THE SECOND IMAGE THAT CONTINUED to return to Julia Brumfeld in the months and years after Mark’s troubles—it was a kind of flattening to call them troubles—was an image she’d pushed from her mind for so many years she didn’t know if what bothered her more was seeing it, or the futile and exhausting energy she’d put in to expunge it from her memory. It, too, was a simple visual image, but one that bore identifiable antecedents: bright white subway tile, a fluorescent-lit floor. On the tile, three stark streaks of red blood. The tile was white. The blood was red—when Julia allowed herself to think about it in words, it felt flat, meaningless, almost a cliché—oh, beautiful, you’ve described tile as being white, blood as being red, how evocative! Original! It could not be evoked and it could not be displaced, though it appeared as she cleaned out the basement, and again as she sat in her house in the days after Mark’s arrest. Words flattened the image, distorted and falsified it. It didn’t need words. Julia had long since accepted the clichés in her life. When she was seventeen it was as if her only goal in her life was to avoid becoming a cliché. She ran thousands of miles from her parents at great expense to her future selves to try to outpace becoming one. But after having Mark her life was a long, slow evolution of accepting and then walking inside well-worn paths and making them her own. That was parenthood itself when you viewed parenthood as an effect on the parent, not a responsibility to the child: living inside existing clichés, but lending them nuance. There was joy in it. Julia felt it every day until it was stolen from her by her own son, the responsibility for whose actions it was anyone’s but her own, a theft that began the day Mark announced he was moving home from Brooklyn and was confirmed the day she learned of his actions in that very basement she had spent weeks cleaning out for him.
Images on the other hand were each their own, original and unique like DNA, and the image was image—incontrovertible, irreducible, and tangible as the tile in her own kitchen a hundred and fifty miles south of its referent. When she imagined herself speaking it, saying words like “tile” and “white” and “subway” and “blood” to anyone—to her beloved son, because Mark was still her beloved son even if she couldn’t bring herself to visit him for months after the attack or fully understand the charges against him, and no matter how her feeling for him might shift in response to his actions she would never stop loving him; to her husband, who would recommend to her a good therapist she would never assent to see and wouldn’t be able to hear, having rehearsed the narrative surrounding the images themselves enough times that he could no longer look at them with any semblance of objectivity; to a therapist, who would analyze the unanalyzable—it was somehow more painful than the image itself. As if that was possible.
But that was the image: white subway tile, clean taupe caulking between each, fluorescent lighting, three long, thin splatters of red blood. It wasn’t that Julia could not have provided the data points, the useless facts she had sought through officious Dewey decimals or asked obsolescent Jeeves or looked up on facile capacious Google in the years after those images returned. She was six years old. That’s how old the memory was: she was sixty-seven now, she was six then, do the arithmetic. A memory older than many of her friends. A memory older than the federal agents pursuing her son, knocking politely on her door, trailing surreptitiously her car. Almost a year prior she had come home from school to find no one at her house. A neighbor came by to say her mother and father were out, they would be back—one of her parents would be back, someone would be back. But that wasn’t accurate. Her father wouldn’t be back for years, if ever. Instead he was sent to the state mental institution, known at the time in the official register as the Lunatic Hospital and in their neighborhood as the Nuthouse or the Looneybin, and though she couldn’t remember much of the long ride out Germantown Avenue until it became Germantown Pike, far past the western boundary of the city and into the city’s western suburbs into Montgomery County, past the low pastoral hills of the Erdenheim Farms and into the semi-urban realms of Norristown and Conshohocken—though she couldn’t remember walking into the immense brick edifice, or what she and her mother talked about or what music was playing in the background or what a squirrel looked like scaling the corrugated bark of a tree outside her window when they stopped at a stoplight at the intersection of Bells Mills Road, or what it felt like, or what its consequences meant when she would be raised without all the real spoils from the war, a war that had flattened her father to a mental patient and narrowed her access to all the spoils coming home so that only after she married Cal and got Mark off to college could she afford these instruments she was now being forced to move out of their autonomous space in the basement so Mark could return home—she had just a flash of white subway tile and the three thin lines of blood on it.
If she was pushed, sure—sure she could picture the brick façade, the entry wing jutting out like the snout of some great rust-red brown bear, but memory was as much the result of looking at photographs over the years since as walking in—of plugging it into Wikipedia to see it and just as quickly selecting “QUIT” on the draw-down at the top of the screen, fumbling with the mouse to make it go away though she knew it would never end, as if a memory could be quitted like the screen on a computer desktop—it was so immense she wondered if that was a perspective she’d seen it from as a child. So instead it was just: white tile, three lines of flung red. It was not a memory she would have chosen to recover or would have chosen to discuss. But in the months after her son was placed under arrest by federal officers, it began to return to her in flashes of pure image so that at times only a healthy 2 mg dose of Xanax, its acerbic bite dissolving under her tongue, or if things were really dire chewed and chalky in the pouch of her inner cheek and then feeling as it flowed sweetly into her veins relieving her of her burden, could save her from it as some inescapable, enduring present.