A Loose End in Time

I need to interrupt the flow of the memoir's narrative, to pick up a neglected thread.

During my second and early part of my third years my sense of time was rather non-linear. Every night I would go over the day's events in my head. Those would be in a neat linear order for me. But different days were disconnected. Looking back on it all I have to use incidental clues, later information, and reason to figure out times. For example, schools started after Labor Day throughout the U.S. and its more populous territories. Therefore, the start of school coincided with early September.

Another example is my Mother's second pregnancy. I remember wondering why her belly was sticking out. She regularly took me in to the bathroom to have me shower with her, so I saw her naked often and I could touch the belly. One of those intimate moments stands out in my mind because she used it as an opportunity to urinate on me.

As vivid as that memory is, it has, in itself, no place in time. It's like the snapshots of my family album that were once attached to pages but have since come loose, so I just tuck them with each other between some blank pages at the end, or keep them in an envelope, in a jumble.

Still, I'm able to pin it down a little. I know she wasn't too visibly pregnant when I was released from Tripler Medical Center, because I have pictures from that day. And I know she was pregnant a third time. I know that third pregnancy ended in miscarriage about a month before my third birthday, after time started getting linear for me. I know in fact that the third was a different pregnancy from the second one, just because the second went to term.

I know that the second pregnancy ended with a birth. I wasn't there for the birth, of course. I don't even remember anything at all said about it afterward, by either of my parents, for several years. All I knew at the time was, she went to the hospital with a big belly and came home without.

The earliest memory I have hearing the birth discussed was when my Mother was abusing me at age six or seven and taunted me by telling me that my brother Robert was better than me. When I asked about him, she told me he was the one who died because he was born without anything below the waist, so he wasn't dirty like me.

The main way I can place the time is by using the fact that my Mother wouldn't let my Father photograph her appearing pregnant. I recall a trip to the beach around the time the little girls had started taking care of me. The picture below, which shows me getting annoyed at one of my girlfriends, and about to whack her head with my shovel, may have been taken on that trip to the beach. My Mother isn't in any of the pictures accompanying this one. My memory is that my Mother was extremely pregnant on at least one trip to the beach. So I think the birth of Robert occurred in the summer, maybe July or August of 1951. Before the Quest began.


[Below: Getting tired of the goddamned papparazzi.]

The Alpha

I remember my birth. I haven't always believed that it was my birth that I was remembering. For a long time I assumed, as most people do, that no one could remember much of anything of their early pre-verbal life, much less their birth. But I've changed my mind.

The turning point regarding my belief in this thing came in the Spring of 1984. I was 34 years old, and I had always had a vivid detailed "memory" of being run over by a car on an early birthday. I could not only remember it, I could remember a sequence of dramatic events leading up to it, which would have needed at least an hour to transpire. I remembered suffering two blows to my head, one to the top, one to the side. I remembered a tire of the car rolling over my chest, forcing my lungs empty and pushing me deep into the soil. I remembered the trip in the ambulance to the hospital afterward.

I knew from documentary evidence, family photos for example, that the event, if it had actually occurred, could have happened no later than my second birthday. There was no way anything like that could have happened on my third or fourth or any later birthday. I had assumed until 1984 that it either hadn't happened at all and I had dreamed it, or it happened on my 2nd birthday.

Then I found a box of documents my parents had hidden from me all their lives. The box included doctors' reports and x-rays concerning the admission of a baby to Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. The documents were dated in multiple places. The date of admission was July 9, 1950, my first birthday. I almost fainted when I saw that. Then I thought, no, this can't be, this must have been a brother I never knew.

I knew my Mother had given birth to a baby that died within hours of severe organic deformities. If he had lived, they were going to call that baby my brother Robert. So I looked again at the admitting documents, expecting to see the name Robert. The name was mine. The documents described how a one-year-old baby was picked up by ambulance after arriving at the scene at 9:05 PM July 9, 1950. The baby was admitted with evidence of two instances of head trauma, a fractured and dislodged skull, tire-tracks across his chest, and a story from the Native Hawaiian ambulance attendants, duly noted, that he had been lifted off the grass. Exactly as I remembered it.

I couldn't believe anymore that I had simply dreamed it. But that also meant that I didn't dream waking up in the hospital later with a detailed and accurate memory of not only the events of those few hours but of the previous year. I am convinced now that I was so shocked by what had happened that I became obsessed at that time with the earliest events of my life, going back to my birth, because I needed to know what went wrong.

I suspect that most any 1 year-old child could tell you of memories of his birth if only he could interpret them and articulate them. What I did was preserve them out of a desperate need to find an interpretation, until I could.

Here is that interpretation.

First, there was blackness and I don't remember any sound. Then there was a sound, but I don't feel like I noticed it. Then suddenly there were two sounds. I remember suddenly being aware of something for the first time ever. I was aware that there were two sounds. I'm sure that what I was aware of were the two sounds of my Mother's and my own heartbeats. I didn't know that one came from me and one came from someone else. But I was aware that they were distinct from one another. It was a first awareness that there were distinctions.

If a time passed after that I had no sense of it. But then all at once there was a point of light in my imagination. It was just there. Then below it there was an image of a flat surface. I'd never seen anything before. I'm sure I wasn't really seeing anything then, it was a vision. Other lights appeared above the surface. It was like a night sky over a still ocean. The other lights began to revolve around the first and still brightest one, like the stars revolve around the pole star. The stationary light became brighter and a filament passed from it to the surface. For a moment a kind of ball appeared there, as if floating. I thought the ball was me. It was the first memory I had of having a sense of being. I was the ball, the light had made me.

Then, the stationary light moved downward to the "horizon" and appeared to move below it. As it did, the other lights continued revolving around it and moved in unison with it. After doing this, the original image was restored and the movement downward repeated. It repeated once or twice more. Finally I had in my mind the notion that not only could the light move, but so could I. I could somehow follow it. No sooner did I have the idea that I could follow the light downward, then I felt movement. I was aware of moving muscles, and changing position. I felt that I was twisting about and diving at the same time. The idea of movement and the movement happened at the same time. I have a sense that I was both causing the motion and all at the same time being propelled by an external cause.

Exactly then there was a sound, which I couldn't interpret at the time. But I could remember it phonetically and later I could interpret it. It was English and by the time I was 3 I knew enough to know the words used. "John -- I think the baby just turned over."

In all this I still had very little sense of time. The movements had happened once and for all, there was no idea that there was time between them. Even the beats didn't seem to beat in time. But then I noticed that they were closer and farther, and closer and farther. They would match and then separate. I saw a point of light again. The heartbeats became more and more matched, taking longer and longer to converge and diverge, and simultaneously the point spread out into a line segment.

As soon as the line seemed to stretch out horizontally forever the heartbeats synchronized.

After this all hell broke loose. There were loud voices. Yelling. There was pushing. I was pushing. I didn't know why at first. Then I saw a light and I decided that it was the light I was pushing for.

I don't remember any trauma. The idea that nobody would remember their own birth because it would be too unbearable doesn't fit with me. I don't remember it being bad. I remember it being thrilling. It was an adventure.

At least it was until the doctor held me. I was afraid being held by that man. He smelled wrong. I think I was predisposed to fear anything that smelled like a man at the moment of birth.

The birthing room was a blur otherwise. Bright but no details. The first details I remember were of something that looked like a typical viewing room. I was laid on a crib. As I laid there I happened to see a wall clock in front and above me. I took it for a face and was immediately afraid. My eyes strayed from it and I didn't know how to look back where I had seen it. So I had to search the whole wall for the clock again. Gradually I was able to find it, lose it, and find it again. I did this over and over, and the clock didn't attack me. So I came to trust the clock and decided it was there to protect me. I think I briefly thought of it as Mother.

Then a nurse appeared and I was confused again.