The Rememberer

“The Rememberer,” by American author Aimee Bender, is a short story that uses conventions of magical realism to explore the themes of Thought Versus Feeling, Love and Obligation, and The Sublime Quality of Loss. First published in the September 1, 1997, issue of The Missouri Review, the piece later appeared in Bender’s award-winning short story collection, The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (1998).

Bender uses first-person point-of-view to tell the story of Annie, a woman who witnesses her boyfriend, Ben, revert to earlier evolutionary forms. Annie uses a matter-of-fact tone to share with the reader that Ben first turned into an ape, then a sea turtle, and finally a salamander. Although she has no idea how his “devolution” happened, she accepts her new reality. As Ben transforms from human to animal, Annie transforms from lover to caretaker.

The story begins with the narrator, Annie, describing Ben’s condition of reverse evolution. The couple is into a month of this process. Annie then reflects on their life at the beginning of his reverse evolution and how she tried to understand Ben’s condition by visiting a community college science professor. She also explains that initially people in her life were curious about where Ben had gone, but that eventually they stop calling.

Annie then reflects on the last day that Ben was human. Annie describes how Ben had always been sad about the state of the world, which was one of the reasons she fell in love with him. She shared his melancholy about humankind. The day before he turns into an ape, Ben claims that as humankind grows smarter and their brains grow bigger, the world “dries up and dies” (Paragraph 7). He says that he and Annie “think far too much” (Paragraph 8) and the world does not have enough “heart” (Paragraph 7).

Annie then reflects on how she responded to Ben in his distress over humankind by reflecting back on the first time they had sex. Before actually having sex, they ended up having a long conversation about poetry. She also remembers the time when Ben woke her up to take her outside to look at the stars and talk about dreaming. Although this moment leads Ben to sleep soundly, Annie cannot go back to sleep.

Annie then returns the story back to Ben’s last human day. She tells the reader how she kissed his neck as he sat with his head in his hands. They have sex and Ben later says he wants to sleep outside. She chooses to stay in their bed. When she awakens the next morning and looks out the window, Annie discovers an ape on her patio.

Rather than call 911, Annie hugs the ape she believes to be Ben, and even sits on the lawn and ripping up grass with him. She gazes into his eyes and commits to learning everything she can about the simian version of her boyfriend. At one point, Ben reaches for Annie like a lover, but she firmly tells him no. She believes he understands her words when he stops. Annie says she wants to care for Ben as if he were her son or a beloved pet. Initially, she believes his transformation is a temporary one.

Eventually, Annie realizes Ben isn’t returning to his human form. After his second regression into a sea turtle, she comes home from a workday to discover he’s become a salamander. She asks him if he remembers her. Recalling that he used to enjoy honey, she drizzles some into the water of his baking pan. As she watches salamander-Ben lick at the honey, she realizes their relationship is over. Imagining him turning into a single-celled organism that she’d need a microscope to find, Annie knows she can no longer bear to watch Ben’s reverse evolution.

She puts Ben and his baking pan in the passenger seat of her car and drives to the beach. Using the pan as a makeshift boat, she places Ben on a wave. Finally, she watches him swim out of the pan, and she waves to the water, thinking he might look back at her.

As the story ends, Annie reveals that she reads the newspapers to check for stories about a naked man washing ashore. She looks for Ben on walks and keeps her phone number listed. In the meantime, she notes that unless he returns, her job is to remember—to recall the moments when he held her in his arms, how his breath felt in her ear. She goes over her memories again and again, honoring her felt responsibility for remembering Ben.