[Original Novel] The Background of Your Memories, Part 3

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I tried to protest, but she shushed me. “There’s nothing written on the tapes, even.” I took one of the tapes in my hands. The label read “choir practice” followed by the date, in black sharpie. Tears welled up in my eyes. Why can’t she see it? What does it mean?

“Don’t worry” she continued. “I’m not angry about this. I’m relieved to find out, if anything. You need help.” I angrily accused her of fucking with me, then reached for another tape, intent on rewinding it so we could watch it again. She snatched it from my hand.

“They’re blank. There’s nothing written on them and nothing shows up on the screen.” I tearfully begged her to believe me. “I believe...you think you’re seeing something” she said. “But you need to believe me when I say that you’re losing it. That you’ve been affected more deeply than you realized. You need help. I happen to know a therapist who specializes in stuff like this, too.”

I continued to protest as she fired off an email to whatever shrink she meant to foist on me, but all of it fell on deaf ears. She gathered her things and left, calling out over her shoulder that she’d text me the shrink’s contact info “...for when you’re ready.”

I just sat there, hands shaking as I rewound the tapes. Then I played the first one, recording it with my own phone. Same result. While I did that, I noticed the light cast by the screen onto my surroundings never flickered. It was now as it always had been, a steady glow...with a blue tint.

I held one of the tapes in my hands, peering down at the writing on the label. Daring it to vanish I suppose. It didn’t. I rubbed at it with my thumb...to no effect. I covered it, then uncovered it. Looked away, then back, then repeated the process. Nothing I tried would make the writing disappear.

It had every appearance of plain, sober reality. Yet when I took a photo of it with my phone, it was only a blank label. The mania returned. I felt locked in a cognitive loop, confronted with two apparent truths I could find no way to reconcile.

Nothing like this has ever happened to me until now. I’ve never seen any chupacabras or bigfoots. Bigfeet? I’ve always defaulted to the simpler, mundane explanation in response to that sort of thing; insanity. Delusion. Casting down judgement from on high, never imagining I’d be on the receiving end one day.

Could she be right? Even as I continued to study the black markings on the tape which I now knew to be illusory, they refused to fade. What other possible explanation is there? I’ve never given much thought to how difficult it is to seriously doubt your own sanity, as I never expected to be in this position.

This must be what it feels like, surely? Insanity is imperceptible to the afflicted. They never feel insane. The more I thought about it, the more it all lined up. My phone buzzed. “Heironimus P. Travigan, PhD” followed by an address I recognized as someplace on the campus of the local university.

I was supposed to start there about a month ago. My life ground to a halt after the crash, all my plans fell to pieces as I folded up into myself. Nothing stops me from setting up a meeting with admissions and starting classes...except that I’d have to give up the shed.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way” I whispered, running my fingers over the tape’s impossible label. They were supposed to see me graduate. They would’ve looked so proud as I walked up to the stage to receive my diploma. No doubt Dad would’ve filmed it, like he filmed every other milestone in our lives.

It still seemed like the only possible future. How could it not be? Try as I might, I couldn’t picture any future at all where they remained in the ground. Some immovably stubborn fragment of my heart bitterly fought any effort to so much as imagine how my life might proceed without them.

I didn’t even realize I was still crying until I noticed the damp spots forming on the blanket where my tears fell. My every thought was consumed with the matter of the tapes, Sarah, and the psychologist she meant for me to seek out.

If she’s right, shouldn’t I? But then, I’d have to leave the shed for that. No longer than an hour or two, though. I felt shaken enough that reluctance to leave the shed won out for the time being. But as often happens, I felt differently after sleeping on it.

I owe that mainly to having the car dream again. The nightscape, the city. Honk, screech, crash, death. Waking up from it for the hundredth time provoked some reflection. Could I really bear another sixty years of this? Or even ten? Or one, for that matter.

Something still held me back. Only after protracted introspection could I nail it down. Seeing the shrink would be a step forward. Towards resuming my life, business as usual. A step into a future without them. That small, stubborn part of me violently recoiled from it.

To take even that first step would be tacitly acknowledging what’s happened. That it really occurred, that it’s permanent. That there’s no going back, and no other future I might escape to in which they’re still here with me.

If only I’d crossed that threshold before I realized it’s there. “It’ll only be that much harder now” I thought. In the end, I couldn’t make myself drive there. Just couldn’t do it. I could open the car door and sit in the driver’s seat, buckle myself in and start the engine, but that’s the full extent of it.

My arms wouldn’t move when I tried to take hold of the wheel. My foot wouldn’t budge from the brake. I fought with myself for over an hour before breaking down into a pathetic, blubbering mess. I pounded on the wheel, startling myself with the inadvertent honk. My neighbor, in the process of washing his BMW, shot me a sour look.

I gave up for the day and retreated back into the shed. Feeling defeated, but also enraged. How could such a simple thing be so difficult? I beat on my forehead with both hands. All I had to do was drive to that address. I had a whole fucking day to do it in and I still didn’t manage.

Didn’t have an appointment anyway. Didn’t even think to dress myself properly, bathe, or comb my hair. What a fucking mess. I wrapped myself up in the blankets until fully enveloped, like a chrysalis I hoped never to hatch from.

I wasted the next few days curled up like that, growing steadily more feeble, eyes glued to the screen. I knew it wasn’t real. I knew to anybody else’s eyes, I was holed up watching blank tapes. It didn’t matter to me anymore. Real or imagined, I needed it.

Dreams of the old man and the playground troubled me. All of it with the same grainy, faded quality from the video. “They’re from the background of your memories”. Something about it hooked into a deep seated part of my brain and tugged relentlessly at it.

A splinter in my mind. There’s something to be said for it though, as it finally got me out of bed. After bundling up on account of the frigid early morning air, I made my way out of the suburbs and into Greenborough park. Proximity to this park, and to the local elementary school, was a big factor in my parents’ decision to purchase the house.

I don’t know why, but it never occurred to me in all these years to come back and visit this place until now. I suppose it’s because I was never big on nostalgia until after the crash. A middle aged jogger with a golden lab on a leash shoots me a wary sidelong glance, as if I have no business being here. Do I?

Except for her, the park is desolate. Wispy bands of ethereal white fog still drifting an inch or so above the ground, grass glistening with dew. With winter at the door, the trees are all bare. Thin, convoluted branches snaking this way and that towards the sky.

Soon I am alone, navigating a minefield of memories. I pass a bench I once sat on as my mother applied a band-aid to my knee after I fell off my bicycle, wooden planks now grimy and worn from more than a decade of exposure.

There’s the playground. A sort of unofficial social classroom in which I learned many things about the behavior of other children that we were never taught in school. The slide, dented and rusty, cannot possibly be considered fit for use. The swings haven’t fared much better.

Then I spot it. I’m unsure at first because of how the years have reshaped this place in all manner of subtle ways, but as I get closer, my certainty grows. It’s just like in the tape. The picnic blanket was over there, and…

My gaze comes to rest on the soggy, torn fringe of landscaping fabric, still protruding from the soil. I smile weakly, remembering how powerfully it confused me so long ago. Such a silly thing, to have left such a lasting memory.

The sky is overcast. The underside of the cloud layer resembles a slowly shifting inverted landscape of mountains and valleys, all of it the same dreary shade of grey. A single droplet strikes my lapel, but no more follow. As if the sky cannot yet make up its mind whether to rain.

Staring at the sky like that, I nearly didn’t notice him. But as I turned to leave, my eyes snagged on a distant figure in a grey trenchcoat. As grey as his hair. He stood exactly where he had in the video, before a mess of tall grass with the playground just on the other side.

“Hey!” I called out. He turned to look, but then retreated, wading into the grass as I approached. “Come back! I just want to talk!” But by the time I reached the grass, he seemed to fade into the distance. Not actually escaping, but blending into the drab grey melange as if he’d only ever been a temporarily separated piece of it.

I stood there wide eyed, awash in an unmanageable flood of emotion, unsure what to think. Who is he? What does he know about the tapes? Perhaps Sarah was right, and I’m losing it. He might’ve just been some random old man out for a walk, in which case I can only imagine what he thinks of me now.

I waded a ways into the grass, scanning the playground beyond it. The old man was plainly long gone, so I returned the way I came. Feeling everything and nothing, wondering just what it is I hoped I would find in that park, I retraced my steps until I arrived back at the shed. After disrobing, I crawled back under the covers and put in another tape.

The next time Sarah texted me it was to let me know she’d gone ahead and made me an appointment. Despite everything, I smiled. For someone who dumped me because she didn’t want to play mother to someone much too old for it, she’s sure had a hard time stopping.

She wound up giving me a ride, too. “You didn’t have to do this” I mumbled. “I could’ve taken the bus.” She challenged me to get out my wallet and show her some bus tickets. Of course I didn’t have any. “That’s what I thought. I didn’t go to the trouble of setting you up with Dr. Travigan so you could waste his time, holed up in that miserable little shed.”

I didn’t fight it. Not out of recognition that I needed help, but for lack of willpower. Just a passenger being carried along, in this car as much as in life. When we arrived, I was in for a surprise. It was like no therapist’s office I’ve ever seen, instead resembling an aged but beautifully detailed little Victorian home.

Upon knocking a few times, the door opened a crack, and a feeble voice inquired what business I’d come on. When I identified myself as the subject of Sarah’s email and explained that I had an appointment, the chain was unfastened and the door swung open the rest of the way.

The man who now stood before me could be no more than five feet tall, hunched over with wispy grey hair and distressingly pale skin. He wore a grey v-neck sweater with a curious logo embroidered just above where the left breast pocket would be. He studied me for a moment through some sort of tinted monocle, then spoke.

“Come in, come in! Right this way! Sarah has told me a great deal about you. Nothing too personal, not to worry, but I understand you’ve been having recurring dreams?” I confirmed it. He led me through a breathtakingly intricate, detailed interior, every surface bearing some sort of decorative carving.

The wainscots were particularly ornate, as were the repeating slender pillars resembling the supports of a staircase hand rail...clearly not load bearing. Who polishes all this, I wonder. What little I know of interior decoration of this sort includes that much of it is often made by hand, the work of specialized craftsmen who command handsome pay.

Various unfamiliar contraptions lined the walls of every room we passed through. Some which I could discern the purpose of, like primitive video goggles, but others were more cryptically designed. “Quite the oddity, isn’t it? The brainchild of one Ivan Sutherland, who called it the ultimate display.”

It consisted of a pair of tiny monitors of the old picture tube type, with mirrors and lenses to direct the image from each one into the left and right eyes of whoever wears it. The apparatus was too heavy to sit on the head unsupported, instead suspended from an articulated boom. Oddly there was also something like a neck strap, with a pair of hypodermic syringes mounted to it...

I soon located the small plaque which identified it as a “computer aided transcendence vehicle.” I’ve never heard of such a thing. It did make it easier to identify all of the other gadgets now that I knew to look for the plaques, though.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 4!}