Introduction

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Excerpt

There’s a condition called tinnitus where you hear a ringing that isn’t there. It’s not a disease itself, merely a symptom of other maladies, but the constant hum of nonexistent sound has been known to drive the afflicted to madness and suicide. I don’t suffer from this, exactly, but I have a strange feeling now and then that something’s going on in the background.

Today’s meeting with Dr. Korsakoff is a good example. He’s a strange little Russian who looks as though he’s never let a ray of sunlight touch his skin, and when he speaks of the human body I begin to drift. I don’t see how he expects a man of my age to understand him. Thiamine, neurons, gliosis, all of it coated in his throaty accent, well, it goes right by me. I wonder if this is the point of such talk—a reminder that he has completed medical school and I have not. It seems to me that point was ceded upon my arrival in his office months ago. But when after some time he begins to speak to me like a human being again, what he’s saying is hard to miss.

“You will in essence, Mr. Strauss, lose your mind.”

I’d been staring at a potted philodendron placed in an awkward corner of his office. The room was even drabber than the hospital as a whole, but the philodendron was exquisite. As he droned I resolved to devise a plan to steal it. But then this “lose your mind” business caught my attention.

“The good news is that it will be gradual, and you likely won’t even notice.” He stared at me. He was probably worried I was going to start crying. I imagine a person in his situation is required to deal with a wide variety of uncomfortable reactions.

“How does a person unknowingly lose his mind?”

“Yours is a rare condition,” he said, seeming almost excited, “in which the damage that is being done to your brain does not destroy cognitive function, but instead affects your brain’s ability to store and process memories. In response to this, your brain will invent new memories.”

All I could do was sit there. Everything seemed louder and slower. The fluorescent lights were a hive of bees, and footsteps in the hallway thunder-clapped toward the elevator. Somewhere down the corridor a telephone rang a fire alarm. Eventually I was able to ask how long I had.

He shrugged. “Months. Years, even. While you may have some associated cognitive problems, your condition is not life threatening. You’re not a young man, so it’s possible you might die of something else before it becomes a problem. Although it does appear that other than this you are extraordinarily healthy.”

“Thank you,” I said, which immediately seemed stupid.

He kept talking, but that tinnitus feeling kicked in. Imagine if your mind was making a noise, not an actual noise, but whatever the mental equivalent is. Then add a little fogginess and you have a pretty good idea of where I was. I realized the doctor had stood and moved from behind his desk. It seemed our appointment was over, so I stood too, but I felt that I couldn’t leave the conversation where things were, with me as some sort of dumbstruck simpleton.

“I really like your philodendron.” I stopped myself from mentioning that he should be careful because variegated philodendrons can be highly toxic to dogs and cats. I don’t know how I know this, or if it’s even true, and anyway you don’t see many dogs and cats in a doctor’s office so it didn’t seem like useful information.

“Thank you. I find it very calming.” He smiled. It didn’t suit his thin lips.

We both observed the plant for a moment. One of its fronds fluttered slightly in the breeze from the air conditioning vent. “So do I.”

“Would you like me to take your photograph with it?”

I would have, but his eagerness unnerved me and I refused. He hid his disappointment well.

And now I’m sitting outside on a bench by the main doors of the hospital. I could go straight home—there’s no one waiting for me, no one whose feelings I need to concern myself with. I can stew away as much as I like in my one-room apartment, and I probably will later on. Right now I can’t find the energy, and anyway I have a feeling I’m supposed to be somewhere this afternoon. If I can’t remember where then I’ll have to go home and see if it’s written down in the notebook resting on my bedside table, but at the moment it doesn’t seem particularly important and if it is I’ll remember soon.

Watching the various people go in and out of the swishing automatic doors is soothing. They all have problems too, or else they wouldn’t be here. Different problems than I, some more serious, some less serious, but problems all the same. One man in particular catches my attention. For some reason the sensor on the door doesn’t register his presence. He continues forward and very nearly collides with unyielding plate glass. He steps back, startled, and waits for admittance. When it’s not forthcoming he waves his arms above his head and, as though recognizing him from across a crowded room, the hospital swings open its doors and the man ventures through them, appearing afraid that they might close at any moment. I know how he feels.

Okay then, what is to be done? I am, apparently, going to lose my mind. Not all of it. I will still know how to tie my shoes and boil water and read and speak. But I won’t remember my life. I don’t know what to make of this. My life has been a mixed bag. I’ve spent much of it trying to atone for a mistake I made long ago as a young man. It was a stupid mistake and I often think that in attempting to settle my debts I’ve fouled things up even more. Other times I think I did the best I could. Likely I’ll never know for certain which is right. But what if all that is gone, if each memory that is mine alone slips away forever? Will my burden be lifted or will it increase? What is a memory anyway, other than a ghost of something that’s been gone for a long time? There are secrets I’ve kept. Maybe they should stay secrets.

No. I will have to tell Alice what has happened, explain myself, clarify what has been left obscure. She deserves to know the whole story. It has been a mistake to keep it from her for all these years. But I’ll have to tell her properly, or it will only make things worse.

Alice knows most of the story already, but in any story there are details that can be pushed one way or another, and I have definitely pushed them in my favour. There are details that can be left out entirely, which I have also done when it suited me. The only way is to start at the beginning and tell it as I believe it to be, not as I want it to be. I no longer have the luxury of time. My mind will soon become another door that is no longer open to me. It’s time to confess everything.

I deprived her of a father. This she has long been aware of. The whole world knows me as the man who killed Harry Houdini, the most famous person on the planet. I could tell her all about him. His story is complicated, and some of it is widely known. What no one knows, save for myself and one other person who likely died long ago, is that I didn’t just kill Harry Houdini. I killed him twice. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. The Confabulist ultimately poses the question can we trust our memories to provide an accurate record of what has actually happened to us in our lives? What do you think the answer is? Did the book make you think differently about your own memories of your past and how accurate they might be, how others might have remembered the same events differently?

2. Have you ever known anyone with an illness that affected his or her memory? Did the novel in any way change your understanding of that experience?

3. At what point did you realize that Martin’s relationship to Houdini might not be as he was remembering it? Which of the Martin–Clara memories do you think really happened and which were unintentionally invented?

4. As The Confabulist makes clear, magic tricks take advantage of the human mind’s tendency to make assumptions and become distracted. How does Steven Galloway employ these techniques in telling the story of Martin and his relationship with Houdini? Do you see how the Houdini story in the book is its own kind of magic trick, and Martin, as narrator, is our unwitting magician?

5. What is Alice’s true relationship to Martin? What parallels do you think Alice sees between Martin, as she has known and remembers him, and the version of Houdini he shares with her?

6. What role does history play inn The Confabulist? Where is the line drawn about what history knows for a fact about Houdini, about what some people suspect, and about what Martin’s mind invented? Are there clear distinctions? In this way, might it be possible to compare our public understanding of history with our personal understanding of our memories of ourselves?

7. The idea of secrets is threaded throughout The Confabulist. How does keeping a secret change how you interact with the people around you? How does it change your relationship to what the truth really is? Think not only in terms of the book, when answering, but also beyond it.

8. Think about the larger implications of false memory. In what way can false memory be destructive? In what way can it be something positive?

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