Almost No Memory

THE CENTER OF THE STORY

A woman has written a story that has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting. But in this story the hurricane threatens the city without actually striking it. The story is flat and even, just as the earth seems flat and even when a hurricane is advancing over it, and if she were to show it to a friend, the friend would probably say that, unlike a hurricane, this story has no center.

It was not an easy story to write, because it was about religion, and religion was not something she really wanted to write about. Something, though, made her want to write this story. Now that it is finished, it puzzles her, and there is a peculiar yellow pall over it, either because of the religion or because of the light in the sky before the hurricane.

She can’t think where the center of the story might be.

She was reading the Bible in a time of hurricane, not because she was afraid of a major disaster, though she was afraid, or because these days also happened to be the High Holy Days, but because she needed to know exactly what was in it. She read slowly and took many notes. Outside her apartment, the weather was changing: the wind rose, the branches swayed on the young trees, and the leaves fluttered. She read about Noah and the Ark and tried to picture very exactly what she read, the better to understand it: a man hundreds of years old trying to walk and give directions to his family, the mud covering the earth after the flood receded, the stink of rot, and then the sacrifice of animals and the stink of burning hair, fur, and horn.

She did little else but read the Bible for several days, and she looked out the window often and listened to the news. Certainly the Bible and the hurricane belong in the story, though whether at the center or not she does not know. She had started the story with her landlady. Her landlady, an old woman from Trinidad, was alone in the downstairs hall talking quietly about the Mayor, while she was upstairs, thinking of writing a letter to the President. Her landlady said the red carpet remnant on the hall floor was given to her by her friend the Mayor. She will probably take out the President and the landlady, but leave in the Bible and the hurricane. Perhaps if she takes out things that are not interesting, or do not belong in the story for other reasons, this will give it more of a center, since as soon as there is less in a story, more of it must be in the center.

In another part of the story, a man is very ill and thinks he is dying. He was not dying, he had eaten something that poisoned him and drunk too much on top of it, but he thought he was dying, and telephoned her to come help him. This was at the very moment the hurricane was supposed to strike the city, and some of the windows in the neighborhoods between her house and his were covered with tape in the shape of asterisks. In his room, the blinds were drawn, the light was yellow, and the windows rattled. He lay on his back in bed with a hand on his bare chest. His face was gray.

It is unclear what his place is, in the story. Certainly his illness has little connection with the rest of the story except that it overcame him at the height of the hurricane. But then he also told her something on the phone about blasphemy. He had recently blasphemed in a dreadful way, he said, by committing a certain forbidden act on a Holy Day. What he realized as he did it, he said, was that for complicated reasons he was trying to hurt God, and if he was trying to hurt God he must believe in Him. He had experienced the truth of what he had been taught long ago, that blasphemy proved one’s belief in God.

This man, his illness, his fear for his life, and the blasphemy that had caused his illness, as he probably thought, and also something else he said about God that she remembered later, riding a train out of the city, could be at the center of the story, with the Bible and the hurricane at the edge of it, but there may not be enough to tell about him for him to be the center, or this may be the wrong time to tell it.

So there is the hurricane that did not strike the city but cast a yellow light over it, and there is this man, and there is the Bible, but no landlady, no President, and no newscasters, though she watched the news several times a day, every day, to see what the hurricane was going to do. The newscasters would tell her to look out the window and she would look. They would tell her that at that very moment, because the sun had just set, rams’ horns were being blown all over the city, and she would be excited, even though she could not hear any rams’ horns in her neighborhood. But though the newscasters serve to hold the story together from one day to the next, they are not in themselves very interesting and certainly not central to a story that has trouble finding its center.

In those days she also visited churches and synagogues. The last church she visited was a Baptist congregation in the north of the city. There, large black women in white uniforms asked her to sit down but she was too nervous to sit. Then, standing at the back of the crowded hall, she began to feel faint when a procession of women in red robes came toward her at a stately pace, singing. She left, found the ladies’ room, and sat in a stall watching a fly, not sure she would be able to stand up again.

In fact, close to the center of the story may be the moment when she realizes that, even though she is not a believer, she has an unusual, religious sort of peace in her, perhaps because she has been visiting churches and synagogues and studying the Bible, and that this peace has allowed her to accept the possibility of the worst sort of disaster, one even worse than a hurricane.

She rides the train up along the river away from the city. The danger of the hurricane is past. The water in the river has not risen to cover the tracks, though it is close to them. As she looks out at the water, she suddenly remembers the devil. She has not made a place for him in what she might believe, or even in the questions she is asking about what she believes. She has asked several friends whether they thought there was a God, but she has not mentioned the devil to anyone. After she remembers this, she realizes something else: the very fact that she has forgotten the devil must mean he has, at this point, no place in her beliefs, though she thinks she believes in the power of evil.

This comes close to the end of the story as it is now, but she can’t really end with the devil and a train ride. So the end is a problem, too, though less of a problem than the center. There may be no center. There may be no center because she is afraid to put any one of these elements in the center — the man, the religion, or the hurricane. Or — which is or is not the same thing — there is a center but the center is empty, either because she has not yet found what belongs there or because it is meant to be empty: there, but empty, in the same way that the man was sick but not dying, the hurricane approached but did not strike, and she had a religious calm but no faith.