A former professor of art history who has lived many years in several countries, Julia Ballerini is now settled in Manhattan where she is devoted full time to writing fiction. Several of her stories have been published in print and online.
Painless
The dog was licking her face. A furry black dog. It was dark. How long had she been lying on the pavement? It had been daylight when she fell. That she remembers. She crawled over cobblestones and gravel, the dog ahead, barking. That she remembers. Then whiteness. Space of no memories. Ambulence. Her mother bending over her. Can you hear me, hear me, hear me!
Was it the next day that someone brought her two orange fish in a round bowl? She remembers them swimming in and out of her mind’s whiteness as she lay cranked to a tilt on a bed as white as her mind. Watery black eyes stared, slithery mouths gulped open. Did she scream? The orange fish were soon disappeared.
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Her mother was folding clothes into a suitcase, a suitcase that smelled of newness. She was fourteen and being packed away to boarding school, disappeared like the gulping goldfish. It was then, seven years after the fall, that her mother, smoothing a new blue sweater into a new brown valise––it was then that her mother said, stop crying, you’re lucky to be alive, you almost died in that accident.
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Now she watches her own child scrambling up a slide in the playground holding tight its silvery edges. She has a startling memory of having not having held on to the rusty rails of that long-ago fire escape, of having leaned into the fall, of having given herself up to it. Not because of a will to die, but because of an absence of a will to live.
She closes her eyes trying to conjur a memory of pain. The pain immediately after the fall or the pain that must have sliced its way through the drugs in the hospital. Nothing. Her breath comes in and out of her lungs, her belly expands and subsides, but she can’t remember the pain, only the horror of the staring, gulping fish.
Back home from the playground, her little girl tucked safely in bed, she goes to the computer. She types: memory and pain. Site after site is about the short-term memory of pain, not the long-term forgetting of it. The newsletter of the International Association for the Study of Pain is no help.
Yet the search has its rewards. She learns about nerves that carry pain signals to the spinal cord and brain to excite the cells that make memories of pain––a cellular excitation that produces an hightened reactivity to pain that can last for months. Her cells must have been revved up, excited, sensitive to a pain she can no longer recall.
“Excite” a technical term. Yes, but she pictures a nervy little creature bringing a message of pain to a nebbish looking cell.
“Yo man, belly just sliced open like a sausage. Blood spurting everywhere. What a scene! Hurts like hell.”
“Wow! Cool. Tell me more. Hold on, lemmy grab a pencil and paper.”
She learns about molecules called ERKs––extracellular signal-related kinases––that can change the memory of cells in the spinal cord and brain. Molecular psycotherapy! She reads up on the marine snail Aplysia that is very attractive to neurobiologists because of large brain cells that are up to one millimeter in diameter. One millimeter! What is the size of a human brain cell? She hasn’t a clue. She logs out, shuts down her computer.
She calls her friend Richard whose store of knowledge is phenomenal and who was once married to a doctor. “Memory is not intended to be an archive,” he tells her. “We have an automatic extinguishing mechanism that remembers having the pain but not the pain itself. Otherwise we could not go on.” That makes sense. Except for certain phobias and an intense dislike of oatmeal Richard usually makes sense.
It is reassuring to know that, even if her brain cells turn out to be smaller than those of a mollusk, her pain extinguishing mechanism is working in full force.
Tomorrow she and her daughter will make up a story about a brainy snail named Aplysia. A snail who feels no pain. A joyous snail with a will to live.