Reappraisal

I was ready to fully embrace my real identity. But a foreign voice interrupted me. It would be more accurate to call it a thought.

Stupid dragon, shouldn’t she know everything? Why does she keep avoiding the subject? Does she really not know how to wake up Thomas?

I recognized this person. She was the elf from my other memory. Her name… her name was Lyla.

When will Lyla and Thomas get back?

This familiar voice belonged to another person I knew. Coyote. That was her name.

Gosh. I want to rip out someone’s intestines.

And this… who could this be? I didn’t recall meeting anyone like that. The voice was blended with owl hooting, so maybe it could be an animal?

All the voices reacted to the torrent of memory twisting in my head. They plucked out the scenes that resonated with them. And the rest of the hurricane stalled in its aggressive dance, enough for me to see my identity as Thomas again.

The intruding thoughts were practically begging to be found. They were too tidy and organized. I needed no effort at all to corner them into a wad. And with Res’s essence concentrated in one spot, it gained a voice of its own.

“What is the meaning of this stubbornness?” it asked in a genuinely curious tone. It couldn’t comprehend why I wouldn’t give in.

“Generally, people don’t want their identities and memories erased.”

The voice didn’t feel satisfied with my response, but it still conceded some ground. “It doesn’t matter if you keep your identity. But you have to give up your memory. There isn’t any reason not to.”

“Nope. I’m keeping my memories too.”

The most accurate way to describe the voice’s reaction was the color red. It was beet red. Maybe even with a whiff of a defective flame. It reached into my sea of memories and pulled out a particular chain of them.

“Look at this. You claimed to be exploited over and over again by this person called ‘the professor’. But do you remember every moment you have spent with him? All you did was construct a villain out of him and discard any episodes that contradicted the tale you had spun. That is a false truth created by your memories. So, why not skip these expendable memories and get to the truth?” Indignation was rich in her voice as she lectured me.

A jumble of blended-together scenes overran me. I had a distinct sense that the professor was a horrible person, that he had been responsible for my suffering, and I remembered the late nights, stolen credits, and cold attitudes. Res had a point here. It was an incomplete picture. We find commonalities in certain selected memories and construct a biased narrative with them.

Had I been acting only according to my flawed instincts? I struggled to locate the value in our error-prone system of memory. What would the answer be? Not pretentious ones like “beauty” or “humanity”, explanations that weren’t any better than “because I said so.”

“Thomas, what do you want? My treat,” another familiar voice cut off my thoughts.

I was at a classy bar after midnight. Slow jazz drifted in the background. There were only a few other patrons with us. Guess this place was one of those secluded gems. The person with me was the professor, the one I had granted the role of a villain in my past life.

“I would like a Long Island iced tea. Thanks for the treat, Professor Louche.”

The professor chuckled and slapped me on the back, oddly out of character for him. “Call me Marlon. Your thesis defense ended this morning already. You have basically graduated.”

When I thought about it more, this might have been the only time I met up with him after work. Even though that was the only time we interacted so casually, all I thought about back then was escaping. I could blame the air-conditioning there, but it was overshadowed by the excessive heat from his sudden closeness. Not physically; it was the issue of our status difference. He was no longer my boss, no longer someone who had absolute control over me.

He kept asking for refills after finishing each batch of alcohol; while I had intentionally prolonged my time sipping through my only glass, hoping he would eventually stop ordering more. I couldn’t bear being pressured into a second drink.

“Do you think you understand humans? After so many years of psychology,” he suddenly asked me while half-drunk.

“I like to think I do. All thanks to your guidance,” I reluctantly answered after carefully considering which answer he wanted to hear. He must have wanted me to praise him.

“Wrong. You don’t. I don’t either. No one truly does. We, as psychologists, we only look at the data, the general population, as you know. So, what do these loose trends tell us about human beings?” He flung his arms around while explaining, nearly knocking his drink over.

“Everything. We can predict trends. We can design policies. We gain the language to explain people’s behavior and inner worlds.” At this point, I was more annoyed at his answer than fearful of his perception of me.

“Then what about one person? How can you use only everything you have learned to predict and understand the inner world of one person?” The professor poked his finger obnoxiously at my forehead. I held back my desire to punch him.

“That is preposterous. Why do I need to know the ever-changing state of one person, when the psychological patterns of everyone in the world are already in my grasp?” His words were dangerous to me back then, a threat, feeding into my fears that my efforts to learn psychology had been worthless.

The professor kept shaking his head. “You don’t get it. But… I guess that’s fine. No one gets it. No one can get everything. As long as you are learning, everything will become clearer. As long as you don’t close yourself off, you can get a glimpse of the truth.”

I had forgotten this bizarre conversation and the rest of the uneventful night. It was a blip in my four-year-long struggle under the professor’s tyranny. This unpolished jewel of a random scene had revealed itself to me at this moment, when I needed assistance against Res’s logical beatdown.

“Because it is dynamic. Because it is useful in this way.” I yelled, and for some unknown reason, a pang of sadness burst out with this declaration. Maybe I should have chatted more with Professor Marlon Louche that day. Maybe then, he wouldn’t be such a caricature in my mind. Maybe then, I would gain a friend and lose an enemy. Or he might just be pure evil. Or he might have been laughing at my naivety, at how much of a pushover I was. Or this entire memory could be fabricated, a vehicle for me to refute Res’s point.

The only certainty I had was that I didn’t know. I could never know what Professor Louche truly was like beyond the veil of my conceited perception. This memory, no matter how inaccurate it was, had given me the fuel I desperately needed.

“Dynamic? Useful? They are all pointless without truth or faithfulness to reality,” Res returned to her main point.

“You’re right. Getting feedback from what’s around you is important. And that is what truth is. The world changes and deviates. How can you claim your little stack of paper contains all the truth in the world?”

“Because what I have written down is what I have to know. All that is important in the world.”

“And how do you know what is important? Through your memories. It is a flawed system that has been torturing so many people. But it is also what creates the identity and essence of a person, including you. You think you have escaped memory, but you have only written yours down on paper.” I had experienced its power firsthand: the rapid shift of my identity after Res altered my memory.

“I’m not the same. I’m not bothered by the fictitious past like the rest of you. Tortured either way, by remembering past suffering or thirsting for dissipated pleasure.” Res voice became more like screeching, as if grouping her with the rest of us was the greatest insult thrown her way.

“Some painful memories torture people to no end; these we have to get over and make peace with. But others give a history you can look back fondly on, give you valuable lessons for the future, and give your life meaning.” Without remembering the fallout with Lyla, I would never have found the words I wanted to say to her.

“But they are fake! Lies! How can you condone believing in these fictions, when reality is right in front of us?”

“Because our mind changes its memories for a reason. It wants nothing but to help us, in its own way. Sometimes, its good intentions fall flat, but you cannot say that memory is useless. Quite the opposite, memories pave the way for our present and future, the same way perception does. We don’t have to sacrifice realism either. If we embrace the dynamic nature of our minds, and look outward at the world and its people, we can get closer to the truth. And this is exactly what you aren’t doing. You are just recycling your own ideals and fantasies. Memories, even if they are flawed, are more real than you are.” As I said this, my memories of Professor Louche flashed past.

“How dare you speak as if you understand memory? I have been observing and experimenting with the subjects of this city, and even before this, I had been studying people for the past ten years. What do you have? Just a fleeting inspiration. You can’t possibly know more than I do.” Res couldn’t argue with me anymore. All she could do was doubt the source of my claims. After all, she was probably the only person in the world who had achieved this level of knowledge, enough to flip the fundamentals of magic around. However, she was only one person, studying memory in a fraction of a lifetime.

“I have one hundred years of psychology behind me.” The ideas that I had learned over the years emerged like stars in the sky, all gazing at Res’s existence.

From the ridiculous psychoanalytic theories of Freud, to Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, to modern information processing theory. The history of psychology is riddled with errors and mistakes. But we push forward, retesting the results of our predecessors, and we will never be so arrogant as to think that we can see the absolute truth.

“No, these babblings must be from your imagination. Creations from your memories.”

“Then test them. I'm waiting for you to disprove me. Unlike you, I admit that what I know is incomplete. Unlike you, I will adjust my knowledge if there is convincing evidence to do so. Am I wrong?”

“You're wrong. No, no, no…” Res's voice kept repeating this single word.

“Looks like this is all too overwhelming to you. The pleasure you chase so much is just determined by the movements of tiny molecules. The reality you think you perceive is plagued by preconceptions and expectations. Again, am I wrong about that?”

If she couldn't even accept that memories with the emotions they carry, despite their shortcomings, produce more value and meaning than the sum of their parts, she wouldn't be able to handle what the rest of psychology had to offer. In giving up the sanctity of memory, she might have placed all of her hopes in other aspects of the mind.

I felt my psychology knowledge tear Res's presence apart like vultures would do to a corpse. Her ideas were rapidly challenged and absorbed by the sea of psychological research and arguments that I had preserved, at least partially, from my past life. Until what she thought was absolute became only one of the many perspectives I possessed within me.

“Why, with this much knowledge, why won’t you reshape the world into a paradise?” That essence of hers only managed to let out this one last question, before fully integrating into my memory, like a breath released into the atmosphere.

“Have you been listening to me? Even this is not enough at all.” My mental world receded into the background, and I was once again aware of the outside world.