id="ub48fe099-a480-5eb6-8147-06a7bbb4bfab">
CHARLES BAXTER
The Feast of Love
In loving memory of my brother
THOMAS HOOKER BAXTER
(1939–1998)
Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be.
—SAMUEL BECKETT, Molloy
CONTENTS
THE MAN—ME, this pale being, no one else, it seems—wakes in fright, tangled up in the sheets.
The darkened room, the half-closed doors of the closet and the slender pine-slatted lamp on the bedside table: I don’t recognize them. On the opposite side of the room, the streetlight’s distant luminance coating the window shade has an eerie unwelcome glow. None of these previously familiar objects have any familiarity now. What’s worse, I cannot remember or recognize myself. I sit up in bed—actually, I lurch in mild sleepy terror toward the vertical. There’s a demon here, one of the unnamed ones, the demon of erasure and forgetting. I can’t manage my way through this feeling because my mind isn’t working, and because it, the flesh in which I’m housed, hasn’t yet become me.
Looking into the darkness, I have optical floaters: there, on the opposite wall, are gears turning separately and then moving closer to one another until their cogs start to mesh and rotate in unison.
Then I feel her hand on my back. She’s accustomed by now to my night amnesias, and with what has become an almost automatic response, she reaches up sleepily from her side of the bed and touches me between the shoulder blades. In this manner the world’s objects slip back into their fixed positions.
“Charlie,” she says. Although I have not recognized myself, apparently I recognize her: her hand, her voice, even the slight saltine-cracker scent of her body as it rises out of sleep. I turn toward her and hold her in my arms, trying to get my heart rate under control. She puts her hand to my chest. “You’ve been dreaming,” she says. “It’s only a bad dream.” Then she says, half-asleep again, “You have bad dreams,” she yawns, “because you don’t …” Before she can finish the sentence, she descends back into sleep.
I get up and walk to the study. I have been advised to take a set of steps as a remedy. I have “identity lapses,” as the doctor is pleased to call them. I have not found this clinical phrase in any