The Antidote

“This is what I can do for people, I thought. This is my new purpose. I will take whatever they cannot stand to know. The memories that make them chase impossible dreams, that make them sick with regret and grief. Whatever they hope to preserve for the future. Whatever cargo unbalances the cart. Whatever days and nights they cannot absorb into their living. Whatever they wish to forget for a morning or a decade. I can hold on to anything, for anyone.”

The Antidote welcomes her work as a Vault, initially regarding it as a gift she can provide that others cannot. She speaks in banking metaphors that draw a parallel between the memories she holds and the way a financial bank operates: This establishes The Weight of Memory as a theme.

“Still, I won’t forget the true story of how my brother died. I won’t pay a prairie witch to put Frank out of my mind He still draws breaths inside me. I do not want to lose my brother a second time. I only visited a Vault once in my life—back when I was just a boy—and what I remember best is the ride home to Uz with Papa, how light I felt, holding on to the saddle horn for dear life. Once was enough to convince me that I never wanted to make another deposit to a witch.”

Here Harp explains that, even though he has experienced the advantage of having an unpleasant memory taken away by a Vault, he deliberately chooses not to remove the painful memory of his brother’s death by suicide. This indicates that Harp understands the value of such memories in a way that other citizens of Uz do not.

“We were taught to be grateful for every breath of air we took behind the locked doors, every bitter sip of lemon tea and every hand pressed to our bellies, and whether or not this touch brought us pleasure, whether or not this was a wanted pressure, we were to say the magic words: ‘Thank you.’ […] We carried our heavy burdens of hope and dread together. I loved these women, and I loved their future children. If I owe a debt of gratitude to anyone, it is to the other mothers.”

The Milford Home for Unwed Mothers commits abuse under the guise that it is both in the best interest of the residents and that they are fortunate to endure such abuse. As an adult, the Antidote is aware of this lie and recognizes that it is her fellow residents who truly enrich and bless her life.

“It was the strangest sensation, to tell a story to this earhorn—no sooner did I utter a word than I forgot what I’d only just said. It felt like crossing a river and looking back to discover the bridge I’d been standing on had vanished. I spoke in a torrent without considering what I was saying, and once I’d begun, I felt like a hooked fish getting jerked along. Then the story released me and I was done. Now I understood why Valeria had suggested that I make a deposit. A beautiful spaciousness had replaced—what? I did not care a bit that it was gone. There was no shape to the blankness in my head, just a pleasant ongoing roaring.”

Here Dell describes the experience of depositing a memory with the Antidote—one of the novel’s most prominent magical realist elements. She describes the resulting emptiness as pleasant—it is this feeling that propels the citizens of Uz to continue to deposit their unpleasant memories. Later, however, the novel will suggest that this pleasantness is misleading and that the emptiness the citizens feel is genuinely harmful.

“Sourdough was Nebraska slang for counterfeit bills. I like to picture our work that way—kneading dough, watching it rise inside of people. These had been the happiest three weeks I had ever lived, a time of intense labor and creativity and usefulness. I knew better than to share it with anyone, although my teammates noticed a change in me right away.”

Dell immediately finds her work as the Antidote’s apprentice deeply satisfying because she feels that she is making a valuable and meaningful contribution to her society. This sense of purpose motivates her more than the financial earnings that initially propelled her to seek work. Yet she recognizes that aspects of her work—because they involve dishonesty—should be kept secret.

“Photographs substitute for memories, [Roy Stryker] told me at our first meeting. ‘You must strive to become part of the environment. To be an unobtrusive presence.’”

Cleo echoes her boss’s words, creating a contrast between herself and the Antidote. Whereas the Antidote strives to take away memories, Cleo stives to instill them. As an embodiment of memory, it is Cleo who will recognize the harm that has come to the people of Uz as a result of being made empty of memory.

“Photographs frightened my mother […] My mother seemed to feel she was dishonoring the subjects of my portraits by seeing them framed through my eyes. A photograph was a ‘misremembering,’ she told me. ‘But everybody misremembers vividly, Mama,’ I’d say. A memory is never the fullness of what happened.”

Cleo’s mother argues that the image depicted in a photograph can inaccurately capture the scene or event it displays. Here Cleo does not disagree with that sentiment but argues that this inaccuracy is not a problem. She insists that memory by its nature is inaccurate and faulty. These notions will be infused with even greater meaning once Cleo’s photo depicts the coverup of Sheriff Iscoe’s crime.

“Extreme luck is extremely lonely. Good as well as bad. I didn’t know that a month ago. Now I’d been enclosed in some kind of bubble, set apart from the dust and from everyone who suffers. If I could extend my spell of protection to my neighbors it might feel like a true blessing. As it stands, I feel like an ant trapped under a glass. My isolation feels complete. Nobody has shunned me or run me out of town. Nevertheless, I have been cast out of Uz.”

Harp Oletsky is unable to relish the good fortune of his successful wheat crop because he is alone in his success. He feels guilty for the inexplicable good fortune that he cannot share with his neighbors. His good fortune makes him an Other, which parallels the way that the Antidote is an outcast in Uz.

“People talk about memories flying into and out of their heads. But my work makes me wonder if our maps are wrong. It seems to me that the seat of memory is much lower down, Son. My customers often rub at the place where their spine meets their tailbone. Others spiderweb their hands over their navel. Folks who come to me remember in their hands and their feet. Their thundering hearts remember. Their blood circulates their past. People desire with their whole bodies, and they remember that way too.

Now that I am awake, I know that my business is founded on a lie. There is no safe way to remove chapters from the book of one’s life. You cannot wait until there is more time, more money, more safety, less pain to recollect the past.”

The Antidote, in her imagined conversation with her absent son, uses the metaphor of cartography, or map-making, to explain how people have misunderstood the nature of memory. Her insistence that memory resides throughout the body suggests that memory can cause a physical sensation—that emotional joy and emotional trauma alike impact one’s physical being. Yet, she comes to believe that it is wrong of her to alleviate such memories, no matter how painful they might be.

“Son, I have spent so many years carrying others’ memories, without knowing anything about them. I have swallowed lifetimes, and lost them. It feels miraculous that I can still recollect any fraction of the past. I want to share with You the little that I do know, and remember. Otherwise we ‘fallen women’ will shrink away into objects of pity, living curios. Counterfeiters like me will continue to erase us from sight.”

Here Antonina speaks to her son, confiding in him the irony that, though she is a Vault, she will lose her own memories of her son. This points to the significance of memories to create meaning and purpose in life as they stand as proof that a person existed.

“What choice did I have left? I wouldn’t be Vick’s accomplice, and I felt certain that he would kill me if I refused—if my defrauded customers didn’t find me first. But running felt like another kind of dying. Running would mean giving up the dream of our reunion. The one thing that kept me rooted to this earth, Son.”

Here the Antidote weighs her options in response to the information of his crimes that the sheriff has burdened her with. Though she values her own life, being reunited with her son one day is ultimately the primary motivator of living each day. To flee Uz increases her chances of survival but decreases the chance that her son will find her.

“Ania and I saw clearly then that the Indians who lived beside ups had been made into prisoners on their homeland. What had happened to the Poles in Germany was happening here, and no settler lifted a hand to stop it. Quite the opposite […] Every time I met the eyes of a Pawnee woman at the trading depot, I thought of my mother overpaying for bread, ignoring the German soldiers’ taunting. Well, how could I help anyone, when I did not have anything? I first needed power myself, I reasoned. Once I had my own land and money, then I would be able to help others.”

Tomasz’s words reveal both the universality of oppression throughout the world and the complacency that plays a role in fueling it. Though Tomasz empathizes with the Pawnees, he insists he is helpless to aid them. When he does, later in life, obtain the wealth he speaks of here, he fails to help the Pawnee but instead focuses on ways to maintain his privileged status.

“Long before I could speak the language of our new country, I understood that a White man could do anything he wanted to an Indian. I could still feel the horror and outrage entirely then. I felt allied with the Indians, who suffered the same injustices and persecution that we Poles endured under German rule. I did not yet fully grasp that to the Indians, I was the White man.”

Tomasz’s words point to the complexity of the racial divisions present in the United States in the 1800s. His preconceived notion of the States as a land of equal opportunity is destroyed by the reality of the Pawnee oppression he witnesses. He seeks to separate himself from this oppression but cannot.

“It is very possible to live in a house built from stolen timber without thinking of oneself as a thief. For years, I did this. I am a Catholic who moved to Nebraska to live out Christ’s teachings. Love your neighbor as yourself. Give him the shirt off your back. We took everything from the Indians. Even their children.”

Here, Tomasz acknowledges the gravity of the harms he and others have done to the Pawnee people. It is because he feels an overwhelming sense of guilt that he deposits this memory with a Vault.

“The weight of the deposit settled itself into my chest. Seated in the witch’s hot dugout, I began to gasp and thrash. I understood now why our papa had made this deposit. I did not want to know what I knew. I was the son of a thief and a murderer who I loved. My father’s sorrow was no longer a mystery to me. It became my own.”

Harp cannot ignore the atrocities perpetuated by his father and immediately feels he must right the wrongs committed by his ancestors. He understands that generational trauma continues to impact the Pawnee people who have been displaced, and he seeks to correct this.

“I cannot begin to understand how this camera chooses and channels these scenes, across the plains of time. But I know the land itself has something to do with it. The land is teaching me how to see it. Particles of animals, particles of vegetables, particles of soil and sky. To put it in terms that you might better understand: the land is making propaganda for the future of the land.”

Cleo is certain that the camera has a sort of magical power that cannot be explained by humans. But she views the photographs as potential cautionary tales and considers them as opportunities to prevent further damage to the landscape in the future. This attitude contrasts with other views expressed throughout Uz’s history in which many settlers were eager to take parts of the land for themselves, with no consideration to future consequences.

“Does this Graflex peer into ‘the’ future or ‘a’ future? I prefer to believe it’s the latter. Scenes grow out of the developing tray like droplets beading on a spiderweb. Some threads of the web seem to show what has happened, others show what could. The patterns that connect them feel more circular and delicate than definite and linear.”

Cleo chooses to be optimistic that the future that the camera depicts is alterable: if humans consider the impact that their present action will have on the landscape and the environment in the future, and work to make productive and caring choices, then their efforts will be rewarded.

“‘Miss Allfrey? I don’t understand what I’m looking at—’

‘The future,’ I said. A future. Unless it’s the past.’

That’s what I wanted to believe, anyhow. That destiny is open. Narrowly open, maybe. Not infinitely open. But undecided. Unfixed. Free. I wanted to believe that people could change direction together. If I didn’t believe that, why had I joined up with the New Deal photographers in the first place?”

Here again Cleo presents her optimistic view of the future to Harp. In a sense, she serves as a kind of parallel to Harp, who focuses on righting the wrongs of the past. Cleo, on the other hand, seeks to prevent atrocities from happening in the future. Both of their stances highlight The Interconnectedness of Humans and Nature.

“My uncle’s smile is like some shy, nocturnal animal, scared of its own shadow. It’s always trying to burrow back into his wrinkles. But when I said Mama’s name, the smile emerged without a trace of wariness. He looked truly happy. Story after story after story rolled into me, and I was happy to receive them. Uncle Harp spoke without pausing for close to an hour. When he finally stopped, he looked flushed and tired.”

In telling Dell his memories of Lada, Harp performs a reversal of the magical erasure that comes with making a deposit to a Vault—he is happy to relive these memories and is made fuller by their telling. This fullness is a foil to the emptiness that comes with making a deposit with a Vault.

“It was in that moment that I became a witch […] After that, there are many gaps in my memory. I remember a struggle with the visiting physician, a long needle, and injection, and another snowy omission. When I woke a second time, I escaped them. What I recall is that I was all-body.”

Antonina recounts the memory of her son being taken away from her. She is certain that this profound loss triggered her becoming a Vault. This speaks to how important the loss of her son from her life is for her.

“I wanted to share this new clarity with my neighbors. The story we taught our kids and dramatized with silly hats during the Founder’s Day pageant—that story was killing everything. There were cavities in Uz’s story that needed to be filled in, before a more permanent collapse occurred. We had to look at the real origins of this blowing soil, this degraded land. Sheriff Iscoe was not the only man with blood on his hands. I would hold up mine to show them and make a beginning.”

Upon hearing his father’s deposited memory, Harp is moved to right the past wrongs committed by his ancestors. Though he did not directly participate in the abuse of the Pawnees, he feels responsible by association and shares in their guilt.

“I had curated this show for the Uzians, but I did not feel the work was mine. Sometimes, I’d accidentally been its enemy. Overexposing the film, bungling the temperature of the developer fluid, failing to agitate the solution in the tank properly. Too hot, too cold, too fast, too slow. Often the ideal conditions only reveal themselves to me in hindsight, after I hold up a ruined print and see what I should have done for it. It is incredibly hard to make a picture that even approaches what you saw through the lens. ‘On your luckiest days,’ Roy Stryker told me, ‘the camera will see beyond your intentions. It will see more than you can.’”

Cleo speaks of art’s ability to convey sentiments and truths that are beyond the artist herself. Her camera’s magical ability makes the ordinary magic of art literal, and here Cleo underscores that she has little direct control over what the camera itself reveals.

“I understand why he chose to put all this out of his mind, friends. He couldn’t live with what he’d done to get the land. He kept his deposit a secret from us. A private affair. But when many thousands of us decide to forget the same truths, what happens? Look at what is happening to the soil without roots. We are the children of these crimes of memory, and we go on committing them.”

Here Harp references the deposit made by his father, which contained a confession of the role he played in the events that led to the massacre of many Pawnee people. The metaphor he makes regarding “soil without roots” points to the dangers of losing one’s ancestral memories but also echoes the phenomenon that spurred the Dust Bowl.