The Background of Your Memories

Trauma drives a young man to retreat into the world of dreams

¹
There’s never enough time. It always starts the same way, with my parents up front while I ride in back, the distant twinkling lights of an oil refinery slowly passing by to one side. At least I think that’s what it is.

The shape doesn’t stay consistent. Sometimes it looks like a city or an electrical station, black silhouettes dotted with illuminated points...difficult to make out against the passing nightscape. What I assume are mountains loom large in the background, though I can make out no detail.

Then the honking begins as we enter the city proper. I cover my ears and complain, but can’t make my voice heard over the din. Honking, shouting and the screech of tires. A bright light suddenly illuminates the silhouettes of my parents in sharp contrast...just before the crash.

It happens so quickly that if I didn’t have this dream so often, I couldn’t tell you what all followed. But by now, every grisly detail is intimately familiar. The abrupt forward lurch of their bodies on impact. The unbelievably swift, violent crumpling of the entire front of the car towards me, crushing both of them into a pulpy red mess before my eyes.

Then it starts over. On the rare occasion that I realize I’m dreaming, by then it’s too late. There’s never enough time! We’re already in the city, the honking and screeching of tires has begun. Before I can get their attention and beg them to stop the car, we crash.

The front implodes, tangled steel and shards of glass rushing towards me. My parents are mangled beyond recognition in the span of a second. The steering column collapses my father’s chest, the shattered fragments of windshield shred their skin.

It’s all too quick. A smeared, unintelligible blur of rubber on asphalt, of steel crumpling against steel. Of shouting, honking, tires screeching and my own futile cries of terror. I never realize I’m dreaming in time! If only I could warn them before we enter the city.

Honk, screech, crash, death. Honk, screech, crash, death. Like a video clip stuck on repeat that I’m trapped inside of. Honk, screech, crash, death! There’s just never enough time. The screaming! My own, and my mother’s for the split second she’s able to.

The screaming continues after I awaken, and after a moment I realize it’s my own. Drenched in sweat, heart racing, my body still convinced death is imminent. After disentangling myself from the sheets, I look over at the alarm clock.

Four in the morning. No chance of returning to sleep. So, after wiping the crust out of my eyes and firing up the VCR, I return to watching tapes. By now they surround me, stacked up over my head to either side of the television.

They were neatly packed away when I found them in a row of moldy old cardboard boxes, here in the shed. I might’ve just tossed them into the truck and put ’em in storage along with everything else, except that curiosity got the better of me.

Every other tape was just junk they’d recorded off television, much of it before I was born. But a few of them were taken on vacation. God, look at me. I must’ve been no older than three! Running down the beach, squealing in protest as mom tried to put my diaper back on.

Just like that, I was ensnared. I didn’t plan to move a cot into the shed initially, but I couldn’t pry myself away from that screen. I might’ve moved the VCR and television into the house, but I haven’t been able to make myself spend longer than a few minutes in there. The air is too thick with memories.

First the cot and some blankets. Then a portable heater to fight back the chill of late nights and early mornings spent staring at that flickering picture tube. I only go into the house to use the bathroom now, or to fix something to eat.

Pretty soon I was set up well enough in there that I stopped driving to and from my apartment, and just started living full time in the shed. It’s difficult to express why, but although I couldn’t bear to spend any significant length of time inside the house, I still wanted to be close to it.

Like hovering near enough to a flame that you stay warm, but not so near that you burn yourself? Something of that nature. Being confronted by their smiling faces, peering at me from every framed photo on every wall was difficult enough that my first attempt to sleep in the house didn’t even last an hour. I thought the shed would be an improvement until I found the tapes.

Never stood a chance, I suppose. I’ve long since stopped checking my phone. It’s not just the messages from work asking where I’ve disappeared to. Ever since my parents died, all these people I don’t fucking know have come out of the woodwork, all wanting something from me.

Sign these papers. Pay these debts. Move this, sell that, sign more papers. No idea what I’m signing either, but their stern voices make me scared not to. None of them seem aware of what I’m going through. Occasional token words of sympathy, like the contents of a hallmark card, are the only hint of recognition. Even that’s scarce.

I couldn’t have found the tapes at a better time, so sorely did I need the escape. From this mess, this burning wreckage of a life, into the world of comforting illusion. The world where they’re still alive, still laughing...just on the other side of the screen.

How many hours have I spent like this? Face inches from the glass, soaking in every fuzzy, faded little detail I’m able to given the terrible image quality. Still, if I squint, I can believe it’s a window. The most tantalizing but cruel window imaginable, which I can never open, break into or crawl through however desperately I wish.

An absolutely impassable barrier between where I am now, and where I need to be in order to go on. As if it’s someplace I can still escape to? Some part of my mind just can’t grasp it. How can they be gone? They’re right there on the screen! I can almost reach out and touch their faces, they’re so close…

It doesn’t help that all my childhood belongings are stashed in here as well. Action figures, building blocks, old game systems and comic books. Whatever they felt was distracting me from schoolwork at the time, or when they just wanted to clear out some clutter.

Nearly every item has a memory associated with it. Brief, dreamlike flashes each time I pick up some relic of my boyhood, slowly turning it over in my hands. There are healthy ways to cope. I know this isn’t one of them. It hurts, but I can’t stop.

I can get away though, now and then. Cracking open the shed door, I shudder at the sudden influx of frigid autumn air. Still dark out, but the local coffee shop opens at 4 for the sake of the poor souls who start work at 5. People who actually have a legitimate reason to be there so early.

I hardly wanted to be around other people right then, but I also had no intention of going back to sleep. So after pulling on some clothes and making a token effort to straighten my hair, I piled into my dinged up little hatchback and set off.

As I pulled up to the coffee shop, I thought I recognized a familiar SUV tucked away in the far corner of the parking lot. Sure enough, Sarah was waiting for me inside. Why do I always run into my exes when I’m groggy and disheveled?

“Why don’t you check your messages?” I winced, and considered leaving. “I swung by the house” she continued, “your car was there but the lights were out. I would’ve given up except for the calls.” She clarified that my boss called her about my recent string of missed days.

“You’re fired, you know.” I’d be surprised if I wasn’t. I asked how he had her number. “You still have me listed as your emergency contact.” It trickled back to me bit by bit. Fragmented memories from what felt like another lifetime, when the two of us sought to entangle our lives as completely as possible. It only created more work for both of us when we parted ways.

She seemed placated when I told her about the non-stop calls from various suited ghouls pushing me to sell the house, the cars, to complete this or that legal process. “Still, you can’t just cut yourself off from the world like that. There are people who care about you, who will help you deal with this if you let them.”

I can’t? Really? Sounds like a challenge. The only part of this world I still want any part of is that warm, faintly glowing screen in that dark little chamber, tapes piled up all around me. I knew I couldn’t say so without worrying her, so I went in a different direction.

“Remember how after the breakup, I just kind of floated around? Unsure what to do with my life, since I’d planned my future around the assumption that we’d still be together? The wanderings of a lost child.” She looked mildly uncomfortable, but nodded.

“I remember thinking to myself, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Over and over. I’ve never handled change very well. Small ones, sure. Incremental. But when something upsets my life in a big way, it’s a different story. Every time I realized I was spinning my wheels but going nowhere and tried to do something about it, some deep-seated part of me fought every effort to change course.

Like it didn’t get the memo. It had to be dragged kicking and screaming away from the smoldering debris of Plan A, and then only after prying its fingers loose one by one. I read something once about how the brain, like the rest of our bodies, evolved to conserve calories.

So it resists any sudden, drastic restructuring, falling back on what we today recognize as cognitive biases in order to avoid it. The proverbial old dog which can’t learn new tricks. But if it were only that, I don’t think it would’ve been so difficult to put my life back together.”

She shifted in her seat and looked about ready to interject, but I carried on. “Having done that once after the breakup, I thought nothing could catch me so completely off guard ever again. Not to the point where I flat out stop understanding life and my place in it.

I’ve been through a lot of hard times. You were there for some of them, I don’t have to tell you what it was like. But until you left, nothing else was able to fuck me up so badly that I didn’t know how to continue. Just flesh wounds. Dented but not destroyed.

When you go through an emotional apocalypse like that and come out the other side in one piece, a lot of fears leave you. Discovering that you can survive being totally destroyed like that, broken down to the tiniest, most fundamental pieces but still regenerate, inspires a sort of false confidence that nothing can ever hurt you again.

I think like most people, I have a narrative in my head about my life in which I’m the protagonist on some sort of quest. We start thinking about our own lives that way before we’re even old enough to be self aware about it. Humans are storytellers, it’s how we propagated knowledge before writing.

So when bad things happen, part of how we cope is to frame those events as pitfalls on our quest. Setbacks that the hero will overcome and be stronger for it. That usually works too, for small things. Losing your home, spending the night in jail...a breakup…”

I’d meant to stop bringing that up, but it slipped out. Sarah looked away, but kept listening. “But there are some things that doesn’t work for” I stipulated. “Really hard, cold, difficult shit where the narrative breaks down. Rape...miscarriage...the death of a loved one. Life suddenly stops being a story. As if the stage is dismantled, the curtains ripped away to reveal a bare brick wall behind the set. Life as it truly is.

I’m not going to be okay. I know it hasn’t been long enough to say that for sure, but this feels totally different from...you know. I just feel fucked up and broken inside. I feel like glass shards, thorns and poison. I can’t see a way of coming back from this.”

Bless her heart, she said exactly what I would have if our places were reversed. “I know you. When you’re hurt, you turn inward, retreating from the world. Sinking further and further into yourself. It’s fine to find temporary refuge there, but there is no permanent escape in that direction. If you travel down that path far enough, the only thing at the end is death.

If you let this kill you, it will only compound the tragedy. If they knew you survived the crash, don’t you think they’d be relieved? Don’t you think they devoted most of their adult lives to nurturing you, to shaping what sort of person you’d grow into? Now you’re going to throw all of that into a fire?”

I glanced around the room. Mercifully, because it was so early, the place was desolate. The only other customer present huddled over a laptop at the far end of the room with headphones on. If any of this disturbed him, or if he could even hear it, he gave no indication.

When I didn’t say anything for a while, she nudged a small coffee across the table. “I don’t drink coffee, but figured I should buy something if I was going to hang out here for any length of time.” I took it, savoring the warmth radiating into the cold, stiff joints of my hands.

“Yanno, you were always like this. Never wanted to ask for help with anything, even when it was obvious to me that you needed it. If you forget everything else I’ve said, at least remember that much. You shouldn’t try to bear all of this yourself.

I can’t be the only one worried about you. I can’t be the only one who has reached out to you. Take hold of those hands and let them pull you out of the pit you’re in, or else it will become your grave.” Unusually blunt by her standards. I expected her to steer me away from suicidal ideation, not rub my nose in it.

I got her off my case by promising that I’d start checking my messages, and touch base with her later in the week. When I returned to the shed, the lingering caffeine buzz prevented me from just crawling back into the cot and passing out like usual. As intended I suppose, though the run-in with Sarah left me feeling unexpectedly drained.

Weary but unable to sleep, I sat cross-legged on my cot, wrapped the blanket around myself and went back to watching tapes. This one turned out to be from a picnic. I vaguely remembered bits and pieces of it, but have never been sure whether they were genuine memories or something I dreamt.

What a surreal sensation to witness the basis for those faded, distorted memories playing out before me, filling in the gaps. I looked about five, playing in the grass at a local park as my parents poured themselves some wine.

When I looked troubled, Mom asked me what was the matter. I’d pulled up the edge of some tough black fabric commonly used in landscaping as a weed barrier. “The ground shouldn’t be made out of cloth” I muttered. She seemed tickled by it and asked what it should be made out of. “It should be made out of...ground. Shouldn’t it?”

She made some remark to Dad about my curiosity, then asked me what it mattered whether the ground is made of cloth or dirt. I mulled it over, little brow furrowed deeply, before answering. “It makes the difference of...whether anything I do or say matters at all. Whether the world is real, or fake.”

They had a good long laugh over that. To them, the sort of cute, silly thing that often comes out of the mouths of children. But I remembered that part to this day only because of the impact it made on me. It was the moment when I first started to seriously contemplate such questions.

But there was something else. Something in the background of the video that I didn’t remember from that day. Distant enough that I might’ve missed it if I weren’t in the habit of watching the screen close up.

A dark figure, spectating the picnic from within a patch of tall grass. As I watched, it began to approach. Step by step it came, carefully parting the tall grass, then making its way towards the camera. That’s when I realized both Mom and Dad were in frame for the entire video. Who filmed this?

As it drew near I could make out more and more detail. A withered old man dressed in a black velvet uniform, the boots and gloves made of black vinyl and the belt needlessly wide. A small obsidian pin adorned his collar, the buttons fastening the garment shut made from highly polished silver.

The whole time, I wracked my brain for some explanation as to how this could be on an old home video. Did someone else find these tapes before I did? Copy their contents to a computer, edit this weird shit in, then put it back on the tape somehow? But there’d been no identifiable transition from the picnic to whatever was unfolding now. It was perfectly seamless.

The old man only stopped when he was but ten or so feet from the camera. A light wind whipped his sparse grey hair about. Then he spoke. “They’re from the background of your memories.” He fell silent for a moment after that. As if I was supposed to understand?

“They’re from the background of your memories” he then repeated, gesturing slowly toward the tall grass behind him. As he walked in that direction, whoever was holding the camera dutifully followed. The old man then spread the tall grass.

Through the parted grass, I could see more distant figures milling about on an abandoned playground. Dressed in black robes, some strangely shaped helmet or mask concealing their faces. They seemed to be searching for something.

That’s when I noticed all colors had begun fading away. From bright sunshine, a blue sky and rich green grass to a muted sepia, so slowly that I didn’t realize it was happening until the scene was nearly monochrome.

In fact it was the changing of the seasons, from Summer to Winter. The trees, once lush and replete with leaves, were now bare. Twisted, skeletal branches reached up to the the cloudy winter sky. As I watched the robed figures wander, I noticed everywhere they stepped, the grass withered and turned to dust...leaving only naked soil.

Then one of them abruptly turned to face the camera. The video ended there. I couldn’t believe it, rewinding a ways just to be sure it wasn’t something wrong with the VCR. What the fuck? Has it always been here, waiting for me to watch it?

For that matter, why don’t I remember any of that from when I was little? It still seemed like it had to be a trick of some kind. Had to be, surely? Who was that man, anyway? What did he mean by “They’re from the background of your memories?”

The next tape was of a school play. I was the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. Besides the cringe fuel, nothing jumped out at me. I was about to eject it when I noticed the silhouette of a strange figure standing at the back of the stage, where the lights didn’t reach. Nobody in the audience seemed to notice. It wore a long black cloak and some large, bulbous headgear I couldn’t make out the shape of.

Now that I knew what to look for, I spotted another like him in the audience. Off to one side, obscured by the poor picture quality but wearing the same outfit and headgear. Bulbous, bone white and with a long, curved beak...an oversized bird skull.

As if realizing I’d spotted him, the one in the audience turned to look at me. Then, as before, the tape suddenly ended. I tried rewinding again with the same result. As soon as they know they’ve been spotted, it’s over. Whoever filmed these turns the camera off, or they stop the recording somehow.

I struggled to make sense of any of it, and failed. I at least knew it wasn’t simply a prank. Editing them into the audience so perfectly would’ve been a monumental task, and for what benefit? To confound me?

The next tape was of my mother singing in choir. I was there as well sitting next to my Dad, antsy as hell because of how long I’d been there. Two hours is an eternity to a kid. It was almost unsurprising when I spotted the black robed figure standing off to the side, tucked away in the shadows.

Then the choir began to sing a song I have no memory of. “They’re from the backgroooouuunnnnd of your memoriiiiieeeees” they sang, setting the old man’s cryptic words to a melody. “They’re from the backgroooouuunnnnd of your memoriiiiieeeees.”

I began to sweat. Who made this? Why put so much work into something like this only to leave it sitting in a box for however long, assuming I’d find it someday? The old man from before walked into frame, first peering at the robed figure in the shadows, then turning towards the camera with a knowing look. He slowly shook his head.

I grabbed thick handfuls of my own hair and tugged at it. Teeth grinding, anxiety consuming my mind. How? Who did this, and when? For what possible reason? Possibilities occurred to me in rapid fire, rejected just as quickly. None of them could explain what I just saw to my own satisfaction.

As before, the longer I watched, the more the scene changed. The colors were the first to go. Then the walls began to show signs of mold, wear, and water damage. As if the building were rapidly growing old all around those watching the choir, who seemed oblivious to it. The banner hanging over the stage grew bitter and yellow. The text changed along with it...to a now familiar phrase.

Only when the nearest black robed figure noticed the camera did the recording end. Why? To prevent me from seeing something, I assumed. But what? I rocked back and forth in the cot, gripping the edges of the blanket, overwhelmed by what I’d seen.

Sarah. Sarah has to see this! She’ll never believe me if I simply tell her over the phone or in person. So I texted her, something about how I’d mulled over what she said at the coffee shop and decided I really could use someone to talk to.

The text she sent in response sounded relieved. “Tomorrow’s a bit soon, I was thinking more like Friday, but I suppose I can shuffle some things around. I’m glad I got through to you. Don’t think that just because we lead separate lives now that I ever stopped caring.”

When the mania subsided, I began to wonder if I might’ve been wrong to deceive her. But I couldn’t keep this to myself, surely? Someone else had to know, and I couldn’t think of anyone else local that I trusted with something like this.

When the caffeine finally wore off and allowed me to get some sleep, it was unusually fitful. My dreams incorporated scenery from the tapes, including the rapid decay. That old man’s face kept appearing, uttering his cryptic warning.

I awoke just before noon. An impressive feat by my standards, as of late anyway. When I’m cooped up in that shed, if not for the alarm clock and my phone I’d have no idea of what time it is. My sleep pattern was the first casualty of that ignorance.

After taking a badly needed shower in the downstairs bathroom, I continued the slow process of packing everything up in preparation to sell the house. It’s no mystery to me why I’ve been dragging my feet, but that knowledge does nothing to accelerate the process.

I have to touch everything before I put it into one of the boxes. Feel the weight of it. Study it for any details I might’ve overlooked until now. These are all things my parents bought for one reason or another. Trying to work out why has become a sort of sentimental archaeology.

When someone dies, it isn’t just a corpse they leave behind. That’s actually the smallest part of their remains. The nucleus, certainly, but not the whole. Everything they did with their life which left behind some sort of tangible evidence that they existed...the choices they made, what they valued, what they were trying to accomplish spreads out from that nucleus like the spiderweb which remains long after the spider perishes.

Like a fingerprint. Or a puzzle. A baffling, convoluted mess of clues left behind which made perfect sense to the deceased, but which must be painstakingly deciphered by anyone else. Like trying to reconstruct from fossilized remains how the original creature looked, sounded and behaved.

So many papers! Filing cabinets full of them. Drawers, boxes and binders filled to the brim. Enough reading material for the rest of my life, though I’d have to first skim through to discover how much of it was personally written by either of them, and how much was just tax returns or whatever.

I’d just about gathered up enough to bind into a book when Sarah texted. I ignored it for a moment, still taking my time, reading a page full of messily scribbled notes that must’ve been my father’s. It was an itemized list of expenses for repairing a used motor boat he purchased once upon a time, but never did anything with.

When I finally bothered to check the text, she’d sent another two with irritated looking emojis, reminding me that I promised to check my phone more often. I called her and explained what I was in the process of doing when her first text arrived. Her tone softened somewhat.

“Oh, that’s...Well it’s good that you’re packing it up, I think. No good for you to keep it the way it is, haunting that place like a...I mean, that stuff will just constantly remind you of them unless you get rid of it. You don’t need to sell it, necessarily-”

I cut in to clarify that I’d begun renting a storage unit. “I found something in the shed that you’ve got to see though” I gushed. She seemed skeptical that it could be anything that remarkable and frustrated that I wouldn’t simply come out and tell her.

“It’s just something sentimental. It’s important to me, I want to show someone.” She went quiet for a moment...then asked what time she should show up. When her SUV pulled in, I’d just finished rewinding the tapes from last night in preparation.

“Jesus. You’ve been sleeping in here?” She ducked into the musty, darkened shed with visible apprehension. I patted the cot next to me where I meant for her to sit down. She hesitated, but then obliged.

“What are all these tapes?” She seemed to work it out on her own a moment after those words cleared her lips, but I filled her in anyway. “Ohhh. Oh no, this isn’t...You shouldn’t be... Fuck. I see what happened. Like a black hole.”

Accurate, except that I no longer want to escape by this point. She went on about how unhealthy all this is. How it was the worst possible thing that could’ve happened to me, like a recovering gambling addict who wins the lottery.

“This isn’t what you need right now” she urged, trying in vain to pry the remote from my hand. I let her have it, but then simply reached over and turned the TV on manually. “Watch one tape” I insisted. “Just one. You’ll see what I mean.”

She gave me a mournful look, but did not protest further. I popped in the first tape and hit play. After a few seconds of seeking, the picnic in the park appeared on the screen. I glanced over her a few times as she watched, face illuminated by the television’s faint but steady glow.

The old man appeared, approaching the camera. “They’re from the background of your memories” he said. Once more I looked over and studied her face. Eyes wide, jaw hanging slightly agape. “I know, right? What the fuck. But it gets weirder.”

She stared at the screen like that for a while longer. Then at me. “Don’t look away” I said, “you’ll miss it.” So she returned her gaze to the screen and didn’t look away again until we’d gone through all of the tapes I watched last night.

“This?” she finally said. “This is what you asked me to come over for? It is, isn’t it.” I begged her not to be mad. “You wouldn’t have believed me if I told you over the phone. I knew I had to show you in person, and there’s nobody else I can trust.”

Her face slowly contorted as she gaped at me. “...Show me what? There was nothing. The tapes were all blank.” I blinked a few times, then laughed in her face. “Alright, good one Sarah. Look I’m sorry I misled you, but like I said, you were the only one-”

She rewound the tape a ways, then hit play. As I watched, she got her phone out and set it to record the screen. After about ten seconds she stopped recording and played it back for me. A blue screen, exactly as she claimed.

I turned back to the television, still playing the last minute or so of the picnic video. Then looked at Sarah’s phone again, absolutely baffled. She heaved out a sigh. “...I guess I didn’t realize how much it affected you.”

I tried to protest, but she shushed me. “There’s nothing written on the tapes, even.” I took one of the tapes in my hands. The label read “choir practice” followed by the date, in black sharpie. Tears welled up in my eyes. Why can’t she see it? What does it mean?