“And it’s really convenient for them that 9/11 happens right after Bush becomes president,” Sam is saying, with the half-ironic smile of the conspiracy theorist.
“So what about the WMDs?” I say. Sam gives a derisive little snort. I don’t think I’ve ever used the phrase WMDs before tonight, and it sounds phony and stupid. “Obviously the president is an idiot. But that doesn’t change the fact that maybe they’ve got these weapons.”
Maya is unruffled. “That’s what UN inspections are for,” she says. “Look, this is the same thing the government has always done. They create these villains to scare us, and then they exploit that fear.”
I don’t want to challenge her, but the prevailing and totally unearned confidence sets me on edge. There’s too much we don’t know, and even if we had access to all the classified intelligence, the situation involves too many interdependent variables to allow anyone to predict outcomes with any confidence. “I’m not saying we should invade,” I say. Cynthia and Sam are shuttling their eyes back and forth. “I just think we need to be wary of getting into a little festival of certainty. Can’t we admit that we don’t really know?”
Maya sets down her knife and fork. “You can reserve judgment as long as you like,” she says. “And, you know, congratulations, you’ve won the gold medal for scrupulous empiricism or whatever. But meanwhile you’re abandoning the battlefield to the other side.”
I give a little nod of concession and get up, shaking with disloyalty, to clear the plates and fetch the ice cream. There’s a silence while the air clears. Political disagreement is rare in San Francisco in 2003: the areas of consensus are just so vast.
“Do you write about this stuff for the paper?” Cynthia asks Maya, bringing the subject into a personal register and thus defusing it.
Maya shifts gears easily. “No, I do local-government stuff,” she says. “Sometimes it feels a little irrelevant, especially these days.”
Standing at the counter I force the scoop into the overfrozen ice cream. Sam mentions an acquaintance who writes a nightlife column for Maya’s paper, and they compare notes. Sam appears to treat the world as a set of interconnected play structures to which she has total access: gender, fashion, clubland. The recovery movement and its therapists and sweaters and self-help workbooks must seem passé to her. A historical shift has taken place while I wasn’t watching, and among young radical women the emphasis has shifted from personal oppression to self-definition. A few years ago, sexual abuse was the only thing on daytime TV. Now it’s anthrax attacks and shoe bombs and chemical weapons. So what happened to the sexual abuse? Maya’s talking now about her editor, her assignments, things I’ve heard before, and I imagine her as a helpless child, her father creeping down the hall to her room. I picture him as the Hooded Claw from the Perils of Penelope Pitstop cartoons. I have trouble envisioning the abusive act itself. Although of course it happens. And she’s never said he was actually inside her. Her memories aren’t clear. This line of thought is about to destroy everything. There are weapons, hidden out in the desert, or else there aren’t. The babies ripped from their incubators a decade ago in Kuwait, left on the cold floor to die, were a fabrication. These blurry sense-memories that vanish and then return, like lost sailors to their families’ doorsteps: him pressing up against her in the night, his hands on her body, his breath on her face. How sure can she be?
8
There are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
WHEN I WAS SEVEN, Nicky’s mom dropped me off at home and I knew that my parents had been waiting for me, although I’m not sure how I knew this. My mom said, “We’re getting what’s called a divorce.” I knew the word — it had happened to Dennis Yoder’s parents, and everyone was really quiet around him for a few weeks — but I wasn’t sure what it meant in practical terms. My father was teaching evening classes and often came home after I was asleep. I don’t know that I was sure who he was or why he lived with us.
It was explained that Dad was going to move into an apartment in the neighborhood, and I was going to visit him there sometimes. I didn’t understand why I would be visiting him. Would it be like when we visited grown-ups who didn’t have any kids and there weren’t any toys there? I asked about that, and my dad said he’d get some toys. He sounded tired when he said it, and I thought that the toy store must be really far away from his apartment.
And then my mom said, “This doesn’t mean we don’t love you anymore. You understand that, right?”
It hadn’t occurred to me that what they were saying had anything to do with their love for me. They didn’t want to be married to each other, and having been around their marriage I didn’t blame them. But the idea that they didn’t love me anymore got stuck in my back teeth and I couldn’t get it out with my tongue.
The most painful ideas are the hardest to dislodge.
When we get home from Cynthia’s I pretend to be drunker than I am, gulping down a big glass of water, tossing my jacket onto the couch. I say I’m tired too many times, and then we go to bed and I lie awake for seven hours.
Maya can wake herself at the time of her choice. At six minutes to seven she slips out of bed, fully alert, like someone moving from one scheduled activity to the next. As she dresses I lie still and imitate the even breaths of refreshing stage-four sleep. Her ablutions seem to take an inordinately long time. Finally the apartment door swings shut and I roll onto my back and look up at the ceiling and with no enthusiasm begin to masturbate. I used to masturbate with a dry hand, and then I discovered the advantage gained by lubricating your palm with saliva, and now I can’t remember how I used to do it without chafing. Perhaps I began with delicate little strokes, and for ten years I’ve been incrementally increasing the pressure in the interest of a more stimulating masturbatory experience, and now I flail at myself with vigorous pumps that would have frightened and overwhelmed me a decade ago. When this feeble attempt at self-soothing is finished I shower, make coffee, sit down on the couch, turn on the TV, and look back and forth between CNN and the gray view outside until at last I pick up the laptop from the coffee table.
If you were to make a map of the web pages that turn up when you Google the term recovered memory, you’d see two clusters. One represents the recovery movement, which advocates for people who believe they’ve been abused. The other represents the false memory movement, which defends people who claim they’ve been wrongly accused. There are lots of connections within the clusters, but very few between them. Both sides have tragic stories to telclass="underline" traumatized children molested by trusted adults, innocent parents caught up in witch hunts. Some recovered memories have been corroborated; some have been disproved or recanted. Most of the websites are made by amateurs, and their clumsy designs make both sides seem crankish and untrustworthy.
I’m left with this: Maya believes her father did terrible things to her. In the past few years she’s begun to remember him doing them. But what does remember mean? The images appear on her mental screen, or the feelings of terror and violation arise in her body, and they’re tagged as memories, as traces of things she once experienced. But how did they get tagged that way? The brain is complicated. There’s an experiment: You take two brothers. The older brother says, Hey, remember the time we were at the mall and you got lost? The younger brother says, Huh, I don’t remember that. And then the next day he says, Oh yeah, I kind of remember. And then the day after that he says, I was looking at the Transformers in the toy store and I turned around and everyone was gone. None of it ever happened.