 I'm going to read from my memoir and I'm going to say this out loud because it's going to sound crazy when I read it. My mom and I both lost our memory and my family says that this is my grandfather's fault. They say in my family that my mother and I owe the accidents that left us with temporary amnesia to my grandfather, my mother's father. Grandfather Nono was a curandero, a medicine man. He neglected to initiate the next generation of seers and that is why it is said that an accident happened to mommy and later to me was an initiation all in itself. Mommy is not sure whether she was nine or ten years old when she lost her memory. She also doesn't know if she lost her memory for six or eight months but what she does know is that things were different when she recovered. She climbed trees in her native Ocania. She terrorized her mother. She ran up and down the mountain of Cristo Rey just as she used to except now every once in a while she saw people appear in vapors next to those who were flesh and blood. Sometimes she could hear them speak. Other times she heard the whispers of a disembodied voice. This is a story that happens in Spanish where mommy and the tías call each other voz, the archaic thou, but they use too with me, the informal tender you. In Spanish our stories are slow, then fast, and we cackle constantly even when we talk about the dead. I tell the tías how unusual and fantastic of a coincidence it is for mommy to lose her memory at eight or nine and for me to lose my memory when I am 23. The tías couldn't care less about my notion that this story is like science fiction. So American this one, no? And what mommy and the tías want to talk about is what I dreamt when I had no memory. In Colombia people live with an open door to the other world. Dreams are seen as the burrow of the great beyond, subterranean hillways, narrowways, tunnels. In my family we study dreams and try to decode their architecture. When we greet each other we do so with a question, did you dream last night? When we ask after each other we say, do you know what so and so has dreamt these days? During her amnesia, mommy dreamt of her past lives and the tías want to know whether I glimpsed at the same kind of thing. But when I think back to what I dreamt, all I see is color, the morphing colors of a sunset, the iridescent sheen of an oily surface. I dreamt of a muted image, a cup of soup smoking in my hands, someone throwing their head back and laughter in a bar. When I tell the tías this, they are disappointed. Bueno, they say, they stare down, they pat my hand. What's important is that you are now someone who could cross between two worlds. But I tell them that I'm not, and I tell them that I can't. I tell them that I don't see things like mommy did after her accident. I don't hear voices or see ghosts, and I cannot see the future. The tías not slowly understanding. And it is as if this is a piece of information they've been waiting for. And they begin to look away, shifting their eyes to mommy again, looking to start a different conversation. But in between looking at me and at mommy, they say, better anyway to be normal. Live your life. You'll see how quickly you forget quicker than a witch's fart. It's Colombian Singh. Mommy doesn't remember the falling down the hole. The men in hard hats had been digging out for weeks. She doesn't remember the journey through the black, dark, the gust of breeze that blew against her body, the heartbeat that must have been her stomach. Unlike me, what she remembers of her accident is what took place before. Mommy was inside her house, relishing the shade of the thatched roof, and the breeze that swooped in through the courtyard. The sun was high outside, and mommy was trying to keep her color light. She didn't like people calling her mi negrita. Partly because mommy's older sister, Tia Nancy, they called mi blanquita. And Tia Nancy was the one who got the new shoes, the new dresses, the birthday parties. And mommy always got the hand-me-downs and no parties, not even a first communion. So it must have been the color of her skin, like a burnt chicharra, that was to blame. She was thinking all of this when mommy's cousins, Natalia and Marina, raced in giggling and yelling, come Jenny, see what we found. There's a deep, dark hole in the mountain. Natalia and Marina lived across the street from mommy, right next to great-grandmother Mamaria, who was the landowner. Mommy didn't like her cousin Natalia, who was just a year older, because Natalia was always trying to control everything. Natalia, in turn, hated mommy because mommy was the favorite, not just in their family, but in the barrio, and she was beautiful in spite of her dark skin. Marina, who was younger than them both, was a territory that mommy and Natalia constantly fought over because whoever had Marina on their side owned the majority in the group, and owning the majority in the group meant you were the leader. I have no interest in seeing a hole, mommy said, and she began to walk away, but it's dark night inside that hole, Natalia said. Mommy turned around and she caught Natalia glancing at her sister, and then Marina said, come Jenny, we just want you to see. To get to the dark hole, they had to climb up the footpath to a cliff. There they saw the abandoned dusty machinery of the men who had been there for some months, sitting in culverts in the mountain to bring water to Cristo Rey. Beyond the machinery, they discovered the large hole. The hole looked so black, mommy stayed in place as Natalia and Marina took a step closer and leaned forward to look down. Now you. Mommy said no, but Marina said, we'll be right behind you, nothing will happen. Mommy took a step closer, she saw the velvet dark sides of the hole, the sound of a rustling breeze traveling up a rich black earth far down at the bottom, and then the last thing mommy remembers is a hand on the small of her back, and there is nothing else after the feeling of the hand on the small of her back. Grandfather Nono, who was in the back hills of the family house, halfway up a tree cutting down mangoes, felt mommy's soul calling to him at that moment. That's how Nono described it to mommy and Natalia's. For Vadom, they tell me, the sound of a soul calling to him, that's what he said. Nono looked into the distance, listening for a moment, and then he jumped down and bounded up the hill, pasco cotta and avocado trees rushing out into the dirt road. Natalia and Marina were standing quietly across the road, leaning against the wall of their house, looking down. Nono asked them, have you two seen Jenny? They looked at each other, and then Natalia said, no, we have not. Nono turned to Marina, have you seen Jenny? But Marina shook her head. Nono then rushed into their house to ask Moncho, his wife's older brother, if he had seen mommy. Moncho said he was sure he had seen the three of them, mommy, Marina, Natalia, walking out together up the dirt path. Ask them again, they know where she is. Marina and Natalia tonight seeing mommy again, but after a while, Marina said, I think I saw her head up that hill, but she was all alone. Nono scrambled up the mount, then he stopped at the crest, trying to hold on to the feeling of the call. When he opened his eyes, he thought about the hole. He felt sure that's where mommy was, and instead of running to investigate the tunnel from the top, he turned around and headed back down as quickly as he could, and bolted through palms on tall grass and mague and borrachero trees to the other opening, the end of the tunnel that cut horizontally through the mountain, and through which he could walk in like it was a cave. Nono didn't have a light, and for a long time he stepped in absolute darkness. He knew there might be snakes, and he was alert listening for a rustle. In the absolute dark, Nono said he felt mommy's life snuffing out. Ahead, he saw a light falling in a beam from above ground, and he sprinted toward it. There was a body lying there, very still, and as he got closer under the sunlight, he saw mommy face down, lying in a dark pool of blood. The pool of dark red expanded underneath her. Nono bent down and turned her over. Her whole face was slick and red, breath bubbled out of her nose. He checked for a broken neck and hoisted her up, and ran with her in his arms, ran as fast as he could through the dark cave across the hill, down the dirt path, into his house, and there he set her on a table and rattled his bottles of remedies looking for holy water, which he used to wash the blood off her face, so he could see the deep cuts he needed to pray over in order to stop the flow of blood. Thank you.