The photograph still dangling in her hand, she drifts out of the room. In the stillness she leaves behind, her final words seem to ripple outward like waves of water from a thrown stone—don’t remember don’t remember don’t remember don’trememberdon’t
“Remember?” Sally is always prompting him, “Don’t you remember?” And although she asks it gently, he’s nearly grown to resent her implication that remembering is a decision he might choose to make, that by forgetting he is being purposefully rash or slovenly.
Remember where you left your wallet. Remember where you put the car keys. Remember what the bank statement said. Remember what we did over the weekend, where we’re going for dinner tonight. Remember to lock the door, to put away the ice cream, to turn off the stove. Remember that time in Sicily, and what we did in Rome, and where you left your jacket, your shoes, your address book. So many remembers, chattering like a rain of hailstones, bruising his head. Remember your bold life Remember since you ow’d no more to time Than I do now Briefly thyself remember
pray you, love, remember
“Member to get me,” he hears a child say. He sees her, too, floating somewhere in that odd darkness inside his head, a girl of five or six with crooked pigtails and a worried expression in her eyes. Gazing through the window at the walled greensward, John watches as she climbs out of the backseat of the car he has just pulled up to idle beside the curb.
“Member?” he quips, twisting around in the driver’s seat. “Don’t you mean remember?”
“No,” she answers, lugging a pink backpack off the seat and shrugging into it. Shaking her head earnestly, she insists, “Member. Re means you have to do it again, like Mommy when she forgets. I want you to member the first time. I don’t like to get forgot.”
He feels a wisp of regret or even worry, but he knows he mustn’t infect the girl with his concerns about her mother. “I’ll member that!” he answers heartily.
Nodding solemnly, the child pushes the car door closed. Flooded by his love for her, John watches as she trudges across the schoolyard until she is lost among the other children. When he drives away toward campus and the classes and committees waiting for him there, he is certain he will never forget the promise he has just made, certain he’ll not forget the quaint endearing charm of her request.
But stranded as he is in this strange chamber, that promise plagues him. He’d pledged to member that grave girl, but he has no idea where she might be waiting, no idea how to find her, or even exactly who she is.
Besides, he suddenly recalls, it was she who forgot, not he. He’d waited up all night for her—or at least for some sullen ghost or prickly older sister of that girl. For hours he’d stalked circles in the sitting room of their suite in the hotel off King’s Road, breaking off his pacing to gaze out over London and wonder where in that whole huge city she might be, while the minutes ticked on toward morning and the hour of his speech.
She got lost. That’s what she explained after the constables delivered her to the hotel the next evening. Speaking so defiantly it was as if it were he who had caused the trouble and not she, she insisted she’d just gone out for a little walk. She’d meant to be back before John and Freya returned from As You Like It, but she’d met some people in Trafalgar Square, some students. They’d gone to a pub, and maybe she’d had a bit too much to drink—she, who was still too young to drink in California. She got lost trying to find her way back to the hotel. She’d forgotten the hotel’s name and what street it was on.
It was she who forgot, John reminds himself with a curt nod. It was her forgetting that cost them all so exceedingly.
Outside the window, the sun shines on. A row of flowers sways and nods at the base of the bushes that line the ivied wall. In the welkin above, a jet plane inches through the blue, leaving a wake of vapor as white and soft as the puffs of cotton his mother used to pull from the bottles of the pills she had to take. There was a window in that house, too, he remembers—in the house where he was born—a wide, modern window that his father had installed to underscore his standing as owner of the town’s largest hardware store. A picture window is what his mother called it. In California’s Central Valley, when telephones were affixed to walls and horses delivered milk.
The Johnny he was back then could stand at that picture window for hours, hands clasped behind his back, chin resting on the sill, his breath occasionally obscuring his vision with its warm fog while he gazed and gazed, soaking up the passing pageant one image at a time—a boy on roller skates, a car with fenders plump as pillows, a dog pausing to make water against the fire hydrant—the whole street his to study as long as he was good.
Though even then it was sometimes hard to know what that meant—good—hard to know how to be good right. And hard to know when what he had done was wrong. Sometimes his father growled and sometimes his mother squealed. Sometimes they purred. Inexplicably.
He’d had a dolly—he remembers—a puppy hand sewn and stuffed, given him by an aunt who ignored the injunction against letting boys have anything soft to love. Happy Dog. He’d named his dolly Happy Dog, and it was made of brown corduroy, with two black eyes embroidered on its long brown face. He slept with it at night, carted it with him during the day by one loose leg. Sometimes, watching out the window, he surreptitiously sucked a satin ear. Alone inside his own small body, gazing at the world.
Trying to understand.
In his intro classes, after he’s said his piece about learning and knowing and understanding before we go, he likes to pause, to wait until his students have nodded their easy agreement and are bending back over their notebooks before he adds, “But it’s really not that simple, is it? Because only the fools among us fail to realize how imperfect human understanding is. Anything we think we know about a situation or someone else or even ourselves is always limited by that old trap, point of view. Just as we are all of us stuck in time, so we are also stuck inside ourselves, doomed to live and die inside our own thick skulls.
“As Brutus says in Julius Caesar,” he’ll continue, borrowing the lines as effortlessly as if the words were his own, “‘the eye sees not itself But by reflection.’ And though here we might pause to admire how deftly Shakespeare makes the word ‘reflection’ earn its keep by suggesting both mirrors and contemplation, we also have to admit that what Brutus is saying is not really very profound.”
Into the listening silence, he offers, “We can never see our own faces directly, never look straight into our own eyes. If it weren’t for photographs, films, and mirrors, the only clues we would ever have about how we appear to other people would have to come from those people themselves.”
In a good lecture, timing is everything, and here John has learned to pause while his students contemplate those thoughts—at first dismissing them and then resisting them, and then, when they recognize their truth and start to get an inkling of their import, nearly losing themselves in their vortex—before he suggests, “Only imagination allows us any relief from the trap of ourselves. Only imagination can give us any chance of seeing anyone else’s self or soul.
“And it’s art and literature—and Shakespeare—” he adds for the sake of the appreciative fond chuckle that ripples through the lecture hall, “that lets us imagine the humanity in other people, and helps us find it in ourselves.”
They have so much to learn, his students. So much still to understand about ambiguity and interpretation and where meaning lies, so much to figure out about comedy, tragedy, history, and romance, too—both the tangled affections of their own sapling hearts, as well as those plays that critics call the romances, those radiant strange plays that William Shakespeare wrote at the end of his career.
It has grown harder, over time, to teach his students anything, what with so much else competing for their attention—new technologies along with ancient hormones—and the value of an education all but forgotten in the scuffle for a job. These days, even proper punctuation and correct citations are a challenge for some of
his students. But John has never given up on teaching. Unlike many of his colleagues, he never lost his faith in students nor his passion for his subject. He never lost his conviction that studying William Shakespeare can help people live richer lives.
It’s no longer a popular view. At least in academic circles the belief that human beings are capable of growth and change, and the faith that art can help to fuel those evolutions, have fallen far from favor. Nowadays, human beings are seen as little more than preprogrammed machines, or mere animals at the mercy of language. And humanism—that transcendent vision that spans centuries and religions in its celebration of reason, responsibility, art, and examined lives—has been tossed out like old bathwater, leaving humanity naked and shivering on the dirty ground.
He blames his colleagues for this disgrace—the younger ones for embracing it and the older ones for not resisting more. And he blames himself, too. He’d had his golden chance, that time in London. But fate confounded him, and all his efforts came to naught. People failed him, too, he reflects now with a scowl, letting him down in such troublous ways that he has long made it a practice not to think on them at all.
The room in which he sits is so silent he can hear time’s tick, the small click of it rising from the watch that is strapped to the wrist resting in his lap. It’s a wrist he can hardly accept as his, so startlingly sharp are its bones beneath such tissuey skin. The watch is more familiar—the good Elgin his father gave him when he graduated from high school. For over half a century it has counted out his seconds like a second pulse, though rarely has it been quiet enough for him to hear its beat.
Outside the window a tree keeps watch, its branches ticking in a whiff of breeze, its new leaves like crumpled petals unfurling. Mid-morning light filters through its limbs and leaves, casting a lace of shade across the ground outside, the floor within, his sneaker-shod feet. Studying those trembling shadows, John tries to discern patterns or tease out meanings, strains to find a way to understand this strange new story. But it is as if some essential piece were lost, a gap in the narrative, a lacuna in the text, the missing phrase or page he needs to make sense of the whole.
What country, friends
There was a clock in his fourth grade classroom, a little ticking one that sat like a round black gnome on the teacher’s desk. He remembers watching it watch over time. Or rather, time doubles back so that he is there still—little Johnny Wilson, twisting and fidgeting in his seat as that clock taps his days away one ticktock at a time.
He is hungry for stories even then, already craving the other lives that stories let him live. Peter Rabbit, Tom Sawyer, Winnie-the-Pooh. Long John Silver with his bottle of rum. Every book he rescues from his school’s neglected library takes him beyond himself, and each time he returns to being simply John, he finds himself enlarged.
He is enlarged, too, by words, by their meanings and their sounds, by the way they lull or trouble or thrill him, the spells they cast. Soporific. Mortified. Heffalump. Ingenious. Whenever his teacher asks the class to look up definitions in the dictionary, it takes him twice as long as any other child because his attention is diverted by every other word his eyes land on. Adamantine. Adaptable. Addlepated. Adore.
When he and the girl he has adored all year are sent outside to clean erasers, he keeps them busy longer than necessary, smashing the gray pads together with an industry that makes the girl giggle, banging until not one more white puff can be coaxed to billow away into the pollen-laden air. When he leans in to kiss her, he is as astonished by his own audacity as he is by the unexpected softness of her cheek.
Back in this strange cul-de-sac of time, John shakes his head in fond amazement at that kiss. No one kissed in his home, or even much in the movies that long ago. And yet inside that moment it had seemed the inevitable next thing, to kiss when he lacked matter to speak. And so he’d pressed his lips against the girl’s cheek and held his mouth there, waiting. But before anything more could happen, she’d pulled away, looking solemn for an instant and then giggling and skipping off, leaving him to cart all the erasers back into the classroom by himself, his pants smeared with chalk, his ears as hot as if he had been leaning against the radiator.
Youth’s a stuff will not endure. Though of course he hadn’t understood that then. Back then old age had been as hard to believe in as love had been a breeze. Slapping the teacher’s erasers, kissing that soft cheek, he’d been boy eternal. He’d not believed he would ever grow up, had not believed that he would one day shave or drive, one day leave home. Back then, death had been easier to believe in than old age. Even decades beyond that day, when his waist began to soften, and the first white hairs appeared like maggots in his thick brown locks, he had still not really understood that he—John Hubbard Wilson—could ever actually be old. Not aching and sagging, not steeped in the million indignities of a body gone soft and stiff, a brain gone, too. Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.
“Good morning, John,” a voice sings in his ear. “Remember me?” A woman plants herself in front of him, a hale woman, rotund and ruddy-cheeked as a country shepherdess—a Dorcas, a Mopsa, or a Phebe.
“Morning,” she says again, reaching down to place a hand on his shoulder as if she were a pastor or a used car salesman. “I’m Matty. Yesterday I said I’d see you again tomorrow. And here it is tomorrow—and here I am!” A small gold cross hangs from a chain that is nearly lost in the folds of her plump neck. On the fabric of her tunic, green and pink kittens lick ice cream cones and nap on beach towels. The badge pinned to her tunic announces MATTY.
“How are you this fine day?” she asks when John does not respond. “How are you feeling?”
“When will I be leaving?” John asks briskly, ignoring her foolishness about feeling. “I’ve been waiting all morning.”
“Oh, I’m not really sure,” she replies with vague good cheer.
“I need to know,” he insists. “I’ve got work to do. I’ve already waited patiently, more than … long enough.”
“But you only just got here,” she announces jovially, “yesterday.”
“Yesterday?” he echoes, his voice wobbling on the word. He tries again, “What country is this?”
“What country?” Her laugh rings loud. “This is America, John. The good old USA. Solano, California. You moved across town, is all. It’s just a little extra confusing right now because it’s all so new. Moving’s disorienting for anyone. Give it a little more time, and you’ll get in the swing.”
“I don’t want the swing,” he answers. “I want to leave. Where is my …” he pauses, searching for a worthy word, “Sally?”
“Your Sally?” The woman chuckles as if he’d intended another joke. “You mean, your wife?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he says impatiently, “wife.” On his tongue that little syllable conjures a specific flavor of breath and flesh, evokes a certain frequency, a hum as warm and known as home. Wife. She’d been sad when he last saw her, her countenance seemed crushed, her spirit, too. It troubles him to recall. He worries that he is helpless to help her, imprisoned as he is in this confounding cell. Wherever she is, in whatever home or room or confine of her own, he hopes she is faring better now than he.
“She said this is an extra busy time of year for her, what with her bees and all.” The blithesome woman gives a stout shudder. “But you probably know that. She’ll come to visit just as soon as she can. In the meantime, she’s already called this morning to check on you.”
“There’s work I need—” John begins.
“Oh, forget about work, why don’t you?” the woman interjects. “You’ve been working hard for years. You’ve earned a vacation. Why not just relax and enjoy a little break?”
“I’ve broken long enough,” he snaps. “Please,” he blurts, his voice startling even him with its raw pleading.
Something wavers in the woman’s eyes, though she answers with practiced aplomb, “Let’s give it a little longer before we start making any new p
lans. We’ll take good care of you here—I promise. Your Sally will come to visit as soon as she can. And, hey—right now it’s time for your meds.”
“Meds?” John echoes, making the word sound silly.
“You know—medication. Medicine,” the woman explains, holding out a little paper cup, shaking it so John can hear the rattle of the pill it contains.
“‘No med’cine,’” he replies.
“Now John, you’ve got to take your medicine.”
“‘No med’cine in the world can do thee good,’” John continues, looking past his companion to the ivy-shrouded wall as he repeats Laertes’s words to the dying Prince Hamlet.
“Sure it can,” she answers reassuringly. “It’s for your blood pressure.”
When she leans down in front of him, John sees the concern hovering on her face, and for a moment he is tempted to sink into her solicitude, but then he waves it away with a wafture of his hand. “‘In thee there is not half an hour’s life,’” he continues, speaking Laertes’s urgent eulogy for the sake of its own magnificence, speaking to himself since it is obvious this cheery rustic cannot understand.
“‘The treacherous instrument is in thy hand,’” he adds, savoring the odd comfort of those stark words, imbued as they are with all the nuances of meaning and feeling they have collected throughout his decades of living with that play, so that now, like the layered colors of a Flemish painting, they seem to shine in his mind with their own internal light.
“It’s a pill in my hand, John. I need you to take it.” Her voice is as determinedly patient as if she were speaking to a child. “This isn’t such a bad place,” she says as she tips the little capsule into John’s palm, watches while he places it on his tongue, and then offers him a glass of water. After he has swallowed and returned the glass to her, she reaches to take up his other hand, which has been lying loose in his lap like a possession he forgot he owned. “You’ll like it here fine,” she says, giving his fingers a little squeeze, “once you’ve gotten used to it.”