The Topology of Forgetting
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The second time Mara forgot her mother's face, the photographs changed too. Not dramatically - her mother's eyes were still brown, her smile still crooked at the left corner - but something essential had gone missing, like a word on the tip of a tongue that had never existed in any language anyone had ever spoken. She stood in her childhood bedroom, holding the picture frame, trying to remember what she had lost. Outside, the trees were losing their names one by one, becoming just green things that rustled in wind that might have once had a sound. Mara opened the picture itself. On the back she saw the faintest markings, no more than scratches on the paper: the name Decker. In a different life, these would be scrawl illegible even to a child. When Mara looked again at the photograph, she saw a white landscape that stretched until it collided several people holding histories, their perspectives overlapping, never quite meeting, until they became something that neither understood. Mara's birth name had been Jaboub, the daughter of Fatim. Fatim Jaboub. What she remembered of her mother was the hair, and the smell of soap (Milk of Magnesia), and that the windowsill in her bedroom window was clean until Fatim took her hands and told her she was dangerous. I've got to go, Mara, her mother said. Mara,
I have to go, was the last thought Mara had of her mother, burning in a memory she made to keep her from crying.
After that day, Mara never asked again. Not about her mother, about her father, about why they said what they said, who they thought they were, what they hoped to be. They, the power more powerful than power, that was afraid of people with the courage to remember. It was this they feared most of all, more than bombs. It was them: the people whose lives include the absence of someone, not because they want it but because it's all they've ever known.
Mara had no idea where her mother was. Other than the dark, creased photograph in the box, there were no rock-chisel memories of men with beards, ball gowns, cousins: fragmentary visions of life and movement in a static picture frame.
II.
When Mara lifted herself from the vibrating trance of molecular specialization - instruments, hammering metal, the sneeze of gas - she felt as though she were waking up as a different person. PEOPLE: The three words were suddenly primary and personal, their meanings complete. How had they gotten lost? Mara now felt as though there were two Mara's at a point in time, two hours apart - or days if she were on the other side of the earth. She experienced them as two persons with separate thoughts, two perspectives crossing - partially overlapping - but never trusting enough to be connected.
available online ■ what did you do in the war, daddy? the past tense of Elias Watson - 1
Downstairs, a familiar rattle converged with the interactions of distant molecules. Mara stretched her arms, felt her shoulders and back ache. She could hear her blood in the drums of her eyes. When she staggered to the bathroom she saw herself: broken like the rest of her, the bags under her eyes darker than the majority of her, as though there were thousands of tiny Mara's, injured, dead, in stasis. She was startled. When she read the thought, she didn't recognize it, even when she saw it on her face and heard it in her voice.
She had been away from it for two hours, and still palpable traces of meander remained under her skin: hot, heavy impressions - the same three minutes that made a lifetime. She stepped back to compare notes with what she was expecting. Her features had changed yet again - back to what was always there. Older maybe. She ran her hand over her skin. Looming within the scar - the epicenter
Here, around us, time slowed down to the word. We ascend and descend through it. These are the times when time becomes as an efflorescence - a growth of the real, or a small unraveling. They say life works in concentric circles - though to our eyes it looks (in certain light) like crumpled pieces of paper littering the floor of a god. Look closer. Can't you see the veins, the capillaries of his skin, the trees branching through him? Inside all matter - apparently - there are openings, sails, canvases. We sympathize◆ About the ending
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