Long time readers will recognise the name Yuelian (
) from numerous past editions of the Omnibus and Symposium. Those who are familiar will be expecting a captivating, understated, elegantly written and beautiful observed piece of short fiction based on that prior catalogue of submissions. And they are absolute correct to do so, as this wonderful work proves.Enjoy.
bad things happen to people who forget.
at least that’s what she’d always believed, for as long as she could remember, a belief woven so deeply into her muscles and bones and fascia that she would not have recognized it as a belief but rather an absolute truth. ever since she’d learned to write her own name she’d begun documenting her life meticulously, on post-it notes, lined paper journals with brightly colored fineliners, and as she’d grown older and the world migrated from paper to fiber-optic, then on the pixelated screens of laptops and phones too.
and then, after the catastrophe, there was nothing she wanted more than to forget. not everything, of course - she’d never give up joyful memories of birthdays or bleeding heart sunsets or the people she loved. no, the only moments she wanted to lose were the aching ones of her husband which burrowed deeper and deeper the more she attempted to escape them. she’d tried letting them go, but something about that unnatural gesture - of releasing, of unclenching - only caused the memories to become more ingrained.
the hypnotist reminded her inexplicably of batman at their first in-person appointment: a midnight blue scarf which rested on his shoulders like a cape, his scent of vetiver or moss, the serious yet sensitive expression on his face. he chipped away at the gap between his veneers with a gold-plated toothpick.
his brow furrowed, he asked: “what can i do for you today?”
over a series of video calls he’d already learned about the recent tragedy: months spent loitering among yellow LEDs in sterile hallways at the hospital followed by the creaky rehab facility where her husband shrank away from her and ultimately disappeared, alone in his sleep, less than an hour after she had said goodbye with a half-hearted promise to visit at the same time tomorrow. the hypnotist had heard about the harrowing nights since the funeral, her agony as she stared at the oversized moon from her balcony, waxing and waning but always too out-of-reach to grasp with her fingers.
the woman said shakily: “i would like to forget certain things. not everything - i don’t want to forget him - just the beginnings and endings, the milestone memories which i can’t shake from my brain. all those first and last moments keep playing over and over like a broken record, and i’m afraid if i relive them much longer i will…”
the hypnotist looked at her with an expression of combined sympathy and regret.
“…i will go insane.”
he considered her words for some time as he continued picking at his teeth. “let’s suppose we could alter your memories so that you no longer recall firsts or lasts…”
he placed his toothpick gingerly on the table and made a teepee or a church steeple with the tips of all ten fingers.
“what do you plan to do when you experience a new beginning or ending in the future? it’s quite unlikely that i can prevent you from living, and even if i could…” he raised his caterpillar eyebrows at the end of the sentence, and they hovered over his eyes forming expectant question marks.
the woman didn’t know how to alleviate the hypnotist’s doubt; was only quite sure that she could not bear to keep re-living those moments etched in Edelstein. the awkward first coffee date, their first weekend getaway, his last night in their bed at home, her last glimpse of his pale and disappearing face. she was startled to hear her own voice bursting through her lips: “do it. please do it. you must do it.”
and so the hypnotist asked her to close her eyes and had her visualize an elevator, and in her mind’s eye it was a monstrous old art nouveau thing with a rusty green frame and stained glass panels and garish tortoise shell buttons. she closed the doors by yanking a handle from within and felt a jolt before the elevator began shuttling down, down, downwards. it moved between sheaths of cobwebbed memories and dreams and forgotten loves and familiar faces until she was tucked away in the bottom of a very deep, very dark, warm place. she wasn’t sure if the hypnotist was still speaking to her but with a swift, sure movement which must’ve been instinct she curled herself into a snug ball and stayed there for a long time.
the next thing she recalls is waking up in her bed, her cat’s whisker scraping the surface of her cheek and a swift breeze greeting her from the open window.
it is done, she thinks. she feels the first itch of something in her throat, the moistness of a pregnant tear pooling against her eyelashes, and then she blinks and goes about her day as gracefully as she can. she imagines herself as a dancer from The Royal Ballet gliding through time and space across her life, a clamshell stage.
at first she doesn’t remember anything at all. days or weeks or maybe even months whoosh by like the scenes outside a speeding train, images and emotions sliding away from her as soon as they appear. but then, gradually, as if approaching a monet from the opposite side of a gallery, she begins to remember details about him, those in-between moments that were neither beginnings nor endings, neither firsts nor lasts.
the first complete memory hits with the prickliness of a cold shower, droplets of realization forming at the crown of her head and moving down to her shoulders, then her wrists and hands, stunning her with their vibrancy. it is a memory of an argument, only she doesn’t know what it’s about, only recognizes the unpleasant feeling of weight and pressure choking her shoulders like a straitjacket. she raises her voice and her husband blinks rapidly and makes little impotent fists, rendered helpless and pathetic in his lack of control. they are standing on the gravel path along a canal, and her bike is tipped over onto a grass field and all around them are signs of disheveled chaos, of broken things and devastation and irreparable hurt. she wonders how they got here. she wonders if they will survive this.
after that the middle moments pop up everywhere, all around her, at any time of day, moments of sudden clarity which are more vivid than they had been in real life. she wonders if those in-between memories had been dulled by the constant repetition of beginnings and endings after his death, if they are now becoming sharper because she is closer to them, immersing herself in their pixelated layers.
but something is wrong. in these middle moments she questions herself and her husband, is unsure of her life decisions, feels abandoned and unloved. where are all the positive middle-memories? she wonders. she is certain that their life together was mostly good, filled with more joy than sadness…
a flash of pale yellow. she is sitting on the edge of his hospital bed as he finishes lunch, a cold noodle salad with jell-o for dessert. it is some time after he’d received the diagnosis, after his surgery, perhaps also after the first round of chemotherapy has begun and ended. it is certainly after the first time she’d imagined what life without him might look like. how many times has she been here? how many times has she sat, shoulders drooped, on that saggy mattress, watched her husband spoon cherry-flavored jell-o into his drooping mouth, listened to that intolerable beeping of life-support machines?
she decides to go diving. she is alone, of course - of course she is alone - except for the six other certified open water divers, although if she’s honest none of them really know what they are doing. sure, they have cards with certification dates and know the proper hand gestures and how to equalize their ears on the way down and back up, to clear their regulators and their masks of water and maintain steady buoyancy. she knows how to go through all these motions, but she still feels her heartbeat pulsing through her shins and forearms, places where it doesn’t belong.
nevertheless she gives her buddy the “OK” and then they descend, slowly, exhaling, exhaling, deflating their BCDs, exhaling, exhaling. yet another solo dive with an unfamiliar but friendly buddy, one dive among what must’ve been hundreds by now, although she doesn’t know when she first started, can’t remember if her husband has ever been diving with her, is unsure if she will ever see him again. she stares into the speckled blue-green-bronze ocean, a hue so breathtaking and immense that the weight of the ocean and the not knowing is finally too much for her. she can no longer bear not to know where these in-between moments start and end, for as soon as she has experienced their edges they are gone again, having perished in their transition out of the present. she gasps and a slug of salty water rushes into her mouth, an unwelcome visitor suffocating her tongue. she begins to panic for an instant before taking her regulator out of her mouth and clearing it as she was taught to do, as she has done so many times before. she taps her buddy on the arm and points a finger towards the shimmery surface and then begins her upward ascent, hectically, chaotically, until she notices that she is not swimming but rather being lifted up in a cage.
the cage continues swiftly through the shimmering water and she realizes that it is composed of seaweed-colored scaffolding, and as the cage emerges into the daylight she sees stained glass art nouveau panels and garish tortoise-shell buttons. a man who must be the divemaster or hypnotist is opening the cage or elevator door and with a splash of water she lands at the bottom of the dive-boat, next to piles of sand and shells and stray pieces of kelp. as the man peers at her she sees that he is holding a gold-plated toothpick and wearing a midnight blue cape around his shoulders.
after she has spent an eternity gazing down at the pools of water around her feet, the divemaster or hypnotist asks:
“what happened?”
and she blinks because she doesn’t know, the only thing which feels solid is a phrase which repeats itself inside her head and then echoes from the depths of her belly until she hears her own voice practically spitting the words out: “b-b-bad. b-b-b-bad things.” then finally: “bad things happen to people who forget.”
“ah, and here i was thinking that forgetting was human,” chuckles the hypnotist or divemaster as he unfolds a large plush towel and wraps it around her quivering arms. “…what is it, exactly, which you have forgotten?”
“e-e-everything,” stammers the woman. “first i forgot everything about him, and then i started to remember just the in-between moments, but they were all sad and negative, there were no more happy memories at all. a-a-and nothing i experienced had any beginning or ending at all, and time or moments just… went on forever and ever and ever, and it was just - just too much.”
the divemaster or hypnotist points towards the horizon with his golden toothpick, and she sees that the sky is no longer a sky but a projector screen on which scenes from her life are playing, and she watches a moment of lazy joy unfolding with her husband, a morning in a sun-streaked room with their kitten snuggled between them in bed.
“what is this?” she asks the divemaster/hypnotist.
“a moment you purged from your memory during our first session,” he says.
“but that wasn’t a first or a last…” her voice tapers off. “…was it?”
the hypnotist or divemaster doesn’t know, just continues to wave his golden toothpick like a magic wand at the sky or projector.
she watches scene after scene flashing after each other like staccato, purged moments that she had not consciously identified as milestones. roasting marshmallows by a summer campfire, a board game night with friends, takeout dinners in front of the TV. some variation of these happy moments had played out over and over again throughout the course of their time together, were certainly mundane occurrences with nothing remarkable about them. so why had she purged them?
now she leans into the divemaster/hypnotist with a sense of urgency. “please, something must’ve gone wrong with our session,” she pleads. “why did i remove all of these memories if they weren’t firsts or lasts?”
the hypnotist/divemaster appears surprised. “how are you so sure?” he asks. “perhaps you have to look closer in order to see what is or isn’t beginning or ending.”
he gestures once more with his golden toothpick and the current scene freezes in place, a blurry image of her jeans-clad backside as she does a playful dance on their backyard patio, her husband grinning at her twirling hips. it is a birthday or an anniversary, she isn’t sure which, but she is sure it is one of many such celebrations before his illness. the hypnotist-divemaster flicks his toothpick again, and the edges of the picture grow blurry as she zooms deeper into it, until she does see the beginning of something, the first experience of an emotion she can’t describe in words, and in that very same instant a glaring question asks itself:
what if the only difference between the beginnings, the endings, and the in-betweens was the distance at which she experienced them?
she shuts her eyes swiftly and when she opens them again she is sitting in the hypnotist’s office, although it’s unclear if it is their first or last session or merely one of the infinite in-between moments she has spent sitting in this exact spot. the hypnotist is smiling at her, his batman cape hugging his shoulders. she closes her eyes again and zooms in closer, and then closer, and yet closer again, until the edges of time and space have faded and she hears only the shaky yet certain sounds of her own breath, or perhaps it is the hypnotist’s breath, or her air tank underneath miles of ocean water, or the whirring machines next to her husband’s hospital bed. she smiles and sighs, allowing all of these neither-first-nor-last-nor-in-between breaths to move through her in unison, synchronized at last.