Memories of the Future by Siri Hustvedt

Author:Siri Hustvedt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2019-03-22T04:00:00+00:00

The passage in the notebook continues, but I pause at this convenient interval while Minnesota, my young self, sleeps soundly with the aid of a drug on Lucy’s sofa. She has been saved by a broom and by three women who think they are complete strangers to her but are less strange to her than they believe. If she dreams that night, she won’t remember her dreams. While she sleeps, her heart beats and she breathes in and out, and a clock in 2C ticks off the minutes and the earth moves on its invisible axis and in the morning the sun will rise and the city will get noisier and people will crowd the sidewalks and the trains. If the past is not a somewhere we can visit, then to wring truths from it is like squeezing nothing from nothing. No, the past is not a place. And, if the past doesn’t exist except in the machinations of theoretical physics and science fiction, then what are we left with? Should I say all that remains are fluctuating mental images in people’s heads that vanish with them when they die, and historical records, volume upon volume of words and numbers?

It will be two days before Minnesota realizes that she doesn’t even know the last name of the man who threw her into a bookshelf. She is a healthy girl and her cut heals quickly. But for seven nights in a row, she will wake in terror after a dream. It is always the same dream with no images, just the explosive sensations of her head against a hard surface and no wind inside her, and a malevolent presence moving toward her. When she has calmed herself, she understands that she is reliving the assault. She has heard about such experiences after plane crashes and car accidents and battles. The dream lasts a week and then it disappears. Years pass, and one night, it returns. Years go by again, and she dreams the terrible dream for a second time and then after more years, it strikes again. Three times. As far as she can tell, there is no rhyme or reason for this revenant. The ghost’s meaning lies in what she can’t know, buried in the speechless truths of her body that have no one to narrate them.

I narrate now as best I can. Thirty-eight years ago, she wrote, “I will do my best.” I will not lie to you. The memory hurts me—hurts me now—and that is how the past stays alive. It isn’t a place, but a movement, a surge of then in now. The violence of that night and the sound of a voice saying over and over, Please, no, echo across and through and in time, not my time alone. It merges and mingles with other times. Our times. The violence quickened in me before I ever saw Jeffrey, and it is here as I sit writing in the guest room only steps from where my mother is sleeping.

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