Chapter 9: Oysters Observing the Sun (2024)

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Min’s message lingers on the home screen of my phone, flashing every now and then with a persistent appeal to check, to read, to respond. I resist, of course, because there is no adequate response to a preternatural occurrence of such uncanniness, like something out of Gogol. And yet, a part of me, the gumshoe who has listened to too many true crime podcasts, is tempted to dig, to ask the tough questions and leave no stone unturned.

If I listened to her, though, I would venture ever further into a burgeoning labyrinth of non-sequiturs, pursuing a woman who had purported to share one of my earliest clinical memories, but now takes it all back. From Rhiannon’s reconnaissance report, it is doubtful she ever worked at the hospital at all. Then again, I imagine her ad hoc probe probably took the form of an offhand question lobbed at a busy colleague from down the hall. Hardly the stratagem of a Nancy Drew.

In any case, I have a few hypotheses, which occasionally barrel into my awareness with echoing shouts. The first, of course, is that I am descending into madness, and so both my questions and answers are tautologically crazy. But the more compelling explanation is that something has happened to the architecture of memory, both mine and my late father’s, whose remembrancers seem to have externalized of their own accord, taken root somewhere in the world, or at least in my mind. It is a window I never asked for, a lens whose curvature distorts as it reveals. By way of some inscrutable diktat, I am fated to wander through my father’s memory city, a f*ckless, grieving tourist, drifting through recollections that were never mine, making sense of time recorded in the inner world of another, the most intimate of prisms.

It is late in the week when I finally muster the courage to begin building my own memory structure. I sit at the small desk abutting my living room wall swathed in the last light of the gloaming, whose arcing creep illuminates my neck like a thick pendant. Distant pealing shouts and industrial creaks waft through an open window. I close my eyes and conjure a memory house on my inner tableau. It is gauzy at first, as though glimpsed through frosted glass, but I will it to clarify, an ethereal maritime bungalow lofted in the sky, floating like a plaster cloud. An outdoor staircase winds around its facade like a filigreed boa constrictor. I approach its heavy ovular door and emerge into a mudroom, of all places, with shiny canary rainboots parked on a patch of pristine teal carpet. I bend down to pick up one of the slick boots, which on second glance is so small that I can almost grasp the whole sole in one hand. Here, I decide to deposit a memory, the first, in fact, that I can recall with certainty. Just as my father instructed, I label it, “pizza in the rain.”

Then I allow the memory to unwind in its entirety. At first, the recollection is projected mistily against my inner tableau like an old film, but then I am there, no longer observing, standing beside my mother in a kitchen that is not ours. The tiles are sticky against my bare feet, and Sesame Street is playing on the small box television in the living room, in which a futon with a lacquered wooden frame all but obscures Big Bird, whose great yellow sunflower head feathers wag tantalizingly in a visible ribbon at the horizon of my vision.

My mother drops down to her haunches and takes my little forearms in her hands.

“Karina,” she says. “I’m hungry.”

I pat my belly. “Empty.”

She raises her eyebrows and grins wryly. Her eyes, the same carrot-in-swamp-water as mine, twinkle at me. Her skin is smooth and olive, and her thick silver curls, which she has left long and loose, bunch up against the baggy collar of her sweatshirt.

“Well, we should eat,” she says. “And I think we should have pizza.”

I bounce up and down on my bare feet, my heels sticking momentarily to the tile. “Pizza!” I shout.

My mother leaps into the air from her haunches. “Pizza,” she echoes and then drops back into a rocking squat. “What kind?”

I ponder this question. “I don’t know.”

“I like mushrooms and peppers on mine,” she says.

I shake my head and scrunch up my face. “No yucky poo stuff on it.”

“No cheese?”

“Oh, no,” I explain. “Pizza has cheese.”

“Mmm hmm,” she says. “Then what about tomato sauce? You know, Karina, we could just ask them for the crust. Just the bread. Nothing on it.”

“No,” I say, frowning. “Pizza has sauce and cheese and bread.”

My mother nods with dawning understanding. “So let me get this straight. I’ll have yucky poo vegetables on my pizza and you’ll have sauce and cheese on yours.”

I am very satisfied with this arrangement. “Daddy can have some of mine,” I say.

“That’s so nice of you, Karina,” says my mother. “He can have some when he gets back from his conference. I’ll save him a little sliver, too.”

My memory shudders and shifts. The next image is sluggish at first, darkened by a penumbra of strained recall. I am watching my mother as she peers out the window of the little condo in which we are staying in Aubade Village. She turns to me with a big wry grin.

“Do you think we can beat the rain?” she asks me.

“I can wear my boots,” I reply. “Just in case.”

There is another skip in my memory, an erosion, maybe, from the whipping sands of time. Now, we are walking back to the condo along a densely wooded path. A rivulet of water plops onto my head. It is so large that it splashes. Then there is another. And another.

“Uh oh,” my mother says.

I imagine a cloud unzipping to let out a rainstorm. Now, we are running and laughing, hand in hand. My shirt is soaked, I remember, the sopping fabric warm against my skin, but my sticky feet are still dry in my little yellow rainboots, which I wear without socks.

My mother whoops in the rain. “Oh, God,” she laughs. “We’re soaked to the bone!” She scoops me up like a superhero and I throw my head back to giggle into the sky. I remember her face, open and dripping with rain. Her sodden silver hair is almost gunmetal gray and plastered against her forehead. She is radiant and smiling and joyous. In all my memories of my mother, I know this is the happiest of all our moments, sloshing along this stretch of sylvan path in a mountain town I cannot generate enough detail to reconstruct in reminiscence.

Suddenly, we are back at the condo with floppy slices of pizza held in our damp hands.

“It’s the best ever,” I exclaim, mud-spattered and rapturous. My mother allows me to eat before she draws a bath.

Wait, is this the same memory? I pause my inner projector, and the narrative gears sputter and spark for a moment. No, the bath was in Bonneville, not Aubade Village. I’m certain of it. I must have conflated them, these two very early remembrances, in the summer before kindergarten. Without my prompting, something catches once again in the machinery of my inner projector, and a wave of recollection once again floods my awareness.

We are back in Bonneville. My father is again out of town, but my mother and I are no longer in Aubade Village. This is the kitchen of their house before the renovation. The chintzy linoleum, with its ersatz tiles of olive and orange and brown, still sticks to the bottoms of my filthy little feet. My mother is at the sink washing a pot, her wild silvery curls framed by dual three-tiered hanging metal baskets overflowing with fruit.

“It’s almost bath time,” she says.

“Only if it’s Señor Bubble,” I reply. “With Silly Foam.”

She peers down at me with mock seriousness. “You know, Karina,” she says. “Señor Bubble and Silly Foam are special guests. They don’t always come to our bath parties.”

Feeling gutsy, I double down on my demand. “They should come today!”

She gestures toward the bathroom beside the small galley kitchen. “Why don’t you take a look in the bathroom cabinet?”

I pad over to the cupboard beneath the sink and yank the chipped white handle as hard as I can.

“Mom!” I shout from the bathroom. “They’re here!”

There is another shift in memory, and I am in the bathtub. My mother kneels beside the basin with an arm resting on the lip. Stray beams of sunlight peak through the small sliding window above the tub. I am ensconced in a chrysalis of soap bubbles and ropes of papaya-coloured foam, which I continue to spray from the aerosol can. My mother gives me Groucho Marx eyebrows and a beard. Cannily, she waits a full minute before rubbing it into my skin and hair.

“I think we need some music,” she says. She rises and jogs to the other room, where I hear her heaving up her yellow boombox, which she brings back to the small bathroom and plugs into the wall outlet.

“I am going to play something for you,” she says. “You know, your father is a very handsome man. But when I was a girl, I had a big crush on Paul McCartney.” She raises her eyebrows at me lasciviously. “He’s so cute.”

I do not know who this man is, but I parrot my mother’s last pronouncement. “So cute.”

She pops open the tape deck and glances at the label of the cassette. Then she clicks the door in place and presses play.

“Admiral Halsey notified me. He had to have a berth or he couldn’t get to sleep.”

My mother hears berth as bath, and she sings along. At bath, she splashes me gently. Her lips dance as she mimics the Liverpudlian accent in her parodic falsetto.

“Or a butterfly? Butter pie?”

My mother shimmies her shoulders and rises to pirouette once before dropping back into a crouch just in time for the refrain.

“Haaaaaannds across the water, water. Heads across the sky.”

With a hand paddle, my mother makes bath waves. I giggle every time a foamy crest breaks across my neck and outstretched arms.

“Haaaaaannds across the water, water. Heads across the sky.

Haaaaaannds across the water, water. Heads across the sky.”

This last image fades, and fragments of other memories, shards of mood really, buzz around my inner tableau like gnats. These, too, are some of the earliest memories, though so gossamer thin as to be silhouetted. They beg for recognition. A snippet of an old children’s television show in which a book review was followed by a behind-the-scenes tour of a bagel shop. A puffy brown-and-orange coat. Alexander and his bummer of a day. And an ambient felt sense, itself no doubt a prelapsarian artifact of memory and the earliest years of girlhood, that I, like a Wordsworth child, was only truly free in childhood, only happy knowing so little. Time was dilated in those first days of memory, so expansive that a day seemed to stretch over a decade of novel experience and each moment was shot through with endless wonder. It is with saudade—that is the only word that begins to touch the depth of this longing—that I pine for this dawning of memory. For the moments that never again will be.

I realize with a start that I have now invested both memories, which should be discrete, in the same locus, the canary rainboots in the mudroom. I bring myself back to the mudroom and imagine an oaken closet, which I install beside the shoe mat. There, on the top shelf, I conjure a bottle of Señor Bubble, on which I paste a label that reads “Hands Across the Water.” Then I replay the memory once more and deposit it in its proper mnemonic counterpart.

I wander into what will at some point be the living room of my floating house, which I leave empty and unformed for now. There is another room beside it, a kitchen, maybe, whose glow spills out into an optic white expanse of possibility space. I turn my attention to a scintillating object in my periphery, a loose, lazy spiral staircase that emerges in the centre of my inner tableau without my conjuring it. Its cool, glittering blue railing winds up and out of view. As I approach it, another memory unspools, almost without my prompting. This time, the projection is clearer, almost oversaturated, and I find I am eager to give myself to it.

I am creeping as sneakily as I can across the rickety floorboards of a ramshackle cabin. Though I cannot see them, I know that I am treading the narrowest of paths between two rows of back-to-back bunk beds that stretch from the door to the far, crayon-graffitied wall. Most of us are sleeping. Our overseer, a college student maybe five years older than her charges, emits quiet, whistling exhalations when she’s sleeping, which is good news for her campers, who are determined to make their way into the woods to rendezvous with awkward swains who are no doubt waiting nervously beneath a very specific tree.

I crack open the swinging screen door just enough to slip my body through and close it with exaggerated delicacy. Barefoot and clad in an oversized t-shirt and bicycle shorts, I gingerly dance along the path carpeted with pine needles and into the copse of the whispered instructions. It is amazing that no one, not the counsellors nor the camp administration, has caught on to this ritual, consummated in the dark of night, which I know, as I jaunt into the woods with butterflies in my stomach and a stick of cinnamon gum tucked into the hollow of my cheek, I will remember forever.

He will signal with a penlight, he had said. And so I search the darkness for its pale white lumen. A pinecone crunches under my right arch, and it takes every ounce of forbearance I have to not howl into the night. The noise must alert my camp beau, Micah, who hisses at me. I wheel around, trying to echolocate, and I glimpse a small arcing light waving frantically.

“Hey, Karina,” he whispers loudly in a breathy pubertal honk. “I’m here. Follow the light.”

I weave toward the light on the edges of my feet, hoping upon hope that my path is mercifully clear of debris. When I come near, he extends a tentative hand, which brushes my neck. He holds the light to his peach-fuzzy face, and his brown eyes squint as he tries to meet mine. He offers a gawky, brace-laden smile, and fumbles for my hand, which is as clammy as his in the cool, still mountain air.

Like a medieval guard investigating a noise heard in his dungeon, Micah holds his penlight aloft, scanning the brush. The burble of the creek that runs adjacent to Camp Gendlin rises to the volume of a growl, and the crumbly dirt gives way to shore mud as we trace the curve of the brook. Micah lowers his beacon to examine a long, flat boulder.

“We could sit here,” he says.

“Ok,” I reply and give the cinnamon gum I’ve been storing in my cheek a few chews.

We hunker down beside each other on the damp rock surface and say nothing for a moment. We are still holding hands, and Micah’s pendant light hangs from his curled finger on a little metal keychain. My heart is beating fast.

“So,” he says finally. “Like, what’s up?”

“Good,” I say. “Marnie was totally sleeping. I don’t think anyone heard me leave.”

Micah delicately places the little light on the rock so we can see the vague lineaments of each other’s faces. He nods. “Yeah, totally.”

I laugh nervously. “I don’t, um, really know what we’re doing.”

“You ever made out before?”

I pause for a moment, wondering whether I should lie. He reads this delay with the guilelessness of an earnest thirteen-year-old who has not yet learned to posture. “Yeah, me neither,” he says. In the little light’s glow, his hairless cheeks look ruddy and full. “I think you’re kinda hot,” he says.

“You, too. Super hot.”

He leans down to pick up a wet leaf from the pebbly dirt. “Have to spit out my gum,” he explains.

“Oh, me, too.”

He holds out the leaf, flopped over in his palm like a starfish, and I delicately spit my used-up red gum next to his, which is smaller and bright white. He rolls up the leaf and stuffs it into his pocket.

“Don’t want to be a litter bug.”

I adjust myself so that I am facing him and he does the same. Somehow, we manage to hold hands throughout this production.

“OK, ready?” he says.

“I think so.”

“I’m going to come in slowly so we don’t hit our heads.”

“Good idea.”

“Should I get the light so we can see each other?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nah, I’ll leave it on the rock. That’s more romantic.”

“Yeah.”

“OK, I’m ready. What about you?”

“Mm hm.”

I keep my eyes open until his lips touch mine. Then I angle my face and we part our lips. My stomach twists as though it is being wrung out, but I admonish myself to focus, to keep my lips still and soft. We linger there for a long moment, frozen mid-kiss. And then, to my surprise, he begins to talk.

“Should we try tongue?” he says into my mouth.

“No,” I reply, taking great care to not move my lips. “Just lits.”

We mash our mouths together like fish sharing food. He releases my hand and drapes two ungainly arms around my neck. I grip his bony ribcage in my tingling fingers. And we kiss there on the rock until we get tired. Then he reaches for my hand once more, and it is still clammy and cool.

“That was so fly,” he says.

“Yeah, it was cool.”

“Want to come back here tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“We don’t have to try tongue.”

“I know.”

We make our way back to the little cluster of wood cabins hand in hand. Micah surreptitiously angles his penlight toward the pine needle carpet, on which I toe gingerly, trying to keep up with his anxious strides. As we approach my cabin, still quiescent in the liminal hours between very late night and the earliest hours of morning, he extinguishes the light with a soft click.

“You good?” he whispers, perhaps a tad too loudly.

“Yeah, I’ll have to be really quiet.”

“If anyone wakes up, you could just say you got up to pee.”

“Nice, that’s smart.”

With a fumbling hand, he fishes for my hand once more. “You rock, Karina.”

“Yeah, ditto,” I reply. “But vice versa.”

“OK, go,” he whispers. “See you at breakfast.”

Back in my floating house, I allow this memory to linger on this moment before conjuring a big elephant ear house plant in a peach ceramic pot, which I place next to the glittering blue banister. I do not know why I choose it, but it seems to fit the label of “first kiss,” which I etch into one of its floppy arrowhead leaves with my fingernail.

I vacillate about the ending of this last reproduction of memory. There is always more, of course. After our dalliance, I returned to the cabin and was never found out. Micah and I met several more times over the following weeks, and together we had many firsts, which, as I consider them in their adumbrated, sketchy forms, I would be reluctant to reify, to make real here in my memory house for fear of someone, somewhere, sometime glimpsing them if I ever left traces of my own in the world of solids.

Besides, these are just a few memories of a pulsing multitude, the flotsam of adolescence, punctuated by intense flashes of jubilation and agonizing self-awareness and my dog Lucius, who trots by my side as we trudge up to Quayside park. It would take a lifetime to instantiate each bubbling memory in objects strewn throughout the house, souvenirs of those early years of young adulthood, when my world was still whole.

I lay a hand on the bannister and ascend onto the first step of the helical, winding staircase. Through the lattice of shimmering cobalt and the cool white, I can just glimpse a platform landing at the very top. From the roiling ferment of half-remembered shreds, a particularly vivid memory is pooling in my awareness. Señor Bubble and my first kiss are fairly staid, bland fare, but this inchoate memory marks a clear departure. I resist it, this carnal interlude in an otherwise sedate college life, which still erupts every now and then in sweaty, sensuous dreams, but I am no match. In spite of my defiance, an image of a fairytale chateau crystallizes richly on my inner tableau. And so I have no choice but to give myself to it. The scene materializes even more crisply than the last, with a proximateness of time that renders this other Karina more knowable, more recognizable, more vivid in remembrance.

We are in a bicycle shop in Tours, the gateway to France’s storied Loire Valley, which is home to hundreds of majestic chateaux that dot its idyllic, verdant landscape. The shop owner, an older man who pretends to neither speak nor understand English, cajoles us into renting Peugeot road bikes, which he insists are formidable. Marcel suggests we leave right away so we can reach the gardens of Villandry by noon and the Sleeping Beauty castle in Usse when the sun is highest in the sky. He is slight, like the cyclists I have seen in the European tours, with a boxy jaw that tapers into a cleft chin. He has a habit of fingering my elbow as we talk, probing in the grooves of my epicondyles as though searching for treasure.

“We can have sandwich for lunch,” he says. “Any kind.”

“That’s quite the sales pitch,” I say. “Any sandwich I want.”

He smiles and drums triplets against my forearm. “There is a path along the river that we can follow all the way. Paradise. So much wine.”

It is hard to believe I met this man just yesterday. “I know someplace delicious to eat,” he had said to me in the foyer of the hostel, whose bright, open common area is still bustling in recollection. He took me to a little bistro with cloth-set tables spilling out onto the Place Plumereau, and told me he was on a journey to find himself. He was a disenchanted advertising copy writer, he had said, and now he was making a wanderjahr through his homeland.

“Like your Steinbeck with his dog,” he had said. “But I bring only myself.”

As the sun began to set, we returned to the hostel, strolling so close to each other that my fingers caught on his hip pocket and pulled him into me. Miraculously, we managed to find an empty single room that was unlocked, and we made love on top of the duvet, each of us covering the other’s mouth with a firm, cupped hand. Then we returned to the bunk beds of the shared space, where I slept, as I had been instructed, on top of my suitcase.

The bike tour is his idea. His father is Belgian, he tells me, but his mother was raised in Chinon, a small town in the Loire Valley that boasts a chateau. “Not impressive,” he says. “At one time, it was a jail. But it is still chateau. It is still part of history.”

He tells me we can make it to Chinon by dark if we ride “strong.” His cousin has a little inn there, and he has called ahead to secure our room. “And you should not worry,” he assures me. “If our legs tire, we can take a train.”

I remember we mount the bicycles on a hill. I am wearing shorts, and the heat of the sun adheres my thighs to the thin, hard seat. He leads the way. I should be wearing a helmet, but I allow my curls, more pepper than salt then, to fly free, like Medusa’s snakes, I imagine, stretching their coiled bodies toward the sun. I am smiling so broadly that I can feel the wind against my teeth.

The bike path hugs the verdant shores of the Loire River, along which we see encampments of travellers, to which Marcel alerts me with a gesture and a shout. “The bohemians.”

I have come to France to study abroad, or at least that is the pretence I invoke to rationalize my year of saving. Intensive language course at L’Institut begin in a few short days, during which I will learn “the purest French still spoken.” I have left this week free, open, I told my college friend Rachel, to the abyss.

In my reveries, I had imagined the Loire Valley as perennially temperate, warm enough to wear a dress, but cool enough to keep it dry. No one had warned me about the scorchers, the heat waves that steam through in weeklong bursts, poaching visitors like me in rooms without air conditioning. My backpack is snug against my back. I packed light, I remember, and left most of my stuff in a hostel locker, secured with a padlock I bought at a stationery store and the occasional prayer to the hospitality gods.

We arrive at the Gardens of Villandry just before lunchtime, as Marcel promised. They are like something out of a dream, a majestic maze of boxwood hedging, topiaries, canals, and fountains. “They have vegetables, too,” Marcel tells me. “Different with the seasons.”

We wander along the endless manicured paths on our way to the chateau. I remember my feet cheeping on burnished checkerboard tiles, a creamy off-white and faded black. Perhaps I was in a hallway, or a bedroom. More vivid in my recollection is Marcel’s hand, always at my elbow, and his stream-of-consciousness recounting, which he shared with me on our desultory stroll through the chill medieval corridors.

“I did not come here until I was older,” he says. “It is like someone in Paris who walk by the tower sometimes, but never go because it is not cool to be tourist in a city that belong to you.”

There was a baguette sandwich, as promised, though I cannot remember whether it was filled with cheese or vegetables. Even in those days, I eschewed meat, which bewildered the locals, who interpreted my preference as a peculiar allergy. I remember thinking France so much more enlightened than my North American hometown, where cyclists often had to wedge themselves between traffic and a wall of parked cars, any one of which could fling open a door and present the rider with the most dubious of prizes.

Chinon comes back to me in snippets, shards of memory dipped in liquid joy. The imperial, cream-coloured stone of the centre ville. A little pizza shop that serves my oblong Neapolitan pizza with a serrated knife handle peeking out from under the crust. There is the little room in Marcel’s cousin’s inn, where the receptionist checks a paper notebook for our reservation and gives us a key that dangles from a wine cork. We made love again in the middle of the afternoon, I remember, and showered before going out once more, into the town, where we coalesce with the throngs who have come out for the annual jazz festival.

In Chinon, I am not a tourist, but a reveller. I whoop and dance in the ambient cigarette smoke, carried along by the brassy cheers of a jazz trumpet. Marcel presents me with a balloon giraffe twisted by a woman also selling cotton candy. “In French, it mean dad’s beard,” he tells me. “Barbe à papa.”

I remember thinking that I had not been happy until this undulant moment. I was alive, really alive, in this bacchanal, where I remember an old man twirling with a little girl and a group of red-faced attendees singing at the tops of their lungs.

I turn to Marcel and shout in his ear. “I’m not going home. When my study abroad ends, I’m coming back here. I’ll be a pizza chef in that little pizzeria in the centre ville.”

Marcel grins. “We can change passports,” he says. “I will go back to Bonneville and live the Hollywood life.”

Like a worn-out VHS tape, my memory skips and jolts. There is a flash of the Chateau de Chenonceau, Sleeping Beauty’s castle, with its mob of sweating tourists, cameras swinging on neck straps, dissonant amid the fairytale opulence. I know we stopped at Montsoreau on our way to Saumur, but I cannot conjure anything, even a feeling, to embed in this memory.

Saumur is a blur, too, a torrid amalgam of sex and cobblestone and sparkling wine. But I remember Sunday, the final day of our getaway, as though it were yesterday. Marcel and I are basking in the morning sun with half-full fluted glasses in hand. I feel particularly French today, sitting at a small round table along Saumur’s central city square with a cafe au lait, a glass of local wine, and a tarte au pomme.

“I have to be back in Tours by evening,” I say to Marcel. “There’s an orientation dinner.”

He strokes his chin blithely. “Ah, plenty of time,” he replies. “But first, we have to see the chateau.”

When we finish our petite breakfast, we amble over to the Saumur fortress and wander through its medieval dioramas hemmed in by stanchions. The louche Marcel suggests we hide behind a four-poster bed and “make love and life,” which I admit I considered for a moment. Then we have an impromptu picnic in a bit of green space near the chateau, and we share a bottle of sparkling rosé and filled baguettes from a boulangerie.

These were the days before smart phones, and I can no longer remember how I discovered that it was nearly five o’ clock. There is an image, barely animate in my imagining, of a bric-a-brac shop on the outskirts of the town. Outside its entrance, a mother is wiping crumbs from a toddler’s face as he grins at the sky.

“Marcel, we have to go,” I say. “Where are the bikes?”

In the alley behind the bed-and-breakfast, he had locked their frames together using a loop of chain. Our backpacks, I am mortified to discover, are stashed behind a bench in the empty foyer. “We have to ride fast,” I say to Marcel. “I have to be back in Tours tonight. My first class is at eight in the morning.”

Through the thinnest of pretences, a dawning awareness creeps across his swarthy vagabond features. “This is no problem,” he says.

We straddle our bicycles in the courtyard. “Marcel, how far out are we?” I ask.

“Seventy-five kilometres?”

My heart drops in my chest. “Oh, God,” I say. “That’s hours and hours of riding. We can’t make it back by dark.”

“There is always Chinon,” he says breezily.

“No, Marcel,” I snap. “I cannot be late on the first day. And I am supposed to meet my host family tonight. They’re expecting me after the welcome dinner.”

He steeples his fingers in front of his narrow chest. “There is a train.”

“When?”

He glances at his wristwatch. “We have to go.”

I scramble to follow him down the serpentine laneways of central Saumur. We slalom the clusters of pedestrians meandering along the narrow sidewalks and across the Loire River. The train station looms in front of us, a small white building flanking tracks that look like zipper teeth in the wavy heat of the early evening.

Suddenly, Marcel makes an about-face. “We will ride to Chinon,” he calls over his shoulder. “Last train is six heure et demi.”

“What?” I shout.

“The train will leave from Chinon,” he calls. “It is that or nothing. Today is Sunday.”

With a flick of his wrist, Marcel shifts into a lower gear and rises in his seat to pump his thick legs. I follow suit, but I struggle to keep up. We segue onto the bicycle path, hugging the river’s gentle contours. I remember pumping so hard that my quadriceps burned, threatening, I feared in a moment of histrionic panic, to slough right off my femurs.

We do not speak during our thirty-kilometre dash across the valley. Marcel pedals tirelessly, and in my effort to match his pace, I open my mouth wide to gulp air. More than once, I inadvertently capture an errant insect in the vacuum of my inhalations and cough pathetically while pumping my aching legs.

“Are you dying?” Marcel yells over his shoulder.

“What time is it?” I shout back.

He glances at his wristwatch and signs his reply. Five forty-seven.

“Are we going to make it?” I croak.

He begins to shrug, and then, as though thinking better of this gesture, thrusts his watch arm in the air with an emphatic thumbs-up.

I am beginning to regret the sparkling wine, which I have been drinking all day with only the daintiest sips of water. A shuddering, queasy malaise spreads from my trunk to my digits, pawing at my resolve with its claws extended. I tell myself that mind must win over body, but this truism rings hollowly as hour-old, acrid wine spurts into my closed mouth in searing bursts of gastric reflux.

I have a memory, perhaps a false one, of our arriving just moments before the train departs, but I also remember taking our time to heave our heavy old road bikes into the small vestibule connecting two passenger coaches. In any case, we do indeed make it back to Tours, and miraculously I arrive punctually to the arrival dinner, smelling, I am sure, of alcohol and sweat. Marcel and I have several more liaisons during my stay in Tours, one of which, secreted away in a park in the early morning, I dare not rehearse here.

I end this stream-of-consciousness, rollicking spool of memory not with an image, but a bygone mood left on a park bench somewhere in Central France. I deposit it in the glittering blue railing with the etching Tours, a tantalizing invitation to find my way back every now and again.

From my low-lying perch in the middle of the helical staircase, I peer down at the expanse of vacant space beside the kitchen, whose doorway is still darkened. It is a living room, I decide whimsically, with a sectional couch that limns an L in the centre of the space. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases materialize around the perimeter, and now it is a room, with walls cobbled together with book bricks.

I drift down the stairs and over to the sectional. Unlike the couch in my apartment, which is stiff and feels like it is upholstered in burlap, it is soft and receptive. My parents’ couch concealed a deep pit, beneath which the couch’s frame was always pitilessly exposed. I am tempted to include this pit somewhere in the couch I have envisaged, a locus for another memory. It was on my parents’ couch, after all, that I opened my medical school acceptance letter.

My inner projector kicks into gear without my permission, and before I know it, I am levitating above the overstuffed arm of my parents’ saggy couch mid-sit, body taught with galvanic energy. My mother is beside me, wringing her hands. She leans her head back toward the kitchen and shouts. “Perry?” She turns to me, her carrot-in-swamp-water eyes peeled wide and unblinking. “Where is he?” she mutters before shouting once more. “What the hell are you doing?”

My father’s smooth baritone wafts out from the kitchen. “I’m getting a glass of water. Do you want one?”

My mother scrunches her nose in a mock snarl and makes a clawing motion with her fingers. I force a lippy smile and lower myself gingerly onto the arm of the couch, allowing the envelope I am clutching to rest on the denim of my pants.

“You have T-minus ten seconds, Per,” my mother bellows. “Nine, eight, seven…”

There is so much cathected in this moment. Attempt number three, do or die. If this doesn’t work, then I will have to pivot, to make a life and career in a less rarified field, in a less competitive milieu, somewhere I would evidently belong. I would have to invent myself anew.

“Five, four, three…”

All that time, the countless hours funnelled into this pursuit, possibly a pipe dream. While my friends partied, I hunched over textbooks in a library cubicle with sweat beading above my brow like a troll’s tiara. To boost my flabby physics score, I appealed to the largest of MCAT prep cartels, which was more than happy to gobble up ten unexpected grand in federal student loans. I was monomaniacal, single-minded, obsessed. If you do everything, you cannot lose, I told myself, so I strapped myself to my ambition like a missile winnowing toward a giant flashing target.

“Perry, goddamn it!” my mother yells. “Two, one…”

My father shuffles in with three glasses of water clinking in an awkward embrace. “Here I come to save the day,” he croons with a single finger extended toward the ceiling. He shuffles over to the couch. My mother lifts two of the glasses from his clutch.

“Drum roll or no?” my dad asks.

I flick the letter onto the couch. “I can’t do it,” I say. “It’s too much.”

“Oh, you have to open it,” says my mother.

My father scoops up the envelope and tosses it onto my lap. “You could close your eyes,” he suggests.

I pinch one of the corners and shake to expose a pouch to tear open. “OK,” I say. “Don’t talk. Just let’s be quiet. I’ll do it.”

I dig my nail into the flap and yank. Then, with my fingers curved into a pincer, I reach in. It is a single page. I remember I could not bring myself to lock eyes with either of my parents as I unfolded the document, but I could feel their gazes on me, hot and itchy. Dare I dream?

And dare I remember further? In the world of solids, I am buffeted by a gust of grief, which dissolves my nebulous dream house and drips tears onto the surface of the small desk in my cramped apartment. The recollection, which was just on the cusp of its climax, is left unfinished. I do not re-experience the surge of euphoria when I read that first word, “welcome.” I dare not recall the expressions on my parents’ faces, the rib-squinching tightness of their embraces, the vivaciousness of their healthy bodies in ecstatic motion.

I uncross my legs, one of which has fallen asleep, and hobble to the washroom to void my bladder and clear the detritus of memory from my consciousness. This final remembering invites a shuddering ache, a deep and visceral felt sense that these memories are precious not just as happenings, but happenings that can never again be, at least not as they were. Holograms captured in soap bubbles, glimpsed from some remove. The past does, indeed, lean over the present, and nothing smudges the boundary between then and now like organized reminiscence. I suspect it has, in its way, changed everything

When I arrive at clinic the next morning, I am relieved to learn that Dr. Fossal is away at a conference for medical pedagogues and I have been reassigned to work with the mumbling, auburn-haired Dr. McTeague down the hall in the smallest of the clinic’s chartrooms.

She greets me with a serene smile and pats the stool next to her. For whatever reason, we are otherwise alone. We comb through the list together, and then she exhorts me to “have at it.”

The morning passes with a pleasant steadiness. After I see my first patient, a middle-aged executive determined to lower his stratospheric cholesterol by walking thirty-thousand steps each day, Dr. McTeague tells me she trusts my clinical judgment. And so I breeze through the rest of the list, refilling prescriptions, peering in ears, doing light counselling with Dr. McTeague’s regulars. Though I make an unusually conscientious effort to provide good care for this other staff physician’s panel, I finish with nearly an hour to spare before lunch.

“Is there anything else I should do?” I ask her.

Dr. McTeague has already begun to pack her oversized purse. Her pencil-thin brows narrow with quiet fierceness as she coaxes the cheap zipper closed over what appears to be a stack of dishes.

“Nope,” she murmurs. “The list is the list, and ours is short.”

I ask her to fill out one of my mini-evaluations, which residents are supposed to hock to supervisors on their rotation circuit. Dr. Fossal never offers, and so when the opportunity arises, I must be the ever-keen, opportunistic learner, my cell phone primed with the clunky e-form to foist on unsuspecting overseers.

“You’re right on track,” she says with a soft grin crinkling her freckled cheeks. “Solid and well-rounded. A good doc.”

She hands back my phone so I can submit the form. “Oh, you know what,” she says. “Today, I don’t have an afternoon clinic. My daughter is in morning preschool. You can ask around to see if anyone’s short a resident. Or—” she shrugs. “You can just have the afternoon off.” She hauls the cartoonishly large tote over a narrow shoulder, bearing a milky upper arm. “Good to see you, Karina,” she says. “Just a few more months until you’re out in the world.”

I wait a few minutes after she leaves to sneak out through the back stairwell. Since I am finished nearly an hour before lunch, I do not chance upon any colleagues or staff on my way outside, where rain patters Bolero on the sidewalk.

I jog to my apartment with my Family Med Krew fleece tented over my head. My phone buzzes twice in my pocket, but I wait to read the QuidNunc messages until I doff my shoes and bag on the plastic tray beside my door. My screen seems to blink as I wipe it with rubbing alcohol.

Ben T [12:18:23]: So what did you choose? Spaceship? Boudoir? Fortress?

I smile to myself as I tap out a reply. On a whim, I also extend an invitation.

Karina [12:34: 36]: None of the above. Hey, I’m home unexpectedly early! Do you want to come over?

Ben T [12:38:14]: A mystery. OK OK. I can wait. Yeah I’d love to! I’ll stop by after work—like 530 or so. I’ll text you though because that’s polite. Should I bring anything?

Karina [12:40:12]: Har har. Just your presence.

Ben T [12:41:37]: OK, send me the address and I’ll find my way there.

I glance at the inside of my fridge. It is a horrorshow of the inedible and unidentifiable, with mysterious drippings, now solid, mottling the glass shelves and a number of frozen jars of unknown provenance wedged into nooks and crannies. I twist the thermostat dial back to the blue zone and shut the door. Then I throw my yellow rain jacket over my shoulders and fetch my wallet from my backpack.

Like an awkward duck, I totter along the slick sidewalk to the farmer’s market, whose tent stalls have been hastily draped with blue tarp. I gather an assortment of vegetables for a summer salad and a “foast” from the vegan butcher, who tells me it “slices like roast chicken.” I also buy a strawberry pie from a spherical, red-faced older woman, who crimps an aluminum shield over the mound of exposed fruit.

Somewhat hunch-shouldered under the weight of my reusable bags, I wobble back to my apartment, groaning as I heave the swinging sacks up the stone stairs and drop them unceremoniously on my shoe mat.

One of the arcane jars in the fridge stores an ancient salad dressing, preserved, I hope, in spite of my not remembering when I made it. But it is green, which means I used basil. And since I know only two salad dressing recipes, I deduce that this one has lemon juice instead of vinegar.

I chop and assemble the salad in a big wooden bowl and let it sit while I tidy the apartment. My flimsy round table can barely support two wicker placemats, whose corners jut out sharply. I set out my nicest plates and open the pie box on the counter beside the kitchen sink. The towel ring above the bathroom sink is missing a cloth, so I yank open the linen closet and gingerly pull a taupe rag from the frontmost pile, ever-cautious of a turning. But the talismans are safely secreted away, far from my clumsy fingers.

Ben announces his arrival with a shave-and-a-haircut knock. We hug briefly in the doorway, and he doffs his canvas deck shoes next to mine on the mat.

“Hey, not bad,” he says, gesturing toward the cramped kitchen and austere living room, with its block bookcase and bare couch.

“I’ve lived here since medical school,” I say.

“Good location, too,” he adds and then claps. “Come on, put me to work,” he says. “What can I do to help?”

I scoop the big wooden bowl off the kitchen counter and place it in the centre of the table. “Vegan chicken salad,” I say. “With a homemade dressing. And dessert is resting on the counter.”

Ben’s eyes crinkle with apparent approval. “Nice work,”“ he nods. “Very gourmet. No frozen pizza in the Bergson house, I’m gathering.”

“I had an unexpected break today,” I say and motion for him to sit. “Once we’ve served ourselves, I’ll move the bowl so we can see each other.”

We take turns piling salad on our plates, and then I slide the big wooden bowl across the floor to rest under the fronds of my stalwart little umbrella tree.

“I was thinking about you,” Ben says. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m OK. Easy day today. My supervisor wasn’t in clinic, so I worked with someone more human.”

“Big relief, I’m sure,” he says. “I’ll be honest, I was a little worried about you the other night.”

I allow myself to sigh quietly. “Oh, I’m fine. I just, I don’t know, lost my footing. Took my eyes off the prize.”

He reaches across the table to take my fingers in a loose grip. For a long moment, we sit there silently, scanning each other’s seeking faces for fidelity, or perhaps daring the other to leap up and throw their napkin on the table like a noir ingenue in a fit of passion.

“By the way,” I say, cutting what could have been mounting tension. “The art of memory is alive in this apartment. I have begun construction on a house lofted high in the sky.”

“Oh, wow. So you did it? A house full of memories.”

“It was pretty wild,” I say. “I didn’t even have to call them, really.”

“Yeah, they just kind of float to the top, percolating up from the netherworld and siting there, waiting for you to let them through.”

“You have one, too.”

He grins. “A castle on a hill.”

“A sanctuary from the big, bad world?”

“Yeah, it’s a refuge,” he says and forks a small bite of salad into his mouth. “This is good, by the way,” he says from behind his customary hand shield. “What kind of dressing?”

“It’s basil and cashews and stuff.”

“Hmm, very cool,” he says. “But yeah, it’s a refuge for sure. From the drudgery of life, I guess. We’re children of the nineties, Karina. We need that nostalgic fix.”

“Never got that chance to climb the Aggro Crag?” I tease.

He grins. “I always dreamed of going on Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego, but my mom said we had to live in Boston to get an audition.”

“Well, I think Rockapella’s still around.”

“This was just, what, twenty years ago? Hard to believe that was me. I tucked my shirt into my cargo shorts. I used gel. I had a catchphrase.”

“A catchphrase?”

He laughs sheepishly. “Allrighty then.”

“No,” I say with mock severity.

“Oh yeah.” Ben’s lips pull into an ironic smile. “You know, it’s too bad you can’t get a glimpse into this world of mine,” he says. “Up close and personal. Like a tourist in a French new wave movie.”

“That would be something,” I say. “Then I could see who you really are, all your deep and dark and perverse little secrets.”

He spreads his hands in feigned innocence. “Hey, I’m an open book. All the deep and dark and deviant stuff is totally fair game. Ask away.”

I nudge my salad plate toward the middle of the table so I can rest my chin on my clasped hands. Ben mirrors my posture and puffs out his cheeks. “God, so many options,” I say. “And what an opportunity to figure out exactly who this man across from me is.”

He leans back in his chair and affects a posture of boyish nonchalance. “OK, how’s this? No arrests, but I have egged things, toilet-papered a house, and left boloney on the hood of my nemesis’ car on a hot day. I believe in love and have lived, shall we say, energetically. I’m a ruminator, but not overly neurotic, I don’t think, and I have low blood pressure, so I have to be careful with getting up too quickly.”

“Not bad,” I say. “And now, I guess you’ll want me to reciprocate.”

“Naturally.”

“OK,” I say. “Well, I have had several past lives, many of which you probably wouldn’t believe given when you’ve met me. I’ve made some trouble, had some romance, and found a bit of adventure.”

“No specifics?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, that’s coy.”

“OK, nosy, what do you want to know?”

“Not so much about your past,” he says. “But the present interests me very much.” He strokes his stubbly cheek with his fingertips and co*cks his head in a sort of challenge. “What are we doing, Karina?”

The implications of this question blossom up my spine in spidery filaments. He continues to caress his cheek with his forefinger. “These things never happen the way we expect them to. You meet someone somewhere. It’s a fluke. And by some, I don’t know, tractor beam or something, you find yourself drawn to them. And the more you get to know them, the more you want to be around them.” He spreads his hands in front of his plate, almost apologetically. “Look, I know life is complicated. There are good and bad times for serendipity. I can’t help but think that our meeting at the MOTH was both really good and really bad luck.”

“No, it was good luck,” I say. “But things have been complicated. That’s an understatement, actually.”

“Well, I just don’t want to push, you know?” Ben continues. “And I’m trying to read the air, but this is one of those times when my intuition is failing me. And maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m being selfish. Maybe the clues are there, but I’m so stuck in my own head that I can’t see that this is just too much.”

For a long, seeking moment, we just sit there. His head dips slightly and I can see that there is a sombreness in his mien, a bittersweet core. It stirs something in me, an impulse long dormant. I take a deep breath and my slouch corrects itself in a pneumatic burst. Like a marionette yanked from a pratfall, I rise from my seat and edge around the table. My fingertips brush the parabolic curve and jump over the corner of his jutting placemat. As though pushed by an invisible hand, I bend at the waist and grip Ben’s lean shoulders. I do not think. I do not consider. I simply lean over him and press my lips into his. He receives me tentatively at first, with hovering arms and hands that dare not grab or pull or squeeze. I tap his elbows and he rises on one clumsy leg, an arm extending to the chairback for buttress.

“There’s pie,” I gasp into his mouth.

His stubble rakes my cheeks as he turns to whisper in my ear. “Later. Later.”

We lurch and stumble into my small bedroom and make love on top of my duvet, which winds itself into a whorl of rumpled fabric beneath our seeking bodies. In Ben’s ecstatic face, I glimpse flashes of Marcel and Jake and the others, fragments of memory that concatenate into a daisy chain of mouths agape, hands settled in the hollow of my lower back, warm, heavy bodies writhing against mine.

In the afterglow, it is my idea to have strawberry pie in bed. I use a slotted spoon to pile diner-sized heaps onto my old earthenware plates and then retreat to my sunflower sheets. Ben takes the plate and spoon in one hand and beckons me to slide in beside him with the other, which he drapes around my shoulder. “And now, pie,” he says.

“I got it from my favourite stall in the farmer’s market. The lady who owns it advertises it as ‘better than sex.’ Then again, that’s what she says about all her baked goods.”

Ben coaxes a bolus of pie down his throat and holds up an index finger to signal his impending response. “This was certainly unexpected,” he says. “Though I’m not one to complain.”

“I’ve just—look, this wasn’t—. You know, Ben, I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

“Well, then let it out,” he says. “What is that great line about secrets? They’re a prison that—no, it’s um.” He snaps his fingers in syncopated cracks. “I can’t remember. Brain fart.”

Perhaps it is the post-coital afterglow that loosens my lips and sends a fleeting, dangerous impulse flitting across my mind. In its wake, a very big secret is shaken loose.

“It’s not just the things we’ve talked about,” I say. “There have been…happenings.”

“Happenings,” he repeats.

“Things that have happened that I have had to make sense of.”

Ben’s brows knit like quizzical caterpillars preparing to wrestle. “Things and stuff?” he asks with a sly grin.

I slap his exposed abdomen. “No, it’s—. Look, if I tell you, do you promise you won’t think I’m insane?”

“You didn’t kill anyone, right?”

“OK, at dinner, you had mused about what it would be like if we could visit each other’s memory palaces. What if I told you I have? What if I told you I had been there, in another person’s memories, and it seemed as real as my experience here in the real world?”

Ben’s face is a tableau of incredulity. “I would say that is almost certainly impossible.”

“When I was cleaning out my dad’s office, I found a manuscript in his typewriter. And I, well—look, I know this is going to sound preposterous, but when I read the letter he wrote to me, I transported, literally travelled, to his memory city. It’s huge, really vast, and full of memories, some I recognize from stories, but others that were new to me. I’ve been there, Ben, first as an observer, and then, as things developed, I became a player in the scenes that were unfolding.”

I pause to glance at him. His lips are parted slightly and his pale green irises peek out from a deep, inscrutable squint.

“I didn’t ask to go,” I continue. “And let me tell you, I’ve seen things I never wanted to see. I now know things I’d prefer I didn’t know. But these turnings, as I’ve begun to think of them, they keep happening. Some of my dad’s things seem to act like talismans, like magical lodestones.” I gesture to the doorway to my bedroom. “I’ve stashed the manuscript and his old pocket watch at the back of my linen closet so I won’t inadvertently touch them and invoke a turning. But recently, things have gotten even weirder. It turns out some of the memories I’ve come across are false. They’re red herrings. They don’t match the memories of other people, people who are alive, who were there. And there was a woman, a stranger, who accosted me at a restaurant. She claimed she knew me. She said we met on my first rotation, but I know she wasn’t there. And—.” I am now almost panting. “And this is nuts, isn’t it?”

He stares back at me with that deep squint of his. “I mean, it’s not something you hear every day.”

“And get this,” I continue, almost manic now. “That woman who insisted she knew me, the one who sat down with me at Bao to Me Baby, just texted me to say she was ‘mistaken.’ All this while I’m trying to finish residency and, well, grieve.” I grip his thigh through the piled sheets. “What do you think of all this?”

His lips curl, revealing two incisors squeezing a trapped strawberry seed. “It’s a pretty outlandish story.”

“I swear to God it’s true.”

“Then show me.”

“Right now?”

“No, no. We can do it later.”

“You believe me?”

He shrugs and brushes an errant crust crumb from the bedsheet. “Well, it’s either true or you are nuts, you’re right,” he says. “Or I guess this could be a really extravagant and imaginative practical joke.”

“I’ll show you.”

He sighs, no longer playful. “All right, Karina.” He reaches over to the night table, where he’s deposited his pineapple-printed underwear, and pulls them on. “Let me just go to the bathroom.”

I gather the dessert plates and dump them into the sink. “I’m not kidding,” I call from the kitchen. In lieu of a reply is the thunderous flush of my ancient toilet. On his way back to the bedroom, he pulls out his phone to glance at the screen and clicks his tongue. “Jesus, it’s eleven. Would you be offended if I took off? I’m invigilating an exam at seven.”

“Oh, OK,” I say, somewhat startled by his abruptness. “Sure.”

“It’s not about the memory crawling, or whatever it is you’re doing,” he says, pulling on his pants. He pads over to plant a kiss on my forehead. “I’ll text you when I get back.”

Leaning against my coat rack, he slips on his boat shoes on the foam mat abutting the front door. He pauses and fixes me with a pensive pucker. “You know,” he says. “They’re probably yours, the memories, a kind of trick of the mind.”

I say nothing. Little draughts of shame and dread swirl around the kitchen, mingling with the redolent strawberry remnants of the unwrapped pie left on the counter.

“Maybe they’re trying to tell you something.”

“Well, I’m here,” I mutter.

“Next time you’re there, ask one of the figures in the memory. What do you want? Why am I here?”

“OK, Ben.”

“See what they say,” he says as he makes his way into the hallway. “Maybe they’re offering you a gift.”

*Note: The illustrations accompanying this story were generated using AI technology

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