The Memory Palace

On long car rides, my dad would challenge me with a game—or what he called a game—that he'd experimented with in his childhood. Here's how it worked: Beginning with my current thought, I traversed my mind to find my way back along the path that had brought me there. The object of the game was to see how far back I could go—how many connections I could recall before reaching that void where thought must have been but was now shrouded. 

I had thought of our dog Bandit after thinking about llamas, since Bandit was a Lhasa Apso, a word that in my mind still begins with two L's; the llama emerged upon the dome of my head when I scratched the still somewhat bald spot where a llama had once munched on a bit of my hair; the urge to touch my hair was preceded by a quick glance in the semi-reflective window, which I had gazed out after noticing a sleek sports car. Before the car was a thought of the highway stretching out across California—indeed an unbroken stretch of pavement from Canada to Mexico—a thought which had arisen from a consideration of the map of the United States, which followed the brief and embarrassing mental reenactment of the time I cheated on my third-grade state capital test—going back into the classroom to find my paper in the stack and quickly swap in Albany, some far-off place that certainly seemed like it couldn't live up to New York City. 

My father's memory has always been impressive. That he's spent his life working on computers and databases seems hardly surprising given the preternatural lookup function that his mind calls upon when remembering obscure anniversaries or distant relatives or a seemingly endless entourage of ephemera about the year in which this or that thing occurred. That he repeated the same jokes over and over again ("Geology... rocks!") seemed curious to me when I was growing up, since I knew that he must have remembered making them before. Now that I do the same, I wonder less. 

I've often wondered, though, if my father carries the same burden of melancholic memory that I've acquired—or if perhaps that mixture of recall and sorrow is something my mother and he created together as a gift peculiar to me. In Brideshead Revisited, Sebastian muses: "I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember." Meanwhile, I feel that I've done the opposite: In a largely happy life, I've left breadcrumbs of sadness to remember where I was ugly and miserable; I've erected high towers to see from any vantage point the places where I felt most low, where I could have dug forever and never found a remnant of joy. 

Like many people, my collection of childhood memories evokes a feeling more similar to watching a 1950s slide show than scrolling through comprehensive camera rolls that grace modern smartphones: infrequent and precious stills that must stand as representatives for days, months, or years or my life. A brief clip of a lost baseball card that a teacher had gifted me; a circle of students outside my preschool talking about a TV show that I did not know; an anonymous rose sent to me in middle school whose origin I never discovered; a smoke-filled bowling alley I fled; an Olive Garden where I sat on the bench in the wispy cold air, waiting for my family to finish eating amidst a bustle and clamor I could not bear.

This nearly vacant vacuum of memory became my home again during the brief period that I was taking antipsychotics for severe anxiety. The miniscule round yellow tablet was embossed 5 & 67, and when I took it each night, the elixir made sleep seem more like death and life feel more like sleep. The memories from that time are, like childhood visions, merely episodic—not the sort of long, cinematic, and interlacing dramas that characterize most of my other adult memories. I've tried to write about that period of my life, but it often feels more like invention than recollection. 

There's a curiosity about memory: We're able to remember just enough to know we can't remember it all. In the archives of that lost year, there are faces with burnt edges and names left in the wrong drawer, stories disconnected from anything that came before or after and feelings removed from their sources. If I sit in stillness long enough, I sense that I've marshaled adjacent memories such that I can outline the contours of what I'm looking for ("We've got you surrounded! Come out with your hands up!") but when I finally storm the compound, I find only a singular void. 

I remember that period of my life very clearly as the time that I can hardly remember anything at all. What remains—throwing pine cones against the tree in the backyard; a game of chess against a man perpetually clad in pajamas; flying kites with Regina in the Rose Garden—is a shadow of a dim time when the heavy past collided too fiercely with an uncertain future, erasing the present in the melee. That is, if I'm remembering correctly.