Factoring Humanity

8

After Kyle had gone home, Heather sat in the darkened living room, thinking. It was past time she went to bed—she had a 9:00 A.M. meeting tomorrow.

Damn, maybe Kyle’s insomnia was contagious. She was bone-tired but too nervous to sleep.

She’d said something—words tumbling out without thinking—to Kyle, and now she was trying to decide if she’d really believed it.

But those things—a war, a car exploding, even a child dying—they are common enough occurrences. They’re not unthinkable; indeed, there’s not a parent alive who doesn’t fret about something happening to one of their children.

But it wasn’t an undefined “something” that had happened to Mary. No, Mary had taken her own life, slitting her wrists. Heather hadn’t been expecting that, or even fearing it. It had been as shocking to her as… as… well, as what Eileen Franklin had supposedly seen, the rape and murder of her childhood friend by her own father.

But Heather hadn’t walled off the memories of what had happened to Mary.

Because…

Because, perhaps, suicide was not unthinkable to her.

Not, of course, that Heather had ever contemplated taking her own life—not seriously anyway.

No, no, that wasn’t it. But suicide had touched her life once before in the past.

She did not often think of it.

In fact, she hadn’t thought of it in years.

Had the memories been repressed? Had recent stress brought them to light?

No. Surely not. Surely she could have recalled it all at any time and had just been choosing not to.

It had been so long ago, and she had been so young. Young and foolish.

Heather had been eighteen, fresh out of high school, leaving the small town of Vegreville, Alberta, for the first time, coming halfway across the continent to giant, cosmopolitan Toronto. She’d tried so many new things that wild first year. And she’d taken an introductory astronomy course—she’d always loved the stars, crystal points above the flat prairie sky.

Heather had fallen head over heels in love with the teaching assistant, Josh Huneker. Josh was six years older, a grad student, thin, with delicate, surgeon-like hands, soulful pale-blue eyes, and the gentlest, kindest demeanor of anyone she’d ever met.

Of course, it hadn’t been love—not really. But it felt something like it at the time. She’d so wanted to be loved, to be with a man, to experiment, to experience.

Josh had seemed… not indifferent, but ambivalent perhaps, to Heather’s obvious attention. They’d met at the beginning of the academic year in September; by Canadian Thanksgiving, five weeks later, they were lovers.

And it was everything she could have hoped for. Josh was sensitive and gentle and caring, and afterward, he would talk with her for hours—about humanity, about ecology, about whales, about rain forests, and about the future.

They’d dated off and on for much of that academic year. No commitment, though—Josh didn’t seem to want one, and, truth be told, Heather didn’t either. She’d been looking to broaden her experience, not to settle down.

In February Josh had had to go away. The National Research Council of Canada operated a forty-six-meter radio telescope at Lake Traverse in Algonquin Park, a huge area of untamed forest and Precambrian shield in northern Ontario. Josh was slated to spend a week there, helping monitor the equipment.

And he’d gone. But the other astronomer who was there with him had gotten sick: appendicitis. An air ambulance had taken him from the telescope building to a hospital in Huntsville.

Josh had stayed on, but then snowstorms had prevented anyone from coming up to join him. He’d been alone with the giant telescope for a week, snowed in.

It shouldn’t have been any problem; there’d been food and water enough for two for the entire duration of the planned stay. But when the roads finally were cleared and someone could get up to the observatory from Toronto, they found Josh dead.

He had killed himself.

Heather had had no special status; the police never notified her directly. She’d first learned about it from an article in The Toronto Star.

They said he’d killed himself over quarrels with his lover.

Heather had known that Josh had a roommate. She’d met Barry—a philosophy student with a closely cropped beard—several times.

But she hadn’t realized just how close Josh and Barry had been, or how much of a—well, if not a pawn, certainly a complicating factor in their troubled relationship she’d been.

No, she didn’t often think of that.

But no doubt it had had an impact. Perhaps she was less surprised than most mothers would be when her own daughter had turned out to have hidden demons and undisclosed issues—when her own daughter had taken her life.

And if it hadn’t been a great, unthinkable shock, then she couldn’t have repressed the memories of Mary’s death… regardless of how much she wanted to.

Kilometers away Kyle lay in bed in his one-bedroom apartment, also trying to get to sleep.

False memories.

Or repressed memories.

Was there anything in his life that had been so traumatic, so painful, that if he could, he would have shut out its memory?

Of course there was.

Becky’s accusation.

Mary’s suicide.

The two worst things that had ever happened to him.

Yes, if repression were possible, surely he’d repress those.

Unless—unless, as Heather said, even they weren’t sufficiently unthinkable to trigger the suppression mechanism.

He racked his brain, trying to recall other examples of things he might have suppressed. He was conscious of what an impossible task that was: trying to remember things that he wouldn’t allow himself to remember.

But then it hit him—something from his childhood. Something he’d never conceived of. Something that had cost him his faith in God.

Kyle had been brought up in Canada’s United Church, an easygoing Protestant denomination. But he’d drifted away from it over the years and today was seen in a hall of worship only when weddings or funerals required it. Oh, in moments of quiet reflection, he thought there might be some sort of Creator, but ever since that day when he was fifteen, he had been unable to believe in the benevolent God his church had preached.

Kyle’s parents were out for the evening, and he had decided to stay up as long as he could. He didn’t get to play with the remote when his father was home, but now he was flipping channels madly, hoping for something titillating on late-night TV. Still, when he came across a nature documentary, he paused. You never knew when some topless African woman was going to wander into the scene.

He saw a female lion stalking a herd of zebras beside a water hole. The lion’s tawny hide was almost invisible in the tall yellow grasses. There were hundreds of zebras, but she was interested only in the animals at the margin. The narrator spoke in hushed tones, like the commentator on his dad’s golf shows, as if words added long after the footage was shot could somehow disturb the unfolding of the scene. “The lioness looks for a straggler,” he said. “She wants to pick out a weak member of the herd.”

Kyle sat up; this was much more vivid than the ancient, grainy Wild Kingdom episodes he’d seen before.

The lion continued to stalk. The background noises consisted of zebra hooves falling on baked earth, the rustling of grass, the calls of birds, and the droning of insects. The shadows were short, hugging the animals’ legs like shy toddlers clutching their parents.

Suddenly the lion surged forward, legs pumping, mouth hanging wide open. She leaped onto a zebra’s haunch, biting deeply into it. The other zebras began to gallop away, clouds of dust rising in their wake, the footfalls like thunder. Birds wheeled into flight, squawking loudly.

The attacked animal now had stripes of red running between its black and white ones. It fell to its knees, propelled down by the impact of the lion. The blood mixed with the parched soil, forming a maroon-colored mud. The lion was hungry, or at least thirsty, and it bit deeply into the zebra’s flesh again, scooping out a wet mound of muscle and connective tissue. All the while, the zebra’s head continued to move and its eyelids beat up and down.

The poor thing was alive, thought Kyle. It’s bleeding all over the savannah, it’s about to be eaten, and it’s still alive.

A zebra. Genus Equus, they’d said in science class. Just like a horse.

Kyle had done some riding at summer camp. He knew how intelligent horses were, how sensitive they were, how feeling they were. A zebra couldn’t be that different. The animal had to be in agony, had to be panicked, had to be terrified.

And it hit him. Fifteen years old, it hit him like a ton of bricks.

It wasn’t just this zebra, of course. It was almost all zebras—and Thomson’s gazelles and wildebeests and giraffes.

And it wasn’t just Africa.

It was almost all prey animals anywhere in the world.

Animals didn’t die of old age. They didn’t quietly expire after long, pleasant lives. They didn’t pass on unaided.

No.

They were torn apart, often limb from limb, hemorrhaging severely, usually still conscious, still aware, still sensing.

Death was a horrible, vicious act, almost without exception. Kyle’s grandfather had passed away the year before. Kyle had never really thought about getting old himself, but suddenly the litany of terms he’d heard his parents bat about during Granddad’s illness came back to him.

Heart disease.

Osteoporosis.

Prostate cancer.

Cataracts.

Senility.

Throughout all of history, most people had died horrible deaths, too. Humans had generally not lived long enough to experience old age; evolution, which, as he’d learned in school, had fine-tuned so much of human physiology, had simply had no opportunity to address these problems because almost no one in previous generations had lived long enough to experience them.

The zebra gutted by the lion.

The rat swallowed whole by the snake.

The paralyzed insect that felt itself being eaten alive from within by implanted larvae.

All of them surely aware of what was happening to them.

All of them tortured.

No quick deaths.

No merciful deaths.

Kyle had put down the remote after that, his interest in catching a glimpse of naked breasts gone. He’d gone to bed, but had lain awake for hours.

From that night on, whenever he tried to think of God, he found himself thinking instead of the zebra, its blood staining the water hole.

And to this day, try as he might, he’d been unable to repress that memory.

Heather still wasn’t able to sleep. She got up off the couch, went to the closet in the bedroom and found some old photo albums; for the last ten years or so, she’d taken only filmless electronic photos, but all of her early memories were stored as prints.

She sat back down on the couch, one leg tucked up underneath her. She opened one of the albums, spread it on her lap.

The pictures were from fifteen or so years ago—the turn of the century. The old house on Merton. God, how she missed that place.

She flipped a page. The photos were under acetate, held in place by a slight adhesive on the backing sheets.

Becky’s fifth birthday party—the last one they’d had in the Merton house. Balloons clinging to the wall with static electricity. Becky’s friends Jasmine and Brandi—such sophisticated names for such little girls!—playing pin the tail on the donkey.

Of course, that was the party that Heather’s sister, Doreen, had failed to show up at—Becky was crushed that her aunt hadn’t made it. Heather was still angry about that; she’d bent over backward making a fuss for Doreen’s children’s birthdays, baking cakes, picking out gifts, and more. But Doreen had been too busy, begging off because some better offer had come along…

She turned the page again and—

Well, fancy that.

More pictures from the party.

And there was Doreen. She had shown up after all.

Heather peeled up the acetate sheet; it made a sucking sound as it pulled away from the adhesive backing. She then removed the print and read the caption she’d written on the back: “Becky’s 5th B-Day.” And just in case there was any doubt, there was the date printed by the photofinisher, two days after Rebecca’s actual birthday.

She’d been mad at Doreen for a decade and a half over this. Doreen must have originally said she wasn’t coming, but had actually shown up at the last minute. Heather had remembered the first part, but had completely forgotten the second.

But there was the photograph: Doreen crouching down next to Becky.

Photos didn’t lie.

Heather exhaled.

Memory was an imperfect process. Of course, the photos reminded her of things. But they were also telling her things she’d never known, or had completely forgotten.

And yet, how many rolls of film had she ever shot? Maybe a couple of hundred—meaning that scattered about in photo albums and shoeboxes, there were a few thousand still frames from her life. Of course there were some home videos, too, and the electronic snapshots she’d saved to disk.

And there were diaries, and copies of old correspondence.

And little mementos and souvenirs that brought to mind events long past.

But that was it. The rest was stored nowhere else but in her fallible brain.

She closed the album. The word “Memories” was stamped in gold foil on its beige vinyl cover, but the gold was flaking off.

She looked across the room, down the hallway.

Her computer was down there; when he’d still lived here, Kyle’s had been in the basement.

They had practiced safe computing. Every morning when she went to work, she had a memory wafer in her purse containing the previous night’s backup of Kyle’s optical drive; the drive itself was almost crash-proof, but off-site storage was the only real insurance against loss due to fire or theft. Kyle, likewise, had always taken a memory wafer to his lab with Heather’s backup on it.

But what of real value was on their home computers? Financial records, all of which could be reconstructed with some effort. Correspondence, most of it utterly ephemeral. Student grades and other work-related stuff, which all could be redone, if need be.

But for the most important events of their lives, there were no backups, no archives.

Her gaze fell on the stereo cabinet. On top of it sat some framed photographs—of herself, of Kyle, of Becky, and yes, of Mary.

What had really gone on?

If only there were an archive of our memories—some infallible record of everything that had ever happened.

Irrefutable proof, one way or the other.

She closed her eyes.

If only.