I put the newspaper back on the bedside table, and will sit for a while. I’m not sure what to do with myself anymore.
Mid-1960s
Sam came in to wake me up this morning. His face was red like he had been crying. He looked so young, too. I wondered if I had turned youthful in the night, and hoped so greatly for that to be true. No matter my age, he reached down and grabbed my hand, squeezing it gently when he delivered the news to me that Marilyn Monroe had passed.
I wasn’t sure why, but my eyes suddenly felt hot and lit up with tears. They were so warm, and I was absolutely devastated. She had been an icon. Growing up, I had seen her image pasted around in movies, posters, and the dawning of the internet. Now, she was once again nothing more than a memory, one that had been sealed in immortality while she was still in her prime. It was a tragedy. I squeezed Sam’s hand back, feeling it suddenly disintegrate between my fingertips. I gasped suddenly, and sat back, breathing heavily.
Sam was not in the room. Sam had been dead for over a decade now. I looked down and saw the newspaper in front of me, with the headline describing the tragic fall of the great Ms. Monroe.
Once again, I am embarrassed and humiliated. But this time, it’s only for myself to see. And possibly the nursing staff. I’m sure I’ve given them a rousing thing or two to talk about since I’ve been here. But, I also suppose that everyone who lives here has to be a character in one way or another, debilitated in body or mind. I presume that occurrences such as these are no uncommon thing in the home. I will just have to learn to allow myself more humility towards my own decline, and current state of being.
After all, for me, there is no longer any help. Every day, my imagination, or perhaps my memories, seem to bleed further into reality.
Sometimes, I am spared for a few minutes. When my imagination isn’t acting up, my thoughts are actually relatively clear. I am able to remember things, and identify current events. I try to read the newspaper every day and focus on the happenings around the world to jog my mind and keep myself going. The newspaper helps focus my thoughts and gives me something else to think about, rather than yearning for my lost family, or for the one that still loves me to come and visit soon. It is not a bad place where I live, I am just lost in my own solitude.
I’ve met some of the other people who live here, but have trouble recalling their names or faces. The nurses take me to my meals and outside to get fresh air. Sometimes Susan will come and visit, but I can never remember when she is coming next, or even when she came last. Todd and Connor have been here too, but I don’t recall what we talked about. Probably about the news.
I seem to be able to keep track of the newspaper headlines better than my own day to day existence. They are the only chronological thing I can seem to keep track of. Even if they have nothing to do with me or those I love. Nevertheless, I am very glad that I have kept up with my newspaper reading, and will not stop it. I feel that it will help keep me from slipping into oblivion.
One of the headlines that sticks out especially in my mind was the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Sam’s image was not there to give me the news this time. I love seeing him, but when I realize that I have been dreaming, caught in a delusional or hallucinogenic state, it is comforting and yet very much disturbing. I prefer to see him when I sleep, because then I have some way to rationalize it.
On the day that the poor Kennedy boy was shot, the nurses gathered us all up and wheeled us down to the main dining hall. I had no idea what was happening, and was very fearful. I can’t seem to recall the timeline of historical events anymore before they happen, but as soon as something does, the memories from my history courses, or my pop culture knowledge from childhood flood back to me, enveloping me in their smells and sounds and emotions. As soon as they flicked on the big, boxed television in the main room and his face came clearly into view, my heart sank. I knew what had happened.
Part of me wishes that I had followed his presidency more. I knew he did wonderful things and worked to improve the health of the nation, but I hadn’t followed these headlines much, at least not that I could recall. Either way, I understand the gravity of it all and realize that it is a national and international tragedy. For the first time in my life, though, I heard about what happened to Jacqui. That was in the newspaper. I imagined her there, covered in the blood of her husband, partner, and love of her life. I was so incredibly devastated when Sam passed—and still am—I am not sure how any man or woman could survive something so horrific and traumatizing. My heart went out to her, and it still does.
I also, very clearly, remember the day that I saw the headline that the Beatles had come to America. My heart leapt out of my chest. Clearly, I was and had not been a child of the Sixties, but my mother was. She used to play the Beatles for me on our little CD player—and we would dance in the living room, singing Hey Jude, and I Wanna Hold Your Hand at the top of our lungs. It was stunning to me to know that I had made it all the way up to that era, to the beginning of the Beatles. I had just rolled into my eighties. Which was entirely shocking. I thought about all of the death that had come before me, all of the tragedies, personal and external, that I had lived through and somehow managed to come out on the other side, to live to see George Harrison put his bowl-shaped head on the front of my newspaper. I smiled; there was something very novel, and very satisfying about it. Too bad the images will fade. Maybe it’s better that way.
Sometimes I feel that way, and I picture what would happen if my mother could see me now. Old and ragged, my skin hanging limply from my form, old, weathered, and thin. My figure seems so delicate now. I think my mother would cry if she saw me, remembering the young girl that had left her standing alone in the driveway, now aged and dying before she herself had even given birth to me. It is very strange. As much as I love Sam, and Susan, and would not take my experience back for the world, I still feel as if I do not belong where I am. I still see my family, and they come to visit and Susan consoles me, but now, with my main form of interaction with the world being the newspaper, and the little images that fill my mind, blurring the lines between past and future, I feel more and more alien. I don’t like it in the least.
It’s getting worse. I’m beginning to see my father.
Instead of Sam coming to visit me in the night, it is he who shows up in my little, cream-colored room, waiting for me to awaken. I wonder if it is happening because of my feelings of displacement and separation from the world that I am living in and existing in. Honestly, I’m not certain, but it haunts me. The feelings, and the figure have been haunting me for almost a week now.
A recent encounter happened after I had fallen asleep for a short nap. The other thing I am beginning to loathe about old age, is my inability to sleep for long durations. I always seem to be disturbed, by someone or something, or by myself. I feel restless and anxious, and grab randomly at things around me, resting on the small dresser next to my bed, fiddling with my hairbrush or newspaper, waiting to go to sleep. But on this particular evening, I had fallen asleep quite easily. And then I awoke to a startle, something crashing on the floor of my room.
I shot up in bed, looking around blindly for what or where the noise had come from. I reached over to my little dresser and grabbed my glasses, placing them on the bridge of my nose.
It was my father. He was in the corner, wrapping himself in a bathrobe that had been draped over a chair. He hadn’t aged a day since I last saw him in the woods on that frigid morning when we fell through time. I grabbed my chest then, feeling it tighten, and prepared for my heart to come to a halt altogether. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be real.
He stood up, his eyes were bloodshot, and his face looked tired as it always did whenever he went on an excursion. Then, suddenly, he dropped to his knees, crying out, “Alice?”
I felt faint. All of the blood drained from my face, and I stretched out my hands to him. Why was this happening? How was this possible? And why would he come to me now, when I
am old and gray and dying?
But I continued to stretch out my hands. My wrinkled and thinning fingers touched the air near where he sat on the carpet; his face contorted up and tears streaming from his eyes. My heart hadn’t stopped yet, and I suddenly knew that it wouldn’t. I only feared now that I was already dead. I had moved on, and was going to heaven, to join my family once again.
“Alice!” he said again, “is it you? Darling, is it you?” He was sobbing now, his breaths were heavy and his shoulders sighed, shuddering up and down. I couldn’t fathom it. It couldn’t be real. How could it be real?
He reached out his hands, and grabbed mine. His hands were strong and youthful still, and I felt mine disappear in his, frail and weak. The emotions were overwhelming, I had no idea what was happening, and was so incredibly disoriented, I cried out, and clung to his hand. It was my father. It was my father, after all of these years he had come back to me. He had come back to me.
He began rubbing my hands, and through his tears he uttered words. “I am so sorry, my darling, I am so sorry, I left you there, I left you back in time and I have never forgiven myself. I never can, I left you to live there, I abandoned you. My girl, my sweet baby girl, and look at you. You have lived, you have lived without me and I couldn’t save you, oh God, Alice…” His sobs came in heavy gasps again. “Alice, what have I done?”
My voice cracked as I tried to speak. Tears were blinding me, my already pathetic vision distorted. “Dad? Daddy, is it really you? I don’t believe it, it can’t be you, you can’t control where you go, how did this happen?” And then I stopped, looking down at his hands, and in his eyes. “You did leave me. You left me alone, and now… now I am old. I am a grandmother, with a daughter and a grandson. You left me alone in the woods…” My breath caught in my throat and I cried out, “I never stopped thinking about you and Mom…I never did…and I didn’t tell anyone. Over all of these years I didn’t tell anyone…but how, how could you come back to me now? Come back to find me like this?”
He blinked the tears away, mucus streaming from his nose, and his eyes beginning to swell from the tears. “I come to the same places, I always fall through, to the same places…” he said, “I kept ending up in a field, just back a few years, to when you were ten years old. It took me a while to place it. The place was where they had demolished this building, the living center…” He paused, looking away from me. “I didn’t know you would be here. I didn’t know that this would happen. I haven’t stopped looking for you. Every time I’ve gone back, I’ve even gone back to those woods, I search. I search and I ask, and I hope and I pray, and nothing has happened. I don’t know how I ended up in this room, but I saw your picture when I fell, the picture there, of you and your husband…married?” His voice broke again when he said it, smiling and blinking back tears. “Alice, if there was anything I could change, I never would have left you in those woods, it haunts me, I love you, you are my daughter, and all I have ever wanted to do is protect you.”
“I know,” I cried, “I forgave you a long time ago. In my youth I was angry, but I realized that you would never do anything to hurt me. What pained me was the thought of you and Mom, searching for me, hoping that I would return, but knowing the impossibility of that ever happening…” I gasped again, putting a hand over my mouth and looking to the sky. It was unbelievable.
“If you could, if you do, go back in time, and find me, find me as a young girl again, as your daughter, take me back. If I am with my family, leave me. Leave me there, I love them so and they are all I have ever wanted in my life. But if you do find me, take me back with you!” I cried and screamed, and held his hand as tight as I could.
He started to speak, but his image shifted. The pixels came back out, and his silenced voice screamed, his mouth opening and closing as his body faded in and out, and began to drift, drift back somewhere in time, to search for me, unrelenting, through the ages.
And then I woke up. It was about five o’clock in the morning, and I woke up sobbing, in night sweats. It would happen again, in variations, for days to come. My father, lost in time, visiting me only through my delusions. I sat in my solitude and cried, wishing more than anything that I could vanish, too.
1975
I look at the paper every day, still, but nothing seems to seep in. Things aren’t sticking in my mind anymore. I still know who I am, mostly, and what I am doing, but struggle in remembering where I am. I always forget the news, or why things are happening or why they have happened. Recently, we ended a war with Vietnam. I cannot for the life of me remember starting the war, or the purpose of the war, but only saw and recognize its demise. When I clear my head long enough to read the newspaper headline, I feel that I have experienced so much violence at this point that I have begun to block it all out. This is the excuse I am giving for not remembering the war. The details roll off of my mind like sand seeping out of your hand between your fingers.
The nurses bring me my breakfast every morning. Sometimes I wish that I could go downstairs to the dining room to get it, but it seems so much easier when they bring it to me. It scares me that sometimes I don’t even remember eating it. Like magic, it appears in front of me, and then I check the clock and it is already noon and time to head down for lunch, my breakfast tray gone, as if it never existed. This scares me. I don’t like not being in control of my thoughts, of my direction, and of my intention in life. I am not sure what is happening to me, or how to control it. At least I can still recall the names and faces of my loved ones. I think it is because I can place them within memories of my past.
Outside of my memories, my life has become relatively mundane. I am living vicariously through those who are on the outside, Susan, Connor and Todd. They are the lights of my life, brilliant, beautiful people who I am so lucky to have in my family, and cannot believe that I took part in bringing them into the world and bringing them all together. I must say that of Susan, I am the most proud of her more than anything else I have done in my life. I created an incredible human being, who has done so much for her family, for her career in art preservation, and for society. I love her with all of my heart.
Just as she had promised, Susan still comes to visit me often. It is one of the only things I look forward to, aside from writing my thoughts and my morning paper. The nurses are nice, but we don’t engage much, and they usually seem in a hurry, as if I am more of an annoyance or a protocol than anything else, so I typically don’t try to speak much to them. Susan’s visits also help me focus. When she is there, I can feel the fog lift, and my mind clears for a time. It’s wonderful, and rejuvenating. Sometimes I still lose myself around her, especially if I have been thinking of Sam. But, usually, I do very well, and am able to keep up with her and her spunk. At least I think so. I doubt she’d let me know if I drifted.
We often have coffee, as we used to, and sometimes we go for strolls through the little gardens outside, if it’s nice out. Though these days, I require a wheelchair more often than not. In the winter, we stay inside. I really don’t care much for the cold, and my body can’t take it anymore. It’s shocking how quickly it makes your bones ache, and as much as you wouldn’t believe it, or you wouldn’t expect it to happen to you, it does. My joints ache as I walk in the cold, and my breathing grows desperately shallow. It’s incredibly frustrating, and it scares me.
But it is summer now, the war—whatever it was about—has ended, and things are looking up. There have been changes in my family, and they are very exciting ones. Things are moving quickly, and I can’t believe how things change over time, how people mature and time works her magic to surprise us. Most recently, I learned that Connor has gotten engaged.
Susan told me that he had been seeing a lovely young woman, whose name I do not remember, and that he was thinking about proposing to her. Connor himself comes to visit me from time to time, but it is not as often as it used to be. And I can’t blame him. He is a young man now, and has a busy new life, now with a beautiful young partner. And
he has been busy with his career, too. Susan tells me that he has been going on more frequent business trips for work. I know he is working as an engineer, but do not remember nor understand the intricacies of his work. I am so impressed by him, and so happy for Susan and Todd. I know they are very proud.
I learned of the engagement just the other day, on a fabulous visit from the entire family. Susan had called me ahead of time, not wanting to scare me with a big group. Her precautions are very thoughtful, and I respect her judgment, but sometimes it is hurtful. I feel that when she presumes something about my mental capacities, sometimes that makes it more truthful. I do not want to fall into that trap.
But, regardless, she told me in advance, and I made a point to remember. I was so excited for their visit, and I think that helps. The entire family there for me, in my new little space and solitude. It would be a wonderful day. I tried to think of things we could do, that would mean something to them. The only thing I could think of was to go for a walk in the gardens, which were very lovely. Though Susan saw them often, Connor and Todd had not yet seen them. I wrote it down in my notebook, and hoped to God that I wouldn’t forget what day it is or what was happening when I awoke in the morning.
Infinity's Daughter Page 15
