Remind Me Again What Happened
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Remind Me Again What Happened
a novel
Joanna Luloff
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2018
Also by Joanna Luloff
The Beach at Galle Road
For Will
But my grief wanted a just image, an image which would be both justice and accuracy—justesse: just an image, but a just image.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory—meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion—is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.
—William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
Contents
Claire
Charlie
Rachel
Claire
Charlie
Rachel
Claire
Charlie
Rachel
Claire
Charlie
Rachel
Claire
Charlie
Rachel
Claire
Charlie
Rachel
Claire
Charlie
Rachel
Claire
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Algonquin
Claire
The last photo the nurse found on my camera was of an ice cream vendor on a stone street in Mysore. Now that I’m home again, Charlie has printed it out for me. I’ve placed it in my “Past Life: Work” folder. Charlie hates the way I label my absent memories, but the system has been helping me. All those weeks ago in the hospital, the doctor told me that this photograph helped his staff come up with my diagnosis. Before all of this doctor’s sleuthing work, before my induced coma, before all my bumps and bruises, I had been in a hotel overlooking the sea. I had asked the concierge to bring me some tea and Tylenol. I was too tired to move and I felt like I was coming down with a fever, or that’s what I’m told I said to the stranger at the other end of the phone line. When the young man from room service came to the door, however, I didn’t answer. Instead he heard a lamp break, so he found a maid and together they entered the room with her key. They reported they found me thrashing on the floor. An ambulance was summoned and brought me to the hospital. I don’t remember any of this. It remains a blank space in my memory. The hotel staff, the nurses, and Charlie, my ever-dutiful husband, have helped fill in the gaps.
It was only when, days later, Charlie sat by my bedside, showing me the most recent images on my camera, trying to trigger my memory, that the doctor peered over Charlie’s shoulder. “How long were you in India?” he asked.
“Close to six months,” Charlie answered for me.
“We may have found the culprit.” The doctor smiled eagerly, and I suppose we were meant to take this as good news, though I’m sure neither of us felt like celebrating. The doctor patted Charlie’s back in congratulations, for us or for him, it was all the same. Two men congratulating one another for their fine detective work. I have to imagine most of this scene, filling out the scribbled notes I’ve written in my notebook. It would still be a few more days before Rachel arrived. I had asked Charlie to call her. I needed my best friend, and I wanted an ally. It’s funny what stays and what goes in a malfunctioning brain. I still had—have—my instincts.
A mosquito bite. A simple nibble, one of hundreds that had poked at my skin, but this one came with a virus. Japanese encephalitis, the doctor explained, as if the news were a gift. I was lucky I was not dead. I was unlucky that I was part of the 30 percent whose natural immunities couldn’t shrug off the worst manifestations of the virus. High fever, seizures, damage to the central nervous system. This is why Charlie often answers questions for me and tells me what did and did not happen. Just as he helped me put together the fragments of those first memories in the hospital and the details of the days that followed, he continues to do this now, many months later. There is a smudge where my memories are supposed to be.
Three months have passed since that hospital room in Florida. Rachel has gone into town. Charlie dropped her off on his way to the office a few hours ago. They both looked exhausted this morning, and the kitchen was silent as they prepared their tea and English muffins. Now, I am alone in the garage. Rachel is gone but she has left me these neat piles of my life, unpacked from boxes and arranged in careful stacks on the garage floor. She is a better friend than I probably deserve. I am surrounded. There are labels: “Work.” “Childhood.” “NY Office.” “Grad School/Our House.” “India/New Projects.” When I look out the front window, this is what I see. Every day, I take a picture to help me remember and keep track of reality.
There has been a mosquito buzzing around my head for a while now, and eventually I let it settle on the exposed skin of my calf, just where my rumpled sock leaves the edge of my jeans. It is too late in the year for the insect still to be alive, and I am impressed by its will. I watch it land and poke its little snout along my bumpy skin. Such a small creature, and such a gentle pressure and the slightest sting. How can something so tiny take away so much? I wonder what other blood is mixing with mine, and I wonder what might happen to the next person it bites. Rationally I know I’m not contagious, but there are times when I think my loopiness and my emptiness might infect other people. I let the mosquito think it’s safe, I let it have its snack, but I feel the anger building inside me. I am stealthy, and then I strike. My palm comes down hard on its little head, and my blood and the blood of whoever or whatever was bitten before me splatters in a very tiny puddle on my leg. I flick the mosquito off me and rub away the blood with the edge of my sweater. I return to the piles around me.
I’m finding it easy to drift through the stacks of the distant past. My memories open up like old home movies. I see my mother, alive again, and can almost imagine her sitting here with me, going through the old photos, confirming my past. My mother, young, smelling of jasmine and talcum powder. The streets of my old town extend from my memory; I walk home from school along Woodsgate Road, and as I turn the corner toward our house, I see Ralph and Patsy in the window, their little heads bobbing from the force of their tails wagging. Their breath fogs up the window, and I wave to them. My mother will be in the TV room watching Days of Our Lives with her anatomy books spread out over the table. She will have given up studying for the day. She has polished her toenails and there are stained cotton balls tossed around on the floor, the couch.
There will be a glass of juice, grown slightly too warm, on the counter waiting for me, along with two Chips Ahoy! cookies on a small plate. Next to my snack, chicken or veal will be defrosting on a platter, assuming it’s not pizza night. My father will come home three hours from now. I will kick the soccer ball around in the backyard with my neighbor Jenny or I will do math problems on my yellow plastic desk. My mother will put on a Jim Croce album or Cat Stevens or Joan Baez, and she will hum along to it or talk on the phone or start pounding the chicken with a rolling pin, and sometimes all three at once.
I am a messy kid and I have a clumsily made bed with a rainbow comforter. I give my stuffed animals turns on the bed; they are in constant rotation for the prime spot on my green pillows. I am methodical in my fairness. I have never played with dolls, but I am convinced my stuffed animals have feelings and I treat them as confidantes and I make sure that their feelings are never hu
rt. I do not play favorites.
I know that my mother is sick; she has cut back her hours in her graduate program. She watches more TV than she ever has before. She talks to herself and I talk to my stuffed animals. My father tousles my hair when he comes home and refuses to look me in the eyes. This is how I know for sure that my mother is not doing well. My father watches her and she watches me. She goes over my math homework, quizzes me on my spelling, and asks who has the prime spot on my bed tonight. When I sleep, I have space under each arm for one of my friends. I choose one and let Mom choose the other—tonight it will be Snowball and Pigsty. Ralph or Patsy hurries around as my mother bends to kiss me good night. She didn’t eat much dinner, but still her breath smells of garlic and basil. She leaves the door open a crack to let the hall light in. I have bad dreams and I am afraid of the dark. I will always have night terrors. I will always lose my breath in fear at what I see, eyes open, in the darkness of all my subsequent bedrooms. I listen to my parents’ voices and the sounds of the TV. I don’t sleep; I only pretend. It will always be this way.
Do you see how much I remember?
Since there were no other witnesses, here is my version of waking up in the hospital, and you will have to take my word for it.
I woke up in a buzzing room and Charlie wasn’t there. I still blame him for that. I think it would have helped to see him straightaway. And I wonder, if he had been with me beforehand, in the hotel room, if he hadn’t been delayed, would he have seen the signs of my fever sooner, would he have gotten me to the hospital when there was more they could have done? Before the fever spiked. Before the seizures began.
Instead of Charlie, the first thing I saw in that dank, unpleasant room was the shadow of a fan cast on moldy walls. Everything else was awash in blankness. It was humid. Too humid for a hospital, I thought. And then I began to remember that I was far from home. But perhaps remember isn’t quite the right word. I sensed that I had chosen to go away for a while, back to an old, familiar place. The heat was familiar. Charlie was supposed to meet me here, but he hadn’t yet. Later I’d find a crumpled note in my bag that proved it. Written in the concierge’s hand and framed with the Lighthouse Hotel border: So sorry. Something came up. May be quite delayed. Will call soon. No name, but I assumed from Charlie. The tone certainly carried his abrupt politeness. There are many things I still remember.
And so I lay there in an unfamiliar bed, the sheets kicked down around my ankles, waiting for someone to arrive who would tell me where I was, what was wrong with me, when I could go home. I had a headache behind my eyes that reminded me of the migraines I have suffered ever since I was a little girl. And there was something plastic attached to my neck that sucked and pulled at my skin. My neck, in fact, was breathing instead of my mouth. I can’t begin to explain the panic I felt. Nor the sense that every time I approached something like a memory, it got blotted out by a sudden shadow. It’s the same kind of sensation that comes after you stare at the sun too long, and then as you look away, a trailing splotch of undefined color interrupts your vision. You can sense the many things that surround what you are looking at, but the closer you get to the thing itself, the blinder you become.
I tried to remember. Outside this hospital room, I thought, there is a city that leads to the sea. There is a hotel by the water, with lounge chairs sagging with heavy cotton cushions in shades of dark orange and blue. I can feel myself lying on one of those chairs, my fingers drawing shapes in the sand. I am waiting for something or someone, but before I can remember who, the sun begins to blind me again and a doctor walks in and knocks his clipboard against the metal frame of my bed. He has my attention. He is small and wears a neat mustache. His skin is dark against the blue white of his doctor’s coat. “Mrs. Scott? How are you feeling?”
“My name is Claire,” I answer. “Please call me Claire.”
Charlie
When I get home, Claire is still in the garage with her piles of artificial memory. Every time I look at her now, multiple images appear: the Claire in front of me, the Claire I fell in love with, and the Claire struggling against her mind and body in the hospital. Out of the three Claires, there may be only one I am still in love with, and I fear that the one in front of me is not a match. And of course I loathe myself for each and every one of these thoughts.
We are still reorganizing ourselves, trying to get back into some semblance of our old life, a life, I can admit, that has not been right for some time. Our troubles started long before Claire got sick. When the doctors called me, I hadn’t been in touch with Claire for several weeks. This was fairly typical. Her assignments took her to hard-to-reach places where phone connections were unreliable, and our conversations felt more like quick check-ins than real exchanges. She would let me know that she was well and whether the story was going satisfactorily or poorly; I would tell her that we had just put an issue to bed and update her on how her plants were faring. Our chats were polite and quick, and then we slipped back into our own, separate lives. Sometimes even her rushed “love yous” got cut off because of the poor connection.
When that phone call from the hospital came, though, in the early evening at the start of autumn, I felt a tremendous rush of fear, love, and confusion, and it took me a few moments to realize that the doctor was calling from the States—Florida, in fact—and not some remote clinic in Tamil Nadu. I had to brush aside a quick beat of anger—Claire was in America and hadn’t let me know—as I packed my bags while the doctor went on and on about seizures, telling me that Claire had been in and out of consciousness, that it was touch and go. I had no idea what I was doing in my panic. Somehow or other, there was a flight out of Burlington to New York, and from there a connecting flight to Miami first thing the next morning, and then I would have to rent a car and travel to the Keys, a place where neither I nor, as far as I knew, Claire had ever been before.
I hardly remember the drive from the airport, just little blips of images—the startling blue of the ocean, the narrow causeways that led me to the Lower Keys Medical Center, where finally my vision settled and my mind registered where I was. Such a strange feeling, to follow a driveway lined with palm trees, ending at a white-and-turquoise building, blocky and outdated. The whole place felt out of sync with time. I half expected to be greeted, handed a daiquiri, and led to a lounge chair by some smartly dressed concierge in a uniform of crisp white.
The breezes were thick with humidity; it was still summer in Florida and there were few tourists. The hospital itself felt half-abandoned; the AC was faltering, and the staff had set up box fans here and there to move the stifling air about. I felt caught in its sludge. To be honest, I wanted to return to my rental car, blast some cold air against my skin, and drive away from both that place and Claire, who the doctors had informed me just that morning was still unresponsive.
Even now, so many weeks later, when my mind reapproaches the memory of walking into her room, I want to turn away and run. But instead I find myself there, led gently by a kind nurse. I remember asking, when we arrived at the room, whether we should knock, to which the nurse replied, “No need for that,” and suddenly there I was, alone in a room with my unconscious wife. Her hair had gotten long. Someone had tied it into a loose ponytail, I suppose so it wouldn’t get tangled in the series of tubes and wires connecting Claire to too many machines to count. Everything in the room seemed to be in perpetual movement except for Claire. A breathing machine attached to Claire’s throat. Monitors that beeped erratic lines, documenting Claire’s invisible inner workings. A blood pressure sleeve that sighed to life every now and then. I don’t know how long I stood there, trying to decipher what these machines were telling me about my wife. I don’t know if I spoke to her, or if I just hovered close to her body, silent and waiting. I was used to Claire starting the conversation. I was used to following her lead. Eventually I pulled over a chair and reached for her fingertips. The back of her hand was blackened and bruised from IV lines. Her fingers were cold and unresponsive,
so I let them fall away from mine. I was horrified and, yes, a little repulsed.
How can I explain the sick, deep revulsion in my gut that crept up my back, tingled my neck? My sweat, in that humid room, felt icy. I couldn’t measure the Claire in front of me with the Claire of my mind’s eye. Here was only struggling body, interloper, false double. Claire had always been the strong one. And in recent months she had become so easy for me to identify as the selfish one, the brave one, the bad one, the one at fault, the one who left. And me? I had a script for myself as well. I was the loyal one, the steady one, the one who had been hurt, betrayed, the one who had stayed. But now Claire had shifted my certainties. Her silent body, suddenly vulnerable, weak, guileless, was making demands that Claire would never have made of me. Be strong, Charlie, it said. Don’t run away. Say something. Comfort me. Be the first one I see when I open my eyes. Of course, these were all projections. When Claire finally woke up, she didn’t come close to saying any of these things. But she did reach for my hand and say, “Tell me what happened.” I didn’t know where to begin.
It always takes me a little while before I approach Claire when I return home after work. I don’t know which Claire will greet me. On some days she meets me with clear eyes, with organized notes, and with a list of questions. What was her first published article? When she next meets with Dr. Stuart, can we ask him to lower the dosage of her prednisone? When we go to the grocery store, can I help her remember to pick up lemon curd? On other days her gaze is foggy. Rachel might be rubbing her back as they look through an old photo album. I know, right away, the days when she’s had a grand mal seizure that has left her in bed for the majority of the day, flipping through TV shows or scolding herself for laziness and another memory’s escape from her grasp. On other days she’s got fury in her eyes. The physical therapist was patronizing or she lost her balance on the stairs or she couldn’t find an old postcard from her father that she was sure was in one particular box.