Present Day 
Present Day “IT’S NOT GOOD NEWS,” I SAY. ALICE SEEMS ACCUSTOMED to bad news—she betrays no shock or surprise.
I tell her the particulars of Dr. Korsakoff’s diagnosis and ask if she has any questions.
“No, not really,” she says.
This puzzles me. I have nothing but questions. The ice cream orderly is again lurking at the entrance.
“What’s that guy’s problem?” I say, the harshness of my voice surprising me.
Alice looks around. “Who?”
I point toward the hospital doors. “The ice cream man.”
She looks at me like I’m a child throwing a tantrum. “He’s not an ice cream man, Martin.”
“I know that. He looks like one, though. He keeps coming out here and giving me dirty looks. We should go.”
“Since when is staring at me his job?”
Alice begins to answer but thinks better of it. We’re on the verge of a disagreement, and she seems to want to step back from it as much as I do. I don’t know why I’m acting this way. There’s an anger inside me, one I don’t know what to do with. I will try harder to keep it in check. Especially around Alice.
We’ve been meeting regularly every few months or so since I came out of hiding. After that first meeting, where she tracked me down, it took me a while to work up the nerve to tell her my story. I couldn’t tell her everything—I still haven’t told her everything—but what I did say to her made me feel better. Just being around her seems to bring me a measure of peace. She’s like me—she keeps to herself and isn’t particularly forthcoming about her life. I enjoy her, though. She’s the only link I have to the life I never lived. She’s asked me a lot of questions about what I’m like, about my family, about why I am the way I am. Attempting to answer her has bonded us.
We watch the traffic lights on the street change from green to yellow to red and back to green. I can tell she’s thinking, and I’m content to leave her to it.
“Do you know why I keep coming to see you?” she says, her voice so soft I almost can’t hear her.
She’s here for answers, I imagine. As I am the man who killed her father, she wants to know why, how. I want to tell her she was better off without him, that he wasn’t anyone she’d have wanted for a father. It’s hard to tell someone that their father was a horrible man. No, not hard. It’s cruel. The truth is not the salve people make it out to be.
“You want to know what happened,” I say.
“When I was about eleven,” she says, “my mother took me to the beach. I’d never been before. We lived with my grandparents, who were not the sort of people who did such things. For a week before we went I asked her every day if today was the day, and finally her answer was yes. We took three buses, loaded up with towels and swimming suits and whatever else, it doesn’t matter.”
I haven’t been to the beach in years, but when I was growing up, there was a swimming pond that all the town’s kids would go to on hot summer days.
“When we got there, my mother spread out our blanket and said I could go swimming, but I didn’t want to. Something felt wrong. I sat on the blanket and watched everyone else, kids building sand castles and swimming and running around, adults joining them or sunning themselves or talking. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, why I wasn’t having a good time. My mother gave up trying to make me and sat reading her book.
“I want to be able to tell you a story about seeing a happy family with a mother and father and feeling sorry for myself, or maybe one where I went swimming and had trouble and some stranger had to save me because my father wasn’t there, but nothing like that happened at all. I’d brought a small rubber chicken, a toy I was fond of, and at one point a dog picked it up and ran away with it. I didn’t do anything, just sat there and watched it go.”
Her neck is red and her shoulders are raised. She’s looking off at a space where there isn’t anything to see, they way people do when they’re trying to remember something.
“I don’t know what I expected to happen. But I know I expected something—anything. And nothing happened. There was an absence of event.”
An absence created by the loss of her father. An absence created by me. I wonder which is better, a parent who never fully existed or one who has haunted you through your life. Is the ghost of a real parent more or less than the imagination of an invisible one?
“What was it like? The absence.” I am afraid of her response.
She thinks before answering. I like that about her.
“It’s like your life is a mystery. There are pieces of you that you don’t know the origin of. They may be yours alone or you may be continuing a long history. There’s a voice in your head and you don’t know if it’s yours or a stranger’s.”
“I’m sorry.”
She smiles. “I know. That’s not why I came today.”
My head is buzzing. That damned tinnitus. She doesn’t seem to understand that she doesn’t know what really happened. I need to tell her. Maybe this will help her understand herself, or the voice in her head that might be her own. I’m making a mess of this.
“There’s more, Alice. I haven’t told you the whole story.”
“I don’t need to hear it,” she says.
Another confabulation jumps out at me. I don’t know why certain false memories are so persistent. It’s a familiar one. I am sitting in a sparsely furnished room by myself. Above me a bare lightbulb hisses and ticks. There is a pile of boxes in the corner waiting to be unpacked. I am drunk, can taste my dry mouth. I have at some point been crying, but at this moment I am still. I am dazed by loneliness, futility, and the sense that while there was nothing I could have done to avoid ending up as I am, it was still my fault. The telephone rings, and I know that it is Clara calling, but I don’t answer it. I can’t. I sit there and feel myself get smaller and smaller, until I am certain I will vanish.
Now, recalling this moment that never happened, I want to make myself answer the phone. It doesn’t matter why Clara’s calling. Even if it is to scream at me, to berate me for all my failings and transgressions, it would be worth it to hear her voice. It doesn’t matter that it’s only my imagination.
“The past is the past,” Alice says, and I remember where I am.
I’m not sure how to answer her. Nothing is in the past for me. Because I remember it in the present, it’s in my head right now, though it’s always reconstructed. And reconstruction can’t be trusted. I can’t be trusted. None of us can.
Houdini’s audience saw an elephant disappear. That’s what they remembered. They’d remember it moments after it happened, weeks after it happened, and years after it happened.
But Jennie the elephant never went anywhere. She went up a ramp into a box. The box was rotated a quarter turn and a curtain was drawn back, revealing an open circle with bars on it. Through this circle they were able to see the inside of the box and the backdrop on the stage behind the box.
Houdini was employing a trick that magicians had been using for a hundred years. It was a mirror. Jennie and her trainer walked into the box and stood behind an angled mirror that reflected the opposite half of the box and the background. They saw half an empty box and its reflection. That’s all.
Because the audience saw Jennie go into the box, and they saw, or thought they saw, an empty box, what they reconstructed was a disappearing elephant. Something they knew to be impossible but nevertheless believed. It’s what they wanted.
I know what I saw in Alice’s father, what sort of man he was. He was a fool. He was a womanizer. He thought he loved his mother—what he really loved was how she made him feel about himself. When she died, he grieved not for her but for himself, for the loss of that version of the man he deep down knew he wasn’t. He wanted people to think he was a brave man. At his core he was a coward. He betrayed the woman who loved him, and he betrayed himself. He was not fit to be a father. She might know all this already. But I have never told her. And before I am gone from myself, I need to tell her this, from my own mouth, in my own words. A confession.
“Alice,” I say, “I have to tell you what really happened. It’s important.”
“I don’t think it is.”
If we have our three times, if there is the past, the present, and the future, then what purpose does the past serve? In the present we experience all sorts of situations, all of them requiring something of us. We need to react in a way that keeps us whole, keeps us from happily racing out into traffic. Without some sort of past, the present would paralyze us.
But does the past change who we are? It may change how Alice feels about her life, but not necessarily for the better. I could tell everyone who saw the elephant disappear in front of them at the Hippodrome that it was just a mirror and some clever physics, but would that make their lives better? Would the reconstruction of their reconstruction be more truthful or of more value to them? Because at the end of the past and the present is the future. It never really comes but it’s there all the same, this supposed place we will someday get to. But the future is either our own death or the existence of magic.
My mind is beginning to buzz again, and I’m in danger of becoming overwhelmed.
“Martin?” she says, placing her hand on my arm. I flinch and she pulls it back.
“I don’t know,” I say. My hands are shaking, and I’m speaking in a voice I haven’t used in a long time. I can’t figure out what I need to say. “I don’t know what it will do. But soon it will be gone. I can’t keep these memories safe, that’s what Dr. Korsakoff has told me. And this story, it’s your past. It’s all I have to offer you.”
“Okay,” she says. “I understand. Go ahead.” There’s that face that is so reassuring.
“I don’t know where to start.”
She takes my hand. Her fingers are soft. “Start at the beginning.”
I take a slow breath and let the buzzing in my ears subside. I will tell her everything as I know it to be, and will not leave anything out. She may not like what she learns, but I will have to accept that as it comes.
“It is a constant struggle not to become the thing you hate most,” I begin.