Memory and Dream

Journal Entries

Biographies bore me. I don’t care how insightful a biographer is, no one knows what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Autobiographies bore me, too, because we lie to ourselves even more than a biographer does. Here’s what I think the bottom line is: if you’re looking for truth, try fiction. Oh, I can hear the protest already: “But fiction is even more lies.” This is certainly true. But I’ve always believed that the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story. So why have I started a journal? Well, it wasn’t my idea. Truth is, I was dead set against it.

I went into therapy after Izzy moved back to the island. It wasn’t Izzy’s moving away that sent me over the edge—that had been building up for a while. I’ve always had these bouts with depression; I hide them well, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Some mornings it’s all I can do to get out of bed and face another day. So it wasn’t Izzy’s leaving me alone in the apartment so much as it was that I didn’t have anybody around for whom I had to put on a cheerful mask. The thing with pretending you’re in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better. Without Izzy being there every day, the emptiness I’ve always carried inside me expanded until it threatened to swallow me whole.

So I thought I’d try therapy. Sophie’s been through it. And Wendy. Even Christy, though lord knows why he would have needed it, he always seems so confident, so self-contained. Still, I suppose people say the same thing about me. We’re back to masks, I guess.

Anyway, I went to see this woman that Sophie recommended, Jane Cooke, but it didn’t really seem to help. I’ve always been a talker. I’ll talk to just about anyone about anything—except about myself.

My sessions with Jane weren’t any different. After a couple of months of weekly visits, she was the one who suggested I start keeping a journal.

“You’ve already told me that anything anyone might want to know about you is in your stories,” she said.

“That’s true.”

“But there must still be things you feel a need to communicate, or you’d no longer be writing these stories. Would that be a fair assessment?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever have enough time to tell all the stories I need to tell,” I told her.

Jane smiled. “There’s never enough time, is there?”

“But the stories aren’t enough. I know people who use their writing as therapy, but I don’t get a sense of catharsis from mine. Telling stories is something I have to do, but it’s like the part of me that tells the stories and the part of me that’s always depressed are two separate people. The stories help other people work through their bad times, but they don’t do anything to help me.”

Jane nodded. “Do you keep a journal?” she asked.

“I never really saw the point in it.”

“Well, I’m going to ask you to give it a try.”

I thought I saw what she was getting at. “You want me to write about the things I can’t seem to talk about.”

“You do seem to have an easier time articulating certain concerns on paper.”

“So I write this stuff all down and then I show you the entries.”

Jane shook her head. “No. I want you to think of them as stories that you write just for yourself, instead of for other people. And don’t make any rules for yourself about what goes in the journal except for the fact that you write in it every day. You can write about the day you’re having, or plan to have.

Story ideas, events from the past, philosophical chitchat, anything at all. Think of it as a way for you to have a dialogue with yourself, for yourself. No pressure, no expectations.”

‘just write for me.”

Jane nodded.

I laughed. “Sounds kind of like masturbating.”

Jane smiled in response, but I could see she didn’t agree with me at all. “There’s nothing unhealthy about doing something for yourself,” she said. “Our society has made it seem somehow shameful if we do anything for ourselves and that shouldn’t be the case. We deserve a little downtime to devote to ourselves.”

“Okay,” I said. “So I start a journal. And then what?”

“Then nothing,” Jane said. “I don’t want you to go into this with any sort of preconceptions. Just do it for yourself. Perhaps it will help you recall something that we can discuss in our sessions, perhaps not, but that’s not the reason you should be doing it. I want you to simply talk to yourself on paper. Give it a chance and see how it goes. We can discuss how it makes you feel after a few weeks.”

So that’s what I’m doing here—talking to myself, working on my autobiography, ha, ha—instead of telling stories to other people. But is it still autobiography, if I’m only writing to myself with no plans for publication? I don’t know what it is, or how it’s making me feel. For now I’m just going to do it.

* *

Rereading yesterday’s entry—yes, Dr. Jane, this makes two days in a row, whoopie-do got me thinking about autobiographies again, only from a different perspective, that of celebrities and their public’s seemingly insatiable need to know everything there is to know about them. I mean, People magazine didn’t get so popular because of its dedication to serious journalism.

I know Jane thinks I should be using these pages in a therapeutic manner, but I can see another use for these pages as well and that’s to set the future record straight. I don’t know why I care what people write about me after I’m dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I’d hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don’t care what they might think of me; but I don’t want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn’t have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.

So I realize that while I can use these pages as a journal the way Jane wants me to, I also have to use them to tell my own story. I’ll have to be completely honest. I’ll have to overcome my distaste of autobiography because of the fear of what they’ll say about me if I don’t write this.

The truth is, the success of The Angels of My First Death surprised no one as much as it did me.

But while my friends were all delighted with the newfound fame and freedom from monetary worries that the sales of that first book brought me, I could only think: what if when I die, my biographer goes to Margaret and gets her version of my early years, rather than the truth? Izzy and Alan and Jilly and the rest of them, they can fill in my Newford years, but going back to what brought me scurrying into the city—I’m the only one who can tell that story.

So that’s what brings me here: therapy and fear. But I’m going to compromise. I’ll tell the truth—I’ll always tell the truth in these pages—but I’ll do it in my own way.

* *

Here’s a weird thought: What if everyone only has so many words inside of them? Then sooner or later you’d run out of words, wouldn’t you? And you’d never know when it was going to happen because everybody would have a different allotment, it would be different for everyone—the way hair colour varies, or fingerprints. I could be in the middle of a story, and then run out of words and it’d never be finished. I could be using up the words I need for that story writing this.

Christ, I don’t even want to think about it.

* *

It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I discovered why my mother hated me. Like many unwanted children, I had a recurring fantasy that I was an orphan. That one day my real parents would arrive and take me away. But I never really believed it. I just figured, even as a child, that some people were born with good fortune and others got dealt the shit. You either played out your hand, or you folded. Then one day when I was fourteen ...

This is more intimidating than I thought it would be. Even with all these good intentions I’ve got and the past so far behind me, I still find it hard to write anything more than a few details. Fiction’s such an easier way to tell the truth. Anyway, here’s a big clue: I could only call her Margaret, not Mother.

I told all my friends I was an orphan, but here’s my real family tree: My father went to jail for molesting me when I was an infant and he was killed there by another inmate. I’d like to think it was because the other prisoners drew the line at having to do time with child-molesters, but the truth is he was a stoolie.

My mother committed suicide. Not because she loved my father and died of a broken heart. She just couldn’t deal with real life. Tell me about it.

Siblings? Not a one.

* *

Got up. Looked in the mirror after having a pee. Went back to bed. Don’t know if ever want to get up again. Is this the kind of thing you had in mind for me to write, Jane? I hope not, because it’s really starting to depress me and it doesn’t take much these days, let me tell you.

* *

Definitely a down day yesterday. Maybe I should try to find something happier to write about, like how from the first time I met Izzy, I felt we were knitted together, the way the eye knits a landscape, horizon to sky. I knew we would always be friends. Two weeks of being together with her and I wanted to be more than friends. I realized that I had fallen in love with her from day one, but I never once got up the courage to tell her. I hope I do before either of us dies. Maybe when we’re old and grey and nobody else could possibly want us—though I can’t see anybody ever not wanting Izzy. It’s not because she’s beautiful, which she is; it’s because she’s an angel, sent down from heaven to make us all a little more grateful about our time spent here on planet earth. We’re better people for having known her.

She’d die to hear me saying that. When it comes to modesty, she’s cornered the market. She was like that right from the start.

* *

Here’s something Izzy’s friend John once told me. He was passing it on as a story idea but I never have gotten around to using it yet. I never forgot it, though. We were having dinner together at the Dear Mouse Diner during that crazy period when Izzy was trying to put together her first show at The Green Man, both of us feeling a little lonely and left out of her life. I told him I’d been reading the Bible lately, mostly because I wanted to soak in the language, and how startled I was at just how many good stories there were in it.

“What about the ones they left out?” he asked.

“Like what?”

“Like how there wasn’t only a Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, but a Tree of Life as well, and who ate of its fruit, lived forever. That was why God expelled Adam and Eve—not because they had acquired knowledge, but that they might acquire both knowledge and immortality.”

“Where’d you hear about that?” I wanted to know.

“Can’t remember,” he said. “But you can go ahead and use it.”

“Maybe I will.”

He just gave me one of his all-purpose shrugs by way of reply and then steered the conversation elsewhere.

Funny thing is, I was never jealous of what he and Izzy had going. I was just happy that she was happy. I know how corny that sounds, but what can I do? It’s the truth.

* * *

I actually had a pretty normal day today. I got up early and wrote all the way through until about twelve-thirty when Alan came by to see if I wanted to go down to Perry’s for lunch, where we ran into Christy. Alan had to go back to work after lunch—he’s editing a collection of Kristiana Wheeler poems that his press is publishing in the fall—so Christy and I went rambling through the narrow streets of Old Market together, just the two of us, soaking up the ambience, pretending we were somewhere in Europe inside of Newford. That’s one of the things that I’ve always liked about this city. It’s such a hodgepodge of architectural stylings and humours that I sometimes feel as though I could visit any major city in the world without ever leaving its streets. All I have to do is turn a corner.

Old Market is definitely old world. The matrons in their black dresses and shawls, gossiping in clusters like small parliaments of crows. The little old men sitting at tables in the cafes, drinking strong coffee, smoking their pipes and playing cards or dominoes. The twisty cobblestoned streets, too narrow for most cars. The way the old gabled roof-lines seem to lean up against each other, whispering secrets in the form of swallows and gulls. The air is full of the smell of baking bread and fish and cabbage soup and other less discernible odours. Hidden gardens and squares rise up out of nowhere, tangles of rosebushes and neatly laid-out flowerbeds, small cobbled-stoned plazas with wooden benches and wrought-iron light-posts. The rest of the city seems a hundred miles away. A hundred years away.

By the time I got back to the Waterhouse Street apartment I was feeling so relaxed that I sat down and finished “The Goatgirl’s Mercedes” and got about three pages into a new story that’s still waiting on a title. Truth is, I don’t even know what it’s about yet. I just met the characters and we’re still negotiating.

* * *

I brought my journal along to my session with Jane today, but I didn’t show her any of it. She asked me how it was going and I had to admit that I enjoyed writing in it.

“But even writing to myself,” I admitted, “I still can’t seem to talk about the past. I start to write about it and everything closes up inside me.”

“Don’t force it,” Jane told me. “Remember what we agreed on: no expectations. Let what wants to come, come.”

“That sounds like the way I normally write.”

“So you’ve already got the trick down. What you have to do now is stick to it.”

I can’t remember what else we talked about. Nothing monumental, that’s for sure. I almost told her that I just wanted to forget about these weekly sessions, but then I remembered Christy talking about how long it had taken him to work things out when he was in therapy and I decided to stick with it a little longer. I mean, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do with that one hour a week.

* *

The new story sucks. I’ve never dragged such a limp cast of characters out of my head as the ones that I’ve got stumbling through this story. I’d scrap everything I’ve done so far except I know from experience that having let them out onto the page, they’ll never give me any peace until I take them through to the end. Makes no difference to them how shitty the story turns out to be, just so long as I finish it.

* *

Margaret used to delight in tormenting me. I don’t know what she had against me. So far back as my memory goes she would find ways to hurt me, emotionally as well as physically, and it just never made any sense. I mean, what could a three-year-old—which is as far back as I can clearly remember—possibly have done to earn such hate? I used to drive myself crazy trying to make sense of it. Trying to figure out ways to get on her good side.

It was only when I got older that I realized it didn’t have anything to do with me personally. It was a power thing and I was just one more thing for Margaret to control.

I hope my sister—excuse me, my stepsister—Susan is suitably grateful to me. If I hadn’t been there, her parents would have taken it all out on her, instead of me. But of course as far as Susan’s concerned, the sun rises and sets with Margaret and Peter. Especially Margaret. Everybody always defers to her. I mean, while it’s true that Peter started fucking me from the time I turned six, and I’m not saying the old pervert didn’t enjoy it, it was Margaret who put him up to it. Margaret who sat on the bed and watched it happen. Margaret who kept coming up with all these “interesting” variations. Margaret who took the Polaroid pictures that they’d sell to the other sick freaks who hadn’t been lucky enough to acquire their own live-in sex toy. Considering what put my natural father in jail, I guess life wouldn’t have been much better living with my real parents.

I wonder what it’s like to have parents that love you. Parents who’d do anything to protect you from the kind of shit that Margaret reveled in.

I’m never going to know, am I?

* *

This morning I was washing out a tin can before I put it in the recycling bin and I sliced open my finger. I can’t believe how much blood poured out of that little wound. I might have bled to death, standing there watching the blood spurt from my finger into the sink, but I finally got smart, washed it out, bandaged it, and then put up with the way its been throbbing all day.

Luckily it was the index finger of my left hand, so I can still write my daily entry. Trouble is, ha ha, I’ve got nothing to say. Cutting my finger was the highlight of my day.

* * *

Izzy called this morning and we had a nice long talk. She’s invited me out to the island for the weekend, so I’ve got that to look forward to. I still can’t get used to her being so far away after all the years we lived together, but then things started to get different long before she actually packed up all her stuff and went away.

Something changed in Izzy after John left her and the mugging. I’m not sure which was worse on her.

The mugging seemed a betrayal of the city she’d come to love, as though it were responsible for the battering she received. When she finally moved back to the island a few years later, I wasn’t surprised. I think I was the only one.

As for John’s abandoning her ... I wonder if he ever realized just how much he broke her heart? He was the reason that she didn’t want to use her newfound magic anymore. It was as much because of how badly things turned out between them as it was for John’s warnings of the danger it would put the numena in. That’s what I call the beings that came to life through Izzy’s art. I ran across the word “numen” in the dictionary once while looking up something else. It means a spiritual force or influence often identified with a natural object, phenomenon, or locality. Works for me.

Izzy and I had long talks about her numena, me saying she owed it to the numena to make their own choice as to whether or not they wanted to come across, she being scared of what might happen to them once they got here and knowing how terrible she’d feel if they got hurt. I’m not sure what convinced her to continue bringing them across. I doubt it was my arguments alone—when Izzy sets her mind on something she can be the most stubborn woman I know. It’s more likely that with Rushkin gone, she felt it would be safe.

Once she made the decision, though, she threw herself into her work—creating paintings that would have stood the test of time with the best of the world’s great art, had they only survived. She had Rushkin’s studio to herself—he’d gone on sabbatical or something—and that was where she worked her magic, peopling not only her canvases, but the streets around us with the denizens of her imagination.

The numena themselves were usually pretty circumspect about being noticed. Mind you, Newford’s always had a reputation for being a hotbed of oddities and marvels. Next to the West Coast, we’ve probably got the highest percentage of mystics, pagans, sages, and downright strange people on the continent, so a few more magical sightings weren’t necessarily going to make the headlines of anything except for a rag like The Newford Sun.

Izzy told no one about the magic besides me—not even Alan or Ply. She felt as though Hking about it would dissipate the power, that it would set up a wall between our world and that otherworld from which the magic came. I still maintain that there was no otherworld—or at least not in the sense that Izzy believed in it. The magic came from her. The world was inside her, the magic blossomed in the fertile ground of her inner landscape and was pulled forth by her painting. No less a wondrous, enchanted process, to be sure, but the difference seemed important, if not to anyone else, at least to me.

After a few months of mourning her abandonment at John’s hand, she also became very social. She was out all the time, a fixture at all the Waterhouse Street parties; she started drinking and taking drugs, and she had a constant stream of lovers. I don’t think there was ever a time in those years that she didn’t have a lover in attendance, with at least one or two pining for what they’d lost and a couple more waiting in the wings to take their turn on the carousel. Count me in among the former, forever unrequited like so many of the women in those Victorian novels that Kristiana loves to read.

But it wasn’t all fun and games, though it might seem so from the outside looking in. Izzy found time for her career as well. Her star rose until soon the occasional paintings she offered up for sale began to command high four-figure prices. Still, for all her success at the easel or in bed, I don’t think she was ever happy again.

My own fortunes seemed to rise in direct proportion to how her happiness diminished. My turning point came when Alan decided to publish The Angels of My First Death. I still have no idea why that first collection did as well as it did. My circle of friends had widened to include any number of other writers and I thought many of them to be far more talented than I was. Anne Bourke, certainly. Christy Riddell—especially with his newer stories. Frank Katchen. We had quite a community going in Lower Crowsea in those days. Not so high profile as the artists and musicians, or even the theatre people, but then writers aren’t usually as flamboyant, are they? We work in private, emerging for the parties or book launches and signings, before withdrawing back into our seclusions. Except for Frank, who seemed to enjoy the idea of being a writer so much more than actually doing the work. But then there are always exceptions, aren’t there, and whatever else might be said about Frank, he did exceptional work.

Alan’s Crowsea Review never had to go beyond the borders of Lower Crowsea itself to find its contributors, but it grew rapidly from a student effort into one of the more respected literary magazines in the country. It seemed only natural for him to use his East Street Press as an imprint of books as well. He tested the waters with a novella by Tama Jostyn called Wintering and Dust, Dreams and Little Love Letters, a collection of Kristiana’s poems, before he did my collection of short stories. The first two did reasonably well for books published by a regional press, selling out their modest print runs within six months of publication. Then came The Angels of My First Death and everything changed.

I made so much money off the paperback sales and subsequent foreign rights, movie options and the like that it was criminal. I could’ve lived high on the hog, but instead I kept the apartment on Waterhouse Street and channeled my money into setting up the Newford Children’s Foundation.

I don’t mention this to toot my horn. Truth is, if I had a choice between being remembered forever and the Foundation, the Foundation would always come first. I believe in what I write—I can’t not write—but once I saw the serious money I could make by writing, the act of writing became subservient to the Foundation, existing to keep the Foundation solvent as much as for my own need to tell stories.

They both promote the same message: children are people and they have rights; don’t abuse those rights.

They both strive to educate the public. But the Foundation will always be more important because it’s actually helping those in need. I’d’ve given anything for the option to become a ward of the Foundation when I was a kid myself.

* *

Tomorrow I’m off to Wren Island to stay with Izzy. I’m so excited. I’ve packed and repacked my bags three times already. I was hoping to finish off that new story before I went, but I can’t seem to concentrate on it. Maybe I should just write, “And then they all died. The End.” And leave it at that. It wouldn’t be any worse than what I’ve written so far. But who knows? Maybe being with Izzy again will make the whole thing come alive for me. Stranger things have happened in her company, that’s for sure.

* *

I’m having the best time I’ve had in ages. Izzy’s been after me for years to move onto the island with her and I’ll tell you, if it could always be like today, I’d do it in a flash. But it gets harder and harder for me to be in her company and not just blurt out that I love her. That I want to be her lover. I don’t think she’s exactly homophobic, but I do know that the thought of same-sex sex makes her feel very uncomfortable.

I can remember walking past a cafe on Lee Street with her once and we saw two women necking in a darkened corner of the outside patio.

“God,” Izzy said. “Why do they have to do that in public?”

“Heterosexuals do it in public.”

“Yeah, but that’s normal. I couldn’t ever imagine kissing another woman like that.”

I didn’t say anything. Truth is, I’m not so sure that I’m actually a lesbian myself. I’m not attracted to men, but I’m not attracted to women either. It’s just Izzy I want.

* *

I like the work that Izzy’s been doing for the past few years, but I miss the earlier paintings. Or maybe it’s that I miss the numena.

Izzy used to say that they came from a place where all was story—that’s all they remember, she told me: that there were stories. But we’re all made of stories—you, me, everybody. The ones you can see and the hidden stories we keep secret inside—like my love for Izzy. When they finally put us underground, the stories are what will go on. Not forever, perhaps, but for a time. It’s a kind of immortality, I suppose, bounded by limits, it’s true, but then so’s everything.

It didn’t work that way for her numena, though. Even when they were brought over to this world through Izzy’s art, they lived in secret, in their own hidden world. Izzy could find them—or they found her. I could see them, because I knew where to look. I suppose other people saw them from time to time as well, but it wouldn’t be quite real for them. I thought it’d be different. I thought their existence would change the world, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve been wrong about something, and I doubt it’ll be the last. It just never hurt so much before. The cost was never so high.

When the farmhouse burned, the numena died, and their stories died with them. Only Izzy remembered them, and me.

And Rushkin, I suppose, wherever he might be.