Remembrance of Things I Forgot: A Novel

Ch. 9

121 9 COMING OUT TO YOUR MOM as yourself from twenty years in the future is a lot more difficult than coming out to her as gay. For one thing, my mother didn’t demand proof that I was gay: she took my word for it; but she accepted my identity as Junior-in-twenty only after Junior and Taylor vouched for me, and after I took a ballpoint pen and inked up my and Junior’s right thumbs and showed her that our prints matched. She thought we were kidding at first but then came around to seeming to believe us. Predictably, both of my coming out stories received the same response. “What are we going to tell your father?” We’d moved inside the house and were sitting in the large, sunny living room, drinking iced tea, while Ravi dozed in a patch of sunlight on the carpet. I was tempted to remind my mother she had said the exact same thing a year earlier when Junior came out to her. And my reaction was still the same. He’d handle the news better than she would. He already believed in flying saucers and ancient Greek supercomputers; his son traveling to the past in a time machine wasn’t much more of a stretch. She couldn’t take her eyes off my scalp. Her disappointment in my hair loss made me feel like a careless child. She noticed that I noticed 122 her staring. “I’m sorry. It’s going to take me a while to get used to it.” She gestured vaguely in the direction of her hair. Her next question was “Who was that?” I gave her a brief description and short history of Dick Cheney. I assumed she would find my story impossible to believe, but she had a less idealistic view of human nature than I did. She seemed to think a homicidal vice president was more probable than little green men. “What’s not to believe?” she said. “I know for a fact that he’s an asshole, and now you tell me he’s the vice president.” She smiled and shook her head. “Oh, I shouldn’t talk like that.” She habitually apologized for her cursing, and my sister and I always dreamed that one day she’d say, “Fuck! I can’t believe I swore again!” I didn’t tell her that Taylor would someday be the boyfriend with whom I would eventually want to break up. She would understandably become confused about whether she should love him now or hate him later. Her loyalty was always with me—she never sided with any of my exes—and her knowing that Taylor wasn’t permanently affixed to our family would make her begrudge him every time she sent him a check for his birthday, cooked him dinner, or offered him a second glass of wine. Our safety was her next concern. She wanted to know what we were doing and basically implied that the best way to ensure our well-being would be for me to immediately return to my own time. I couldn’t do that. Junior and I looked at each other. I didn’t want to tell her about Carol’s suicide, but then thought, since we’d all eventually feel responsible for her death, maybe the best plan of action would be to make everyone feel responsible for keeping her alive. My mother observed Junior and me glancing at each other. “What now?” she asked. It was a phrase that she used throughout her life as an acknowledgment of pending bad news while also an expression of her impatience to deal with it. At that moment I was disoriented about whose life I was leading: mine from the old present or mine from the new present? When my sister killed herself, I’d called my brother Kevin that night, and he had 123 volunteered to drive in from Syracuse the next morning to tell my mother so she wouldn’t be alone when she heard the news. I lived in New York City and would undergo my own trial of driving to the hospital in New Jersey and seeing Carol’s body on a respirator with raw gunshot wounds poorly bandaged on both sides of her head. The next morning I would have to demand that the doctors take her off the respirator...