Just Like the Ones We Used to Know

It’s a couple of weeks late, but what the hell: if it’s nostalgia it ought to be late. This is the bit I was working on this morning…

He thought about Christmas movies and the Portals embedded in them. Was it the bridge that Jimmy Stewart jumped off, or was it the icy river he landed in, that transported him into an alternative present in which he did not exist? Was Rosebud the Portal, or the castle in which it was enshrined, or the fire that consumed it? He wondered if there was anything Portalic in those old Bing Crosby holiday musicals. Bingo and Danny Kaye, both self-consciously ridiculous as frilly drag sisters, lisping their way through that corny Irving Berlin number. Bing and Danny marching in full uniform with the rest of the boys across that Vermont ski mountain, reassuring a beleaguered but ramrod-straight Dean Jagger that even a retired Army hero occupied a very special place in the post-War nostalgia. Bing seated at the piano in the chalet singing White Christmas to an enraptured Rosemary Clooney. Yes, of course that was it: that was the Portal.

Ulrich remembered reading somewhere that in real life Bing Crosby had been rather a cold-hearted bastard. This spiteful allegation had endeared the Crooner to Ulrich in a way that the smooth, schmaltzy screen persona never had. Bing wasn’t simply being himself up there: he was an artist who had created an alternate version of himself so consistent and compelling that the public bought it. Ulrich wondered whether the on-screen Bing wasn’t more real than the brooding and insular workaholic who sat chain-smoking in his trailer between takes. A mean SOB singing a Jew’s Christmas song to a lush: this combination, this synergy, had opened a Portal so pure and powerful that it still worked more than half a century later. Ulrich hoped that maybe it would be in this place, at this time, with this cast of characters – two asleep on the couch, one standing in the darkened kitchen gazing into the outer darkness – that something improbable would open up and pull them through. “Or maybe,” he considered, “it will happen when I walk back into the living room.” He did; it didn’t. Ten minutes later: “maybe if I go to my Lab.”

Ulrich wondered if the Portal would offer a nostalgic sort of passage, like White Christmas. He thought his wife would like that. Many of the basement boxes contained talismans for invoking their past lives, preserved and packed away in bubble paper. There were probably a dozen boxes of Christmas ornaments down there, most of them remnants from her childhood. His, too – when his parents had sold the old house he had picked through the stuff they weren’t going to take with them down to Florida.  A video of “White Christmas” was on one of the basement shelves, he realized – his wife had recorded it off the television many years ago. She would be sad if the basement wouldn’t fit through the Portal.

Ulrich remembered their first Christmas in this house. It was before their daughter was born, and his wife’s family had flown in for a visit. She was so nervous serving Christmas dinner that she broke down in tears when she dropped a Brussels sprout on the carpet. Later her little brother got sick and vomited all over the room they had put him up in, which also happened to be Ulrich’s office. That tonight of all nights he should be barraged by nostalgic memories Ulrich regarded as indicative of something, but he wasn’t sure what.

Ulrich O’Connor found himself remembering many things as he stared unseeing from his Laboratory window into the expectant night. The exact moment he had quit his last job. The day before his mother died. The shocked look on his newborn daughter’s face as she confronted the world for the first time. Proposing. The last cigarette he had ever smoked. The first cigarette. Getting kicked out of his own junior high school graduation. His only Little League home run. The get-well cards his classmates sent him when he had the chicken pox. The time his best friend hit him over the head with a toy fire truck – the very first entry in Ulrich’s sparsely-populated memory. He wondered if he might be dying.

And then he remembered, or seemed to remember, something else, something even before the fire truck. He would be all alone on a small island, watching the small waves as they timidly crept out of the surrounding sea and up onto the sand. Either that, or else he was in the middle of a vast and empty parking lot. There would be a pulsating sensation and a whooshing noise, and he would feel enclosed inside an enormous emptiness. As a young child he had experienced this hallucination many times; never before had he realized that the hallucination itself must have been a kind of memory. “I believe,” Ulrich thought then, “that it is everyone’s first memory.”

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