I want to show you that no matter how many lives we run to ruin together, what matters is we are together.
What matters is we are running together.
I am this old man with yet another doctor in yet another hospital, this doctor and her notes, asking questions.
How old were you when you started to remember everything?
How old were you when you met Allen in the asylum?
The same age as when I met Tristan in the desert town.
And Billy on the road before the crash.
You are Allen and Tristan and Billy.
I am always Caleb.
If there is any continuity in these millions of lives it is us, you and I. Young and old. Hate and love, not opposite but entwined.
In the beginning I was so angry that you always died.
In the beginning I didn’t understand death, not when I could remember every life.
If you were here, you’d say, Don’t tell her anything. Not only because it sounds crazy, but because it’s not hers to know. But I’m an old man and all I have left are these memories.
And maybe that’s all we ever have; maybe that is what we’re made of.
In one life we met in the asylum where the walls wept in the summer and outside in the yard you offered me a contraband cigarette. We were both crazy and knew it; unlike what everybody says, it is possible to question your sanity and be batshit. Like criminals, we ask each other why we are inside and both of us lie about it and we smoke and crouch against the wall and watch the birds flit in and out, launching from the lawn into the sky.
That’s what freedom looks like, you tell me, and I think I fell in love. So simple and so ignorant but love is that, isn’t it, the unacknowledged ignorance of another person through which we convince ourselves we know, we see, we understand. But I understood nothing and so it was deep, this love, and I was young and barely remembered the other lives. We are fifteen and abandoned but we find each other in that asylum where the walls wept in the summer a kind of acid rain green.
I had my notebook, even then. The first time in my room, you open it and begin to read and I sit on my hands on the squeaking bed and rock back and forth like a metronome. And you ask, Is this why you’re in here? Even though you know because in group they asked and we weren’t supposed to lie, even though everybody lies, especially to doctors, and all I talked about were my dreams and how they began when I was thirteen and they crowded my head and sometimes I couldn’t hear anything so my parents thought I needed mental help. Put him away where somebody can fix him, he thinks he lives in another country, he’s speaking in tongues, he talks about wars he’s never fought and people he’s never met and skies that don’t look like ours.
You smile and murmur, That’s cool, and I love you a little more, I love the way your back looks in that t-shirt, like muscled wings, I love the length of your arms and your broad shoulders and the cherry blossom tattooed on your wrist. You say it means that everything dies, nothing lasts forever or even for very long.
I let you read my notebook because in it I remembered everything. Everything? Yes everything, every minute every second of every day since I was thirteen and sometimes it’s not even my life here, this life, this body and these walls. I don’t know how to keep it all separate in my head so that’s why I’m here.
You say, I want to know more. You say, Tell me about all of your worlds.
Where do I start? I’m never going to forget you and that’s not hyperbole, it’s not even romantic, I am never going to forget every detail of you and you might even be remembered in another world.
I was fifteen and felt it. How our lives ran together like rivers from different seas.
Every day they chase us from the yard and into the hall and they take away your cigarettes but we find ways around the corners and the pills and we collect pebbles of them in the palms of our hands, pink and blue and yellow, and you tell me about the river you used to sit beside in the summers when your family went to the country and the smooth rocks at the shore and then your words stop because some memory catches you and you turn away.
Don’t you want to forget some things?
Of course, but I have no choice. There is no choice. You said you were in the asylum because you tried to kill yourself, Allen. More than once. Why?
But that isn’t something you will ever tell me. Not in this life or any other. And there is no choice about forgetting or remembering. You forget to survive and I remember as a part of life I can’t separate from death. I remember every single one of your deaths, the hell that chased us through our lives.
It feels like a western, Tristan, all hot round sun and the earthy barn scent of horses and dust and desert vegetation like cactus and tumbleweeds, and we’re watering the horses in a shallow ravine with some remembrance of a storm from the night before. The long equine heads drop to slurp the muddy water and they flick their ears and the reins shake and flies pick at their soft spotted hides and their grey tails swish. We sit with our hats pulled low and there’s a tear in your trousers. There’s a bullet wound gaping in the tear in your trousers and the bullet went clean through. Last night I had to burn it through with the heated steel of my knife and you cursed me out so hard it carved into the stars and I used my second shirt to tie your leg and we drank whiskey and listened for approach. But there’s no approach and now the sun is burning and the sky is more blue than the brown water the horses drink and you ask if we’ll ever get to the end of the Earth.
I don’t know but that’s the only place for us, we’ve been riding for five days straight and I tell you about my dreams, the one where the walls are weeping in a strange big building and instead of pebbles in the ravine there are small coloured stones, so small we can swallow them. One’s supposed to put us to sleep and one’s supposed to keep us calm and the other one makes it hard to dream. We’re running because I can’t keep any of it in my head and I’m sorry, I know it’s dangerous and there’s no helping it, my father said I should be put down like a dog and now here we are with your shot-up leg taking rest with the snakes and the spiders.
Ain’t nobody at fault if your head’s a little sideways.
Doesn’t it feel like we’ve known each other all our lives? Doesn’t it feel like it’s been twenty winters?
We ride headlong. Your leg won’t stop bleeding. Your face grows pale. We stop on the mesa and the desert drops its cold weight on our backs. The horses breathe smoke like dragons, our breath curling out from our lungs and wrapping together and I wrap you up in my coat and my arms and build a fire through which I can see your eyes and how damp they grow like they are sweating even as we shiver. In the morning, there is frost along the flats and I have to help you up onto the horse. I ride behind you cradling you like a madonna and the back of your hair smells like the air and it is burning. I press my nose into it anyway and press my hand to the wound on your leg and though the blood is thick and slow like lava it stains my fingers and you tell me to burn it again, the first time didn’t take.
It goes on like this for days, you’re slowly bleeding and I’m trying to stop it. I talk to you to keep you awake until my voice sounds raw. I tell you what your names are in these other lives. The big building with the coloured pebbles: I call you Allen.
The one where you crash: your name is Billy.
Through every life, I am Caleb. You call me Caleb and I answer.
Billy, how’s your head? This is a regular question between us after the crash. You ask me too. How’s your head, Caleb? What other lives do you remember? At first it was a kind of mocking, a tease because you didn’t believe me. But through the years when I write down these memories and let you read them in my notebook, the consistency of the fragments tells another story.
Are you sure you’re not just telling stories?
No, because if they’re stories I should be abl
e to put them away, manipulate them, forget about them for a while. Instead these pieces come to me with such power and clarity, provoked by some scene or word, whether it’s on television or in conversation. The summer sun flashes a kind of hallucination across my eyes, you and I riding through a desert on horseback, the scent of blood in my mouth. The first time I ran into the hospital after your crash, the emergency room melded for a moment with another room, one with bars on the windows and doors that lock from the outside. I stood beside your bed, held your hand, and saw birds in my mind. I heard you say, That’s what freedom looks like. But it wasn’t a memory from this time, this life. We knew already how freedom felt.
Racing down a desert road together, the deep and steady thunder of the wheels beneath us.
The first time we see each other in that rundown town, two travellers at the frayed ends of the world.
Immediate recognition and not understanding how.
Not even time can hold us.
Are we always together?
Yes, always.
I don’t tell you about the dying.
In this timeline, after the crash and all the hours spent outside physiotherapy rooms, I meet a doctor and she tells me about total recall. We talk about the chaotic nature of memories while I watch through the glass as you learn how to walk again. Some people can recall everything in their lives, she says. Not many, but it exists for a few. She is one of the doctors that documents such things. I thought that shit was just in science fiction.
I thought for most of my life I was just crazy, because in other lives I am crazy or I’m told that I’m crazy. It’s easy to believe it when everyone around you says it.
Then I just accepted I’m crazy and that’s when I met you, Billy. Eyes so black they hold the crazy in. They take all the crazy in the universe and suck it down into nothing. I fell in.
The doctor says, Temporal recall.
That’s what the doctor tells me eventually, that her particular group has discovered this thing, this phenomenon. Temporal recall, like telekinesis or something psychic and psychic means crazy, doesn’t it? I don’t know how she knows there is something about me, maybe it’s the distraction in my eyes but that could be because I’m worried about you. Maybe she sees the lives lined in my features, each stroke a memory.
Eventually I show her my notebook.
That’s when our arguments start because you don’t want anyone to know our secret, Billy.
They’ll put you away. I hear you. I can’t claim to listen to a hundred lives I’m leading in other planes of existence, or whatever they call it, and think they won’t come for me. The ever-present “they.”
They’ll put you away and then where will I be?
You and I made a pact to never leave each other and if one of us goes (it will always be you but I don’t say that) then the other has to immediately kill himself. Was this ever a joke? It wasn’t for me. Don’t call it romantic, it’s just practical.
There is no life without you and I’ve seen it a million times.
Back in the asylum we play checkers in the TV room. Your name is Allen. I’m still Caleb. There’s someone in the corner, facing the corner, talking to herself. There’s someone else in front of the TV arguing with the TV. Outside, snow falls. The cold and wind howl at the windowpane. For minutes, I am caught in the cadence of the winter storm, flung and flurried like the snowflakes into a vortex of other memories. They feel like a blizzard in my mind, impossible to catch just one and examine the crystalline perfection of pattern. Instead, I am trudging along a glacier, spike-heeled with crampons and mittens that make my hands sweat. Above, a sky so blue it feels endless, like night will never fall. A permanent day for a permanent memory, and in a blink the white disappears with the cold and I am staring at the edges of a window, and I look back at you, Allen, and you are looking at me over the red and black pieces of our checkerboard.
Again?
Yes, more than again. Always. We are in winter and I am pulling you on a travois, you’re buried under furs and your hands have turned blue, more blue than the sky, and your dark eyes show nothing of the day, just night.
My headache feels like a sun expanding behind my eyes. Going supernova.
Caleb. You pull me back. Again. Am I there? you ask.
Of course you are, you’re always there.
We’re on a glacier and I’m trying to keep you alive. Always trying to keep you alive against the perpetual fall of night.
At night in the asylum the restless spirits wail like the wind, up and down our wing of the hospital. In our room we stare at the shadow the window bars make on the blank wall.
Do you think we’ll ever get out of here?
You will before me. I’m permanently crazy. They just want to see that you won’t harm yourself again.
Except I will.
Except you will.
So maybe I’ll stay in here with you.
But the thought of that cuts through me like a wound and I look across the gap of space between our beds and the cold of the glacier yawns beneath my feet and it changes in a blink to a desert, a winter desert dusted with new snow. The horse’s breath plumes in front of us. You can’t stay. You shouldn’t stay. Maybe you need to be out there so I can follow you.
This is the only pattern that matters. You’re hurt and I try to fix you and you keep hurting yourself.
I’m old with it, even in our asylum. I feel the years lined along my bones, stringing my muscles together. Sometimes when I write in my notebook my hand changes into a shape of thin skin and thick blue veins, the gnarl of an ancient tree.
Since one of us can’t leave and the other doesn’t want to stay, we make a pact to both get out together.
No matter what, we run together.
The memory tells me you’re dying in the desert, Tristan, but it doesn’t come to me chronologically. Time doesn’t work that way and neither do our minds. Birds outside our barred window remind me of desert crows and I see myself shooing them away from the blood on your leg while you sleep, the mercy of sleep. The horses hoof the ground and snort. The moon is a round white eye in the night, a cyclopean indifference to how alone we are, running from our families because they think I’m mad, possibly demonic, and you’re a deviant.
Something’s different about this memory, though.
I’m also bleeding. Or is it your blood?
On the palms of my hands there’s blood.
On the front of my shirt is blood.
The sticky mass in my hair is blood and we’re both cold, shivering like we’re trying to throw off a bad spirit.
I hold tighter. The crows come again, a flutter of black wings and black eyes darting in every direction where they smell death.
In a blink we’re riding again, the horse takes the brunt of this weight with its head lowered and you’re too weak to even grasp the reins so I hold them and hold you. The winter sun blurs overhead like a sulphur disc and I feel that this is later, much later, that this isn’t the first few days when we ran from the town. It’s your other leg bleeding, and along your ribs where I cauterized and it didn’t take. Again. Always.
Why are you always dying?
It screams in my head like a crow’s call.
Why are you always at the end of your life?
Show me another life. The tears seep out the corners of my eyes, a cold burn. Show me something else so we’re not just this, the universe can’t be this cruel, it isn’t a god.
Our bodies on the ground with the snow falling on them, dusting your eyelashes. I can’t even build a fire, I just hold your hand.
Word travelled through the towns. There’s that witch and his deviant. Sinful creatures, sons of perdition.
They shoot me first. And as I’m stumbling down the street, I hear you running toward me, shouting, you
r gun out.
But it’s too late.
Why don’t you just lie to them?
Three months in the asylum, Allen, and I know you’re going to leave me. You can’t take it anymore, you want to be free, all of our promises sound like lies now and I should’ve known better. A pact to run together, who are we fooling? When you go back to your life it’s to the country homes by the river and the gilded lights and good education. Why don’t I lie so I can leave too? So we can have a life outside of this big building, one without pills and bars on the window and locked doors and wistful birds?
There’s nothing out there for me. Except you. And I can’t have you. We leave here and you hurt yourself.
That’s the pills talking.
Because you don’t see your own deaths and I’m old from the sight of it, the constant fucking reality of it.
The only reality in worlds of crazy.
All the worlds of crazy in my head.
Billy, how’s your head?
A hospital at night feels like a morgue. I sit beside your bed. It’s right after the crash and you’re bandaged around your head like a mummy, like a burn victim, white gauze and stitches holding your face together, holding your skull together so you don’t spill all over the pillow like an egg. I hold your hand but it’s like holding a corpse’s.
I came to the hospital before your crash.
This is the concussive force of a memory, felt in delay.
I used to come here long before your crash.
I lay in bed, or on a tray. Yes, a tray like a meal in a cafeteria and they put me inside a big drum and told me not to move as they took pictures of my head. Inside my head.
Caleb, how’s your head?
I’ve been inside this hospital, in and out, for weeks. Weeks stretching to months and so many tests, studying to be a doctor doesn’t come with this many tests. Being a student doesn’t inflict this many tests. Tests of my memory and tests of my cognition and tests of my vision. Something is wrong with my head and it’s always been wrong and they tell me some weeks in, some weeks after all of these damn tests that there’s a part of my brain that doesn’t want to play with the other parts and now it’s rebelling. It’s malignant, like resentment, like some form of hate that’s embedded in love and the only one it hurts is you.
Seasons Between Us Page 15
