Inside the Heart Lies the Hippocampus

Hussameddine Al Attar, Lebanon

“I cannot dilute the torment inflicted by your mind unto itself, nor can I alter the sequence of  events that has brought you to my desk. My services are confined in the strictest manner to the  erasure of memories of your choice. Do you have any questions?”  

William seated himself before the speaking mage and prayed his chest would tighten to  slow his beating heart. He, yellow in trembling, whispered a nay. He had not been greeted with  solace upon his arrival; he had expected to be received as a deliverance-seeking soul, yet the  mage operated with an apathy and ease that disturbed him. Does he not understand, William  thought, that it is not for leisure that I have treaded to this den? The whistling of the kettle that  the mage hadn’t yet looked up from did not ease his worry. William dug his hands inside his coat  and managed to speak: “They call you the Memory-Maker.”  

“They also call me a swindler, a charlatan, and a pirate. Names are weightless.”  “I apologize, sir,” stuttered William. “I’m only nervous.”  

“That is what the tea is for.” The Memory Maker conjured two teacups from a pocket in  his robe and offered one to William, revealing his face from beneath his hat for the first time.  The young man thanked him kindly as the cups were filled. Between the two hung a steam fog  that the mage tried to disperse with a swipe and a breath. He returned his attention to a paper and  quill before him and asked, “What would you like to forget?”  

William ignored an itch growing down his neck. Pit-turned stomach and twiddling  fingers, he sat mute, like an effigy, upon the creaking chair. He searched for words to describe  his situation to the old mage, and when he found none, he searched for ones that would allow  him to leave. “I apologize for wasting your time. This was a mistake. I cannot do this.” 

The mage tossed the quill to his side and rubbed his eyes. A loud sigh escaped him and  seemed to echo. William watched his composure waver for the first time as fatigue washed over  his face. “I’m truly sorry, sir. Thank you for the tea. I won’t trouble you further.” He forced  himself to stand and turned to the corridor whence he entered.  

 “Yes, you will.”  

William paused. The mage now sat up, hands upon the table, and stared at his customer  with pitiful eyes. Shaken, the latter responded, “Pardon?”  

“You will trouble me again, William. In six days. I guarantee it.”  

“How do you know my name?”  

“Sit,” he pleaded. “Sit and for once, I beg you, see it to its end. Confess your sins. Sit and  reveal the thoughts that haunt you.”  

The old man’s sudden animation caught William by surprise. Unsure where next to step,  he froze by the entrance and peered at the mage with a furrowed brow. Where has all this vigor  come from? The cold, unshakable calm the mage displayed had, in a snap, given way to an  almost desperation. Despite only having been in the room for shy of a quarter hour, William was  certain this was out of character.  

“Pray, trust my word and seat yourself,” continued the mage. He gulped down the last of  his tea and refilled both cups.  

William took hesitant steps towards the old man and reseated himself. The mage repeated  his question, “What would you like to forget?”, and William’s itch returned. Heart restless but  mind curious, he confessed, “The passing of my son.” 

The mage lifted his quill. “I’m sorry for your loss. How old was he?”   “Eleven…and a few months.”  

“What exactly do you want to forget about his passing?”  

“I don’t understand.”  

“Do you want to forget his passing altogether?”  

“Yes, I suppose. What else would you have me forget?”  

“Then, as I understand it, you would like to believe he is still alive.”  

“N-No,” William faltered. “Then the revelation would break my heart again. I would  experience his loss again. No, of course not; I cannot mourn him twice.”  

“What would you replace the memory of his passing with?” The mage looked up at William and thought for a while. “Would you rather believe he has travelled for school? Then  again, you would have to realize his absence by summer, but—”  

“Why do you insist on feeding me a lie?” he interrupted. “Why must I replace the  memory with another?”  

The mage took off his glasses and adjusted his posture. “If I am to wipe away a section of  your mind, I must fill the gap I leave. That is why some call me the Memory Maker. How would  you perceive the period of time whose events have been erased otherwise? If you would like to  forget your son’s passing, your perception of the time of his death must alter accordingly and so  must your perception of your son. I could, instead, erase your son from your mind entirely.” 

An offended expression across William’s face told the mage his idea was unwelcome. He  continued, “Which is it you want to forget—death or pain?”  

“Since his passing, I have been accompanied by anguish. Standing and supine, I have  become a prisoner of my mind. I never asked for proof of his mortality. Yes, Memory Maker, I  would forget the pain—never his memory.”  

The mage’s quill raced across the page and rarely rested in his hand. “What emotion shall  replace hurt? Indifference?”  

“Indifference?”  

“There is no sorrow in indifference.”  

William slumped back against the chair and hung his shoulders. “You ask me to be  dispassionate in his loss? I care for him eternally and invariably. I cannot pretend his death  means nothing to me.”  

“It would be real, William. You would not be pretending.” He smiled. “The painless loss  of your son requires a cold detachment from its happening.”  

“If I am to be indifferent to his death, if I am to forget his meaning to me, then I must  forget my love for him. I cannot unlove him.” William shook his head furiously, perspiring at his  brow. “You are absurd. The ease you display is unnatural; it is inhuman.”  

“Mind yourself, William,” snapped the mage. “The spirits that enter through that  doorway do not come for sympathy. No, no, no, they come for rescue. They come to divorce  themselves from their minds. My services have never included tenderness, nor have I ever  claimed that they do. You mention absurdity?” He spat to his side and seared William’s eyes with his own. “If you equate this mercy I extend to absurdity, then why do you sit there still, with no intention of abandoning your pursuit?” The old man laid back against his chair and took large  sips of his tea, his eyes darting across the room to avoid his client. “People come here for a  baptism, unorthodox as it may be, but a baptism nonetheless, and that is what they receive.”  

William’s fury began to abate, and he wiped his eyes clear of sweat. The veins at his  forehead had all but burst. He decided offending the mage, at his profession at least, was not the  cleverest route to take. Settled, however, was an uneasiness that William could not shake. “Have  you any family, old mage? Any children or grandchildren?”  

“Neither.”  

“Are you married then?”  

“Has my personal life become the concern of my customers?” he croaked. The mage  hesitated before entertaining William’s question. Perhaps this was the only way forward.  Fidgeting with the teacup, he nodded, then shook his head. “I was married once, ages ago.”  William’s silence edged the mage to continue. “It was death that drove us apart, but I cannot tell  you much about it. I cannot tell you about it because I do not remember it.”  

“You’ve erased it from your memory, haven’t you?”  

“Not all of it. Only the manner of her death. That, I cannot remember. I am afraid…”—a  deep sigh escaped him— “that I have had something to do with her passing. I was not allowed at  her funeral. Her father’s heart gave in at the sight of me, and her mother almost killed me.” He  pulled his collar down and to the right to reveal a bullet wound at the base of his neck.  

“Do you regret erasing your memory?” asked William. 

“I may have killed her. I may have been drunk at a pub when she died. I may have failed  to save her from a fire. Whatever I had done or failed to do, it had undone me, and I would much  rather live answerless than remorseful. I have been punished with exile, but it is a thousand-fold  more merciful a sentence than knowing how I had killed her.”  

William, guilt-ridden, offered his condolences to the old mage, and a white silence waved  between the two. “It is ironic,” he spoke without meaning to, minutes into the stalemate.  

“What is?”  

“You believe exile to be your punishment, yet you aid many in abandoning their  memories. It is an exile from the mind.”  

“I disagree, my friend. I like to think I have led an exodus.”  

“You believe yourself a Moses?” laughed William.  

The mage’s face hardened. “I am certainly no Prometheus.”  

“Tell me, messenger: what must I forget to end my torment without sacrificing the love  that allows it to exist?”  

“My customers do not often come with such strict criteria. I am more accustomed to the  ashamed adulterer, the thief who wishes to start anew, and the mourners who would trade their  love for numbness.”  

“Then you only serve the guilty and the ungrateful, and to hell with the rest of us.”  

“That is not fair of you. You know as well as I that you cannot blame these people more  than they blame themselves already.”  

A redness flooded William’s face and overcame his senses. “Don’t you dare lecture me  about fairness,” he shouted, jumping from his seat quickly enough to thud against the table and  knock the cups over, drenching the table with tea. Voice cracking, and composure faltering, he  continued: “If one thing is unfair, it is having to bury my son in my backyard. It is having to wake my wife from her trance every hour. It is her forgetting to eat and drink, and—by God, I  swear to you—her lungs may forget to fill, and her heart may forget to beat. Do not tell me what  is fair and what isn’t. Why are we not told that our minds despise us? That they entrap us,  enslave us, and begin a ceaseless, sadistic torture of our souls? Remembrance is not a virtue,  Memory Maker; it is a bane!” His beard glistened with tears, sweat, and drool, and his entire  body shook with a fervor it had never known before.  

“William, I implore you to calm down.”  

“You speak ceaselessly of absolution and rebirth and baptism, but know this, Memory  Maker: your hands are thick with blood as they were when you murdered your wife and  forgetting about it does not clean them of a drop. You remain just as guilty without the memory  of it.”  

“Shame on you,” bellowed the mage, striking the table with such a force that bruised his  hand. “I have confided in you what I have never uttered to another, and you use that to berate  me? You have sought my services yourself, remember? What a pity! Here I was confident I was  finally making some progress with you…but you are hopeless, my friend, in your demand that a  non-Moses grant you a miracle.”  

“I should never have come here. I repeat, this was truly a mistake. Give me one of your  potions, mage, and let me forget having joined you in this abysmal den tonight. I am better off haunted than guilty of desecrating myself or my family. Give me one of your potions and let us end this.”  

The mage rose and walked towards an open cabinet behind him. He quickly grabbed a  vial and slammed the cupboard shut, the hinges upon which it hung giving out on impact. It  came crashing down with the shelves inside snapping like twigs. He pressed the flask hard  against the rebel’s chest, almost carving a crescent in the skin beneath the wool. “You have made  yourself an enemy tonight, William. It should not have gone this way.”  

William grabbed the potion and stormed off. At the foot of the stairs, a sudden thought  immobilized him, and involuntarily, he turned to the standing mage. “You never explained to me  how you know my name.”  

Heaving, still, watching the tea stain the tablecloth, the mage pressed at his temple and  suppressed a hollow scoff. A despondency washed over his visage and his bitter expression  relaxed. “This is not your first visit, William; it is your eleventh. You have sought my services  before, but you had always left before telling me about your son’s death.”  

“That is impossible, I’m certain. It’s taken me the greater part of the past week to gather  the courage to come here.”  

“It’s taken you six days every time. You would walk to those stairs behind you,  apologizing insistently on wasting my time, and suddenly, you would stop. Eyes blinded in  certitude, you would whip towards me and ask to forget the night. You did not want to remember  fleeing. You believed it too cowardly, that shame would forbid you from venturing to my den again if you so wished. I never stood in your way. Every time, I would remove this night from  your memory and let you believe you had fallen asleep early. Six days later, you would reappear at my stairs, call me the Memory-Maker, and ask for my help. Not a week, could you last, with  the death of your son orbiting your soul. You have written yourself ten tragedies and here you  are, with that vial in your palm, about to write an eleventh.”  

Fearing his legs would not hold him longer if he stayed, William bolted up the staircase  and out to the streets. He did not try to shield his face from the pouring rain. He hoped to find  something that would contradict the old man’s testimony, but he did not try hard. Unpleasant as  the mage may be, William did not distrust him.  

He hurried before his chest caved in against a heart yet to explode. He felt the walls of  his home and made his way across the corridors. All but one lantern were dimmed. William fell  before a room that haunted him and rested his back against a wall. He watched his wife by their  son’s bedside, beneath a candle in that infernal room, looking silently at nothing, imagining him  still there, resting, breathing. She sat like patience on a monument, smiling at grief.  

Eyes blurred and cheeks flooded with tears, William lifted the vial to his lips and drank it  in its entirety.  

He had never had such a harrowing visit. The old mage threw the tablecloth into a bin and rinsed  the kettle. He pulled a vial from the broken cabinet and rested it between his thumb and index.  Tonight, for the second time in his life, he sought his own service; he would become his second  biggest customer.  

He downed the potion in two bitter swallows. Would it be so different in six days?  The mage prayed William does not write a twelfth tragedy. 

Hussameddine is a Lebanese engineering student enrolled in his third year at university. He has found a strong passion for art and literature and hopes to explore them to their extent. Some of his work was published for the first time this past spring with Aster Lit, and he is still experimenting with his writing to find the genres that suit him best.