What The Dead Remember

I dig around the crevices of my comforter. My phone is in there somewhere. When I finally find it, I’m greeted by the time. 4:07. Morning. Hence my being in bed. The 4th night in a row I’ve woken exactly at this time. Had there been any other inkling that my studio apartment is haunted, I would believe in supernatural intervention in my life.

Can ghosts even haunt apartment buildings?

This time I was trudging through the streets of Stalingrad. By the uniforms and emblems of the men around me, I can deduce I’m Soviet. The explosions all around me tip me off that it’s during World War Two.

I’ve had this dream before. Last Tuesday if I’m remembering correctly. But I’ll check my journals to be sure. And add another tally to the number of times I’ve had this dream this year.

My psychiatrist calls it “Transmemorial Dream Disorder.” Some two-bit exaggerated moniker. But I haven’t had the chance to tell him how I really feel. I assume he came up with it. I don’t expect many people are walking into doctors’ offices proclaiming “when I dream, I have other people’s memories.”

But that wouldn’t be right either.

What I’m really experiencing is my own memories, in a way. Memories of my past selves. Past lives. Sort of a reverse reincarnation. A de-incarnation perhaps.

My dreams in Stalingrad always start and end relatively similar. I’m in a bunker. Four or five other soldiers are in there with me. Some reloading their bolt action rifles. Others seated in the dirt, backs against the wooden pilings that form the walls of the bunker. In a trance of extreme exhaustion and mentally weighing how much life is truly worth.

I don’t yet know my name, but I’ve concluded that I must be an officer. Most of the time, a scrawny, withered younger soldier approaches me, yelling something in Russian. I don’t understand it. I being my present self. My past self understands it naturally and replies to the kid with his own order, before the young soldier sprints through the bunker, back the way he arrived.

After this interaction, I say something to my men around me in the bunker. Something of encouragement, it seems. I’m pounding a fist into the air and the seated men jump to action. I grab my own rifle and begin walking through the bunker. I make it about twenty yards to the next station and before I can begin talking to the officer in charge, a bright yellow flash erupts, my vision goes blank and I’m jolted awake.

Sometimes.

Other times I fall immediately into another memory. As if I’ve walked through a portal. My lead foot planting into another time and place. My trailing foot still where I came from. A flash of light and suddenly I’m a new person.

This time I’m a boy. Clearing plates and empty beer bottles off a bamboo table. American GIs are talking loudly all around me. They pay no attention to me. Engrossed with half-naked Asian women and seduced by an opium high.

I’ve assumed this is Saigon. Again from reasonable conclusions of my surroundings.

In this one, I carry an armful of dishes through a beige beaded door. Emerging in a stifling hot kitchen. I walk through another beaded gateway into a room of more woman in various states of undress. I pay them no mind. This is second nature to me. This has been my life for some time. Through a third door, this time heavy, wooden. It swings open to reveal a bustling alleyway. Beggars missing an eye or an arm hassle more American service members trudging through the streets on R&R.

On my right is a large water basin and I soak the plates and glasses before drying them off with a towel draped over my shoulder that I’m only just now noticing. I observe the bustling that is erupting in the streets.

An older man bursts through the wooden back door, yelling something at me in, I’m assuming, Vietnamese. I nod and hastily finish drying the remaining plate before throwing the towel back over my shoulder and running back through the door of the bar, brothel, boom-boom house, whatever you want to call it.

That’s where that one goes blank.

I stare up sleepily at the exposed ceiling, begging for a reprieve of the insomnia that follows. But after a minute of meditation I feel that my effort is futile. I roll over, pressing play on the next episode of “Family Guy” on my phone and prepare my excuse to call out sick from work that day.

***

Dr. Vickner’s office on the eighteenth floor of a converted apartment building in Philadelphia is a drab color palette of beiges and browns. Possibly to reflect a sense of neutrality on his patients. His other patients. Our relationship lost any sense of neutrality years ago. The parts of the walls that aren’t blandly painted house floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with DSM-5 professional manuals, Greek and Roman philosophicals and of course, Sigmund Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams.” I’ve wondered numerous times while sitting on his faded leather couch whether he’s read them, any of them. He says he has but I’ve never once heard him reference anything meaningful from these texts.

He sits across from me, bent over a coffee table, three binders worth of notes littered across it.

My eyes glance to an aqua and gold ombre spine. The words “The Power of Now” drip down the edge. My mind flicks to the night when Vickner tried to kiss me. On this very couch. A glass of red wine in each of our hands. We had been conducting an impromptu hypnotherapy session. As I pulled away at the last moment, my eyes clicked to that book spine, now forever associated with that moment.

Not that it was a bad moment. Just a moment that appeared in the wrong place. At the wrong time.

I begin today’s session with my latest synopses of my memories of Stalingrad and as a Vietnamese brothel house boy. But Vickner doesn’t want to talk about older dreams. Not in the slightest. He’s interested in a new one I had. You could hardly consider him my psychiatrist anymore. We abandoned the formalities months ago. Once he was convinced that my “dreams” were much more than what they seemed. He’s a good psychiatrist, skeptical at first. But his flaw is a belief in the supernatural. And once we had verifiable facts of what I was seeing, he jumped in with both feet.

My newest one has revealed itself to be much more morbid than the others. There is something about death that carries these memories through time and space to me. Most, if not all, are the result of the untimely removal of the soul from its corporeal vessel. I have no doubt that even though my memory of the Vietnamese boy ends before he re-enters the brothel, a moment not shortly after, he is met by a VC mortar during the fall of Saigon. Or finds himself on the wrong end of a drunken Army man’s 1911. I simply haven’t unlocked that moment in time yet.

Curiosity is added by the fact that this is one of the few memories in which I’m female.

“Take me through it again,” Vickner asks. “Where are you when you enter this memory?”

“It’s dark. Nighttime. But more likely around midnight or early morning. I’m in a field. Not a field. More like a vast lawn. It’s manicured. Cut short. It slopes downhill and I’m stumbling trying to control the speed I’m walking. The liquid in the shallow coupe glass I’m holding is sloshing over the rim.”

“What else do you see?” Vickner asks.

“I’m walking down the hill, towards a river. There’s a dock with a modest boathouse adjacent to it. I turn around. Behind me is a lavish mansion. Lit up in golden lights. I can hear jazz music echoing off the marble columns. And a crowd laughing. It’s a party.”

“When I turn back around to continue down the hill towards the river, my eyes blink and I lose the memory for a moment. Like a blackout of sorts. Or a gap in which the memory is not strong enough to connect. I never see how it happens that I end up with my back pressed against the pine boards of the boathouse. I can feel the weathered splinters scraping the exposed part of my back. There’s a man now. A few feet from me, standing at the base of the dock. I can hardly see his face. The only light is the moon and stars shimmering off the water. But he’s standing with a sense of pride. A sense of authority. His light wool suit is absent of audacity or gaudiness but there’s a sense that it’s handcrafted, custom made, expensive.”

“And he says nothing here?” Vickner presses. “There is no hint as to who this man is? Are there any identifiable marks? A scar? Does he carry a cane?”

“No. Nothing. It’s too dark. I know for sure he doesn’t have a cane. His only distinguishable trait from any other person from that era would be that he has long hair. Like shoulder-length long, black hair. I’ve never seen a picture from the twenties with someone with hair like that. It’s uncouth yet attractive in the same way.”

“I roll my dress up my leg and pull a cigarette and lighter from my garter. I light the cigarette and it goes blank again.”

“Keep going,” Vickner asks in a pressuring, impatient tone.

“That part never changes,” I say. “The next time I’m in the memory, we are in the boathouse. He is on top of me. My back scraping against the wooden planks. He kisses my neck. His rough hand caressing my cheek.”

“My eyes blink. A long, dark blink.”

“When I reopen them, his hand is no longer on my cheek, but around my neck. The other rising to meet its counterpart. His glove-like hands intertwined around my throat as he gently squeezes. I only saw his eyes before through the dim light and still only can, but the look of compassion has been replaced by numbness and brutality.”

“He squeezes harder. I feel my legs spasming underneath him. My feet, free of his weight, kicking out violently in any direction. He squeezes harder. And the memory goes blank.”

Vickner is seated, leaning over his notes scattered across the coffee table. His elbows resting on his knees. As I finish the story, he leans back in the armchair, removing his wire-rimmed glasses, placing one of the arms in his mouth and chewing it softly.

“You know what I’m going to suggest, don’t you?” he says.

“I have an idea,” I reply. My body goes cold. My armpits and hands begin to moisten. “You want to hypnotize me and send me back there.”

“Precisely. But that does not mean I’m not concerned for your safety.” Vickner leans in again. His eyes plastered to the turtleneck collar of my sweater. “Show me again.”

My hands shake as I reach for the collar.

Slowly, I begin to shed the fabric from my neck.

Vickner releases a heavy sigh.

My neck is red, sore and bruised. Tattooed completely around it are palm prints, two thumbs intersecting around my windpipe.