In the Meantime by Robin Lippincott

[Kathryn]

An old man with a mask covering his nose and mouth so that only his eyes are visible; she thinks they were green-or was it the mask that was green? (That is the thing, or one of the things, about memory: it is faulty and unreliable; it can't be trusted). The masked man takes her out of her mother's arms and walks away with her, carrying her-his own hairy arms extended-into a bright white light: she is kicking and screaming, crying, hysterical, her body and face becoming clenched as a red fist in protest; now her mother is crying, too, though less hysterically, but the strange man with the bushy eyebrows and the mask is smiling. She is so young that she cannot yet walk or speak, and of course her fear, if only she could formulate it into thought, never mind words (now it is only a feeling), is that she will never see her mother again-ever! And though her mother is thinking the very same thing, but for a different reason, she, her daughter, does not and cannot, know it, because the strange masked man is taking her away, and her mother is just standing there allowing him to do so.

Separation.

A congenital defect of her infant heart had required emergency surgery. She was less than a year old at the time, and her chances, because of her age and size, were fifty-fifty. The year was 1926.

But if this is her first memory and she can't even remember whether it was the surgeon's mask or his eyes that were green (perhaps it was both?), can she be believed about the rest of it; did this actually happen? And if it did happen, does the true color of the surgeon's eyes/mask really matter?

[Luke]

His mother's dress-a field of small black and white diamond shapes. She is holding him, and as she moves him about on her lap the diamond shapes become smaller or larger or, eventually, a blurry, kaleidoscopic fusion of gray, depending upon his distance from them. He delights in putting a single finger, his pointer, into the center of the light diamond, and then the dark diamond, the light space and the dark space, over and over, and then looking up at her to make sure that she sees what he is doing, and giggling. She giggles along with him-they are united in delight. But suddenly the black and white diamonds grow increasingly blurry, less and less distinct, a gray field, and then disappear completely: she has put him down and walked away, into another room, out of sight. Now it is cabbages that he sees; no, roses (more shades of gray)-a chintz pattern, the sofa. This surface is much softer than his mother, and bouncier, too; he bounces up and down, on the verge of hysteria. Then he hears her voice calling to him; it is muted, faint. She calls his name: Luke! He bounces again. And then again-now feeling buoyant, buoyed, elated: she is still there! She has not abandoned him after all. She is calling his name, signifying him, Luke! Luke! and he is laughing and bouncing up and down, so that laughing and bouncing seem to be one and the same. She continues to call his name, over and over, and he continues laughing and bouncing, and then her voice, his name, now one, becomes louder, and still louder, until it is right upon him, and then suddenly she is there, too, and the gray field of her dress becomes distinct black and white diamonds once again, and he is in her lap and can again finger the black space and then the white space, and he and his mother are reunited, together, one.

[Starling]

There are no people, it is people-less, blessedly, peacefully-and only much later in his life ambiguously-people-less, with only the open window and the breeze blowing the sheer flimsy white see-through drapery in and out of the room, sweeping in and then out again, and so on. And that is all, the extent of it, his memory-the frame of the window, the evanescent, blowing, in-and-out drapery, and his own scrawny appendages (arms/hands/legs/feet) occasionally flailing into the periphery of his vision; whatever he can see out the window, through the drapery, or between its panels, is blurry and abstract-shapes, is all he could say with any degree of certainty. He must be lying on his back, in his crib, by an open window, and if he could have seen out, he supposes what he would have seen would be a blue sky, or a gray or some other shade of sky (pick an appropriate color) depending upon the weather and the time of day, and green grass, or not green, and maybe not even grass, depending upon the time of year-this could have been anywhere between winter and summer, but he does not recall feeling either hot or cold. He would like to say that he saw a dog or a cat or a bird (especially a starling), or even a quotidian squirrel out that window, but in fact he remembers seeing none of those things (no white chickens; no red wheel barrows glazed with rain), for not only is his memory people-less, it is also completely devoid of a single living thing, nary a peep nor a leaf, save himself.

Save himself!

He has been trying to do that very thing ever since.

And he, too-like so many others who have traveled this path before him-has to wonder if this, his first memory, is revisionist, colored by what followed (that is, his life)? He cannot say for sure, and that is the troublesome thing.