Depth

What's the only way to recognize a repressed memory? When it floats up into your head one day, buoyed by nervousness or drugs.

Twelve. I went through a comic book phase this particular year, tending toward solitary activities in place of sports that I once enjoyed with my now-crosstown friends, before we moved. Comics were the antidote to Language Arts class--they interested me as much as anthologized stories, but I didn't have to write anything about them. Writing was consistently an act of failure for me.

Study skills. Reading skills. Summarize this passage. I can't remember my teacher's name now, but I remember her bright lipstick, blouses, wrinkled face and cigarette smell and the way she regularly reminded me how disappointed she was in my performance. Fuck writing and fuck you, I thought. I still think that last part.

I hated 7th grade so much, but I didn't know it. One morning, my dad turned down the radio on the way to school and asked "what ever happened to you? You used to be so nice."

At this moment, the 13 year old in the passenger seat searches for gravitas. Flattened brow, scrutinizing the windshield. The crackling political banter cuts into the grind of an idle Chevy Nova. I say nothing and open the car door.

There was a mythology unit. I wrote a report on Thor and his magic goats. (The goats drew his chariot.) Thor's goats were possessed of such maternal concern for Thor that they let him slaughter and eat them once a day, after which they would spring back to life at some point. Their only provision was that Thor not break any of their bones, because they could only repair flesh. A fine dinner; then, rage: one of his roommates breaks a goat femur to suck out the marrow. Thor is quick to rain down justice upon on his friend but needs Odin's help to restore the goat.

I wrote this the night before it was due, and I made up some of it. Then I put down the pencil, but I didn't think my report was finished. I wanted to leave the class with an illustration of Thor's power. So I took my latest issue of Thor (the comic) and copied his likeness from the cover. (I solved the minor problem of the stylized half-Thor/half-Beta Ray Bill by doing my best to invent a replacement Thor-half.) I stayed up until 10 that evening portraying the the mythical hero proudly wielding his might hammer, Mjolnir.

The drawing turned out a little weird. (Someone would later ask me, "is he drunk?"; I didn't know what to answer, since the only drunks I had seen were cartoon characters, and Thor didn't look funny or melodramatic, just slightly unfocused in his gaze.) Thor looked creepy at 10pm, but my mom, still awake, saw me finishing the drawing. "That looks AWE-SIM," she said to me, recalling the way I would say that word when I was 5. She would often say things that were helpful but oblivious to how an adolescent can become crazed and embarrassed at minutiae like reminders of one's stupider, earlier self.

And so I believed her. "Really?" I asked.

"Yes, of course it is, honey."

I taped the smeared portrait of Thor and his mighty hammer to the cardboard on which I had affixed my essay. The next day, I would proudly hold the drawing in the air as I read the goat report.

This is the part of the story that I can't tell. I can only remember the previous evening's preparation and something that happened after I got up in front of the class. I wonder if I'm repressing the memory or if my brain made the decision ex tempore to not mix the chemicals to anthologize this particular event. Or maybe the remembered event was flagged as recyclable.

But I do remember one image pretty clearly. After the presentation, someone has taken my drawing and displayed it on the heating vent across the room, propped up in one of the slits at eye level, to remind the class that we are all under drunk, weird Thor's cross-eyed purview. I am trying to hide my face, nervous that I might cry.

I can never forgive my mom for her unrelenting support and positivity. They were such fragile gifts to me; forgeries with no redeemable value. I wish she would have been more honest; told me Thor looked like shit.

Now, Thor, back to the deep you go.