volume 9
Now Memory, Now Sleep
by Graham Thompson
Just before sleep, my thoughts frenzy. Something of the darkness plays on my eyes and ears, and for a moment, for that instant which precedes unconsciousness, I am wide awake. It is then the most clear memories and often sentimental feelings of my life come to me. Sometimes a book lay open on the floor beside my bed, spine up, the tips of its jacket slightly flared; the image of a bird flutters, I see my backyard at age nine, the blue-stone patio, a Louisville bat with a navy stripe at its center leaning against the red brick skirt of the house; and there I am, red-faced and frightened, shoulders trembling, crying from a bee sting on the neck. The sound of the drapes brushing the windowsill calls me back. In the darkness, which tends to soften shapes, pull objects out of reach further still, thicken the air and lend it visible substance, my memories come to me in such vivid colors. I watch them as if a film, and as suddenly as one appears, another takes its place. A car horn sounds down the street. Wind chimes ring from the breeze. Not yet asleep, I close my eyes to greens and violets, which then pixilate, grow into colorful brick towers, now spiraling toward me until their closeness renders them a haze, and I can hear myself practicing the trumpet in grade school. I see the band room, its heavy green doors, the metal webbing over the garden windows; the older, substitute drummer knocks at the back door, and one of the trumpeters from our rear row lets him in, pleased at his part in the scandal. Mr. Volaro conducts us to begin the next song, and I grow frustrated from the quickness and difficulty of Satin Doll.
This lucidity sometimes lasts several minutes, other times less. It plays on the eyes and mind before sleep much like a brief lightening storm brightens the sky before the roll of thunder shakes the clouds to rain. During these spells, I return most often to my younger years. I relive waking my grandparents on a Passover visit: I am lying on my back beneath the pullout couch in the early morning quiet, kicking them through the thin mattress. I wonder if one can only love such a devil in memory. For then, to be sure, I was a nuisance. But presently we recall that boy with laughter. It seems the cushion of years gone by forgives the seat of a cane-woven chair its holes.
The memories evoked in the moments prior to sleep arise with stunning clarity. Perhaps this is the benefit of the absence of light, for with it subsides the distraction of definite and recognizable structures. In the corner, my desk becomes a gargoyle. I am frightened momentarily, and then I am two years old, rising and falling to my father’s breathing as we nap together, he on his back in a red plaid shirt, I on his belly in a yellow bunny suit. It may be that in nearing sleep my subconscious reminds me that gargoyles are put atop buildings as guards, in order to protect, and thus do I recall an afternoon doze with dad.
I am a good sleeper, make no mistake. Naturally, the occasional fever or poorly timed dark thought demands a long night of excruciating reshuffling, my childish concern for every click and hiss in the pipes laughable next day. I do not sleep-walk or sleep-eat, or, for that matter, share in any witching hour wandering beyond the bedposts. My vespertine condition is of a greedy sort: I feel deep repose will rob me of that frenzied surge of preslumber imagery wherein my past resides. How to regain it? In an attempt, I have begun jotting down quick notes of passing thoughts and memories. Strewn about my apartment—on my desk, on the kitchen table, between couch cushions and shelved books—are shorthand fragments of my past and the ideas which have in turn resulted.
Memory speaks in varied tones, now tender, now severe. The soft darkness of a warm bedroom is for one’s mind a stage on which play memorial metamorphoses, past images entering and exiting with near or distant sounds, a thought taking form from the shape of a sweater draped over a chair in the dark. One can little help wondering how many years of our lives we relive in flashes before nodding off each night, and the number of them lost to sleep.
I find myself nearly upset by uncontrollable interferences. I am remembering a fishing trip, the gray-blue dawn light, the icy wind whipping my cheeks at the bow of the small boat. I can see the fog enveloping our skiff, smell the cold Atlantic on my blue upper lip; the shoreline of Prince Edward Island is just discernible in the distance, trailing further away in the wake of our weighted lines. Suddenly, my cat leaps onto my lap, a knotted string dangling from his mouth, giving me little nods and excited eyes so that I’ll play. My sight of the early morning ocean is replaced by soft black hair, green eyes and pointed ears. I might have recalled my exact words after eating raw oysters for the first time on the dock, but my cat has put the memory to sleep.
For a time now, I have been writing. I have also submerged myself, as in a warm bath, into literature of the past, allowing my eyes to wander among the faces, hilly scapes, crowded public squares and quiet private bedrooms of familiar and foreign design. The far away chill of the icy wind off the Neva, the poor St. Petersburgan soul robbed of his new overcoat, the much grieved doctor making his rounds of plague victims in the abandoned streets of Oran, even the starving writer desperately scribbling out verses in the hallway of a pitying family’s apartment in Christiana—the colors, smells and emotions which abound within these worlds have meshed so intimately with my own memories of years since past, with such richness, that I have begun to think of many of them as my own. Upon the gentle closing of a book I absorb certain particulars, and like a single droplet of water dripping from the faucet into my steaming porcelain tub, causing the stillness to ripple and brush against the pink islet of my protruding knee, they blend and settle nearly imperceptibly with the images of my own life. I wonder if in old age the distinction between a youthful summer trip to Lake Magaguidavic and some Chekovian story of an August at the dacha will become confused. This possibility is, for me, a joyous one. Just as the disabled child of a favorite novel mistakes snowflakes for winter butterflies, so might I recall the black sand of an unmapped island in Moosehead Lake with creative inaccuracy.
It must somehow be expected of an author to find pleasure in the mutations the past undergoes upon a third or fourth retelling. I imagine myself, aged seventy, a grandchild sitting on each of my corduroy knees, attentive only at times when the inflection in my voice startles them—I do not suppose it will matter to them if my stories are infused with grains of fictitious mortar, so long as they can trace the lines in my face with the tips of their smaller fingers. Further still into the future I hear them telling their own children that their great-grandfather was a great lover of birds, not because I expressed at any time an affinity for winged creatures, but rather because their memory has saved and manipulated the afternoon during which I told them the lines branching out from the corner’s of my eyes are called crow’s feet.
When writing, creating original pictures out of sometimes genuine and sometimes slightly spurious souvenirs, I feel this brand of associative interplay is an advantage. One carries about their memories like a pocketful of loose change, now picking out a brown penny, now a sparkling dime. Their dullness or brilliance is, in part, due to the work of our imperfect memories, our exposure to so many sunlit or drizzling days. I see myself as a young boy with pant-legs rolled up to knee-level, a fisherman’s cap pulled tightly over my messy brown hair, peering with a crooked brow into the clear water of a shallow running river. I am mystified at the number of tiny minnows flickering by. The sunlight shimmering silver on their backs, my own reflection wavering on the rushing water: the tiny fish look as if swimming through me, and the sound of the water relays to me a fluid, physical sensation. Finally, myself fully dazed, the hand of another boy reaches into the river and, to my genuine horror, plucks out an oval, white-specked stone from the riverbed, revealing the dripping catalyst of my beautiful hallucination. I can think of no better well than my own from which to pull up by the bucketful the unique instances so complimentary to literary fiction. So colorful and accidentally complex are such moments—both refreshing and attractive for their peculiar honesty and careful layers—that I can claim only partial credit when hints of such playfulness turn up in my work.
I take up my pen and fix to a white sand beach the shallow footprints of a young boy. The sea sedates the warm shoreline with regular soft waves, celebrating its arrival (as we do the new year!) with a quick but brilliant bubbling over before settling with a sizzle and hiss. The sky sits blue and motionless overhead; now and then a profile, bunny-shaped cloud intercepts the sun, and below the beach grows dreary for a moment, then promising again when, at last, the hare hops over the star. And just out of mother’s audible range but still in sight, my tan-backed boy builds a many-towered sandcastle, one overturned pail at a time, encircling its simple clutter with the inevitable hand-scooped moat. Running back and forth, from the shallow waves to his crumbling empire, my barefoot boy fills his moat with excited but sloppily drawn buckets from the sea. From under her umbrella, mother smiles sympathetically as she looks on: there, by the shoreline—standing with hands on hips, legs patched with wet and dry sand—her little one throws back his head in fatigue and frustration before his kingdom, as his salty splashing has flooded its foundation, and clump by clump it crumbles into the moat.
One’s memories bear a striking resemblance to such a scene, similar in both construction and fragility. Steeped as we are in emotions, for good or ill, the abundant grains of our past hold together not in a sturdy weave, but rather in a shifting mass, much like sand on a beach. Those crystal images that stand out like so many glimmering towers, rich with personal detail, tend to crumble at the slightest interference. I remember certain days from my youth with stunning clarity, wherein my mother or elder sister were present. Often their versions impart on the same afternoon a date or location that renders my version false. Fragile by design, memories slip into the moat. A childhood neighbors’ regular evening yelling matches (they used to keep me up at night in my crib) are replaced by their yellow labrador who, so often left out-of-doors for the night, begrudged their neglect with its incessant barking. The conditional mixture of sound and imagery, one’s proximity to these sensations, and the particular age at which we are exposed to them provides for the clearest, imperfect memories. I recall a hellish plane ride, at age eleven, to the Caribbean. My parents insist we went rather to Canada, by car, and that I spent the weekend bedridden with a violent fever. Squinting, I can just see myself, shivering and covered in sweat, a wet towel folded in place on my brow, hazily staring at the model airplanes dangling from the ceiling fan, and through them at a painting of arching islands in an aquamarine sea.
In the quick spells of memory I suffer before sleep a unique pattern arises, a personal mosaic. There is a submission to the simplest illusions, like the look of astonishment in my five-year-old eyes when, at my older sister’s beckoning, I turn in the back seat to see a trail of baby-sized footprints on her window. And only when my chin begins to tremble (God knows why those tiny feet inspired tears) does she reveal the trick, again fogging up the window with her breath and gently pressing the side of her small fist into the glass.
Back to volume 9
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Graham Thompson is a native of Providence, Rhode Island and a recent graduate of Columbia College Chicago (July 2006), acquiring a major in Fiction Writing. He presently resides in Chicago, Illinois, and is at work on his first novel. The South Loop Review is his inaugural publication.