Amnesiascope: A Novel (18 page)

Polly isn’t all the guilt I have left, just one of the biggest parts of it. It bobs in the arctic stream of my memories like the shard of ice from a much larger block in the far distance, along with smaller receding shards. There is the guilt about my marriage. There is the guilt about Viv and the pain of our first year. There is the guilt about Christina, a low-rider in a black beat-up T-Bird and a lazy Cheshire smile and a beauty mark over one eyelid, who I knew after Sally and whose time and faith and warmth I cavalierly used up and wasted; I came to feel a great affection for her even after our passion was over, at a time when I could not yet pinpoint any capacity for love I might still have, and even now I still miss that affection. Little pieces floating in the cold current: a string of bedded women who claimed they expected nothing when I knew they expected everything, but I accepted their disclaimers anyway so I could have their bodies for a moment and release into them all the pain that can be released but none of the pain that can’t. Farther back is the guilt about my father’s death, as banal as it is universal, over things unsaid and gestures unmade: “If you have anything to tell him, tell him soon,” my mother, crying, warned me two weeks before he went. Left to my own devices, I can
drown
in guilt. I wake in the night to a wave of it suspended high above me in the dark. Part of me has been hoping for it; sometimes I wonder if it is less a barometer of my morality than another expression of my ego—vanity disguised as evidence that I still have a conscience. Then I turn on the light. I think about Sally and the wave vanishes, because about Sally of course there is little guilt, which is why she’s been such a luxury to me for so long, and why I was so reluctant for so long to give her up. The pain of Sally is cleaner, and there hasn’t been that much pain in my life recently in which I could pretend to be so pure. But then Sally calls and I hear her voice full of sadness and trepidation, and the pain isn’t quite so clean anymore; and then I remember Polly, and everything else is remembered again too.

Here, in the Last City of the Last Millennium, I have meant to defeat guilt and memory once and for all, though I know the effort is doomed. It isn’t an amnesia of the mind I pursue, or an amnesia of the heart; it is rather an amnesia of the psyche that sets me free. I’ve been working on my stutter. I almost lost it for a while but I’ve gotten it back, better than ever. I open my window and lean out into the street and stutter at the world, frightening animals and alarming somnambulists and causing cars to swerve. Every word ricochets in the back of my throat until I achieve true senselessness, until not a line of communication with anyone else is left, until every exchange is irrevocably rude. Standing in the shadows of street corners I open my mouth and let go at the passersby. It’s more than a hesitancy, it’s more than a slight tension in the larynx, it’s a full assault. In the movies the stutterer is always the one unhinged, the one so pathetically weak he winds up hanging himself, once he has fulfilled his function of giving the audience a good belly laugh. My stutter is different. Mine is a stutter, refined by the day, perfected by the minute, that will drive everyone else to hang themselves. People clear a path at my approach; they hear it coming, like a siren or an alarm. Every memory I have left tangles on the inane bursts from my lips like the words tangling on my tongue. The only sound I don’t stammer is the moan of my orgasm. But I’m working on it.

In the Stutter was born the Dream. I don’t remember my first word, I don’t remember my first stutter, but I’m told they were not the same, that my first word was stammer-free; thus, the moment of my truest eloquence was the moment of my earliest communication, back before the beginning of memory. Did I best know myself then, before the stutter, or have I come to know myself best since, when who I am has been defined by the stutter? I don’t have an answer. The stutterer is both the person I really am, and someone I am not. He is the intermediary through which I’ve been forced, by the impairment of my speech, to reveal myself to the world. But whatever passed through my mind the first time I stuttered, at the age of four or five, whatever awful virgin humiliation was breached, only to be compounded over the years, then the decades, through childhood and adolescence into youthful manhood to the shores of middle age, I’ve forgotten. I’ve wiped it away. Everything about me has felt fundamentally flawed since, in the way I suppose everyone feels a fundamental flaw. But my flaw is only a secret from everyone else as long as I keep my mouth shut. Beginning with the simplest introduction—“My name is …”—my secret is revealed, since my own name has always been one of the most impossible words to express fluidly.

Here are the rules: I can talk about this, you can’t. The most casual reference to it by another person still humiliates me. That I might make it a matter of public record does not mean I’m open to discussion on the subject. I will fool you from time to time; sometimes I won’t do it at all. Some years back, giving a reading in a book store, I was asked about it afterward. “But you haven’t stuttered once,” someone piped up from the crowd of listeners, expecting I’d find the observation reassuring. “Oh,” I said, “you wanted the stuttering version? I didn’t know that. I only do that when I want to amuse people. No, this was the Top Forty version—the stuttering version is the dance mix. Less melody and more percussion, and it goes on all night. …” No one ingratiates him or herself, no one worms his or her way into my confidence, by initiating a discussion on stuttering. I remember a counselor, later in life, long after the Stutter School, advising that a stutterer “must face his stuttering,” as though the stutterer is not confronted by his stuttering every moment. As though every moment of the most perfunctory social intercourse does not involve the choice to speak or not, does not involve a hundred rapid-fire decisions having to do with word selection, phrasing, the mad dash or the clandestine tiptoe across the minefield of semantic bombs, verbal spasms, rhetorical tics waiting to detonate on the end of one’s tongue. And between the utterance of the sound, and the act of violation by which the stutterer listens to himself, the minefield is crossed back, the return journey made to some private painful assessment by which he concludes: “It didn’t sound so bad, did it? It was almost
sonorous,
wouldn’t you say?” It may be that the stuttering of the past wasn’t as bad as I remember, but only in the same way the stuttering of the present is always worse than I hear it, until I play my voice back, on a tape perhaps, to my own appalled realization.

Listen. I don’t know another way of talking about it that doesn’t skirt some sordid spectacle of self-pity, self-absorption, self-loathing. And rather than risk any of those, I’d as soon take everything back, and forget about it, and pretend, as I’ve always pretended, that the man who writes these words on paper is the true one, rather than the one who spits them out fitfully. I come from a long line of stoics: Scandinavian, Celt, American Indian. Blabbermouths these people are not. It’s possible that if I’d never stuttered, I never would have become a writer, though we’ll never know. But whatever imagination I was born to proved to be, from the beginning, the only safe haven when the stuttering began; and whatever grand vanity I might have begun to form was cut off at the knees or, more precisely, the throat. In the interior of my imagination, my words always belonged to me, I did not belong to them. In this interior as well, only I could know my own integrity when I was seven years old and the teacher called my mother to complain I must have plagiarized the short story we were assigned to write, since my strangled speech offered no convincing evidence I could even read, let alone write. It was ten years before anyone was truly convinced. By then, if teachers and principles were ready to concede I
could
indeed write the things I claimed to have written, they argued nonetheless that these were not the sort of things I
should
be writing. It was too late. Having asserted my imagination and won my voice, I would not give them back.

Well, I couldn’t give them back, could I? What of me would have been left? A stutter or silence. I had been a little seven-year-old kid, after all, with everything I was and everything I dreamed of being shrouded by the static of my own mouth; until I broke through. And then I had gone too far to surrender the word, and the more forbidden it was, the more irrevocable was my claim to it. Much later, buried under all the unpublished manuscripts and all the years piling up right behind them, I might very well have surrendered the word if it would have left me anything but faceless, voiceless, beingless. By the end of those fifteen years that stretched from twenty to thirty-five, when I had so futilely tried to become a published novelist, I had long since crossed the terrain of dejection to despair: but in the Stutter was born the Dream, and it pushed me from one effort to another across so much defeat that when the breakthrough finally came, modest as it was, it commanded that I destroy everything that had come before, including the pile of unpublished manuscripts. And because that small breakthrough had seemed so elusive, such a monstrous mountain to scale, I had this idea that once having scaled it, everything else about the Dream would finally lie at my fingertips. Having caught the tip of the Dream, I assumed the rest of it was simply to be taken. I don’t know why, five novels later, it didn’t happen. Any conjecture would only sound graceless, bitter, self-justifying. I’ve seriously considered the most obvious answer, that I was never as good as I hoped or wanted to believe. That the Dream was fantastic relative to what my talent really was. Looking back I can’t help seeing the worst: my insights as trite, my imagination as second-rate, my facility for words only as glib as I always wished my talk could be. More than that, I see my faith in myself as most counterfeit of all. Looking back, I’m not sure now I ever believed the Dream was really possible. Because if in the Stutter was born the Dream, in the Doubt was born the Stutter, and so the Dream was always infected by Doubt. I’ve thrust myself forward not out of faith or even will but the sort of primal force of habit that moves an animal to the place that nature commands it, to graze or mate or die; and somewhere past the rubicon of inspiration’s replenishment, where I was emptying myself more than I was refilling, and even though I didn’t really believe the harshest words of my harshest review, which suggested, like the second-grade teacher, that I was really nothing more than a glorified plagiarist, the Doubt could not help but still assume it was one more thing I was guilty of.

And then I was exhausted. Now, like a once devout man who comes to doubt God, I have no more vision, no more ideas, no more nerve. In the name of growing older, growing wiser, I find myself pulled toward the vortex of a capitulation that, as a younger man, I despised in others. It confuses me. I want to be wise—and then I wonder, in that desire, whether wisdom is the enemy of passion, or whether believing that wisdom is the enemy of passion is only the sign that I’m neither wise nor passionate. I only hope that I’m left with more than rage or the cheap cynicism of everyone who fails his or her dream, and can only therefore scorn the dreams of others; God knows the world is full enough of such people. My ever-growing inconsequentiality seeps in beneath the door of one room after another, the public and then the literary, the private and finally the secret. I got a call the other day from the head of a stutterer’s “support group,” if you can believe such a thing, wondering if I would be a part of it: “But what is it you
do
in this group anyway?” I wanted to know. “Spend all night just trying to get through the minutes of the last meeting? Do you protest stuttering comedians, movies that laugh at us? Do you make the world
sensitive
to our plight? Are you going to make my stuttering
inconsequential
, is that the idea? Are you going to collectivize my stutter, so it’s not my burden alone to bear? You st-st-stay away from my stutter,” and I slammed the phone down, and was struck by the silence around me.

One night, a few months ago, I woke in a fit of absurd inspiration. I got out of bed and went into the other room, and pulled from the shelves the books I’d written, and began tearing them apart, ripping them down their spines and casting away the covers, spreading all the pages on the floor around me. This went on all night until I looked up not only to see dawn but Ventura in my doorway. He had been up early to work, had gone down to the corner café to get some coffee, came back and saw the light beneath my door and knocked; and when I didn’t answer, and all he heard inside was the ripping of pages, he came in. Now he stood looking at me surrounded by a thousand disembodied pages on the floor. Excitedly I explained to him my brainstorm. I told him I was going to rewrite all my books into one huge book except
with the stutter
—from beginning to end one colossal, sprawling, staggering epic of manic stammering, stunned gasping, throttled gulping and violent hiccupping that would sum up all of our lives, the times in which we live, the age behind us and the one to come. After this, not only would no one ever write another book, no one would want to, all eloquence exposed for the bankrupt rhetorical currency it is. By the time I finished Ventura had turned the oddest pallor I’ve ever seen, gray around the eyes and white at the edges of his hair. He looked at me as though he was uncertain whether to lock me in the room and take all the sharp objects on his way out, or say and do nothing, with blind faith that my seizure would pass and I would return to normal. He chose the latter, nodding silently and backing slowly out into the hallway. When he was gone I just sat there for a while and, just as silently as he had gone, got myself a forty-pound trash bag and scooped up the pages and filled the bag up. Then I lowered the window shades, turned off the telephone and went back to bed.

Christ, I wanted to be a hero once. I wanted to be something so much larger than I am that I might be out of earshot of my own voice. I wanted to save someone or something, to redeem some ideal, to find and live in that moment between utter desperation and the exhilaration of desperation, when the only recourse left is to burst free of oneself. Now I’ve forgotten that as well. Now my stutter is all that’s left of that attempt, and it survives only because it’s ridiculous enough to survive and to remind me, every time I open my mouth, that the only courage left is to try and forget the unforgettable.