The Absolute Book

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘Help to what?’ said one.

  ‘Will helping him help you?’ asked another.

  ‘No one here can help us,’ said yet another.

  Shift said, ‘I thought he wanted my friend to hear his story. But he seems to have no interest in that. It was me who twisted him up like that. He remembers most of what happened. But he doesn’t know to lay the blame at my feet. His one good arm is the arm he lost. It works because he doesn’t remember what happened to it.’

  ‘Why do you say “friend”?’ said the first speaker. ‘How can you have a friend here with you?’

  ‘By the most extraordinary luck.’

  The third speaker asked, ‘What happened to the man’s arm?’

  ‘I ate it,’ Shift answered, and looked perplexed and alarmed, as if he hadn’t meant to respond truthfully, or at all.

  ‘He must have already been dead when you ate it, or you’d be in the Nearest Place,’ the second speaker intoned in a singsong chant. ‘You must have had a good reason to kill him, or you’d be in the Nearest Place. You must have had a good reason to eat him, or you’d be in the Nearest Place.’

  Taryn gathered that the Nearest Place was Hell.

  The first said, ‘I’ve been looking for my friend up and down all the roads. In and out of all the parishes.’

  The souls were clustered around Shift now, almost encroaching on his cloud of matter.

  ‘Your friend is in Heaven,’ Shift said. ‘My friend is here.’ He pointed at Taryn.

  Everyone turned and gazed at her. Then the third speaker said, with polite censoriousness, ‘No one has a friend here.’

  The only one who hadn’t yet spoken, but who had been examining Shift closely the whole time, said, ‘What are you?’

  ‘I’m a soul, like you.’

  ‘We are people.’

  ‘A person, like you. The soul of a person.’

  ‘You are not a person.’

  Taryn thought this was probably the direst insult she’d heard directed at Shift, who counted everyone as people.

  Through the bricks at her back she felt the faint vibration of a train’s wheels over joins in the tracks. She went to Shift and told him she thought a slow train was on its way. Everyone lost interest in them. They streamed away from their hiding place and up the embankment.

  Taryn hauled on Shift and they followed. They sprinted across the short stretch of level ground and up the embankment. The engine went by them and they began running alongside the train. But it was gaining on them.

  Shift stopped running so he’d be the first to reach the open door at the front of coach number three. He jumped on, then leaned out and snatched at Taryn as the train carried him past her.

  His hand slid off her.

  He vanished from the doorway and Taryn understood that he was running back down the length of the train to catch her at another door. She looked behind her. The next door was nearly on her. She must try herself, but the bandolier of chain was weighing her down and she couldn’t vault, could barely run. There was nothing to grab on to. Her hands fumbled on the rear doorway of carriage three as it went past, and she tripped and tumbled against the moving carriage and then desperately pushed herself clear. She came down in the dust and several souls trampled over her as they chased the receding doorway.

  Once they passed, Taryn raised her head to look back along the line and count doors; count the chances she had left. Six. Five, for she’d not be on her feet quickly enough for the first of them.

  She had been seen. The Muleskinner had left his post by the door to the third building and was hurrying her way, rolling like a spinifex seed barrelling along wet sand on a windy day.

  Taryn screamed. A door sailed past over her head and there was a thump as Shift landed behind her. He picked her up, lifted her over his head and threw her into the next passing doorway. She tumbled between the legs of the people in what turned out to be a very crowded carriage.

  She got to her feet and leaned out the door. Shift was still chasing the train, lining up with the last door. The ragged star of the Muleskinner bowled up behind him.

  Shift jumped and made the door. The Muleskinner stretched and stamped his straight leg in behind Shift. He seemed to lodge there, like a thrown shuriken. The train picked him up and carried him along. Shift seized the Muleskinner’s anchored leg, batted away the good hand, and flung the man out into the black air.

  The hospital had illuminated the empty land around it, but they were now well past the hospital and everything was dark.

  Taryn saw the Muleskinner drop away and become shadow. He fell lightly, like a dry plant, not a solid body, but as he fell he grappled away a streamer of bones and leaves, moths and butterflies, seedpods, frogspawn. The matter scattered beside the track. Shift leaned from the doorway, looking back. Then he turned Taryn’s way, shouted something she couldn’t hear over the thump and squeal of the wheels, and jumped.

  The remaining windows of the last carriage flashed their way over him, counting down from four to zero. Then he was lost in the darkness.

  The train went on, submerged in the desert night.

  Taryn remained by the door of the packed carriage. Hours went by, and very gradually the countryside reappeared. Blue-grey, then dun. The sun came up unseen, perhaps somewhere behind the train.

  Desert and the odd dwelling; that’s all there was. But then, after the train passed what looked like an artificial hill—narrow at its ends, with wide ramps facing up and down the line and some kind of lookout on top—the crowd in the carriage seemed to perk up. They began to peer expectantly out the windows.

  How many of these passengers had made this journey before? Taryn wondered. They all seemed to know what came next.

  The train slowed. It had entered some kind of suburb.

  A billboard glided by, on it a man with his finger to his lips, except his finger was an unlit candle. Another billboard showed one of those tailless fish, up on end, its smiling mouth and single eye pointed skyward, and its sickle-shaped tail balanced on its head, like horns.

  The billboards were painted, not printed. The only things in the settlement that looked mass-produced were the clothes people wore in the streets. Taryn saw Levi’s and Reeboks and Yankees caps, Doc Martens, Lacoste shirts, Adidas sportswear. She saw bits and pieces of uniforms from various wars. Taryn understood that the clothes were all remembered—ghost objects. But the billboards were like the hospital, made here, with an idea in mind and an agreed-upon understanding. They were material, and indigenous.

  This was the sort of thinking she had to do in order to become someone who could settle here. She could stay. She could start a library: build a small house and fill it with the books she remembered. A real house, with ghost books. But when Taryn tried to remember books, the only one that came to mind was her own. Was her own book the only one she’d ever really needed?

  She thought of the thing she and Shift were looking for—a cipher key to a language capable of commanding nature, a kind of absolute book, one they had dreamed up out of their different personal needs, and which was probably no more real than the fictional absolute books she had written about in The Feverish Library: Casaubon’s Key to All the Mythologies; Lovecraft’s Necronomicon; and the ‘catalogue of catalogues’ Borges’ librarian wandered in search of in his youth.

  And then she thought, I will get off wherever this train stops, and I will wait right there until Shift finds me. She could feel a tugging on the ends of that short, chopped-off lock at the back of her head. Her father was wearing a bracelet made of her hair. She had a body waiting for her. And it was her mother she must find, not her sister, not an occupation.

  Taryn stayed on the station for two days and a night. She watched people disembark from trains that stopped, replaced by those who’d waited, often for most of a day. There was no timetable. But no one settled in on the platform and made themselves comfortable, as people normally would in the case of unreliable transport. With services like these you wou
ld expect to see folding chairs, thermoses and sleeping bags. Everyone seemed to have remembered the form of waiting, but not the form of resting while waiting.

  There were very few benches on the platform, so the throng simply stood, looking up the line. The trains only ran in one direction. It made Taryn worry about how she’d get back. She could walk, of course; follow the line, recognise where she’d been, orient herself to an uphill and an out. But walking would be slow and Taryn had a vague sense that time mattered, that there was something she had to be back for—a talk to give, a celebration to witness. Perhaps it was Carol’s wedding. She couldn’t remember discharging her matron of honour duties at the ceremony or celebration, so the wedding must still be before her.

  The people on the station didn’t talk to one another, but Taryn was approached twice by individuals asking if she’d let them have her chain. What they wanted it for they didn’t say. Taryn explained that she couldn’t remove it and they looked at her with uncertainty bordering on dread, and she intuited that few people came here so encumbered. Her chain didn’t fit the usual picture.

  Passengers came and went. Everyone flowing through the station seemed preoccupied, holding themselves in readiness for the next thing. Some had sheaves of documents in folders or envelopes. They would stand perusing their papers as they waited, some absorbed, some agitated. ‘This is not my file,’ one might declare, to no one in particular. ‘I asked for mine, but this is the file of that dreadful woman who left me in the lurch.’

  Many of them voiced complaints. But no one seemed to listen to anything anyone else had to say.

  Even witnessing the dissatisfaction of others with their files, Taryn felt that if she were to visit the records office she’d be able to locate her own. She was an experienced researcher. She could read her file and make some sense of her situation. She hadn’t forgotten that she wasn’t dead, wasn’t finished, was in fact a visitor in this great hospital’s visiting hours, not herself someone in need of a cure. But the urge to go looking for some news about herself, some orienting information, possibly flattering, was exactly like the one she’d get when her Facebook stream presented her with a quiz: Which of the four temperament types are you? Which philosopher are you? Which Star Wars character? Which endangered British bird?

  ‘Excuse me,’ Taryn said, to the person nearest her. ‘How far is it to the records office?’

  ‘If you go by the riverbed, you will reach its landing in an hour,’ came the answer.

  ‘But the riverbed is powdery, and with that chain you’ll be sinking up to your ankles at every step,’ said another.

  Both of the people who spoke looked pleased with themselves, puffed up with importance.

  ‘Oh, I wish I’d thought of helping her,’ said someone else. ‘That’s a candle.’

  The woman who’d voiced this thought was abruptly chastised, in a noisy chorus, like a fuss in a henhouse. People shouted at her in several languages. The only thing Taryn was able to pick out was, ‘Do you imagine she can give you a candle? Where would she get a candle?’ They seemed to be arguing about whether it was possible to earn enough points—candles—to escape this country. About a contractual arrangement that some seemed to believe in and others did not. It was either worth showing consideration to others as a general display of good form to the invisible powers who must surely be paying attention, or it was not, because no one here who helped another would, by doing so, help themselves.

  Taryn wanted to say that the general habit of being helpful would make life easier for everyone, whether or not it was noticed. That human kindness was heartwarming, and didn’t they need their hearts warmed? But it was pointless. They were here legitimately, while she was an illegal. They got to argue about the rules by which they lived, and to disagree on the spirit of the rules, while she got to stand by saddened and frightened by it all, clinging to a distinction that, as an illegal, she’d been able to make: Purgatory wasn’t forever living with your mistakes; it was forever defending your decisions.

  Taryn’s chain got heavier by the hour. If it gained any more weight she wouldn’t be able to get about even dragging herself. If she was going to make a move and explore the records office—not to look up her records or anyone else’s, but to see what it was like, in case it was in any way like the Borges’ library—she should move. Before another night arrived, she should wade along the river of powder looking for some place imposing enough to be the focus of pilgrimages and hope. But then she remembered the hospital, real from afar, ruinous close-to, and she kept her seat. After all, she was very lucky to have a seat. It’s the small things, Taryn thought and, a few minutes later that minutes were small things, and that she was herself only minute by minute, and the chatter in her head was like a machine breathing for her.

  The weight was lifted from her kilo by kilo as someone unwound the chain. It was night, and there were no lights that side of the station. The ghost electricity in the city on the other side of the station only threw the building’s shadow over the platform.

  ‘Thank you,’ Taryn murmured.

  The last loop was lifted over her head and the chain went taut. She was pulled up out of her seat. She stumbled where she was led and saw that it was the Muleskinner—standing straight now—his back to her as he drew her along.

  Taryn grabbed her end of the chain to take the strain off her neck and hurried to catch up. She overtook the chain. Its slack loop fidgeted and rattled after them.

  ‘I’m glad to see that you’re more yourself,’ Taryn said. She was glad; he was less frightening to look at and, she hoped, not as fast now that he was on his feet.

  ‘As if you care.’

  ‘To care I’d have to have known you were in trouble.’

  ‘I wasn’t in trouble. Your boyfriend broke me and he straightened me out again.’

  Taryn craned this way and that, but there was no other person in sight. The chain was making a hell of a noise. You’d think someone might look out a window.

  She asked, ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He stopped to pick up his shit.’

  Taryn was furious. Shift had said something about how they were mostly just their propensities here, and she’d managed to resist throwing herself at an archive, but he’d kept preening, which wasn’t even a propensity he had. Either that, or he was putting himself back together, which might, she thought, be expressive of his forgetting everything every second century. But he had more power, more presence of mind, even under all his camouflage, than she could muster. He shouldn’t be going to pieces.

  The Muleskinner led Taryn off the platform and across the lines—there was a barrier arm, down when it should be up. They had to edge around it.

  ‘What happened to you?’ Taryn said.

  ‘You happened to me.’

  ‘No, Hamish, you weren’t in love with me. I refuse to believe that.’

  ‘What would you know. You’ve never been in love.’ He waved the rectangular something he was carrying.

  ‘Is that my file?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does it say I’ve never been in love?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Taryn absorbed this. She didn’t ask for her file, or for insights into whatever else might contain. She kept meekly following him, making sure the chain didn’t tighten and hurt her—though this wasn’t her body and couldn’t be damaged. She bore that in mind, and otherwise just followed where he led.

  It was in the nature of that country that you either found what you looked for, or conjured it. And, if you found what you looked for, it wasn’t what you hoped for. It was either a dream of a thing—like the trains—or a dreamcatcher, like the mudbrick building that housed a remembered hospital. Accordingly, sometime after it got light and the streets filled with the usual resolutely occupied people, the Muleskinner found a kind of bar—a dark room, dusty bottles on one wall, a mirror so smeared it was just glassy vagueness, a few customers perched on stools, the bar before them empty. Perhaps the place w
asn’t yet serving, or perhaps it never did. The air in the room had no scent—not even stale alcohol—and no promise of flavour.

  The tavern had a garden bar. Tables and benches under a pergola covered in vines. The vines had died back for winter—or were dead. Taryn thought they were dormant. She had seen grass and trees in this country, so plants could grow. Perhaps there was a season when grass and vines flowered. There was water—there’d been a stream they crossed over. Water had been used to make the hospital’s bricks. The tavern’s rough-hewn timber furniture was real, like the hospital building. They were things like the enduring part of a coral reef, the hard honeycomb in which tendrilled animals lived. The reef animals being all the ghost stuff—remembered window glass, bedding, oxygen tanks, call buttons, railway lines, train carriages, train whistles, barstools, and bottles of liquor. Taryn wanted to ask the Muleskinner whether he’d brought any remembered money so they could buy a drink. It was tempting to talk back to his silence.

  Men and their silences, Taryn thought. Shift told her so little that her sense of why it was worthwhile being here was as thin as she was. She wasn’t even making anything with her thoughts—as the Muleskinner had. He’d dreamed up a lock and chain. Couldn’t she at least dream up a key for the lock?

  Taryn considered the man across the table. ‘So,’ she said. ‘McFadden. Here we are, in a social setting. When the bar opens for business, we can hash out our differences over a drink.’

  He didn’t respond, only gazed at her.

  Taryn waited for something expressive to happen. Maybe he’d weep tears of blood. ‘If you wanted what we’d had, the connection of our conspiracy, or more than that, you would have talked to me,’ she said. ‘You act as if I wouldn’t have listened to you when you called me, but it was you who wouldn’t talk.’

  ‘I was waiting for you to say my name.’

  ‘Like a magic word? Perhaps you’ve been telling yourself that, but I know what you really wanted was to scare me.’

  ‘Are you saying you don’t have to listen to me now because I didn’t approach you in the right way?’ He was scornful.