“Who’s this.”
“Poospatuck Incident,” Jon-David says. “It’s on the agenda.” (Turning to Dorian.) “Here, I saved you a seat.”
“What’s your name?”
“Dorian.”
As the man types it, Jon-David lays a hand on Dorian’s back and whispers: “Congratulations. You’re officially present.”
She wakes up on the couch and recalls having woken up several times already. Each time glimpsing the television, but seeing only vaguely what it was showing her, and not really hearing what was being said. On the table between herself and the television: an ashtray and the small ceramic pipe she bought in a head shop in Haight-Ashbury long ago (before the bridge fell, before Dorian) and a small plastic zip bag with a few buds of the stuff they’d had the other night in the park; all this beside a wine glass and a bottle of red, half empty. One of the times she’d awakened, she had become cognizant first of the television and then of Dorian, who was sitting on the couch beside her, looking into her eyes and touching her shoulder, prodding her gently, saying:
“Mom, Mom.”
And Kathryn had responded with something like: “Hm? What. Dorian. Are we all right?”
“Here,” he had said.
What he wanted to do was help her up. But she was alert enough to not want him to think she couldn’t do it on her own …
And so finally he had left her there, with the TV still on, thinking that’s how you end up when you don’t carefully consider every choice in life, one thing leads to another and you find yourself middle-aged and stoned and asleep in front of a neoliberal news program at nine o’clock at night. Why is she the one I want to talk to? Because, if she were sober, she’d drag it out of you. What’s the matter, she would say. Where were you tonight? She would take you by the shirt sleeve, grip your arm and make it hurt, making you believe there are things a mother is powerful enough to disallow. And my father. Won’t pressure you at all. Because deep down, he doesn’t want to know. If he stays ignorant, he won’t have to act. He can stay in his own world of stories.
Still, go looking.
You won’t find him in the room downstairs, or in the bedroom. But through a window onto the back yard, you will notice a light in the trees. Go out there, cross the lawn, and stand by the door of the gazebo. He is inside. Writing in the light of a camping lantern, by hand in a notebook. Address him through the screen.
“Dad.”
The pen will stop moving. Perhaps only coincidentally. He didn’t hear you. Just a pause in composition. But then he closes the notebook and caps the pen and turns to you and says: “Hey.”
“Hey.” (Open the door.) “What is this, like, your new office?”
“Sort of.”
The little screened-in outbuilding is furnished with a rattan couch; a small glass table, on which the lantern is set; and a lawn chair, in which you now seat yourself. Notice, on the couch, in addition to the notebook and the pen, a couple of old-fashioned books, a pod and a pair of earphones. And something else. A print-out, a picture. Grainy and ghostly, like a diagnostic medical image.
“Where were you tonight?” he asks.
“Nowhere.”
He sees what you’re looking at. His eyes go from you to the picture and back to you again. A moth is outside, trying to get in. Wings beating against the wire mesh of the window screen in a kind of code.
I knew what it was even as he gave it to me and said: “It’s the photo you wanted. I zoomed into the sunglasses. That’s the reflection.” The strange thing is, I couldn’t see it at first. Couldn’t see the thing I was consciously looking for: a girl of eight or nine, holding a camera or a phone in front of her eyes. I couldn’t see that. Still, I thought: I have not been wrong. I haven’t. He altered the image … Then suddenly the truth was obvious and clear. I saw through the illusion of the white and black pattern. The flowing lines that seemed to be the lightplay of an aurora were actually strands of long hair (there must have been a wind coming off the ocean). A sloping shape, almost whited out by a brightness that could only be the sky, became the outline of an arm and shoulder. The darker vertical line was the strap of a swimsuit top; and the dark blur making it hard to discern a face was the device that had taken the picture in which she herself had been captured.
“It’s her,” I said.
“I know it seems that way,” my father said.
“It is.”
“Dorian—”
“How did you do it? Erase everything. I search her name and there’s nothing — not even deep-archived.”
“Dodo, listen to me.”
“Don’t call me that. She made up that name.”
“You’re seeing something that isn’t there. So am I. It’s happening to me now.”
“What is,” I said.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s what I’m writing. I don’t know where the words are coming from. Something’s going on. Maybe in the water supply or in something like milk that we consume on a regular basis. I don’t think it could be airborne, but— A kind of hallucinogen. A drug that affects memory …”
Soon as he says it, he wishes he hadn’t. Because he does not himself believe it. A drug in the water? If they were under the influence of some kind of chemical, so would countless others be. There’d be widespread reports of people remembering family, friends, lovers who never existed. No, this isn’t pandemic. It’s specific. To us. Us. Yes, us. It’s happening to me now. Nothing’s happening. You’re simply seeing what you want to see. She’s nothing but a dream. The pregnancy was real. And it might’ve been a girl — is that what you’re thinking? And it might’ve been yours. All of it is possible. Okay, fine. Let’s say it was yours (which there’s an even chance it wasn’t), and it was a girl and you kept it and had it. So one day, eight years later, you could’ve been on a beach in California and she could’ve taken a picture of you and her mother and her brother (and herself), and let’s say ten years after that she was in the city when the thing happened, just like Dorian says she was, and let’s say she died there. How did you — all of you — forget all that? Maybe that’s it. Maybe what’s it. The drug. It doesn’t create false memories, it erases real ones. Christ, would you listen to yourself … Listening, insofar as words not spoken aloud can be heard again in memory; and as Mitch listens, he speaks further still, saying it can’t be that kind of drug either, because a life cannot be made to vanish totally: not from the cloud, nor from the mind. Yes, certain links can rot, or be deliberately broken. But Dorian said it himself. There are archives. It’s the same with memory. We can take a pill for grief or trauma. Mitigate the pain of a loss. Even forget the day it happened, the specifics of the event. But we can’t erase a life. The life will always be a part of us, and always will have been a life. And if some force came hurtling out of the sky over San Francisco, not a hijacked plane or a meteor but something infinitely more powerful, enough to crash entire systems of reality … if that’s what happened that day over the bridge and she was there, then all this — the words I am writing, the dreams my son is dreaming, the photo his hands are holding now — these things would be recovered fragments of the life we lost …