Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel Page 5

  Before dialing Carol’s number, I tried to figure out what I should say. My first thought, shouting an unsolicited “Don’t kill yourself !” would be the iciest of cold calls. Carol would think I was crazy and hang up. Then I considered that perhaps I shouldn’t call. I was trying to change the future and it might backfire. What if my call first implanted the idea of suicide in her mind, making me ultimately responsible for her death? It was a valid concern because every warning is also a dare: I’d always thought that if God hadn’t hung a big forbidden sign on the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve might still be Gardening.

  All these thoughts were just a way of letting me pretend that I wasn’t scared. Scared that I couldn’t prevent her death and afraid that my failure would fundamentally alter my outlook on life, convincing me that none of us have any control over our fate. Even if it’s true, who wants to live with that oppressive belief ?

  Carol’s phone rang five times before she answered.

  “Hello.” She sounded out of breath, as if she’d run up a flight of stairs.

  “Carol. . . .”

  “Hi, Groovy. You sound like you have a cold.”

  I noted that my voice must have aged, but was so powerfully moved upon hearing Carol once again that I couldn’t respond right away. I became choked up. My sister had always called me Groovy. It was a little private joke between us. I’d always loved the word—groovy has always been my highest praise. I’d started saying groovy in the late ’60s— trying to sound groovy—when we were kids. But after Carol’s death, I played back an old message she’d left on my answering machine. When I heard “Hi, Groovy,” I suddenly understood that she never used the word ironically. Carol really regarded me as her groovy older brother living in New York.

  “I’m a little congested.” It was close to the truth. Hearing Carol’s voice put me on the verge of crying.

  “I was just thinking of calling you. Mom called last night. She said the girls in Card Club were taking her to a Thigh restaurant. Yes, not a Thai restaurant. Thigh. She said it repeatedly: “I’m not sure if I like Thigh food.” Of course, I told her no one likes ‘Thigh’ food . . .”

  I laughed but also felt as if I might sob. Carol had always regaled me with yarns about our mother and the Card Club “girls”—friends my mother had been playing pinochle with for almost twenty years and would still be playing cards with twenty years later. It was odd but felt completely natural to be chatting with Carol again. I relished hearing her voice at a time in her life when she was happy and contented. After purchasing my first cell phone in the late ’90s, I used to call Carol all the time, often sharing recent conversations I’d had with our mother. For instance, a day after our mother attended her first bris, I called Carol to tell her, “Mom said, ‘It was very interesting. I didn’t know the Jewish people don’t believe in original sin. They believe that you’re born good but that you’ll eventually disappoint everyone.’”

  For months after her death, when something funny or odd happened, for a split second I’d think, “I have to call Carol.” Then I’d remember she was dead and my grief would be heart-wrenchingly renewed. I still had the same phone and never could bring myself to delete Carol’s name from my address book, even though seeing her name was always painful.

  “Uh, Carol, I need to talk to you about something.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  Now she sounded worried. I was gay and lived in New York in 1986. She probably thought I was about to tell her I was HIV positive.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. Look, this will sound crazy, but I had a terrible dream last night. It took place fifteen years from now.”

  Telling her I had a bad dream was hokey, but I thought it was a plausible way to introduce the subject of her suicide without resorting to the conversation-ending declaration: “I’m a time traveler from the future . . .”

  “Is this your roundabout way of telling me that you’ve become a telephone psychic?”

  “Just listen.”

  “All right.”

  I’d snapped at her. I’d never realized before that telling a lie because the truth was unbelievable was more stressful than straightforward dishonesty.

  “I received a message on my machine to call the sheriff’s office. Someone there told me that you had shot yourself. In the head. You’d been taken to a hospital. I cried out and crumpled up as if someone had struck me. You were living in New Jersey and we’d spoken three times that day. I’d invited you to come to my place to have dinner that night but you said no. I’d really insisted. You’d been depressed for a year but had recently told me you were feeling better. I drove to the hospital. You were on life support but there was nothing they could do.”

  “You shouldn’t read The Bell Jar before going to bed.”

  “It was the most horrible thing that—it was the most horrible thing that had ever happened to Mom, Kevin, Alan—or me.”

  “Are you crying?”

  I’d hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  “Now you’re scaring me.”

  “You don’t understand. I was there when we took you off life support.”

  Is there any way to make a young healthy woman imagine her own death? It was like asking her to remember her own birth.

  “John, I’m not going to kill myself. I’ve never thought about doing that. It was a bad dream.”

  “But your life could change in fifteen years. You have to promise me that you’ll never kill yourself. We have to make a pact that if you ever think about doing it, you’ll call and tell me. I love you and would do anything for you.”

  “Don’t worry. It was a nightmare.”

  “No. You have to promise me.”

  I made her swear that if she ever had suicidal thoughts she would call and tell me. Even if she felt that she didn’t want to burden me with her problems, she had to call me.

  “Now I’m starting to feel depressed,” she joked.

  “You know depression runs in the women in our family. Nan had it and Mom has it and you could have it too. You should just be aware of it.” An idea occurred to me. “Maybe I’ll start sending you a self-help book every week.”

  “If you do that, then I will kill myself.”

  After we hung up, I felt devastated by how much I missed her. Even talking to Carol about her own death had been enjoyable. The call made me more determined to save her. I was satisfied that at least my sister would never forget our conversation. She never forgot anything, an ability that I used to admire. She could recall things that happened in our lives that I’d completely forgotten. After her death I found a photo of the two of us in our early twenties. Carol’s wearing hipster sunglasses and her long hair is streaked silver on the sides à la Bride of Frankenstein. I look stoned and I’m wearing a huge gray wig that looks tossed on my head. I have no memory of that picture, but Carol would know exactly when and why we were dressed like that. It was only after Carol’s death that I understood that having total recall was a curse, making it impossible to forget any of the sad moments in your life, all the while adding new injuries.

  But Carol’s last comment had been a joke, which made me doubt whether a phone call would have enough impact to change the course of her life. In our family, jokes were a way of expressing your feelings or avoiding your feelings or an even more confusing mixture of concealing and revealing. I needed to really convince Carol that I was telling the truth and that she was in danger. You’d think persuading someone happy that someday they’re going to be miserable would be the simplest task in the world; after all, isn’t every life story a comedy with an unhappy ending? Then I thought, My case would be strengthened if she met both of me: her brother from the present and the same brother from the future. I couldn’t do this by myself and neither could Junior. We needed to visit her together.

  I didn’t need to look up my parents’ telephone number. I knew it by heart. What would I say to my dad? I couldn’t remember any telephone conv
ersation between us that hadn’t been perfunctory. “How are you?” “Fine.” “Me too.” “Bye.” Now I was going to ring him up to tell him that I was his son from the future and he was going to die of alcoholism. It would seem like the cruelest prank phone call in history. It would be better to wait and do it face to face. I felt uncomfortable about putting it off, but the alternative was so preposterously disagreeable that I decided to risk it.

  Then I also considered trying to prevent Taylor from becoming a Republican. Not doing anything was untenable. I’d warn Taylor if he was going to be hit by lightning, and he was about to be struck by stupid and nasty. In order to shield him from that doom, I’d need to give him a detailed explanation of the history of the United States for the next twenty years. The thought of recounting all the hypocrisy, lies, and mean-spiritedness was depressing, but I also worried it would sound boring and unbelievable. In 1986 Taylor was finishing up his PhD at MIT, his parents were divorced, and during summer vacations he still sometimes helped his mother run her dry-cleaning business in Queens. I looked up her telephone number and dialed.

  Mrs. Esgard’s gruff “Hello” always sounded like she wanted you to reply, “Good-bye!” I asked to speak to Taylor. “Taylor!” she shouted. At first, his mother had terrified me. I wasn’t used to a mom who sprinkled scorn and praise on her children with every sentence. My personal favorite was the time at Christmas when she opened her present and said, “My son’s a genius who doesn’t know his mother never wears purple.” Mrs. Esgard had grown to tolerate me, but I never lost the impression that she thought her brilliant son could do better than a comic book dealer.

  “Taylor,” she yelled once more.

  “Hello?” he asked.

  “Hi, Taylor, my name’s John Sherkston,” I blurted out. “We haven’t met yet but I’m from the future and in five years we’re going to meet and become boyfriends.”

  “Let me take this call upstairs,” Taylor said. “Stay on the line; I’ll just be a minute.”

  I waited while he went upstairs and picked up another phone. I thought for sure that he would hang up on me, but one of his strengths as a scientist was his inexhaustible curiosity. Anyone who mentioned time travel to Taylor had his attention.

  “So you’re from the future?” Taylor asked. “Who’s the president then?”

  “George W. Bush, the vice president’s son.”

  “Really? I’ve never heard of him.”

  “Count your blessings.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I used a time machine that you’re going to build. See? I know you’ve always been fascinated by time travel even though your professors think it’s kind of silly.”

  “That’s true, but I need more corroboration than that,” Taylor continued, sounding unfazed by everything I had said. “Tell me about what my boyfriend will look like in the future.”

  “I’m tall and . . . I have thinning hair.”

  “They can invent a time machine, but not a cure for baldness?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you a genetically altered super-soldier? With muscles practically bursting through your uniform?”

  “Um, no. But I work out. I’m muscular.”

  “How’s the sex between us? Do I get off on your freaky, pumped-up bod?”

  “Um, it’s good.”

  “Prove that we’re boyfriends. Tell me what I like to do in bed.”

  I shared our usual sexual practices with him, but then added, “Whenever you have an orgasm, you let out a quiet moan that sounds like a cry of regret, as if you’ve dropped something fragile and watched it break.”

  “Yeah, that’s good. But don’t a lot of guys moan?”

  It seemed that we had gotten off track. I wanted to make sure I told him what I needed to say.

  “Look, that’s true, but what I’m really calling about is that in fifteen years, terrorists will hijack jets and fly them into the World Trade Towers, and that event will change you.” I paused for a second, concerned that telling him “You’ll turn into someone I can’t love” would sound trivial. It wouldn’t make any sense without telling him about the entire history of the Bush–Cheney administration. Then I said it anyway.

  There was no response from Taylor and I became nervous. “I can explain.”

  “Are these terrorists really muscular and sexy?”

  “No! They’re . . . terrorists.”

  “But could they be muscular and really sexy?”

  I was slow on the uptake and tried to answer his question logically. “I guess anyone can theoretically become muscular and sexy.”

  “And you came back in the time machine I built just to stop this attack by having hot sex with the muscular, sexy terrorists so they’ll miss their flights?”

  “No!” I said in exasperation. “I, um, came back in time . . .” I couldn’t tell him why I came back in time. I had no idea why Cheney sent me. And it wouldn’t make a good first impression if I mentioned talking about buying vintage comic books in order to get enough money to divorce him.

  “It was because of an accident,” I said, struggling to invent a story. “You went to talk to the president on your cell phone and I accidentally hit a switch.” I thought my lie sounded plausible.

  “Well, I like the sound of your deep voice,” Taylor said. “But can we skip this crappy terrorist story and say that you’re a huge, muscular, super-strong android sent from the future to fuck me? What are you wearing?”

  Oh, Jesus. I’d forgotten how much he enjoyed phone sex back in the ’80s and that sci-fi sexual fantasies had always turned his crank. I’d once overheard him having a serious conversation with another queer sci-fi geek about whether you could program a teleporter to scramble a man’s atoms and then rearrange them so that he’d lose the love handles he beamed down with, and beam back up with broader shoulders and a bigger dick. Taylor probably thought I was part of some time travel porn scenario that some guy had cooked up. I was tempted to just go with it, but thought that it would be my luck to be caught beating off when Taylor showed up, along with a team of scientists. Somehow telling Taylor that I was having phone sex with him as a young man wouldn’t make the situation any less humiliating. I decided if I was going to make a convincing argument against him becoming a Republican, I would have to attempt to explain everything.

  “After this terrorist attack, the entire country naturally backed our president, but he used this support to lead our country into an unnecessary war that he had planned the whole time.”

  “All right, you suck at phone sex! Don’t ever call me again.”

  “Wait!” I shouted. “I’m not calling for phone sex. You really do invent a time machine and I am your boyfriend from twenty years in the future.”

  Don’t think I wasn’t aware that anyone would have a hard time buying that.

  “Well, if I can invent a time machine, can’t you at least invent a story that gets me off ?”

  Taylor hung up. I’d failed. I felt sad that I probably wouldn’t have another chance to prevent Taylor from becoming a Republican. At any minute I expected to be returned to the future. I thought, If only Al Gore had been president on 9/11, Taylor’s patriotic reaction might have turned him into a conservative Democrat, tough on crime and defense, soft on senior citizens and sea otters. I could live with that, since it could also describe me.

  My success rate at altering the future with cold calls seemed to be nil, but I was still in Good Samaritan mode and tried to remember other circumstances where my foreknowledge could help people. In addition to tripping up Death, I considered whether I could delay any of the other three horsemen of daily life: Disease, Divorce, and Dullness. I immediately thought of Disease and all my friends who’d died of AIDS. Why didn’t I think of bringing back crates of drugs with me? I asked forgiveness from Shawn, Jorge, Will, Kevin, Bob, Kim, Mark, Marcus, Cully, and others whose names I’d forgotten.

  During the twenty-year interval, other deaths had occurred in my life, but it w
as frustrating to grasp that I couldn’t prevent most of them. They weren’t accidental or intentional; they were deaths by old age or illnesses that were incurable in 1986 and would still be incurable in 2006. (It would just be cruel to call up people like my uncle Bill and say, “You’re going to wake up dead in two years.”) Interfering with Divorce seemed presumptuous because relationships usually began well before ending badly. Who was I to deny someone a possible life-changing fuck before his boyfriend or girlfriend turned into an asshole? I could play the spoiler for Dullness, trying to prevent dull people from doing dull things (I planned to make a living will giving my loved ones permission to pull my plug if I ever take up solving Sudoku puzzles), but the thought of preventing dullness bored me. I had to accept that graves yawn for some people because even the earth knows every minute spent with them will be an eternity.

  I examined myself carefully in the cheval mirror. There was nothing I could do about my hair loss. There’s something essentially demoralizing about looking in a mirror and asking, Would I fuck me? Trust me, if you’re ambivalent, it will ruin your day. But I didn’t want my appearance to disappoint Junior and then have him become suicidal. (This actually concerned me, since similar plot twists frequently occurred in science fiction stories.) I decided to go to Canal Jeans and buy myself a more flattering shirt and a pair of pants. It was absurd, but I was nervous about dating myself.

  4

  THE DOORBELL CHIMES startled me when they rang at 9:13. (The chimes were another part of the steampunk décor. Taylor’s thoroughness was impressive and annoying.) When I opened the door, Junior seemed nervous. He said hello as his glance darted around me almost as if he couldn’t decide where to begin undressing me with his eyes. Then he took in the Finney Room’s cartoonish furniture, which embarrassed me. But Junior thought it was cool and was fascinated by the steampunk air conditioner, where cold air blew from a window-unit faux bronze bas-relief of the three heads of Cerberus.