Jenny Wood, the narrator of “Remember Me, Remember Me,” is a ghost who died at age three and developed the ability to absorb the memories of other ghosts, gathering into herself interior worlds she would never have otherwise encountered.
At one point in my afterlife I roamed from one Little Free Library to another. Many of my ghosts had loved books, and I’d eavesdropped on their memories of reading. But now I could choose what to read, on what pages to linger, and what passages to reread until the words seemed like my own thoughts. Even if I had no hands or fingers, I knew a way to move from page to page. Whenever I shrank and floated through a little library’s glass doors, I spread a filament of myself against any book’s pages, and the slight difference between the type and the paper felt like a subtle form of Braille. And sometimes, a book could bring me back to one of my ghosts’ stories. Inside one little library built from parts of a dismantled piano, I found a copy of The Art of String Quartet Playing, the favorite book of a ghost I’d met one snowy night in Budapest. He floated outside the Palace of Arts, singing a wistful song. During his conservatory years, Mark had read this book religiously. It was one of his last thoughts on the night he died, a night that began with a failed rehearsal. Mark was the second violinist in a string quartet practicing for a concert only a few days away. The lead violinist — his wife Avery — was beyond late. An hour had passed with still no response to his calls, his voice mails, his increasingly terse texts. Tod and Werner said not a word. Finally, to kill some time they practiced a few knotty passages in Mozart’s Divertimento for String Trio.
Was Avery off somewhere with Sándor? Her first husband’s only pleasure had been her sadness. When Sándor finally cut her loose, Mark took the chance he’d long been waiting for, and he hoped that the quiet of a new relationship and the steady pace of making music together would heal her miseries. A mistake, to agree to perform in Budapest, Sándor’s hometown. The rehearsal ended without a word from Avery. Mark decided not to return to the hotel. I won’t go back, he thought. Let her worry. Mostly, he feared their room would be empty. He walked for hours, violin case in hand. Maybe their courtship’s tempo had moved too quickly, he had once confessed to Avery. She’d laughed a joyless laugh and asked if he ever stopped thinking in musical terms. Behind her words, Mark felt the sting of yet another critique of his playing. Now, giddy from cold and hunger, Mark imagined performing a Bach partita, his thoughts more supple than his fingers. As if he knew he would never again perform music. Mark finally took in the gathering celebrations in the crowded streets. He’d forgotten — tonight was New Year’s Eve. And still no call from Avery. He kept walking, his wall of self-pity resisting the joy of others. When midnight’s fireworks began, each new explosion brought another bit of Avery’s advice back to him. She often repeated, with less and less patience, “Imagine that each note is a door waiting to be opened.” Why had she so insisted? Mark’s strength had always been an exactitude with the notes on a score, less on what was implied. He was the spine of the quartet! But maybe, if I had finally, truly considered her advice, Mark thought, stunned and alone among the oohing and aahing crowd, she would have found a reason to stay with me. He continued his relentless march until he found himself at the entrance to the Chain Bridge. Why not cross over the Danube, from Buda to Pest and back, again and again, and take in the city’s winter skyline? That should at least get him to dawn. By Mark’s fifth crossing of the bridge, Aretha Franklin’s “Chain chain chain, chain of fools…” wouldn’t stop repeating inside him. How could a simple song’s overused Mixolydian scale pack such emotional power? Avery would have smiled that its secret was lost to him. Again, he could hear her judgment of his playing: “Too precise. More warmth.”
More warmth? Her first husband knew well how to make her feel, though that had mostly been heartache. The calm that Mark had tried to offer bored her. How could he have let himself push Avery back into Sándor’s arms? Her new miseries would be Mark’s fault, his fault! Mark stopped halfway across the river. He set down his violin case. I’ll show her some emotion, he thought, and he managed to raise himself to the edge of the bridge. How alarmed Avery would be if she believed he’d jump at the thought of losing her. Mark had no such intention, but he enjoyed imagining Avery calling out and drawing him back to her. He hadn’t planned on slipping. He plunged through the air, stunned and disbelieving, while, of all things, a tricky moment in the Ravel quartet serenaded his fall, an expressive melody that required delicacy, as the string quartet book had advised: Too much emphasis would ruin the music’s flow. They were Mark’s last thoughts before he hit the water. When he rose from the dark Danube, the river’s chill now nothing to him, he floated high enough through the misty air to look down at the Chain Bridge, the skyline. Not a trace of his body in the Danube below. Who knew when that would be found? I met Mark when he was freshly dead, barely a month into his afterlife. He floated outside Budapest’s Palace of the Arts. Its vast glass halls lit the night sky as he sang in a beautifully eerie voice. No one heard him but me. What was he singing? I couldn’t resist touching him, and while the memories of dozens of my ghosts poured into Mark, I saw his last months, his last night, his death. He broke from me, his ghostly eyes globes of surprise, and then he turned away: a crowd had begun leaving the concert hall, and Sándor stepped quickly among them. Avery followed behind, once again under his spell. Mark swooped beside Avery and sang “Remember me, remember me,” the refrain from Henry Purcell’s “Dido’s Lament,” an aria I now knew well, from all the performances Mark had once heard. His world of music had become mine, enriching my afterlife. The effect of my collected lives on him? They might offer insight into the depths he’d struggled to master in music. One of my ghosts, Binita, survived the difficult birth of her third child because a light-hearted young woman peddled fresh chapatis on the street below, a joyful voice that helped Binita face each new surge of terrifying pain. Another ghost, Tomás, hovered every year above his former favela’s carnival drum corps and felt vividly alive as long as the waves of axé rhythms rippled through his invisible body. What would Mark do with this knowledge, I wondered, when he floated, unseen and unheard, beside Sándor and Avery down cold, snowy streets? •
Author Unseen has published work in The New Yorker, Washington Post Magazine, Paris Review, McSweeney’s and elsewhere, and is the author of seven previous books of fiction and nonfiction. Author Unseen is also the author and creator of the novel and stealth literary project, What the Dead Can Say. Initially, a limited-edition of the print version of this novel was delivered by hand to 1,000 Little Free Libraries in 28 states across the country. What the Dead Can Say is now available in an expanded digital edition at whatthedeadcansay.com. “Remember Me, Remember Me” is an excerpt from a forthcoming bonus chapter for this digital edition.