Reconstruction: The Failure of Memory
My father waits in his brown suit on a bench. When he begins to lean
Slightly to the left, you might think he’s simply dozing off—but he doesn’t
Catch himself and jerk awake, embarrassed, like you expect. He just sinks
Slowly down until his freshly shaved cheek is pressed
Against the wooden slats. The bus comes and goes,
And nearly three hours later, my father opens his eyes, pulls his stiff body
Up with his good right arm and looks around. Across the street, people wander
In and out of the Rexall Drugstore, and the glass door of the barber shop
Is propped open with a kitchen chair. My father can see
A teenage boy inside flipping through a magazine as he waits for his cut.
Finally, when a woman pushes a baby stroller up to the bench and sits down
With a loud sigh, my father asks her the time. Then he nods
And slowly stands up, a little off-balance. He walks across the street
To phone my mother and tell her it’s happened again. Sometimes
It’s like this—no dramatic thrashing or spasms at all. He simply shuts down
Like an unplugged appliance, losing minutes or hours of his life.
When my younger brother comes to live with me
All broken down at the age of 33, wanting at last to live,
We discover he has no memory. He has only rage. This brother
Will spend terrible years trying to reconstruct
Our childhood—the childhood I’ve spent my life forgetting—
To get well. He wants someone to blame—for the drinking,
The drugs, the brutal fits of madness and despair. He wants
To make sense of it all. He keeps asking about the past. He asks
For instance, if we were abused. His state-appointed therapist believes
There must have been violence. Violence would be sufficient cause.
My brother needs me to remember. In his dream, he says he is standing
Almost naked in the snow-filled yard. He is small, maybe three years old, freezing,
Bruised, and terrified. Our mother pulls the car into the driveway
Bringing the rest of us home. Our father must be inside
The house. She leaves the car running, jumps out, yells at me
To put the boy in the car, and walks straight into the house. Is this a memory?
My brother wants me to tell him that this is what his wounded mind
Has been trying to protect him from.
My father spends most days in long underwear, chain-smoking
Lucky strikes and walking back and forth from his coffee pot
In the kitchen to the bathroom to the bedroom, dragging
The paralyzed left side of his body with him
Like an uncooperative Siamese twin. One of us
Usually takes the burning cigarette from his fingers
When he falls, balancing it on the edge of an ashtray as if
He’d left the room to let the dog out—or take a phone call—
And he picks it up again without a word when he comes around.
Once, when I was sitting next to him on the sofa, he fell hard against me
And before my mother could pull him off, the cigarette had seared
A neat round hole through my t-shirt, and scorched its message
Permanently into my skin. Sometimes he doesn’t even fall.
He just stops talking in mid-sentence and stares
Straight for a minute or two into the blank air until his brain
Switches back on. When I ask him to tell me what he thinks about
During those blackouts, he slaps my face. My mother tells me
He has no memory of the seizures. She says it’s as if
He’s been taken outside of time.
We were taught to say he was mentally ill, but our father
Was clearly crazy—dangerous—an American man
Who couldn’t even provide for his own. He’d had to accept
Charity—first from the church of a god he didn’t believe in,
And then from the state’s fat white hand. He believed
He was not a man. Body and mind ravaged by a childhood
Fever, he’d been betrayed by his own image. You might say
He shouldn’t have felt ashamed—of the seizures, of his hopeless,
Limping walk, of his miserable life. None of it
Was his fault. It’s true. But he was ashamed—
And so was I. And lately
