He’s funny, he makes me laugh; when was the last time I actually laughed?
“You gotta laugh,” he says. “It’s the best thing you can do for your health.”
In the evening we go to see stand-up, and after the first fifteen minutes of not being very impressed, I found that I was laughing until my face hurt.
I remembered that night. I had been alone, and wondered in retrospect quite what had prompted me to visit the club; not my usual scene, not the sort of thing I usually did. I tried to remember who sat next to me, and drew a blank. We must have held hands throughout, though, to avoid forgetting. More notes — six in total, all written in the same form.
Today you spent the day with someone you cannot remember. You have agreed to meet him again at 10.30 at the Coney Island ferry.
… at Grand Central Station
… at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
… at Times Square
Collections of photos and memorabilia pile up. I remember going to the theatre twice that week, once to see a show about a dysfunctional Irish family that left me bored, once to see a production of Coriolanus that left most of its cast variously drenched in blood, water, vegetable matter, paint and pain. The audience, when the scarlet-soaked actors bowed at the end, stood and cheered, and so did I, and did someone cheer next to me? Was there a man in the seat beside mine who whooped at this tale of ambitious mothers and vengeful generals?
Can’t remember.
Photos: he and I, grinning outside the theatre. Ticket stubs, menus, napkins with doodles on them — he has a gift for caricature, there I am, my nose too big, my eyes bulging like they’re going to burst, hair like candy floss exploding from my skull, tiny curving body. I have doodled a reply — a stick figure, barely human, waving in a corner. At the end of every day a letter, carefully written from the me that was to the me that is now.
Tonight we had sex. It seemed something we should do. It was fine. Now he’s sitting on the bed writing a letter to himself, explaining the day that has been and everything that has happened, before we forget. It’s 4 a.m., and I just want to sleep. I find it hard to gather words, and am so afraid of putting my pen down, closing my eyes, killing everything that today was.
Would we be friends, lovers, were we not what we are? Two asthmatics meet in a room, will they stay together simply because they are asthmatic? Do I like Parker? Do I like him?
An email address, a phone number. In a stranger’s handwriting: just in case. In my handwriting:
The address of someone you cannot remember, in case you ever need him.
On the seventh day, a note written on hotel stationery.
Today we agreed not to see each other.
That was all it said.
And at the very bottom of the box, a letter, written in someone else’s hand, which read:
Dear Hope
My name is Parker. I hope that you have letters about me already, which you have been keeping, as I have been keeping photos and letters about you. I hope that you are favourable in your report of me. I don’t know you — today is the first day we have ever met — but I see from pictures and notes that we’ve met many times before. I think the days that went before have been wonderful, but I cannot remember you in them. I wanted to write to you, before we part, so that there is something physical of me in your hands, which you may remember when I am gone.
How stupid it must seem that I want to tell you things about yourself; I know that I have known you, and yet cannot know you. I am very frightened of what you know about me, of what you have written down. I could tell you the contents of my own letters, my accounts of everything that’s passed between us… but they’d only be words describing words, and that doesn’t feel fair.
You said a thing, when we agreed to go our ways, that I am desperate to remember. Look, I’ve written it here, and I’ve written it on my hand, and I’ve written it in my diary, and I’ll write it on my phone — I will remember it, because it seems to me the way in which you live your life. You said that, since the past vanishes with memory, all that we can live in is now. Remembrance is an act of looking back, and we do not exist in the past, except here, in these letters and photos. Even reading these is not an act of remembrance, because I write now. I hold your image now. I re-read these words, now. I look at you, now. I close my eyes, now. I exist only now. Only my thoughts, the thoughts that I have in this present moment, they are the prism through which all else travels, and even the past, even memory, is remembered only now. We exist in the present tense, and even our futures will one day be the past, and the past will be forgotten, and so only now remains. What matters, therefore, is not hope for things to come, nor regret for things passed, but this action in this moment, these deeds, this now.
Hope — I have lived a complicated life. Can a thing which is forgotten change a man?
I hope it can. Hope, for hope, in hope, of Hope.
I don’t know how to end this letter. Should I say that I love you? I don’t think that would be right. I think it is inappropriate, so I will leave it,
with very best wishes,
I kept the letter, along with all the rest.
I cannot remember Parker now. I do not remember his face, his touch, his body, his words, his deeds, our days.
But I have one thought that I cling to in this present time: that at the end of that week we spent together, I had acquired a taste for comedy.
He is forgotten, but I am changed.
I have no words to express how wondrous this is.
Chapter 29
Some people fantasise about being rescued by firemen.
The fantasy perhaps involves muscular men, faces coated in a manly quantity of soot and sweat, pushing bodily through the flames that dare not touch them in their heavy boots, to sweep the invalid victim off her feet and carry her, slung across one shoulder, bosom heaving, hair flapping around her curiously untouched face, to moonlit safety.
Having been rescued by the fire services of Istanbul, I can report that this is not the case.
Smoke inhalation rendered me unconscious; I woke in pain, on a bed in an ambulance, to find a woman with a face like a rotting potato cutting my trousers away from my legs. I tried to speak, and my lungs were full of flame. I tried to move, and my arms were fallen ebony. Another woman, this one younger, brown-black lipstick, heavy shadow around her eyes, stepped forward and said, in Turkish, a language I do not speak well at all,
“Can you hear me, ma’am?”
She gave me water. The water burned, and I wanted more.
“Ma’am, can you tell me your name?”
“Hope,” I said, before I could remember to lie. “My name is Hope.”
The elder woman continued cutting at my clothes, oblivious to the activities around her. The doors to the ambulance were open, and I could hear fire still raging, see its light cast across the tarmac of the street, hear the sounds of men rushing, masonry crumbling. Who had called the fire engines in? Unlikely I’d ever know; a stranger without a name, who’d saved my life.
“Are you experiencing…” A series of words that I didn’t understand in Turkish, accompanied by careful gestures on the paramedic’s own body, indicating places perhaps where I should be feeling pain. I stared at her uncomprehending, tasted soot on my teeth, felt the air rush through my suddenly hollowed-out, suddenly scorched nose. I shook my head, and the young paramedic smiled awkwardly, trying to find different words, in an easier language.