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When I first heard about my mother’s brain tumor, I got in my car and drove like a lunatic. I am known for erratic bursts of self-destructiveness and unpredictable lapses in concentration, which make operating a motor vehicle extremely dangerous—I get this from my mother. Any man’s mother is a source of grief until she dies.

At the hospital she asks, “What is this thing?” pushing all the buttons on the remote control at once and pointing it at her nose. “It’s a hat,” she explains, giggling and placing it on the top of her flat, bald head. In the next bed, Sharon, the woman who overdosed on drugs, rolls her eyes. “Life is not my style,” Mom says, taking the remote down and handing it to me.

I press play, but just as The Nesting Habits of the Semi-Pulvinated Plover comes on the screen, the doctor arrives and stands in front of us; he’s come to ask how much my mother has forgotten since yesterday.

By the time this happens, it is too late for me. I already have several chins, and if I were to die tomorrow, only about four people would notice and none of them, except my mother, would be women. I’m like a nut magnet—the people I do know couldn’t tell you what day of the week it is, and the people who want to know me look like they just escaped from somewhere. But I’m a happy man, even though this may be hard to believe given my circumstances. I lost a job (which I disliked anyway), I don’t have much money (never will), and older people say I don’t know anything, and maybe they’re right. I once had a girlfriend who said she would marry me if I would agree to change who I am, which is like agreeing to buy a used car that just needs a new engine. Lots of strange things have happened that I don’t understand. If I ever have any money, I’ll hire someone to explain them to me.

When people ask what I’m doing now, I say I’m not doing much. I have interests. In 1984 I became interested in nature. You can’t blame most people for not thinking, because they work instead, but now that I don’t have a job and there is a tumor in my mother’s head eating her memories, it’s time to think about what’s important in life. Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time shedding things, like jobs, cars, and old clothes—trying to think. It’s what the trees start to consider about doing in late August—at least in this part of the world. It’s when life starts to turn in on itself as if it were something that happens once.

“The tumor is fulminant,” the doctor says. “We will have to perform the biopsy tonight, and then we will know the extent of its malignancy by morning.” He tries to smile, turns around, his business done, and looks at the screen. “Ah,” he says, “plovers.”

“Not exactly,” my mother says.

*  *  *  *  *

Sometime in 1977 God had told Mom: watch out for doctors, they just want to touch you. It was April of last year when my father, a doctor, noticed that my mother had started losing little things. Once, she came into his kitchen, sat down at the table next to him and his new wife, and said, “David, who is this woman?”

This happened shortly before she lost her boyfriend while on vacation in Nova Scotia while he was taking a nap. She left the bed-and-breakfast, drove to the nearest airport, boarded a commuter flight, and ended up in London.

“Listen.” she said over the phone to me from London, “what do you think about your father and me getting divorced? I think he’s seeing another woman.”

“You divorced him,” I said cautiously. “He’s married again. I don’t think about it.” There was a silence, and then I asked, “Mom, What are you doing in London?”

“I’m happy, Jamie . . . I don’t know,” she said. “I think I want to meet the Queen.”

*  *  *  *  *

My mother believed in God from the 7th of February, 1976, to the 10th of September, I977. That winter we had the biggest snowstorm in twenty years, and that spring all the cows in town died of a mysterious disease. Mom used to wander the streets at night, leaving notes from God in people’s mailboxes about what was important in life. “Gloves,” one would say. “Fresh milk,” said another. “Heat.”

This is what happened. We were living in a town outside of Buffalo, New York, called Waterville, which was so free of water that during the summer people went to visit relatives in the next town just to bathe. The town was named Waterville because whoever lived there thought constantly about water.

During that summer of 1977 we were sad for each other—it was new to us then. My father moved out and my girlfriend, Alice, moved in with us. Another friend—Tom, who didn’t care what happened to himself because he was overweight—also moved in. Mom spent the summer teaching us how to drink gin. We sat around the kitchen table drinking slowly, not saying much, sinking into a smaller life. We drank until what happened would not be remembered the next day.

*  *  *  *  *

“When the doctor comes in again, tell him I’m not going to do this biopsy thing,” my mother says to me as if she is talking about a dance step.

“We have to find out,” I say.

“I don’t want to know,” she says, “and besides, I don’t have time.”

Ever since Mom got to the hospital she’s been thinking about what’s important, and so she’s decided to write a book on how animals remember. In 1979 she changed her name to Meadow Star and developed an amateur preoccupation with animals. Mom loves animals because they can’t remember in the same way we do.

“The dog is an exception,” she explains. “It learns from people.”

Sharon, who is sprouting little clear tubes filled with liquid, reads to us from People magazine. “James Caan married a slut,” she says. “What bullshit.”

Mom pushes the button on the remote control (which I had showed her how to use) to activate one of the tapes I brought from her house: The Threatened Pygmy Shrews from the hills of Great Britain. Apparently, industrial fallout in the rain acts as a narcotic for the animals, causing them to become disoriented and irresponsible. Some of them wander onto roads and are killed by cars, some just fail to camouflage themselves adequately and are caught by dogs or other predators. The video shows a pale hand wrapped around the neck of a black-eyed gray rodent. Another hand moves in to indicate parts of the animal’s face. The chemical is made outside of Suffolk.

*  *  *  *  *

Lately, I’ve been trying to forget things. Mom has tried to teach me little tricks about forgetting, like trying to think about something else. But most of the time it is useless. It’s like trying not to get wet while you’re swimming. For all the energy spent trying to remember and record our lives, all we really seem to want is to forget. To have forgotten and not know one has forgotten, Mom tells me, is the happiness of an animal.

One of the biggest mistakes I make is trying to think about who I was by remembering the things I have done. I have consistently been much better at being other people, living out scenarios that I read about in books. My mother was the one who always said that being myself was the most important thing I could do. This was before 1977, of course, after which she became a person none of the family could recognize. But my mother’s family cannot be trusted—they are all in the business of killing themselves. Sometimes people in her family do get fatal diseases, but it is usually something so intangible as to arouse suspicion.

*  *  *  *  *

“Do we have to keep watching this shit about rudiments?” Sharon moans.

“That’s ruminants,” my mother replies. “No, we don’t have to watch this.” She presses the fast-forward button, eager to use her new knowledge. She stops on Animal Impostors. A carnivore that looks like a tulip waits for insects to land on its petals before the flower snaps shut and rumbles around for a moment, masticating the captive down its gullet until opening up again, innocently smiling bright yellow.

The angler fish looks like a rock that hasn’t moved for centuries, but when something edible floats by, it strikes at 1/400 of a second.

“That’s a fish?” Sharon says in disbelief.

The Coiler Snake: first it looks dangerous, then it looks dead. The snake rattles its tail like a rattlesnake, but when its predator, the cat, still won’t go away, it rolls over and emits the horrible smell.

The Tasmanian Devil: a thick-set, apparently ill-tempered marsupial that was once plentiful in the time of English explorers, it is rarely seen by tourists. The television camera approaches the devils at ground level. After an initial display of fear, one of the devils rushes the camera, screeching and waving its front paws in the air.

“Where’s the bathroom?” my mother asks, getting up out of bed.

“You were just there twenty minutes ago,” Sharon says.

“Well, will you tell me which direction I took twenty minutes ago?”

“You go down that way and turn left,” Sharon says, pointing with her finger.

“Are you sure?” my mother asks.

“I promise,” says Sharon.

I can understand my mother’s reluctance to enter these halls without directions, so I walk with her. The hospital is a place where people lose themselves—sometimes part by part, sometimes all at once. Even the people who come out alive, maybe carrying someone else’s liver or skin, look like people who have been robbed. We wander down the corridors, past humming contraptions with beeping lights, afraid that around each corner might lurk a cluster of diseases waiting to bore under our skin. There is a paralysis in hospital air. As if the air were hiding some awful secret.

If you knew me, then you would know that nothing is less like me than the things I’ve done. If you met me in line at the grocery store, you might think I have been to college and that I at least could have received good grades. But my past is pocked by sores, such as an inability to spell my own name. My grade school teachers declared that I had a condition, but the symptoms varied so much that they were never able to make a diagnosis. I had a kind of roaming retardation in degenerative form. One week I stuttered uncontrollably, the next I could not tie my shoelaces. I visited speech therapy, physical therapy, and a class entitled Living Skills that taught the importance of being clean.

I was born with serious intent and not without means, but somewhere along the line I failed to acquire an adequate degree of clarity. Many potential geniuses lie like broken cars waiting for one missing part. By 1982 I stopped being in a hurry to improve my life. Shortly afterwards I stopped caring so much.

*  *  *  *  *

During the summer of 1977 my girlfriend, Alice, who had an IQ measured at 165, said that I reminded her of Procrustes who either stretched or sliced off the legs of travelers to fit his bed. She was the one who had to have sex three times a day to stay within commuting distance of her sanity. My mother must have known about all the sex that was going on—and that we seemed to need it like air. For my mother, cooking was as much an act of desperation as our sex. After a while we had to forbid her to use the pots and pans for fear that she would destroy the house. Tom, who had worked in a restaurant, took over the cooking for us that summer. It was just the four of us sitting around, eating mostly salads and drinking gin, listening to my mother talk about what a wonderful man she was leaving.

My father was a man of inaction; it is the most valuable thing I learned from him. He also taught me not to worry about what I am not. “You can either be you or someone else,” he said. “In the end it really doesn’t matter.” I can’t understand why he said things like that. I don’t think thinking ran in his family the way it did in my mother’s, though it might have. We never heard about his family except that they came from a Pennsylvania mining town where they were all miners or miners’ wives. My father was a person with something inside him, an idea that had been ready to burst forth. He used to come over that summer when he left the hospital and work in his garden out back until dark. My mother sat on the second floor, smoking cigarettes, drinking and watching him bury his thoughts with the azaleas. There is nothing to replace the failure of our parents.

Whenever he encountered my mother that summer while transporting a potted plant to the backyard, my father looked at her as if she were a nice piece of jewelry he had just dropped into the ocean. She was unrecognizable with her hair dyed red and with one of her new orange or purple blouses bought from Goodwill. She was usually a little drunk. During that summer we moved as little as possible; people outside were dying of heat stroke. By about August we had more or less decamped to the cellar during the daytime, where we remained, slightly refrigerated, until the fall.

Occasionally my father joined us in the cellar for a drink, and he would talk about politics with my mother as if they were two people who hadn’t been introduced. My mother wasn’t sure who was President. She blames the tumor on that summer, which makes sense now. She often remarked how wonderful it was to have all these new friends. Sometimes she looked at me as if I were someone else’s son.

*  *  *  *  *

Tumors may grow because people can’t forget, as mom says in her book. A psychic friend of the family once said that my mother’s soul is older than the rocks in China, which means she has a lot to forget. To me, tumors seem like illusions—they come from nowhere and steal everything. When desperate they will eat anything that we pretend to know.

Mom pauses the VCR and reaches for a drink that the nurse left for her. “What is this?” she asks, looking at me.

“It’s a glass,” says Sharon. .

“I know, but what’s in it?” she asks.

The Three-toed Sloth of Colombia: a living bug carpet—home to beetles, ticks, fleas, and a steady companion, a moth that lays its eggs in the sloth’s dung. After hatching, the next generation of moths will fly, seek out sloths, and begin the cycle anew. The sloth catches its prey by curling into a form resembling a shrub where insects might choose to live.

The doctor comes in again to threaten my mother with a total loss of self-awareness followed by a painful sinking into idiocy and death, unless she undergoes the biopsy and allows him to operate. He has seen it happen to other people—they lose themselves. It is worse than death, he says. She covers her face with a National Geographic until he leaves.

Following the doctor, two people—a man and a woman, both dressed in black pants, black shoes, and black shirts, and with hair dyed black, setting off ghostly pale faces—sidle up to Sharon and shove a paper bag under her pillow.

“Sharon’s drug dealers,” Mom whispers to me.

The man fingers the tube leading into my mother’s arm and comments that her body is worth about four hundred dollars in narcotics. Sharon starts slipping little pills into her mouth.

Unlike the Nuthatch and the Blue Tit, the Tree Creeper can only move in one direction, which is a serious competitive disadvantage.

*  *  *  *  *

Mom can’t remember any of this now, but on August 27, 1977, my father cut his flowers down with the push mower, after which he never returned to the house again. He didn’t see her again until last year, when she burst into his kitchen and demanded to know the identity of his new wife.

The night my father cut down the flowers my mother told me that my father was a cruel man, which is something I have never been able to see. But I learned too late that you should never trust what your parents say about each other. I think I know now that he was just demonstrating how much he could hurt himself, just for us. That was probably the most important lesson he ever taught me—that in a few seconds you could destroy days’ worth of work and walk away like nothing happened, ever, as if you just stepped off a ship from another planet, everything was completely new and nothing had a name.

The things my father taught me about life have made him an unhappy man. The day before he cut down his garden, he looked up and said, “Jamie, it doesn’t matter how you feel about things.” Then, my hands full of potted azaleas, he said. “Do you want to end up like your mother?”

“No,” I said.

“Then don’t listen to what she tells you.”

*  *  *  *  *

We stayed inside and drew the shades. The only thing that could have helped us would have been a team of highly qualified parapsychologists. That summer, if you had walked by our house, nestled between two Colonials on Woodford Road, and stood for a while looking at the peeling paint, the shutters hanging askew, and the five-foot-tall blades of grass, then you might have guessed that the people inside were experiencing some kind of sadness that was being taken very seriously. Or that there were no people at all, that the place had been abandoned for some reason. It wouldn’t have been hard, though, to imagine that the three people inside were lying under the sadness of the shadows as if under a giant quilt. If you were a neighbor across the street you might have looked out your window after sundown and seen a small light at the very back of the house and asked the rest of your family if they could imagine what we could possibly be doing under that dirty light. What could possibly have happened to those people?

When my mother and I talk now it is about things like politics or migratory birds that anybody could read about in a book. This is another mistake people make about knowing each other too well; they end up talking about nothing.

The doctor comes in again and says that he must do the biopsy, or my mother must leave the hospital for the time being.

Looking at the television, I think that animals seem to get better at surviving, but this is not the case with people. We look back, we collect antiques, we go to my mother’s closet when we are young, haul out her grandparents’ clothes from the Jazz Age, and pretend we are Gatsbys. We pretend we are anything else, we don’t eat, we grow thin and solemn, and we think about our lives.

Animals seem to have a way of seeing what’s necessary and acting on that vision. When unexpected things happen to them, such as an encounter with human scientists, they look momentarily disoriented before they are at it once again—whether it be pecking through bark for worms, or, in the case of the hermit crab, skittering across the ocean floor in search of an abandoned shell suitable for a new home. Animals seem to know that whatever we lose is returned to us in time.

*  *  *  *  *

Normally, I’m an avid carnivore, but whenever I think of that summer when my mother started believing in reincarnation and we couldn’t eat chicken, I stick to vegetables and breads—sometimes fish. Things that never had legs anyway. I think Tom and Alice spent the whole summer eating mostly celery in order to lose weight. Every day there was less of them.

That summer it felt like we were exchanging secrets, pouring them into each other’s glasses and drinking them down. For instance: imagine four ways to kill yourself and Tom’s mother had tried them and failed to succeed at each one of them. She had a job in the state prison system having something to do with paper which was so small that the only reason her position had not been eliminated by the state budget cuts was that only about three people knew she existed.

Once in a while we went to Goodwill to buy shorts, playing cards, or funny hats. Usually we left laughing, dressed in stripes, checks, and dotted patterns, and sauntered out to the Toyota—walking collages of other people’s lives.

But our sadness that summer tasted like licorice, and my mother taught us to savor it. It was, she assured us, our only real friend, and we believed her. Sadness is not learned; it happens to us and seems unavoidable. We learn what to do with it, though. She could not have known that she was teaching us only one kind of sadness—the kind that didn’t go away but whirred through our dreams like bedroom fans.

*  *  *  *  *

“Jamie,” my mother says, dismantling the back of the remote control as if it is a mystery she is trying to get to the bottom of, “how did you do on that biology test?”

“I haven’t taken a test since 1983,” I tell her.

“Oh,” she says, feigning comprehension. “That must have been a long time ago.”

“It was,” I tell her.

The doctor comes in again, his arms crossed. She tells him that she will be packing in a few minutes, and he leaves without saying a word. The end of the videotape contains short blips on different animals. A buffet: The dark reputation of the Cormorant—also known as sea raven, shag, fish hog. Copulation occurs quickly. The pair mate frequently, ensuring the eggs are fertilized. The camera shows a shoreline covered with hysterical black birds.

“As if that’s what they’re thinking,” Sharon says, hands up in the air, looking at me.

When not breeding or feeding, Cormorants are often preening. A black, long-billed bird is shown plucking feathers from its side.

Mom pulls her suitcase from underneath the bed, unplugs the lamp provided by the hospital, and crams it in the lingerie compartment. She pulls her clothes out from the drawers and drops them on Sharon’s lap. Sharon picks through each one, throwing the rejects onto the guest chair.

The creatures of Madagascar: the Lemur, Baki—Baki, the Malagasy Giant Jumping Rat, and the Gastric Brooding Frog, whose young grow in the mother’s stomach for several weeks until she belches them out during optimal environmental conditions. The Dozing Mouse—not a real mouse, but a close relative. The wild bear, followed by flies. . . . Like people, they are sometimes unpredictable.

*  *  *  *  *

My mother sits next to me in the car: bald, smocked, and medicated. I’m not sure she knows where I am taking her, but she seems thankful to leave the hospital even though soon, the doctor told me, the pain will bring her back again. By that time it will probably be too late.

In the silence I start to think that the good kind of sadness is like a shooting star, which rises from within us, crosses our vision, and then sinks again. This may mean that I am hiding certain things, and I’m sure this is true. But why should that matter? I have come to love the things I do not know about my past. They are like possibilities for the future, which, to any person, is just as important to survival as food.

In a way our sadness was a kind of courage that summer, because we were able to admit our disappointment with every last thing, even if at some level we understood that our disappointment was a kind of crime against ourselves. What doesn’t pass out of our lives, even if it is good, ends up killing us. Finally there is something that won’t pass like a disease or a tumor that takes us out of life.

I stop in from of the house from 1977. Almost all the paint peeled off, all the shutters gone, several windows broken—it looks like an old man in captivity. I’m almost certain that my mother can’t remember the dreams behind buying this house even though she still, year after year, refuses to move out.

I now remember waking up from a nap in that house on an August afternoon in 1977 and hearing my friend Tom’s voice. When I went into his room to see what was happening, I ran into my mother, standing, completely naked, arms spread out, next to his bed. We were all so frozen that I thought it would take an ice pick to free us of that situation. But all it took was Alice’s hand on my back for us to scatter like terrified fish into the darkest corners of what even then was a building in collapse.

“Do you remember our trip to Vienna?” she asks, turning to me with a smile. I know that neither of us has been to Vienna. “We went to the opera, didn’t we?” she says. I nod. “The Magic Flute?”

“It was in German and I couldn’t understand a thing,” I add.

“But that didn’t matter.”

“No, it didn’t,” I say. My mother is in the flowering of her life: her own past has been replaced by the most pleasant memories from other people’s lives. Now I have the urge to reach over and touch the side of her face before she gets out of the car, because I know she is dying. But she has darted out of the car with her suitcase and run across the street, her bald head glowing under the streetlamp. A few seconds afterwards she disappears into the darkness of the front room and a small, dirty light appears at the back of the house.

This is my entire life, everything that I remember. It seems that what we know makes us sad, and what we don’t know is who we are. In the end it’s all about little possibilities that vanish, like snow. My story is about what happens to sadness after it grows weary and forgets itself. There is only one sadness to speak of, and it has no name. It passes between us like air.