Chapter 3.1 - The Tall Man

We place ourselves in time because it makes it easier to orient our lives in the larger scheme of existence, and we use calendars and clocks like we do mileage markers on the freeway, to guide us in our travels. We usually ignore the fact that the freeway is already there, that we’re not making it up as we go along, a mile at a time, and that the portion we’ve already traveled doesn’t disappear behind us once it’s out of sight.

Once a moment had been experienced, it belongs to us forever. We can go back to happy moments and relive them any time we wish, in any order we wish, the past doesn’t have to obey linear time. We have full and random access to the stories of our lives and we can skip through the movie, which we’ve already seen, to get to our favorite parts. 

That day Claire decided to visit the age of five, so she grabbed an old blanket and headed to the oak tree, the repository of her memories. A gentle wind shuffled the leaves, disturbing the quiet of the afternoon, and brought with it a strong fragrance of heliotrope and the humid scent of the shade. It wrapped itself around Claire like a silk shawl in which a familiar perfume still lingered. She closed her eyes, watching the inside of her eyelids turn incandescent in the glow of the summer sun.

There she was, again, aged five, wearing the same dress with the long ribbons, apparently before the moment when the chocolate cake had made its way into her lap, she noticed, smiling. She made note of this obvious benefit of running time backwards: one could return things, if one wished, to their unspoiled state with absolutely no effort at all. Still, the chocolate cake had been delicious, she remembered, so she skipped forward to the birthday table, set in the shade of an oak tree, where said cake was braving the heat of the afternoon surrounded by an army of plates and saucers and little silver spoons. Her grandparents were there, strangely enough looking the same age as they did now, returning beaming smiles of happiness to the apple of their eye, now almost ready for school, who looked radiant in her perfect white dress embroidered with flowers; she looked like a little Italian princess on holiday. The little princess, eager to partake of the scrumptious dessert, stood up on the chair, slipped and fell belly first in chocolate frosting.

“Oh, so that’s how it happened, I had forgotten about that!” Claire’s smile broadened, continuing on to her memory. A choir of irritated voices roamed around her, somewhat indistinct, a lot more people than she remembered, who on earth was there, she wondered, looking around inside her mind, surprised by all those faces she didn’t know. “Who on earth were these people,” she thought, “and how come I haven’t seen any of them around during all these years?” She abandoned the goal of indulging in the delicious birthday cake and started focusing on the faces around her instead. The faces felt familiar, but she couldn’t place them anywhere, she was absolutely sure she’d seen them before, maybe in another life whose memories she’d been required to discard. 

Claire didn’t have an opinion about past lives, quite frankly she had been too busy navigating her current one to think about that, so she chalked up all these feelings of deja-vu to a less than stellar memory. She could see all of those people perfectly now, and the more she took in their features, the more they felt like old friends. A wave of comfort relaxed all of her muscles and slowed down her heartbeat. As she gazed at these images inside her mind, watching all those people enjoy their cake, she caught a quick glimpse, in the corner of her eye, of a strangely dressed young man, very tall, whose image vanished from her mind almost immediately. She tried to look straight at the place where she thought she’d seen him, but he was nowhere to be found. “Great, I wonder if it is possible to hallucinate things inside one’s head.” After all our imagination makes up so many things all the time, both enjoyable and frightful, how hard would it be for it to have embellished that memorable birthday party with a whole lot more guests than have actually been present, and especially that man, dressed in white, with long flaxen hair and piercing eyes. She shrugged off the thought, closed her eyes again and returned to her happy memory, inside which she was now digging into the cake with a level of enjoyment only young children are capable of.

A shadow passed over her face and she felt a lock of hair brush over her cheek. She jumped, eyes wide open, adrenaline pumping, staring at nothing. Another gust of warm wind wrapped itself around her, as if to offer comfort.

“There you were,” her grandmother waved from the outdoor table. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.” 

Claire got up, still unsettled by the experience, and joined her.

“Maman, do you remember my fifth birthday?”

“I guess,” the grandmother responded tentatively, frowning and trying to retrieve the memory.

“Was it a big party?”

“Sort of, there were lots of people there, if I recall.” 

Claire sighed, relieved that she didn’t make up all those faces.

“Like who?”

“Oh, some of our old friends, people from the village, visiting relatives,” she enumerated.

“How come I can’t remember any of them?”

“People move on, bebelle. They follow their lives, go to different cities, became estranged, pass away…”

“All of them?”

“Well, I don’t know who you remember, it would be hard to answer that question without more details.” She clapped her hands suddenly, excited about an idea. “Why don’t I bring the photo album, I’m sure there is a picture of that birthday party in there!”

The old album was heavy and its mementos were bursting out of its sides like goose feathers from an overstuffed pillow: still frames of life scrambled in time. There they were, all the people she remembered; Claire and her grandmother went through them, one by one, recalling fun facts about their lives and little anecdotes, and what they could be doing now, if still alive. The guests looked back at them from their virtual world of thirty years ago. It was suffused with the spirit of its time and Claire could feel it alter her perspective.

“There was a tall man with long hair, dressed in white,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to be in this picture.”

Grandmother looked at her intently. 

“You don’t remember him?” Claire asked.

“I don’t think I’ve ever known someone like that, not to mention have them visit,” Grandmother replied. “Are you sure?”

Claire wasn’t sure. Maybe she did paint over that memory with the wide brush of artistic license, she must have been working in an art gallery for too long. One gets so used to imagining stuff that doesn’t exist one starts to take it for granted. Grandmother, however, was determined to put this issue to bed. 

“What else do you remember about him?”

“I don’t know, I can’t remember his face very well, I just remember him being there. He didn’t eat.”

“That’s probably because you fell in the cake,” Grandmother teased. “What else?”

“His hair was braided with flowers,” Claire reluctantly shared the incongruous detail, which seemed too absurd to have been based in reality.

“I don’t know, bebelle, sometimes I feel like you’re making fun of me,” Grandmother got upset.

“I’m sorry, maman, maybe I made this up, you know how children live in their own fantasy worlds.”

The memory felt so real she found it difficult to shake, but it couldn’t possibly have been, it didn’t make any sense in context. As she sat across the table from her grandmother, each sipping tea from their personal cups, she couldn’t imagine anything as odd as that happening in her grandparents’ home, not then and not now. She let go of the thought and breathed in the strong scent of the linden flower tea.