The sky is steely and grey, like the underside of a pan or fogged glass. The world looked the same in each direction- grey of the sky above, grey pavement below and glassy reflective silver of the buildings surrounding him on each side. The city’s really just shades of grey, blending into one another without color barriers. Even the people fading to blandness, fading to simplicity so that laying here on the sidewalk, he could’ve been floating in the sky or deep in the ocean, or maybe he could’ve been dying. He’d like to think death was more exciting than all this but you have to take the cards you’re given. The grey around the sides of his vision started to fade into black, the easily recognized blackness of sleep, slipping into forgetfulness. It was a familiar journey but one that scared him nonetheless, one he fought against endlessly. In these last moments of conciousness he was fighting, struggling to hold on to whatever semblance of identity he could, the way you keep a loved one’s clothes long after they died. He was a nail-biter, a chain-smoker, a hair-twirler, a human. Above all he was human and that, at least, he knew. So he melted into a world of grey, becoming himself a nondescript section of the greater whole, a puzzle piece flipped over to expose nothing but it’s brown cardboard underside.
***
“Jamais vu,” Hillary whispered in his ear, “is the opposite of the more commonly known Déjà vu. Déjà vu, in which you do something but feel as if you have done it before, whereas with Jamais vu you feel as if you have never done the things you are doing before, everywhere is new, everyone’s a stranger.”
“Why does no one ever mention that one?” he asked her, voice barely above a whisper. He didn’t need to whisper, the dorm room was empty save for the two of them, but somehow this seemed like something he couldn’t say out loud. The room smelled like pepper and Lysol and the rosemary perfume that Hillary had inherited from her mother. It was a small room, no bigger than a closet, with nothing but a bed in one corner and a desk pushed up against the other. Hillary liked to joke that if she lay down with her feet against one wall her head could push up against the other, and like all jokes it was based somewhere in the truth. Hillary was a large girl. Not fat, exactly, just tall, with broad shoulders and long hair that reached down to her waist, so the size of the room seemed especially ridiculous next to her. Of course, none of this was what he considered that night, curled up on the bed where it was warm and safe and there were blankets, listening to Hillary whisper obscure facts in his ear. He liked the facts, they made him feel protected, like there was something he knew about the world, something solid and concrete, something that wouldn’t change from day to day. “Everyone always thinks they have Déjà vu, why does no one ever think they have Jamais vu?”
Hillary tipped her head back against a pillow and thought for a long minute before she whispered, “Maybe it’s because people can’t decide how they feel about it. If everything you’re doing is new and fresh maybe it’s less of a curse than if you’re doing everything for the second time. Maybe people are just so used to Jamais vu they hardly notice it anymore”.
“Funny,” he mused, “these people so afraid of doing the same things over and over are the same people who don’t want to die.”
“Maybe it’s to be expected,” Hillary answered, “all humanity is, is one giant contradiction”. Then she reached across the bedside table and grabbed a pen, beginning to draw the clean concise letters across his back.
***
“What you have to keep in mind is that we’re all a part of the evolutionary process,” the woman droned on and on, pacing in front of a classroom full of glassy-eyed students. They were listening, she told herself every morning that they were listening to her, to what she had to say, but when she was being honest she knew that Philosophy and Evolution wasn’t a very popular lecture. She knew that their notes were mostly doodles, her presentation mostly filler allotting them graduation credit just for tolerating her. Recently it had become a sort of game she played, to make her lectures as technical and challenging as she could, maybe just to entertain herself. And her boyfriend too, he liked watching her dance around the kitchen singing words like “autotrophic eukaryote” and “Drosophola malanagaster”. “We are all improving day be day over the people who came before us,” and that’s when she saw it; a hand, just one hand, raised in the back of the classroom. She paused and looked at the origin, finding it to be a boy who went by Daniel. A boy she had been warned against luring into class participation. As soon as he was enrolled in her class the university had informed her that Daniel lived day to day with very little memory of the day before. Something in his brain prevented him from fully developing long-term memory. It wasn’t a freak accident or a birth defect, just luck of the draw. And really, isn’t being born just kind of like buying a ticket in the lottery? He had reached in and felt around for the ticket that seemed like a winner and the one he pulled out happened to be a lucky winner- no past, no future, just the right now. So it was with great hesitancy that she pointed at the hand of a boy who she was almost certain would not know who she was or who he was or possibly even why this room was full of people. Of course, this was her own variety of a lottery- reach in, rifle around, chances are 1/400 he’ll be coherent.. Go.
“Well, I just wonder,” he asked softly, his eyes unfocused, his arms looking heavy on wire thin shoulders, his whole body was wirey, and rail thin, skin and muscle barley stretching over a wide bone structure. He might’ve been beautiful once, but she wouldn’t know from looking at him now. “I just wonder, how it is, then, that we still haven’t quite caught up with all the technology we created” and the whole room went silent.
***
“Memory is a faulty thing,” Hillary said softly. It was another of those nights, the quiet nights, when her facts were deep and her thought process winding and none of it made too much sense but all of it was interesting. The room was still the same, still small and barren but it smelled differently this time. More minty, more fresh, less and less like Hillary’s homey perfume smells, more and more like a maid cart or the underneath of a kitchen sink. “We all treat memory like it’s a picture, a photograph that we can draw on whenever we feel like it but it isn’t. You only really remember something like a sixteenth of the things that happen to you, and even those things you don’t remember perfectly, they’re more like fuzzy old photographs that you squint at, trying to decipher the faces and expressions of people you feel like you might know but you’re not quite sure. I envy you that,” she said, speeding up as she got towards the end, like she wanted, needed, these thoughts out of her head.
“Why would you envy me?” he asked her, turning so he could see her profile as she stared at the ceiling, a sharp nose sloping down on either side into thin, small lips and a high forehead. She wasn’t beautiful exactly but she was the kind of person where he could imagine her being beautiful, imagine someone else finding her beautiful, and maybe that’s really enough. She sighed heavily, releasing a whole breath out of lungs toughened and expanded by trumpet playing, by running. He watched her chest rise up enormous like an island rising out of the ocean and then sink back down into the dipping concave of skin and lax muscles stretched between her jutting hip bones and rounded ribs.
“I suppose I envy you that misguided faith,” she answered. “I have this trust in my memory, and if someone told me today that my name is actually Savannah and I come from Bosnia, I wouldn’t believe them. I’m tied to this life, to this identity by those memories of identity. But you, you don’t have that. You really are a new person every single day,” she rolled over and looked square into his eyes, as if challenging him to deny her, or maybe begging him to deny her, hoping that she was wrong and his life was actually so painful that she would never want to trade places. But he made a policy not to lie. At least, for as much as he could control.
“I suppose,” he said, “it’s nice in that way. And it’s nice in that I can never lie because I never know the truth. It’s nice in that I get to rediscover the world every single day. The only problem is,” and here Hillary raised her eyebrows, as if to indicate that she didn’t believe there could be a problem, “ that I never really remember yesterday. So each day I live, I only live for one day. My life is a series of short and mostly useless lifetimes, spanning a short 24 hours. I feel no anguish, no lack of acceptance, no loss of identity, but I also can’t fully appreciate the gain of a new identity.”
Hillary grinned and wrote MY NAME IS JOHN SMITH in thick, black marker between his shoulder blades. “See, this is who you’ll be tomorrow,” and underneath it she wrote I LOVE HILLARY TURLINGTON “and this is who you’ll love” he grinned “And this is how you’ll vote” she scrawled I AM A REPUBLICAN. “Now isn’t it wonderful,” she asked, “to know that, by morning, you’ll be an entirely different person? All you’ll have to do is look in the mirror, trust the notes, and you’re good”.
“Except, of course,” he whispered, turning to see her not quite beautiful face, her not quite fat body, wondering if he’d think the same way tomorrow, “I’ll have no idea I was ever anyone else.”
“Isn’t that half the fun of it?” she whispered.
***
The world around him was bright. White. Lights flashed like blinking across his vision. He wanted to open his mouth to ask, he had questions, so many questions, but he wasn’t sure what about. The got stuck somewhere in the back of his head and wouldn’t quite make it out from the back of his throat. He tried to lift his arms, he tried to indicate his need for help but all he felt was a shooting pain up his spine, up into the back of his head, over his shoulders. He wanted it to stop he wanted it all to stop and so he slammed his eyes shut and begged for the pain to stop to go away. He crossed his fingers (or he tried but he couldn’t, nothing moved the way he wanted it to, his body just wouldn’t listen to his brain) that he would pass out, die, just to stop it just to be over. He felt himself receeding back into his head and slowly it all sank into peaceful, monotonous black.
***
The obituary wasn’t very extensive, nor did it use a specific name. That was the part that really got under Hillary’s skin, the nameless, facelessness of it all. She had told them over and over that his name was Daniel, but the obituary still read John Doe. It spent a couple sentences going on about his life before launching into a speech about the rare disease he had had, about how the marks on his arms and back indicated he had spent his last moments still trying to cling to some semblance of who he was. Hillary knew otherwise.
She had seen his body right after he had died, the first time she had seen him in ten years. He was laying on the bed in his apartment, a small apartment, the same as his dorm room in college, right down to the smell and his body didn’t have the frantic markings he used to remember the day beforehand, just one long paragraph written on his chest (a tattoo, mind you, not a marker like they usually were). It read:
“Jamais Vu is the opposite of the commonly known Déjà vu, a condition in which everyone and everything around you is unfamiliar, everyone is a stranger. You do things you have done a hundred times before and feel as if you are doing them for the first time.”
She remembered telling him that, she remembered it down to the second, but she wasn’t sure (she still isn’t sure now) why that is what he chose to remember. So she was left to sit in his sparse apartment (empty save for a desk and a bed that nearly filled the tiny space) and think back. And wonder.
