My Name Is Memory (4 page)

He climbed up to standing, balancing the guardrail under his stiff-soled shoes. He waved his arms to keep from slipping. Why did it seem important to jump and not to fall, when it came to the same thing? The heavy moisture in the air made his face feel wet. Another car passed.

Of all the millions of possible things he could take with him, he had a piece of Lucy’s soft purple dress balled up in his hand and the sour taste of bourbon in the back of his throat. In his mind he held the look of fear on her face as she tried to get away from him and he wouldn’t let go, ruining centuries of carefully nurtured hope, knowing he was ruining it, and still not being able to stop himself from ruining it.

That was enough to make him hold his balance and jump.

I
was once a perfectly normal person, but it didn’t last long. That was in my first life. The world was new to me then, and I was new to myself. It began in roughly the year 520 A.D., but I am not sure of the exact point in time. I didn’t keep track of things in the same way then. It was long ago, and I didn’t know I’d be remembering them.

I consider it my first life because I don’t remember anything coming before it. I guess it’s possible that I lived lives before that. Who knows, maybe I’ve been around since before the time of Christ but something happened to me in this particular life that led to the formation of my strange memory. Doubtful but possible, I guess.

And the truth is, some of the very early lives are murky. There were one or two when I think I must have died young from ordinary childhood diseases, and I’m not sure how they fit into the larger order of events. I keep a few bits and pieces from them, the expansive hotness of fever, a familiar hand or voice, but my soul was hardly situated before I moved along.

It’s painful for me to think about that first life and to try to recount it to you. I would have done better to die early of measles or pox.

Since I first began to understand my memory, I’ve considered my actions differently. I know that suffering doesn’t end with death. That’s true for all of us, whether we remember or not. I didn’t know it then. Maybe it helps explain how I did the things I did, but it doesn’t mitigate them.

I WAS FIRST born to the north of the city that was then called Antioch. The first indelible notch in my long record was the earthquake of 526. I had no perspective on it then, but in the years since, I’ve read every account I could find to compare to my own. My family survived, but it left many thousands dead. Our parents had gone to the market that day, and I was alone with my older brother, fishing in the Orontes, when it happened. I remember falling on my knees as the earth rolled under us in waves. For reasons I can’t explain I got up again and walked unsteadily into the river. I can still remember standing in water up to my neck, feeling the syncopated roll of one surface under the other, and then suddenly ducking under, my eyes open wide and my arms out at either side for balance. I lifted my feet from the ground and stretched out until I was parallel with the river. I rolled until I was face up and saw the sky through the water. I saw the way the light lost its certainty under there, and I felt I understood something about it. I have known a true mystic well enough to be sure I am not one, but for a moment the ticking of time was silenced and I saw through the fabric of this world to eternity. I didn’t process it then, but I’ve dreamed it a thousand times since.

My brother shouted curses at me to come back and then followed me when I didn’t. I think he meant to pummel me and drag me back to shore, but the sensations were so peculiar he stood a few yards from me, his face suspended over the river in a look of abstraction. I came back up to the surface, and we waited for the shore to go back to normal. And even when it did, I remember walking home, keeping a wondering eye on the ground as it passed under my feet.

WE WERE PROUD subjects of Byzantium then. Belonging to a great empire made little difference in our small domestic life, but the idea transformed us. It made our hills a little grander and our food a little tastier and our children a little prettier because we fought for them. The able-bodied men in my family fought, albeit distantly, under the famous general Belisarius. He, more than anyone, gave the glory and shape to our lives, which were otherwise not glorious. My uncle, whom we revered, was killed on a campaign to put down a Berber uprising in North Africa. We had only enough information about his death to demonize North Africa and every soul contained therein. I later discovered my uncle was most likely stabbed to death by a comrade for stealing his chicken, but again, that was later.

I sailed with my brother and a hundred other soldiers of the empire across the Mediterranean Sea to North Africa. We were inflamed by vengeance. Like many new souls, I was never better suited to being a soldier than I was in that life. I obeyed orders with absolute literalness. I didn’t question my superiors, not even in the privacy of my mind. I was fully committed, ready to kill, ready to die for my cause.

If you had asked me why this or that Berber tribe, who shared none of our culture, religion, or language, had to die or remain part of Byzantium for a few years longer, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. We weren’t the first to conquer them and wouldn’t be the last, but I was a young man of faith. I didn’t need to know exactly the cause of my fervency. The fervency itself was the cause. And just as blindly as I believed in the rightness of my side, I believed in the black heart of my enemy. This is characteristic of a very young soul and evidence, though not proof, that it really was my first life. I hope so. It would be an atrocity to have stayed that stupid.

In every life since that one, I’ve known from early on that I was different. I’ve known my interior life was something to hide. I have always kept apart, always shared little of myself except in the rarest cases. But that’s not how I was when I started.

I was swelled up with eagerness for my first soldierly assignment, but we spent weeks, it seemed, making a camp civilized for our commander. We went to great and arbitrary lengths to make an African desert as comfortable to him as his hilltop home in Thrace. These are not the kinds of reflections I made at the time. I don’t know if I reflected on anything at all. Little did I know then how long I’d have to reflect and how long I’d be saddled with my regrets.

Even exciting places are boring most of the time. Wars. Movie sets. Emergency rooms. This was yet another war when we mostly sat around gambling, bragging, getting drunk, and watching the meanest drunks pick fights—usually my brother in this case. It was almost identical to every other war I have fought in up to and including the Great War. The memorable parts, as in when you kill or get killed, take a very short amount of time.

At last our assignment came. We were making a raid on an encampment a day’s march west of Leptis Magna. As the mission grew closer it became clear it wasn’t an army encampment so much as it was a village. A village, we were told, where the army was being quartered.

“Is it a village of the Tuareg?” I asked with a shiny thirst for blood. It was the tribe I held responsible for killing my uncle.

My direct superior was a good motivator. He knew the answer I wanted. “Of course.”

I embarked on the raid with a knife and an unlit torch. I remember carrying the knife in my teeth, but that’s an emotional memory and not an actual one. I try to sift those out as well as I can, but there are exceptions, some more pleasurable than others.

When I see myself in that life, it’s mostly from the outside in. It feels to me as though, without the awareness of my memory, I wasn’t me yet. This was an ordinary person who would become me, and I look at him from a distance. Maybe that’s what I do to live with it. I contrast the scraggly, pimply, incapable exterior of that young man to the storm of ferocity and self-importance I know was going on inside his head.

My fellow raiders were like me, the youngest, the lowest, and the most expendable. We could be counted on to see in black and white and come back whole or not at all. We fanned out across the valley, ready to make war.

At some moonless hour of that night, roughly a quarter of our troop took a detour for water. My brother was put in charge of the splinter, and I went with him. We found the water, but afterward we couldn’t find our troop again. There were about twenty of us roving around in the dry scrub. I could tell my brother was flummoxed, but he didn’t want to show it. He was so susceptible to power it corrupted him instantly.

He gathered his group. “We’ll march directly to the village. I know where to go.”

He did seem to know where to go. There was only the suggestion of dawn when we first saw the village on the horizon. “We got here first,” my brother crowed. We came together for a moment to light our torches from a common flame. I remember the greedy eyes in the firelight. We all wanted to do our share of living.

The village was no more than a shadowy cluster of simple structures and thatched roofs. I could picture the enemy soldiers crouching inside, sinister. I put my torch to the dry roof of the first domicile I came to. The thatch was made to burn. I felt a jab of satisfaction as I watched the fire catch and spread. I made my knife ready for any man who would come out and confront me. I went on to the next hut and laid my torch. I heard screaming somewhere behind me, but my ears were muddled by my own roar and thrill.

By the third house, certain smells in my nose and sounds in my ears began to penetrate my thinking mind, burrowing in like worms. The fire had made a false, manic dawn, but now the sun endowed a true one. I could see the house directly in front of me. By rote I surged toward it with my torch and lit a clump of roof, but it didn’t take right away, as the others had. I went around back to try another spot, and I stumbled against a taut rope. I had visions of enemy traps, but as I stepped back I saw there were clothes hanging from it and from a line strung above. The wind lifted up and brushed the smoke away for a moment, and I could see it was a garden laced with clothing lines and small clothes drying in the gray air.

I went back around to the front of the house, confused and angry at the small clothes that hung on the line and the roof that sputtered and wouldn’t burn. The torch that seemed so brilliant in the dark looked weak and false as the sun came on more brightly. The wind blew the smoke away, and I saw that many of the gardens had clothing lines. They weren’t hiding soldiers; they were growing squashes and melons and drying laundry. Some of the gardens were already burning.

I didn’t know what to do then other than get the house to burn. I couldn’t have any other ideas. I confronted confusion with action. I lit the house from the bottom, a well-constructed wooden frame. Inadvertently I thought of the wooden frame we’d labored over for our house. I hurried around to the other side and found a scraggly fistful of roof to light. At last the fire took what I gave it, and the flames licked and popped. I thought I heard the sound of a baby’s cry from inside.

The fire took all right. I couldn’t tell if the emotion that filled me was horror or pride. I could barely move. I could barely force myself away from the blurring heat.

I saw the house as a head with wild, burning hair. The two windows were eyes, and the door was the mouth. To my astonishment the mouth opened and there was a person. It was a young person, a girl, wearing a nightgown.

When I think of it I try to picture her distantly, as the stranger she was then, and not as the girl I love. I change her a little in my memory; I know I do.

Her hair was long and loose, and her face turned to mine with the strangest expression. She must have known what I had done. I stood in front of her burning house with a torch in my hand. The torch had gone out. It had been enough to destroy their home and take their lives, though it was nothing now. I could hear the baby crying behind her.

I wanted to get the girl out of there. I wanted her to run. She was as beautiful as a fawn. Her eyes were large and green, with orange flames sparking in them. I felt panic. Who was going to help her?

I had changed sides. I was horrified. I wanted to put the fire out. There was a baby who would die. Maybe her sister or brother. Was her mother in the house? You have to wake her up, I wanted to shout. I’ll help you.

I no longer seemed to know who had done this terrible thing, but she knew. The flames roared. The wind whipped them and spread them. They were dancing all around her.

“You’ve got to run!” I shouted.

Her eyes were puzzled and sorrowful but not fearful, darting, and crazy, as mine were. Her face was as calm as mine was contorted. I took a step to her, but the heat was uncrossable. Flames curled and spat between us.

She looked out at the burning houses and gardens of her neighbors and then at me. She turned her head and looked behind her into her burning house. I prayed she would step out, but she didn’t. I couldn’t imagine this would be the end of her. She stepped back in.

“Don’t go!” I cried to her.

The mouth of the house was empty again. Within seconds the structure heaved and caved, but the flames stayed and fed on.

“I am sorry,” I heard myself shouting to her. “I’m sorry.” I repeated the words in Aramaic, because I thought that was a language she might understand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

I WAS NEARLY insensible on the march back to our camp, but I did look up long enough to observe heavy smoke on the horizon. I remembered, distantly, that we hadn’t rejoined the larger group, and as we got closer to the smoke I understood why. I was too numb to think or check my words.

“It was the wrong village,” I said.

Only my brother heard me. He must have seen what I saw and known what I knew as well as I did. “It wasn’t,” he said stonily.

At that moment my anguish was too overpowering for me to think about anything else. “It was.”

“It wasn’t,” he said again. I saw no guilt, no self-doubt, no regret. What I did see was wrath toward me, and I would have done better if I’d marked it and never said a word about that night again.