The Year of Fog (11 page)

23

D
AY FORTY-TWO
. It’s late at night and I’m online, answering e-mails at findemma.com, when someone knocks on the door.

For a moment, I allow myself to indulge in the fantasy that it might be Jake, coming to spend the night. But when I look through the peephole, it’s just Nell.

I open the door. She’s in her bathrobe, her hair wet. She smells like mint. “I know it’s late,” she says. “But I thought you might be interested in this article I just found on forensic hypnosis. Did you know that memories retrieved through hypnosis have in some cases been allowed in court?”

“Decaf?” I say.

She nods. “Thanks.”

While I’m pouring the coffee—hers black, mine with a touch of Bailey’s, a habit I’ve picked up in the last few weeks—she opens a file folder and pulls out a photocopied article with accompanying photographs. The male face in the first photo is familiar, but I can’t place it. Below it is the face of a young girl. She’s smiling, looking slightly to the right of the camera. Her hair is styled the same way I wore mine as a little girl in the late seventies—thick, layered bangs swept back from the face.

“Ted Bundy,” Nell says. “His conviction in the Kimberly Leach kidnap and murder”—she taps the girl’s picture with her fingernail—“was largely dependent on testimony provided by the only eyewitness, a man named Clarence Anderson. Anderson came forward five months after the abduction, but he couldn’t remember anything of note. The assistant DA requested that Anderson be put under hypnosis. Afterward, he identified both Bundy and the little girl. He even described their clothing. His testimony was the missing piece that made all the circumstantial evidence come together.”

From the file folder, she produces a business card. “No pressure,” she says, “but this gentleman is a friend of a friend. His office is in North Beach.”

The card is white, with a name, James Rudolph, printed in red block letters. Beneath the name is a single italicized word,
hypnotherapist
, followed by a phone number and e-mail address.

“I’m pretty much willing to try anything at this point,” I say.

“Why don’t you call him right now?”

I pick up the phone. “If you told me a couple of months ago that I’d be calling a hypnotist, I never would have believed you.” I dial the number, and a woman answers on the first ring. “Hello?”

“Oh,” I say, “maybe I have the wrong number.”

“You looking for Jimmy?” she asks in a thick Boston accent.

“Pardon?”

“Rudolph, Jimmy Rudolph.”

“Yes.”

“One minute.”

There’s some shuffling on the other end, and a man’s voice comes on the line. “Yes?”

“I was calling about the hypnosis.”

“Sure,” he says. “Sorry about the confusion. I’m out of the office today, had my calls forwarded. When are you looking to come in?”

“When are you available?”

“How does tomorrow sound?” he says. “One o’clock sharp?”

“Okay.”

“Wear something comfortable.” The line goes dead.

“Well?” Nell asks.

“I’m not so sure.”

She shrugs. “It’s worth a try, anyway. It’s well known that trauma can impede memories of a given event. Hypnosis is supposed to allow you to bypass your psychological defenses and tap into repressed material.”

She flips through the folder and produces a full-color photocopy of a painting by John William Waterhouse. Two men recline side by side, nearly identical save for their coloring. One is red-haired, pale, brightly lit, slumbering against the other man’s shoulder. The second is dark-haired, olive-skinned, shadowed, draped in a funereal cloth. One is accompanied by flutes, the other by a lyre.

“Hypnos,” she explains, “the Greek god of sleep, shown here with his brother Thanatos, god of death.”

Nell has plenty more to say on the subject of hypnotism—case histories and court precedents, odd ephemera, the two major theories of hypnosis currently in vogue. “Retrieval holds that all of a person’s experiences are stored in a sort of memory bank, and hypnosis helps you access them. Construction, on the other hand, posits that the past is continually remade in the interest of the present, and memories are constructed based on a number of factors.”

I marvel once again at Nell’s capacity for learning, her ability to absorb and process a vast amount of information about any given subject on any given day. I cannot help but wonder if her passion for information has something to do with her son’s death, if the constant consumption of facts is her attempt to fill a never-diminishing void. I imagine her grief as a black hole, never satisfied, that sucks up knowledge with alarming speed. It is the same ever-expanding black hole that has taken hold of my mind and heart in these long weeks of Emma’s absence. While Nell feeds hers with learning, I feed mine with this endless search.

The next afternoon, when I get home, she greets me at the door. “Well?” she asks.

“The guy was a quack. He had me sit in this armchair that looked like it had been rescued from the Salvation Army. The office reeked of cigar smoke. The session was about as relaxing as a trip to Home Depot. After we’d finished, he tried to sell me on some hypnosis seminar he’s conducting next month in Tahoe.”

“That’s unfortunate,” she says. “It seemed like a promising path to try.”

I don’t tell Jake about the hypnosis. Alternative psychology doesn’t fit into his worldview, and I imagine he’d see the whole thing as an absurd charade, a pointless grasping at straws. But the fact is I’ll grasp at anything now, take part in any charade that offers even the most infinitesimal promise. There is no other choice.

24

O
NCE, WHEN
we were children, Annabel and I saved our allowance for a month, then sent it to the Everlasting Toy Corporation. We had seen an ad in the back of
Highlights
for miniature sea horses, just $4.95 plus shipping and handling. For several weeks that summer, we sat on the front porch with Kool-Aid and a deck of Uno cards, waiting for the UPS truck to arrive.

But the sea horses did not come via UPS. They came, unceremoniously, in the mail, in a padded manila envelope. When we opened the package, I was disappointed to find that it did not say
sea horses,
but
sea monkeys
, and these monkeys weren’t even alive; they were just pale nuggets in a cellophane bag. The aquarium itself was a flimsy plastic number, ten inches tall and six inches wide. The kit came with a little packet of multicolored pebbles, which we scattered in the bottom of the aquarium. Annabel and I still had hope. We dropped the monkeys in and waited for something to happen.

Finally, a couple of hours later, one of the nuggets expanded, then began to wiggle and swim. We did not even bother to name it, for it was clear that this was not a sea horse, it was not even a sea monkey, it was just some kind of mutant shrimp. Within a week, all our shrimp were dead. Our mother dumped the grimy water into the toilet and said, “Well, girls, so much for Everlasting Toys.”

It wasn’t until several years later, on a trip to Marine World with Ramon, that I saw actual sea horses. “‘Hippocampus,’” he read, running his finger along the label. “‘From the Greek words for horse,
hippos
, and sea monster,
campus.
’” We watched two of them changing colors and performing an elaborate dance. The sign explained that most species of sea horses are monogamous. Each day during pregnancy, the male and female exchange a dance of greeting. After the dance, they separate for the rest of the day.

“Sexy,” Ramon said. The fish transformed before our eyes, their vibrant colors shifting as they moved side to side in graceful pirouettes.

The placard revealed that it is the male sea horse, not the female, who endures pregnancy, fertilizing the eggs in a brood pouch on his abdomen and carrying them to term. Ramon turned me around to face him and playfully pinned my body to the glass. “I’d do that for you,” he said, “if you’d marry me.”

“Ask me again in ten years.”

“By then, it will be too late.” He let me go. I could tell he was upset. He wanted the relationship to move faster, to go places I knew it never would. I knew he was too old for me, and that there were things I wanted to do with my life that didn’t involve him. I could not have imagined how little time we really had together. I could not have known that, in less than a year, he would be dead.

I’m flipping through one of Nell’s books on memory when a drawing catches my eye—a sea horse, in bright blues and greens. The chapter heading is “The Role of the Hippocampus.” The hippocampus is a curved portion of the brain located in the medial temporal lobe, just above the ear. It got its name because early anatomists believed the structure resembled a sea horse. Although the function of the hippocampus remains, in large part, a mystery, neuroscientists do know that it is crucial for learning new facts, remembering recent events, and transferring new information into long-term memory. If the hippocampus is damaged, old memories remain intact, but no new ones are formed.

I feel as if some invisible line demarcates the space in my mind, creating an unbridgeable division in time: before Emma disappeared, and after. In one portion of my brain there exists an entire lifetime of memories, a complex network of emotional and intellectual information—sensory impressions and remembered voices and mini-movies of important and mundane events—all the stuff of which my personal history is made. Emma is there, and Jake, and Ramon, Annabel, my mother, my childhood. All I must do to relive a happy moment with someone I love is to conjure one among billions of memories embedded there. And yet, I cannot help but wonder why my memory performed so poorly on the day Emma disappeared. What synaptic impulse chose the details to be saved and the ones to be thrown away?

25

J
AKE AND
I drive out to the Sutro Baths on a cold morning at the end of August. There are only a few tourists milling about. The place smells faintly of fish, and of the cypress trees lining the adjacent cliffs. Neither of us has mentioned what brought us here. Neither of us dares give voice to our fears as we peer over the edge of the parking lot into the gray ruins, shrouded in mist.

A search team covered this entire area within forty-eight hours of Emma’s disappearance and found nothing. I’ve already been out here a couple of times myself. We keep retracing our steps, searching the same places again and again.

The old Sutro Baths sit near the end of the peninsula. The baths, which opened in 1896, were destroyed by fire seventy years later. A green-tinted building with a two-acre glass roof once housed 517 private dressing rooms, six tanks containing almost two million gallons of salt water, and an amphitheater and promenade that could seat more than seven thousand. Now, only the cement footings remain. There’s an end-of-the-world feel to the place, as if the apocalypse descended on this small portion of cliff and beach, leaving the rest of the city untouched.

When the tide comes in, the current pulls everything past the baths and into the bay. Things get stuck in the ruins and stay for days before being dragged back out to sea. Looking down into the catacombs, watching the ocean tumble over the shattered seawall, one has the feeling of having stepped into another, darker century. The large circular structure, which once served as a holding tank for seawater being pumped into the baths, is now filled with stagnant rainwater and a thin green layer of slime.

“My dad used to swim here when he was a kid,” Jake says. “I have a photograph of him standing on a diving board in one of those rented, black wool bathing suits that visitors were required to wear.”

I peer through the binoculars into the cold Pacific. A barge moves through the choppy waves toward the bay. Freight boxes stacked three deep bear giant Chinese characters. I move the binoculars by a fraction and am staring suddenly not into the vastness of the ocean, but into a single catacomb. Things are floating there: a Coca-Cola can, its label faded to pink; some tattered item of clothing; a paperback book, waterlogged. One by one I search the compartments, terrified by what I might see. Those who commit the most horrific acts must find somewhere to conceal the evidence; every few weeks there’s another report of a body found in a ravine, a Dumpster, an abandoned building. I do not want to think about the myriad places where a child’s body might be hidden, but it’s impossible not to think of it, impossible not to envision the most terrible possibilities.

Jake’s back is turned to me. Though he doesn’t say it, I know he is praying. Since that day when I went to mass with him, he hasn’t pressured me to go again, but I know he’s been attending every week, occasionally meeting with a priest. It angers me that he’ll pour his grief out to a stranger when he confides so little in me, when he considers the support group to be a waste of time. I was surprised this morning when he called and asked if I would go with him to the Sutro Baths. I was grateful to him for reaching out to me, for trying, in his way, to reconnect.

I scan the ruins one last time. “Nothing,” I say, relief welling up in my chest.

Jake’s whole body relaxes, like a kite string going slack.

We walk the steep path down past the baths. At the end is a dark tunnel cut into the rock. Inside, the temperature drops sharply. There is an echo, a constant drip-drip of water falling from the cave walls and splashing into the shallow pools beneath. A cone of light shines through from the other side. Jake does something he has not done in weeks: he takes my hand. We emerge at the other end of the tunnel. The rocks beneath our feet are slick, and water swirls among them. In the distance, the Marin Headlands roll out toward the sea, their sharp edges softened by fog.

“Do you remember when we brought Emma there?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“She was in heaven when we explored the old fort,” he says, jingling his keys in his pocket. “Remember how she insisted on going back to the car and getting all her dolls so you could take a picture of them sitting on top of the cannon?”

His voice catches and he puts his arms around my shoulders, holding on. Maybe, if Emma had died, if we had seen it happen and attended the funeral, we could bear to relive the memories. Maybe we could repeat little things she said, recount our outings together in great detail. Maybe, if she were dead, we would discover some language with which to talk about her. But not knowing where she is, not knowing if she is suffering, if she is alone, if she is terrified, makes it impossible. With each pleasant memory that our words conjure, there are other, darker images lurking in the background.

The wind whips Jake’s hair around his face, drops of seawater cling to his wool sweater, and we stand silently for a while, shivering, staring out at the freezing water.

From here we can see the antlike figures of surfers bobbing on the waves, waiting. I remember reading somewhere that a swell can travel for thousands of miles across the ocean before it reaches shore. Surfers look so relaxed astride their boards, but the truth is their bodies must be intimately attuned not only to the surface of the water, but also to what’s going on underneath. By some magical trick or instinct or vision, they must be alert at the exact instant when the well-traveled swell drags the ocean bottom in a certain way and forms a wave. It seems like some divine accident, that the wave and the surfer should meet at all.