Eating Memories (8 page)

“Sir?”

“How long have I been here?”

“Presumably eighteen hours, sir,” the intelligence officer said. “That’s how long you’ve been missing.” The officer had flat, suspicious eyes and he kept his hand near the weapon at his belt.

“George. We’ve been looking all over hell and gone for you,” his aide told him. “Jesus Christ. We nearly started an interplanetary incident.”

The ambassador coughed. He licked his lips. They felt glued. With practical, professional solicitude, Besseh brought him a drink. George had raised it to his mouth when the intelligence chief stepped forward. “Don’t!” he snapped.

“You don’t know where that cup’s been,” his aide sighed, “or even what’s in it. You know the hygiene around here.”

George took a sip, anyway, much to the intelligence officer’s alarm. It was fresh water.

Taking another sip, George turned to the subdued and frightened Besseh. At one time George had wanted the Karee to be cowed. Now he found it painful. Besseh had crawled into himself and was looking at some neutral spot on the floor, what the Sisters at Sacred Heart School used to call “custody of the eyes”; only the nun’s institutional shyness came from duty. Besseh’s came from fear. The magician knew what the humans were capable of. The mind was powerful, but sometimes the body was stronger.

“. . . can never tell what these people can do with drugs and the like,” the intelligence officer was saying. “Anyway, to extract information by kidnaping is a crime in anyone’s book.”

“I wasn’t kidnaped. You know that.”

The officer closed his mouth with a nearly audible snap.

“I came here of my own accord.” He smiled weakly. “Besseh Yo is merely a blameless tool.”

“Guard!” the intelligence officer ordered. “Get this stinking Karee out of here!”

George watched in silence as an embassy officer shoved the magician out of the room. “You can’t arrest Besseh,” he said when the Karee was gone.

The aide sat down on the cot next to George. “Look. Let’s be reasonable, okay? The magician does its little magic number on you. You don’t know what you’d say. Shit, George. This was stupid.”

“That Karee has to disappear. Hence you were kidnaped. That’s what we’ll tell the League. No questions about that. They don’t like the Karee, either,” the intelligence man said.

George was only half listening. Suddenly his gaze lost its focus. Oh, my God. I can’t remember how I met her.”

“Huh?” asked the aide.

“I can’t remember.” He stood. Vertigo hit him and he nearly toppled. His aide grabbed his arm. “Get Besseh in here!” George shouted. He was terrified and it came out in his voice. “Get Besseh in here quick!”

The intelligence officer left and came back with the little Karee. Besseh crooked his neck to look at George.

A violent tide of tears rose in the ambassador’s eyes. He blinked, scattering light. “I can’t remember. Oh, Jesus God. I can’t remember.”

Besseh put out a calming hand that stopped some inches above George’s arm. “Yes, yuma,” it told him softly and with some hint of
compassion. “I eat the memories. I tell you this.”

“Get out!” George screamed at the two other humans. Both men hesitated a moment before they left the room.

The little Karee stood before him, less mysterious in the light from the open door. “You simpering, ugly dwarf,” George said. “You made me forget her. Goddamn you. I know you hate us, but how could you do that?”

“Sit. You will be tired.”

He sat on the cot. Besseh sat on the stool next to him. In a moment George gave in to exhaustion and laid down. The ceiling of Besseh’s room was black with soot.

“The memories are good, George,” Besseh told him. It smacked its lips. “Tasty memories. I understand yuma now. Only sometimes is your words pus. But Lauren is different. More like a Karee, I think. Hah. You love her for make you laugh, and hate us for laughing. Stupid, the yumas, like I say.”

George flicked a glance to
the side. Besseh was smiling, more sure of itself. Irony suited the magician better than servitude. “I can remember the last few months with her. I can remember that. But I can’t remember how we met, or the first house we lived in.”

“We don’t finish because the stupid yuma come and think you dead.”

“How much, Besseh? How much besides Lauren to you remember?”

With a groan the Karee rose and walked to a barrel of drinking water. Besseh dipped in a cup. “You don’t tell me you be ambassador, ta?”

“I tried. You wouldn’t listen.”

Besseh stuck out its lower lip. “Well, the body is stupid, but sometimes the mind, it stupid, too. When I eat memory, I have to eat everything.”

The ambassador knew the governmental secrets were important. He knew that, but it didn’t seem to matter. His mind was besieged with Lauren’s death and the rest of his thoughts were laid waste.

He pictured her, but the image other face was faded somehow, as if usage had dulled the colors. “In my mind she’s got four months to live. I’ll always remember her as dying.”

One hand to its contorted back as if its spine were sore, the Karee shuffled its way back to the stool and sat. “I never stop in the middle before like this. Maybe I shouldn’t eat more.”

“What would you do?”

‘Besseh sat quietly for a moment, its hands in its lap.

“What would you do if you were me, Besseh Yo?”

The Karee nodded. “I seen this a lot, this sort of bad stomach like you got. I would live it. The hurt in you should come out like vomit.”

The magician was a brown gnome crippled by the weight of vicarious pain. “Is that what it’s like, eating vomit? Does it hurt you, Besseh, going down?”

There was a jerk of the bent shoulders. Besseh was surprised by the question. “I don’t keep the memory, yuma. When you finish, and I am full, I go and wash her away in the water. All will be gone,” Besseh warned him. It leaned forward so closely that George could smell the musky, dank odor of its body. “Be gone, understand? Everything. Secrets. Lauren. Everything. Can’t get it back never.”

“I understand.” At that moment George realized how much he had loved Lauren. He loved her enough to give up his happiest memories to end the pain of her loss. “Please do it,” he said before he could change his mind.

He closed his eyes and felt the moist press of Besseh’s hand on his forehead. George wanted to utter some murmur of gratitude. ‘His mouth wouldn’t work.

And Lauren was laughing in the kitchen.

* * *

Something hit him hard in the chest. He opened his eyes to see Besseh over him. George put his hands to his face and discovered he had been crying. He couldn’t remember why.

“Men still outside, George.”

“Yes.” He sat up. His staff was angry with him. But why had he come to the Karee’s house? he wondered. It was something vaguely connected with a death.

“You help me? You protect me? I only do what you ask for.”

George hesitated. “I’ll protect you,” he said. It seemed as if, for some reason, he and the magician had known each other for years. George’s trust was instinctual, as it would have been for a good, close friend.

The magician handed him a cup of water and twisted its head so it could see him. “Lauren,” it said.

“Yes? Should I remember?”

Besseh rose stiffly and walked over to the barrel. For a moment the magician simply stared downwards. George felt a tug of sympathy and more than a clutch of fear. Then Besseh raised its hands and brought them in a slow downward plunge to the water.

“Wait!” George said.

The gnarled hands paused a scant inch above the liquid surface. Besseh turned towards him.

“Should I?”
George asked anxiously. He hated to see those hands come down. The movement seemed so final, but he wasn’t sure why. “Should I remember?”

For a moment the magician regarded him. “No,” Besseh whispered. His voice was nearly lost in the splash his hands made.

Author’s Note:
This particular short story intends to cut like a knife. On rereading it I wasn’t prepared, in fact, for the pain it elicits. Perhaps all mothers and daughters will find hurt in these few pages, just like all fathers and sons will find pain reading Pat Conroy.

Walking up the steps, she automatically straightens her dress. It’s habit with her now, after having been trained for years by the electric-shock therapy of her mother’s words.

On the way to church, Mama finally looks down, down, and down, like those cartoons where the person seems big as a mountain. She doesn’t really speak like a mountain, though. A mountain should boom. Mama hisses. Don’t you have a comb in your purse? Your hair’s falling all in your face. And, God, didn’t you iron that dress?

She pauses to check her hem in the glass doors as they open. Mr. Parks, the only human in the lobby; breaks off a list of instructions to a bot as soon as she walks in. The smile on his face is of a sort that should be legal only on morticians.

“Ms. Jouette?” His eyes are the gray hue of mold on spoiled food. His gaze lowers to her hands.

She looks down to see smears of the paint she had been using that morning: a poisonous yellow, a vicious blue.

The handkerchief comes out. Mama spits on it. The spit is slimy and doesn’t feel like water at all. Can’t you keep yourself clean for even a few minutes? Didn’t you wash your face this morning when you got up? The cotton hankie, rubbed hard, is as hurtful as sandpaper. When it’s pulled away, she looks in the tiny compact mirror Mama has thrust into her hands and sees the red smudges like bruises where Mama has scrubbed.

“Will they take her?” Mr. Parks asks. Even his voice is unctuous. If she were to
spend the night with him, she would wake up, she imagines, to
find oil smudges on
the sheets. He would make love with the slick, uncompromising rhythm of a piston.

“No.”

His head nods on its greased hinge. “I assume they’ll take you
.
It would be quite a coup for them, actually.”

“There’s no reason for me to go, now.”

For a moment his gaze rests on her face. There is a bitter envy there that makes him seem more real, less of a meaty machine. “It’s for the best, I suppose. You
’
re not the type.”

She feels the sting and lashes back. She’s learned to protect herself from everyone but her mother. “Well, Mr. Parks. What type do you assume to
be the right one?”

When a knife tip is pressed against flesh, the flesh dimples in. The skin stretches to
its breaking point. There was something of that frantic yielding in Mr. Parks’s eyes. “The pioneer woman. You
know. Hard-bitten, rough.” He changes subjects as if her cowardice and softness are no
more remarkable than her hair color. “Your mother had a bad day today.”

All Mama’s days are bad, she thinks.

“The Synadase is no
longer working.”

A bot chair brings a toothless old man into the room. The chair and the old man are having an argument about a patch of liquid sunlight in the atrium. The old man wants to
sit in it. The chair is patiently explaining the dangers of ultraviolet radiation.

“Ms. Jouette?”

“I heard you.”

“You’ve done everything you
can do. You
can at least feel good about that.”

“I can feel good about trying to
get my mother to
a place where they would let her live. Now I can feel good about telling you
to
kill her.’” She is still looking at the old man and the chair. The chair is winning the argument by cheating. It simply refuses to
move forward, and the old man is apparently too feeble to walk. He bangs with futile anger on the padded armrests.

“Most of our families are not so insistent. They realize that what’s done is it blessing.”

“A blessing for whom?”

Mr. Parks doesn’t answer.

She turns to see him looking at the little square of incandescent sunlight that dominates the atrium like a visit from God. There is a shocking sort of longing in Mr. Parks’s face.

“A blessing for whom?”

Mr. Park’s tongue darts out to lick his lips, leaving no wetness behind, as if he had no moisture in him. “None of our families has fought as hard as you. You must love your mother very much.”

It surprises her that Mr. Parks has not understood. If he understood he would speak of guilt. He would speak of anger.

“Loving someone,” Parks says, “means letting them go.”

Yes
, she thinks.
But then I’m not certain I love Mama. I need her to live long enough so that I can decide.

“A bot will take you,” he says.

She follows the rococo cleaning bot down the hall. In the third room her mother is waiting.

“Mama?” she calls.

Her mother doesn’t look up. She’s staring out the window into the green of the lawns. The rest home is an expensive place to buy time, and it has all the amenities of the rich: open spaces where nothing at all happens.

Nothing is happening on the lawn. A few old people, bright umbrellas over them, have been set out to bake in the spring heat. Three bots, generic models, stand by to move the umbrellas as if they were mechanical daisies tracking the sun.

“Is it raining?” her mother asks. Fingers like dry twigs lie uneasily in her lap.

“No. It’s not raining. Mama, listen, Mars Colony wants to take me. But they won’t take you.”

Mama never takes her eyes off the lawn. “Nurse?”

“No, Mama. I’m Lou.”

Mama’s vague blue gaze rises to focus on some spot just past Lou’s shoulder. “Nurse?”

“Maybe you know me better as Tina Louise. I always hated that name.”

Mama smiles. Her pink skin is transparent with age and it shows painfully through the thinning white hair. If the government would wait, the problem would solve itself. A little while longer and her mother would be invisible. “Is it raining?”

Lou looks back at the lawn but in her mind sees the cruel light of the desert. Mars would be like that: all burnt umbers, siennas, purples, and a pale blue wash of sky. “They want me on Mars,” she says to her mother. “They want somebody to paint it now. Before it gets civilized.”

Without her makeup her mother already looks dead. A bot has brushed her hair until it glows and washed her face until it shines. She wonders if the bot was gentle.

That’s a terrible color lipstick, her mother says. It is eleven o’clock in the morning and it is the first time her mother’s really looked at her all day. It makes you look jaundiced, Mama says. Can’t you dress yourself any better than that? Why do you always want to look ugly?

The store is crowded. People are all around them. Some of the people hear and turn their heads to stare. She feels very ugly, very yellow.

“Even when I offered them a lot of money, they turned me down. Colonists must be useful, they told me. Everyone must have a job. I explained that it would be important to me to see you buried. There’s lots of land there. I pictured a little plot for you, just six feet by two, all your own. And a headstone with one of your favorite sayings. ‘STAND UP STRAIGHT.’ Or, ‘YOU’RE GETTING FAT.’ Something to remember you by.”

Mama’s head twitches like a bot with a program error. The slight palsy has made one eyelid permanently lower than the other. “Is it raining yet?” she asks in a wavering, piccolo voice. “Remember to close the window.”

“Say something meaningful for once, Mama. Talk about something other than your health or how your geraniums are doing.”

Her mother turns those time-blinded eyes out to the lawn. A silly-baby smile tugs senselessly at her lips. “It’s raining.”

Lou sits. “Please talk to me.”

That’s nice, dear, her mother says as she stands back and looks doubtfully at the painting. Lou stands poised, toes balanced on the precipice, waiting for something, anything else. Her mother speaks. Are those the bluebonnets? That patch of blue, there? And is that green color the grass?

Yes, Mama.

They’re not very realistic, are they?

Don’t you like it?

I wish you’d filled in the rest .of the painting. And I don’t understand why you put the highway in it. Seems like a funny scene to paint.

It is funny. That’s what it’s supposed to be. Don’t you read the title, see the painting and laugh?

“Bluebonnets #17?” That’s the title?

Yes.

It’s hanging in the National Museum of Modern Art, Mama, she wants to shout. Some people think it’s funny. The curator of the museum says he laughs every time he looks. Can’t you even smile?

Your Aunt Penny was an artist, her mother says. I know.

She painted bluebonnets, too. But those paintings had pretty oak trees and little wooden bridges and cows. The bluebonnets looked like bluebonnets. Couldn’t you do something like that?

No, Mama. To me, bluebonnets always looked this way.

The door slides open and Mr. Parks is there.

“Not yet,” Lou says.

He says, “I’m sorry,” and comes
forward anyway. He kneels down beside Mama. “Hello, Mrs. Jouette,” he says.

“Hello,” she replies, turning to look down at him. Her expression seems suddenly very coherent.

Lou stiffens. Her mother has not acknowledged Lou’s arrival, but she knows Mr. Parks is there. Perhaps, Lou thinks, she will see a side to Mama that has been well hidden. Mama and Mr. Parks will play chess and discuss Immanuel Kant or suspension architecture.

“How are we today?” Mr. Parks asks.

Mama’s smile broadens into a sweet benediction of a smile, a smile Lou has seen on the painted faces of Blessed Virgin Marys. “Is it raining?’

Mr. Parks takes a medication disc from his pocket. He is smiling, too. A Jesus-With-The-Children sort of smile.

“Is it time already? Lou asks.

Mr. Parks darts a glance at her’ with his muddy gray eyes. “There’s no sense prolonging it. He presses the disc to the frail white of Mama’s wrists, right where the veins show through like velvet purple cords. His thumb rubs gently and persistently over the bulge of the medication as he looks into Mama’s eyes. Mr. Parks’s messages are mixed. His thumb and eyes talk of love, but they also talk of murder.

Mama’s smile broadens. She was never very good at the nuances of language.

“It won’t be long now,” Mr. Parks says to Lou. He is still smiling at Mama. Mr. Parks is very good at his job. “Take her other hand.”

Lou hesitates.

Mr. Parks looks up at Lou. The smile has fled and, in its place is a shocking, angry command. “Take her hand!” he snaps. Lou does. Mama’s hand is cool and dry.

“Tell her you love her.”

Lou looks at him with disbelief.

“Tell her you love her,” he says.

“She doesn’t know me.”

“It doesn’t matter. Tell her you love her, anyway. There isn’t much time.”

Tears spring up in Lou’s eyes. They surprise her. “Mama?” Her voice shakes. “Mama? It’s Lou.”

Mama’s eyes are closing. She is still watching Mr. Parks.

“Mama?”

Please look at me,
she thinks.
Won’t you even look at me?
“I love you,”
Lou
says. Even now she is embarrassed by saying it.

Right now, she thinks. Right now Mama will finally look at me. She‘ll see me for once, not just the way I’m dressed or the way my hair looks. And there will be one of those moments when everything becomes clear. Isn’t that what death is all about? And she’ll explain herself to me. Just a word or two is all that’s needed, but something I can think about and finally understand.

Thin, translucent lids roll down over the marbles of Mama’s eyes. Her mouth opens just a bit. Lou strains forward to catch the last whisper and feels a puff of warm breath at the side of her face.

Mr. Parks says, “She’s gone.” In a moment he says in a louder voice. “You can let go of her hand, now. She’s gone.”

Lou jerks. She loosens her grip and stands, straightening her skirt. Her knees feel watery as if her body wants her to kneel some more.

Her mother’s death leaves a taste in her mouth like vinegar and a sound like low-level humming in her ears. If the death were to have a color, it would be an artificial, heavy-metal green.

“There’s a little ceremony before cremation. You might like to attend.”

“No, thank you.” Lou wonders if her tears have damaged her makeup.

Mr. Parks follows her out the door. The hall is empty. “We’ve had our problems, Ms. Jouette, but I want you to know I admire you.”

She glances at him, surprised.

“I think your fighting it was wrong, but I think it was admirable, too. It reminded me of that poem, ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.’”

She can think of no way to respond.

“We’re trained, of course, to see death as a gentle, fitting conclusion but I can sympathize with the way you see it.”

Her lips move for a moment before sound emerges. “How do I see it?”

Mr. Parks seems surprised. “If you haven’t come to grips with it, of course, we have counselors. It’s hard losing someone you love in just that way. That’s why I had you hold her hand. It’s not so important for the traveler as it is for the leave-taker. And, in our institution, the leave-taker is never forgotten.” He holds his hand out. She takes it, wondering if he too, is planning to die and if she should tell him she loves him.