"You Will Learn to Love Her Again"
This is your home now. You’ve never had a home, and now you do. That’s what your wife tells you. You’ve never had a wife either – or at least you hadn’t met her yet until yesterday morning – and now you do. Just like that.
And the ride to your home! The van didn’t have windows, so you couldn’t see the city, but the motion was new. You remembered the motion from before, so it wasn’t new really, but you were experiencing it for the first time yourself.
And your wife sat beside you, and as you let the bumps in the road fling you into the air she clutched your hand and wept quietly. She smiled at you, and while it was the first time anyone had ever looked at you this way, you know she didn’t mean it. Though it is unfamiliar, you can read her face. You remember that much.
But somewhere between his death, her husband’s death, your death, and the rush to the medical campus, most of everything else about her was lost.
You love your neighborhood. Sometimes when you are standing in the little cement courtyard you play a game you invented called “is that a rat or a plastic bag.” You sit on the wooden chair that has started rotting and smelling like earth and you run your fingers up and down the legs. You feel the soft, crumbling wood for the first time. You remember what it felt like, but you are experiencing it for real now. Your fingers are experiencing something new.
You go back inside and make you and your wife coffee. You remember doing this much. You open the cabinet above the sink and take the mug with her name on it. You read it out loud to yourself: “Colleen.” You feel awkward, saying her name, and the last syllable slips out under your breath. You feel embarrassed. The coffee is hot and the steam lightly burns your face and you feel yourself warm up from the lungs outward.
You pour milk into your wife’s coffee. You remember doing this much. She comes down the stairs and sits across from you.
“I had a dream last night,” she says, without looking up at you. “But I wasn’t me. I was this detective” Her voice is tired and raspy. You feel like it wouldn’t matter if you were there or not. She might go on talking if you walked out of the room. You want to listen patiently. You feel like you owe it to her.
“I was searching for this missing woman. And we ended up in the basement of our house, I mean – fuck, ouch, hot – I know our house doesn’t have a basement but somehow it was the basement to this house, do you get what I mean?” She stops speaking to sip her coffee and looks up at you over her glasses. Her hair is a mess, all tangled curls, and her eyes have dark rings under them. You are surprised at yourself because you find this attractive. You nod. She continues.
“Anyway, we go down level after level (again: dream basement) and it just keeps going down until the final floor is that room at Hopkins where—” She stops, now wondering how to make this right. She’s not sure how you feel about what she’s started to say. You aren’t sure how you feel either, but you decide to pretend you haven’t started to think about it. You ask her to go on.
“So, there was this pile of clones of this missing woman. Probably 20 clone slugs, their tanks all smashed up, they’re hanging out all over the place, all a little rotten. But rotten like those zombies in Return of the Living Dead.” Her hands shoot up on either side of her head. “Fried bleach-blonde hair sticking straight out and big green splotches all over their naked bodies.” She groans, rolls her eyes, and takes another sip.
You remember that movie. You remember watching it and you wonder if you watched it together. Maybe when you first started dating you went and saw it together. Obviously she’s seen it too. You suddenly want to see the movie again. But really see it, not just remember seeing it.
“And her body, the actual missing woman, was buried under the pile! There was some kind of horrible accident in her secret lab, I don’t know.” She laughs to herself, and you notice sometimes when she laughs she snorts. Her hands float in front of her as she speaks. Her eyes are fixated on the space between them.
“And she was crushed to death under all these copies of her own body. Then I realize: she’s me! The missing lady, all the rotten clone slugs: me! She’s got my face, my body. She was a little more rotten than I like to think I am, but she was me. What does that mean?” And she seems to really be asking you, or anyone really. She’s really asking, though, either way. Again, you feel like you could walk away and she would just keep asking.
“Do you dream? Or, do you know if you can?”
She turns to look at you. This question is directed at you. That same smile from the ride home. She really wants to know, but you don’t think you should tell her. You remember something you heard once about when color televisions first came out, how before that everyone used to dream in black and white.
You, her husband, knew about what would happen to his body after he died. He knew that they would grow you like a potato in some tube in some Johns Hopkins basement. He didn’t know that all the money he poured into the campus wouldn’t exactly pay off as intended.
He didn’t know that when you woke up you would be practically useless to your wife. She remembers him. You do not remember her.
They explained it all to you, at least, which you suppose was the ethical thing to do given the circumstances. You are kind of like a gift to your wife, in a way, from her husband. You were supposed to remember her, like you remember all the movies you love, like you remember the feeling of cold cement on your bare feet, how you want to feel these things for yourself that you know he felt. Her hands on you were supposed to make you feel how it felt when your cat, Mustard, curled up in your lap and purred the first day you came home. Instead, Colleen's hands are completely foreign to you. No memories, no feelings that would otherwise be attached to those memories. She’s a stranger.
Every day they come in their van and pick you up and take you back to the campus where they test your blood, check your pupils, and check your lung capacity. They bash you in the knee and ask you personal questions. They look for wear and tear, both natural and unnatural. After about a week of this they let you find your own way home. You look up the route home on the phone you’ve inherited. It’s not even the medical campus they’ve been taking you to.
You decide to walk, at least part way, and cut through the park. As you climb the stairs down into the dell the wind whips up and the scents of mud and grass and wet, dead leaves pour into you. Two long haired dogs fly across the field as their owners shout names that are unintelligible but still beautiful to hear in tandem. A couple sits on the bench talking as you walk by. You distinctly notice that they don’t stop talking to look up at you as you walk by. A young woman walks by smoking a cigarette.
She is walking a pit bull with cropped ears and listening to music as she smokes. The smell of the burning tobacco is pleasant to you. You think about the warm smoke filling your lungs, how cozy that must feel.
You know you’ve never smoked, but you know they sell cigarettes at the 7/11 nearby. You wonder if you are allowed to try something new. Or, should you? Who is going to stop you?
Maybe if you learn to enjoy this new thing then other things you don’t remember, things you should remember, well maybe you can enjoy them as well. The smoke is hot, not like the steam from the coffee or your first breath after they test your lungs every morning, and you cough. Your eyes burn.
When you get home your wife asks where you’ve been and smells the cigarette on you and stares at you. She is confused, or maybe worried.
“You don’t smoke.” She shakes her head, not angry at you. She’s clearing her thoughts. She’s frustrated with herself again for forgetting and she stumbles over her words. “I mean you never smoked before.” Her eyes are red and the skin around them is puffy. You realize she’s been crying again.
You’ve been sneaking around your house lately. Partly because Colleen still feels like a stranger, partly because you know that the sight of you upsets her. The day that you first moved in – or moved back in – you tried to share a bed. On that first night she slept on the pull-out in the living room. Every night after you’ve slept there. It’s only fair; it’s her bed, not yours.
At night while you try to sleep you can hear her crying from her bedroom. Sometimes she plays sad music and you aren’t sure if it’s to cover the sound of her crying or to really immerse herself in her emotions. You always think to yourself that you should do something like get up, walk to the door, knock, and offer to hold her. Or at least sit with her and talk. Instead you try and make out what she is saying with the blanket pulled up to your chin and your feet poking out at the end of the mattress. You’ve begun wearing socks to bed. She tells you this is also new.
In the mornings Colleen wanders around the house in her pink robe. She doesn’t have to go back to work yet, and you don’t think she should. You think it’s good she’s taking this time to really grieve. There are bare patches in the material near the bottom of her robe where Mustard must have gotten her claws caught in the fluff. You remember really reading up on whether declawing might be a good option because she has such a bad case of polydactylism that her feet are constantly getting caught in the rug and the curtains and her toys. This was when she was a kitten, when you were considering declawing her. She must be almost seven years old now. You don’t remember Mustard getting caught on your wife’s robe. You don’t remember if Mustard was yours before you moved in together or if you both adopted her together. You don’t want to ask.
Lately you’ve been watching a lot of nature documentaries. Colleen spends most of her days out of the house. You’ve stopped asking where she goes. You think about work. Colleen has been gently suggesting you find a way to keep busy. You think she’s been suggesting this because she wants to be able to spend time around the house too, but you’re always there. You’ve been thinking of picking up work as a dog walker. You mentioned this to Colleen the other day and she told you that you hate dogs. You don’t remember ever hating dogs, but you don’t want to say anything.
You don’t want to keep upsetting her every time you run into each other on the way to the bathroom. You don’t want to see her smile at you the way she does when she doesn’t know what to say. Sometimes she will leave little domestic notes before she goes out:
“There’s meatloaf in the fridge. Ha Ha, Jesus,” or, “I already know about it. I called the plumber before you woke up.”
Your checkups are two weeks apart now. You enjoy your walk to and from campus. You usually cut through the park. Sometimes you will sit and watch the dogs run around. You like the thought of having a dog. If you moved out you could get one, but you are pretty sure Mustard doesn’t do too well around other animals so you can’t get one just yet. The pretty young woman with the pit bull walks by you, smoking. She smiles at you. You want a cigarette.
You smoke.