My Name Is Memory (18 page)

But as she closed her eyes and listened to the tape, the things she saw under hypnosis she saw again. She pictured herself opening the bedroom door; she saw the room just as she had before. But in the recording the girl—she—was suddenly buffeted by emotion and stopped seeing clearly. Lucy didn’t feel the pain she had felt then, so she tried to get a look around the room.

Keeping her eyes shut, she pictured the faint glow of the yellow walls, the green, leafy cast of the light coming through two high windows. She didn’t feel as though she was making it up. She didn’t know where the image came from, but she felt as if she was investigating, poking around something that was already contained in her mind in great detail.

There weren’t three soldiers in the room. There weren’t any, now that she looked. She could hold up a brief and fleeting image of the soldiers in there, but it didn’t stay. The picture that stayed was an empty room with a tall, canopied bed, a heavy armoire, a bureau with a cloudy mirror over it, and a row of elegant bookshelves built into the far wall. She had the strange sensation that if she could get over to that shelf, she could see the title of every book on it. But the girl—she—hadn’t gotten that far. She’d stood in the doorway, weeping.

Downstairs in her own house a door slammed and startled Lucy. She sat up, eyes open, back in her room, which also happened to have yellow walls. She closed her eyes and opened them again. She felt as though she’d come up through fifty feet of heavy water. Now, back up on the surface and looking down, the image she’d had was blurry and far away. She couldn’t really see it anymore.

That night she dreamed of the yellow room—the other yellow room. She saw Daniel in it, which didn’t surprise her dream-self in the least. He didn’t look the same as the Daniel she’d known in high school, but she knew it was him nonetheless. That was often how it was in dreams. He wanted to tell her something. He had that same agonized expression as on the night of the senior party. He was trying to tell her something, but he couldn’t make any noise. He had no air in his lungs. He tried and struggled, and she felt sad for him. And then she realized she knew what he was trying to say.

“Oh, the note!” she said, taking hold of his hands. “I know about that.”

I
could not believe I was dying. The good Dr. Burke knew it, and at first I didn’t believe him. I was absolutely certain he was wrong, because fate could not be that cruel, I decided, even though I had every reason to know that fate is not paying attention on that scale. But as the days passed it was impossible not to recognize that my lungs were deteriorating rather than improving. I had died of tuberculosis before; I knew how it went. And this time my lungs were already ravaged by gas. I was perhaps the person in the world least afraid of dying, but this time I could not stand it.

There had been so many lives I had been happy to leave, even if painfully. So many times I had been eager to start again, to see where a new life would lead with the hope that it would lead me back to Sophia. And now I had her and couldn’t stay.

How would I find her again? Fate might eventually drop her in my lap again, but at what pace? Five hundred years? I couldn’t do it again.

I had the power to bring an end to my life. That was wrong, maybe, but I did. Why couldn’t I live if I wanted to? I should have been able to. That’s what I thought. I wanted to live. I’d never asked my body for that before. All the stuff I knew, my head packed so full of things, it should have made some difference. I could speak Euskara. I could play the fucking harpsichord. That should have bought me something. But it didn’t. My body didn’t care.

I knew Sophia could leave me behind. She could disappear for whole centuries, never knowing I even existed. I did the searching and remembering, she did the disappearing and the forgetting. I hated to be the one to leave her. I held on to those seventeen days as hard as I’ve ever held on to anything.

All I could think to do was love her. That’s all a person can do.

SOPHIA MUST HAVE known, too. She had a sorrowful, questioning look in her eyes when she came into my room that evening. As if to say, You’re not really going, are you?

The two other occupants of my room were gone, one released from his life and the other to a facility close to his family in Sussex. I can’t say that I missed them. It gave our meetings, Sophia’s and mine, a different feel.

“Can I tell you a secret?” she asked, looking around the room.

“Please.”

“This was my bedroom.”

I sat back against the pillow. “This was your bedroom?” I glanced at the yellow walls, the tall windows with the flowered draperies, the bookshelves along the wall. It was true that it didn’t exactly have the feel of a hospital. “How can that be?”

“Before it was requisitioned.”

“Really. You lived here?” It was clear from her accent and her manners that she was well born, but I hadn’t realized quite how well. I considered this. “So I have been sleeping in your bedroom.”

She nodded a little mischievously.

“I like that.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. Very much. Where do you live now?”

“In one of the cottages by the river.”

“Do you mind it?”

“Not at all. I’d be happy to stay, even after the war.”

“But you’ll move back here?”

“I suppose we will. If it ever ends.”

“You don’t want to?”

She shrugged. “It’s not cheerful here anymore. It’s far too big for just my father and me, and the gardens are all grown over.”

The thought of her being born in this grand house made my claims on her seem a bit far-fetched to me. She was probably Lady Constance. She was back to being the magistrate’s wife, and I was the barefoot orphan.

Once I knew her relationship to the house, it started to fascinate me. It was an old house and full of old things. Because I was dying, she brought me some clothes from a grandfather or great uncle and discreetly vanished while I struggled to put them on. Because I was dying, she agreed to take me on a walk through the upper floors and pointed out places where famous men and women had slept, sometimes together.

The next afternoon she brought me books from the vast library.

“If you’ve lived as long as you say, you’ve probably read all of these.”

I studied the spines. “Most of them.” I pointed to the Ovid. “I read this in Latin. And the Aristotle in Greek.”

“So you read Latin and Greek, do you?” She could tell by my accent and my rank that I was not a product of public school. She had that challenging look, but it had a few parts of affection in it, too.

“How could I not, being around so long?”

“What other languages do you know?”

I shrugged. “A lot of them.”

“Which ones?”

“Ask me one and I’ll tell you.”

“Arabic?”

“Yes.”

“Russian?”

“Not the modern way, but yes.”

Her nod was dubious but amused. “Right. And German?”

“Of course.”

“Japanese?”

“No. Well, a little bit.”

“French?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Are you being honest with me?”

“Absolutely. Always.” My face was more serious than hers.

“It’s hard to believe what you say.”

I touched the curling ends of her hair, and she let me. I was happy. “Why don’t you search your library. Try to find a book in a language I can’t read.”

She seemed to like the challenge. That night she brought me eight books in eight languages, all of which I read parts of and translated for her. She was able to test me a bit in Latin and Greek, and she knew enough Italian, French, and Spanish to be convinced.

“But these are easy,” I protested. “These are all Romance languages. Bring me Hungarian; bring me Aramaic.”

The look of teasing was gone from her face. “How do you do this?” she asked in a low voice. “You are beginning to frighten me.”

OVER THE NEXT several nights she brought me artifacts from the house. Our second challenge after books and languages was musical instruments. Her great-grandfather had been a collector. And I was able to explain the origins of all of them and play most of them. I played an aulos made of bone and a panpipe rubbed with ancient wax, and blew into a buccina of a type I actually played at two points in my military career in Anatolia. They were too old to get a true sound out of, but at least I could demonstrate.

She could only bring the ones she could carry, but one night she led me out of her old bedroom, I dressed in her grandfather’s riding breeches, to the harpsichord in the music room to play for her, which I did, and joyfully. My fingers were rusty and did not possess a great deal of talent to begin with, but the girl and the moment and my memory carried me.

Afterward, I wanted to kiss her so badly.

“You are extraordinary,” she said. “How do you do it?”

“You wouldn’t think I was extraordinary if you knew how many years I’d played. These fingers I have now can’t quite keep up with me.”

“You say that like you’ve had other fingers.”

“I have. Hundreds. You need to develop the muscles and to have certain physical gifts to play really well.”

She looked away, and I was scared I had gone too far with my hundreds of fingers. I came down from my high and realized I was tired and out of breath and felt frustrated by my stupid failing body. How was I ever going to kiss her?

“I honestly don’t know how you can be so young and do so many things,” she said softly.

“And nearly all of them are quite worthless, aren’t they?”

“How can you say that?”

“What good does it do me to play an aulos or a panpipe? They are extinct. You have no idea how much time I wasted on each of those instruments. It doesn’t add up to anything anymore.”

“It wasn’t a waste,” she said passionately.

I couldn’t help smiling at her warm, pink face. “You’re right. They gave me a chance to try to impress you.”

She regarded her ten fingers and then looked at me thoughtfully. “Didn’t it give you pleasure to learn them?” she asked. “Didn’t you like being able to play?”

“It was a long time ago, but yes, I loved being able to play,” I answered.

“Then that’s the good of them.”

OUR THIRD CHALLENGE was nautical instruments. Another of her ancestors had been a collector, so she tried me on those. Not only did I know how to work each of them, but they were tremendously rich in memories. Each one suggested a story to me. Sailing the Cape of Good Hope in a storm, navigating the straits of fire under a providential ceiling of stars. I told her about massive typhoons, terrifying landfalls, pirate invasions, and many drownings, two of which were my own. She loved to hear about sailing in and out of Venice, and I told her about Nestor the dog. She took off her shoes and sat on my bed with her feet tucked under, listening for as long as I could talk. She leaned her head against my knee, and I prayed she wouldn’t move it.

She sighed when the last lights blinked off in the hallway and she knew she had to leave. “How did a boy from Nottingham get so terribly clever at telling stories?”

“I am a boy from a lot of places. I’m just telling you things I remember.”

She looked at me critically. “I am struggling against believing you. That was no trouble at first, but now it’s become difficult.” She studied my face carefully. “There is something about you that’s not like any person I’ve met. You have a strange kind of confidence. Like you really are a man who knows the entire world. Or at least believes it.”

I laughed, just happy that she let me hold her hand so long. “It’s both, I suppose.”

“Why aren’t you famous? Why aren’t the writers writing about you and the photographers taking your picture?”

I felt hurt, and I didn’t hide it. “No one knows these things about me. I don’t tell anyone. I don’t want to be famous. And why would anyone believe me?”

“Because you can do extraordinary things.”

“And so can many others.”

“Not like you.”

I touched the bandages on my ribs. “I want to live my life as serenely as possible. I don’t want to be thought of as mad. I don’t want to be thrown into the lunatic bin, where the other people with old memories go. I don’t tell anyone these things.”

“But you told me.”

I turned to her. I felt grave, and I couldn’t act otherwise. “God, Sophia. You aren’t anyone. Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said to you? You might think I’m another pathetic boy in your care, and I am. But you are everything to me.”

I was sitting up and flushed, and so determined I could barely feel my lungs or any other part of me. Sophia had dropped my hand, and she looked as though she was going to cry.

“Please try to believe me,” I said. “This didn’t happen by accident. You have been with me from the very first life. You are my first memory every time, the single thread in all of my lives. It’s you who makes me a person.”

LUCY SPENT THE majority of her days in solitary speculation. She stood behind the back counter at Healthy Eats, blending fruit smoothies out of mountains of ingredients for a seemingly endless line of customers, but she was so deep in her thoughts that she was essentially alone. The sound of crunching ice in the blender looped in and out of constant wondering. It was the soundtrack to her summer.

She hadn’t told Marnie. She’d barely told herself. She was waiting for the right moment.

She wondered about Daniel most often. She didn’t know whether to think about him as alive or dead, but she thought about him anyway. Inside her head, he was the one she could talk to.

She felt as though she understood his solitude better. She understood it so well that she felt as though she had caught it from him like a fever. Well, first she’d caught his craziness; the solitude came more slowly. When you knew you were different, when your interior world didn’t make sense to anyone, including you, it naturally set you apart. You couldn’t keep track of what normal people were supposed to think versus what you actually thought, and the gap between them widened. The simplest interactions were a little more strained, until maybe you gave up on most of them.