscious mind. They stitched you instantly and fully to your other times, without regard to sequence. It was the closest thing to time travel on this earth. If he had to point to a place to explain his unusual abilities, it would probably be his nose. He’d had many of them over the centuries, and his gift of smell stayed with him through all.

  He walked down Alderman Street, past the stadium and toward the dorms in Hereford College, where she lived. Here was where he might see her. This was where she lived and walked. His mounting adrenaline gave each of the sounds an extra boost. The drone of a mower. The rush of the trees. The trucks on a highway beyond his sight. This was her place, and the closer he got to Whyburn House, the more he imagined it was full of her. Her sidewalk, her pollen, her sky. The people in the direction of her building all wore her face for at least a moment.

  It was hard for him, he realized, to picture her how she was now. He tended to picture her as Sophia and then let her image evolve in his mind as though in stop-motion photography. But she stayed on as a kind of amalgam, dissolving and resolving through different versions. It was hard to hold on to her as she would be right now if he saw her on the sidewalk. Her body was smaller this time, he thought, her bones lighter and softer. Last time, as an old woman, she’d had freckles and veins and spots on her hands, and now she was washed clean again.

  He thought of the first time he saw her in this life, on the sidewalk with Marnie when she was fifteen and wearing those shorts. She was as radiant as if she had been chosen by the sun. That was before he’d moved to Hopewood, before she knew of him at all.

  He thought of the time he’d watched her in the ceramics studio a couple of months after he’d arrived at school. He hadn’t meant to stalk her. He’d gone to the art building to sign himself up for a printmaking class, and when he couldn’t find the teacher he’d gone wandering. He was standing in the annex between two studios when he realized the lone figure at the kickwheel was her. He meant to say something and not just stand there, but he was paralyzed by the sight of her, and by the time he could think again he’d let too much time pass. She didn’t look up. That was partly what caused his paralytic trance. Her foot urged the flywheel, the clay spun in a shifting mound, her hands moved in hypnotic symmetry, the sun was filtering down through dirty windows, and her eyes were focused on something he couldn’t see. She had clay up to her elbows and all over her shirt and flecks of it on her face and in her hair. He was struck by how deeply absorbed she was in the moment and by the helpless sense he had that he couldn’t reach her there. He was struck to admiration by the terrible state of her shirt.

  He thought of that night at the high school and her in the light purple dress with the little purple flowers in her hair. His blood rushed high and low as he felt his hands holding on to her. She was certainly as beautiful as ever this time. Maybe it was just in his eyes, but her smile was a revelation. Although very young children were kind of homogenous, people pressed their souls into their faces and bodies fairly quickly in a life, and more and more deeply as they aged. A loving soul was always more beautiful over the long haul, but actual prettiness was fleeting. He used to think that fairness would dictate a conservation of physical beauty over the life of a soul, but it didn’t work that way. Fairness turned out to be a human construct, and the universe had little use for it. Sophia had more than her share of beauty.

  And today. What would he do if he saw her? It was a fantasy he’d played several different ways. Would she stop and know him? If she didn’t, would he stop her? What would he say? Would it be enough just to see her? He told himself it would. He just wanted to look at her and know her life was marching along under the same arch of time and space as his. Even that would be a comfort, a kind of intimacy almost. Was it wrong that that could count as intimacy?

  She lived with Marnie on the third floor of Whyburn House. He’d done the research to know that and not more. If he found out more he felt like a stalker, but if he did too little he’d wander around like an idiot. He didn’t want to slant the knowledge too much in his direction. He didn’t want one more inequality between them. Mostly he wanted not to know and to be surprised. Some sad part of him wanted it to be like a regular boy meeting a girl and falling in love.

  She lived here in this red brick building. Her glass double doors, her nonskid floor covering. Her mail slot. One of them had to be. You could feel the giant air-conditioning system fighting its battle for her.

  He’d lived in a dorm once, but he couldn’t get used to it. It didn’t have the functionality of a barracks or a monastery, say. It had the arbitrary and mildly coercive feel of social engineering. And this one was mostly empty, which underscored the impression. He greeted th
e guard at the desk and glanced down at the sign-in sheet. It had one name, not hers.

  “ID, please,” the guard said.

  “Sorry?”

  The guard turned down his buzzing radio. His tag said his name was Claude Valbrun. “You need to show an ID if you’re not a resident, and you’re not a resident, because if you were, I would know you.” He wasn’t the least bit unfriendly. He said it with evident pride.

  Flustered, Daniel took out his driver’s license. “I-I’m not—I wasn’t planning on going in the building,” he explained.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  Daniel stopped. It was a good question, and he couldn’t answer it.

  The guard pointed to the phone on the wall past his desk. “Even if you just want to use the house phone, you still need to sign in.”

  Did he want to use that phone? Could he just pick it up and call her? He didn’t know how to call her. Should he ask for her number? Would Claude Valbrun give it to him? And anyway, what was he thinking?

  “You are looking for someone,” the guard informed him sympathetically.

  Daniel nodded.

  “Who?” He wanted to help Daniel along.

  Daniel felt like he was in therapy. Should he just tell him? He couldn’t help himself. He was going to call her Sophia before he stopped himself. “Lucy Broward.”

  “Oh. Lucy.” He smiled. “With the long hair. Third-floor Lucy. I like that girl.”

  Daniel found himself nodding eagerly.

  “She gave me chocolates at Christmastime, and a little plant with red flowers for my wife. What was the name of that plant?” He closed one eye to help him think. “My memory is good for some things and not others.” He closed the other eye. “What was the name of it? My wife knew.”

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said honestly. “Poinsettia?” He wished they could get on with it.

  He opened both eyes. “Hmm. No. It started with a C, I think. Or a G. Just when you leave, I’ll think of it. Anyway, Lucy is gone.”

  “She is?” His hopes fell so far and fast he had to realize how high he’d built them. He couldn’t keep the disappointment off his face.

  “Sure. Most of ’em are. May fourth was the last day of classes. It’s quiet here until the summer students start showing up after July fourth.”

  “She’s gone for the summer? She won’t be back here?” Had he really thought he was going to see her just like that?

  “She and that tall friend of hers moved out the end of last week.”

  “Marnie?”

  “Right. Marnie.”

  “I don’t know where she’ll be living next year. Could be here. Could be someplace else.”

  Daniel nodded bleakly. Who knew if she’d even come back to this campus? What if she did an exchange program or something? He hadn’t found her at all.

  Claude looked genuinely sorry for him as he handed back his driver’s license. So much so that it was embarrassing. “Seems to me the school year ends earlier every year,” Claude said philosophically, shaking his head in a way that gave Daniel a feeling of kinship. Here the man sat watching them go by, year after year, getting younger and further away from him.

  Now was the time for Daniel to put his ID back in his wallet and turn around and walk out the door. Now, suddenly, he didn’t want to go. He wanted to stay here with this nice man who liked Sophia. He wanted Claude to go back to trying to remember the name of the flower.

  Daniel felt as though he was in a game of warmer-colder. This building wasn’t so hot as he had hoped—it didn’t contain Sophia anymore—but it was a lot warmer than it would be once he got outside, where the trail would be purely cold again.

  He put his ID back in his wallet and his wallet back in his pocket, but he didn’t turn to go. “What kinds of things is your memory good for?” he asked, trying to sound conversational and lighthearted.

  Claude shrugged. He seemed happy to have company. “Faces. And names.”

  THREE BEERS MADE Daniel feel optimistic. Maybe she was staying in Charlottesville for the summer. Maybe she got a job here and moved off campus for a few months. Maybe she was waiting tables or wearing one of those Genius T-shirts, working at the Apple store. Maybe she would walk into this very bar if he sat here long enough.

  “Another one,” he said to the bartender, raising his glass. It took him several more tries to get the guy’s attention. The bartender was enough in demand that he’d suddenly gone deaf and lost his peripheral vision at the same time.

  “Thanks,” he said when his fourth Bass ale finally arrived, knowing the futility of his maybes. He knew that he could have five or ten or fifty Bass ales and she wouldn’t walk in here. She wasn’t from the kind of family where you rented an apartment and pretended to earn money. She was from the kind of family where you moved home and actually earned money. He’d seen two kids from their high school already, one passing on the sidewalk and another spilling her breasts onto the table in the corner, and they were depressingly not her. None of this was remotely her anymore, and the more he drank, the farther away she seemed.

  It was for the better, probably. What good did he bring her? But he just wanted to see her. That would satisfy him. That’s all he’d come for.

  He regretted wearing his best shirt, and looking at himself in the mirror that morning with so much pleasure and hope. What was he thinking? He wished he had a different shirt to change into. New bar smells and his new sweat and the perfume emitted by that girl over in the corner would get into the fabric and overwhelm the precious bit of her left in it. He hated that thought.

  The guy sitting to his right had a double chin and soccer cleats and was getting drunk at a faster rate than he. There was something familiar and unappealing about him, which Daniel wasn’t tempted to pursue.

  The fifth Bass arrived around the time the girl from the corner table came over and sat on the stool to his left. He forgot that she might remember him until she remembered him.

  “You went to Hopewood, didn’t you?” she asked.

  “For a while.” She had very white teeth. People were always having very white teeth these days.

  “I remember you. You were—” She had a bursting look, like the vodka was trying to do the talking and she was trying to stop it. “Never mind,” she said mischievously.

  He kept his eyes steady to the north of her neck. “Okay,” he said, though she certainly wanted him to cajole her.

  “Do you go here?” she asked. She had been on some kind of squad in high school, he recalled. He could picture her in one of those outfits with the very short pleated skirts, constantly being turned upside down.

  “To school here? No. Do you?”

  “Yes. Soon to be a junior.”

  She knew Sophia, no doubt. She started to emit a small glow of Sophia association. He resisted asking.

  “Where do you go?”

  He took a long swig of beer. “Nowhere. I work.” He didn’t feel like saying anything true.

  This dulled the interest in her eyes a little bit. Or at least shifted it.

  “Do you still see any Hopewood people?” she asked.

  “No.” He took another sip. It was hot in this place. “Do you?”

  “Yeah. A lot. Like nine people from our class are here.”

  He nodded. Her glow intensified a little. He bought her another vodka tonic on the strength of it.

  “Can I tell you something?”

  He relented. “All right.”

  “We thought you were dead.”

  “Oh?”

  “Somebody saw you jump off a bridge.”

  He tried not to wince visibly. It wasn’t his best memory. “I guess they were mistaken.”

  She nodded and sipped her drink. “It’s good that you’re not dead.”

  “Hey, thanks.”

  She leaned over and kissed him just to the side of his mouth. He felt the slight moisture of spit and sweat that she left on his skin.

  “So who do you still see?” he
asked.

  “From our class?” Her bracelets jingled with every gesture.

  “Yeah.”

  He waited through the list until she got to Marnie, Lucy’s friend. “I think I remember her.”

  “Weird girl. Black-and-blonde hair?”

  “She was friends with . . .” He felt stupid pretending to search for the name of the most important person in the world to him.

  “Who?” She fixed him with a look that made him feel transparent. “You mean Lucy, right?” Her voice was flat.

  Hungry as he was to hear one thing about her—that she was a drug dealer, a cross-dresser, a baton twirler, anything, so long as she was in his world—this was too stupid. He got up. “I have to piss,” he muttered. He slapped down a twenty to cover the rest of his tab.

  “I bet you don’t remember my name, do you?”

  He kept moving.

  “Wait,” she said. She jingled some more as she took hold of his wrist. “What are you doing after this?”

  “Leaving. Going back up north.”

  “Wait, though,” she said. “There’s a party at the Deke house. Come with me.”

  His stupid reptilian mind wondered if Sophia might be there. “No. I hafta go.” He could hear the fifth and sixth beers in his voice. He had to go back to his car and sleep until he wasn’t drunk anymore.

  “Are you sure? I’ll order you another beer, and then you can decide.”

  He shook his head. If he had another beer, he wouldn’t be able to keep his gaze from dipping into her blouse. And if he had another one after that, he would probably go back to her dorm room and roll onto her twin bed with her and take off her clothes with his eyes shut, because it wouldn’t be her he was picturing. He’d done it before, and he never felt good about it after. She was probably an economics major or maybe a political-science major, and maybe she made great margaritas and loved her father and could hit a mean forehand and who knew what else, but she was also the kind of girl who got called another girl’s name at the important moment.