As I recall, it was some time about 7 or 8 years ago that I wrote a page or two opening of what I thought would be a short story. Around that time I had a dream at night about being taken captive by a group of some kind of dangerous “rebels” only to discover that I sympathized with them. I mused on this a bit and came up with an idea for a story where a man loses his memory, comes to sympathize with a group of people, only to regain his memory and find that they are his sworn enemy.
I’ve come across SciFi stories before involving characters struggling with memory loss and identity issues. Something never sat right with me with the stories I encountered. Years ago I saw an episode of the Outer Limits (from when the series ran back in the 90’s) where a man with memory loss has an adventure with a woman and essentially falls in love with her. They find out that he was some kind of evil scientist who has been torturing homeless people or something or other. At the end of the episode he is captured, his memory is restored, and he goes right back to being an asshole. Likewise in the classic Verhoeven film “Total Recall” (based on a notably different and simpler short story by Philip K. Dick) the central protagonist is deathly afraid of regaining his memory because he doesn’t like the man that he was.
In both of these stories it was never perfectly clear (at least to me) that these characters were really threatened with losing the memory of everything they had experienced in the interim. All that was really clear was that they would gain the memory of everything that had come before. And so it made me wonder: What if the operation at the end of Total Recall had succeeded, but not in a fashion where Quaid is erased, but rather he simply gains the memories of Hauser? Or perhaps, from another view, Hauser gains the memories of Quaid? Who would triumph in the end? What if the villainous Cohaagen cackled in delight thinking he had gained back his evil companion, but instead he got a conflicted man torn by the memory of the experiences he had gained while he was “Quaid” and struggling to fit them into the larger context of his identity as “Hauser?”
Of course in that particular film, the “Quaid” identity is itself subject to a host of false memories and carefully arranged lies–which is part of what never sat well with me. At the end of the film the ostensibly triumphant ending only has the slightest twinge of insecurity around whether it was really real after all. But the bigger question to me has been… even if it was “real” didn’t he miss out on an opportunity to regain his true memories of the past? He may never really know what his real childhood was like. He may never even know who his parents actually were or anything that was lost when “Hauser” was not restored. We’re supposed to cheer at the end that the villain was conquered, the people of Mars are safe, etc., but just who is the central character? And will he ever know?
On the flip side, the Outer Limits episode I hazily remember left a bad taste in my mouth for a different reason. There’s never any indication that the memories the central character experienced throughout the course of the episode are ever destroyed. It’s simply a matter that his old memories are restored. Yet we are never given any indication that he ever had the slightest struggle or doubt with going back to his old wicked ways. We are supposed to just cynically accept that individuals are so thoroughly enthralled to their past that new experiences have virtually no effect at all on who they are in the present.
In my experience that is woefully untrue. Worldviews can radically change–and continue to change–as individuals gain new experiences and things they learn over a short (sometimes very short) period of time. And thus I had it in my mind to make a story to that effect.
For years I left it alone. I had only written the opening with a central character crawling through darkness and ruin. I had no clear idea what was beyond in the light, but many nights I would sometimes drift off to sleep imagining what that might be. To imagine having no more attachments in the world. No responsibilities or worries or stresses. Only living in the moment as a man with no past emerging from darkness into a serene untouched landscape. The thought of it served as a catharsis as I slept alone in the empty bed of a very troubled marriage.
It was only after my long-overdue divorce and then subsequent marriage–to a wonderful woman who has brought love and light into my life–that I found the inspiration and motivation to write the rest of the story. Over the course of a few months the story grew longer and longer as I realized it required a greater amount of breadth that I anticipated to tell the tale with the amount of depth it seemed to deserve.
That story became my first novel. A book I have entitled “Different Vessels.” The title is itself, in part, a literary allusion. But I don’t want to say anymore, lest I give away any spoilers. (Hopefully I haven’t done as much already.)
To any reading this blog entry who might be interested in checking it out, I have the book available on Amazon as both an eBook and Paperback. To celebrate the fourth of July and my own birthday (July 8) I am making the eBook available free of charge from today through the 8th.
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