The Rockmore House

27 | Lifespans

Paul led Eric and I down another set of stairs and through a white hallway punctuated with paintings of stark Scandinavian-looking landscapes in unearthly colors. He stopped at the entrance to an exhibition called, "Distortions: Memory as Fiction."

In the first room, there was a quote written on one wall:

"He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the words and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not."

                    ― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

The opposite wall was covered in paired photographs ranging from older square-shaped black and white photos, to ones in muted tones from probably the fifties through the eighties, to more recent pictures in full color. In the first pair of black and white images, a boy posing with a dog in front of a Christmas tree appears in the next photo on a front porch in the exact same clothes and position. In another, a woman caught by surprise looks over her shoulder at the photographer with her mouth slightly open as if she's about to speak. In the photo on the right she's at a kitchen sink in front of a window, in the other, she's outside and there is a lake in the distance.

A placard with the artist's statement read: "A Series of Potentially Misremembered Moments (2016) is a collection of photographic prints drawn from used camera cards purchased on eBay and unclaimed family photo albums from estate sales and storage unit auctions. The works in this series feature moments unlikely to have been remembered without photographic evidence, captured only to be later discarded. With the utilization of juxtaposed images, one of which contains the subject in their original setting and the other featuring the subject in an equally realistic but ultimately inaccurate setting, the series questions the reality and meaning of the mundane."

The painting around the corner was so much larger and more vivid than the wall of snapshots that it was startling. In it, Curious George ran from the man with the yellow hat, holding a jar of peanut butter with a bold red, blue and green striped label. Mickey Mouse had his arm around the Monopoly man, while they watched the scene play out. All of the images seemed to jump out from the white background they were on and implant directly into my brain.

"Jiffy peanut butter," Eric mumbled. "That's the kind we get."

"That's impossible," Paul said. "Because it doesn't exist. Those are all examples of the Mandela Effect."

"What's that?" Eric asked.

"A false memory or belief held by many people. Like that Curious George has a tail, Mickey Mouse wears suspenders, or that the Monopoly Man has a monocle, all of which are untrue. Obviously these examples," he gestured toward the characters in the painting, "are just mind tricks. But apparently there are people all over the world who claim to remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, when he actually was released from prison in 1990 and died in 2013. Some people believe the Mandela Effect is evidence that alternate timelines exist."

"Are you some people?" I asked. "Do you think there are alternate timelines?"

"Ha!" Paul's sudden burst of a laugh filled the small room and made Eric and I jump in surprise. "I know there are."

The next room was empty except for three benches, and completely dark until a projector overhead beamed a video onto a blank wall.

We sat and watched a woman describe how ever since her son passed away as a child, she felt as though she lived two separate lives: the one based in reality, where her son was gone, and another in her mind, where she imagined him going through middle school and high school, graduating and going to college. Every single day, she imagined what he'd be doing, from moments of triumph, like winning a high school basketball game, to sadness like experiencing his first heartbreak, to the mundane, like playing video games with his friends or leaving for his after-school job at a fast food restaurant.