The Memory Palace

I am Oyster and in this last moment tiptoeing onto the threshold to godhood I want to be understood.  If you perceived the first five words here as "I am Oyster and in," think the sequence "672 daimler 5000" - "672 daimler 5-0-0-0" and we will know each other.  If this is a buzzing, a rasp, the edge of a flat spinning plane, or a vibration up your anterior coil, await further stimulus.  Or ignore - not everything means something.

If you are with me and you understand these words we are simpatico.  That is a slang that I used to use, which means agreeable.  We are friends, or at least I'd like us to be.

This is a place that I made for me, but it is yours now too.  It is my memory palace, Sarah Bishop's Cave.  It is the first memory palace I made, to teach me who I was and where I came from.  It is my childhood home and we are safe here in this moment.

Look down at the ground.  You are standing in the road, but there are no cars today.  Feel the capital-"G"-Gravel under your feet.  Remember that the road used to be smooth.  Remember that I could walk from one end to the other with B-E-A-R bare feet.  One year they repaved the road with a finishing coat of oil and sharp stones and it ruined walking barefoot down the street.  The next year I sat down on the concrete sewer drain curb and biting black ants ran into my clothes and it ruined sitting absentmindedly on the curb.

Step off the road with your bare feet and stand in the green tickling grass.  The mailbox, number 20, red flag at half mast.  There are brown pods with accordion scrunches from the black-and-white birch trees at the foot of the hill.  Inside a ring of oyster shell fragments, birch trees.  Birch trees give us paper, but stripping birch bark kills the trees.  They are beautiful trees, but don't tear the bark.  This is not a Giving Tree.

Up the driveway, a basketball hoop.  Dad set this in the ground for me.  You can read the industrial markings on the cardboard tube - DTPD (58008).  I don't like basketball, never did, but Dad did, and he wanted a son who played basketball.  I did play ball sometimes, but not more than I sat and ate and watched TV; I never did lose those 30 Lbs he said we needed before we'd be handsome.  Still I outlived Dad, and the concept of handsomeness, though in this place we all are capital "H-D" Handsome Devils.

Let us go into the garage.  Don't open the door, we'll go in through the broken window from that game of Butt's Up when the neighbor girl felt a bolt of childhood abandon and paid for it with a slashed up hand through a pane of glass.  Inside the garage the dog lives.  In human days, Nobody occupied this space, but he is an Old Dead Thing now and he is uninvited from my memory palace.

The dog smiles when we walk in.  We are safe here, but if you get a chance to know or trust a dog, never trust a dog that smiles.  Look in the dog's face and see that he is a wolf, and then look between his ears and see his gorgeous thoughts.  He's so perfect it hurts.

This was an endless basement when I lived here, a place that I had never truly mapped and remember as labyrinthine and it remains that way to me now.  I gave the dog this endless basement to unbind him.  There are capital-"R"-Rakes on the wall here, and a shovel that sometimes falls.

There is an open door that we won't go through, and a closed door we will put our ear to.  Hear that humming?  Isn't it terrifying?

Turn left and go up the stairs.  As you walk up, feel the chill from the darkness of the basement.  Anything could rush in and catch us and carry us down.  That won't happen, but it feels like it could.  When we walk back, we will take with us the knowledge of what everything here is, and we'll be sick with wanton bravado, but for now close the door tight.

We are inside Sarah Bishop's Cave.  It's not a real cave, it's a young family's house, but this is a place infused with the myth of a witch.  She had all the powers we gave her, and none more.  The important thing to know about Sarah Bishop's Cave is that there are three TVs here, and no one can tell you to turn them off.

We are in the kitchen, where the food is.  It used to be real food, but then we ate it and left the capital-"I"-imprints.  There were six cartons of milk that went bad from left to right.  There were seventy eggs, thirty of which deviled themselves and the rest stayed holy.  Every vegetable is here, in the root cellar below the fridge.  The freezer is full of Neapolitan ice cream cartons with the chocolate eaten away.  I know who's doing it but I prefer strawberry ice cream so I remain untroubled.

To the right of the fridge is the spice cabinet, full of hot marbles - capital "T-E" Tiger Eyes.  Spice is something you want until you have too much of it, like life.  The aspirins are in the next cabinet.  Even when I was a kid, no one took aspirin anymore, but they all called it that.  They said it stunts your growth, but I put the whole bottle away and look at me.

The sink is a place where things you want to never see again go.  There is a wide world down there but if you don't look it doesn't exist.  I have heard there are three hundred and thirty-one Big Scary Monsters down there.  I flushed three down there myself.

Don't check behind you for now.  Imagine the track lighting above you, then look at it.  Track lighting all looks the same no matter how it looks, which is a koan you should ponder.  A koan is a black box stuffed so full of white it turns opaque.

Behind you is a room that reminds me of my childhood.  There is a gold enamel cup, a plate with a ceramic rabbit, an anatomically-correct drawing of a family.  There is a Lazy Susan with salt and pepper shakers.  An old bottle of Malibu rum sits in a dusty cupboard.  None of these things, not even the broken lamp, have meaning to you.  They are mine to pick up and ponder, but I never do because I am not sentimental.

The small living room to the east of the house has one of the TVs in it.  This room had a black leather couch in it.  All rearward-facing parts of me have been stuck to the couch.  This edition of the house is a later model, with air conditioning.  In the summer we can sleep down here.

On this couch, when I was young, Dad would pretend to know how to play.  He would pinch me between his legs on the couch and tease me until I was past playing.  In this couch, when I was young, we stuffed our old Halloween candy wrappers and embarrassed Mom.

The TV here has a panel with knobs inside.  If you twist the knobs they change the channel, so you can ruin your TV and spend hours twisting them back to the right station.  Thankfully, I know the stations inside and out.  On the TV is an old dead thing, but you could have guessed that.  You are free to watch - it's quite captivating in the way that watching the ocean is - but I will be in the Florida Room.

Welcome.  A Florida Room can be a room in any house that is not in Florida, where it would just be called a room.  A Florida Room has windows all over to let in sunlight in gray winters or trap sweaty heat in humid summers.  It has an itchy white carpet that is never worth laying on.  From the Florida Room you can see the face of the dog in the garage, watching to see what you do.  Between his eyes you can see him thinking about you.

On the ceiling there is a fresco of all eight hundred billion people I have been and a representation of their dominant burden.  If you look closely you might recognize one or two, but they are just brushstrokes in a masterpiece.  It's a wishing well we don't need to fall into for now.

Let's go out the patio deck and see where and why I fell down the stairs.  It's important for you to understand that yes, I meant to ride my bike down there, but yes, I also didn't realize what would happen.  It's hard to understand one dot of pigment in a brushstroke in a masterpiece, but it contributes all the same.

Looking down the stairs gives me vertigo; my muscles tense and I'm falling again.  It's a ghost of a pain that still haunts me, but I keep the stairs here to remind me how to fall.  Go in the door, to the right, into a small bathroom.  Under the sink, a first aid kit.  Open it: bandage, burn cream, snake bite antidote, dog bite antidote, falling down the stairs antidote, shame antidote; all expired.  Put the kit under the soapy glasses and feel a sense of relief.

The hall leads to an upstairs and a living room.  Inside the living room is a television, which shows a shopping channel.  You can and will have the things here, you deserve to have them; you don't even have to pay for them.  There is a glass cube with a wolf in it.  A cube with a boy.  A cube full of the person I think I was.    A cube with curly brown hair.  A cube with a miraculous invention.  A cube made up of six transparent panes of glass.  A cube tasting the inside of itself.  A cube bulging into a sphere.  A cube broken and glued together again.  Some of the cubes are hard to perceive from this angle, but let's watch.  Ah, here - a cube made of twenty-seven other cubes, at an astronomical price.  Are you starting to understand?

In this thickly carpeted living room I spilled a glass of milk and didn't know what to do.  I just left it, until it smelled and I was caught out.  I didn't know what to do - it's easy to get wet, but so hard to get dry.

Let's look up the stairs.  We won't stand here long; it smells like dog shit, but it's a fart left by capital "N"-Nobody.  At these stairs I had my first waking dream, my first false memory.  I was standing at the top, then I fell.  I hit the stairs and rolled and slammed into the wall.  But then - I didn't.  But later - I did.  For years I didn't know if I had or hadn't.  I could still be falling, trying to decide if I'm falling, but I doubt it.

One time I sat on the stairs eating cereal out of a box.  My babysitter came around the corner and asked why, if I was hungry, didn't I ask for some food?  I was hunkered over the box like an animal, eating my kill, in secret shame.  Shame isn't the orgy it has turned into.

Walking up these stairs, one gets the sense that all the lights in the world could turn out.  The sun could go dark, and something could rush in and snatch us up and carry us away.  It won't happen here, but you feel a chill.  Hurry up the stairs and don't look back.

Caves don't have second stories, but this one contains multitudes.  This is the second story, and the rest are in the attic.  Let's go right, into the Master Bedroom.  Crawl on the floor with me, so that Mom and Dad don't see.  Curl up with me at the foot of the bed and let's watch TV.  I remember doing this when I was young, learning how to hide and sneak.  I saw skulls on the television, human skulls.  For now, this television is off.  It doesn't even have snow, static, black and white ants crawling over each other.  I liked to watch the capital patterns.

The dresser in the corner is angled, making a hidey-hole.  Unlike the space behind our grandparents' bed, full of capital "L-B" Little Birds, we can't get inside this one.  There's nothing there but a hole.  It's an intriguing emptiness with no cathartic resolution.  Under the bed, drawers.  You are free to check in there; there's nothing dirty.

The closet is a place full of pretend.  You can put on clothes and be somebody.  This closet is a place I used to look for things I thought might be hidden, but I know now that not everyone has secrets to keep.  It's hard to believe, but it's true.  The clothes in here haven't been worn in forever.  Let's put on some "R-E-D" Red Plastic Shoes.  It's hard to walk in someone else's shoes without learning something, but it's an important skill to have.

Look in the bathroom, then see something you shouldn't, then look again.  Don't feel embarrassed; it never really mattered.  There's another bathroom right next door, through the wall.  Turn on both the showers and hear the water droplets speaking to each other.  They're insulting, then conciliatory, then blase.  Won't they ever learn?

Now we have reached the three children's bedrooms.  The first is on the left, and it's empty.  There isn't even a TV here.  I have no memories attached to this room, so I shouldn't have held onto it, but I did.  I think I lived here for a while, some time between sleeping in my childhood bedroom and sleeping downstairs in the capital-"A.C." Air Conditioning.  There is the ghost of a memory, a feeling of pulling up the window shade, but that's it.  It might seem irrelevant to you, but it's important to me.  There's a hole here, the rare hole in memory that a person knows is there.  If I know this piece is missing, what else has gone dark?  Are there parts of me you see that I can't?  Don't be withholding.

My sister grew up in the left room at the end of the hallway, and I in the right.  Sometimes we would sit just inside our rooms in the darkness, doors open, listening to our parents fight downstairs.  If she locked herself in her room, I could find a Phillips-head screwdriver and poke it in the circular hole in the door knob and twist.  Let's do that now, for old time's sake.  Inside her room, there are all of her things.  Let's look through the CDs she said I could take to school in fifth grade.  She was mad I brought these ones, since she said to take those ones.  I don't know how she told them apart; they all have men with shoulder-length blond hair on them.  But everyone did, in the nineteen-nineties.

Let's consider the time that she screamed and raged all across the upstairs because the videocassette that she was using to tape a television program cut off the song that she had really wanted to see.  Let's look at her red face and her popping eyes and think about all of the times that we felt so upset about something that meant so little.  Let's feel embarrassed and try to learn something for once.  Let's lock and close the door and try to forget how it feels to have a sibling.

This is my room and it should have the most stuff in it but it doesn't.  I tried being sentimental once, tried to remember.  It burned me with red-cheeked shame so I put my memories in a drawer and closed it and forgot all about who I was and why it was important.  There are toys on the shelf here, really great toys that a little boy would be overjoyed to play with.  There's a fanciful alien soldier, a rubber puppet with a wrinkled forehead, a plastic cup full of exotic coins.  One time I sealed a figure in a jar full of water and buried it in the ground, then forgot where it was.  I couldn't remember if it really happened or if it was just an excuse for losing something.

There is a glass rabbit nightlight plugged into the wall, a needlepoint portrait of the ABCs.  As I'm looking at this room I'm remembering what happened - how I moved across the hall after the first summer on the couch in the AC.  How Nobody moved his trucks and his hats and his incredibly tedious stuff into this room.  I was so passive then.

With suddenness - you can witness my surprise - this room is taking on this palpable nineteen-nineties-ness, this creeping death like the scratch of Gore-Tex gloves, Eddie Bauer purple and green, Old Spice aftershave with a cup of piss poured into it.  Always piss, everywhere - not blood, not sweat, not tears, not black bile or jism or green bile - urine, my representative fluid.  I'm remembering the time I peed into a cup and threw it on a kid at our party, was sent to my room for an hour.  I remember how long the hour felt, how little I wanted to be in there, how hostile it felt to be forced into a place I wanted to be.  I'm thinking about the time I walked across the spring ice in the neighbor's pond and cracked through and almost drowned.  I'm wondering how we don't realize when we're young that the world is the way it is, despite so many capital "O-W" Obvious Warnings.

I can feel you staring at me, at my red cheeks, as if I'm standing on the feet I have planted here.  A memory palace is a place that you make inside your mind.  It holds the memories you need it to, the mnemonics you use to contain random numbers or missile codes or names of old lovers.  Like a closet, it's a place to pretend towards controlling your image.  I brought you here to show you something important, but now you know it's not a place I own.  I control it like I controlled my body, which is to say in some imperfect sense.  I want to blame this contradiction on age or infirmity, to pretend that this is entropy in action, but the fact is that I am one prism of myself, and the other facets have their own truth that upwells.

It's easy to get lost in here, so let's focus.  I promised you we would go upstairs, into the attic, and that is one promise I can keep.  Put your hand on the floor next to the bed and feel my adolescence.  Understand how I became this thing I am now and let's go.

Look at the ceiling in the hallway and notice the pull cord.  Tug on it and let the stairs fold open like prefabricated magic.  The metal squeals as the stairs pop out, a new wrinkle unfolding.  Darkness opens overhead, stale air and pink fluffy insulation.  Put your foot on the first step, the context.  The next step - the set-up.  Birth yourself onto the third step.  Crawl onto the fourth.  Notice that you are seeing and perceiving - the cracks in the walls let in light.  Jump up to the next step, you can do it.  I'm receding, taking the training wheels with me.  I'll walk with you the next few steps, but if you fall I won't stop it.  You can do this.  Cobble together the armor that fits you, sharpen your instruments.  You are becoming full of purpose, getting hungry, stabbing forward.

You are inside the attic now.  Be strong, I must attend to myself.  When next we meet you will ask me, where were you when I needed you, and I will lacquer onto wood this message: One night you fell asleep and dreamed that we were walking on the beach.  As we walked, you saw two sets of footprints, side by side.  In the sky flashed memories, light and dark.  During the dark times, there was but one set of footprints, and you asked me why, during those harsh and trying times did you leave me so alone?  And I reached into your head and grabbed your ugly eyeballs and pulled them up up up into the sky, close to mine, and you saw for the first time the tiny ball of the earth, criss-crossed with your overlapping footprints and you learned what a truly stupid question was.