Avery pinched the Polaroid between his thumb and index finger, the corner creasing from the tightness of his grip. With his other hand, he absentmindedly flipped open and closed the lid of his chrome Zippo. The photograph was of him and his grandfather, a grizzly old mountain man with a coonskin cap and a shine in his eye that reflected his love for the wild unknown. Though Avery’s grandfather had been a long-time recluse, he had come down from the mountain when Avery was born to pay his respects to his kin. When he laid eyes upon Avery, though, he fell so deeply in love with his grandson that he never again retired alone to his mountain home. For years, Avery had created scenarios based on the photographs he kept in hopes that the spark of his imagination would catch to the tinder and set his memories ablaze. Although he had struggled with this for years, his grandfather remained in a time that Avery could not remember.
Avery’s first memory was of waking up and forgetting. Everything he knew. Everything he had known—gone. Four years old and completely disoriented. Tabula rasa. A blank slate. He pulled himself out of bed, placed his bare feet on the shag carpet, wiggled his toes, captured the yarn between them, tugged, felt each individual fiber of each individual thread of each individual staple. He gulped air like a fish out of water; he knew the ratio of the ten gasses trapped in his lungs; he could feel his red blood cells expanding with oxygen, spreading throughout his entire body. His fingertips glowed. His lungs burned. He felt himself for the first time, simultaneously within himself and without himself, like watching a film where he was the star, knowing both worlds at once.
He floated out of his room and down the stairs. He saw his mother in the kitchen and she poured him a bowl of cereal. He knew her, but he did not know anything about her. He saw his father in the bathroom, inspecting himself in the mirror, adjusting the knot of his tie. Avery knew him, too, but he did not know anything about him either. When his father emerged, he ruffled Avery’s hair on his way to kiss his wife on the cheek. That’s my dad, and that’s my mom, but it’s like I’ve never met them before. Avery’s head flooded with uncertainty.
“I’ll see you after work,” his father announced to both Avery and his mother. His voice seemed distant. It was almost like Avery was swimming in an aquarium, listening to the rumble of his father’s voice through the trembling water. But no one had bothered to clean his tank, and now everything was fuzzy.
Three days passed. Avery questioned everything. Was he dreaming? It felt like a dream. His actions seemed unreal. He was a marionette; when his hands reached out to twist doorknobs or when his feet carried him across thresholds, it’s not because he willed himself—he was being controlled. When he looked at the clock on his nightstand, the numbers were garbled; time had no meaning. It was dark outside, it was light outside, but that’s all. What Avery found most puzzling, though, was the framed photograph on his nightstand—a two-year old Avery sitting on the shoulders of some Jeremiah Johnson. They were in the woods, and the colors were muted and dim except for where they stood, in a patch of light shining down from a recess in the canopy of the trees. Avery had no recollection whatsoever of this man, who looked like he’d rather be scalping the poor boy, not playing with him.
By the end of the third day, vanishing just as quickly as it had arrived, Avery’s obscure perception disappeared. His conscious mind had dominated, leaving his subconscious locked in the heart of a babushka doll.
When he had awoken that morning, Avery’s life had flashed before his eyes, and it was only at this moment, twenty years later, that he remembered what he had forgotten. He could remember the warmth and darkness of his mother’s womb and how much more comforting it was breathing in amniotic fluid instead of air, and the faint red glow of sunshine through his mother’s skin and blood, and the shape of his father’s large hands making shadow puppets against his mother’s stomach, rabbits and dogs and eagles, and then those gentle hands just holding on and trying to reach out to something so intangible yet so real, and the sound of his father’s passionate “I love you” meant for two, and how Avery before he was Avery kicked with excitement and recognition at the sound of his father’s voice, and how he could feel the wave of his mother’s laughter rocking him like an earthquake as she giggled, “He’s kicking! He’s kicking! Feel!” and how he could have stayed like that forever; he remembered how being born was like a VHS tape being ejected from a VCR and how the room was so much colder and brighter than what he was used to; he remembered the first sting of oxygen in his lungs and he remembered his mother’s shrieks of pain turning into happy laughter and then turning into a lullaby, a soft coo like a dove as he heard his name for the first time, Avery, as he wrapped all five of his miniscule fingers around only her index finger, and he remembered the pain of circumcision and his umbilical cord drying and falling off and being able to distinguish orange from red and the first time he laughed and the first time he called for his mother “Hum” and saying his first real word and then being able to string two together and asking questions and understanding more than he could say. And, then, it slowed, and he could remember being tall, sitting on his grandfather’s shoulders with his grandfather’s strong, calloused hands wrapped tightly around his thighs so he wouldn’t fall as they traipsed along John Muir trail, hearing his mother call, “Turn around!”, and the click and shudder of the Polaroid camera capturing the moment, freezing time.
When he was four, Avery had woken up and forgotten everything. His subconscious mind had gone into hiding, but, now, twenty years later, it had all come rushing forth like water thundering from a collapsing dam. An icy and bone-crushing torrent. It smothered his body and drowned his mind and left him in a watery tomb, submerged and forgotten, but still alive.
What if you could cheat death? All of our lives, we are taught to look to the future, but what if that’s all backward? What if the key to the future is tapping into your past? His subconscious had awoken from its dormant state, mingling everything he had forgotten—everything that had been reality—with every fabrication that he had made throughout the years. The borders between reality and imaginary had been erased, and he was no longer Avery who defined his life around perceptions of the past; he had become Avery who had swum to the deepest chasms of the ocean and seen himself reflected in the core of the Earth. He was Avery who had seen God in the love of a mountaineer. He was lucid; he was real. He was his own puppeteer.
“Life is just a memory,” Avery breathed. He snapped open the lid of his Zippo, lit the edge of the photograph, and watched as the ink bled, bubbled, and finally disappeared.
