Memory's Eraser

Memory's Eraser

Lan opens the family photo album, her finger pausing on a wedding picture. The man in black-rimmed glasses smiles brightly, his arm draped around her shoulder. She cannot recall his name.

The realization takes her breath. She has only just turned forty; Alzheimer’s should not arrive so soon.

She closes her eyes, breathing slowly, groping through the fog of memory. At last it surfaces: Chen Ming. She hates to admit it, but lately she has been consumed by longing for him. When she remembers his hand brushing along her arm, that patch of skin still prickles.

She decides on a deep cleaning, starting with the kitchen, even though she scrubbed it just yesterday. From her phone flows the voice of Sanmao’s Stories of the Sahara, which she plays on repeat. It starts from how Sanmao conquers her Spanish husband’s stomach with Chinese food to her secret peeks at desert dwellers bathing. By the time Sanmao turns her shabby rental into a beautiful home, Lan has forgotten the first story. Still, the voice comforts her: she is not alone; she can still remember some things.

She tries hard to hold on to the beautiful. She opens diaries, albums, her phone. Each time she recalls something, she writes it down. While wiping the stovetop, she remembers the thrill of her first kiss with Ming. Then the sourness of her first morning sickness surges back. Before these slip through her fingers like sand, she rushes to the table and jots them in her diary. In the round fishbowl, a goldfish peers at her. She calls it “Fish.” That way she will never forget. They say goldfish have only seven seconds of memory; staring into its eyes, she feels an odd comfort.

Lan does not want to remember everything, only the good parts. Her psychiatrist, Ling, recommends mindfulness training, aerobic exercise, and stronger antidepressants. “If the decline continues, go to neurology.”

Lan was diagnosed with depression in high school. While trying for a baby after marriage, she went off her meds. Back then, her lips curved upward without her noticing. Fish opens and closes its mouth at her, bearing witness with its short memory: happiness really existed.

Fish can distinguish dream from reality. Sometimes Lan cannot. When she wakes sobbing in the night, pillow soaked, fingernails stabbing her thigh, she doesn’t know if it was nightmare or her body recalling the past. Her body remembers all her emotions. How did her husband leave? Did she really have a child? The C-section scar crawls like a centipede across her belly. If there had been a daughter, why was there no trace in the album? Could she trust her memory?

She commands her body to recall cradling a baby. Instead comes the image of her own bloodied body being wheeled into surgery. Childbirth is supposed to be pain and joy together, yet she remembers only despair. Boundless despair.

She rises and returns to the kitchen, scrubbing every corner with a rag, erasing every speck of dust.

At night she moves the fishbowl to her bedside. Together they listen to the soft voice narrating Sanmao’s adventures in the Sahara. Fish circles once in the bowl. When the narrator reaches the part where blood runs down Sanmao’s legs, Lan stuffs the blanket into her mouth to muffle her sobs.

“You need to allow yourself to fully experience loss,” Ling says. “Pain unfelt does not vanish; it only returns in symptoms, in the body, in repeated ties.”

She cannot.

She cannot revisit the car crash: her husband’s bloodied forehead, the daughter whose heart stopped twenty-seven days before birth, cut from her body. She cannot bear reliving the moment of losing them both. She must forget. Without that accident, she would now be in Ming’s arms, their daughter asleep in the crib. Happiness within reach.

The thought chokes her.

She inhales slowly, counts to four, holds for seven, exhales. She imagines a giant eraser in her hand, rubbing away the painful memories, the shavings dispersing with a breath. She recalls her daughter’s first kick, warmth flooding her body; recalls pulling Ming’s hand onto her belly, the moment the three of them were bound together. Her body gradually unclenches.

Fish gazes at her, mouth opening and closing.

Tomorrow morning, she will write down the memory of that first kick, the moment she was a happy woman, with a loving husband and an unborn daughter.