Of Unreliable Memories and Fatal Routines
Is that love or hunger in her eyes? She’s looking up at me expectantly: an involuntary shimmy in her hind quarter, her chin tilting her elongated head back, her ears flopping adorably over her chest so the occiput protrudes. She nods at me, unblinking, as if some thought’s running like a mad hare in her brain and needs release. She knows our morning routine.
I’m confident I or my wife or my daughter let her out to do her business. The drying puddle on the patio pavers is liquid proof. I peek under the table at her bowls. She lapped up thirty seconds of room temperature water and has another ten seconds remaining.
I rub that thick skull bone and cup both her ears in my hands. “What is it? You know I love you.”
I deliver a parting pat and return to my coffee. But she won’t leave me be. She nudges my thigh, insinuating, insisting I have missed something.
To remember, I close my eyes. In my ears the chicken and rice and carrot kibble grate against the plastic container. A raspy shuffling as kibble drops from tin cup to steel bowl. Even at 1:00 a.m. on Saturday with my eyes shut and fingers reading the typewriter keys, I can hear that dry food cascading like pellets of my basset hound’s everything. I wonder if, when she dreams and paws at the air, she too hears that distant pouring of food and love. The memory isn’t false. That morning feeding has nearly two thousand days of consecutive history. The memory is true, even if today no one fed her.
And watching her lick her chops, I run my tongue over my own teeth.
Did I floss this morning? I recall the waxed string zipping from its container and feel it coiling about my purpling finger. But did I floss?
Anything I do a thousand times I can convince myself I did a thousand and one.
Did I lock the front door? I sit in the car with mind and engine running. The weight of my keys lightened upon insertion into the door’s locking mechanism. Loose keys clattered before I gripped them and with a twist slammed the bolt home. Squeezed the handle, pulled and pushed, and the door would not yield. Thousands of days before this one it has not yielded, but today, sitting in my car, I imagine all the faceless burglars hiding behind oak trees and hedges and waiting for me to leave my house open to them.
We used to mock my father who, after loading the silver station wagon with his wife and five children, would sit in the driver’s seat, drum his fingers on the steering wheel, exhale, and exit the car, just to challenge the house’s front door and his mind’s memory. And every pre-COVID morning I would start my car as the world slept and jog to the front door to imitate my father. I have taken to narrating the experience-—“You are locking the front door”-—in hopes verbal reassurance could reduce my paranoia.
For the most part my routines do no harm. Our hound trots, carrying a healthy weight. A double dose of flossing hasn’t lacerated my gums. The ten additional steps and seconds to check the front door haven’t made me late to work or appointments or parties. In fact, as a type 1 diabetic, I crave routines. If this body were any other machine in my house, I would have hauled it to the street decades ago with a handwritten sign-—“still works, with much effort”-—and waited by the window for curb pickers. But, if I can control my routines, my daily habits, then I can perhaps control this body that requires so much maintenance.
My daughter doesn’t ask anymore what I’m eating for breakfast.
“Yogurt and blueberries,” they assess over their plate of pancakes, or fried eggs, or scrambled eggs, or cold pizza, or bagel and cream cheese, or cereal, or grits and cheddar cheese.
“Yogurt and blueberries,” I nod into the final bite. “Salad for lunch,” they surmise mid chew.
“Salad for lunch,” I confirm.
They return to their breakfast, for the sun has risen, their dad has eaten, and they believe the rest of the world will be as consistent.
“I couldn’t do that,” my wife says, scanning another recipe site for ideas. “I know,” she waves me off before I can poorly sing my chorus. “You could eat grilled chicken, rice, and broccoli with hot sauce every day.” The thought of a single menu option makes nausea pool in her mouth and her appetite scamper off.
It’s not the affinity for flavors that has me repeating dishes; it’s the routine, the known outcome, the effect of each meal’s carbs on my blood sugar. I can anticipate at every meal how much insulin I would need to stabilize my numbers and prevent my body’s self-destructive attack on my organs. My routine gives me control, and that control keeps me alive.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve become a creature of habit, little more than a balding orangutan who eats beneath the same durian tree and evacuates his bowels behind the same fern. When I clack out words on my Remington, Radiohead’s OK Computer spins because when I write I listen to Radiohead. And when I listen to Radiohead, I write.
I’m Pavlov’s author, conditioned to convey thoughts to paper upon auditory recognition.
Set a routine. That’s what all the authors who sell their advice insist. So when I write I retreat to the office at the back of the house and shut the door. I set the needle near the record’s first groove and set myself facing the purple wall before the record’s static turns to song. I nod at my wife’s handmade birthday card pinned to the cork board, at the picture of Val Kilmer whose outstretched arms terminate in a pair of lightly-gripped revolvers. He’s wearing that Fuck-Me-or-Kill-Me smirk, and below his waist my wife printed his encouragement: You’re a daisy if you do.
So get goin’ on the doin’.
I pinch the clasp and remove the machine’s lid. I insert a sheet of my daughter’s old math homework into the paper table. Crank the paten knob and drop the release lever. Begin each page with the date and title of what I’m working toward. For as long as the record plays, I write.
Return every night, even if I’d rather sit on the couch and let streaming services wash over me like a clod beneath a buckled pool ledge. Once I gather enough mass to pass as a first draft, I pin those ink-stained slices to the wall and leave them to hang. Let ‘em dry. Return when they’re mummies, more brittle to the touch. Let the body drain and then see what I can do with the skin and bones.
After a week I sit on the couch next to the record player with my headphones on and disappear into a story I created that then reads as vaguely familiar, like some street strolled in childhood that, revisited, produces nostalgic flares despite its flaws. I work with a highlighter and pencil and slash, slash, slash, slaughtering most of what I brought forth. Merciless Xs through entire paragraphs of tangent and fluff. A phrase highlighted here. A sentence there. Those words, harvested bits from a creative pileup, I cling to with a cup of coffee and consider. The pencil taps, thoughts expand, and between text and in margins I scratch in lines that bind it together into a salvageable piece.
I hide that scarred monster in a folder marked “WORKS TO REVISE” because I know what comes next. The hard part. The real writing.
A few weeks later I read the piece again and remember what I liked in the first place.
Fueled by indignation that no one has even asked yet to read, this thing they didn’t know I wrote, I knock out a few lines of the quick brown fox jumps over the zen, not lazy, pacifist dog and transcribe the gently sanded rough draft, try to make sense of this carcass smiling up at me. Add where something vital’s missing. Keep only the essential. Tell my ego to take a walk and let me work so that the ego could justify its existence. With my cold bedside manner I lay a hand on my daughter’s acts of perfection, her 10/10 papers with their “Great Job” positive reinforcement, then flip those beauties to their other side to eye my mangled desecration.
Hang in there buddy-—you’re taking shape.
Each sheet I filch of all its usable bits receives the orange highlighter strike-—a biohazard marker meaning, “Do not return to this page.” I carve no more than two pages a night because writing is difficult and I get tired. Night by night, the number of mutilated sheets increases, as do their polished doppelgangers on my computer screen.
When I have something that resembles a final draft, I ask my wife to check its vital signs. Does it flow? Anything unclear? Any place to elaborate? Does it make sense? Can it be better? I encourage her to read at her leisure, but my unblinking enthusiasm dials up the pressure in the room, rendering leisure impossible. I busy myself peeling potatoes, or soaking rice, or trimming white fat globules from defrosted chicken thighs, or washing dishes as she reads, keeping an ear tuned to her reactions. Was that a sigh? A chuckle? A tongue snap against her mouth’s roof?
Signaling what? What?! When she returns to find me casually stress-wringing a wet dish towel I know if I did something or nothing with all that time. If I, with words amassed and arranged through routine, have reached her.
Routine transforms the blank side of second grade math homework into a 5,000 word essay, creates something where there was nothing.
Recently I realized how desperate we are for our routines that return our somethings to nothing, for our funeral rituals, even when we no longer believe in them. The familiarity, in trying times, restores order, comfort.
We worship no deities in this house, offer no prayers to cloud-riding voyeurs. Our daughter counts us among the believers in science, cause and effect, and randomness—-believers in, not proponents of, shit-ends-of-the-stick, and piss flowing downhill, and the powerful maintaining their power through acts of oppression and aggression.
I’ve had conversations with people who struggle to accept how I could so absolutely deny their savior, or their prophet, or their omnipotent being who daily proves impotent to address neither major nor minor wrongs in our societies.
“God will punish the sinners in the afterlife.”
That’s like watching a bouncer let his friend into the club without collecting the cover charge and being told, “It’s okay. He’ll pay on the way out.”
You could rock on your soles outside the rest of the night waiting to see justice and dawn will rise on an unjust world. Some people in this life are never condemned, and since this life is the only life, they never will be.
During the COVID-19 pandemic my uncle died, not from the virus, but because of the social distancing that demanded we disrupt our routines. No longer was he making his usual bank and grocery store stops. No longer was he chauffeuring grand nieces and nephews to and from school and sports. So when his everydays became no more, he became no more. Doctors will write a report about his diabetes, and his kidneys, and his heart, but failing organs have attached to them numerous causal links, a lifetime of routines that sink them. Break the routine, break the spirit, break the man.
We, the grieving, were denied the typical process, and oh, my open-wounded heart, how we did miss the customs I loathe. My wife and I have already discussed our funeral arrangements-—skip the macabre, the line of friends, family, and strangers, these tangential rubberneckers paying respect and looking for reason to wear their nicest clothes as they obscenely scratch the itch of their morbid curiosity.
Cancel the groundskeeper and pitmaster, too. Grab a shovel, one and all! Drop my meat sack in a hand-dug hole of rich soil and let the critters with their pincers make quick work of returning me to a more natural state. Skip the clothing, too. Apparently funeral homes give you the option of granting your dearly departed an eternity of rest in their birthday suits.
“If you don’t choose a mortuary garment, we place them in overalls.” “Like denim overalls? Like deceased farmers?”
“No. Plastic see-through unionalls.”
Such waste, like asking the taco place to wrap your ahi tuna tacos in the wax paper and plastic bag when you have every intention of devouring your meal in the shop’s parking lot.
Mulch me. Grow an oak tree from my decomposing navel. It beats all the chemicals pumped through our lifeless vessel in delusional efforts to inject life into a corpse’s rigor mortic muscles and shriveling skin. Chemicals that then sit in the ground. So much wood and metal and silk and cloth and plastic, all packed into the earth for no other reason than that’s what we do. Future alien generations will unearth what we’ve earthed and assume we lived like rats in nests, insulated by our broken sporks and chicken bones and candy wrappers. You can probably describe some of your own finely dressed skeletons surrounded in their expensive wooden box by lifetime comforts that matter as little as everything else to the dead-—a deck of cards, a pen, some chocolates, a little bottle of booze. Don’t waste your time. Upon my death (please make sure I’m actually dead), strip me, roll me into a hole like some mob victim in the Nevada sands, and carry on with your life.
But it is an act of hybris to assume burial rituals have anything to do with the dead.
For my uncle, we the living missed the tradition, the routine, the typical North American grieving process. No wake. No gathering at his house as a family to remember forgotten faces in faded pictures. No memories conjured into substance, stories of an Elizabeth Street and Little Italy we the younger generation would never know, tales told to an audience wanting more, more of this man we miss. No sifting through his books, his tools, his knives, each remembering and taking a piece of him with us. No church service. No scents of incense, no fragrant wisps of sanctity. No echoed songs of custom bounced off arches in the heavens. None of the grandeur with the flowers and the organ and the bells. No pallbearers to shoulder the lamentable weight of our dead. No grand feast following the burial with too much food and drink and stories and laughter and deep healing heaves that prove to us, the living, life has been restored.
Instead I drove in a long line behind a long car carting a long box and watched from a distance some strangers lower that box into a hole. In the silence of my car with my wife and daughter, I ached for our stupid traditions. That morning we started one of our own. In my diabetes bag, next to the insulin and bottles of cranberry juice, I stashed a handful of dark chocolate eggs left over from the holiday. I passed them to my wife and daughter and peeled the purple foil from my bittersweet treat.
Though my uncle died, I sought my own reflection in the church’s glass front, in the procession’s car windows, in the polished casket wood. Every grave’s a mirror, and I looked thin. Hair, uncut since December, curled and coiled and caught the wind regardless of the product applied to suppress it. This uncle was my godfather and a fellow diabetic. Though he was type two and I am type one, when we shared the same verb tense we would chat about our numbers, compare A1Cs and dietary routines. In pictures from our youth we look more like brothers than uncle and nephew. Thick slicked black hair, wide eyes aflame with a love for ball busting, a tight grin set in parenthetical pudgy cheeks.
Cleaning out his house now, months after his death, we have come to appreciate his meticulous nature-—collectibles organized, files in the house for utility and credit card payments, files in the garage with manuals for every tool he ever purchased, with detailed notes for every house improvement project he imagined, for every idea he ever planned and completed.
Everything had a place, and he knew that place. His routine organization gave him control over his possessions, and now that he’s gone, now that his things and his spaces have lost their possessive attributes, we are left to make sense of his routines.
And since we live, we are left to carry on our own routines. I think of him nearly every evening between nine and ten. Within that hour you know where to find me-—seated in my underwear at my spot at the kitchen table. This isn’t anything kinky. It’s just another daily life process. There I inch up my underwear’s elastic ribbing to expose a thick slab of thigh meat, a chunk of muscle and pale skin dashed with feathers and coils of black hair.
I can poke my thigh right now and summon to memory last night’s dose, a tenderness just beneath the skin. Smell the alcohol swab. Watch the pen needle drip a drop to clear the air bubbles. Feel the skin’s tension, reluctant to yield to the steel tip sharpened for a singular and single use. Hear the rip of skin’s desire giving way to the body’s need for survival. Hear the roulette-wheel-click of the plunger delivering twenty-nine units of long-lasting protection. Feel the leg receive that liquid. Feel the inserted spike stick, stick, stick, stick for ten seconds so every drop serves its purpose and doesn’t fall upon withdrawal like the seed thou shalt not spill.
But sometimes the doom clock strikes at 10:30 when the decaf tea can’t keep me conscious enough to grade papers. I slump before the pile, chin to chest, shallow breaths. I awake later than I thought it was, later than my usual Toujeo shot, later than that baseline for all the future quick-acting doses before meals. I blink and stretch and wipe the drool and ask myself, “Did I take my great stabilizer, the shot that restores order to my chaotic body?”
Doubt regains consciousness sooner than confidence, and it has questions.
“You thought about taking the shot before you sat to grade, but what time was that? Was it before nine? Just after? Think!” But all I can think of is Sammy Jankis in Memento, of unreliable memories and fatal routines.
I nudge my thighs, press for any sense of pain, for the slightest discomfort, the ache of a hole torn and occupied until the last synthetic drop completed its subcutaneous firework.
I hear the groan of my belt, the click of my buckle’s tong’s release. The pop and toothy whisper of my fly. But did I do it? Incredulous me wonders. Two thousand injections at that dinner table. But did I complete two thousand and one?
My routine has convinced me that I don’t know. So I dial up twenty-nine units on my pen needle and stab a portion of thigh that can’t protest. Then I snatch three bottles of cranberry juice from the useful, not lazy Susan and wake my wife to tell her I may have inadvertently killed myself.
“I may have double dosed,” I say in the darkness of our bedroom. “The emergency glucagon kit is next to my juices. I love you,” I make sure to say, and hope to continue the routine of waking the next morning.
Michael P. Moran lives on Long Island with his wife, child, and pups. His creative nonfiction works were published in The Chaffin Journal, Miracle Monocle, Emerald City, The Bookends Review, and Please See Me. He can be reached on Instagram @mikesgotaremington.
