The Memory Palace Read Online Free PDF Page B

She was eighteen, and schizophrenia had yet to rear its ugly head. I read the list of activities below her smiling face:
Orchestra, Play Production, Choral Club, Accompanist, Student Council, Music Appreciation Club, National Honor Society,
the list went on. She was voted “Most Versatile” in the Popularity Poll. Her classmates wrote:
Good luck at Carnegie Hall! May your magic piano fingers charm all the hearts of the world
. One boy wrote,
To my dream girl, the sweetest and prettiest gal at Glenville. Another wrote, So when are you going to teach me how to rumba? And another, It will take more than a war to make me forget you
. The introduction to her yearbook, written by a boy named Marvin, is titled “War Baby.” He writes at the end:
We are the class of January, 1945—a war class. We leave Glenville, determined to finish the fight.
    I never realized until then that my mother lost her mind the year we dropped the bomb. Seven months after she graduated, in August 1945, America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shortly afterward while on a bus coming home from a movie with her father, the voices inside my mother’s head arrived unannounced, in all their terrible glory.
    Our mother was wide awake when we arrived. “Where were you? I thought you weren’t going to come. You girls need to help me. We have to get back to the house before it’s too late.”
    “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve got everything under control.”
    “But I’m so worried about everything.” My mother reached up and touched the back of my head. “And you. What about your little noggin? Does it still hurt?”
    “My head’s okay,” I said. “Just some problems here and there, you know.”
    “You should wear a helmet,” she said. “That way, they can’t get you again.”
    When I injured my brain, I almost didn’t write her about it, but changedmy mind. It seemed like the kind of thing a mother should know, even if she was indigent and ill. When I wrote, I spared her the gory details, like I did with most things.
    “They stole my memory too,” she whispered, as I straightened out her pillows. “They have their tricks.”
    When the truck hit, I was in the passenger’s seat, leaning over, looking for a cassette. The man driving my car, who suffered whiplash in the accident, was a guy I was dating at the time. We were on our way home from my sister’s house in northern New York. The truck driver, who must have fallen asleep, swerved toward the right and tried to put on his brakes. The next thing I recall was a pair of white-gloved hands reaching in to pull me out of the car. I remember a blur of blinking lights, and the feeling of hot lava dripping down the back of my head.
    When I eventually told my mother about the accident, I said that I suffered from memory loss, mostly short-term but some long-term memory as well, which isn’t that common with traumatic brain injury. I didn’t tell her about the strange sensations of lost time that one doctor thought might be temporal lobe seizures, or that I no longer could follow directions, that I didn’t know how to leave a tip, and had trouble reading, writing, and doing just about anything that required over ten minutes of concentration. Why tell a homeless woman who slept at the airport that it felt like it was raining inside my body and ants were crawling up and down my legs? My mother thought there were rats living inside her body, aliens in her head.
    Natalia and I returned to the storage room before dinner. “We should have worn headlamps,” I said. “It’s like going down into a cave.”
    “Let’s not stay long,” said my sister. “I want to go back tonight to see her. How are you doing, by the way? You look exhausted.”
    Even though I usually appear fine to the outside world, when I do too many things, say, shop for food and have coffee with a friend on the same day, I might not be able to drive home or talk to anyone for two days after that. If I’m exhausted, I