Memory is, if nothing else, the only true bridge between the living and the dead. Greater than monuments, stronger than ideas, and more tangible than words printed on paper can ever be. Want an example?
Look. There is a man, and he is weeping.
There, at the foot of the hospital bed, his face buried in his hands.
He is living proof of what grief does to memory. Grief alters memory, shapes it so that we see not the person we have lost, but some different thing entirely: an idea, a caricature of some strange but close person who could do no wrong, no evil, no foul.
All he remembers is his wife, his beautiful, perfect wife, bathed in heavenly splendor. The day they met, which ended with coffee stains on her blouse and swapped phone numbers. The first time they kissed, her soft lips tasting of strawberries. Their wedding day, how luminous she looked in her wedding dress, and how they had danced together for what might have been a blissful eternity.
He doesn't remember the times they fought. He doesn't remember the times she nagged him, said she wished she had never married such a slob. He doesn't remember the time she left and promised that she would never come back. He doesn't remember the bad stuff, because the bad stuff simply doesn't matter anymore. Today, on the day of her death, all he knows about his wife was that she was a saint. The old cliché about absence making the heart grow fonder is all too true, and, tell me, is there a more permanent absence than death?
This man will weep, and he will remember his wife as people should be remembered: fondly, with tears, and with a respect never given to them in life. Some time later, perhaps weeks, months, perhaps years, he will look back on her and see her for what she truly was: flawed, human, real. But that will come later. For now, she is his angel, his flawless little angel, watching over him from above.
This is what grief does to memory. We see the person we wish to see, so that our hearts can hurt that much more. Because we want it to hurt. We have a right to feel pain; to even want it. And after a while, the pain numbs us, and we feel nothing. Nothing at all.
A thousand miles away, Maggie Chesterton was not allowed this comfort. Her son, child, her baby, had died a criminal. That was the truth, the long and short of it. She knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that her son had his demons, and had lost to them. She couldn't bring herself to remember him fondly, not even if she wanted to. For her, the present had tainted the past almost irreconcilably, destroying what she once believed it to be. But still, no longer how long she sat in the dark of her kitchen and decimated her long-standing pledge to stay sober, she could not bring herself to hate him.
She sat at the kitchen table, where the once-family had shared so many meals, so many laughs, so many stories. But the table meant nothing now. Its innocence was shattered, gone forever like a pearl cast into Hell. She tried not to think about it. Her only companion was the sound of the liquor as it swished and sloshed about in its glass prison.
Little did she know, I was spying on her. Well, not spying, technically. More like observing. I like to think of it as spying, though. Makes me feel cool. The woman's son was standing next to me, and I could feel his unease; he was breathing out his nose, quite loudly, I might add.
“You can stop that,” I said. “The whole breathing thing. You're dead. You could never breathe again and it wouldn't bother you in the least.”
He didn't appear to be listening to my words of wisdom. He was too fixated on his mother, sitting in her little chair staring off into the dark. We were standing in the middle of the kitchen, next to a row of cabinets. If she would only turn her head in the slightest, she would be staring right at us.
“Can she see us?” he asked.
“Of course not. And don't even think about throwing a sheet over your head. It works, but not the way you want it to.”
“Can she even hear us?”
“Not a bit. We're like ninjas. Neat, huh?”
“I guess,” he said, not really paying attention. “God, she looks so depressed.”
“She's probably heard about you, by now,” I said. “Or the lack of you, I suppose.”
The woman lifted the bottle to her lips, took a sip, and set the bottle back onto the table. Even when she set it down, her hand was still gripped around it. The boy turned away from her, as if he could no longer look
“I can make her better, right?” he said. “I can make all this go away?”
“Yes,” I said. “But it has to be you. I can't take away memories of you any more than you can take away memories of me.”
“It's so weird,” he said. “I mean, I've heard about Grim Reapers and stuff, but I've never heard about stealing memories.”
“Well, that would make sense, wouldn't it? How could someone recall the act of not remembering?”
“I guess.”
A pause. The woman took another swig from her bottle. It was nearly empty now, most of it backwash. She examined her remaining liquid courage and finished it off. She set the bottle down on the ground and stood up. She crossed the kitchen and opened a cabinet barely a foot away from where we were standing. After a few moments of watching her fumble around inside the cabinet, the boy reached out, as if to touch her, but before final contact could be made, she turned away, not even bothering to close the door behind her. In her hand she carried another bottle, this one full.
“How do I do it?” he said, watching his mother settle herself back down at the table. “Tear away the memories? I don't wanna see this, so tell me now. No joking around, no bull.”
“What's life without a little joking around?”
“We're dead.”
“What's this 'we' shit, Casper?”
The boy turned to me, and I recognized the emotion scrawled across his face. I'm still a little rusty on my English, but I think the proper term is “rage”.
“Just tell me!” he yelled.
Had the boy been in possession of a working voice box, this command would have woken the whole neighborhood. I looked at him, all the humor gone from my face.
“Do you know who I am?” I said simply. It wasn't a question.
He looked down at the floor, the anger that had been so prevalent a moment ago gone in an instant.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean-”
“You pull them out.”
“What?”
“The memories,” I said. “You pull them out. Kind of like fishing.”
“I don't fish.”
“Me either. But you get the gist. Now go. Do it now so we can get this over with.”
“I'm sorry,” he said again.
“It's okay. You're only human. Dead, but human.”
There was a moment of silence, a strange little calm before the storm.
“So, fishing?” he said after the pause.
“Reach inside her head and pluck the memories out. It's as simple as that.”
"How do I know which one's are mine? What if I yank out her prom night or something?"
"It doesn't work like that," I said. "You can only take away what you yourself have given."
“So I just,” he stretched out his hand in an act of imitation, “phase right through her, right?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “You'll find your that your new body is quite – what's the word? – not solid.”
The boy heaved in a heavy sigh.
“Here we go,” he said, and approached the woman. I watched with clinical detachment as he prepared to perform the procedure. I hate erasing. I hate the whole damn practice. Memories are important. Without memories, there is no history, and without history, how do we forge ahead? It sickens me how these people, these humans, refuse to accept responsibility for who and what they are.
As the boy stopped next to the woman, she took another sip from her bottle, then – in an act that I would admit almost surprised even me – suddenly pricked up her head, as if listening for something. It was as if she could feel her son's presence next to her. She turned her head in his direction, and fear spread across the boy's face. For a moment – a single, eternal moment – they looked into each other's eyes. The moment – being a moment – could only last so long. Finding nothing but the emptiness of her kitchen, the woman turned away from her son and returned to her bottle.
The boy turned to me, the fear now turned to puzzlement. I shrugged, then nodded in a way that sad, “Go on, then.”
The boy nodded back, and reached his hand into his mother's head. The hand slipped through the flesh as if into a puddle of water. The boy's hands were shaking as they passed through, guilty as well as afraid for the atrocity they were about to perform. The woman didn't stir. She didn't even notice, at least not at first. Then, without even slightest hint of warning, her face twisted, and she opened her mouth as if to scream. The boy yanked his hand out of his mother's head, a sliver of purple, liquid memory grasped in his hand. The woman's head collapsed onto the table, and the bottle of liquor fell from her hand and shattered as it hit the floor.
The boy gripped the memory in his hand. It was a long, wet thing, wriggling about like – ironically, enough – a fish. The poor thing thought it was alive. Veins of red pulsed inside its body. Violet drops of plasm dripped from it onto the floor as it struggled around in the boy's hand.
He turned to his mother, shock in his eyes.
“She's fine,” I said calmly. “But I told you it would hurt.”
He turned his face to me, the fear in his eyes replaced by anger and desperation. If he had the mind to protest, it was apparent he had changed his mind.
“Is she gonna be okay?” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
“What do I do with it, now?” said the boy, holding the memory away from him at arm's length as if afraid it might attack him.
“Let it die.”
“How?”
“Same way you let a fish die.”
“That seems so-”
“Cruel?”
“Yeah.”
“So is shoving your hand into your mother's brain and yanking out her memories.”
At this the boy was silenced, and put his mind to restraining the memory. It still wiggled around in his hand, though with much less vigor than it had before. I could see the unease spread across the boy's face. It was clear that he hadn't been sure, up until right here and right now, what he had signed up for. He gritted his teeth as every thought and tender kiss his mother had ever given him died in his hand. After several moments of a silence that lingered between uncomfortable and horrific, the thing let out a final, ghostly rattle and was still.
The boy was breathing heavily. He dropped the memory onto the ground, and when thought collided with wood, neither made even the smallest of sounds. He looked at me, as if unsure what to say.
“Just think,” I said in the most sarcastic voice I could muster. “You're saving her so much trouble.”
The boy didn't respond. He turned to face his mother, her head still resting on the kitchen table. A puddle of liquor and broken glass was spreading at her feet.
“Let's go,” he said, sickened.
As he turned to leave, the thing on the floor – the thing that, moments ago, has been as dead as Caesar Augustus – sprang back to life, its very willpower twitching into back into existence. Before the boy could react, it coiled itself around his ankle and sent him crashing to the floor. The memory wrapped around his entire body, consuming him like a spider's web. Silvery veins covered his body, his eyes turning a glassy, colorless prism. He choked out a final gasp that even I couldn't understand, and he was still except for the lungs still pulsing inside his chest.
For Caleb Chesterton, the world disintegrated.
The walls, the windows, the ceiling, everything, disappeared into chasm of blinding, terrible light. This was it, he somehow now. He had been given a life, had failed it miserably, and this was to be his Hell. The moaning void of nothingness consumed him, and for what felt like a thousand years, he was its prisoner.
Then, within a single, minuscule moment, the world was rebuilt, and he was back in his kitchen. Daylight flooded through the windows from an orange sky slowly giving way to twilight. He was walking around the kitchen, not as an actor but as an observer through the eyes of another. He knew, somehow, that this was his mother. He was somehow inside her memory, gazing back at her life like some sort of home movie. His mother hummed to the radio as it buzzed off an old Mama Cass song.
The memory came in snatches, like small flares of light amidst nothingness. He watched through her eyes as she scrambled eggs into the frying pan, and the memory went black. When it resumed, she was scraping the eggs off the pan and onto a small plate.
Footsteps. Then, out of the foyer, came the image of the not-so-late Caleb Chesterton.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” said his mom.
“Hey,” said the living and breathing Caleb. He was gazing out the sliding screen window. “Dad home?”
And suddenly, the ghost of the Caleb Chesterton realized – with a painful lurch in his heart – what day this was. This was the day of his death; hours before, in fact. This was the last time he saw his mother.
“It's six-thirty,” his mother answered, seemingly unphased by her son's lack of attention. “He's working late, I suppose. Should be dark soon.”
“Hmm,” he said, clearly not paying attention.
“Made some eggs,” said his mother. “Good old breakfast dinner, like grandma used to make. Enough for two. Lila's still at camp and all your father wants is those crap hamburgers from Mickey D's. You want some bacon?”
“Not hungry,” Caleb mumbled.
Look at her, you bastard! screamed Caleb, the real Caleb, the dead and regretful Caleb from inside his human prison. Just look at her. Please!
His living counterpart seemed not to notice.
“I'm gone,” he said. “Be back later tonight.”
“Oh,” said his mother's voice. “Oh, well, never mind.”
But the boy wasn't paying attention. Before she had the words out of her mouth, he had already closed the door behind him. She sighed, and the weight of it broke his heart.
“Well,” she said to herself as she contemplated the plateful of scrambled eggs. “Guess it's dinner for one tonight.”
The images in front of him faded, giving way to blinding, horrific light. When his vision returned, the kitchen was again dark and he was – now, more than ever – himself. The dead, dried-up memory lay on the ground beside him, it's final act complete.
I was standing in the same spot, watching curiously.
“How was it?” I asked, innocently enough.
He turned to me, terror scrawled across his face.
“The hell was that?” was his response.
“A memory,” I said. “Freshest one of the lot, I suppose.”
I reached down and helped the boy to his feet, his hands shaking as I pulled him up.
“That's happened before?” he said. “And you didn't tell me?”
“Memories are tricky things,” I said. “Some flicker away with time, some are locked away and found again, but some are strong. Stronger than the people who house them, I suppose. What just happened was the memory of you refusing to die. It fought back, vainly of course, but I see it managed to land a good punch or two.”
“Did you see all that?” said the boy. “The replay, I mean?”
“No,” I said. “Your memories are your own. People can't take them away, I can't take them away, God can't take them away. Only you can. I don't like to intrude.”
“It seemed so real,” he said sadly, stealing a glance back at his mother, who was still slumped over on the kitchen table. I could tell that he wanted nothing more than to wrap his arms around her and never let go. “It was like I was watching it from here eyes. God, it just, it felt so real.”
“It was real,” I said. “Once upon a time, that is. But now it's gone. You saw to that, didn't you?”
For a few moments the boy said nothing, the weight of his actions heavy upon him. He looked at me, and I saw all I needed to know. I nodded and, with the grace of a long and storied professional, I nonchalantly created another rip in the Universe.
“Come along, Casper,” I said.
He turned to enter the portal. Before stepping through, he gave the kitchen one final glance.
“I want to get out of here,” he said finally. “I never want to see this house again.”
“You never have to,” I said, stepping aside so that the boy could pass into the void. “Only in your memory.”
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