Fiction and Drama

Ariana Harwicz

In the end amnesia does the dirty work

We don’t decide anything over the course of a lifetime, we follow our own lives meekly along signposted paths, half-heartedly trying to catch up, teetering on the edge of the abyss, asking the wrong person for help, hitchhiking along a dangerous highway, fleeing when it would’ve been better to stay, staying by accident. At most we catch up for a few miles, like running a night marathon alongside a cargo train, you can’t ask for much more. We don’t decide anything about our love lives either, the quickening adrenaline, the red-hot lava. The long marriage, the holiday camp romance, incestuous desires, in an old people’s home, an asylum, a palliative care center, in a luxury euthanasia clinic, most use the same words to say the same thing: that you die without the faintest idea. What kind of lives would you like to have lived, gentlemen? No idea. What do you regret, ladies? No idea. We could do it all over again and everything would turn out differently. Born in the same bed, to the same mother, the same day, the same year, a different life. I could’ve never been born and everything would be the same. The same house next door with its moles and black currants, the same trees cut back and burned in a bonfire at the first sign of winter. Nobody could answer one simple question: Why did they choose a life of solitude, or one divorce after another, or a marriage that ends in a race to see whose health will be first to take a nosedive? Once again I think about all this fractured nonsense to pass the time while I lift and entwine the grapevines, straighten the stakes, tighten the wires, and sort the buds. The supervisor, the owner’s nephew, oversees all this work. We jump from one bed to the next, from one chair to the next, in intensive care, in the room where they play cards and everyone just shrugs. In the end amnesia does the dirty work that nobody else wants to do and sweeps everything away. Most die in cloud-cuckoo-land; why did they take the path leading this way instead of the one in the opposite direction? They can remember events, when they deserted the army, when they fell for a minor and would secretly meet her in the barn, but they don’t remember why or how, if she had braids, if she had the body of a child, what it was that made them so senile. He continues to supervise me, he watches every move I make as if I were his slave, it’s the 21st century, Hey, I tell him, it’s the 21st century. We cross the canal on foot, on a motorcycle, we head toward the cliff or the waterfall, always wandering, but this is as far as I got, thinking too much about this abstract and useless nonsense makes my movements less precise. It’s time to clock out. Sorry, all good, see you tomorrow. I can’t afford any criticism at work, or to attract any warnings from the boss, it all gets put in my file.

I decide to start riding a bike again, it was on sale, it has several gears and lights for the darkest nights, and sometimes I can see myself head-on, a wild boar with neutral eyes and me in complete darkness. Once, when I had the boys, I took them on a ride, swerving to avoid the owls and the bats, all three of us screaming at the top of our lungs. They asked me in the middle of the countryside if it was true that they swallowed spiders while they were sleeping. They’ve left school now, I know what they’re doing, what they should be doing. I managed to get to this age without an electronic ankle tag, I don’t want to end up sitting at some bar in Sancerre telling all the drunks the story of what led me to this debacle, to this shriveled body, something I did one day without even noticing that I cut my life short. I ride my bike over the slippery sand dunes, it’s cold now, the crabs and the snails have found shelter. I imagine what they’re wearing, their striped sweaters or the ones with the diamond pattern that their grandmother bought them this season, I know how she wraps them up like onions, their puffer jackets that I never wanted her to buy for them. They’ve left now, they’ve been sent to wash their hands before eating, they’re sitting at the table now, she’s made them their poached eggs now, they’re watching television in the game room now while their grandfather stirs the embers in the hearth. I look at the plants and the long stems growing beneath the sand. The world is far too vast, the land of aurora borealis, fjords, tundra valleys, salt flats, icebergs, and gulfs, but at the same time, the world is so tiny, so narrow, a blind alley like my rented home, a village with a church and post office. A roundabout for the drunk to walk around, his face bloody. The sun should be coming up by now, surely. I want it to rise, let it rise several times in the same morning, there are still five days to go until our bodies collide. Sometimes I imagine huge things, a scorched city, La Charité-sur-Loire lit up by blazing flashes of light, the grayish match above my children’s heads, their hair gray.