UNEASY CHRYSALIDS, OUR MEMORIES

by John Shirley

JULY 4, 1993

I have been told by my history tutor that since I am an American, today should have some special significance for me. I should feel patriotic and grateful to my country. Or at least I should feel guilty if I don’t feel that way. But none of those emotions are present because I didn’t know about the importance of the Fourth of July until today. Or at least, the person who I now am didn’t know, though probably the old Jo Ann Culpepper did. Marsha, a cheery and energetic girl who I have been told was my best friend, said that I was once quite patriotic as a little girl, and should have been as a woman, especially after the big revival of nationalism after 1986.

A president and three of his cabinet members were assassinated with a bomb, and that sparked off another sort of uprising shortly after July 1986. I gather that most of the insurgents and guerrillas in the U.S. were purged. At least, that is what Mr. Zelenke, my history tutor, tells me, though some of the things he tells me are so outrageous that I often wonder if he makes them up.

According to Marsha, I knew all those historic things before I lost that portion of my memory two years ago, but when I hear them now, they don’t actually ring with familiarity.

Dr. Fosdick said that my memory was fractured in September 1991 because of what he called “a permanent complication from glandular damage causing a chemical imbalance rendering mnemonic banks inaccessible, with pathological implications of dementia praecox.” I think that was it. He said that it will be impossible for me to get my old memory back, so they will try to give me a background with tutoring.

This diary is supposed to be an exercise for recall. I’m still terribly absentminded, even in small things. I forgot to turn off the tap, and water flooded the house; I forgot to feed my fish, and they died.

Dr. Fosdick said that I could repair my reflexes but that I’ll have to settle for what little I have left of my life.

I remember my mother, some. She was tall, thin, dark-haired, like me. That’s where I got most of my looks. Even the black eyes with the blue circles under them. It looked good on my mother, but not on me. She was a speedy, nervous person, I think. Always doing something, easily startled. I’m not like that, really I’m not. I’m rather slow with my reactions, and boring to talk to. People get tired of me easily.

But it’s not as if I had nothing to say. I was even thinking of starting an organization to help people with messed-up memories like mine. A lot of people suffer from it, especially politicians, I’ve noticed.

I don’t remember my father much. I doubt if I liked him, somehow.

I wish I could remember more about my mamma. I have to admit I’m lonely. People shouldn’t have to admit that they’re lonely; it’s too much like signing a confession. But I feel guilty that I’m lonely, like I’ve failed socially. Dr. Fosdick says give it time.

They say I was an only child. I once had lots of friends and a boyfriend. I wonder what happened to my boyfriend? No one seems to know. Some of my friends come to see me once in a while. No, that isn’t true. Dr. Fosdick said that this journal should be extremely honest. Actually, none of them ever come to see me because of what happened to my parents during the purge by the vigilantes. A lot of people don’t like to be associated with me because of my antinationalist background. I wish I could remember my “antinationalist background.”

JULY 8, 1993

Dr. Fosdick took me to one of the Independence Day government-sponsored festivals a few days ago. Free beer or pop or hot dogs. I didn’t think he’d ask me to go anywhere with him. I thought that his interest in me would be purely clinical. But he has spent an awful lot of time with me.

We were sitting together, leaning our elbows on Minnesota. Each of the fifty tables at the festival was shaped like one of the states, and at the height of the evening they push them all together to symbolize the strengths of nationalism. All the tables together make the shape of the United States, with mustard stains and crumpled paper cups on it. We were drinking Coke, the National Drink (state-owned), out of bottles shaped like Polaris missiles, and eating hot dogs. Those were the only things on the menu. There were a lot of boisterous people making toasts and singing the anthem all around us (see, Dr. Fosdick? I’m using words from my vocabulary exercises when I talk. Like you wanted! Boisterous!), but they had looks of strain, like the celebration was out of character. We were a little island of quiet in the middle of colorful festivity. The festival was on top of the Ford Defense Building, in the open air under the bubble of the smog shield, through which I could barely make out the half-moon. The waiters looked silly dressed in red rags like the Communists wear, and Dr. Fosdick explained that it was supposed to be symbolic of something because they were serving us. I thought that it was symbolic of the silliness of the organizers of the festival, but I couldn’t say that.

I sat quietly, wondering if Dr. Fosdick had ever had connections with the vigilantes. I am sure that he didn’t, because he took me in after they killed my parents, and no nationalist would shelter the daughter of impurities.

Dr. Fosdick said something strange to me, then: “Sometimes it’s a valuable asset to have no memory. You have no regrets that way. I envy you at times, Jo Ann.” That was the first time he’d ever called me Jo Ann. Always it was Miss Culpepper. I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled.

I was sort of disappointed the first time I met Dr. Fosdick. I had thought that he would be an imposing Germanic figure with thick spectacles and an accent and a white laboratory smock. That was how a scientist was supposed to look, I thought. But when I was introduced to him seven months ago, I met a short little man with coarse black hair greased back like a cowboy’s, no glasses over his shiny blue eyes. Dr. Fosdick has a rusty face. He wears jeans and a plaid shirt, even at work, never touches a white smock, and he listens to country music. We had to leave the festival early when some vigs recognized me. So we didn’t get to see the sky rockets or the floggings.

JULY 10, 1993

I underwent something ugly today. It is running around in my head like a dog that’s chained in one place so long it tracks a circular rut around itself in the dirt.

They made me relive the incident that took away my memory. I didn’t want to do it. I wish that the incident itself was washed out, but for some reason, only everything before it is gone. They aren’t sure if it was the thing that happened or the blow I got on the head that took it away. Maybe both.

My memory goes back two years. It starts with the incident, and everything before that is gone except for a few fragments: high-school graduation, studying English (Marsha says that I gave up my ambition to be an English teacher after the book burnings), women’s-infantry-corps initiation and the recovery in the hospital after the initiation, a trial of some kind (though I can’t remember what I was tried for), some childhood pictures of my mother happily working in her garden, my aunt on her deathbed, a dog biting my ankle, a date with a boy who insisted on sodomy instead of the usual… and then the incident.

The nurses at the clinic are very sympathetic when I tell what happened. They make tsk noises about the men who killed my parents, but none of them ever say anything directly against the vigs. I’m not bitter.

Before the incident, my memories of education leave off with a little geography, ability to write (I had to relearn how to read), the names of the nations in the UN except for the United States. Some math and grammar, but almost no lit, which was once my specialty.

And the incident. The men who came into our apartment and what they did with knives to my mother and father. The blood, the blades, the screams, the curious neighbors looking in the open door. I can’t understand why it wasn’t erased. The memories of my parents that might have made me hate their killers are lost.

I had to relive it once today, so I’d rather not go into it more now.

JULY 30, 1993

I haven’t written in this journal for so long because so many wonderful things have happened that I just didn’t know how to express it.

Well, perhaps that is an exaggeration. To make myself feel better. Because there are some things I’ve been worried about, too.

I didn’t think anyone would ever care about me much, because I’m pretty shallow and I have this habit of running myself down. But Dr. Fosdick says that if people look down on me it’s because I look down on myself. And someone does care about me. Dr. Fosdick. I guess it’s okay to talk about all this here, though I feel funny talking about Dr. Fosdick, because I know he’s going to read this. I’m supposed to be honest, so that he’ll know how much I’ve improved and all.

Dr. Fosdick made love to me yesterday at my apartment. I think he had been considering it for a while, because he had insisted that I take birth-control pills, though I was sure that no one would ever want to sleep with me. He must have cared about me right off, to have prepared for it so long ahead of time.

He came to my apartment unexpectedly, with the usual dope that people bring on social visits; but it wasn’t the government-issue green-weed kind, it was the white powdery sort that makes you excited. He really didn’t need to give me cocaine for that, however. I had waited for a long time. I can’t really remember any of my other lovers, so I can’t compare Dr. Fosdick to anyone. (It’s funny, but he has never asked me to call him by his first name, and I don’t even know what it is. I had to call him Dr. Fosdick when he made love to me.) He was nice, and he didn’t even mind that I was in my period. He was energetic, like those really fast pistons you see on the Eagle car commercials on the viddy.

But something else has happened. After we made love, he gave me an injection in my right arm (it’s still sore) with a syringe from a leather case he had in his coat pocket. He said that it was a serum that might bring back my memory.

I asked him why he couldn’t give it to me at the clinic, and he replied that it was still a bit experimental and that he hadn’t had it officially approved as yet. The medical board wouldn’t let him use it until it was too late. It had to be injected within a certain period of time after the original loss of memory, he told me, or else it wouldn’t work. He held my hand and said very earnestly that the medical board didn’t care about my recovery like he did.

The only thing that really disturbed me was that he injected it into my arm without asking me first, or even telling me. I turned away from him for a moment, and the next thing I knew, there was a needle stinging my arm.

He explained that he had wanted it to be a surprise.

AUGUST 4, 1993

Two things happened today that should mean something to me, I think, though they seem distant and removed from me.

I was walking with Dr. Fosdick in the lower corridors of the subterranean shopping center looking at the “new” Revolutionary War-style dresses in the shop windows. It was Friday, so the walk was crowded with people going to the free U.S.-history exhibitions in the auditorium down the way. Among that crowd, I saw one of the men who had stabbed my mother and father. He was a big man with his hair shaved into the star and his eyes very red from dope. He was walking with another man I didn’t recognize. The first man pointed at me and laughed, taking a step toward me. Dr. Fosdick motioned for me to remain where I was. He walked briskly over to the man with the star on his square head and said something to him I couldn’t hear. The man laughed again, but nodded and walked away.

I felt very detached from the whole scene, but there was a certain sense of déjà vu.

The other thing that happened was the headline on the front page of The Daily Loyalty: UNITED STATES WITHDRAWS FROM UN. Mr. Zelenke says that the withdrawal marks the end of a disappointing era.

We were discussing the event at my lesson, after I came back from the shopping center. He said that the withdrawal was a further step toward the “Purification of Resources” goal the Hearth government had set for itself.

Mr. Zelenke is a spindly, kindly man with a large nose and eyes that slant downward so mournfully I always feel I should agree with whatever he says to keep him from crying. He always seems to be on the point of tears.

But this time something grated in me when he said “purification.”

“But couldn’t it be,” I objected in a coarser tone than I am used to, “that they are pulling out of the UN because they’re scared?”

Mr. Zelenke was upset and probably would have started crying if I hadn’t taken it all back.

AUGUST 6, 1993

Some cruelly surprising things happened today.

I was sitting with Dr. Fosdick in his office. He had an arm around my shoulders, and he was reading a poem to me from a book called Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire.

“This book was my wife’s favorite,” he said casually as he flipped through the yellowed pages with his rough right hand. I leaned against him, pretending to look at the book. I don’t have much to myself, really. Very little memory. I feel like a sort of scarecrow in personality, just a rag on some broomsticks. Because people are made of memories. And leaning against Dr. Fosdick makes me feel like his memories are mine, too, somehow.

“Are you separated from your wife?” I asked. I asked mostly out of obligation, because I really didn’t want him to think about her.

“No. She’s dead two years. Killed in a … landslide. It was one of those stupid, unexpected accidents. We were hiking …” His voice got husky.

Strange. My parents have been dead two years. The timing of our tragedies was the same.

“I understand,” I said, feeling bad for bringing it up at all. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

He took a deep breath. “Anyway, this was her favorite poetry.” He began to read out loud. I didn’t like the poetry much, but maybe I didn’t understand it right. And I was distracted by the sore place on my arm where Dr. Fosdick had injected me again that afternoon.

But two stanzas sounded almost familiar, and I can’t get them out of my mind. They are from a poem called The Flask:

. . . and hinges creak or in a press

in some deserted house where the sharp stress

of odors old and dusty fill the brain

an ancient flask is brought to light again

And forth the ghosts of long dead odors creep

there, softly trembly in the shadows, sleep

a thousand thoughts, funereal chrysalids

phantoms of the old folding darkness hide …

A woman was standing in the office with us! There was no way that she could have gotten in; the door was locked. The woman was lovely and covered with white mist that still revealed the outlines of her nude body, her blond hair streaming over her white shoulders.

I gasped, and Dr. Fosdick asked, almost eagerly, “What’s wrong? Did the poem upset you?”

I pointed at the woman. He looked in that direction, right through her, then looked back at me and shrugged.

“Don’t you see her?” I whispered.

The woman was coming toward us. And now I could see that she was looking at Dr. Fosdick with hate in her narrow green eyes.

Then she vanished. Just like that.

Dr. Fosdick says that it was a hallucination symptomatic of the return of my memory. He says that she is probably some important figure out of my past whom I didn’t recognize yet.

But there was no familiarity about her at all. She looked Scandinavian, about thirty. Where would I have met such a person, and seen her naked?

I was scared the rest of the day, knowing that she was somewhere around.

AUGUST 20, 1993

Dr. Fosdick asked to see this journal last Friday. I told him that I had destroyed it because it contained parts which embarrassed me. He seemed to repress anger, but he insisted that it was very important to my progress for him to know my inner feelings. I apologized and said that I would start another journal.

Of course, I didn’t really destroy it, but I hid it. I don’t know why exactly. Or perhaps I do know. I hate to think about it, but I don’t trust Dr. Fosdick anymore. I wanted to trust him. I wanted to fall in love with him. But I can’t. Maybe it’s because he says that he is in love with me, and I cannot believe that anyone could love me.

But disquieting things have happened lately.

The woman has come back many times. I would see her in the corners of the room, sitting, looking at me as if I were a mirror. I didn’t tell Dr. Fosdick about it.

I have had some strange recollections. I seem to recall being a little girl on a dairy farm owned by my parents. Perhaps my memory of my mother as tall and thin is a distortion of the chemical imbalance I was supposed to have, because the woman I remember as my mother on the dairy farm had red hair and freckles and a tall blond husband.

I remember going to medical school, though Marsha didn’t tell me anything about that. The faces around me at the school are indistinct and unidentified. There is an alien sense to these memories that makes me feel like an actress who has memorized her lines, only to find herself in the wrong play.

I have one peculiarly vivid memory of walking alone in a park. It is a spring day tempered by a cool breeze, the heaters under the bushes adding to the faint warmth that comes to us from the sunlight penetrating the smog shield. I’m in a secluded place, though the path is well beaten by lovers. There is lush greenery on all sides, with little firecracker tongues of red and yellow flowers. The background detail of the dream is lucid, but the human events are blurry, like a camera shot that shifts in and out of focus confusingly.

I am looking at a blue jay who is looking back at me from a branch of a pussy willow a few feet from my face. The bird cocks its head as if it’s listening to my thoughts and doesn’t want to miss anything. Its eyes are shining like the beads of sweat on my forehead. We regard each other for a minute, and then it screams raucously and flurries at my face. I put up my hands to shield my eyes, but the bird flies over my shoulder, and I hear someone cry out behind me. There are two men there, one with his hands to his face. He grunts: “Why did it attack me? Damn thing. Kill it!”

“Too late. It got away,” the other man says in a voice that is almost familiar. “You must have come too near its nest. Blue jays are temperamental like that.”

The first man drops his hand, and there are three long hyphens reddening his right cheek where the bird clawed him. “Well, the woman’s still here, she ain’t flown off. Let’s take care of her.” He takes a step toward me.

But the other man puts a restraining hand on his companion’s arm. I cannot see the face of the second man; it is as if he wears a mask of mist.

“No, leave her alone. Our information was wrong. She goes to my school. She’s not one of them, she’s a nationalist.”

I nod hastily, and note the Captain America armbands on the right bicep of each man. Nationalist vigilantes.

I feel like I should know the man who intervened for me, but his face is lost. He puts a rough hand on my arm, smiling… .

The memory ends there. It is like the chrysalis of some strange creature struggling to emerge. But I know I was never a nationalist. My father was a dissenting liberal. That’s why the vigs killed my parents.

Did the stranger with the lost face lie for me?

Somewhere, there is a very important lie.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1993

I’m frightened. I’m scared of myself because I have developed an unreasoning hatred for Dr. Fosdick. I think of excuses to avoid my therapeutic sessions with him, and I’ve broken all our dates.

And when I reread my diary, parts of it—especially the last part-sound like they were written by someone else. “The chrysalis of some strange creature . . Did I say that? I don’t know what I meant by that. And the handwriting in the August 20 section of my diary is smaller than usual, almost crabbed. Maybe I was just in a hurry.

But this morning I went to get my hair done. They asked me if I had an appointment, and I said, “Yes, of course. The same time I’ve come to this hairdresser’s every week for four years.” And then I caught myself and wondered why I had said that. I hadn’t been to that hairdresser before. I usually do my own hair. And they said they had no appointment for me. The secretary gave me a strange look and took off her reading glasses to watch me as I left.

I had made an appointment; I remember it distinctly. I remember playing with the cat with a pencil while calling the hairdresser’s on the phone. But I don’t have a cat.

And I’ve been sleepwalking. I woke up last night in the kitchen. I’m afraid to tell anyone about all this. They’d put me away for sure.

So I just sit in my drab apartment and try not to think about it. I try to read, but I’m too nervous to sit still enough to concentrate.

My apartment has two rooms—bathroom and the combination living room, bedroom, and kitchenette. It’s paid for by my parents’ insurance. The rooms are undecorated. I took down the pictures Dr. Fosdick gave to me.

I shift uncomfortably in my wooden chair as I write this, because my clothes are tormenting me. They are all too small, though I haven’t gained any weight. I no longer like the colors and textures of my clothing. Too drab. Crude. I can’t imagine why I chose them.

There is something missing in my room, as if it should have another life in it besides mine. Something small to warm up the corners and add motion. A pet. A small dog? A cat! I’ve never wanted one before, but I have an empty spot in me, like a little drawer pulled open in my chest where a miniature life should fit in to supplement my own… .

When I read, it’s always poetry. I disliked poetry before, but lately I’ve been reading Baudelaire. I’m beginning to see the veins of death that he talks about, veins that run through the walls of any place you have grown accustomed to. The old man living upstairs is part of a conspiracy to convince me that old age is inevitable so that I will make supplications to time.

I no longer see the woman, but I feel her presence. And I can catch glimpses of a small animal that I can’t identify running around the floor in the room, poking its nose from behind chairs or hiding under cushions, darting just on the periphery of my vision. I suspect that it is my lost pet. It is like the panther in Rilke’s poem who was behind bars so long that its existence is so wholly subjective it might as well be dead.

Rereading this diary, I am growing more and more worried. Because I am certain that Jo Ann Culpepper had never read Rilke. She disliked poetry. And she would never have said anything about “supplications to time” and all that. And the handwriting is almost a scribble.

I find it increasingly easy to refer to Jo Ann Culpepper almost formally, as if I were speaking of a relative who had passed away… . Someone whose memory I can regard as I would a caged animal.

SEPTEMBER 4, 1993

Marsha came to see me today, just as I was feeding the two cats I got from the pound.

Marsha is an Irish dumpling, springy and so optimistic that it makes me pessimistic. I don’t know why I feel vindictive toward her all of a sudden. I think we were once good friends. It is cruel of me. But I felt antipathy from the moment she came into my room.

“Hello, hello! Ohhh, it’s been so long, Jo Ann, no kidding. I’ve been really worrying about you. Dr. Fosdick, too. He asked me to—”

I glared the dimples from her round cheeks. “Did Dr. Fosdick tell you to come?”

“What’s wrong?” Her saccharine voice faltered, and she put a hand to her doughy face as if to adjust a feature slipped out of place. I just looked at her, trying to remember.

But I felt no friendship for her. She was brown and hamsterlike, a rodent snuck into my room, an invader, a stranger come to sell me something.

“I don’t want anything,” I said. I had picked up a vase with one hand without noticing having done it. When she looked at the vase, I quelled the urge to brain her with it, and set it back on the table. My trembling fingers left it slightly rocking.

“What? Jo Ann-”

“I don’t need you or Dr. Fosdick.”

“Jo Ann.” She was hurt.

“I’m sorry,” I said, seeing the blond woman standing in the corner, her jade-green eyes stony with loathing. I saw her only in my mind’s eye this time, but so vividly I thought that she was about to slap Marsha across the face. But Marsha smiled, reassured, as I said, “Well … How have you been?”

We chatted uncomfortably for a while, until the estrangement grew into embarrassment. Then she left, murmuring about coming back soon, calling the clinic, they’re worried.

I hope I never see her again. If she gives me that “It’s-been-so-long” crap again, I’ll feed her to my cats.

SEPTEMBER 5, 1993

I was afraid that he’d come and smash my door down if I didn’t, so I went to visit Dr. Fosdick today. I forced myself.

“Thank God,” he said, nervous, embarrassed at his unprofessional outburst. “I’ve been worried sick about you. Why didn’t you answer the door when I knocked?” His mouth worked as if he were trying to keep something from escaping from it, and his lips were the parting folds of a chrysalis.

“I … must have been asleep, Doctor.”

He looked into my eyes and raised a brow. “Really?”

How dare he question my honesty! I thought furiously. Fake it. He can have you committed.

I shrugged. “I haven’t been well. Sleep too deeply.”

“What? Not well? Here, sit down.” I sat by him on the con-foam couch in his office and toyed with the leaves of a potted plant, shredding them one by one between my grotesquely thin fingers.

“In some ways I have been improving. I’ve been more … articulate lately. Words come to me more easily than they used to. I’ve begun to remember some books I must have read before…” Then I sensed that I was telling him things he shouldn’t know.

“You do look more confident… . But what is it that you have been remembering?” He put an arm around me. I pushed it off. He frowned but only opened his desk drawer for the little tape recorder for the session. In that swift movement I saw in the open drawer a framed photo of the woman of my apparition. She was sitting on a lawn in an evening gown, surrounded by three large cats. One of the cats was very black and perched itself on one of her soft shoulders, nestling in her lush blond hair. The cat seemed to be looking at me, until Dr. Fosdick closed the drawer on its golden eyes.

The woman in the photo had been Dr. Fosdick’s wife. I remembered; she remembered.

“There is a surprise waiting for you back at your flat,” Dr. Fosdick was saying. “I had it sent-” But I cut him off with as hard a slap as I could manage, leaving a red imprint on his cowboy jaw. I turned and ran from the office, pushing an astounded secretary to the floor in a flurry of overturned papers as I rushed past. A bus was just loading outside. I hopped aboard and turned to look at Dr. Fosdick as he ran, unheeded, after the bus a block back. His face, getting smaller, was the face of the man of my memory—the vigilantes in the park, the medical student, Dr. Lawrence Fosdick, my husband. Older, but undeniably it was he.

Jo Ann Culpepper didn’t know him before the loss of her memory.

But I remember a night in a beach cabin on the coast of Maine. I could map the topography of his hands over my breasts; on breasts fuller than Jo Ann’s, between hips wider than hers.

I remember our quiet marriage, our work together at the clinic, the exhaustive private work at the laboratory after our regular hours at the clinic.

And Lawrence’s warnings. He said that I should not make fun of the vigs. But I hated the nationalists. They controlled Lawrence, and through him puppeted me. Since Lawrence was vigilante coordinator for our sector, he was expected to live up to a vig model. They made a ridiculous cartoon of our private life.

He warned me again. But I derided the nationalists at our parties, where a quarter of our guests were vigs.

I think I knew they would kill us. But: Death may rise, a sun of another kind, and bring to blossom the flowers of their minds. Baudelaire again.

I wanted to kill us both, but only one of us died.

He stood behind me on the mountainside, and I knew what he was going to do.

I didn’t try to stop him, because I thought he would pull us both over the edge. But he pushed only me. I fell, saw him receding, getting smaller against the sky, and I felt the giant hand crumple me in granite fingers. The landslide skinned me alive under jagged rocks. A million points of penetration.

I lay in shock, my exposed face shredded into a red sponge soaking up pain. I watched my husband scuttle down the hillside path, jumping over sagebrush and winding around the tormented bristle-cone pines, himself an animate root. He stood over me with his face twitching in a thin-sauce parody of my agony. I remember the moment of death shining like the jeweled eyes of a rapacious blue jay.

I remembered all, seeing him get smaller as the bus left him behind, as if I was falling from the cliff again. Smaller. I hurried back to my room, managed to get there before he did.

There was his “surprise.” A fat and butter-yellow canary in an ornate cage with a note tied to it with a ribbon. I didn’t bother to read the note, but I took the cage inside. The bird fluttered in its confinement like a memory that wants to be forgotten. It reminded me of Marsha. So, while I was packing my bags, I left the cage door open with the cats in front of it.

By the time I had everything I needed—I would travel light, leave most of Jo Ann’s clothes behind, and buy new things later—the cats were finished. I brushed stray feathers from their whiskers and took them along in a paper sack, grabbed up the suitcase, and took a cab to a hotel. On the way to the hotel we passed through a neighborhood that Lawrence and I had once lived in. We had lived in this neighborhood, across from the playfield of the elementary school, during the time we unlocked the memory code.

Experimenting on rats, Lawrence and I found that the memory of the sound of an electric bell was chemically recorded into an eight-segment chain of six amino acids. When the chemicals were isolated from the brain and injected into other rats that were not trained to the sound, the untrained animals acted as if they had been conditioned to the bell. My husband simply extrapolated it into humanity… . Typical of him to find it easy to compare people with trained animals.

Combinations of twenty amino acids produce peptides that are programmed with certain memories, according to which sequence of amino acids is chosen. Larry found which combinations of amino acids correlated with general memories in rats. It wouldn’t be difficult —merely tedious—to carry the process into evaluation of the human memory system.

He never told me what he had intended to do with the results. Perhaps the national Hearth would use it to train soldiers, injecting memories synthesized from a trained fighter pilot into the brain of a trainee. Or maybe extract information from prisoners by withdrawing their memories and reinjecting them into volunteers. If I can help it, they’ll never use it for anything. I put up with the vigs for convenience’s sake, but they forced the issue. I should have known where Lawrence’s loyalties would be, him and his fucking cowboy music.

The day after the final proofs of success, he was called to a vig meeting. They were voting as to whether to purge a Professor Culpepper. The vote was affirmative. Larry, in his capacity as regional coordinator, signed the death order. But he asked that the professor’s only child, the girl, be spared and turned over to the clinic. He had use for her. No one objected. It didn’t matter if the girl attempted to tell the authorities who’d killed her parents. The vigs are “officially” frowned upon, but actually sanctified by the national Hearth government. They are never brought to court.

The girl was just seventeen, ripe time in the development of her memory coordinations. But it turned out even better than he had hoped. Her memory had blanked from the shock of witnessing her parents’ murder. There would be no complications of her prior memory patterns if he were to introduce new combinations of peptides. But first he had to obtain them. A day later he received an ultimatum from the vigs. His wife must be killed because of her impurities, or he …

He told me about the ultimatum and said that we would hide in our cabin in the Ozarks until the danger was over.

Then he killed me to save his skin and his position.

No. He killed her. But he carried her back, to the cabin where he’d hidden the equipment, and extracted the mnemonic peptides. And he injected a large portion of Sandra’s mnemonic peptides into me.

1 was lucky. He also saved the memories of my father; he still has them, frozen. He might have tried to put those in me, and I would have killed myself by now if he had. He injected too much of Sandra in me, because I remember more than he wanted.

I am tall, thin, five-foot-eight, weigh a hundred-ten. But someone who weighed one-hundred-thirty and who was five inches shorter than I is trying to fit herself into my body. There isn’t enough room. There is an overwhelming nausea, as if I’d overeaten to the point of vomiting. I feel like the whole nation must have felt in 1986. Usurped. Cut open from the inside.

The husband of the string of cold chemical memories ordered the vigs to kill my father, then killed his wife. Then he made her memories mine. Why? Because he wanted her back? He must have been crazy with remorse.

Crazy with remorse? What crap. Jo Ann is an idiot if she believes that. Vigilantes know no remorse. He brought me back because he’s an inept incompetent.

But Jo Ann deserves everything she got. It makes me nauseated to read the first part of her diary. It’s full of fatuous and naive comments like “I was even thinking of starting an organization to help people with messed-up memories …” and “He was nice, and he didn’t even mind that I was in my period.” And I’m revolted by the big-eyed innocence in the way she looks at things. She let him dominate her. “Leaning against him …” I think he was able to justify killing me to himself because I would never let him dominate me. The gullible little ass trusted him right from the start, let him dominate her until he shot her up with me, erasing bit by bit the last of her vestigial personality.

Lawrence and I used to talk of the possible meanings of our discoveries. Obviously, personality is merely the persistence of memory. Motives are just chemicals. If there are such things as souls, then all souls are alike, distinguished only by their arbitrary trappings of memory.

There is a sickness in my body this evening. Perhaps the air-conditioner isn’t working and the carbon monoxide is seeping in.

The night is gathering itself up in dismal layers. First the dusk, then the noises of the car fiends outside, their customized horns braying like donkeys or grunting like bulls; tires squealing, engines grinding piston teeth together. Then a layer of my own exhaustion. My cats escaped their shopping bag when I got out of the cab at the hotel door. I’ve been out all day prowling around the park, looking for them. No luck. I haven’t slept much in the past few days, and there is a decaying night radiation below the strata of my weariness.

If I find the cats I’ll kill them for leaving me. I’ll feed their remains to an eagle at the zoo when no one’s watching.

My mind is formed like the design of a spin painting, dollops of color in a whirlwind.

SEPTEMBER 10, 1993

It makes me feel better to keep this journal. For Jo Ann it was a release. But for me it’s a confession.

I went into the clinic when I knew Lawrence would be there alone. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do.

He was alone at his desk. He didn’t feign felicity as I had expected. He knew that I remembered everything. His eyes were grave and his voice monotonous. “I want you to understand, Sandra—”

“If it were just me, maybe I could go away and forget. I can’t stand that naive little bitch you seduced, but something about the way you killed her parents and then took her for experiments and then killed me, all within a couple of days—”

“No. They would have been killed even if I hadn’t signed the death order. The vote was almost unanimous. This is a democratic country, after all.” He smiled bitterly.

“And how did you vote?”

He turned his back to me, opened a cabinet, extracted the leather case containing the hypodermic.

I broke a chloroform bottle over his head and jumped back with a handkerchief to my mouth. He fell amid the broken glass, his tense body slowly unraveling, going limp.

When he was unconscious, I dragged him to the nearest table and set to work. The method he had used on Jo Ann was permanent, because it was implemented gradually. In our early experiments we tried injecting memories into an unconscious man whose own memory was undamaged. If done with unerring precision, this technique worked temporarily. And then left the subject a babbling moron for the remainder of his life. We wanted something more permanent and less wasteful. But it would do for my purposes. I went to the freezer and found the mnemonic solution for Professor Culpepper.

Two hours later Professor Albert Culpepper, temporarily housed in Lawrence, awoke and sat up, rubbing his temples. I had my face disguised by a surgical mask on the off-chance that he might recognize his daughter, though she’d changed with age.

Culpepper bridled, looked startled, quickly scanned the room with frantic eyes.

“Where are they? Jo Ann? Sadie?” He croaked.

“Take it easy,” I said. He jumped to his feet and whirled into an antagonistic crouch, hands outstretched, face infuriated. Seeing me— not one of the party of vig killers he remembered—he relaxed some but remained wary. “Professor Culpepper. Your wife and your little girl are dead. Murdered. You saw your wife stabbed, remember?”

“Yes.” His eyes showed whites all around the pupils. He began to grow agitated, gritting his teeth, fingers clenching and unclenching. “Where are they? The vigs!” From between clenched teeth. Lawrence had extracted a heavy dose of Culpepper’s last-moment emotions. Mostly hate.

I handed him the automatic pistol I’d found in Lawrence’s desk. “The vigs will be having a meeting in twenty-five minutes at this address. Five blocks from here.” I gave him the slip of paper. He put it in his pocket with trembling hands.

I was about to launch into a speech designed to convince him to wreak vengeance on the vigs. No need to bother. He ran from the room growling incoherently.

He had an hour and a half as Culpepper. He would make it. He’d probably get five or six of them before they got him.

As for me …

I say me, not we. There is only one. Oh, when I look into the mirror, I see Jo Ann Culpepper’s washed-out, neurotic face. My hands are her ugly claws. I hate Lawrence for sticking me with this body. He had no respect for me. He might have found something with elegance. But this clumsy relic has a foul stink to it I can’t quite wash away. I deserve better than this. But I’m trapped, whole, in this ungainly parody of womanhood. I’m tired from pounding the bars of this cage. I’m in my hotel room. No sign of the cats. So tired I can hardly think. Pages are blurring.

Maybe Jo Ann, the plebeian whore Jo Ann, was not taken in by Lawrence. Maybe they were working together. The bitch would have done anything for him. So she trapped me in this unclean cell. Brain cells have bars.

If she gets too near the cage, I can reach out through the bars and grab her by her skinny throat and throttle her. She’s a fool. She expects me to believe that this is my body. It’s not, and I can prove it. I’m going to kill her. I’m going to get the razor and slash her throat. And get out. She thinks she has me hypnotized to believe I’m stuck in here. I’ll have my own purge, in a way.

I’m not sure where I’ll go after that. Run and hide, I suppose. Maybe I’ll sell “Dr. Fosdick’s” notes to the men in the red rags.

I’m going now. To get the razor. But I have a nagging feeling that there is something that I have forgotten.

John Shirley writes:

The fact that there is a red-and-white-striped barber pole with a gold ball on top planted in Antarctica at the exact geographical location of the South Pole keeps me awake at night. I saw it on a TV special; some Coast Guard kid put it there. On hearing about this barber pole at the South Pole, Steven P. Brown was heard to remark, “Walt Disney really is God!”

But I beg to differ. After all, that is not a very pious thing to say. Because Walt Disney far outranks God, and Steve’s statement shows little respect for Disney. As a matter of fact, Disney was an artist, in his repressed way. He made his sick self-image respectably ameliorated by streamlining it down into a cute li’l cartoon character. And that is only the inherent perfidy of any artist, no more. He was an artist. And God, you see, is the whipping boy of art. God is a groveling sycophant unto art.

Mother Mary, or Venus, as she was once called (also Mother Nature, or any female fertility archetype), is the handmaiden (as they say at the massage parlours) of art.

The Devil is the slave of art. But that is certainly more illustrious than God’s station: cuckold, scapegoat, lackey—somebody for the boss to kick around when he gets pissed.

Of course, an artist has a choice. He can choose to make God perform, do tricks, juggle, or flail himself like a dwarf Harlequin. Or he can demand that Mary come to bed. Or he can command the Devil to caper and dance or cook barbecued chicken. It is the function of the artist to make arbitrary choices.

Most artists tend to concentrate on rapport with one or the other-Devil, Mary, or God.

Me, I prefer to work with the Devil. He’s a regular guy, cooks some fine chicken, and knows when to keep his mouth shut. God, the Devil, Mary, or the impression of self—these are delusions of memory (which is what this story is about), and memory is an illusion of art. And art is the biggest delusion of all.

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