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Inside my skin there is this space; it twists and turns, it bleeds and aches.
Inside my heart there's an empty room; it's waiting for lightning, it's waiting for you.
I am waiting and I am needing you here,
Inside the absence of fear."- Jewel. 'Absence of Fear'.
Bertrand Russell once wrote that pure mathematics is the field in which we don't know what we're talking about or to what extent what we're saying is true or false. I won't claim that I've ever read Russell. I found that statement in a Danish novel about a woman called Smilla. Rather mad, she was, and yet one of the sanest characters whose head I've ever been in. Regardless - if that is what pure mathematics is - the uncertain, the intangible - then in my life, pure mathematics is my father. The idea of him being numbers is soothing somehow. I know what they meant to him. That much, at least, I was always able to remember. The mind is a curiously complex mechanism. When I was twelve and my father died, they brought me to the Czech Republic and put me in a home. Since then I've lost count of how many complete strangers I have accosted in parks and on public transport to interrogate them about their childhoods. Their heads were overflowing with memories. School excursions. Lost pets. Sleepless sleepovers. Their first detention.
Not me. All those little scraps of history that change you from a physical body into a spiritual being - all those stitches that embroider the tapestry of your life - where they were supposed to be I had a void. Emptiness, because my mind had developed an incapacity for dealing with the truth. Blankness, because at some stage in my thirteenth year, close on the heels of my father's death, my past had been wrapped up in a thickly bound bundle and hidden behind a door at the back of my mind. For ten long years, the most that I could dredge up were some scenes of my father seated at his desk, with that concentrated, intense expression on his face and mountains of work piled up around him. More often than not, a colleague leaning over his shoulder. How many hours must I have watched him work like that, for the scene to have remained painted in my mind with indelible ink? Remained, despite their best efforts to annihilate my past.
I pull my knees up to my breasts at the thought and press my back harder against the park bench. I sit and wonder what kind of whim made him suggest that we meet here. Was it because he thought it would be impossible, had hoped that I wouldn't make it? Had he already been planning on coming here from London for some private reasons of his own? Or has he been following my life for all these years, watching from the sidelines that they pushed him into? To travel from Brno, where I'm studying, to Prague is not such a big deal and maybe he knew that. Either way, this was the place that he picked. Prague Castle, Pražskỳ hrad, is somewhere above me, and I'm in its gardens. Millions of people come to see the castle each year, apparently. I read on the map that where I'm sitting was once the moat but I can't visualise it at all. I suppose that like most people I think of moats in connection with small tracts of dirty water and a fairy tale castle. Pražskỳ hrad is impressive, but no fairytale, and water would never have worked here. But it's a stupid thought anyway; the mere drop down into the grassed gulley where I'm sitting would have made it easier to defend. Whatever.
I wonder if he ever came here, my father. I've tried, and failed, to visualise him as a small boy. When I was seventeen, I took the only thing I had of his - my name - and searched down my relatives. Apparently he'd always been close to them and could not believe that his daughter could have no memories of his life. I've never understood why I wasn't given to them in the first place, especially for that first year in the Czech Republic. Perhaps in their grief at his death they didn't want little Merry, the child of his they'd never even met. I don't suppose I blame them. Taking on a twelve year old isn’t like taking on a baby. But they told me what little they could. He didn't grow up in Prague, but my great grandmother lived here. Maybe she walked him through these gardens on a visit. But to be honest, I don't know if she were the garden-walking type. And even now, even today, there's a barrier a little further up where an armed man leans against a shady tree and protects whatever's beyond it from tourists and squirrels. He would be attractive if it weren't for the gun he's holding.
When I was thirteen-and-three-quarters, I was sent from the Czech Republic to the USA; allowed to live near the ocean. I suppose I spoke better English than Czech anyway. It was for that reason that I missed all the years of history that I would have had if I'd stayed in school here. I learnt about Independence Day and Teddy Roosevelt instead. But I know enough. Yesterday, I was in Wenceslas Square. So much history all in one place. But it didn't look like I had imagined. For a start, it isn't a square at all. I suppose that the English name is misleading. Instead, it's two roads with cars chugging up and down, and a stretch of green and a pedestrian zone in the centre. People, mostly Germans and Americans, stood around with cameras and looked at the building at the end of the street. A man set burnt himself to death in front of that building. Two men, actually. How do you do that? What does it feel like? Not the actual burning part, but the bit before that, the bit where you take the flame in your hands and caress it and inhale its scent and think, right, now this is it, this is where I make my passage from this world agonising. Does the knowledge of what you're about to do make your brains sting?
My hands find their way to the lighter in my pocket. I take it out and light a cigarette with unsteady fingers and pretend that that had been my sole intention all along. I don't want to think like that anymore. I'm sick of the inside of the therapist's room and I don't care how soothing that decor is supposed to be. I don't want to be the girl with the marks on her body. I tell myself that I’m not helpless anymore because now I remember. I don't have to wish I had the strength to end it all. I don't need the bad poetry in the margins of my textbooks.
(Life crawls up around you
Takes you unawares
Wraps cold bone hands at throat
Squeezes dead fish soul downwards
Lost; and foetid water swells around you
Pounds, pulps and covers over,
Suffocates -
You're dead.)
Sometimes, in the last few days, I've wondered about something. If they hadn't made me forget, would I have forgotten of my own free will? Because only a lunatic seriously believes that she wasn't born on Earth. Maybe I would have denied it all, repressed it. But as it was, I had no choice. No choice but to forget. To forget, until I saw the newspaper clipping on the pin board of the wall of the science department. I'd stood there and stared at it until everyone else was staring at me just as curiously, and then without saying a word I'd ripped it down off its thumbtacks and cradled it in my hand like the Holy Grail, and read it over again. There he was. There he was in London. In London having a book published. The professor had called out to me but I'd run out of the room and I haven't stopped running since. Not until now, not until this moment where I sit here with my knees at my chest and the cigarette at my lips and Prague Castle hanging somewhere above me. Sitting here and wondering if he'll come, come like he said he would.
I'd phoned the newspaper where I'd seen his photograph in the clipping. Eventually I'd phoned the journalist herself. The journalist who'd done the article on him. The article on the colleague I remembered seeing leaning over my father's shoulder uncountable times.
How many years had I wondered if that scene in my mind were even real? But at the sight of his face, his face in the small photograph beside the large one, ten years old and taken the year my father died, it all came crashing down. All those countless hours of emptiness and suddenly I was full to overflowing. Suddenly I could remember it all. Could even remember that it hadn't been my choice; that I hadn't built the wall that the therapists couldn't break through. Because suddenly I could see it as if it were yesterday: the week my father died. The accident in the laboratory. The days at his bedside in the infirmary, with kind Doctor Keller at my shoulder. The funeral in the gateroom. The discussions by the adults that I eavesdropped by tapping into their radio frequencies. Their decision that I would have to go to Earth, that I would have to live in some country I'd never even seen, miles and miles from the ocean. That I would have to leave, even though he begged to keep me. Their realisation that I knew too much. The injection. The oblivion. The loss of my life and my home and my friends.
The loss of my second dad.
I'm not sure if I ever had a mother. I've searched my re-born memories and can find no trace of one. Perhaps she died when I was very young. Maybe she was never in existence. These new images that inhabit me now, picturing out my childhood in full colour, are so surreal that I'm ready to accept anything. The city in the ocean. The gates through the heavens. The machines that turned on and off at barely a touch from my skin. All that - and my two fathers. It was almost always me and the two of them. Dozens of other faces come up with regularity - Doctor Heightmeyer, Doctor Keller, Teyla. But my fathers were the basis of my life, the wheel upon which my days spun. I wonder why he never tried to contact me in the years since. Was it the knowledge that they'd made me forget him? The acceptance that the distance they'd put between us was too great? Or was it that it hurt too much?
Because once I'd remembered, once I'd seen his face on that clipping, I knew. I remember.
I remember the hours listening to them argue incomprehensibly.
I remember Doctor Weir's disapproval when they taught me how to make fireworks for my seventh birthday.
I remember that he could tell better stories than my father, even if they were usually about himself.
I remember that he could shout at me for an eternity if I put a foot wrong, but that if Colonel Sheppard ever raised his voice in my direction, he'd be the first one there in my defence. Even if Sheppard was saying exactly what he'd just said.
I remember the film nights were he'd be so tired that he'd fall asleep and I could eat what was left of his popcorn.
I remember the awkward bear hugs and the reluctantly, but fiercely, given love.
I remember him pleading to keep me. I remember me begging him to.
I remember my father's best friend.My father's lover. My second dad. I remember Rodney.
There's a movement out of the corner of my eye and there he is. He's gotten older, but then I suppose so have I. He walks with a stick even though it's obvious he doesn't need it. It's one of his ploys, one of his deceptions in aid of his campaign to convince himself and the world at large that he's only half the man he actually is.
I don't put my feet to the ground and stand until he's almost walked past me; he didn't recognise me seated there. I'm not twelve anymore. The pigtail is gone and the boots on my feet are tall and black in place of scuffed sneakers. But the moment I stand he knows who I am, and the moment he meets my eyes I can see him see my father looking out. I see the hurt and I wonder just how much he loved him.
"You shouldn't be able to remember," he says gruffly by way of greeting. Ten years and that's the best he can do. He always was an irascible old codger.
"Hi, Merry, how are you? I'm fine, thanks, Rodney," I snipe, anxious to hide my insane, overwhelming joy at seeing him again.
He ignores me completely. "They made sure of it. Elizabeth Weir. The IOC. For your own good, they said. To help her integrate into society, they said. Because she can't stay here forever, they said. The chance that you would ever manage to relocate your memories after the injection were -"
"Astronomically small, I believe your words were." I shrug at him.
He blinks at me. "You were listening. You tapped the radios again." It's an accusation.
I nod, and suddenly I'm a child again and in his bad books. We fall silent and I can hear the wind rustling in our jackets and along the grass. I flick my cigarette on the ground and watch it go out.
"Disgusting habit," he says.
I ignore him. "You were supposed to keep me, Rodney. He wanted you to keep me. You wanted to keep me."
He looks straight through me, beyond me, over my shoulder. I know that if I turn, I'll see nothing there but the shadow of my father's ghost.
That's when I hit him in the middle of his chest and a twelve year old's soul whines, "I wanted you to keep me!"
Finally he sees me. Not my father. Not his own loss. Just me, Merry Zelenka, with my marks on my arms and my cigarette at my feet. And he reaches out and touches my hair as if I were made of fragile glass and every square inch of me collapses into a bubble of tears and I'm twelve and my father is in a coffin in the gateroom and Rodney's all I have left.
"Oh God," I whisper, "You left me all alone."
He rests his stupid stick against the park bench and wraps his arms around me and when I hide my face against his shoulder he pats my back just as awkwardly and just as lovingly as he always did. "It'll all be okay now, Meredith. I've come for keeps."