Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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СКАЧАТЬ too, because when it comes to survival, there isn’t a lot of room for repeated trial and error. It is for this reason that the amygdala is “quick to learn and slow to forget,” it is said. “Emotional memory,” says LeDoux, “may be forever.” Just as Sam did not need to see his father walk away with his suitcase more than once to remember it decades later, many of us needed to live through only one 9/11 to be haunted by that morning always. Emotional memories stand stronger and longer than everyday recollections, and their vividness makes them feel more real and more central to who we are than the piddling day-to-day. The problem is that when these remembrances are negative, harking back to Charcot, Freud, and Janet, our emotional memories can function as “malignant memories.” They are bad memories that do bad things. The tyranny of the past rules the present and the future as these outsize, tenacious reminiscences take over our autobiographies, and even our lives. Although Sam surely went to birthday parties and rode his bike and ate ice cream and played at the park when he was in the fourth grade, he hardly remembers anything about that year other than the losses and the shocks.

      ***

      After Sam’s father left, shiny silver dead bolts appeared on the front and back doors of his house. His mother did not mention them but she had the keys, so—as with many other things—it went without saying: The locks had been installed so Sam’s father could not return. In the months and years that followed, the dead bolts only served as reminders that not once did Sam’s father ever even try to come home. He did call to come get a long wooden table he had bought when he was a bachelor, and although Sam and his mother cleared it off and got it ready to go, his dad never showed. Nor did he come get his slides of Coney Island or his stamp collection, though Sam did not lie on the floor and thumb through its pages on Saturdays anymore. Catching sight of the black leather-bound binder on the bookshelf made Sam feel embarrassed and exposed, like seeing an old teddy bear he felt he could no longer pick up.

      Sam’s father did not come back for Sam, either, although one time he took the boy to a matinee. Sam had never been picked up by his father in the driveway before—it was strange—and as he walked to the car, he squinted in the glare of the sun. He could not tell if it was the bright light or the fact that he was working very hard not to cry, but as Sam climbed into the passenger seat he could not unscrunch his eyebrows. He shifted around in his seat not knowing what to say, disturbed by the fact that he had lost control of his face. Sam cannot recall what movie the two saw and he hardly watched it as he sat there gripping the armrests, distracted by the fact that even in the dark theater, he could not unscrew his forehead. What Sam did not know is that those brow muscles are called Darwin’s Grief Muscles because they betray confusion and sadness, even when we try to hide them. As trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk explains, “The body keeps the score,” especially when we have feelings our conscious mind cannot or will not register.

      Sam’s parents officially divorced on Valentine’s Day—yes, really—just over two years after his father left. Later Sam would learn that, after the judge ordered his father to pay child support, Sam’s father grumbled to his mother on the way out of the courthouse that he would kill them all first. That evening, Sam’s mother went straight from work to a bar to celebrate with a friend, while Sam kept busy with sixth-grade homework. Around eleven o’clock, she walked in through the back door and let her purse fall on the floor, instead of placing it on the counter as she usually did. Then she rushed to the kitchen and threw up in the sink.

      Most children of divorce go from seeing a parent every day to seeing the now absent parent between four and fourteen days a month. About a quarter of kids have little or no contact with the noncustodial parent, usually their fathers, within three years, and that was the case for Sam. Like many children, Sam wished he could see his father more, and he told his best friend that maybe he would go live with him in the summer sometime, that his dad was lonely and wanted him to come. “What in the hell is that about?” his mother asked after hearing the news from the friend’s mother. “Your dad isn’t lonely and you’re not going to live with him. You never even hear from him except for getting cards on holidays.”

      For Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Sam’s father tore a ten-dollar bill into two pieces and sent half to Sam and half to Sam’s sister, each tucked into a generic store-bought card. Known more for his cynical wit than for his symbolic gestures, Sam’s father probably thought he was being clever and it was, indeed, a clever illustration of the fact that Sam and his sister’s lives now felt torn in two and unusable. Worthless. Sam and his sister tossed the torn bills into the trash because they did not know what else to do with them.

      Maybe Sam was angry or hurt about those cards, but all he remembers feeling is guilt: guilt because he never sent his father anything at all. Sam knew better than to ask his mother to buy stationery or presents intended for his dad, and besides, Sam no longer knew where his dad lived. Once, a nonprofit sent a membership card to Sam’s house with his father’s name printed on the front. Sam tucked it into his wallet and pretended—even to himself—it was an emergency contact card, a way of reaching his father if he needed him, until one of Sam’s friends called bullshit: “My dad got one of those cards in the mail, too. That’s junk mail!”

      Sam’s father made good on his promise, not of killing them but of not paying child support. His family stopped taking vacations to the beach. They stopped playing sports. They stopped being sure if they could buy clothes or stay in their house. Once when his mother sat in the car and cried over her tax bill, Sam offered bravely, “We could sell Dad’s stamp collection . . .”

      Her sobs became bitter, choking laughter. “That stamp collection isn’t worth anything,” she said through gravelly chuckles. Now Sam was the one who felt like crying.

      Sam’s father moved back to New York. Sam knew this because, inside the holiday cards he still received every year for a while, instead of half a ten-dollar bill was a New York Lottery scratch-off ticket. Virginia did not have the lottery yet, so in a way the tickets seemed exotic and exciting. Sam would hunt a penny out of a drawer and sit down somewhere in private, ready to scrape away the gray powdery goo. Each time he scratched and lost, he felt tricked.

      CHAPTER 3

      Secret

       I’m seven years old, talking to myself, because I’m scared, and because I’m the only person who listens to me.

      —Andre Agassi, Open

      On July 15, 1976, the rural farm town of Chowchilla, California, made national news. It was the next-to-last day of summer school and a school bus was ferrying children home from school when its driver slowed for a white van stopped in the street. Two masked gunmen jumped out of the van, boarded the bus, and then drove away with twenty-six children between the ages of five and fourteen, along with their bus driver, a man named Ed Ray. Guns trained on the children, the masked men drove the bus down into a nearby gully where the confused hostages were transferred to two windowless pitch-black vans. The children were driven around and around, with no explanation, for eleven hours. There was no food or water, and no bathrooms, yet no one panicked or became inconsolable. The children sat calmly—many in their own urine—and passed the time by singing, “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.”

      Deep into the night, the vans came to a stop. The masked gunmen ordered the children off the bus and down into a “hole,” which later only a few recognized to be an opening in the top of a moving truck that had been partially buried underground. Once inside, the children heard a heavy metal plate being dragged over the opening above, sealing the twenty-seven hostages within. Then came the sound of shoveling, and of dirt and stones raining down on the roof above. One hundred miles away, parents had long since noticed that the school bus had disappeared, and as the FBI and the media descended on Chowchilla, the twenty-six children and their bus driver were being buried alive.

      A few kids СКАЧАТЬ