This is fiction. Well, sort of.
“What’s the earliest memory you have of your father,” Baruch asks me. He’s leaning over the counter in his shop, performing surgery on an iPhone battery with a screwdriver.
“I don’t have any memories of my father,” I say.
Baruch drops his scalpel. “No memories,” he lets out a low whistle. “Nothing? No good or bad ones at all? Not a single trauma? You know, even the people who at first say they don’t remember anything can usually come up with a good trauma memory with a little encouragement.”
“No trauma,” I tell him very seriously. “No birthdays, no spankings, no deaths in the family, no trips to Disney World. Just, no memories. Believe me, other people would have gotten them out by now if they could. They’ve tried.”
What I tell him is true. My father passed away of lung cancer when I was nine years old. He never smoked a cigarette in his life, but the cancer picked him for its team anyway. I know what he looked like from hundreds of photos and a few videos, and people tell me stories about what he was like now and then. But I have no memories of him from inside my own head. Nine-year-old me locked his dead father away in a vault. Then locked that vault inside another vault. And then, just for good measure, he put the key in a bottle and threw it out to sea. Not the best thought-out plan, admittedly; but then, nine year-olds are not legally kept away from alcohol, guns, and voting booths on account of their good judgment.
Baruch eyes me carefully, stabs the iPhone with the screwdriver. He’s not even trying to avoid scratching the casing. “Yours is a very serious case,” he says. “I only see maybe two or three cases like yours a year. I can’t promise I can help you. But I’ll try. Did you bring the things on my list?”
I nod and put the things on the table. There’s a green t-shirt, a set of blueprints, and a TDK cassette tape. The tape contains some audio recordings of my father talking to business associates in other countries. The shirt says “Mombasa” on it—that’s where I spent the first fourteen years of my life, and where my father spent the last third of his. He used to wear that shirt.
The blueprints are for a house in Caesarea, Israel. My father was a civil engineer, and when he wasn’t building things for other people, he used to talk about the house he would eventually build for himself to retire in. The house in the blueprints is beautiful; it’s shaped like the conch shells I used to pick up on the beach in Mombasa as a kid. I’ve never seen a house like it. And I probably won’t now, because he passed away before the first block of the foundations could be laid. Eventually, a couple of years after he passed, my mother sold the land.
The items on Baruch’s table are the last of my father’s remaining possessions. Aside from all the photos trapped in albums at my mother’s house, and the fading memories in a few dozen people’s heads, they represent most of the evidence left in this world that a man named Gideon Yarkoni ever existed.
Baruch looks at the objects carefully. He unfolds my father’s shirt and holds it up in front of the incandescent light bulb above us; runs his fingers over the fine lines of the blueprint; pulls an old Sony Walkman out of a drawer and listens to the first few seconds of side A through headphones the size of trash can lids. He touches everything very lightly, patiently—almost as if he expects my father to tap him on the shoulder at any moment and say, I’m sorry, but this is my stuff you’re messing with—do you mind?
“It’s not great,” Baruch finally says with a sigh. “But I guess it’ll do.”
He pulls out a calculator and punches a number into it, then turns it around to show me. I mull it over quietly for a few moments, then nod at him and shake his hand. It’s a lot of money to pay; but then, it’s not often one gets an opportunity like this one.
Three months later, I’m back in the shop for the procedure. Baruch has me strapped to a gurney that looks like it was borrowed from a Russian prison camp circa nineteen-forty-Stalin. I try to have second thoughts, but they take one look at the situation and flee in terror.
“Did you have anything to eat today,” Baruch asks me as he snaps on a pair of impossibly blue gloves.
“Yes. I followed your instructions and ate a full breakfast. Toast and smoked salmon. Some avocado. Orange juice.”
“What about the stroopwafel? Did you eat the stroopwafel?”
“Oh yes,” I say, remembering the stroopwafel Baruch sent in the mail. “I forgot. I ate the stroopwafel.”
“And?”
“And… it was good?” I’m not sure exactly what he’s expecting.
“Excellent,” he says. “The stroopwafel is the most underrated of all the wafels.”
Then he reaches forward and turns out my lights.
When I come to, I’m lying in a cheap bed in a dark room. I feel completely normal; almost as if I’d just had a power nap, rather than undergoing serious brain surgery.
I’m about to get up to go find Baruch when I realize I’m not alone in the room. There’s another man here with me. He’s very large and very hairy; I watch him for a few moments. He paces around the room restlessly for a while, stops, lights a cigarette. The he notices me noticing him.
“What the fuck are you looking at,” he says, and picks up something that looks suspiciously like a crowbar. I suddenly realize that this is him: this is my father. It seems the surgery was a success; I’m having a memory.
Over the next few days, I slowly adjust to the renewed presence of my father in my life. Well, “presence” might not be exactly the right word. My father is now present in my memories in roughly the same way that Americans were “present” on the beach in Normandy. It’s a full-scale invasion. He’s everywhere all the time; everything reminds me of him. When I see a broom, I immediately cower in fear, expecting to feel it across my back. When I enter the house, I duck to avoid being hit by a tennis ball or—at least once—a tennis racket. I can no longer drink a beer without being impaled by a vision of my father throwing up in the kitchen—and, in nearly the same breath, asking me to hand him another beer.
Of all the surprises, the biggest one is this: my father smokes like a chimney. In my newfound memories, cigarettes are everywhere: they pop out of his mouth, hang off his shirt, hide behind his ear. His shirt looks like it was sewed from empty cigarette cartons; his breath smells like an abyss of black smoke and stale filters.
Too late, I realize that 9 year-old me wasn’t an idiot child after all, impulsively rushing to slam shut the painful trapdoor of memory; he was actually a creative genius exercising masterful control over his internal mnemonic canvas.
By the fourth or fifth day, I can no longer stand it. I need to understand why I’ve been lied to for so long; why my entire family decided it was okay to tell me that my father was a good man and a successful civil engineer, when really he was a raging, chain-smoking, alcoholic brute who could barely hold down a construction job for a month at a time.
I call my mother up. We make small talk for a few minutes before I get to the point. Why, I ask her, didn’t you ever tell me my father was an abusive alcoholic? Don’t you think I deserved to know the truth?
There’s a soft choking sound at the other end of the line, and I realize that my mother’s quietly sobbing.
“Look, I didn’t mean to upset you,” I say, though I’m still angry with her. “I just don’t understand why you’d lie to me about something like this. All this time you’ve told me dad was this amazing guy, when we both know he was a feral animal with a two-pack-a-day habit who used to beat the shit out of both of us. I don’t know how you put up with him for so many years. Were you afraid to leave?”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” my mother says, sobbing. “Why would you make up a thing like that? Your father hardly ever drank, and the closest he ever came to beating you was threatening you with a broom to get you to take a shower. He would be ashamed of you for saying things like this. I’m ashamed of you. I’m going to hang up now. Please don’t call me again unless it’s to apologize for being a total asshole.”
She doesn’t hang up immediately; instead, she waits silently for a few seconds, as if she’s giving me a chance to apologize right now. But I don’t apologize, because why should I? My mother deserves an Oscar for her performance. After twenty-six years of blanks, I finally have crystal-clear memories of my father. It’s not my fault that he’s threatening to separate my sternum from my clavicles in most of them.
In the morning, I put on my shoes and go down to Baruch’s shop. When I explain the situation to him, he doesn’t crack wise. Instead, he looks concerned.
“I told you the procedure might not work very well,” he says cautiously.
I tell him that, on the contrary, it seems to have worked too well; there’s now no detail of my father’s appearance or behavior too small for me to avoid reliving over and over. Everything from his mastery of obscure Hungarian expletives to the construction grime he seemingly saved up under his fingernails all day just so he could share it with me when he got home.
“It’s almost like he’s standing here right now next to me,” I tell Baruch. “Berating me for not bringing in the lawnmower, or cuffing me across the neck for getting him the wrong beer from the fridge.”
Baruch asks if I can actually remember my family ever owning a lawnmower.
“Of course not,” I say in exasperation. “I grew up in a small expatriate community in East Africa in the 1980s; there were no lawnmowers there. For god’s sake, we didn’t even have broadcast television.”
Baruch nods and pulls up something on his computer. His eyes scan left to right, then repeat. Then they do it again, like he’s reading the same line, over and over.
“I see your problem,” he finally says slowly, turning the screen to show me. “Right there, you see. Here’s your order. Yarkoni, Tal. Zero Recall. twenty-six years dark. That’s you. And right here, just below you, is an order for a guy named Hal Zamboni. 20/400 recall; eight years dark.”
What follows is one of those proverbial moments when you can hear a pin drop. Except it isn’t a moment; it’s more like a good two minutes, during which I just stand there motionless and stare deeply into Baruch’s corneas. I imagine Baruch must also be experiencing a moment that feels like eternity; at the very least, I hope he’s seeing his life flash before his eyes.
“They are quite similar names,” Baruch says apologetically in response to my smoldering stare. It’s quite an understandable mistake, he assures me; it could have happened to anyone. In fact, it’s already happened to him twice before—which, he points out, only goes to show how unusual it is, considering that he’s operated successfully on at least sixty people.
“Well, fifty-eight,” he says, “if you exclude the… oh, nevermind.”
I ask Baruch when we can schedule a time for me to come in for a correction.
“What exactly do you mean by correction,” he says, backing away from the counter nervously.
Three days later, I knock on the front door of a house on the far side of town, in a solidly middle-class, suburban neighborhood—the kind where everyone knows everyone else by name, but isn’t entirely sure if that’s a good thing.
Hal Zamboni opens the door and shakes my hand. He seems apologetic as he greets me. Or maybe he’s just nervous; I don’t know. I mean, how are you supposed to interact with someone who you know has the misfortune of re-experiencing every aspect of your own traumatic childhood on a daily basis?
“I had a bit of a breakdown,” Zamboni confesses after we’ve sat down inside and he’s lit up a cigarette—holding it in exactly the same way as his late, abusive father. “When Baruch called me up yesterday to tell me about the mix-up, I just lost it. I mean, you can imagine what it’s like. Here I am, going through life with these very faint memories of a father who was an absolute brute; a guy who would beat the shit out of me over nothing, over absolutely nothing… and then one morning I wake up with beautiful, crystal-clear memories of a very different father–a guy who used to take me out for an enormous brunch at some luxury beach resort every Sunday. This guy who puts a giant omelette on my plate and grins at me and asks me what I’m learning in school.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. And I really am. For both of us.
“The weird thing is,” Zamboni says, “the worst part of it wasn’t even realizing that these memories were someone else’s. It was realizing that I had had such a fucked up childhood. I mean, you know, I always knew my dad was kind of a savage. But I didn’t realize how much better other people had it. Compared to my father, yours was a saint. Do you know what that feels like?”
“No,” I say simply. There’s nothing else to say, really; over the past week, I’ve come to realize how little I actually understand about the human condition. So we just sit there on Zamboni’s porch quietly. He smokes cigarette after cigarette, I drink my beer, and we both watch the endless string of cars roll down the narrow street like an angry centipede.
I loved reading this Tal.
I remember your Dad, his big hair, him riding around on a motorbike. I don’t remember much but that he was a pretty cool guy and a good father.
I remember us both being 9 when our dads died of Lung and throat cancer.
And of course what a close friend you became to me x
We keep many memories of you and your aba and bring them up again and again.with love and be in touch .Dod and Doda in Toronto
Great story, thanks for writing this. Feels like I just watched some hours of movie.