Memory Degenerates
Our memories are a strange thing. On one hand, they are unreliable: an error prone, biased, compressed representation of what actually happened. On the other hand, they are all we have to go on, are in some sense more true and real and integral to who we are than any facts that actually happened.
We swim not just in the flood of our perceptions, battered by instantaneous sensations, but also in the narrow stream of our working memory and the broader sea of our long-term recollections.
We write the narrative of what happened to us into our memory, editing it for clarity, brevity, consistency. Sometimes just for dramatic effect or to make it flow better. It tells the story of who we are and how we got here.
It should be terrifying that something so unreliable, so fragile, so malleable, so faulty, is basically all there is for us, outside of the strobe of exactly what our senses are picking up this millisecond. But usually it’s not. It’s all we know and we take it in stride.
It’s only when faced with unusual circumstances — finding out we misremembered something we were convinced had happened, experiencing the confusion of déjà vu, trying to retrace our steps after a night blackout drunk, watching an elderly loved one lose the thread to dementia — that we can recoil in horror at the true state of things, and recognize that we are utterly at the mercy of our memory.
The Degenerate has two stories that cast this fact in a new light and give him, and maybe us, reason to ponder what it all means. At the moment, he’s off doing whatever degenerates do in their spare time — degenerating I presume — so I’ll simply relay the stories as he’s told them to me, perhaps dramatized a bit, and ponder with you the questions they raise. He tells these stories earnestly, with utter conviction, and I believe that he’s not making them up. But how we should interpret them is another question, and he and I have had many discussions trying to work it all out.
Remarkably, despite the fact that his stories highlight the fragility of it all, of the underpinnings of his reality, he doesn’t react with the horror you might expect, but with something more akin to what you might see from the gracious target of a prank. I’m still trying to figure out why.
Birthmark
The Degenerate tells me that later on, on the morning that he wrote what happened at dinner, he was drying off after a shower and noticed in the mirror that his birthmark — a small, slightly darker kidney bean above his left hip — wasn’t there. It was faint, but he’d had it since birth (obviously) and you could see it easily if you looked in the right spot. He was confused. Puzzlement turned to alarm as he remembered what happened at the end of his first ever k-hole the night before, where he couldn’t figure out which slice of space and time he was supposed to return to and ended up picking one at random.
He twisted in the mirror for a while, trying to find it, thinking maybe it was farther around his back than he remembered. But no luck. He let the absurdity of his alarm push it out of his head and went about his day, returning to feeling refreshed after the events of the previous night.
When he got home later that day, still slightly bothered by it, he asked his wife to look for him, to see if she could spot the birthmark that he had somehow misplaced. She laughed at him, “What do you mean? What birthmark?” He said the one he’d always had, above his left hip. She looked and said, “Well, I’ve never noticed it before and I don’t see it now. Are you sure you have one?”
Now slightly more alarmed, he thought back to his memories of the mark. It wasn’t noticeable enough that he would see it every day, but he remembered its shape and color, remembered noticing it in the mirror every once in a while as he dressed, remembered looking at it as a child, bejeweled with drops of water, when he climbed out of the swimming pool, and, yes, remembered lying in bed with his wife early in their relationship when she first noticed it and traced it with her finger.
He couldn’t figure it out, couldn't make sense of it.
He went on with his life – there wasn’t much else to do – but every once in a while he would twist in the mirror again, looking for it. He asked his wife a few more times and, perplexed, she would search perfunctorily to appease him, and shake her head, “Still not there.” He called his mom and asked her about it, and she said she didn’t think he had a birthmark (and maybe he should go to the dermatologist if he had found something). He told a few people about it, about the k-hole and the missing birthmark, and they laughed along with him, thinking he was pulling their leg.
About a year later, the day after another k-hole that ended with similar shards of a fractured multiverse, maybe his third or fourth since that fateful first one that put him on the path to degeneracy, he was putting on his belt and saw – right there above his left hip – the familiar bean shape, ever so slightly darker than the skin around. He ran to his wife and lifted his shirt, twisting and pointing above his hip.
She looked at him quizzically, “Your birthmark? Yeah, what about it?” He didn’t know what to say. “It’s… it’s there!” “Yeah, so? Isn’t it always?,” she replied. He stood there, mouth open, for a bit before slinking off, defeated.
Interrogation
A couple of years later, the Degenerate was in the habit of journeying to inner space once every month or two. He’d sometimes do it in his office, alone late at night on his couch, sometimes in a hotel room with a friend.
He describes many of these trips as being composed of short vignettes, scenes that would play out in his mind’s eye, often seeming like he was being shown or taught something. But he started having a recurring one at the end of each journey. A short scene that would play out right as he was coming back to reality, that would fade away as he opened his eyes to take in his real surroundings.
The scene always unfolded the same way. Initially a frozen tableau, his body sitting naked in a strange room, a blond woman in a robe, standing over him. His consciousness enters the scene, observing it from a vantage point off to the side, but sliding sideways towards his motionless body. When it reaches his head, he blinks, now seeing through his eyes as the scene comes to life. He is blinded by the lights shining brightly in his face but can see the silhouette of the woman, now questioning him angrily, shaking her finger in his face. He can’t make out her face, just the blond halo of hair framed by the spotlights, or figure out her question, or what she wants of him. He tries to speak, but slurs a bit instead. He blinks quickly, trying to make out his surroundings – a weird room, maybe a cabin on a ship, is he on a cruise? He squints his eyes closed, hard, willing them to adjust so that he can figure out what’s going on. But when he opens them, he’s out of the k-hole and back wherever he was before it began.
Over the course of 13 or 14 months, this happened every time he took a journey, maybe 5 or 6 times in all. Always the same, always at the end, always being interrogated. He told some friends about it, wondering what it meant, since so often the other vignettes seemed to have a message. Some speculated that the woman was his wife, who is blond, and that it was his subconscious’ way of bringing up their deteriorating relationship and her frequent anger. Maybe, he always said. They did go on a cruise on their honeymoon…
Then one night, he was in a hotel suite with a friend, listening to music and, well, being degenerate. His friend went to sleep and he took a shower before going to sit on the couch in the dark to do a little more ketamine. He fell away, mind filled with the usual sequence of wild vignettes. After a time, as expected, the recurring scene began, now accompanied by a little wistfulness as he knew it spelled the end of the voyage.
He slurs in response to her, as he always does, blinks and squints his eyes. But when he opens them, he’s still in the room, bright lights still blinding him, woman still standing over him. He blinks a few more times, wits returning but confused by the unexpected continuation, and recognizes his friend, her blond hair framing an angry face, demanding to know what the hell he’s doing. He looks down and sees he’s naked, his towel fallen to the floor before he’d managed to sit on the couch. His friend had flipped the lights on to look for him when he didn’t respond and found him sitting naked, motionless and unresponsive on the couch. He looks around the room and notices for the first time, from this well-lit vantage point, the nautical theme of the decor, the curved wood paneling with stainless steel grommets, the white fabrics with blue trim.
He realizes that his recurring vision was of this moment. But it didn’t make sense, he’d been having them for over a year. How could he have seen this before it happened? What in the world was going on?
After he’d told me these stories the first time, he would occasionally bring them up and we would sit around speculating on what they meant. Neither one of us prone to mystical thinking, we would try to come up with rational, scientific explanations.
No, he didn’t actually return to the wrong shard of the multiverse where the only noticeable difference was his missing birthmark. No, he didn’t actually live there for a year with copies of his wife and parents that had never known him to have one. No, he didn’t finally find his way back to the right one, where everything was (seemingly) the way it was supposed to be, including his birthmark.
And no, he didn’t actually see the future six times before finally getting to play out the mortifying ending to the interrogation.
Much more likely is that he dreamed or imagined it all, but, under the influence of the drug, he somehow wrote it to his memory as real. That’s the only thing that makes sense… right? And he admits as much.
But he struggles to actually believe it. They feel so real to him, like the events unfolded just the way he told them, his remembered confusion spanning months at a time, entwined with memories of all the things that really, provably happened over those months. The scope of the delusion confounds him.
And he’s perplexed by when the imagining and rewriting is supposed to have happened. His friends remember him telling them about the recurring visions of the interrogation, remember speculating that it was his wife. Did he come to in the hotel and immediately rewrite his memory of those recurring visions, to make them conform to his surroundings? Or did he imagine that the hotel room had nautical decor and that it “matched” the visions more than superficially? Sometimes he talks about going to look for that room again, to see if it’s real.
And with the birthmark, he says he gave up trying to figure it out a while ago. Because, he says, it still happens occasionally. Every so often, every year or so, he returns from a sojourn in the ketaverse and things are different: sometimes he has a birthmark and sometimes he doesn’t. And when he doesn’t, he’s never had one. And when he does, he always has. He’ll shrug and laugh and say to me, “It’s a mystery…”
Last time I saw him, he didn’t have one. And he never has as far as I know, at least since he’s been telling me this story and lifting up his shirt as proof.
“Yeah,” he’ll say, eyes twinkling, “but when I do have one, you always say it’s been there every time.”