GreggoryMoore

Monica in Memory

I saw her only the one time. I don't think it can rightly be called eventful. The sex was good, but no better than
I'd enjoyed with others during so many similar encounters. She spent the night, in the morning collected her
clothes, dressed in the bathroom, and left. There was the obligatory exchange of phone numbers, but I tossed
hers in the trash as soon as she'd gone. That might have been the end of it had she lived; I have no way of
knowing.
It was early that evening that I got the message, a voice on my voicemail asking me to call a Detective Josh
Bradley at my earliest convenience. I dialed the number with a generic nervousness, having no guess about the
nature of the conversation I was about to have. He thanked me for returning his call, then asked me if I knew a
Monica Braun. I said that I didn't, then caught myself: I didn't know her surname, I told him, but last night I'd met
a Monica. My phone number had been found in one of her pockets. That morning she had been murdered
during a car-jacking. The detective was contacting me to see if I could help reconstruct her movements just
prior to her death. As delicately as possible I informed him that she had spent the evening at my apartment. The
approximate time of her departure apparently confirmed that she had been assailed while driving from my home
to wherever she intended to go. He asked me if I would be available to come to the station if need be (though
he doubted this would be necessary). I numbly queried as to whether they had apprehended the killer: they
had. There had been several witnesses, and the stolen vehicle was spotted by a unit not thirty minutes later. I
was thanked for my cooperation and was still holding the receiver to my ear as the line went dead.
*
I awoke the next morning with a thought of her—not about her death, but a detail of a moment with her: the
feeling of her pelvic bone against my left palm as it rested on her right hip while we made love with her on top. I
could easily join this to my overall conception of the evening, but that particular sensation seemed to have an
independent existence for me, as vivid and present as when it actually occurred. At the time this didn't seem
strange. Neither did the memory I awoke with the following day (this one of her blinking once while looking at
me just after she had inserted into her pocket the slip of paper with my phone number and before we moved in
for a valedictory hug), even as it remained with me in the same manner as the other continued to do. Although
at some point I developed a vague conception that something unusual was occurring, it was not until about two
weeks on that I articulated to myself what I was experiencing. By this point I was familiar with the rules of the
elusive game my memory seemed to be playing: after every time I slept, I would find myself in possession of a
new cognizance, recalled with an impossible precision that would not generalize with time. I told myself that this
must be the expression of a subconscious horror of what had happened to her (for consciously I did not have a
strong reaction, having known her on only superficial, carnal terms), that it would run its course, that it would
pass. After three months, I could no longer maintain my wishful self-deception and feared I was going insane. I
began consulting with a series of doctors (general practitioners, neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists),
then moved on to spiritualists of all stripes, then to supposed experts on the paranormal. I was supplied with a
variety of theories and subjected myself to all manner of curative measures (drugs, meditation, seances), none
of which ameliorated my condition in the slightest. Meanwhile, I engaged in a variety of behaviors as hopeful
purgatives. For a while I debauched myself to a formerly unimaginable degree, thinking this might blur all of my
life's sexual activity. When this failed, I turned to a celibacy, going so far as to disallow myself even onanistic
pleasure. This, too, proved fruitless. I watched TV endlessly, I listened to music constantly, I traveled from place
to place, tried every exotic food I could lay my hands on—in short, anything to saturate my mind and senses in
the hope that my brain would be too overloaded to continue to hold on to my memorious storehouse of the
approximately six waking hours I had spent with Monica, let alone continuously add to it. My greatest success
came during the brief period when I experimented with sleep deprivation. By this did I succeed in keeping new
remembrances in abeyance, but it did nothing to the ones already accumulated (although, predictably, it wreaked
havoc on all of my other mental functions). And, of course, I had to sleep sometime. Finally, I resigned myself to
one of two fates.
How many impressions can be made in a single moment? If you bring a violet to your nose, there is of course its
aroma and appearance, there is the feel of the stem against your fingers; but there is also the light of the sun
shining down on a part of the sidewalk that is visible in your periphery, there is your left heel pressing down on
your sock against your shoe against the concrete, there is a beat of your heart and air coming into your nose and
lungs, there is the almost imperceptible breeze sounding in the pinna of your right ear. Although your
consciousness attends to only a fraction of the data taken in, the rest are nonetheless registered and go toward
creating your experience. And so how much variety can be yielded from half a day—even if half of that was
spent in unconsciousness, and even if the input is confined to a single subject? How much is there that can be
recalled from my six waking hours with this woman? I experienced a moment of true hopefulness when I
realized that the answer is finite. But I was disabused of any ideas of being relieved of my burden when, using
my experience up till then as a model (over ten years by then, or in excess of four thousand permanent
instances), I calculated that I would have to live to be very old indeed to have any chance of seeing an end. A
week ago I turned forty, and as I sat that night drinking a scotch before retiring, I did the math once again. If I
live to be eighty and sleep once per day, that's fourteen thousand six hundred ten additional fragments of my
time with her. Fourteen thousand six hundred ten. Could that be all? I do not know. That's less than one
fragment per second, so it wouldn't seem so. Already I hold more of those six hours than I would have ever
thought possible of even the most important of my life's events, so much more—and that makes it even easier to
conceive of possibilities of that which was lost and may be recovered, what blanks there might be and that
which may fill them in. Some morning I very well may awaken to having returned to me the feel of a strand of her
hair hanging down into my mouth, the texture on my tongue, I don't know. But she dressed in the bathroom, I left
her to urinate at least once that I remember (so far)—seconds, minutes maybe, stretches of time in which I took
in none of her. Fourteen thousand six hundred ten? Even if so, it's a long road to be traveled.
But that is the preferable destiny, the one in which an end is at least theoretically possible. The other concerns
the way in which memory is thought to work: that every memory is not a replaying of that which was actually
experienced (somewhat analogous to a frame of a film), but a recreation, the remaking—or even the out-and-out
fabrication—of a past impression. Here the mind is performing a sort of fictionalization, something along the
lines of "based on a true story"—and thus is not constrained to facts and their inherent fixity. In the permanent
and delimited world of the true, if you were on your way to the store to purchase milk when you plucked the
violet off the sidewalk, then that is that; but in the infinite world that allows for falsehoods, during one possible
remembrance you are going to pick up orange juice, in another you're on your way home, a gallon of milk already
in hand. The possibilities for a just fraction of a second are limitless.
I tell myself that, just as my inviolable reconstructions of my time with this too-remembered woman do not
conform to the conventional wisdom concerning mental retention, so too don't the workings of my memory
where she is concerned, and that I recall only input actually received. With this in mind, I sometimes fantasize
about my last day of life in a distant, distant future. I imagine waking up that fateful morning with one last
impression to be inserted among the rest, the final piece of the puzzle that, when completed, reveals the totality
of my experience with this Monica, and that I will recognize it as such. That day I will have what I had of her
entirely. Perhaps this is what her spirit requires, and maybe it is only then that both of us can rest.