Desafinado: Slightly Out of Tune
"You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am." -Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) in On the Waterfront, 1954
Session One: Ain't That A Kick In The Head?
"My memory...it finally came back..." She sighed in resignation. "Nothing good came of it though."
"Nothing good" would be putting terms lightly, nothing good, more so, nothing that had been life-changing, profoundly, eye-openingly good would be more precise to say. There were no sparks flying as if the old-rusted cogs within her mind began to turn in remembrance, no, it was more like a tiny flicker of something that once was fleeting was now more tangible than ever.
Thoughts, words, images, sounds, even just the most diminutive ring of a porcelain bell, was enough to throw her into some sensory overload of emotions. Bits and pieces... Bits and pieces...
Sometimes they came in a flurry, a rush of memories that came hammering down her frazzled mind in a tumultuous onslaught of images and sounds and other times, they came slowly, gently, ever so gently, like filling in plaster into cracks on the dry wall.
She jumped, scuttled, pushing faster and faster as her legs carried her uphill towards something so familiar... Something so fleeting, yet palpable all the same - enough that she felt if she were to just reach out, she could grasp it. It was almost there, she was almost there. With each thrust of her leg, as she pumped forward, muscles moving, sinews stretching, breath hitching in her lungs with each labored intake, bringing fire into the pit of her heaving chest, she felt a sense of purpose.
Run fast, stand still.
This was not like many times before, in which she would find herself in this very position, running and leaping in a rush towards her goal and away from the familiar melody of bullets and shouts.
The salty smell of fresh sea water, the cool breeze blowing in her hair, the familiar looming face of the merlion fountain now in shambles from being weathered down, and then there it was... Bits and pieces, bits and pieces.
At this very moment, she could feel almost every sensation more vividly than ever. She could feel the rush of blood through her veins, feel the tiny pinpricks of wind that brought the hairs on the back of her neck to stand straight, feel bits of swirling dust from old building debris brush past her cheeks, and above all, she could feel the steady beat of her heart as it pumped faster and faster from exertion or happiness? - she could not tell.
She waited her whole life to figure it out... Well, her life up until the point she was, to her greatest misfortune, awaken from cryogenic stasis. She was a woman without a past, a woman who intrinsically was a mystery to herself.
"Are you...Faye...?"
How in the hell had she lived for these past three years of her revival? And, who, who in the hell was she?
How could anyone continue to live a life in which they have no memory of, a life in which there was no innate knowledge of oneself to build a foundation upon? How could one continue to eat, sleep, walk, or even dream without those few precious remnants of what could be called their life?
She was a spectre, a vague silhouette, of what had once been a living, breathing woman - she had had hopes, dreams, aspirations, but they were all gone now, gone away with the memories that made her inherently her; or more so, who she had once been.
"Are you a ghost?...They say they appear in places where they have the most regrets..."
Faye Valentine was now a walking ghost with nothing but a superficial barrier, a facade, that she had carefully erected around herself from the time she had first awoke.
She needed that protection. What else could she do?
Given that she had nothing left but her implicit long-term memory, Faye could only make do with what she had. It was all semantics really, that was all she had left with her...and even then, some of the conceptual information she had once known during her lifetime had completely changed in these past fifty-four years.
A dog was an animal, food was necessary to survive, money is simply a human construct to determine value amongst things, the earth is round, the solar system was now habitable and earth was no longer, a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose... All of this information, all of these facts, they were nothing to compare with the value of her past; her memories.
"A ghost from beyond..."
So, she waited her whole life to figure it out... To figure out who the hell Faye Valentine really was. But up until this point, all she had to make up for her lost memories, was a overused beta cassette tape, its player, and a scant few images that seemed familiar, but fleeting all at once.
I remember.
She came upon it like an old dream, like that of the old black and white film noir movies she would always watch with her parents as a child, how they were fuzzy and blurry, a bit too novelty for her tastes, but with acting material far superior than any other film out of the Golden Era of Hollywood.
The mansion, white and regal, in all its scintillating glory. Surrounding it are gilded gates, the promise of tomorrow, the gold string of fate - and joy and warmth and love and life. Tall are the pillars of its foundation, yet small is the ground beneath; where a family of three reside. This is home.
The cogs began to turn again, the rust settling in, proverbial cobwebs ripping from their seams.
She remembers the time she came home from her first day in primary school with bloody knees all scuffed up to the bone from issuing a who-can-do-the-most-cartwheels challenge with another girl and landing unceremoniously on the schoolyard's asphalt - her father had reprimanded her at first, but soothingly stitched her up since he himself was an orthopedic surgeon.
Twisting and turning, the memories come unfurling from the cogs, episodic and vivid - like her first prom and how nervous she was and how Bobby Darin, the cool and collected dream boat who would smoke cigarettes by his locker and ditch school, but at the switch of a button, could school the teacher within fifteen minutes flat, was totally not the dream date she had thought him to be.
Or the time she won Miss Singapore International at seventeen, making her one of the youngest pageant contestants in all of Singaporean history, her mother could never be so proud.
And then that beautiful tune, that really old song that one could only find hidden under the clouded annals of time and stowed away in a vintage record case passed down from her Grandmother Eleanora... It was an orchestra tune, something from the the thirties with Al Bowlly's melancholic voice singing over the melody. She remembered playing it over and over and over on her grandmother's record player in the parlour until her butler begged her to stop.
She remembered this, she remembered that, she remembered a life that seemed like nothing but a dream now.
Myriad memories that coursed through her mind, through her veins, through her blood came in another onslaught, until one of the tiny wires in the back of her unconscious memories seemed to just click.
All too quickly now, comes the rush of the innate knowledge she once had, how her mind was once able to process the many levels of the multifaceted spectrum that was the human brain. How even now, she was able to discern every little nuance, every little kink in someone's behavior, but later use that information to manipulate them into her own liking.
How she thought she was simply inherently wicked and that she merely had the makings of a "manipulative wench" as the Lunkhead liked to call it in a cinch.
She remembers what she had become or rather, what she once was - she had studied rigorously, maintaining an outstanding four-point-five GPA to attend the National University of Singapore to earn her degree in in Behavioral Psychology with a concentration in Cognitive Neuroscience. She graduated at twenty. She was a psychologist, a damn shrink, though, not technically since she was not clinically trained in that department. But a shrink nonetheless, in the most simplistic way.
And with the new knowledge, or rather, the old knowledge, Faye continued on with tomorrow just like any day before.
A/N- Song: Ain't That a Kick in the Head? By. Dean Martin