The Rainbow (Frerard) [underwater_sky]

May - Gold (Part Two)

            We were going to the doctors. That was it. Before I could believe anything, I needed to have someone else confirm it. It felt completely backwards to what I had been telling myself before about health and medicine, but I really couldn't see doing this any other way. Everyone else but myself in that room had already diagnosed him, as if they were the final word from the medical establishment. That was ridiculous to me; I knew they were making him sick more than anything. They were constructing their own stories of what was happening to him, the same way that Lydia had said before about us constructing our versions of pregnancy stories. You are now at the place of birth, I thought to myself, and then replaced it with: You are now at the place of forgetting. When did forgetting become a bad thing, pathological and detrimental? And when did Gerard's forgetting suddenly add up to something like this? There were too many other options for these circumstances, too many other explanations for what was happening. Just because people wanted to jump on the bandwagon for the worst possible condition didn't mean that it was true. I rejected that interpretation; I didn't want to start the story there. People just got old and forgot things in old age, that was that.

            Eventually, as the night wore on and I eventually coaxed him to speak about himself (I resented everyone in the room for even making him second-guess himself like this), even he insisted on seeing the doctor before he believed it himself. He had been so nervous and anxious before about the fact that there could be something wrong that he had created this sense of guilt and spun himself a web of fiction. He felt like something was wrong, so of course, he had made it seemed ten times worse in his mind. Maybe half his symptoms were really a self-fulfilling prophecy. He admitted to being afraid he had dementia or something similar because he kept forgetting and sometimes woke up confused, but maybe it was really nothing at all.

            "Everyone forgets things; it's how the human species keeps going on. You need to forget these horrible things that happen in order to go on," he stated, in the car as we drove home. It was just the two of us, myself driving and him in the passenger seat wringing his hands.

            Vivian had let us borrow her car while Jasmine took hers home, knowing that we were going to need it in order to go to the doctors as soon as we could. Jasmine went home with Hilda, unable to deal with anything just yet. She needed a night to herself. I hugged her tightly before I said goodnight to her, and while I knew that time apart from the situation would do her some good, I didn't think she could acquire that distance with Hilda by her side. Hilda's father had apparently had the disease and died while she was going across the states giving lectures the year before. She had watched the early stages of the disease long enough while she had been at home that she knew what she was looking at, apparently. It had been why she jumped to that conclusion so fast, and why she kept trying to give her advice on the situation. She had wanted Gerard to go to the doctors as well, but not to disregard that diagnosis, but to start treatment. There was not a doubt in her mind at what she was looking at, but I knew there was enough doubt in everything. I hoped and prayed that Jasmine with her skeptical and critical mind would also see the holes in the story and realize that instances could be interpreted many different ways. Just because Hilda had seen it before didn't mean Gerard also had it; Hilda was just projecting. Maybe she was even jealous. Either way, we were seeing a doctor just to be sure, and in the meantime, I was attempting to calm Gerard and myself down.

            Gerard went on and on about how forgetfulness was really a survival tactic so species' kept going on in the face of extinction. While I agreed with him vocally, I thought of Jasmine and Lydia. They couldn't forget pain or trauma; if they tried it came back and it haunted them until they dealt with it. I thought of the nights Jasmine woke up screaming, crying, or shaking; that didn't seem like forgetting at all. I wasn't sure that the human species really had worked out that whole forgetting for survival thing yet, and even if they had, Lydia had spoken about that cultural memory. No one forgot anything, really. But that thought, though it disproved Gerard's words, made me feel better. If he had lost his memories in this big cultural sphere, what if he could also get them back again? I sat quietly to myself and let him talk out his frustrations. There was a lot, now that the damn had burst and his secret was out. I kept my own secret knowledge now that if he had lost something, it could be found again. I didn't argue with him about the imperative nature of forgetting and I wanted Lydia and Hilda and Jasmine to be the ones that were wrong about memory and repression. If memories never really left, then was Gerard's condition as fatalistic as Hilda made it seemed? What interpretation was I supposed to take? I wanted him, so desperately, to be right about himself. He knew himself, not doctors or anyone else, and if he said he was fine, then I believed him.