http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-11/memory/foer-text.html
MEMORY
By Joshua Foer
There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative
assistant from California known in the medical
literature only as "AJ," who remembers almost
every day of her life since age 11. There is an
85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called
"EP," who remembers only his most recent thought.
She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.
"My memory flows like a movienonstop and
uncontrollable," says AJ. She remembers that at
12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man
she had a crush on called her on the telephone.
She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on
December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on
March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at
the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world
events and trips to the grocery store, the
weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is
there. She's not easily stumped.
There have been a handful of people over the
years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek,
the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie
Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000
books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). "S,"
a Russian journalist studied for three decades by
the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria,
could remember impossibly long strings of words,
numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he'd
first heard them. But AJ is unique. Her
extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures,
but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible
memory for autobiographical details is so
unprecedented and so poorly understood that James
McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the
neuroscientists at the University of California,
Irvine who have been studying her for the past
seven years, had to coin a new medical term to
describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome.
EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly
parted white hair and unusually long ears. He's
personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot.
He seems at first like your average genial
grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex
virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it
like an apple. By the time the virus had run its
course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in
the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP's memory.
The virus struck with freakish precision. The
medial temporal lobesthere's one on each side of
the braininclude an arch-shaped structure called
the hippocampus and several adjacent regions that
together perform the magical feat of turning our
perceptions into long-term memories. The memories
aren't actually stored in the hippocampusthey
reside elsewhere, in the brain's corrugated outer
layers, the neocortexbut the hippocampal area is
the part of the brain that makes them stick. EP's
hippocampus was destroyed, and without it he is
like a camcorder without a working tape head. He sees, but he doesn't record.
EP has two types of amnesiaanterograde, which
means he can't form new memories, and retrograde,
which means he can't remember old memories
either, at least not since 1960. His childhood,
his service in the merchant marine, World War
IIall that is perfectly vivid. But as far as he
knows, gas costs less than a dollar a gallon, and
the moon landing never happened.
AJ and EP are extremes on the spectrum of human
memory. And their cases say more than any brain
scan about the extent to which our memories make
us who we are. Though the rest of us are
somewhere between those two poles of remembering
everything and nothing, we've all experienced
some small taste of the promise of AJ and dreaded
the fate of EP. Those three pounds or so of
wrinkled flesh balanced atop our spines can
retain the most trivial details about childhood
experiences for a lifetime but often can't hold
on to even the most important telephone number
for just two minutes. Memory is strange like that.
What is a memory? The best that neuroscientists
can do for the moment is this: A memory is a
stored pattern of connections between neurons in
the brain. There are about a hundred billion of
those neurons, each of which can make perhaps
5,000 to 10,000 synaptic connections with other
neurons, which makes a total of about five
hundred trillion to a thousand trillion synapses
in the average adult brain. By comparison there
are only about 32 trillion bytes of information
in the entire Library of Congress's print
collection. Every sensation we remember, every
thought we think, alters the connections within
that vast network. Synapses are strengthened or
weakened or formed anew. Our physical substance
changes. Indeed, it is always changing, every moment, even as we sleep.
I met EP at his home, a bright bungalow in
suburban San Diego, on a warm spring day. I drove
there with Larry Squire, a neuroscientist and
memory researcher at the University of
California, San Diego, and the San Diego VA
Medical Center, and Jen Frascino, the research
coordinator in Squire's lab who visits EP
regularly to administer cognitive tests. Even
though Frascino has been to EP's home some 200
times, he always greets her as a stranger.
Frascino sits down opposite EP at his dining room
table and asks a series of questions that gauge
his common sense. She quizzes him about what
continent Brazil is on, the number of weeks in a
year, the temperature water boils at. She wants
to demonstrate what IQ tests have already proved:
EP is no dummy. He patiently answers the
questionsall correctlywith roughly the same
sense of bemusement I imagine I would have if a
total stranger walked into my house, sat down at
my table, and very earnestly asked me if I knew the boiling point of water.
"What is the thing to do if you find an envelope
in the street that is sealed, addressed, and has a stamp on it?" Frascino asks.
"Well, you'd put it in the mailbox. What else?"
He chuckles and shoots me a sidelong and knowing
glance, as if to say, Do these people think I'm
an idiot? But sensing that the situation calls
for politeness, he turns back to Frascino and
adds, "But that's a really interesting question
you've got there. Really interesting." He has no
idea he's heard it many times before.
"Why do we cook food?"
"Because it's raw?" The word raw carries his
voice clear across the tonal register, his
bemusement giving way to incredulity.
"Why do we study history?"
"Well, we study history to know what happened in the past."
"But why do we want to know what happened in the past?"
"Because, it's just interesting, frankly."
EP wears a metal medical alert bracelet around
his left wrist. Even though it's obvious what
it's for, I ask him anyway. He turns his wrist over and casually reads it.
"Hmm. It says memory loss."
EP doesn't even remember that he has a memory
problem. That is something he discovers anew
every moment. And since he forgets that he always
forgets, every lost thought seems like just a
casual slipan annoyance and nothing morethe same way it would to you or me.
Ever since his sickness, space for EP has existed
only as far as he can see it. His social universe
is only as large as the people in the room. He
lives under a narrow spotlight, surrounded by darkness.
On a typical morning, EP wakes up, has breakfast,
and returns to bed to listen to the radio. But
back in bed, it's not always clear whether he's
just had breakfast or just woken up. Often he'll
have breakfast again, and return to bed to listen
to some more radio. Some mornings he'll have
breakfast a third time. He watches TV, which can
be very exciting from second to second, though
shows with a clear beginning, middle, and end can
pose a problem. He prefers the History Channel,
or anything about World War II. He takes walks
around the neighborhood, usually several times
before lunch, and sometimes for as long as
three-quarters of an hour. He sits in the yard.
He reads the newspaper, which one can only
imagine must feel like stepping out of a time
machine. Bush who? Iraq what? Computers when? By
the time EP gets to the end of a headline, he's
usually forgotten how it began. Most of the time,
after reading the weather, he just doodles on the
paper, drawing mustaches on the photographs or
tracing his spoon. When he sees home prices in
the real estate section, he invariably announces his shock.
Without a memory, EP has fallen completely out of
time. He has no stream of consciousness, just
droplets that immediately evaporate. If you were
to take the watch off his wristor, more cruelly,
change the timehe'd be completely lost. Trapped
in this limbo of an eternal present, between a
past he can't remember and a future he can't
contemplate, he lives a sedentary life,
completely free from worry. "He's happy all the
time. Very happy. I guess it's because he doesn't
have any stress in his life," says his daughter Carol, who lives nearby.
"How old are you now?" Squire asks him.
"Let's see, 59 or 60. You got me. My memory is
not that perfect. It's pretty good, but sometimes
people ask me questions that I just don't get.
I'm sure you have that sometimes."
"Sure, I do," says Squire, kindly, even though EP
is almost a quarter of a century off.
An enormous amount of what science knows about
memory was learned from a damaged brain that is
remarkably similar to EP's. It belongs to an
81-year-old man known as "HM," an amnesiac who
lives in a nursing home in Connecticut. As a
child, HM suffered from epilepsy that began after
a bike accident at age nine. By the time he was
27, he was blacking out ten times a week and
unable to do much of anything. A neurosurgeon
named William Scoville thought he could cure HM's
epilepsy with an experimental surgery that would
excise the part of the brain that he suspected was causing the problem.
In 1953, while HM lay awake on the operating
table, his scalp anesthetized, Scoville drilled a
pair of holes just above the patient's eyes. The
surgeon lifted the front of HM's brain with a
small metal spatula while a metal straw sucked
out most of the hippocampus, along with much of
the surrounding medial temporal lobes. The
surgery reduced the number of HM's seizures, but
it soon became clear that he'd also been robbed of his memory.
Over the next five decades, HM was the subject of
countless experiments and became the most studied
patient in the history of brain science. Given
the horrific outcome of Scoville's surgery,
everyone assumed HM would be a singular case study.
EP shattered that assumption. What Scoville did
to HM with a metal straw, nature did to EP with
herpes simplex. Side by side, the grainy
black-and-white MRIs of their brains are
uncannily similar, though EP's damage is a bit
more extensive. Even if you have no idea what a
normal brain ought to look like, the gaping
symmetrical holes stare back at you like eyes.
Like EP, HM was able to hold on to memories just
long enough to think about them, but once his
brain moved to something else, he could never
bring them back. In one famous experiment, Brenda
Milner, a Canadian psychologist, asked HM to
remember the number 584 for as long as possible.
To keep the number on the tip of his tongue, he
used a complicated system, which he recounted to Milner:
"It's easy. You just remember 8. You see 5, 8,
and 4 add to 17. You remember 8, subtract it from
17, and it leaves 9. Divide 9 in half and you get
5 and 4 and there you are: 584. Easy."
He concentrated on this elaborate mantra for
several minutes. But as soon as he was
distracted, the number dissolved. He couldn't
even remember that he'd been asked to remember
something. Though scientists had known that there
was a difference between long- and short-term
memory since the late 19th century, they now had
evidence in HM that the two types of memory
happened in different parts of the brain, and
that without most of the hippocampal area, HM
couldn't turn a short-term memory into a long-term one.
Researchers also learned more about another kind
of remembering from HM. Even though he couldn't
say what he'd had for breakfast or name the
current President, there were some things that he
could remember. Milner found that he was capable
of learning complicated tasks without even
realizing it. In one study, she showed that HM
could learn how to trace inside a five-pointed
star on a piece of paper while looking at its
reflection in a mirror. Each time Milner gave HM
the task, he claimed never to have tried it
before. And yet, each day his brain got better at
guiding his hand to work in reverse. Despite his amnesia, he was remembering.
Though there is disagreement about just how many
memory systems there are, scientists generally
divide memories into two types: declarative and
nondeclarative (sometimes referred to as explicit
and implicit). Declarative memories are things
you know you remember, like the color of your car
or what happened yesterday afternoon. EP and HM
have lost the ability to make new declarative
memories. Nondeclarative memories are the things
you know without consciously thinking about them,
like how to ride a bike or how to draw a shape
while looking at it in a mirror. Those
unconscious memories don't rely on the
hippocampal region to be consolidated and stored.
They happen in completely different parts of the
brain. Motor skill learning takes place at the
base of the brain in the cerebellum, perceptual
learning in the neocortex, habit learning at the
brain's center. As EP and HM so strikingly
demonstrate, you can damage one part of the
brain, and the rest will keep on working.
The metaphors we most often use to describe
memorythe photograph, the tape recorder, the
mirror, the hard driveall suggest mechanical
accuracy, as if the mind were some sort of
meticulous transcriber of our experiences. And
for a long time it was a commonly held view that
our brains function as perfect recordersthat a
lifetime of memories are socked away somewhere in
the cerebral attic, and if they can't be found it
isn't because they've disappeared, but only because we've lost access to them.
A Canadian neurosurgeon named Wilder Penfield
thought he'd proved that theory by the 1940s
after using electrical probes to stimulate the
brains of epileptic patients while they were
lying conscious on the operating table. He was
trying to pinpoint the source of their epilepsy,
but he found that when his probe touched certain
parts of the temporal lobe, the patients started
describing vivid experiences. When he touched the
same spot again, he often elicited the same
descriptions. Penfield came to believe that the
brain records everything to which it pays any
degree of conscious attention, and that this recording is permanent.
Most scientists now agree that the strange
recollections triggered by Penfield were closer
to fantasies or hallucinations than to memories,
but the sudden reappearance of long-lost episodes
from one's past is an experience surely familiar
to everyone. Still, as a recorder, the brain does
a notoriously wretched job. Tragedies and
humiliations seem to be etched most sharply,
often with the most unbearable exactitude, while
those memories we think we really needthe name
of the acquaintance, the time of the appointment,
the location of the car keyshave a habit of evaporating.
Michael Anderson, a memory researcher at the
University of Oregon in Eugene, has tried to
estimate the cost of all that evaporation.
According to a decade's worth of "forgetting
diaries" kept by his undergraduate students (the
amount of time it takes to find the car keys, for
example), Anderson calculates that people
squander more than a month of every year just
compensating for things they've forgotten.
AJ remembers when she first realized that her
memory was not the same as everyone else's. She
was in the seventh grade, studying for finals. "I
was not happy because I hated school," she says.
Her mother was helping her with her homework, but
her mind had wandered elsewhere. "I started
thinking about the year before, when I was in
sixth grade and how I loved sixth grade. But then
I started realizing that I was remembering the
exact date, exactly what I was doing a year ago
that day." At first she didn't think much of it.
But a few weeks later, playing with a friend, she
remembered that they had also spent the day together exactly one year earlier.
"Each year has a certain feeling, and then each
time of year has a certain feeling. The spring of
1981 feels completely different from the winter
of 1981," she says. Dates for AJ are like the
petite madeleine cake that sent Marcel Proust's
mind hurtling back in time in Remembrance of
Things Past. Their mere mention starts her
reminiscing involuntarily. "You know when you
smell something, it brings you back? I'm like ten
levels deeper and more intense than that."
My brother used to say, 'Oh, she's the Rain Man.'
And I was like, 'No I'm not!' But I thought, what
if I really. . . . Am I? Is there something wrong
with me?" At one point AJ considered setting up
shop on the nearby boardwalk as the Human
Calendar and charging people five bucks to let
them try to stump her with dates. She decided
against it. "I don't want to be a sideshow."
It would seem as though having a memory like AJ's
would make life qualitatively differentand
better. Our culture inundates us with new
information, yet so little of it is captured and
cataloged in a way that it can be retrieved
later. What would it mean to have all that
otherwise lost knowledge at our fingertips? Would
it make us more persuasive, more confident? Would
it make us, in some fundamental sense, smarter?
To the extent that experience is the sum of our
memories and wisdom the sum of experience, having
a better memory would mean knowing not only more
about the world, but also more about oneself. How
many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and
connections unmade because of our memory's shortcomings?
The dream that AJ embodies, the perfection of
memory, has been with us since at least the fifth
century B.C. and the supposed invention of a
technique known as the "art of memory" by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos.
Simonides had been the sole survivor of a
catastrophic roof collapse at a banquet hall in
Thessaly. According to Cicero, who wrote an
account of the incident four centuries later, the
bodies were mangled beyond recognition. But in
his mind, Simonides was able to close his eyes to
the chaos and see each of the guests at his seat
around the table. He'd discovered the powerful
technique known as the loci method. If you can
convert whatever it is you're trying to remember
into vivid mental images and then arrange them in
some sort of imagined architectural space, known
as a memory palace, memories can be made virtually indelible.
Peter of Ravenna, a noted Italian jurist and
author of a renowned memory textbook of the 15th
century, was said to have used the loci method to
memorize the Bible, the entire legal canon, 200
of Cicero's speeches, and 1,000 verses of Ovid.
For leisure, he would reread books cached away in
his memory palaces. "When I left my country to
visit as a pilgrim the cities of Italy, I can
truly say I carry everything I own with me," he wrote.
It's hard for us to imagine what it must have
been like to live in a culture before the advent
of printed books or before you could carry around
a ballpoint pen and paper to jot notes. "In a
world of few books, and those mostly in communal
libraries, one's education had to be remembered,
for one could never depend on having continuing
access to specific material," writes Mary
Carruthers, author of The Book of Memory, a study
of the role of memory techniques in medieval
culture. "Ancient and medieval people reserved
their awe for memory. Their greatest geniuses
they describe as people of superior memories."
Thirteenth-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, for
example, was celebrated for composing his Summa
Theologica entirely in his head and dictating it
from memory with no more than a few notes. The
Roman philosopher Seneca the Elder could repeat
2,000 names in the order they'd been given to
him. A Roman named Simplicius could recite Virgil
by heartbackward. A strong memory was seen as
the greatest of virtues since it represented the
internalization of a universe of external
knowledge. Indeed, a common theme in the lives of
the saints was that they had extraordinary memories.
After Simonides' discovery, the art of memory was
codified with an extensive set of rules and
instructions by the likes of Cicero and
Quintilian and in countless medieval memory
treatises. Students were taught not only what to
remember but also techniques for how to remember
it. In fact, there are long traditions of memory
training in many cultures. The Jewish Talmud,
embedded with mnemonicstechniques for preserving
memorieswas passed down orally for centuries.
Koranic memorization is still considered a
supreme achievement among devout Muslims.
Traditional West African griots and South Slavic
bards recount colossal epics entirely from memory.
But over the past millennium, many of us have
undergone a profound shift. We've gradually
replaced our internal memory with what
psychologists refer to as external memory, a vast
superstructure of technological crutches that
we've invented so that we don't have to store
information in our brains. We've gone, you might
say, from remembering everything to remembering
awfully little. We have photographs to record our
experiences, calendars to keep track of our
schedules, books (and now the Internet) to store
our collective knowledge, and Post-it notes for
our scribbles. What have the implications of this
outsourcing of memory been for ourselves and for
our society? Has something been lost?
To supplement the memories in her mind, AJ also
stores a trove of external memories. In addition
to the detailed diary she's kept since childhood,
she has a library of close to a thousand
videotapes copied off TV, a trunk full of radio
recordings, and a "research library" consisting
of 50 notebooks filled with facts she's found on
the Internet that relate to events in her memory.
"I just want to keep it all," she says.
Preserving her past has become the central
compulsion of AJ's life. "When I'm blow-drying my
hair in the morning, I'll think of whatever day
it is. And to pass the time, I'll just run
through that day in my head over the last
20-something yearslike flipping through a Rolodex."
AJ traces the origins of her unusual memory to a
move from New Jersey to California that her
family made when she was just eight years old.
Life in New Jersey had been comfortable and
familiar, and California was foreign and strange.
It was the first time she understood that growing
up and moving on necessarily meant forgetting and
leaving behind. "Because I hate change so much,
after that it was like I wanted to be able to
capture everything. Because I know, eventually,
nothing will ever be the same," she says.
K. Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at
Florida State University, believes that at
bottom, AJ might not be all that different from
the rest of us. After the initial announcement of
AJ's condition in the journal Neurocase, Ericsson
suggested that what needs to be explained about
AJ is not some extraordinary, unprecedented
innate memory but rather her extraordinary
obsession with her past. People always remember
things that are important to them. Baseball
fanatics often have an encyclopedic knowledge for
statistics, chess masters often remember tricky
gambits that took place years ago, actors often
remember scripts long after performing them.
Everyone has got a memory for something. Ericsson
believes that if anyone cared about holding on to
the past as much as AJ does, the feat of
memorizing one's life would be well within reach.
I mention Ericsson's theory to AJ, and she
becomes visibly upset. "I just want to call him
on the phone and yell at him. If I spent that
much time memorizing my life, then I really would
be a boring person," she says. "I don't sit
around and memorize it. I just know it."
Remembering everything is both maddening and
lonely for AJ. "I remember good, which is very
comforting. But I also remember badand every bad
choice," she says. "And I really don't give
myself a break. There are all these forks in the
road, moments you have to make a choice, and then
it's ten years later, and I'm still beating
myself up over them. I don't forgive myself for a
lot of things. Your memory is the way it is to
protect you. I feel like it just hasn't protected
me. I would love just for five minutes to be a
simple person and not have all this stuff in my
head. "Most people have called what I have a
gift," AJ says, "but I call it a burden."
The whole point of our nervous system, from the
sensory organs that feed information to the
massive glob of neurons that interpret it, is to
develop a sense of what is happening in the
present and what is about to happen in the
future, so that we can respond in the best
possible way. Our brains are fundamentally
prediction machines, and to work they have to
find order in the chaos of possible memories.
Most of the things that pass through our brains
don't need to be remembered any longer than they need to be thought about.
Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has
developed a taxonomy of forgetting to catalog
what he calls the seven sins of memory. The sin
of absentmindedness: Yo-Yo Ma forgetting his
2.5-million-dollar cello in the back of a taxi.
The Vietnam War veteran still haunted by the
battlefield suffers from the sin of persistence.
The politician who loses a word on the tip of his
tongue during a stump speech is experiencing the
sin of blocking. Though we curse these failures
of memory on an almost daily basis, Schacter
says, that's only because we don't see their
benefits. Each sin is really the flip side of a
virtue, "a price we pay for processes and
functions that serve us well in many respects."
There are good evolutionary reasons why our
memories fail us in the specific ways they do. If
everything we looked at, smelled, heard, or
thought about was immediately filed away in the
enormous database that is our long-term memory,
we'd be drowning in irrelevant information.
In his short story "Funes the Memorious," Jorge
Luis Borges describes a man crippled by an
inability to forget. He remembers every detail of
his life, but he can't distinguish between the
trivial and the important. He can't prioritize,
he can't generalize. He is "virtually incapable
of general, platonic ideas." Perhaps, as Borges
concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not
remembering, that is the essence of what makes us
human. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget."
To age is to forget, also. Roughly five million
Americans have Alzheimer's disease, and even more
suffer from mild cognitive impairment, or lesser
degrees of memory loss. When asked to recall a
list of 15 words read 20 minutes earlier,
octogenarians in one large study recalled fewer
than 60 percent, while the twentysomethings could remember close to 90 percent.
Not surprisingly, people have been searching a
long time for chemicals that might halt that tide
of forgetting. According to the Franciscan
Bernardo de Lavinheta, writing in the early
1500s, "Artificial memory is twofold: the first
part consists in medicines and poultices." The
second part, of course, is the art of memory,
which Lavinheta deemed both safer and more
effective (since memory medicines can sometimes
have the unfortunate side effect of "drying up
the brain"). Today ginkgo biloba is sold as an
over-the-counter supplement, or added to fruit
smoothies and "smart" soft drinks, even without
conclusive evidence that it either boosts memoryor dries up the brain.
Within the past decades, drug companies have
elevated the search to brave new heights. Armed
with a sophisticated understanding of memory's
molecular underpinnings, they've sought to create
new drugs that amplify the brain's natural
capacity to remember. In recent years, at least
three companies have been formed with the express
purpose of developing memory drugs. One of those
companies, Cortex Pharmaceuticals, is attempting
to develop a class of molecules known as
ampakines, which facilitate the transmission of
the neurotransmitter glutamate. Glutamate is one
of the primary excitatory chemicals passed across
the synapses between neurons. By amplifying its
effects, Cortex hopes to improve the brain's
underlying ability to form and retrieve memories.
When administered to middle-age rats, one
ampakine was able to fully reverse their
age-related decline in the cellular mechanism of memory.
It may not be long before drugs such as ampakines
begin to reach the market; when they do, they
could have an enormous impact on society. Though
the pharmaceutical companies are searching for
therapeutic treatments to stave off Alzheimer's
and combat dementia, it seems inevitable that
their pills will end up in the hands of students
cramming for exams and probably a whole lot of
other people who just want to enhance their
brains. Already psycho-stimulants designed to
treat ADHD, like Adderall and Ritalin, are used
as "study buddies" by as many as one in four
students at some colleges trying to increase
their concentration and improve their memories.
All of this raises some troubling ethical
questions. Would we choose to live in a society
where people have vastly better memories? In
fact, what would it even mean to have a better
memory? Would it mean remembering things only
exactly as they happened, free from the revisions
and exaggerations that our mind naturally
creates? Would it mean having a memory that
forgets traumas? Would it mean having a memory
that remembers only those things we want it to
remember? Would it mean becoming AJ?
I want to see EP's unconscious, nondeclarative
memory at work, so I ask him if he's interested
in taking me on a walk around his neighborhood.
He says, "not really," so I wait and ask him
again a couple minutes later. This time he
agrees. We walk out the front door into the high
afternoon sun and turn right. I ask EP why we're
not turning to the left instead.
"I'd just rather not go that way. This is just
the way I go. I don't know why," he says.
If I asked him to draw a map of the route he
takes at least three times a day, he'd never be
able to do it. He doesn't even know his own
address, or (almost as improbably for someone
from San Diego) which way the ocean is. But after
so many years of taking the same walk, the
journey has etched itself on his unconscious. His
wife, Beverly, now lets him go out alone, even
though a single wrong turn would leave him
completely lost. Sometimes he comes back from his
walks with objects he's picked up along the way:
a stack of round stones, a puppy, somebody's
wallet. He's never able to explain how they came into his possession.
"Our neighbors love him because he'll come up to
them and just start talking to them," Beverly
says. Even though he thinks he's meeting them for
the first time, he's learned through habit that
these are people he should feel comfortable
around, and he interprets those unconscious
feelings of comfort as a good reason to stop and say hello.
We cross the street and I'm alone with EP for the
first time. He doesn't know who I am or what I'm
doing at his side, although he seems to sense
that I'm there for some good reason. He is
trapped in the ultimate existential nightmare,
blind to the reality in which he lives. The
impulse strikes me to help him escape, at least
for a second. I want to take him by the arm and
shake him. "You have a rare and debilitating
memory disorder," I want to tell him. "The last
50 years have been lost to you. In less than a
minute, you're going to forget that this
conversation ever even happened." I imagine the
sheer horror that would befall him, the momentary
clarity, the gaping emptiness that would open up
in front of him, and close just as quickly. And
then the passing car or the singing bird that
would snap him back into his oblivious bubble.
We turn around and walk back down the street
whose name he's forgotten, past the waving
neighbors he doesn't recognize, to a home he
doesn't know. In front of the house, there is a
car parked with tinted windows. We turn to look
at our reflections. I ask EP what he sees.
"An old man," he says. "That's all."
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
