The Forgetting Time(12)
For Sheila
He tried to feel her now, in the room, but couldn’t do it; she was fixed to the page like a pinned butterfly. It occurred to him that Sheila’s death, which was the worst thing that had ever happened in his life, had not substantively changed the course of his days. On the other hand, in the five years since he’d been diagnosed, the aphasia had nearly ruined him.
He flipped to the first page. Ah, there they were: his words.
Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality.
It was irrational to think the sentences might have erased themselves in the night simply because he had dreamed it, yet no more irrational than anything else that had been happening to him. Yesterday he had been on the phone with the librarian of the Society for Scientific Exploration in London, discussing the storage of the files he was donating. He wanted to make sure that even though his office was closing, his research would be accessible to any serious scientists that might find it useful. He wanted to tell her about the new cases out of Norway that Amundson had sent him, to ensure that these would be filed properly, but when he came to the place in the sentence where the name of his old colleague should have come up, the name simply wasn’t there.
“The files from up there.” That was the mortifying phrase that came out of his mouth instead. Of course, the librarian had been puzzled.
“What do you mean? Up where?”
Anderson saw the fjords and forests and women of Norway. Amundson’s face rose in his mind, the bulbous nose and the whiskers on his jowls, the cheery, skeptical, but never cynical eyes.
“The new files on birthmarks, you know.”
“Oh. You mean that study from the professor in Sri Lanka?”
“No, no, no.” He felt a momentary surge of despair and wanted to hang up the phone, but he took a breath and willed himself to go on. “The new birthmark research, the research from that guy—that guy up there. Up north. You know who I mean,” he snarled at the poor woman. “In Europe. The ice mountains … the … the fjords!”
“Oh. I’ll make sure the Amundson studies are filed properly,” she said at last, coolly, and he felt a flicker of victory that she now thought him a total asshole instead of mentally impaired.
The week before, he’d pulled The Tempest from the shelf in his bedroom and flipped to the end, but when he came to the line “Our revels now are ended,” the words seemed to shiver in his mind’s grasp, like a moment that was even now passing. How could he not know that word, revels? He, who had read and reread this play, this speech, a hundred times? He had to look it up in the damn dictionary. He should copy out his whole library, he thought, until his hands were swollen, copy every last word from every one of his books, so that he would retain a physical memory there in his hands of all those words he couldn’t bear to lose.
He leafed through the manuscript in his lap. He’d e-mailed it to his agent, of course (it was no longer a paper world); but he’d also printed it out so he could feel the weight of it. A lifetime of work; the strongest cases, distilled for the populace. Decades of patient labor doing the casework, years of writing draft after draft, shooting for clarity, always clarity. His last chance at making a difference: he’d worked like a maniac for four and a half years to finish it while his mind was still capable, before the fog rolled in. Some days he’d forgotten to eat.
The academic community would always consider Anderson a failure. He knew that. There was a moment, when he had first left his job at the medical school and his colleagues still valued him, when his books had been reviewed: twice by The Journal of the American Medical Association, and once in The Lancet. But as his colleagues aged they forgot about him, or more accurately they forgot they had respected him once. No one in that world had shown him any attention for decades now. He was famous in the paranormal research community, of course; he was invited to speak everywhere they studied ESP, or near-death experiences, or mediums. But he would never be accepted again by the scientific community, the only community he had ever really belonged to; he had finally given up that battle, decades after Sheila had exhorted him to do so. It was over.
But now he had written something for a different audience: he was aiming for nothing less than the world.
“If people can understand your data—not academics, I mean real people—it might change something for them.” Sheila had said this to him more than once, but only gradually had he realized the force of her logic, when she was already fighting the heart disease that would kill her.
When he considered his future readers now, he pictured a man like himself, back before any of this had started, when he was at the medical school. He saw himself on a chilly Friday evening walking back from his office through the square, puzzling over a study on somatic symptom disorders, tempted by the warmth and light of the bookstore. Stepping in for a quick browse, he glances at the books on the table, searching for something to grab his attention—and the book calls out to him. He picks it up and flips it open to the first page. Even though it may seem hard to believe, evidence might exist that life after death is actually a reality.
Evidence? he imagined the man thinking to himself. Impossible. But he sits down anyway on a nearby leather chair, and begins to read.…
Anderson knew it was a fantasy. But he had been a man like that once. He, too, had needed evidence. And now he could provide it. He could leave his mark. He had felt full of confidence, until yesterday. Until he had talked to his literary agent and found that every publisher had turned him down. When he’d hung up the phone, he kicked the manuscript across the room, scattering pages like ash.