He tried to look aggrieved but was undone by uselessly pushing his hands into his waistcoat’s pockets and adopting a stiff, almost official posture. His hat, I saw, had a hole in the centre of the brim. “Give me five good reasons why I would do something as stupid as that.”
“Because I saw you with the group of men a while ago and now here you are.”
“Go on. Let me hear four more. And please hurry as I am busy.” He glanced at one wrist then the other, even though neither had a timepiece.
“Never mind. Please step out of the way.”
“I was here first,” he said, but as I sidestepped he did the same, first to the right then to the left.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“I am following your lead.” I made a move as if I was heading to the left but swiftly shifted to the right. “Not fair,” I heard him saying. “Next time I will be more prepared.”
As I hurried to my room I glanced back but I did not see him. For the remainder of the day and half the night I worked on my drawing of a woman striding away from an explosion. Early in the morning, I erased the woman’s face, lightened her outline, rolled up the sheet and took it with me to the library. She was not there, but on the desk she had always chosen was her mask. I pushed it into one of the drawers with the frail hope she would return. But I already knew she was gone; and when I left in the late evening, I tried to lessen my disappointment by convincing myself that she had arrived at the stage where she was confident enough to step out into the world. And I had helped her. Before I arrived at my room I decided that I would seek her out in the place I had thrust her; the town and beyond it, the terminal and the world it led to. I thought of how she had been acclimatizing herself, during our recent trips, for a journey to find this child who may or may not be dead. I reflected too on her questions about the imagination.
5 THE SOLICITOR
Distressingly, I have a few times encountered the man who blocked my path the day the woman disappeared. He calls himself the Solicitor and he has taken to lugging around a battered satchel, which, he insists, is stuffed with his briefs. During our last encounter, I was eyeing the group at the gate when he snucked up behind me and said, “I can represent you.” I was startled and I turned to see him with his briefcase and smile, both battered and useless. “Both of you. Two for the price of one.” I glanced around but there was no one else.
“I have committed no crime so I don’t need any representation.”
“Really?” He looked up at the sky and uttered a dramatic chuckle. “That is not for you to decide.” There was a full growth of hair sprouting from his nostrils and an equivalent growth on his negligible chin. Because his big nose elevated the centre of his face he appeared much closer than he really was. Instinctively, I stepped away.
“Look, I am very –”
“Hear me out. I have the perfect defence.” He tapped his briefcase. “Madness. I can prove that neither of you were in full control of your senses. Diminished responsibility. It’s perfect.”
“I am not interested. And you should stop talking in plurals.”
“You were commanded by the almighty. There were voices in your heads. You saw snakes everywhere. You were innocent proxies.” I hurried away and heard him shouting, “You were sods and idiots. Sleepwalking. Demons in your dreams. Call me. I have represented half the people in this place.”
I don’t doubt it, I thought bitterly as I entered my room and locked the door.
That was seven days earlier and I have avoided him since. It’s now twenty-one days since the woman disappeared. And I have been stuck in my room for most of the time because of the so-called Solicitor and the groups of idlers I see, from a distance, at the gate. They, too, seemed to have taken a disturbing interest in me. So, helplessly cooped up, I have been trying to understand the events of the month and a half since I awoke in this place. Each morning I sneak to the canteen to collect my rations for the day. Usually the place is empty but this morning I saw an old woman sitting by herself and staring with the fixed gaze of the blind at the area before her. She appeared to be in her late seventies and although she had misaligned the buttons on her coat and her scarf lay too loose on her chest, she had taken her time with her hair. She seemed to be expecting someone and I waited a while expecting a caregiver or matron would arrive to take her away. Half an hour later, I walked across to her table and without any hesitation, she told me, “It’s time to go but there is no one to fetch me.”
I asked her, “Have you been waiting for a long time? Someone should come along shortly.”
“It’s time to go. And there’s no one to take me.” Her voice was angry and she began to shout after me, “Take me! Take me away! I cannot go by myself.” She began to pull at her hair and when I stepped back, she grew calm once more, her features frigid yet remote.
I left without collecting anything to eat and on my way out, I saw four or five old men with the same blank expression. Once more, I wondered what I was doing in a place where everyone but me seemed crazy and whether their behaviour would appear normal to someone with a functioning memory.
It’s surprising that an old woman, a disturbed stranger, should affect me, but the face of the old woman remained with me. I tried to regain my focus by looking at the illustrations on the wall, at the scene from my jalousie, the pattern on the iron safe. I tried to determine if, in some way, her obliviousness to her situation mirrored my own condition. There was something else: I was seized with the idea that the focus of old people narrowed so minutely that everything but the pain, the growing feebleness, the grasping for scattered memories, was deflected. You may say this was an overreaction – likely incited by my uncertain age and memory – but I couldn’t help wondering whether this fixed regard of more able-bodied people involved a recollection of better days and an annoyance at how swiftly they had passed, or whether the blind gaze was just that, blankness and nothing more.
Over the following hours, I tried to consider a mind even worse than mine, where connections were constantly eluded, where thoughts died the second they were born. Many of the people in the Compound looked passive and solemn as if they had been tranquilized and I wondered if I, too, had experienced some type of deceptive calm the moment my memory had collapsed. I got out a sheet of paper from the Gladstone bag and reproduced the scene from the canteen and when I was finished I noted how very similar, in my drawing, the gazes of the old people were to those of apes; I saw the same mix of muddled curiosity and helplessness. Perhaps I was just a few steps away from this unavoidable and irreparable debasement. Perhaps I was already there. Two centuries ago, I would have been lucky to reach fifty and I knew that the degradation had already begun in ways I had missed or more likely forgotten: this numbing grind of life. Not for the first time, I wished I knew how old I was.
I have this memory of explorations of solitude; of pastoral tracts extolling long replenishing strolls and closely guarded seclusion and fastening the mind on fixed objects to achieve some sort of peace. I cannot say how I may have reacted when I first read these descriptions but now I am sure that when there is no other choice, this hallucinatory calm is just a prelude to a complete relinquishment of the spirit. I know this sounds awkward and overly dramatic and I would not expect you or anyone not similarly afflicted to understand. Time and again, my mind returns to the old woman sitting alone and confused and I feel that there should be a better way for a life to close. Surely, she must have relatives, grandchildren whose births she may have witnessed and whom she must have seen running around the place.
You may laugh at my sudden decision to get out of this place that was prompted not by my encounter with the creepy trio or the intrusive Solicitor or the loiterers but by an old and harmless woman. In order to accomplish this, I had to more fully understand the Compound.
That very night I began with the area with which I was most familiar. I studied all the illustrations on the wall, staring at them for hours, from different angles, walking fr
om wall to wall, closing my eyes and rearranging the images. I am not sure if, to the normal, inspiration or solutions arrive in an instant from an equilibrizing of linked memories, accepted facts and common knowledge, but in my case the moment of understanding was slow and uncertain. So slow, in fact, that it took a while to notice the connections between the slight man seated before a desk, walking alone in a cloud-filled valley, relaxing with his eyes closed and the dungeons with spike traps and lopsided streetlamps illuminating capsized lorries frozen in steely blue ice. On another wall, there were men and women alighting nimbly on flagpoles and leaping off and vanishing before they hit the ground and above them, blueskinned beings shedding tears that seemed to transform into leaves as they touched the ground. I studied them all, panel by panel, not as individual drawings but as an unfolding narrative, each image connected to the next. As I did so, I literally grew dizzy with excitement and I had to sit awhile just to go over what I had learned. There was a writer. He had composed a tale of strangely powered individuals. The batch of drawings with these men and women – almost an entire wall – that had so confused me was an illustrated representation of this story.
But three hours later, I was on my bed, my head bent, my mind frozen. I had been misled by my breakthrough because the succeeding panels reverted to the writer, lightly pencilled and in the background yet unmistakably present and surrounded by his creations. I saw him conversing with the blue-skinned beings, leaping with the airborne men and women, cavorting with amphibious creatures. But stranger still, I observed that each succeeding drawing brought the writer more into the foreground while portraying his companions as increasingly bent and helpless so that in the end they were nothing more than twisted brutes. Why was this so? What was I supposed to take from this? Were they clues left for me to decipher? Additionally, there were several drawings that seemed completely out of place: an elephant with a thick pencil instead of a tusk, a couple standing forlornly before a tombstone, a group of men gazing at a mess of diagrams on a blackboard, an old house that seemed to be sinking in the ground, sketches of bags and grips and arcane medical equipment. And the child with her mother. For two days and nights, I walked from one end of my room to the next. But there were no answers and I felt that my partial insight had only served to introduce questions beyond any understanding. This was far more frustrating than my previous ignorance. What was the writer doing in the middle of his story? Had I misinterpreted everything so far? Other questions arose and I thought bitterly that trying to recover lost memories was like searching for flecks of gold in a fast-flowing, muddy stream.
Another week has passed and I have shifted my examination from my room to what I know about the Compound. This is what I have come up with:
The Compound is possibly a kind of infirmary but if so, I cannot see any type of security. The huge gates are unlocked and unguarded and I am confused why no one, especially the group of idlers who hang around that area, has attempted to leave.
This may be because the Compound is situated in a deserted town – as determined from my brief foray outside – and it’s likely the security is stationed at the outer perimeters of the town.
There are three old men who either are administrators of some kind or have taken up this designation capriciously. Their base of operation might be in the town but more likely it’s further afield.
There might be even more dangerous men roaming about. One I met in the library pretends to be a shy hoodlum. There are others who seem to be gazing at me from a distance although this may just be my imagination. You understand why I am pushed to this sort of paranoia. The people with whom I come into contact, like the Solicitor, claim to all know me in some form or fashion. I cannot determine if they are working in tandem or if this preferred familiarity is a symptom of whatever ails everyone I have met so far. If it’s the former, I cannot ascribe any motive other than their wish to unsettle me. The most memorable person who issued this claim has disappeared.
I have lost the ability to draw. This is the most distressing blow so far. (If I still possessed this ability there would have been little need to narrate this account to you.) Mercifully, none of my motor functions seems impaired.
My memory does not go back far enough to determine whether the Compound is a kind of temporary holding cell or a lab of some kind or an asylum. But the place is huge and I have avoided any extensive explorations because of the clusters of idlers I see everywhere. This will have to change, as I cannot keep stumbling against the same wall.
From the above you will understand that my exploration was a difficult undertaking as, even in the nights, there were always people loitering around, some of whom misunderstood my interest in the place and decided to walk in lockstep with me.
One evening the Solicitor sneaked up on me. “Are you planning to escape? If that is the case it is my duty to forewarn you that it will be seen as an admission of guilt. The offer still stands. Two for the price of one. It’s the best I can do.”
I focused on his first question. “Why would I want to escape? And where would I go?”
He patted his briefcase and I noticed he was wearing two left shoes. “I have all the information here.” He unzipped his briefcase and pretended to read from a page he half-pulled out. “To the scene of the crime. It’s where all guilty people go. Shall we all meet there?”
“The only place I am going to is my room,” I said as I walked away.
“Have you seen my hat?” I heard him shouting.
After that encounter, I avoided the common paths and instead trudged between the trees and cisterns and abandoned wooden buildings. I soon discovered the Compound was even bigger than I had imagined. I had walked with the wet nurse to the cemetery overlooking an abandoned railway station, but there were gravel tracks on either side of the graveyard that led to long sheds. It seemed a miniature functioning town with its own pond, animal farm, fields and mills all powered by chugging machines in a huge boiler room. I chose the early mornings and the late nights and one night when I was climbing up a rugged hill, I heard a voice saying, “We are most inventive when we are forced to account for our actions.”
The voice was not the Solicitor’s and it had come from one of the slopes that led to a shallow ravine. I thought it was one of the other loiterers, which was strange, as everyone seemed to stick to the main areas. Someone was climbing ahead of me. He had a cane and when he noticed me, he pointed with it to the sky and said, “Look how fiery the clouds appear. The dry branches are scrambling the light. It’s as if someone flung a colony of ants against the sky. The diffusion makes everything seem alight. Can you see it?” I tried to match his view but could only see a gnarled tree clinging to the other side of the slope. “There are little ravines running through the clenched roots,” he continued. “Do you think there are animals living there? We should investigate.” But he stood there pointing with his cane.
“It might be dangerous,” I told him.
“If you can spot the possibility of danger then you should also notice its counterpart,” he told me. “Astonishment.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
He ignored me, jabbed his cane into the ground and took a couple steps up to a ridge in the hill. “This is a place of abandonment,” he said, gazing around. “No, of extinction. People come here to fade away.”
I managed to get closer and asked him, “What are you doing here so late in the night?”
“It’s the only thing left for me.”
“I do not understand.”
He plunged his cane into a crack and levered himself up. “Let me assure you of an indisputable fact,” he said, breathing heavily. “When a man arrives at my stage, when there is little to look forward to, then this man begins to repopulate his world. He remembers old buildings and terminals and benches. But they are all empty, you see. And this old man, or woman, for that matter, tries to put people into the places. Familiar faces, accustomed gestures. He does this slowly and with utmost care.”
“When he is finished? Then he must begin once more.”
He could have been referring to my memory cycles and I told him, “There seems little point in this. Why do the same thing over and over?”
“Isn’t that what we all do? Ah, look at the view from up here.”
We were now beneath the highest ledge, but it was so narrow there was room for only one person. “Do you mind if I remain here?” I asked as he pulled himself up with a surprising agility.
“You can if you prefer, but you will miss everything.”
It was a relief to speak to someone who seemed relatively lucid. I told him, “Perhaps you can describe it for me.”
“It won’t be the same. I might include details that are important to me but meaningless to you.”
“I am just three yards or so beneath you.”
“I see sheds built at odd angles and cows grazing on the sides of trees. A man is unfolding an umbrella and when he is done, a woman appears at his side. They have left now but there is a child running about looking for them. Do you think it’s a game?”
“All I can see are the trees and long rows of some type of spiky plant.”
“We are looking at different things. You are searching for the beginning and I for the end.” He was so close to the edge I felt I should caution him, but he said, “Ah, there he is. A child and he seems not to notice the adult’s departure because he has found his own playthings. New friends. He is playing with them and now his mother returns alone. No, it’s not his mother. A woman, a nurse or nanny of some kind. His new friends are dancing around her, but she cannot see them.”
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