Ant Chalk by Sofia Oumhani Benbahmed

I wake before seven, one eyelid swollen like a petal in spring, and shift my limbs under the thin covers until my consciousness rises to the surface of time, breaking through. I think always of the night before, a vow to make the morning new lodged in my throat like a dry prayer. The cats awaken and rise lithely to their little feet. Charlotte begins to purr in anticipation of food and Pan blinks at me before turning her attention to the baby, pupils dilating.

The coffee maker churns. I can hear the cats lapping at their plates as I pad down the hall.

In the bathroom I lean over the sink and rinse my face with cold water. I reach for the first of the nine orange bottles on the counter, clustered like an army by the toothpaste. Sertraline, the bottle reads. Half a yellow pill slides down my throat and catches as I reach for the second morning bottle.

*

“Do you remember the ant chalk?” Svetlana asked six weeks ago, voice edged with glee.

“Ant chalk…” I whispered, rowing my boat through the thick fog of my memory.

“It sounds familiar, I think.”

“You, like – it wasn’t even legal. I don’t know how you knew about it. You’d go into these little Chinese shops, right up to the counter, and just ask ‘Do you have the ant chalk?’ — They always knew what you were talking about. Anyway, it was your apartment, you know, the one after 24th Street – there were ants everywhere, crawling on the walls, even, so we’d take this chalk and draw all over them and the ants would just die.”

Svetlana sounded impressed, as she often does when she tells me about my life, much of which I don’t remember.

“Your teeth were falling out, too,” she added.

“My — teeth?” I asked, quickly running my tongue along the bones in my mouth.

“Yeah, there was this big shard of one — I saw it, you kept it in your jewelry box.”

Of course I did.

*

I lost my memory four years ago, when I was 25. It slipped as easily as a seal from a rock. I was warned that this was a possible side effect, but strongly advised that any potential benefit would be well-worth the cost. I agreed.

*

The ants come back to me now. I remember that apartment; a hanging mirror, a urine-soaked mattress, bloody paintings on the walls. I left suddenly, and my father flew to California to clean up the mess.

My dad has told me since that, as he cleaned, he moved the oven to sweep underneath; where the shadow had been, a solid sheet of roaches writhed, crawling over one another, frightened by the sudden light. I picture their shells as thick as toenails, shining like dark silk.

*

I used to talk to those roaches as I lay in bed in the dark, while they crawled in the folds of my tangled sheets.

*

There is the question of the first memory, that intimate rite of passage. Before the treatments, or so my father says, I remembered things with chronological precision, but to sift now through the bank of time is a muddied effort. I have retained certain memories that I sharply associate with particular ages and settings, but many of the ones I’ve recovered are severed entirely from context.

I have searched myself in an attempt to locate the first thing I can remember, and I am returning now to the sleeping bird.

*

My parents took me on weekends to the lake to feed the geese and ducks. There were also what seemed like hundreds of pigeons there. Lake Merritt is a popular walking spot in Oakland, and is home to Children’s Fairyland. When I visited recently I watched a spindly old woman rowing a kayak through the center of the lake, and I hoped to someday be her. The surface of the water is filmy and has an oily sheen to it, and at the edges float beer cans and discarded trash.

My childhood best friend’s name was Jessica Raphael; at four years old she stands in our class photo in a corduroy red dress, pale and sweet and unsmiling.

One afternoon — I remember this entirely in grey — my mom brought Jessica and me to feed the birds, and when she wasn’t looking, Jessica jumped down onto the sand at the water’s edge to examine a pigeon we’d spotted, who had stuck her head in the mud. She was limp, her feathers stained and damp. I grabbed a short branch and jumped down to join my friend.

“Poke it,” I told Jessica, trying to hand her the stick, but she shook her head no, so I bent my knees and inched cautiously forward, poking the bird’s wing. She toppled onto her side. Jessica screeched and clambered back up onto the walkway as my mother yelled at me, “GET AWAY FROM THAT BIRD!” but I bent closer. She had been decapitated, and the stump of her neck was crusted with blackened dirt and grains of sand.

Huh. Where did it go? I wondered. I poked her again.

*

It was in the first hospital, the nice one — they called it “The Pavilion” — that I met Gulliver. He was thirteen years old and small for his age with inky black hair and a pale, nearly translucent complexion. He sat in the day room picking with a red pencil at the angry stitched wound on his wrist. No one seemed to notice or pay him any mind.

“Hey,” I said. Silence.

“Hey. If you keep doing that I’m going to get a nurse.”

He pressed down harder.

When the nurse came, she took him by the arm – “That’s it!” she said – and guided him out of the room. Gulliver turned to me as he was shepherded away, wearing an expression of astonishment.

“You told on me,” he said.

That evening at dinner, he brought his tray and set it down next to mine, and began to speak to me as though we were friends.

*

One year later I met my friend Hannah at the base of a steep hill, the entrance to the Home of Peace Cemetery, where Gulliver was to be buried. His family was Jewish, and my understanding is that it was tradition to bury the dead within 24 hours of passing.

I had never been to a funeral before and assumed I had to wear black, but the only black pants I had were torn at the crotch. Still stunned by the news, I used Scotch tape to close the hole. As we climbed the nearly perpendicular hill to the burial site the sun beat down on our backs, and a bead of sweat ran down the side of my face. The tape in my crotch ripped; the crowd was so silent that I heard it tear and swish against itself with each of my steps, producing a crinkle, crinkle, crinkle sound.

*

I was fifteen, and just out of the mean hospital again. The cousins I had always regarded as my sisters had moved to Maryland, and the adults decided that a trip, a visit, would do me good. The air that year was strange, mute and thick, and everything in sight seemed filtered through a rounded sheet of glass. I was pleased to see my cousins, but my speech was slow and my limbs were heavy from the sedative I had been prescribed. I was on twelve different drugs and had gained thirty pounds over the course of two months. I tasted metal all day long. On the first night of my visit, I gladly welcomed bedtime.

*

That night, warm fluid ran down my legs and something bumped into me and yelped in fear. I opened my eyes to find myself standing — I had been sleepwalking — and facing my little cousin Dounia, whose features spelled horror and disgust. I stood, stunned, as the carpet absorbed the urine and Dounia barreled past me, racing up the steps to my aunt’s bedroom.

*

Electroconvulsive therapy can be administered unilaterally or bilaterally. Unilateral treatments target only one hemisphere of the brain, while bilateral stimulation induces a seizure across the entire organ. The latter is more commonly associated with extensive, and at times permanent, memory loss.

*

It became a joke in the year following the ECT: Sofia tells the same stories over and over again! Isn’t she quirky!

I had landed at a transitional living facility called “The Mermaid House” in Santa Cruz, California, where I would spend the next eleven months sifting through past traumas, pulling Goddess Cards, and cleansing bad energy with mugwort and sage. By this point, it had become clear that the treatments had impacted my short-term “working” memory in a lasting way, and had also wiped out much of my long-term memory. The way that working memory was explained to me is that it is comprised of the ability to hold something in mind long enough to store it and later retrieve it. The joke was meant as a statement of endearment, an affectionate acceptance of absent-mindedness and repetitious chatter. In retrospect I see that during my time in Santa Cruz I was treated very much like a child, but I harbor little resentment or blame — at the time, I exhibited many behaviors and traits that I imagine, to an outsider, must have made me seem very simple-minded. I was 26 years old and disturbed by my sudden difficulty completing tasks that I knew I had once performed with ease. I had, for example, forgotten how to drive, and found myself terrified of doing so. When I was informed that I had already told a specific story multiple times, I was confused, having no recollection of such. I frequently found myself stopping mid-sentence, having completely forgotten what I had set out to say, and when I sat down to write I had a much more difficult time finding the words to describe what I meant. I feared that I had lost my intelligence and capacity to think through anything that was even slightly abstract. While I had once hoped to pursue a higher education, I now had doubts that I would be able to do so. But I didn’t voice these fears, even in therapy. I laughed along.

*

I can remember being a small child and feeling uneasy about going to sleep. I would lie in bed and consider the implications of a departure from consciousness; I understood that over my lifetime those nights, those breaks, would accumulate, and I feared forgetting what I believed to be meaningful. I knew that with age I would change, and that I could not predict the nature of these inevitable shifts. I feared forgetting the fear itself, which felt important, and I would hold in my mind the truths I wanted never to forget until I was so tired that I could no longer honor my resolve to stay awake. It was only when I woke the next morning and remembered the previous night’s anxiety that I felt assured.

I have indeed forgotten what I believed then to be most important, but I have not forgotten the fear, and to remember it reassures me even now.

*

Over the last four years I have found myself considering the nature and functions of memory. I think of it as both an architect and a mapmaker, and as the context we need to operate in daily life, develop our perspectives, and make choices. I’ve come to see it as an informant to instinct and our perceptions of self and world, as the fabric of identity. It is memory that allows us to register the familiar and recognize situations that we have previously navigated successfully, as well as those in which we have been harmed. It is a collection of assurances and warnings, our orientation, our blueprint.

*

The more I remember of who I used to be, the more complex my feelings about myself become. On the one hand, I remember the violence I directed toward myself and the pain that I put my family through. I remember the friends I have lost. On the other I admire the depth of kindness I so often showed others, and I remember my guts and sarcasm and acceptance of my darkness. I sometimes miss myself.

*

I have a variety of associations with prayer, but when I think of it, I think first of Laura— young and pale with thin brown hair, her face and arms freckled by the Arizona sun. I can see her raw and scabbed hands, scrubbed bright pink and speckled with blood just beneath the surface of what skin remained.

There was no rest for Laura. I think of her body, wrenched like a plea, seeming to beg for forgiveness. I think of the exhaustion and resignation in her eyes; I think of sweetness and youth.

At mealtimes, Laura could not sit until she felt the blessing of her lord. There were rules: the fork could not graze her lips, the peas were eaten one by one as she worked her way from the edges in. But Laura rarely felt the lord’s blessing. As we sat at the table, Starr—Starr, the perfect patient, Starr who drove me mad with her ceaseless from-feeding-tube-to-fork diatribe—Starr said grace, pointedly referencing only those who sat around the table. I wanted to smack her. The staff had given up, and the other patients paid Laura no mind as she faced the same corner of the room every meal as though on a time-out, her hands pressed tightly together, her eyes squeezed like fists. Her lips trembled with silent, private prayers.

“Laura,” a staff member would say every so often in a tone that poorly concealed impatience and irritation, “Laura—sit down.” Laura’s torso would twitch as she coached herself first to turn to face the open room and then as she walked toward the table and tried to take her place—but just before her bones would meet the plastic chair she would swivel violently up and around again, back to the corner, hands held together at the crown of her head.

After dinner one night I staggered—numb with rage, sick to death of Starr—out of the dining room and out the door of the small adobe house. The sun had begun to set, and the sky overhead was bruised to the bone. Purple clouds pooled thickly like black eyes, bleeding into red and peach and salmon hues.

I had never seen a cactus before and hadn’t imagined that they could be so big. I walked past the bushes, which were lined with painted stones, stones decorated in art therapy with golden crosses of Christ, with bible verses, with affirmations meant to inspire. Purple seemed everyone’s favorite shade of paint, but I am indifferent to purple.

So I walked from the low house to the center of the pebbled yard, to the outdoor sofa and chairs that ringed a fire pit we weren’t allowed to use. I collapsed onto my back on the sofa, dangling my legs over the metal frame and gazing up at the impossibly tall trees and the wounded sky. A faint rain began to fall and the evening light grew metallic. The raindrops began to fall harder, spattering my face, and as I watched, a group of vultures appeared, flying in circles directly overhead—hungry hunters with self-restraint, strategic and intelligent. I had never seen a vulture before. They, too, seemed massive—everything seemed bigger there, I never did adjust to it. The rain began to fall in bullets and my hair wilted and then grew wet and heavy. Around and around and around the vultures flew.

It must have been only the space of a few minutes that I lay there before a nurse came to summon me, but those birds are imprinted on the lenses of my eyes. They remain with me in the calm that I felt then and feel even now when I watch them in my mind.

*

When I was six years old, we had a snail infestation in our backyard. I became inconsolable upon learning of my father’s plan to exterminate them, so my dad retrieved several cardboard boxes from the basement and informed me that the plan had changed. We plucked the snails one by one from the grass and placed them in the boxes – it must have taken hours – and drove over the hill to a nearby wood to set them free. As I watched them trail toward safety, squatting beside my father, I felt something like a prayer bloom in my heart. My dad turned to me with amusement in his eyes.

“Look,” he said, “they’re smiling at you.”

*

I know that I have changed. I know this from the stories people tell me about myself, and from the journals I kept, and from the indisputable facts of my past behavior. I’m not a fan of the expression “I’m a different person now,” which people so often use to describe the disparity between a history of illness and a present reality of health, and in my hopes to reclaim ownership of myself as I have been and as I am, I seek to trace the threads between my past and present.

*

The white room was packed with wires and machines. I lay flat on a gurney with two doctors and a nurse standing overhead, asking me questions to which I provided uncertain answers. On whose scale was I to rate my misery from a one to a 10?

Dr. Fisher stood with his hands in the pockets of his khakis. I remember him wearing a blue polo shirt. Dr. Guerra, on the other hand, always wore a full suit and Coke-bottle glasses. His grey eyebrows flew in wisps from his face.

The IV towered above me, just saline for the moment, chilling my vein. It soothed me. The blood pressure cuff on my upper right arm squeezed and released every five minutes. I wore a green gown and an adult diaper. Directly above me, a ceiling tile had been replaced with an image of a tree-framed sky, the flat, plastic leaves pearlescent, monarch butterflies finding their way into the blue.

“Are you ready?” Dr. Fisher would ask.

I nodded. This was the part I yearned for when I was not there, so basic and absolutely painless. I would play a game: each time, I fought to stay awake, to resist the anesthesia as Dr. Guerra counted down.

“Three” (voice of molasses)

“Two” (fluid and dark)

“One” (…)

And each time, I would find relief in my powerlessness to resist.

“You’re on your way…”

The cuff on my ankle gave a reassuring squeeze as I dissolved.

*

My memory comes into sharper focus when I call to mind the years following the cessation of the ECT; the order of events is clear, I have a fuller understanding of context, and I feel more confident in relaying to others what has been said and done. I remember what it felt like, for instance, when the depressive weight began to lift. I remember waking up and accepting consciousness, and making my way on time to the bathroom to be weighed and have my vitals taken. I remember the transition from sitting in the shower to standing, the newfound strength in my legs, the secret prayer that began to bloom once more.

I had decided to stop ECT a few months in, when I realized that I was not experiencing a sustained benefit and had lost a great deal of my memory. My psychiatrist accepted my request that we cease the treatments without question and told me that she had something in mind for me. It was a newer medication on the market and very expensive, but she felt that she could make a firm case to my insurance company.

Usually these things take weeks to notice, but it was a matter of days after beginning the new combination of meds that I began to notice shifts in the nature of my thoughts, my energy levels, and how I felt in my body. I didn’t trust it and I told no one, but I kept a close watch. Two weeks in, I sat across from Dr. McGuire and said: “I think this is working.”

*

My memories of that winter in Denver are among the sweetest I have. After a full year in the hospital I stepped down to their Partial Hospitalization track, attending programming during the day and sleeping in an apartment I shared with other patients at night. Programming started at 7:15 in the morning, but I had a newfound love of spending time alone, so I would set my alarm for 3:30 or 4:00 a.m. and get up to make a pot of coffee. The second story apartment had a narrow cement balcony which held a small table and a couple of metal chairs. I would sit outside while the stars still shone and write lists — lists of what I was grateful for, my intentions for the day, my recent accomplishments, and my hopes for the future. I’d watch as the sun rose like an anemic peach above the snow-crowned mountains, and listen when the rain fell in heaps. I can remember the sound of the rain hitting the roof; to me, it sounded like racing hooves. I frequented a local bookstore called The Tattered Cover and stood outside under the awning with a cup of coffee, watching the snow fall, smoking a cigarette, and listening to jazz as the tips of my fingers whitened in the cold.

*

When I think of memory, I picture the shape of light; of sunlight penetrating a shallow river, fashioning from the glow and the skipping movement of the water’s mirrored surface a kaleidoscopic lens, through which are illuminated the sunken stones beneath. Words that come to mind, when I think of memory, are precious, and strange, and rare, and fragile, and faint, and doubt. I think of the way that to experience a memory, when it is severed from its context, is like trying to read only certain acts of a long and complex play; difficult to make sense of, and – surely – not my own. It has taken me time to gather enough of these fragments to begin to weave an understanding of what the picture of my life must once have been, and to begin to recognize myself in these pieces as I place them, one by one, into the clay of a progressive mosaic. I am, I was, I am.

Sofia Oumhani Benbahmed is a 31-year-old resident of Durham, North Carolina. She studies creative nonfiction writing at UNC Chapel Hill and plans to go on to pursue an MFA in CNF. You can find her on Twitter at @OumhaniSofia.