My Name Is Memory (8 page)

This summer Lucy had been eager to get home from school to her room and her raspberries and her nothing-special yard. She’d been feeling anxious since the end of the semester, sleeping little and badly, and waking up from terrible dreams. She’d told her mom it was the stress of exams. She had chasing dreams, burning dreams, beating dreams, and the wracking and crying dreams, which often featured the absurd Madame Esme trading off with Dana. And Daniel was a presence, seen or felt, in nearly every one. Lucy’s body ached from the strain of them.

She’d hoped that being home would soothe her and bore her, as it usually did. She thought if she just changed the rhythm of her nights and days, the dreams would stop. And here she was at home, and exams were over and Madame Esme was far away, but the dreams persisted. She couldn’t leave her brain at school. That was the problem. If she could have, she might have enjoyed a perfectly happy summer vacation.

She heard the screen door open and turned to see her mom. She had her pink suit on.

“Did you show a house?” Lucy asked.

“I had that open house on Meadow.”

Lucy could see the sweat seeping into circles under the arms of her mother’s pink linen jacket. “How’d it go?”

“I laid out food and flowers and cleaned that dump up myself. Four brokers showed up, not a buyer in sight, and those vultures had the nerve to eat my snacks.” Her tone was so dramatic Lucy wanted to laugh, but she didn’t.

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

Her mother hated being a realtor. She said she’d prefer to sell underwear at Victoria’s Secret, but her father thought that was unseemly for a graduate of Sweet Briar College. Lucy always had the feeling her mother couldn’t rebel against her native prissiness, so her daughters did it for her.

“Well.” She surveyed Lucy’s sundress. “Are you going out?”

“Kyle Farmer is having a party.”

“Kyle from chorus?”

“Yep. That one.”

“Fun. I’m glad you are going to see your old friends.”

Her mother took so much heart from simple social interactions that Lucy felt bad she didn’t have more of them, or at least make it seem like she did. She wondered if she should have stayed in Charlottesville for the summer with Marnie and spared her mother her true mood. She mostly avoided parties of old high school people. They had a depressing air of unearned nostalgia. Kind of like reunions but premature, where no one had gone out and done anything yet. But tonight she had a motive. Brandon Crist was going to be there, and he was the closest thing to a friend Daniel ever had at that school.

“Can I use your car?” she asked.

Her mother nodded, but her face showed reluctance. “You need to help pay for gas this summer, okay?”

“I know. I’ll fill it up. I put in two applications today.”

“Good girl.” Her mom always wanted to be pleased. She didn’t want to give Lucy a hard time. Dana had broken her so hard that Lucy’s shortcomings were almost like gifts.

I
’m skipping ahead to one of my most consequential lives, which was my seventh, and it began in Pergamum in Asia Minor in roughly the year 754 by our modern calendar. You’ve heard of Pergamum, probably. It was a great city once, though past its prime by the time I was born there. It was one of the loveliest places I’ve ever grown up.

It grew famous as a Hellenistic city with a giant and magnificent acropolis and a massively steep theater seating ten thousand bodies. It transitioned easily into a Roman town when they gave themselves to the empire without much incident in the second century B.C. It had one of the great libraries of the ancient world, with more than two hundred thousand books. Parchment was invented there after one of the Ptolemys stopped exporting papyrus from Egypt. If you know your ancient history, you know it was the library that Mark Antony gave to Cleopatra as a wedding gift.

A few of the glories of the city stood intact in my childhood, though some had crumbled, and most of the temples and shrines had been wrecked or converted to Christian churches by then. The marketplace stayed almost the same.

When I lived there you could see the Aegean from our doorstep. Now the city overlooks a valley fifteen flat miles inland from the sea. I went back there a few lives ago, when the German archaeologists were just getting going on it, and saw the ruins of the old city again. I knew the columns. I knew the blocks of stone under my feet. I had touched those very ones before. I felt closer to them than I feel to most other human beings. We stood still while the world changed shape around us.

I’m not often nostalgic anymore. There’s too much behind me. I know that gradual change is the easiest to take, and the giant leaps and losses can overwhelm you. My home and every trace of my life and family from that time were long erased. But that wasn’t what got to me. It was the look of that ancient city, once mighty and perched on a sea of commerce pushed farther and deeper into dry remoteness and strangled off.

It was back then, as a child in the eighth century, that I allowed myself to suffer how jarringly destructive the present feels and how fragile the past. The present is over quickly, you might say, and it is, but man, it goes like a wrecking ball.

I would sit at a certain crumbling altar overlooking the sea and try to imagine our city as it had been before the degradations. You wanted to think that history was a story of progress, but seeing what remained of Pergamum and the direction we were going, you just knew it wasn’t so.

The first momentous occurrence of that life was the reappearance of my older brother from my first life in Antioch, returning to the role of older brother once more. That kind of thing occasionally happens, family members repeating from one life to another. Usually it’s devotion that keeps people together through lives, but the soul’s basic yearning for balance and resolution can sometimes bring a person back to confront a previous torment. I recognized this old brother with a sense of unease from when I was quite young. Every association with the burning of the village in North Africa was harrowing to me, but added to it was the enmity that had burst out between this old brother and me long ago, when I’d confessed to a superior—and later a priest—that we had raided the wrong village. It was my own relentless guilt that drove me to it, not hostility or vengeance, but my brother didn’t see it that way. From that first moment of recognition, when I was not more than two or three years old, I knew I needed to steer clear of him.

He was called Joaquim now, and he stayed true to his early passions to become an enforcer of iconoclasm under Constantine, leaving our home and family in Pergamum at the age of seventeen. His mission was the destruction of religious art, the invasion of monasteries, and humiliation of monks. It’s no mystery how the old and beautiful works came to be destroyed.

I was called Kyros then. In those days I struggled to consider myself by a new name each time. Later, I would answer to the name my parents gave me but think of myself by my old name. This was more disorienting than you can know. It’s hard enough to maintain your identity through a single life in a single body. Imagine dozens of lives and dozens of bodies in dozens of places among dozens of families, further complicated by dozens of deaths in between. Without my name, my story is no more than a long and haphazard tangle of memories.

At times I wanted to give up the thread of my lengthening life. It felt too hard to hold on, to keep myself together as one person. I felt as though the past and the future, cause and effect, patterns and connections, were a huge complicated artifice, and it was only by my efforts that they kept going. If I gave up it would all dissolve into the raw chaos of the senses. That’s all we really have. The rest is romanticism and storytelling. But we need those stories. I guess I do.

Sometime after the turn of the last millennium, I began naming myself. Whatever my parents named me, I asked them to call me Daniel, the name I had at the very beginning. Some resisted, but all came around in some way at some time, because I didn’t really give them a choice.

THE NIGHT I want to tell you about took place about 773. There are so many things I’ve seen that I could tell you about. But I am telling you a story, a love story, and I will try, with limited digressions, to hold on to my thread.

This particular night I remember distinctly. I hadn’t seen my dreaded brother Joaquim in two years, and he was coming home. He had sent word a few weeks before that he had taken a wife and would bring her to us when he came. Our household was in a stir, as you might imagine. My brother was my parents’ eldest son, and though he was an awful person, he was gone so long we all thought better of him.

Apart from my older brother, it was a good family I had then. I’ve seen quite a range in my time, and there haven’t been as many of those as a person would hope. It’s been an error of mine to think there will be more, and I forget to cherish them as I should. My father was a kind man, though distant, and my mother was a deeply loving soul, probably too much so for her own good. The worst I can accuse them of is parental blindness, and that is something they share with nearly all those who love their children. My two younger brothers, especially the youngest, were sweet-natured and quick to trust.

I guess I was better at loving then, too, and also better at being loved—the two go together. It was a long time ago. Back then the past didn’t stretch out nearly as far, and the present seemed much more vivid—not, as it came to seem later, like an ever-tinier fraction of all there was.

Our family was not rich—my father was a butcher—but we were prosperous and had two servants. I’m sure my father had no meat to sell in the market that day. He slaughtered the fatted calf and every other creature with foot or flesh he could put a knife to for our “welcome home” feast.

My anticipation held as much dread as excitement. I hoped an improved version of my brother would come home with his wife that night, but I knew that the arrogant sadist who’d left would probably be the one to return.

The house and courtyard were laid out as if for an emperor. After all the scurrying preparations, we waited there in eager silence, my parents, my two younger brothers, my uncles, my maternal grandfather, several cousins, the servants. We couldn’t eat or converse because of all the suspense.

It would not have been my brother’s style to arrive when the food was freshly prepared, the meat and sauces were perfectly cooked, and the waiting was still new and enjoyable. It was his style to arrive after the food was wilted and congealed, and the thrill of anticipation had turned to restlessness and worry.

As we waited, the rain began. I remember my mother’s attempts at buoyancy, her happy talk. We spoke Greek then. Not the language of Sophocles but a distant corruption. I can still remember most of the conversation word for word. I try to hold on to the old languages, but keeping them in my head isn’t enough. They are built to communicate, and no one else speaks them anymore.

My brother arrived not on horseback in glorious regalia, as we imagined for him, but on foot, underdressed for the weather and irritable. He came from the darkness into the candlelight first. I looked at him, wondering what had become of his military career, but then his wife entered the room. From the moment she lifted her hood and uncovered her face, I didn’t think about him again. This is the part I wanted to draw your attention to. This is the part that matters.

Seeing the girl from North Africa only in memories and dreams for a couple of centuries, I looked at my brother’s wife and, to my astonishment, saw her made flesh again. To this day, there is no soul I recognize more immediately or more powerfully than hers. Whatever her age or her circumstances, she makes a strong impression on herself and on me.

First out of confusion, then out of shock, and then out of exhilaration, I stared at her too long. My brother was expecting to be greeted with proper bowing and scraping, and my eyes were fixed in almost painful rapture on his wife. A lot of trouble can be accounted to my foolishness that first night.

It wasn’t his displeasure that finally penetrated my fat skull, it was hers. She was confused and embarrassed by all my attention. Her head was down, and her eyes, which had projected so much certainty the other times I’d seen her, were uneasy.

I tried to resume the normal kind of behavior. I embraced my brother. I stepped back to let the other family members take their turns. I watched my parents welcome their new daughter, Sophia.

I orbited her in a strange haze that night. I tried not to, but everywhere I stood and everything I did was in relation to her. I tried not to stare at her too long.

She looked burdened enough as it was. Instead of eating she glanced around at us, her new family, sparing every other glance for her husband. The rest of them feasted and drank while she sat delicately on her hands. My brother was several cups of wine in before he seemed to notice. “Is our food not good enough for you? Eat something!” he roared at her, and finally she did.

That night, I lay awake in wonder. At first I was moved just at seeing her, at knowing she was still alive and now close to me. It took longer to sink in, the injustice of how she happened to turn up. I didn’t know all the ways I loved her yet.

But when I overheard my brother’s voice through the wall I had to recognize what was going on. She was his wife. She belonged to him and never to me.

It wasn’t jealousy. Not at first. I was awed by her and by the role she played in my mind. I longed for forgiveness. I didn’t presume to want her or deserve her in that way. If my brother had been kind to her and she had loved him, I would have taken joy in her joy and just been happy to get to be near her sometimes. I think that’s true.

But he wasn’t kind to her. The voice through the wall rang with abuse.

I couldn’t hear all of it, but he called her a whore. I heard my own name more than once.

I COULD BARELY glance at her the next day; I felt ashamed and guilty. Why could I never do her a good turn? Why did I only add to her suffering? But I did glance at her, eventually. I saw some misery, to be sure, but also pride. And when Joaquim spoke to her across the table I saw disgust in her face. By that look alone I knew she had not chosen to be his wife. His power over her was limited, because she didn’t love him.