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Prolific Writer
Join Date: Dec 2002
Posts: 434
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mechanical amnesia
this is sort of an experiment for me and it's not quite finished yet, but if there's anything useful anyone wants to say, i'm all ears. thanks.
Mechanical Amnesia
*Memory*
Mother's hand on my face, soft skin and the scent of lavender is everywhere. The room is cold and indistinct, like piety, and every time I try to hold an image of it in my mind, it escapes, vaporous. Mother has mottled green eyes, like dirty pieces of jade. I would smile at her, but I'm not feeling up to it and the lavender has made me dizzy. I reach to touch her hand with mine and it is cold, wet, and I think of a frog and how it would feel, and now I am very uncomfortable. Suddenly, soft skin is dead and clammy sweat burns my cheek and I try to move my head away, to brush her aside, but she's dug her fingers in and I feel the wetness of her hand run across my pores and I want to scream, but she's covered my mouth with her other hand. She holds my face steady and I look up at her. Blank. My mother's face is a void; an absence of emotion so strong is hurts to look at it. Only her eyes show any life. Tears slip down her empty face and fall onto my forehead. I no longer want to scream. I just want my mother to go away, to take her sadness, her lack of life, and just leave me alone. Her eyes close. She turns her head away and takes her hands off me and tells me, in a matter of fact tone, that she is going to leave me and that it's my fault. She says that she wanted to live a passionate, wonderful life, but I got in the way, I ruined it for her. Then she leaves the room. After the chilly wetness of her hand dries from my face, I fall asleep. When I wake up, she's gone.
*Thought*
March 3rd, 1992.
My memories were vague and uncomfortable. They warp and change themselves without my knowledge. What is memory and what is reality becomes impossible to discern. When I'd try to explore them, figure out the truth, they would overwhelm me like animate shadows, or specters, and they'd sap me of the will to continue remembering. So I stopped; I let it all drift towards a state of permanent oblivion and I lived my life like I have no past. Now, I'm in a constant state of personal fluctuation. I would call it invigorating, or even liberating, but it's just as confining as being caught in stasis. It has become such that I no longer have a choice in the matter. My memories are no longer a part of me. They reside on a separate level of reality. They exist, and I know they exist, but that's all. Their details, their shape, their texture, their color, their context—I forget it all. I make myself forget. Every experience is new to me. Every time I close my eyes or touch my left foot or clench my toes, it's new. For a moment, I feel the twinge of familiarity, and it's a warm comfort, but it fades, and the newness slides in and it's like getting high, like opium in my blood, soft and gentle, the warmth of a thick blanket thrown over my face. Then it's gone. It slips to wherever my memories go and I'm left with a hollow feeling, like I've lost something irreplaceable. Every moment of my day is like that, getting high, then a withdrawal, all within the same instant. I have no history. I am nothing, a wisp of wind that vanished before it even began. I've never met another person like me in my entire life, and even if I had, I could never have remembered them. When I die, when I'm burned to ash and spread wherever, that will be it. I will be gone. Oblivion. Nonexistence. My life will have amounted to nothing more than charred bone and sulfur and an urn. I won't even have memories of a life well lived to comfort me in my final days. I will simply cease to be. I try to find some sort of reassurance in that, that I am fully prepared for my fate, but it's hard. Every time I reassure myself, it's as if I'm panicking for the first time. Because I am. Because I don't remember panicking the first time. And I won't ever remember panicking.
*Dream*
June 8th, 1993.
I've been sitting in the same spot since Lake Street. The stop I wanted passed by fifteen minutes ago. I have no idea what I'm waiting for. I'm not sure it matters. People get on, people get off. Some notice me, most don't. There's a boy sitting in front of me—he's fifteen or sixteen, and he's absently holding an open envelope with a letter inside. It is addressed to a Justin Gains. Him. It was sent to him by Coral Naveen. Coral lives in Nebraska. The handwriting of the names and addresses is soft, feminine, but it holds endless mystery to me, and so I adjust myself in my seat to get a better look into the envelope without alarming him. I can't see much of the letter itself, just a few gently curved words—the, I'm, coffee, breathe, God, You. Justin stares out the window as the world streams by. His face is smooth and empty, nothing to give away the contents of the letter. I try to guess who Coral is—no one in his immediate family, maybe a girlfriend?—but this passes after a few stops.
I wonder if he's just found out that someone he loved has just died. Perhaps they haven't died at all, but had children, and Coral is relating to him the joy she feels about the sudden addition to the family. The mystery of the letter intrigues me. Any number of infinite possibilities could be within it. His brother's landlord telling him that his brother has been shot three times by an East Indian man, but will live. His girlfriend is pregnant by a man named Evan and is apologizing for everything that she's done to him, while telling him that she had to runaway with the man because it was the only decent thing to be done. A social worker from his delinquent childhood keeping in touch, making sure he hasn't stolen any cars lately—"just kidding, of course."
Three more stops pass by. Justin pulls the signal chord and begins to stand up. My heart seizes in my chest in painful gasps as he moves out into the aisle. When the bus finally stops and the door opens, I follow him out. He still carries the letter and I walk after him, just fast enough to keep up. I have to wipe sweat off my forehead despite the cold, and my ears tingle, like all the blood in my head has been pumped directly into them. We are in a small, dirty neighborhood, and he cuts into one of the alleys. He's heading home.
I follow him into the alley. My pulse thumps in my head like a heavy beat. My hands are moist and sticky and I keep them clenched in tight balls. I decide to jog up and catch him. I call out and after a few moments, he turns around. His face is as impassive as before, perhaps a bit irritated. I laugh a bit, nervously, and run a hand through my hair, which is soaked from sweat. I tell him that we were just on the same bus and that I had seen him that letter. As a reflex, he brings the letter, which he'd been causally holding at his side, up to his chest, almost defensively. After a few seconds of silence, I ask him what the letter is about. He stares at me, blankly, for a few moments, then tells me that it's none of my business and that would I please leave him alone. I tell him that he doesn't understand, that I really want to know what's in the letter—that I've been wondering since I saw it on the bus. He puts the letter into the pocket of his coat and shakes his head. He repeats that it's none of my business and that if I don't leave, he'll have someone call the police. Then he turns around and starts walking again. My arm snaps out and grabs onto his shoulder, spinning him around. I tell him that he needs to show me the letter, that I want to know his life, his memories, so I can figure out my own. He knocks my arm away. As he turns, I hit him in the face.
Everything is a vicious shade of purple. I am kneeling on his chest. My hands slide into his face effortlessly, as if they were specifically designed for this exact motion. Warm, salty wetness covers my arms, like tropical seawater, and I feel the form of his head distort, slowly at first, then in thick, wild hunks. Vague pain stabs into my hands as I pass through teeth and eventually bone, but I don't stop until I feel my arms burn with fatigue and I am too tired to continue. The purple lifts and there's nothing but red. Justin is unrecognizable.
I take a few moments to take in what has happened. I reach into his coat pocket and remove the letter, leaving thick, bloody fingerprints on the paper.
Coral is a pen pal he met through school. She likes horses and wants to major in biology. She has nothing interesting to say. There's nothing about Justin's life, about his brother or his past or his pregnant girlfriend. No memories, nothing for me to hold on to, to cover the absence in my own life. A waste of time.
I drop the letter in the pool of Justin's blood. Useless.
*Sanity*
November 14th, 1999.
"Your getting out soon, right?"
"Yeah."
"Live where you did before?"
"Yeah, with uncle."
"Nice. Meds working and everything, too?"
"I guess."
"Well, either they are or they aren't."
"Everything always hazy, like it's covered with plastic or something."
"What do you mean, 'everything'?"
"Well, like, my thoughts and stuff. Memories. They're all jumbled. I can't really make anything out."
"So? It's better than the alternative. You'd stay stuck in here."
"My head being fucked and numb is what got me in here in the first place. If I can't remember things properly with my meds, how am I any different than before? It's just the same, only now it’s okay, because it’s got some doctor’s signature on it."
"You sound like you want to live here the rest of your life."
"Of course not. But I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I'm not a person anymore. I have nothing to define me—my mind is opaque to me. I can’t really feel anything. That's all I know."
*Realization*
December 5th, 1999.
GenesisMX: hey.
RedQueen328: Whos this?
GenesisMX: just somebody who wants to talk.
RedQueen328: Oh well, hi.
GenesisMX: yeah, hi. what's up?
RedQueen328: Not much I guess, u?
GenesisMX: the same as i always am now, i suppose. tired. exhausted, even.
GenesisMX: yes, exhausted.
RedQueen328: Uhhh k. that sux, I guess.
GenesisMX: huh. well, anyway, where are you from?
RedQueen328: IL. u?
GenesisMX: i'm not sure where i'm from. i'd say here, but i'm never sure where here is. anymore.
GenesisMX: and what a tragedy if i said i was from somewhere and it turned out i was wrong. i'd be lying about an important part of my identity. i've had enough problems with that already.
RedQueen328: ???
GenesisMX: identity is the fabric of our existence. it separates me from you, you from a dog, and the dog from a protozoan.
GenesisMX: identiy and memory.
GenesisMX: *identity.
Red Queen 328: u ok?
GenesisMX: memory is exceedingly important. it ties into identity. if one has an identity, then one has memories to define that identity as individual. they're mutually exclusive. without one, you can't have the other. they sustain each other--more memory, more identity, more memory, more identity, ect.
RedQueen328: wtf?
GenesisMX: you should listen, you know. this all took me a long time to come up with. my whole life. you need memory to be a person. i tried to separate the two. i couldn't. i tried and tried but nothing happened. no matter what your memories are, no matter how much you soak them in blood and fuel, they won't go away, because, first and foremost, you are an individual, and you can't strip that away. you don't want to strip it away. it'll drive you crazy. it's impossible to live that way. it might seem ideal—no memory, no responsibility, no nothing. you're you without anything defining what you need to be. nothing holding you back.
GenesisMX: but you need those things to hold you back. they keep you from going to far, from losing your mind. if you can't define yourself, you lose yourself, and if you lose
yourself, you go insane. trust me, i know this. i can't believe i wasted so much time.
RedQueen328: fcking weirdo.
<RedQueen328 signed off at 1:32 pm>
*Reality*
Mother is hanging from the rafter with the vacuum cord around her neck. Her face is purple. Her eyes are closed. Her left slipper has fallen to the floor. She is smiling. Fourteen years later, I will think about her as I hold a pistol to my temple.
Nothing.
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