Sum Over Histories

I'll never forget our last perfect day together.

We walked through a meadow full of wild flowers, my lovely man and I, with picnic baskets swinging by our sides and the sun golden in a deep blue sky. I don't remember what food we'd brought along, but I do recall how he loved the feast, the way that he loved all sensual things. I never have cared overly much for food, or drink, or even sleep, but that day's bounty filled me with joy, a joy that barred sadness. In the same way he loved the meat and wine, loved them for delighting and sustaining him, in that same way I loved him -- every moment of our twenty-four years together.

We lay back on the blanket, the yellow-green grass rippling around us, the wildflowers in a profusion of colors, and I gazed deep into the sky. He dozed off in the crook of my arm. I kissed him, and watched inscrutable sky-blue deepen into green ripples as I slipped into a waking dream of oceans and endless time and drifting worlds. The dream was a sublime vision of celestial brine through which souls swam -- a dream that branched and grew into leaf as I slipped from drowsy musings into slumber.

Our last perfect day together: I remember it, will always remember it, with matchless clarity. It is one spark in a firmament fraught with lovely light, but it has never been lost to time's dazzling frolic.

***

My first husband was named Peter. I thought I loved him. I thought I belonged with him. I thought these things because, at the time, they were true. But what I also knew, then and always, was that this state of affairs was true only in passing. I kept that unhappy secret to myself until the day I left him, because how do you explain the transient nature of youth, and the consequences of maturation, to someone who is a youth himself? Why shatter a sweet illusion of forever after while it still lay tender in its shell?

From time to time, Peter intuited my gift. After his father died, he recalled how I had slipped away to leave the two of them alone in the garden, where they sipped cognac from big snifters. "You knew," he said, and I told him that I simply had a feeling -- but, of course, it was more than that.

It's not that I see the future, exactly, and my experience is certainly not of the sort you hear prognosticators describe. It's not a blur of half-understood images that come to me in visions; it's not a flurry of symbolic, dreamlike tableaux that swirl about me as I stand frozen in a trance. I simply remember the future, the same way I remember the past: Sometimes in detail, sometimes only vaguely; sometimes with omissions or substitutions, and sometimes with eidetic clarity.

My gift doesn't help me avoid catastrophe. It's never helped me get rich. I still twist ankles, forget birthdays, regret missed chances. Once, smug in my ability and too young to understand it, I took my father's car for a stealthy beer run -- only to lose control and slide into a telephone pole. Standing in the icy night, surveying the damage, all I could think was: Is that today? Somehow I had thought it a month or a year away. Memory plays tricks and the particulars can be elusive. I often only really know the moment when I am in it.

Was I ever tempted to try to change the future? No. It's never even really occurred to me. It's hard enough to remember that what seems so natural to me -- recalling things that have yet to happen, drawing on experience I don't yet have -- is strange and frightening to others. And I only remember my own future; it's not like I can look into your eyes and tell you what day you're going to die, or what stocks to pick for your portfolio.

This is hard to describe, but let me offer an example of what I mean. Peter and I went to a baseball game one summer evening. We were in our late thirties. As the vendor walked by with a bundle of rally monkeys, my husband asked whether I wanted one. Laughing, I said that I would get one for my nephew in a few years, when he was old enough. At the time, my nephew was only six months old, but I knew that giving him a rally monkey emblazoned with the Red Sox logo would drive my Yankees fan brother crazy.

"Maybe we should get your nephew the pink rally monkey," my husband suggested.

"No," I told him, "he gets the green one. The pink one will be for his sister."

"Is your brother's wife expecting again already?" Peter asked me.

"No, not for another couple of years," I replied lightly, as though in jest, but feeling an anxiety slither along my backbone. People used to call me weird, used to avoid me or bully me because they picked up on the fact that I was different. And I don't mean because I'm gay; I mean truly and essentially different. I didn't want my own husband to become alienated from me in the same way.

The matter dropped at that moment, along with a ball from the star player's glove. But though Peter didn't suffer any fear or loathing as a result of my slip, my brother did when I inadvertently broke the news to him. He never asked me about it, but he knew; we'd grown up together, after all. He gave me a weary smile and then looked like he was about to sob from sheer exhaustion.

***

Even before I met Andrew, my second husband, I knew our time would be short. He walked into the shop one day, and I helped him find what he needed... what he didn't yet know he needed. The moment I saw him I recalled him with a happy leap of the heart, and with a shock of grief. What Andrew needed more than the shirt he bought was... well, was me; and as our conversation played out word by ineluctable word, each moment familiar as it passed, time's moving finger merely tracing what was already written, our connection sprang to life. It was deep, and immediate, and urgent. Andrew was astonished, and called it love at first sight, but the truth is that I had loved him always. As we enjoyed that first exchange, that first flirtatious encounter, I had that same thought once again: Is this today? I thought I had more time. I thought it was in January, not in May.

I was overjoyed to find Andrew, but at the same time I struggled; I knew it would be less than a month before I would be moving out, leaving Peter, beginning anew with Andrew. I remembered the last days clearly, Peter angry and resentful: How could I leave him for someone I had just met? What kind of ingrate was I? What kind of hollow-hearted cad? -- this last gem was his phrase, and one that struck a chord of guilt in me even before Peter and I knew each other.

I remembered those confusing, heartbreaking days with intense focus of feeling, my own alternating moods as well as Andrew's mixture of happiness and doubt. He, too, was puzzled: Why was I leaving Peter after so many years? Why leaving Peter for him? Had Peter abused me? Was I unhappy in my marriage? No, and no; and how was he to understand? Peter called me fickle and unfeeling... was that true? Andrew fretted over Peter's accusation, and worried aloud: Would I leave Andrew also, one day, out of the blue? Leave him for some stranger?

Finally, I took his face in my hands. It was impossible to explain, so I didn't. I simply said, "Andrew, you are no stranger. It just took me this long to find you."

He accepted this. Somehow, even without remembering it, he knew we were supposed to be together. It was a relief that Andrew decided he could take it on faith that, as odd and sudden as it seemed, the past was finished and I was now with him... a relief, because how could I have phrased it to his understanding? I left Peter quickly because there was so little time to share with Andrew -- only a year and a half. In less than four months, my second husband, my charismatic black-haired man, would discover how little of his life remained, and how briefly his brilliant soul would shine in this world.

Everyone loved Andrew for the same reason I did: Because he truly was an angel. Peter lashed out at me, telling me that I valued only youth and beauty, and it was true that my black-haired man was gorgeous to behold, and he was younger than me by a good fourteen years. But it was the sweetness of his angelic soul that drew me, and it was the shape of event itself -- event and time, immutable, irrefutable -- that demanded I choose as I did, if you can call it a choice. I don't know. It felt like a choice; it felt like my own free will; but it also felt like a commandment that I should break Peter's heart, to establish my deep ties with Andrew and be there for him, his rock and source of strength as cancer took everything else away.

Even Peter came to understand this. "I wouldn't want to see the things you do," he told me quietly, during our last few moments together, the day our divorce was finalized. Andrew was already sick. Even Peter felt sorry for him -- for me. "How do you do it? How can you stand it? Why didn't you warn me? Why didn't you warn Andrew?"

"It wouldn't have made any difference," I said.

***

The year and a half Andrew and I had together was all we would ever have, all we were meant to have, and it was just about enough. Like my first husband, Andrew came to have some inkling of my ability to remember days to come. He'd joke about it, sometimes, and he'd regard me apprehensively, sometimes; and when the last rounds of chemotherapy failed to erase the wild growths in his spine and lungs, and the doctors spoke of quality of life but not quantity, he looked at me with a dark, glowing burn in his heartbreaking blue eyes -- a kind of recalcitrance that accepted what was coming, but with a proviso: Not today, his burning blue eyes insisted.

"You knew," Andrew said, thinking back to the way I had left my earlier life for him, left with a sureness and swiftness that only now made sense. In that moment, so late in his brief life, he grasped it: In that moment he saw what I had seen, the way time's thread speeds off the spool and flutters into the wind, the gale-force wind of fire that burns the pennants dancing in its luminosity. The pennants that are us.

"Why would you endure this with me?" Andrew asked one day, close to the end of his life. "If I could have known... if I saw things the way you do... I wouldn't."

It was awkward, but we lay in a gingerly arranged tangle of pillows and blankets and IV lines on his hospice bed.

"It would hurt too much," Andrew said. "It would risk too much."

I spoke into the nape of his neck. "Remembering things to come removes the risk," I told him. "I knew what I was doing. I did exactly what I wanted."

"Why?"

"You know why." I held him close, but tenderly, conscious not to press on his hurting body.

"Why throw yourself onto the rocks like that? Why jump into the future with me when the future means going over a cliff and onto jagged rocks at the bottom?"

"That's where we all end up." I didn't know how to make it sound less harsh.

"If I was you, I'd find a place, I'd find a partner for my life that didn't have such terrible things in store," he said.

And I knew, just as he did, why he was saying this.

Our bodies throbbed together with breath. Time trickled away from us.

"Even if we box ourselves up in some safe space," I told him, "the end is the same. Pain, loss, fear, loneliness, dark tumbling into dark... Why not embrace the light between?"

He laughed weakly. "You're such a corndog," he said, and I felt him relax, his anxiety and grief subsiding. He fell asleep in my arms, an echo before the fact of that lovely day in the meadow, decades in the future.

Andrew fought valiantly, and in vain. When his hard struggle was over his words lingered with me. I never wanted to face such loss again; I never wanted to be lured by the promise of love, and its cruel inevitabilities, the sadistic twist of an ending that always comes. Anyone else could simply pretend there would be no ending; I lived with the knowledge of always-approaching endings every day, knowing not the abstraction but the concrete reality.

No: I didn't want to love anyone again, though I knew I was going to -- knew I would have no choice, knew that when the time came I would proceed through the paces, driven by something deep and unconscious; not a compulsion, not a duty, but rather a necessity, a need to see that all things happened as I knew they must. Three years later I met Mitchell. I knew who he was, of course, because I remembered remembering him since I was three years old.

And in life he was more -- so much more -- than in memory. Him: My lovely man, my soul mate. My last true love. This time, there was no moment of surprise, no "Is that today?" I knew, as the day drew close, just where and when I would first see him, and so it came to be. What shocked me was not the date, but the force of his presence, and the sudden completeness in myself that he brought.

When I saw Mitch for the first time, I was surprised at how young he looked -- so much younger than I tended to recall him being since, of course, I'd seen him age, seen him at the end of his life. At the moment of our meeting I loved him, all in a wild rush -- and at the same time, I did not love him yet. More precisely, I remembered that I would love him, remembered how I had missed him throughout my life, remembered how I would miss him for the final decade and a half until my mid-nineties when, in my last two years, I stopped remembering anything at all, past or future, and drifted into an eventless, twilit haze. A sweet symmetry, that, and one I always appreciated: The man who remembered his future looking forward to the time when he could finally forget.

Six days after I had first seen Mitchell, when I felt the bite of that sharp, sweet flame, I wept -- I raged -- and I surrendered. I threw myself into passion's sizzling blue heart, and there I reveled. I surprised myself in doing so. I am still surprised. I will be surprised when the day arrives, when finally I come upon Mitch, and he meets my eye, and light seems to surround him and embrace us both.

***

The moment Mitch and I walked into the house, I took in its rooms and its light with glad recognition. I brushed past the realtor and glanced into the kitchen, then found my way to the stairs and bounded up. "He must like it," the realtor laughed, and I had a flash of irritation: Who was this woman that was standing in our home, with her cheap wig and her cloying demeanor, desperate to make the sale?

I followed the upstairs hallway, the exact pattern of footfalls as graven in me as any muscle memory, glancing into my study as I made my way to the second door on the right. With a smile I felt through my entire body I stepped into the room where we spent so many nights... would spend, will spend so many nights, folded into one another and sleeping peacefully.

My husband's tread was heavy up the hall, and then he stood in the doorway with me. I took his hand. "This is our bedroom," I told him.

"You're feeling sure," Mitch said, smiling.

I was remembering a day, half a decade from that moment, when he came up here to sit on the bed in terror and shock. We were in our late fifties and silver threaded his beard (a beard he hadn't grown yet) and his thick tousle of hair. He had been HIV-positive for over ten years. His doctor told him that he had experienced a viral breakthrough, and the standard medication was no longer working. Mitch's voice shook as he related the news. He sounded afraid. I wrapped my arms around him, held his trembling body, and tried to reassure him. Unlike Peter, unlike Andrew, Mitch had no inkling of my gift. I had no way of making him believe that AIDS was not going to kill him.

"The doctor has something in mind, a new medication," Mitch told me, "but what do we do if it doesn't work?"

I ran a hand tenderly through his thick hair and kissed him... kissed him. "Then we live as well as we can, for as long as we can. And then we die," I told him.

He laughed unsteadily.

"It's going to work," I told him.

"You don't know," he said. "You can't promise."

"I don't have to promise. You just need to trust me."

The new medicine would work for him, and it would immunize me so that he never had to worry again that I, too, might one day seroconvert. Mitch would live to the age of seventy-four, and die only after a long struggle with a progressive disease that turned the sponge of his lungs into tough fiber. He would not note the first traces of the disease until eleven years after that episode of viral breakthrough.

Mitch squeezed my hand. Back in the moment, in our bedroom before it was our bedroom or even had a bed, I returned his smile. "I am sure," I told him. "I'm very sure."

The realtor waited, bemused and polite, as I led Mitch through the house and explained to him the use and layout of each room. He mistook my joy at coming home for the enthusiasm of dreams newly hatched and plans blossoming in a frenzy of possibility... blossoming like wildflowers in our meadow, the meadow we discovered the June after we moved in. The meadow where we shared our last perfect day, our most perfect day.

And that perfect day would brighten and fade over the meadow, and we'd wake from our nap as shadows grew long. We'd gather our blanket and our baskets, and we'd walk home slowly, contentedly, hand in hand as was our custom. His breath would already be coming hard to him. Hearing him rasp ever so slightly, I'd feel the first stirrings of grief and loss. But the sunset was so vivid, and our happiness so placid, that those darker stirrings would flicker and then disappear, banished like so many other sad memories, forbidden to taint the present moment's savor.

How I loved him, love him still, will love him the rest of my life. I remember him with surprise and gratitude every day after his death, and every day before our first meeting. Never again will I honor and cherish, embrace and adore, possess and be so possessed.

But that -- all of that -- is time to come. At this moment, I'm twenty years old and I have just met a man named Peter. Blessed man: He doesn't know yet how many years we will spend together, or how those days will come to an end. He doesn't know about rally monkeys at the baseball stadium, or the slow realization that there are strange possibilities like the remembrance of days to come. He has no notion of the heartbreak that comes with doing what we were always meant to do.

All those things... my first love, my angelic second husband, my third and final life partner... my soul mate, our lovely home, the meadow with its wildflowers... in sum, those things are a life, my life, my history. There's so much to look forward to in the lifetime that lay ahead, across years and decades, across a great and glittering expanse of time strewn with indelible moments. It's those moments I remember so vividly, despite any number of years passed by or waiting; I remember them as though they were just...

Tomorrow.

For Pam