Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  “I will find out who I was. I will someday.”

  I had spoken defiantly but this drew a smile from Cake. “Is that really your intention? Or are you are groping toward another reinvention that will be amenable to you and your pursuits? Perhaps this is the real reason for your claims to a recurring selective amnesia.”

  He turned to the gloomy man, who nodded so shakily I was reminded of a puppet. “When you first arrived here we considered another possibility, but you soon put an end to that.”

  I am sure they knew I would ask about this other possibility and when I did, they engaged in a little huddle before the gloomy man continued, “During moments of extreme and prolonged distress we can conjure counterfeit memories into which we insert familiar faces. We reward these old friends with new roles.”

  “You had us for a while,” the imp said with a malicious smirk. “Today I bake, tomorrow a new man make.”

  I saw Cake fluttering his fat fingers as if he were shaking off some viscous liquid. “We are led to understand that the most primal fear is of darkness and of the night. What if the night washes away our memories and we awake as someone else? Or in an alternate universe? What if our souls are stolen?”

  “Djinns and zombies and spectres and jumbies and gnomes and –” Cake put a hand on the imp’s shoulder to stop his flow.

  I said nothing. I was aware they were all looking carefully at me. Perhaps they expected an outburst or another question. I knew they were trying to confuse me even further or perhaps lead me away from the truth. Eventually I told them, “You seem to know far more of me than I do of myself.”

  “Your statement is correct. Consider us your custodians.”

  “I do not need a custodian so it seems we are wasting each other’s time here. Let’s get to the point. What is it you really want from me? A man with an abbreviated memory.”

  “I am glad you brought that up. Let’s say there’s a man who claims to regularly lose his memory. Would you say that this man’s condition is the result of sabotage or his own fickleness?” The way the words fell from Cake’s tongue made me think he had rehearsed this particular question and everything previous was leading to it.

  “I can’t say. But I am willing to hear your conclusion.”

  The imp seemed so agitated I felt he would crawl onto the table. Again, Cake put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “What we want from you is very straightforward. Simple answers to simple questions.” Once more he raised his head like a tortoise and I felt his question would be both silly and unanswerable. He did not disappoint. “What is the nature of the actual man? How can a man define himself when there are so many influences? If you create a false timeline are you then free to minimize actrocities and maximize small victories?” When I did not answer, he added, “You must understand we are here to help. But we cannot do that if you continue this pretence. Would it suit you if we chose some middle ground and work our way from there? We will even offer you the opportunity to choose this point. A month? A year? Three years?”

  For the first time, he seemed a bit sincere. I knew it was another trap, yet I thought carefully of my response. Eventually I told them, “If I tell you that I do not know who I am it will mean nothing so I will say instead that I do not know who I was. And because that is the beginning of everything I cannot answer any other questions you may have.” I was taken aback by my earnestness and wished I had said nothing. They engaged in a long conference and as they leaned closer, their skulls touching, I knew that if I sketched this scene later I would draw a three-headed man. Perhaps I would give the head in the middle – clearly the most important – pendulous drooping lips and tiny pointed teeth. I heard the scratch of pen on paper.

  The gloomy man brought out a Gladstone bag – funny I would recall a brand – which he placed before him. “We have some material here,” he said as he fiddled with the bag’s contents. Eventually he retrieved a coil spring notebook and a clutch of pencils. He seemed to be inspecting everything and when he was satisfied he turned to Cake, who nodded, and he replaced the pen and notebook. “We would like you to have this.”

  I would have refused but the imp climbed on the table, gathered the bag and hopped toward me. I was startled into acquiescence and when the imp returned to the table I recovered to say, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “Expose yourself.” The imp clapped and received stern glances from both men.

  “We would like you to record your dreams.”

  “In any shape and form.”

  “Light the fire.”

  I felt all at once that this entire encounter had the tenor of a dream. This uncertainty brought a brief surge of dizziness and I tried to steady myself. But during that brief moment I saw flashes of an old man disappearing whenever death came calling and another man caught in some kind of sandstorm and a blind woman pursued by a wolf and a ragged group on a train running toward some catastrophe. But each of these memories were separated by a second of blinding whiteness, like the blank pages between chapters.

  What would they do with these images even if I managed to transcribe them on paper? They were gazing intently at me and appeared to have shifted their chairs so they now appeared closer. I suddenly thought of something: Was I part of some experiment? The men before me were trying to convince me I was not crazy while suggesting that I was not completely sane. They seemed to be leading me down different roads with the hope I would choose one and momentarily I felt they knew less of me than they claimed. I was convinced of this manipulation when Cake said suddenly, “We have decided to grant you your wish.”

  “Return my memory?”

  “The most unreliable thing in our possession is our memory. And yet we invest so much trust in it.” Cake smiled and the tip of his tongue slipped out. “But to answer your question, we cannot return what has not been lost. What we can do is to allow you to clear away the debris. Reidentification, if you wish.” He turned his face to the gloomy one and said, “Our monkish friend has lately taken up with mutual causality. He is growing pious, I am afraid.”

  “Paticca-samuppada. We live, we die and we live again.” The imp tittered at this but the gloomy one put his palms together and recited with almost strained seriousness, “A loop represents the most absolute design in nature. A spider’s web, the veins on a leaf, the spirals on an insect’s wing, the brain –”

  “And so on and so forth,” Cake interrupted. “You are free to go. Free to go.”

  The imp leaped to the table once more, stretched to grasp a string and the room went black. I stumbled out and five minutes later in my room I would have doubted this entire crazy encounter but for the Gladstone bag at the foot of my bed.

  3 BALZAC THE BRUTE

  I noticed the darkening sky when I was returning to my room and hurried along. I was certain I hadn’t spent more than an hour with the trio, and I tried to push aside the notion that neither the passage of time nor the weather seemed to obey rules in this place. The night either took its time or went in a flash and the clouds always appeared like set pieces. I realized this was more likely due to my faulty memory rather than the paranoid idea that everything in the Compound was controlled remotely. Paranoia. The men seemed to imply that it was I who had been brushed by its claws while ignoring their own heightened suspiciousness of my activities and my retentiveness. I wish they had been clearer about whatever they wished of me. Still, I should have been more tactful with them; perhaps they would have explained the circumstances that led me to this place.

  The section of the Compound that houses my room looks like shipping containers stacked alongside each other. The walls seem to be fabricated from a variety of materials: brick, metal, wood, concrete and what looks like hardened cardboard. Likely they had been built at different periods, but the general impression is either of deliberate neglect and decay or a place – much like the sabotaged library books – reconstructed in a wilfully discordant manner. I have no idea why I am placed away from the idlers I see roamin
g around, but for this I am thankful. There is a general statement: It is only in solitude that a man truly understands what he wants of himself. Perhaps you mentioned this to me at some point or maybe it was an aspect of my personality prior to my arrival. I cannot say.

  I shut the door to my room and from habit I focus on the illustrations on the wall. After twenty minutes or so I close my eyes and wait for the rattle of approaching memories. Typically, they are just brief flashes, but perhaps the whiff of my recent encounter has stimulated some dying part of my mind and instead of the familiar and numbing ringing that always comes from somewhere behind my left ear, I hear an irregular whirring that reminds me of a flagpole beating against the wind.

  I see a train station. Apart from a group of diminutive elderly men and women drained of colour, the place is abandoned. The group is gazing at the static clock and their arms are interlocked. The station is cold and smells of damp iron. Through the open window I can see puffs of smoke above a sheen of pink ice. The litter, embedded bottles and steel pinions give the ground a remotely apocalyptic look, as if the cold had swept over the city all at once. There is a row of concrete houses and inside, women with their babies frozen to their breasts. Perhaps there is a curfew in this section of the city. The greyish-black buildings are arranged in a sort of amphitheatre and the small wooded area before a jagged wall must have served as a courtyard. It would have been carefully maintained at one time, before the bush overtook the hedges and covered the benches. I see all of this through the station’s window and when I walk outside, I am met by the mouldy odour of damp rot and neglect. A man is sleeping or frozen in a mess of oily cardboard squares. There is no one else. The memory shifts.

  Someone is on a bus or a carriage with me. I cannot see the face of the other passenger, but I am afraid of him and I am fearful that our destinations match. And, in fact, he gets off with me to a derelict terminal at the edge of a town. Beyond the town there are fields of lustrous hay, golden red, that seem slightly suspended and when I walk to the terminal, I notice a child outside, watching through the bus’s window. As the bus passes slowly, I can see that the child, with a wooden bow-shaped toy at her side, is drawing squiggles in the air. I cannot see her face clearly through the dusty window, but she seems to be looking fearfully in the direction of my fellow passenger who I now see has followed me to the terminal. Beside him is a grotesque black beast, its neck the size of its torso. The group at the terminal freezes when they notice the man. This vision seems to hold some connection with the dream from which I awoke nine days earlier, but there are these additional details.

  I am about to open my eyes when another scene arrives, hurtling like jerky images from an unattended projector. I am struck again by my precise recall of something as arbitrary as a projector. It’s almost as if every trace of autobiographical information has been selectively excised or muddled, leaving everything else intact. In any event, this slice of memory seems older; my recollection more flexible. A solemn couple is on their way to some function. The veiled woman is clutching a photograph of a child and she seems not to notice the little boy trailing them. She is focused on the man, slightly ahead and walking quickly. They are all dressed in dark funereal clothes and the boy hangs back as if he wants to be somewhere else. Or perhaps he was not invited. Now, the woman looks back, not at the pair but at the sky. She raises both hands. The photograph is torn away first, then, as she is spun around, her clothes. Soon they are all caught in a great turbulence, a cyclonic disturbance of swirling boars and bulls and giant fishes with deformed eyes and teardrop-shaped leaves.

  This scene is so terrifying that I get up immediately to search the clutch of illustrations but there is no equivalent representation. Two hours later, still searching through the sketches, I am struck by a sudden thought: does madness appear quietly like a gentle pat on the shoulder or does it arrive full-throttle, all rage and muddy laughter? It’s an important consideration and I wonder if this has been your aim from the beginning; a payback for some silly slight that you have never forgotten. So will it then help if I tell you that I am sorry, contrite, deeply apologetic, ashamed, disgraced and everything else you want me to be? I would tell you all of this directly if you were to suddenly appear before me, but you have hidden yourself well. I have this sense of you only as a presence; a spirit with a jangling bag of old frowns and grievances, a ghost running away from its pale shadow. You made certain I would never recognize you if you decided to show up either in memory or in person. Reading your letters was like shuffling cards in a game whose rules I did not understand. Sometimes I felt you were warning me to never trust you and at other times, you seemed to be saying the mistrust should be directed at myself. I realize that my limited memories may complicate ordinarily trivial descriptions, but I still wonder at your habit of writing in riddles. What are you really afraid of?

  But there are more pressing concerns. If my memory of a terminal is real shouldn’t I try to locate it? Walk backwards until I arrive at some familiar point? But what if I had done this before? The three heads claimed I was in some kind of three-month loop as far as my memory was concerned. My presence in the Compound would indicate I had failed to get to this point of familiarity.

  An hour later, I fall back on my bed and stare at the walls. I think of cellblock inmates gazing at their enclosures and I recall, too, the heads describing the fear of the night and by extension the dulling of memories and consciousness as springing from some primal instinct. I don’t want to be cornered by this sort of hysteria so I try to approach the drawings – which, together with the letters are all I have – differently; not searching for familiarity but attempting to guess at the mood that propelled their creation. I scan each, trying to determine if the instigating emotion was sadness or impatience or devotion. They all seem to be of different styles. The deviations are subtle – deeper brush strokes in some and minuscule shifts in the choices of colour – but as I look closer, I see in those placed lower on the walls the background details, the faces and the landscape are so blurred they appear to be echoes.

  I get up and withdraw the other sketches from the basket and in these, too, there are fluctuations, from the broad leisurely strokes on some to the intricate and reflective pencil work on others. What if I am not really the artist, but have instead been thrown into the room of a lunatic? The three heads had suggested I was, apart from an artist, a madman and an imposter. I recall my first stable memory of the Compound and the listless people milling about as if in a slaughterhouse and my fear that the place was some kind of infirmary. This is a horrible possibility. I circle my room, trying to calm myself. Eventually I open the Gladstone bag, withdraw a sheet and try to sketch the three heads. The sketch looks like a child’s cartoon so I erase it and try again but the result is no different. Maybe it is my frustration, but as I scratch and erase and scratch again, I am forced to consider the possibility the three heads may have been right: I am no different from all the listless and morose people scrounging around the place. Yet, what was their purpose in asking me to sketch my dreams? Was it a part of some remediation or was it something more sinister?

  An hour or so later I gave up my attempt at sketching and decided to preserve the drawing, childish though it was. There was no space on the wall. I tried to shift the cast-iron safe closer to the door. The safe was too solid to budge and my efforts loosened a painting above, that of the woman and her child. The painting fell behind the safe and I attempted to squeeze my hand in the narrow space to retrieve it. I took the boomerang object from the basket and probed behind the safe. When I pulled out the painting, I saw that I had also brought out a chunk of some material that seemed to be a type of hardened cork with a polystyrene interior like vulcanized rubber. At first, I assumed I had broken off a bit of the boomerang but that was made of fossilized bamboo.

  I had never seen anything like it. I wished there was someone to whom I could turn, but a man with no verifiable memories cannot easily trust anyone. Certainly not the three h
eads or the idlers scrounging around. I followed my usual pattern whenever I came across something unfamiliar and headed for the library. I placed the material into my pocket because I knew that even though it was still darkish outside, there would be idlers, always curious, hanging around. On my way through the corridor that led to the canteen, I diverted to a side path to avoid the row of cellblocks where I had encountered the three heads. There were a few men sleeping on the benches and a woman walking in even circles, but thankfully she was too preoccupied with her measurements to pay me any attention, so I arrived at the library unprovoked. Just before I opened the door, I heard the muffled flap of an overcoat but saw no one.

  Once there, I set the material on a table and went in search of a relevant book. This took a while because the covers, as I mentioned, were misleading and when I returned I saw a man sitting at the table. He was staring at the piece of cork or whatever it was and because of his bulky physique and fixed expression, I was immediately cautious. Then I noticed his childlike manner as he reached out for the cork, holding it this way and that. “This is a very interesting thing you have here,” he said in a surprisingly squeaky voice. “Now that you have my attention how do you suggest we proceed?” He smiled and the muscles on his jaw, tightening, popped up his ears a bit.

  “What are you doing here so late in the night?” I reached for the material but he closed his fingers around it. “I didn’t expect to find anyone here.”

  “The answer to that should be obvious. I was anticipating your arrival, although I must add that I am flabbergasted by this piece of implement you have here. Is it bait for a mousetrap? Well, I am not biting.” He tittered and covered his mouth in an almost feminine gesture.

  “Have we met before? Why were you waiting for me?”

  “You, my friend, have committed a heinous crime. Most people have done something they are ashamed of. Even I have walked on the dark side. I am not talking about my colour. So don’t go there.”