At 26, with the assistance of a team of psychological facilitators spending down a healthy post-doctoral research grant, he began to retrieve repressed memories of abuse he had suffered as a child of five. His age at the time of the abominations is a conjecture, derived from a guess at the height from which he recalls having cowered before his tormentors. Any detailing of the boy’s humiliations would be prurient beyond the scope of our purposes here and likely would violate the rights of his publisher, though on the basis of just one batch of unsubstantiated accusations, which the team felt obligated to report to authorities, the boy’s parents were investigated, ostracized by family and lifelong friends, essentially driven from their jobs, home and neighborhood. Their son’s retrieved memories were vivid, compelling, utterly incontrovertible. Regrettably, we can say no more about them here than that they featured a basement location, both parents, masked or hooded strangers with sharp objects, and a donkey or a drawing of a donkey. A second, more resourceful team of therapists helped resolve these memories to closely coincide with the actual layout of the split-level home of the boy’s childhood. To no avail did the parents appeal they had not had a basement. The “subterranean” abominations are now understood to have been suffered in the rumpus room. Though he has not returned home since commencing his therapy, the son professes a willingness to forgive and a generous understanding of the human frailty which compels even those least equipped for childcare nonetheless to reproduce themselves. A book-length memoir of his earliest memories and of the love affair which blossomed, bloomed, attracted pests and ultimately wilted between the young man and the therapist who championed his cause will appear in bookstores in time for the gift-buying season.
Copyright ©1999-2006 David Hodges
3 comments
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November 8, 2006 at 3:17 pm
Kenyan Analyst
Thanks for visiting with me. I got online so long afterwords; I missed the impact of your alert. But thanks anyway.
You’re welcome, of course. Thanks for stopping by.
–David
November 9, 2006 at 1:48 am
M. Shahin
Whoa! I don’t know if I got this right, but the child is making up the abuses so that he can make money on a published book? Quite shocking. Of course, there are many children abused by parents, and this is one of the saddest things in the world and it just makes it worse when some people lie abuse for a certain agenda.
I love “incontrovertible” and I was glad to see that in there. Of course you are a genius at descriptions and crafting together a compelling story. Looking forward to reading more.
I’ve confused a lot of readers with this one, mshahin. But I hate to answer directly and spoil the fun for anybody else. It probably needs a litle retooling.
–David
November 10, 2006 at 9:51 am
litlove
What’s interesting to me is the distancing that’s going on with the narrative voice. It’s not the child’s story, but an appropriation of the child’s story. That in itself could be seen to be as uncertain and morally dubious as the recovered memory, the potential abuse of the child and its subsequent commercialisation.
You’re so right, litlove. That distancing is altogether deliberate. Are readers on your side of the pond familiar with the child’s game “Pin the Tail on the Donkey?”
–David
We certainly are. I was enjoying the ambiguities of your title after I’d left my previous comment, and I can see how that sense of thrashing about in the darkness could apply to this situation, where you might really need a brilliant light and a surgeon’s scalpel to see what was going on.
Wonderful. Now that the “cat” as we say in America, is “out of the bag”, I can apologize to my hundred other readers of this piece for being too vague. The imagined scene of child abuse is in actuality a party game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey; my theme is the inexcusable consequences of faulty “retrieved memories” and the title was supposed to hint that the childhood of our subject’s memory was not the childhood he actually had. Thank you all for helping me fix this story.
–David