‘So are you ready?’ Rachel asks. ‘To read them?’ I glance over at her open journal, in which her tight, clean script has filled an entire page, and I note that her list is already much longer than I had been expecting. Maybe five times as long as mine. The amount of ink alone outstrips the half dozen sites I’ve attributed to her so far, and I estimate that after her father’s grave, the playground, and the campus lawn, after Tunica, the hospital, and her mother’s house, there will be room enough still for ten more sites on the lines she’s filled.
Yet which ten sites? When I try to fathom them, I feel an abyss opening within me. I recall what Matt said today, about needing to find Mr. Mazoch in a fatherly space. Almost despite myself, I find that this is what I’m hoping now — desperately — with regard to Rachel. I’m actually anxious to hear the results of her list, which I would prefer to comprise solely our spots. I want those extra ten lines to hold no surprises, only sites I recognize. For every site that has nothing to do with me, or even with her in relation to me, I will feel strangely rejected.
I don’t just mean places that precede43 me, sites from before we met. There are plenty of moments from Rachel’s past that she has shared with me, and I think of these as memories that she has put in relation to me by relating them to me. Take the story of her father’s death. When she narrates this to me in bed at night, what she’s doing is putting it into play in our relationship. All the locations that this memory colligates (the hospital, her father’s grave, the bedroom that he died in) become our sites, even though she acquired them before we met. The reason she’s even sharing that memory to begin with is that she wants me, as her lover, to know that about her. It’s a biographical experience she considers so fundamental to her sense of self that I couldn’t properly love her — couldn’t know her as my beloved — without first having incorporated it into my own personal sense of who she is. The subtext of any memory that a lover shares is, ‘I want you, my lover, to know this about me, because this is the facet of myself I want you to love. When you say, “I love you,” mean by “you” the subject of this memory.’ That’s why those initial late-night self-disclosures are so important. In developing a coherent narrative of her life, the beloved ends up constructing a self for the lover to love. So I’m keenly mindful of the fact that Rachel related her father memories to me for a reason. She wants me to know and love her as the daughter she used to be: that’s one self she self-identifies as when she self-identifies as my lover. Rachel-qua-daughter and Rachel-qua-lover are contiguous — if not altogether overlapping — selves in her. As a result, any sites deriving from the daughterly period of her life might still qualify as our sites. That’s why I wouldn’t feel rejected by the presence of the hospital on her list.
Whereas if she lists other sites, from memories she’s never shared with me, I’m not sure how I’d feel. There must be millions of moments in Rachel’s past that have yet to come up in conversation, entire years of biographical material and life experience that have gone unmentioned, not because she’s forgotten about them, or because she’s hiding them from me, but simply because there’s never been a real occasion to bring them up. Yet some of these incidental memories might nevertheless be fondly nostalgic, qualifying as destinations for her in undeath. These are the kinds of sites that could be lurking on her list right now. As soon as Rachel reveals them to me, I’ll be duty-bound (should she ever reanimate) to go searching for her there. Like Matt, I find this prospect slightly disquieting. This idea that the version of the person I’ll be looking for won’t be the version I’ve personally known… that I’ll have to search for Rachel in buildings and neighborhoods unfamiliar to me, concealed from me, hidden on the dark side of her memory’s moon.
If she were just returning to a tree house or childhood idyll that she’d never thought to tell me about, or a gymnasium where, a decade ago, she practiced some sport I didn’t know she played, I might not mind so much having to find her there. But what if the site she returns to is the bedroom of a high-school sweetheart, a guy she dated even longer than she’s been dating me, and whose memory — despite her having never mentioned it — she’s apparently been cherishing the entire time we’ve been living together? Imagine if he were the secret love of her life, whose loss she’s never recovered from. What if she self-identifies more deeply as this other guy’s lover than as mine?44 What if his bedroom is on her list right now, one of the ten extra entries from her promiscuous memory? What if he is her paramour from the past tense, cuckolding me from her unconscious, such that her body will break up with me in undeath, leaving our apartment for him? Am I supposed to just stand vigil outside his bedroom, waiting for my moonstruck undead lover to shuffle back? But it wouldn’t even be ‘my’ lover who was shuffling there! The Rachel I’m dating, the ‘you’ I mean when I tell her ‘I love you,’ the self she’s constructed as a backdrop for me to project my love on, has never so much as mentioned this adolescent passion. Its memory isn’t included in the version of her I love. His name has never even come up in conversation between us. Where I’m concerned, she never dated the guy. So if Rachel returns to him when reanimated, it means that undeath has set her clock back: not my Rachel, but some decade-ago Rachel, a high-school Rachel, a beta Rachel45 who is this guy’s lover and (more to the point) this guy’s responsibility. If, in undeath, it’s Michael Furey whom her unconscious is oriented toward, then let Michael Furey go looking for her, is what I’m tempted to say, when I think about it.
But before I can say anything, Rachel clears her throat, preparing to read from her list. And in the moment before she begins, I realize how dangerous I’ve allowed my anxiety to become. I’m investing entirely too much emotion into these sites. For if I would be heartbroken to find Rachel at Michael Furey’s, how might I feel to find her on the campus lawn? To see her kneeling in the grass, as if in search of the little leaf? Surely I would be overcome with love for her all over again. And in that case, who knows what I would do? I might even make the fatal mistake of hugging her. Nor is there any doubt that Rachel — if she were to find me there — would be doomed: that joyous context would prime her to see me as alive. Clearly neither of us is prepared to encounter the other in undeath, not psychologically, not emotionally. Soon, I decide. It will have to be soon. We’ll have to do the defamiliarization exercises.
Rachel looks up at me now, with a conspiratorial grin. As she starts to read from her list, I lean over and see that she’s beginning from the top, with the very first site she wrote down today: ‘The campus lawn,’ she says.