Post-Operation:
There was nothing special about his relationship with her.
He had just met her,
On the same day he met many others.
The first day of high school
Or middle school,
Or piano class,
And, in the same way his relationships with others transpired,
She made enough of an impression in the next ten
Or fifteen years,
To leave only faint memories.
(If memory were a solid,
Hers had an outline that receded and merged with memories of other
Unimportant items)
At the end of those ten,
Or fifteen years,
In a strange way, she started playing a distinct, albeit still relatively insignificant,
Role in his life.
Her role was: to be disliked, to
Personify “annoyance,”
Causing irritation exceeding the amount expected considering her unimportance in his
Life.
She was only a waitress at a restaurant he ate at once every two
Or three weeks.
Two years after his first visit to the restaurant he ate there
For the last time.
She served him his last meal
Smiling, as always
But he knew she was really snarling.
He never returned to the restaurant because he left the city for good.
In fact, his experiences in that city left such a
Sour taste
In his palate that he finally undertook that operation to
Selectively erase parts of his
Long-term memory.
Two months
(Or was it two years?)
After settling in the new city.
The operation was new,
Revolutionary,
And highly prone to errors.
Imprecision that,
If physical,
Would immediately force a corporal surgeon to find another job that depended less upon manual dexterity.
But a memory surgeon was a new concept,
With low expectations
– Even expectations of failure, maybe.
The girl from the old city:
The sole reason he undertook that operation.
(He was aware of the procedure’s questionable efficacy)
His memory of her clashed with his idealized vision, tormented him,
So he chose to relieve that conflict by forgetting what she really meant to him.
Part One:
He met her often during class in high school
Or middle school
Or piano class
And fell in love.
It lasted four years
From first visual contact
To her –
What is an inevitable end to any instance of love between children
– Move,
With her mom, dad, and brother,
To another city.
The duration of four years I am certain of.
After the operation his spine still shivered when he saw
Smelt (if citrus-scented)
Orange nail polish;
The reason was a mystery.
One year and three months after he met her,
He let her wrestle him to submission on top of
Her bed
And paint his fingernails,
Everyone, except the thumbs,
(She saved ¨Fierce Fuschia¨ for those big guys)
“Orange Sorbet,” sparkling, glittering,
The aroma of summer and citrus.
He acted as if he were irritated
But she knew that he could escape if he desired
And his feigned resistance was so he could retain some amount of dignity in case his friends found out.
A translucent curtain covered his memory of those
Days
And nights.
Only the strongest lights escaped the curtain’s stranglehold
– And oh how bright and white they were! –
Emanating from a happy companionship,
He was sure of that, and only that.
Interlude:
An island in his mind?
Sharpness plotted against time formed a plateau centered about the middle years,
Lucid memory maybe?
– Exact epoch uncertain, of course –
One dismal summer lacking any friend at all highlights the
Loneliness
That pervaded, salt and peppered, those middle years.
But he was more alone,
In retrospect,
Than in reality.
Maybe he should have operated on those years instead?
Those six and a half years; no doubt about that number.
Part Two:
Fuck serendipity.
To help pay for her college tuition
She held two jobs
The important one, for our purposes, was at the neighborhood bistro that he visited
– Based on the recommendation by a nationally respected food critic –
One day.
That day would mark the beginning of his memories of her that he would had to erase
With brand new, unreliable, technology.
It would also begin
His perception of her, the new older her:
Waiter
Rude
Dirty
Boring
Tarnished the pristine memory of the girl who could made him laugh, so easily, and gave him his first kiss
After the operation only a sliver of the waiter
Remained
From the two years post-reunification:
Bitchy waitress,
A title given, of course, after a date or two, and conversation,
Catching up!
Learning that she now hated everything that he loved,
Which was everything to him.
After the operation inevitably failed, the modicum of memory of her as that bitchy waitress spread out and colonized the entire two years that he spent in that city. A confusing side effect that they may or may not have known about.
She, of course, could remember that he actually only visited the local restaurant
Once.
That first time
That they faintly recognized each other – eyes immediately locked for slightly longer than they could explain, their foreheads creased into the shape of “V” –
Only apparitions from the past.
Until he read her name tag
And immediately knew it was her.
The Operation:
It was an easy choice for him
– But not in retrospect –
A beautiful memory was priceless,
Artificially – Impossible to construct, but possible to remove.
A novel operation developed using mostly tax revenue.
His most beautiful memories:
Of orange nail polish and all things associated,
That were fairly important.
Her:
The image, smell, touch of
Her, from the first day of high school
– Or whatever –
To four years after. To the day she left the old city.
Those memories were corrupted.
His smile disemboweled,
Muddy water mixed in with the
Bitchy waitress that she had become.
That association was inevitable…
So he chose to remove his memory of the adult
Her,
And leave only the good things.
Eighty eight percent of the two hundred and twelve operations, up to and including his, had failed at least slightly.
Errors ranged from temporal imprecision of a few weeks to targeting the wrong memories entirely.
The error he received was somewhere in between those extremes:
The person targeted was correct,
But instead of removing only the adult her,
The operation cleared the following:
Four months post-first meeting
To end of childhood romance
Plus
Altered
Blurred,
Some of his experiences involving her
From:
First meeting at restaurant
To moment of operation,
Such that all she became in those later years was a waiter that he frequently encountered at his favorite dining place.
But he did not forget how much he disliked that waitress.
(Heavy emotions were especially difficult for the new operation to handle)
The operators noted their latest results, discussed possibilities to improve the technique, and sent him
Home.
The doctors rarely received complaints
————–
And so it came to be that
She
– His memory of her, rather –
Came to play only a small (but bigger than what an outside observer, if only aware of the faintly tangible episodic memories of her in his post-operation state-of-mind, would expect) role in his memories,
For he had lost
Priceless possessions: all
Images,
Scents,
Touches,
From what he had tried so hard to guard,
– Not to doctor.
Into a better situation?
It is true that he was now forever lacking a specific element of
Love from his childhood,
He could not recreate orange sorbet-flavored nail polish,
(For it seems as if one cannot imagine a world as real as the memories sculpted through experience)
But all that hardly mattered,
And he could ignore the fact that he could not enjoy that sensation,
The doctors were fully aware of this loophole that allowed them to practice unobstructed incompetence
Because
Now
He could not even desire,
In the first place,
That feeling he had never experienced before.
Alex con Marla 