Hannu Rajaniemi - The New Voices of Science Fiction

“Did your mother like to cook?”

Madeleine stares.

“Madeleine,” says Clarice, with the inevitably Anglo pronunciation that Madeleine has resigned herself to, “if we’re going to work together to help you, I need to know more about her.”

“The episodes aren’t about her,” says Madeleine, stiffly. “They’re because of the drug.”

“Yes, but—”

“They’re because of the drug, and I don’t need you to tell me I took part in the trial because of her—obviously I did—and I don’t want to tell you about her. This isn’t about my mourning, and I thought we established these aren’t traumatic flashbacks. It’s about the drug.”

“Madeleine,” and Madeleine is fascinated by Clarice’s capacity to both disgust and soothe her with sheer unflappability, “Drugs do not operate—or misfire—in a vacuum. You were one of sixty people participating in that trial. Of those sixty, you’re the only one who has come forward experiencing these episodes.” Clarice leans forward, slightly. “We’ve also spoken about your tendency to see our relationship as adversarial. Please remember that it isn’t. You,” and Clarice doesn’t smile, exactly, so much as that the lines around her mouth become suffused with sympathy, “haven’t even ever volunteered her name to me.”

Madeleine begins to feel like a recalcitrant child instead of an adult standing her ground. This only adds to her resentment.

“Her name was Sylvie,” she offers, finally. “She loved being in the kitchen. She loved making big fancy meals. But she hated having people over. My dad used to tease her about that.”

Clarice nods, smiles her almost-smile encouragingly, makes further notes. “And did you do the technique we discussed to dismiss the memory?”

Madeleine looks away. “Yes.”

“What did you choose this time?”

“Althusser.” She feels ridiculous. “‘In the battle that is philosophy all the techniques of war, including looting and camouflage, are permissible.’”

Clarice frowns as she writes, and Madeleine can’t tell if it’s because talk of war is adversarial or because she dislikes Althusser.

After she buried her mother, Madeleine looked for ways to bury herself.

She read non-fiction, as dense and theoretical as she could find, on any subject she felt she had a chance of understanding: economics, postmodernism, settler-colonialism. While reading Patrick Wolfe she found the phrase invasion is a structure, not an event , and wondered if one could say the same of grief. Grief is an invasion and a structure and an event , she wrote, then struck it out, because it seemed meaningless.

Grief, thinks Madeleine now, is an invasion that climbs inside you and makes you grow a wool blanket from your skin, itchy and insulating, heavy and gray. It wraps and wraps and wraps around, putting layers of scratchy heat between you and the world, until no one wants to approach for fear of the prickle, and people stop asking how you are doing in the blanket, which is a relief, because all you want is to be hidden, out of sight. You can’t think of a time when you won’t be wrapped in the blanket, when you’ll be ready to face the people outside it—but one day, perhaps, you push through. And even though you’ve struggled against the belief that you’re a worthless colony of contagion that must be shunned at all costs, it still comes as a shock, when you emerge, that there’s no one left waiting for you.

Worse still is the shock that you haven’t emerged at all.

“The thing is,” says Madeleine, slowly, “I didn’t use the sentence right way.”

“Oh?”

“I—wanted to see how long it could last, on its own.” Heat in her cheeks, knowing how this will sound, wanting both to resist and embrace it. “To ride it out. It kept going just as I remembered it—she brought me a little pink plastic bowl with yellow flowers on it, poured just a tiny bit of soup in, blew on it, gave it to me with a plastic spoon. There were little star-shaped noodles in it. I—” she feels tears in her eyes, hates this, hates crying in front of Clarice, “—I could have eaten it. It smelled so good, and I could feel I was hungry. But I got superstitious. You know.” She shrugs. “Like if I ate it, I’d have to stay for good.”

“Did you want to stay for good?”

Madeleine says nothing. This is what she hates about Clarice, this demand that her feelings be spelled out into one thing or another: isn’t it obvious that she both wanted and didn’t want to? From what she said?

“I feel like the episodes are lasting longer,” says Madeleine, finally, trying to keep the urgency from consuming her voice. “It used to be just a snap, there and back—I’d blink, I’d be in the memory, I’d realize what happened and it would be like a dream; I’d wake up, I’d come back. I didn’t need sentences to pull me back. But now…” She looks to Clarice to say something, to fill the silence, but Clarice waits, as usual, for Madeleine herself to make the connection, to articulate the fear.

“…Now I wonder if this is how it started for her. My mother. What it was like for her.” The tissue in her hands is damp, not from tears, but from the sweat of her palms. “If I just sped up the process.”

“You don’t have Alzheimer’s,” says Clarice, matter-of-fact. “You aren’t forgetting anything. In fact it appears to be the opposite: you’re remembering so intensely and completely that your memories have the vividness and immediacy of hallucination.” She jots something down. “We’ll keep on working on dismantling the triggers as they arise. If the episodes seem to be lasting longer, it could be partly because they’re growing fewer and farther between. This is not necessarily a bad thing.”

Madeleine nods, chewing her lip, not meeting Clarice’s eyes.

So far as Madeleine is concerned, her mother began dying five years earlier, when the fullness of her life began to fall away from her like chunks of wet cake: names; events; her child. Madeleine watched her mother weep, and this was the worst, because with every storm of grief over her confusion, Madeleine couldn’t help but imagine the memories sloughing from her, as if the memories themselves were the source of her pain, and if she could just forget them and live a barer life, a life before the disease, before her husband’s death, before Madeleine, she could be happy again. If she could only shed the burden of the expectation of memory, she could be happy again.

Madeleine reads Walter Benjamin on time as image, time as accumulation, and thinks of layers and pearls. She thinks of her mother as a pearl dissolving in wine until only a grain of sand is left drowning at the bottom of the glass.

As her mother’s life fell away from her, so did Madeleine’s. She took a leave of absence from her job, and kept extending it; she stopped seeing her friends; her friends stopped seeing her. Madeleine is certain her friends expected her to be relieved when her mother died, and were surprised by the depth of her mourning. She didn’t know how to address that. She didn’t know how to say to those friends, you are relieved to no longer feel embarrassed around the subject, and expect me to sympathize with your relief, and to be normal again for your sake. So she said nothing.

It wasn’t that Madeleine’s friends were bad people; they had their own lives, their own concerns, their own comfort to nourish and nurture and keep safe, and dealing with a woman who was dealing with her mother who was dealing with early-onset Alzheimer’s was just a little too much, especially when her father had only died of bowel cancer a year earlier, especially when she had no other family. It was indecent, so much pain at once, it was unreasonable, and her friends were reasonable people. They had children, families, jobs, and Madeleine had none of these; she understood. She did not make demands.