Stone Arabia. Dana Spiotta
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songs on that album had sky-related titles: “Aurora Borealis,” “Corona,” “Fata Morgana,” “Airglow,” “Brocken Bow,” etc. The second album, Suites for the Sweet, took ten years to produce. It featured original and traditional folk songs with electric arrangements. As I recall from the liner notes, Nik used lots of fiddle and unusual time signatures. I didn’t think it was nearly as good as the first one. This current seasonal release of obscure traditional carols and a few original ballads was the third Pearl Poets album, and although the concept was a bit stretched at this point, it had been so many years since the last one it seemed fresh. A reunion Christmas album to cash in, I guess, was how he would describe it in the Chronicles. I loved it, and I was eager to report the details of my admiration. At least a superficial report, a first pass at it. But he was busy, and then we were right up against midnight. He drank his shot, “Dead Flowers” came on, the whole bar started singing along. He gave me a sloppy kiss on the cheek, his lips wet with bourbon, and I waited until he turned back to the bar before I wiped the wetness off my cheek with a bar napkin, quickly, and then returned the napkin to the bartop, where it found a wet spot and began to darken.
I suppose as I sat there in the early-morning hours of 2004 I might have been contemplating the previous year. I probably couldn’t recall much—now I can’t even recall if I recalled much. But my memory concerns hadn’t reached their peak yet. My semi-obsessive interest in how my own memory functions would top out about a month later. All of that had begun with my mother’s memory issues, which had really kicked in in the last few months of 2003.
Maybe, though, as I sat at the bar, I thought of Ada, and maybe I tried to picture her in New York, at a party. Which would have been nice. But sooner or later I have little doubt that my thoughts turned to my mother’s mind. It is the kind of thing that occurs to you in the marginal moments of your life: during a commercial, a shower, in the fraught minutes before you fall asleep. Or when you sit at a bar, waiting for an arbitrary holiday marker to pass. You suddenly remember how badly she was failing and it deflates you, just takes the air right out of you. So I was probably thinking of her mind and memory, but I can’t be sure, because I cannot recall anything except the song and the kiss and the cocktail napkin on the bar.
This is one of the reasons I am so squeamish about looking back. Can I even do it? Can I be accurate at all? I have discovered how much memory can dissolve under pressure. The more I try to hold on to my ability to remember, the more it seems to escape my grasp. I find this terrifying. I have become alarmed at my inability to recall basic facts of the past, and I have worked to improve things. I have been studying various techniques and even tricks, and I should employ them. Memory, it seems, clings to things. Named things. Spaces. Senses. I even tried the old trick (memory technique #2, use Rhyme and Stories) where you apply a little poem to things you want to remember. A little nonsense thing, like His name is Ed and his nose is red. Or Bob’s birthday is 11-9-63, ’63 is when Kennedy died, 119 is 911 backward. So Kennedy’s assassination was an emergency is what you have to remember. And truly this stuff works, somehow giving your brain little games of association to help it organize its input. But there are two problems with this: I don’t want to fill my head with stupid games. In the time it takes to think up this stuff, I mean, your life is going by. I just hate it too much, I’ll just write down Bob’s birthday, seriously. And that is the other problem. I don’t want to remember someone’s name or some date. That is the kind of skill a politician needs so he can be fast with hundreds of names. That is an imprinting technique for the future. I’m not interested in that (there are only a handful of names in my life). I’m thinking about past events. I’m interested in recall, exact recall, of what was said, who said it and to whom. I want to know the truth, undistorted by time and revision and wishes and regrets.
Shortly after midnight, Nik did not notice the now smushy bar napkin or the wet spot it indicated. He lit a cigarette and leaned on the ledge of the back bar. He still had all his hair and he could shake it from his eyes, and I guess that made him seem youthful at first. But a closer look revealed how not-young he had become. As he inhaled, he squinted and his face revealed every frown and grimace he had ever made, every cigarette he had ever smoked. He hunched in his black T-shirt and his thin body humped at his belly. It looked as though a tight wedge of flesh had been appended to his middle. He still had muscle tone in his skinny-guy arms, but his sloped posture, which in the past gave him a blasé and phlegmatic glamour, now simply accentuated his paunch. He did not care, or seemed not to care, about his drinking belly or his general, considerable decay. He did not care that his hands shook when he lit his cigarette. He did not care when his conversation was brought to a halt by a coughing fit. He pursued a lifetime of abuse that could only come from a warped relationship with the future. Although I can’t say my brother didn’t believe in the future, I know he was never concerned with it. But for me sitting there, watching and thinking—now I remember—of my earlier visit to our mother, I didn’t like it one bit. It was not pleasant New Year’s contemplation for me. I was irritated by it, by him, and by the fact that the bar was wet and messy. I took the remnant of the napkin and sopped it around. He picked up a bar towel and wiped in front of me, an automatic and long-engrained bartender gesture. The bar towel smelled strongly of bleach and beer.
“I have to call Ada,” I said, and got up from the bar.
“Tell her—”
“Yeah, I will.”
I went to the side door of the bar and stepped into the sudden quiet—the almost ringing quiet—of the alley.
I’d missed a call from Jay. It was eight a.m. in England. Very, very sweet. I didn’t listen to his message. I called Ada instead.
“Hey, Ma.”
“It’s Mom.” I couldn’t get used to people knowing who I am when I call.
“Yes—”
“Happy New Year, angel.”
January first continued after I slept for a while; I got up by six-thirty, as it seemed indecent to sleep late on the very first day of a new year. I drank a full deep cup of coffee and then cleaned the house, easy enough to remember because I always spend New Year’s Day cleaning the house. But again, habits and patterns also make this New Year’s Day hard to distinguish from other New Year’s Days, which were also spent cleaning, at least going back as far as when Will left. And even then it was the same, a deep day of cleaning, except Will would be there, so it would be a very different memory and not easily confused with these later, solitary New Year’s Days.
The cleaning was pleasant and ruthless: I emptied the refrigerator of every object, the jar of butter-flecked jelly, the container of capers floating in leaky brine, the optimistic bottle of multivitamins now in a moist, smelly clump, even a not very old bottle of expensive flaxseed oil. All must go, and so it was easy, just dumping without having to smell or decide anything. I did the same thing in the bathroom, though not quite as ruthlessly. Any really recent and expensive cosmetic or cream was spared, but most of the stuff also went. Then the scrubbing and washing: the grout, the shower curtain, the back step, the under eaves on the porch. I moved from there to the recycling. No magazine and no newspaper lived to see the New Year, no exceptions. If it wasn’t read by that date, it didn’t make it. I got it all out. Finally, I did my clothes. This was the most difficult task, but I usually started this in advance. Everything I hadn’t worn in the last year would be given to Goodwill. I continued in this manner to my desk, and by the evening I felt my space—modest though it is—was airy and open to the future. I felt liberated and purged and deeply in control. I have to admit that my rigor was not completely laudable. It existed in tandem and could only exist because of a twinning rigor on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains. As I did my discarding, my righteous, relentless emptying, Nik was doing the opposite. He was organizing the year’s remnants. He was logging and archiving and filing it all. The whole swollen yearlong cumulus. He discarded hardly anything; he wanted souvenirs of every moment. And his accumulations somehow underwrote my eliminations. My liberation was brought to you by the ordered collecting and keeping of my brother. But of course his task was much more complicated than mine. He not only kept, he documented. He annotated, he footnoted, he wrote, he arranged. He updated the Chronicles. (Okay, the Chronicles. Am I already going to digress? Because going into the