One by one the stalls empty out, until I’m standing alone in the restroom, staring into a row of open doors, nine identical toilets, thin white paper spilling from silver rollers onto the floor.
On 280, driving south toward Tanforan, I’m thinking about what separates the logical from the irrational, the sane from those who are mentally lost. A logical person bases her hopes and actions upon facts, statistics, well-reasoned probabilities. For the irrational mind, mere possibility is sufficient. I tell myself that I cannot be losing my mind, because a person who is truly insane is unaware of her downward spiral. I tell myself that as long as I can question my own logic, as long as I can pinpoint the ticks in my mental process, I’m still in control.
Tanforan takes two hours. Then I do Stanford Mall, Hillsdale, and Serramonte.
It’s nearly midnight when I get home. I call Jake and ask him if I can spend the night, even though I know what his answer will be. “You shouldn’t be alone so much,” I say, feeling somewhat dishonest. I’m the one who doesn’t want to be alone, I’m the one who can’t face my empty loft.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Not tonight.”
Unable to sleep, I settle in front of the television. USA is showing Total Recall, in which Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a construction worker haunted by dreams of Mars, a planet to which he has never traveled. The premise of the movie is that Schwarzenegger, unbeknownst to himself, was once a secret agent on Mars. Thus his dreams are not mere dreams at all, but actual memories. I tune in just as a psychic mutant, drenched in phlegm, asks Schwarzenegger what he wants.
“The same as you,” the hero says. “To remember.”
“But why?” the mutant asks.
“To be myself again.”
35
I’VE TAKEN another job, this time in Marin. It’s a garden party for a couple’s fiftieth wedding anniversary. The couple has five grown children, all of whom are in attendance, accompanied by children of their own. Everything is perfect: the calla lilies flanking the patio, the silent caterers dressed in black and white, the violinists wandering among the guests, playing something forgettable but soothing. I’m the odd one out with my clumsy camera bag and comfortable shoes, my messy hair. I barely make it through the cake cutting, then duck into the house and find an upstairs bathroom, where I try to compose myself. My hands are shaking, and I can’t get my mind to focus. From the bathroom window I can see the crowd below, milling about the garden in the fading sunlight. The children have organized a game of hide-and-seek. I open the bathroom window and begin to press the shutter release, knowing, even as I struggle to keep my hands still, that these are the pictures the clients will love: the barefoot girl peeking from behind the tree while her brother creeps up behind her; the tiny boy concealing himself behind a rosebush; the little girl who is “it,” in wrecked linen dress and scuffed shoes, standing in the center of the garden, hands on her hips, scouting out the possibilities.
In a couple of weeks, I know, the clients will come over and select their favorite shots. The photos will go on the mantel, will be distributed to friends, copied, and sent out as Christmas cards. And the clients will be content in the belief that their anniversary has been saved for posterity, that this moment will last forever; the security of my profession rests on this false notion.
A painting can last for centuries, even millennia. The Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, and the Mayan cave drawings are proof of this. But a photograph is, by its nature, a transient work of art. The moment a photograph is transferred to paper, the slow process of erasure begins. The purpose of photography is to stop time, but time inevitably erodes. Not only are photos easily damaged by heat, humidity, and handling; every photograph is light-sensitive, its delicate chemical balance constantly altered by exposure to light.
Color photos printed on Kodak paper, which are advertised to “last a lifetime,” actually begin to fade in a decade. Even the most resilient prints, grayscale images processed on archival quality paper, don’t survive much longer than one hundred years.
Photographs represent our endless battle against time, our determination to preserve a moment: the sweet baby girl before she becomes a difficult teenager; the handsome young man before his body is won over by baldness and fat; the honeymoon trip to Hawaii, before the happy couple become two strangers, living angrily under the same roof. I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism: it is in our nature to believe that the good things will not last.
We put such faith in this flimsy mnemonic device, a moment written in light. But photos provide a false sense of security. Like our own flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. Over time, the contrasts within a photo diminish, the contours soften, the details blur. We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget.
36
OCEAN BEACH, day 105, 10:43 in the morning. A postman is sitting on a concrete wall, looking at the sea, eating a sausage biscuit. On the wall beside him, a McDonald’s cup. Perhaps it is the way he flicks the crumbs off his lap with two fingers—delicately, precisely—or perhaps it is the tilt of his body as he stares out to sea. Maybe it is the way one ankle is crossed over the other, each sock a slightly different shade of white. His feet don’t touch the ground. I can’t pinpoint the exact mannerism, but something about him is familiar. Like the driver of the postal truck I saw in the parking lot the day Emma disappeared, he is Chinese American. Could it be the same man?
I sit in my car for some time, watching him, debating. After so many days of visiting the beach, I am as nervous about being right as I am about being disappointed. After half an hour he folds the napkin into little squares, puts it inside the cup, gets down from the wall, and deposits the trash into a wastebasket. Then he gets into his postal cart and sits listening to music on his iPod.
I approach his cart, smile up at him.
“May I help you?” he asks, removing his earphones.
“Have you heard about her?” I say, handing him the flyer bearing Emma’s picture.
“This is the little girl who disappeared around here a while back.”
“I was wondering if you saw anything that day.”
“Pardon?”
“You were here on July 22nd, the day she disappeared. I remember seeing your truck in the parking lot.”
“Sorry, it wasn’t me. I just started this route in September.”
“Do you know who had it before you?”
“Fellow named Smith, real nice guy, family man. In the hospital now. Lung cancer.”
“What about them?” I ask, handing him the sketches of the couple from the yellow van. “Do they look familiar?”
He looks at the sketches for several seconds, scratches his head, then hands them back. “Wish I could help you, miss, but I’ve never seen them before.”
I wait another half hour in my car, watching, then drive home. It has begun to rain. On the sidewalk in front of my building, someone has drawn a hopscotch grid in blue chalk; only a vague outline of the grid remains. A soggy beanbag lies on the topmost square.
In the evening, I call Detective Sherburne. His wife answers, and I don’t even have to identify myself. “Abby Mason’s on the phone,” she says.
“Evening,” he says a few seconds later.
“Sorry to bother you at home again. Just wondering if there’s any news.”
“Sorry,” he says. “Nothing.” A child is fussing in the background.
“How’s the little one?” I ask.
“Two hands full, but he’s more than worth it.”
“Dinner’s ready,” his wife calls. “Have you finished setting the table?”
“Almost,” he says. Then, to me, “How are you holding up?”
“So-so.”
There’s a pause, and I can hear commotion on his end—silverware, plates, children running. “Listen, Abby, you know I’ll call if we come up with anything.”
“Okay. Sorry to bother you.”
&
nbsp; I hang up, feeling foolish, thinking of the family picture again: Sherburne, his wife, their little daughter, and the toddler, sitting down to dinner. The simplest tableau, repeated in thousands of homes across the city. To think that we might have formed a similar picture—Jake and Emma and me—if only I hadn’t looked away. In some parallel version of events, some alternate universe in which a few seconds months ago played out in an entirely different way, none of this is happening. In that alternate world, we are simply a family, sitting down to dinner. Emma is safe, and Jake and I are married, and tomorrow we will get up and have breakfast together before I take her to school.
I call Jake. The phone rings four times, the machine picks up, his voice crackles like a bad record. “I’m home for the night,” I say. “Call me.”
I put a miniature frozen pizza in the oven, then pick at it in front of the television, just to hear the comfort of voices in my empty loft. One of my favorite movies, Wall Street, is playing on A&E. Charlie Sheen, unkempt and crazed-looking in crumpled suit and loosened tie, argues with Michael Douglas in Central Park. The camera circles above them, swooping in and out, birdlike, as the corrupted boy and the corrupting man enact a verbal sparring match in the shadows of midtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, I’m planning dialogues in my mind, rehearsing the things I’ll say to Emma when she is returned to us. First I’ll tell her I love her, then ask her forgiveness, and finally tell her there’s nothing I want more than to be her mother.
In the dark, with the credits rolling and cars’ headlights shining on the wet pavement beneath my window, I almost believe my own story. I almost believe a day will come when Detective Sherburne will appear at my door, hand in hand with Emma. “She’s home,” he’ll say, and Emma will step across the threshold, into my waiting arms.
37
THE FRONTAL lobes are right here,” Nell explains, locating a spot on my forehead with her fingertips. “The frontal lobes control the executive functions of the mind—self-monitoring, our awareness of our own behavior.”
Nell still knocks on my door once or twice a week, bearing a homemade dinner. Under her watchful eye, I force myself to eat while she talks about some interesting tidbit she’s uncovered in her research. Tonight, the menu is comfort food—lima beans, mashed potatoes, and meat loaf.
“There’s this tiny blood vessel in the brain called the anterior communicating artery,” she continues. “When this blood vessel erupts, it cuts off the normal flow of oxygenated blood to the frontal lobes. The result is something called confabulation.”
I stir the beans in with the potatoes, hoping she won’t notice I’m not eating.
“I read about one patient, J.D., who didn’t leave the hospital for several months. When his doctor asked what he had done the previous weekend, J.D. told a story about going to the movies with his girlfriend, Anna, and mowing his lawn. The memory was incredibly vivid—down to the title of the movie, the street where the theater was located, even the dress his girlfriend was wearing. He did indeed have a girlfriend named Anna who had visited him at the hospital, but of course he couldn’t have gone to the movies or mowed his lawn, because he’d been in the hospital the whole time.”
“So he was lying?”
“Not lying. J.D. thought he was reporting the events of the weekend accurately. Basically, confabulation is the unintentional creation of false memories. A common misconception is that memory is like some sort of computer that stores and retrieves information. The truth is, memory is an act of reconstruction. Every time we remember an event, we piece together rough drafts of the event based on our lifetime of experiences. A person with normal functioning in the frontal lobes would know that he hadn’t left the hospital, and that therefore he couldn’t have gone to the movies. But someone who confabulates doesn’t have any mechanism by which to filter out the fictions.”
“Don’t we all do that to some extent?”
“Of course. Mark Twain put it this way: ‘It is not so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that are not so.’”
That night, after Nell leaves, I think about how I supplied details to my mother’s fake story about the trip to Gatlinburg. How I wanted so badly to believe in this image of family harmony that I created a memory of a luge ride with my father and an evening spent watching television in the motel room with Annabel while my parents were out at dinner.
When I asked Annabel about the scene in the motel room, she conferred. We had, indeed, stayed up late one night watching Eight Is Enough on a tiny TV in a room with vibrating beds. But this had been in Chicago, not Gatlinburg, and we weren’t there on vacation. We were there to attend the funeral of one of my father’s friends from college. According to Annabel, my mother later confessed that the reason my entire family made the trip was that she believed my father was having an affair, and she didn’t want to let him go to Chicago alone for fear of what might happen.
Memory is not unlike a photograph with multiple exposures. One event is layered on top of another, so that it is impossible to distinguish between the details of the two. The older we get, the more multiple-exposure memories we have. Temporal relationships become elastic. As the years progress and we experience more and more, the mini-narratives that make up our lives are distorted, corrupted, so that every one of us is left with a false history, a self-created fiction about the lives we have led.
38
HERE IS the truth, this is what I know: I was walking on the beach, holding Emma’s hand. I looked away, at a dead seal. Seconds passed. Three months, twenty-eight days, twelve and a half hours passed.
Another night, the two of us alone in Jake’s house, the spot on the floor in front of the television where Emma used to sit conspicuously bare. It’s eleven o’clock, and we’ve been stuffing envelopes for hours. We take a half-hour break to watch The Office, eating dinner in front of the television: takeout from Pasquale’s on Sloat. It’s the one holdover from before Emma’s disappearance, the one thing we still do together that smacks of normalcy. For that half hour each night, we can almost pretend things are the way they used to be.
“How are your classes?” I ask, trying to make conversation. Jake just shrugs his shoulders and says, “Nothing new.” At the beginning of October, he returned to work part-time, in order, he said, to hold on to his health insurance, but I suspect it is also a way of holding on to his sanity.
When the show is over I get up to leave, following the pattern that has become the norm. No overnights for us anymore, no casual settling into bed after the TV goes dark. I grab my purse and keys from the end table, and when I bend to kiss Jake goodbye he clutches my hand. “Don’t go.”
“What?”
I have to do a double take to make sure I heard him right. He’s pulling me down on the sofa beside him. “Stay.”
I sit down. He takes both of my hands in his and stares down at my lap. I can tell there’s something he wants to say. My purse strap is still around my shoulder, and I don’t know how to extract myself from it gracefully. I am poised for flight. I try to make eye contact with him, but he keeps his head bowed. I notice a smattering of gray hairs among the black.
Jake grips my hand harder, and I can tell from a slight movement of his head, an uncharacteristic lifting and lowering of the shoulders, that he is crying.
“What is it?”
“Today at school.”
I rub his back, feeling like some kind of impostor. It’s startling how quickly intimacy can fade, how little time it takes for two people to become strangers again. “What happened?”
“It was fifth period. I was giving a lecture on Charlemagne. The kids were so polite. No one was cutting up or passing notes or even talking. And I realized that they pitied me. Every one of them sitting in their seats feeling sorry for the teacher who lost his daughter.”
“Give them time. They’re just nervous, they don’t know what to say.”
“There was a knock on the door. It was Silas Smith, I had him la
st year in American History. Smart kid, very quiet, wears these leather belts with odd buckles he makes in iron shop. ‘There’s a call for you at the office,’ he said. I asked who it was, but he said he didn’t know. He said it in a real apologetic way, and I knew it couldn’t be good. So I gave the kids a free-writing topic, and I went to the office. When I got there, June Fontayne was waiting for me.”
“Who?”
“June Fontayne. She’s the new guidance counselor. Ex-hippie sort. A real quack. Long flowing skirt and all sorts of bangles and beaded necklaces. She’s got crystals all over her desk and a dream-catcher hanging over her door, a little Buddha shrine on the shelf where her books should be. I know there’s bad news coming, and I don’t want to hear whatever it is she has to say. She tells me the police were on the phone, but when she found out who it was she decided to take the call herself. She thought it would be better for me to hear it from her. Like she has any right to be the messenger.”
Oh God, I think. Hear what?
“The police found the body of a young girl and they wanted me to try to make an identification.”
“No.”
Jake’s watch peeks from beneath the cuff of his shirtsleeve. The second hand moves with painful precision. Time expands. A few seconds never felt so long. I remember the way Annabel and I used to count for hide-and-seek, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi.
“June offered to drive me, but I needed to go alone. I took Portola, even though 280 would have been faster. I think I was hoping that maybe the coroner’s office would be closing by the time I got there.”
Jake gets up and paces the room, back and forth, hands in his pockets. I just want him to get to the end of the story, just want him to tell me it wasn’t her.
“I drove as slowly as I could but I got there. Of course I got there, of course it was open. And I’m sitting there in the parking lot of the coroner’s office thinking that I can’t possibly do this. I can’t possibly walk into that building and look at the body of a girl who may be Emma. But I went. I shut my brain down and I just went. What choice did I have, really? On the outside it’s just a plain white building, pleasant even, with bougainvillaea climbing the walls and nice benches positioned in the entryway, but on the inside it looks like a hospital, all white and sterile. It smelled even worse than it looked. A mixture of ammonia and some cloyingly sweet human smell—not like body odor but something else, something worse. It only occurred to me later, as I was driving home, that what I’d been smelling was death, death really does have a smell.”
The Year of Fog Page 15
