Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  “How do you know that?”

  He ignored me and said, “She seems confused because the boy is imitating his friends, in the manner of children. It looks a little cruel as if he is mocking her. Poor boy.”

  “Should your sympathy not be directed at the nurse?”

  He sounded a bit irritated as he said, “You don’t know anything. The boy has been left alone by his parents once again. What else do you expect him to do? His friends are interesting, though. One can turn invisible, another seems to be very strong and the other can fly. What do you think would happen if I flew off this ledge?”

  “You would be smashed on the rocks beneath.”

  “You disappoint me terribly. You see only disaster and tragedy. What if I suddenly discover I can fly and swoop and soar?” Actually, it was he who was the disappointment. I did not want to tempt him by prolonging this subject. He grasped the protruding root of a dead tree – a palm of some kind – and hoisted himself onto a gravelly protrusion just above the ledge. He glanced down at me struggling to keep up with him and said, “The boy tugs away the nurse’s umbrella and makes a running jump as if it can propel him upward. He has stumbled and he glances back to talk to his friends before he tries once more. The nurse seems to be pleading but his friends are encouraging him. He is running faster and farther and he opens the umbrella but beyond my field of vision. Where has he gone?”

  “To find his parents?”

  “Yes, yes. But why would he look for a father who abandoned him for his new wife? I think the boy wants to disappear and become someone else. Not his little stepsister, for sure, because she is part of the scheme, too. Clutching all the affection. They would be better off without her.”

  He was now so close to the edge that I felt he would surely slip over. I was about to warn him when I saw that what I had mistaken for a cane was really an umbrella that he had unfurled. He was waving it around and pointing this way and that. “You should be careful,” I told him. “It’s windy up here.”

  “Then it’s perfect. Perfect.”

  And standing there, pointing his umbrella at the area, pausing frequently to search for some sign of the boy, he told me the most amazing story. He professed to be a writer who had changed the industry because of his creation of psychoneurotic heroes. But the industry, levered on the muscular shoulders of unambiguous automatons, did not pay him much initial attention and they were caught by surprise when each issue drew long lines at the bookstores followed by fevered discussions of these frenetic heroes’ battles with vaguely familiar government officials and wealthy industrialists. The nine members of this group always prevailed by accessing their nemeses’ memories, learning of their strategies, and pre-empting their moves. This was not a seamless operation, however, as the empaths invariably tapped into repellent memories. Absent mothers, bullying fathers, conniving siblings, unresolved sexual issues. Frequently the team delivered their death blows while sobbing uncontrollably. The readers loved it because it mirrored their own lives.

  Then the writer disappeared. There were several rumours. He had been shipped beyond the walls where he had died from either malaria or a bullet. He had been stricken with a debilitating disease. He had been taken out by an envious competitor. Or by the government, which had grown uneasy with his sweeping depiction of corruption. This last view got the most traction because his villains, motivated mostly by greed, intolerance and hypocrisy, could have been drawn from any government office. Soon he was forgotten; or more accurately, he was written into legend.

  Having this conversation up in the mountain was the craziest thing yet in this crazy place. Yet he did not show any surprise at my presence and I could not push aside the suspicion he had been waiting for me. I asked him suddenly, “Do I know you?” When there was no reply I asked, “Was it you who left the note in my room? Who left me here?”

  He paused to ask me, “Do you know that each object carries with it the imprint of all those with whom it has come into contact?”

  “It’s important that I know. I have recorded everything so far. As I will this encounter.” My voice was loud and insistent.

  “The world is filled with little connections. Spirals bearing the faint whiff of sulphur. I can assure you that the further we cast our gazes the more we see of ourselves.”

  “Was it you?” I screamed.

  He leaned over and his umbrella caught a tiny whorl of breeze that spun him around. He laughed as if it was great fun and continued, “When I discovered that the stories did not spring from my own fertile imagination but were planted there, I knew it was time to stop. How could I continue? I was nothing more than a tool and a plant. My stories of empaths and superpowered beings and multiple dimensions and cosmic rays and underground labs were planted to desensitize my readers. To prepare them.”

  I was terribly disappointed. He was now talking in a manner that would impress Balzac and the rest of the Compound. I tried to calm him. “And you have written nothing since?”

  “You don’t believe me,” he said, speaking softly now. “I can see that. But to answer your question, a writer develops a particular way of looking at the world and even when he stops writing, this particular orientation remains. He never loses this madness.”

  “Why would you categorize it as madness?”

  “Oh, it’s just my way of talking. Madness, in a perfectly ordered world, is simply a different vision. Wait, what am I saying? I believe the altitude has made me reckless because I am going to reveal a secret. As a young writer, I imagined that my inspiration had come from the most prosaic of things. My asthmatic childhood. Being bullied each day. A father who claimed that his epileptic fits were communions with an angel and a mother who was jealous because her own visions were only of the life she should have lived. A stepmother who disappeared each time I sought affection. A little sister I daily planned to murder. And when I wrote in a haze with no conscious will, I assumed that this was the method of all geniuses. A senior editor once told me that my stories had the potential to change the world. He could not have known how correct he was.”

  “Correct about what?”

  He sighed and said, “Let me make more plain what you refuse to understand. What I had taken for normal inspiration was far more.” He then revealed that his stories sprang from voices in his head. During the height of his fame, he had been thrilled by the fans’ reception, but as their adoration and tributes grew, he began to feel there was something bigger at play. People began quoting lines of dialogue, dressing up in his heroes’ costumes, writing to him about the changes in their lives. Once, a young girl accosted him outside his office and told him he was a prophet. This in itself was not unusual, as some of his fans had begun to worship him with reverent silence when he entered a public place or presented him with unanswerable questions as if he carried some great wisdom. He began paying more attention to the voices directing his stories. He recalled the precise moment when he realized he was a tool. It was late in the night and the voices were beating about in his head. He was working on an instalment in which his heroes were transported to a dimension that corresponded to an earthly paradise. But this was a paradise with layers of rules, each layer more intractable than the other. He remembered getting up from his desk, turning off the light and returning to bed. But the story followed him in his sleep. He awoke the following morning with a clear decision: he would no longer write this story. But each time he tried another story with other heroes it was chased off by this particular plot. There was only one course of action open to him: he had to stop writing entirely. But even that was not enough. He had to repair the damage he had done by warning his former colleagues.

  Here I will admit that I had decided that this madman was not you. He was now perilously close to the end of the ledge as he continued his story.

  “At first, they listened patiently,” he told me. “Later, I noticed their embarrassment and shiftiness and I concluded that they too were infected. Soon, I was met by security guards or confronted w
ith locked offices. When I realized my entreaties were useless, I contacted the radio stations and newspapers. Finally, I turned to government agencies. The result? My associates cut me off. I was flushed with antipsychotic drugs. It left me shaking with involuntary motion. I lost control of my tongue and lips. I felt like a character in one of my stories. Eventually I was shipped off to an asylum. And it was there that my lucidity returned. I started to see clearly what was happening. And I began to see the end.”

  “Are you referring to the Compound?”

  And that was when his story got more astonishing. He told me that during his years in exile, when his fans were hoping for his return, he had created another gallery of heroes. Among those was a postman whose gift of invisibility had been scuppered by his concurrent blindness. A hemophiliac who invented a serum that gave him extraordinary strength. A sensitive and nervous woman who awoke one night with the ability to fly. I asked why he had never published comics with these heroes and he told me, “Don’t you see? They were all compromised. The invisible man struck with blindness had become a traffic hazard. The hemophiliac superman constantly ruptured blood vessels while lifting his heavy objects. Did I mention that he also suffered from high blood pressure?” he asked. “Or that my beautiful nervous woman would no longer fly as she was often paralysed, in mid-flight, by vertigo?”

  I told him, “They were flawed heroes, then. Much like your earlier ones.”

  “These were not flaws. They were fatal defects that effectively neutralized their powers.”

  “So they were forced to be ordinary men and women. Just like you and I. I think that’s very interesting.”

  “Was it? My own views are different. In any event, they could not be published. They were dangerous nonsense.”

  He seemed a little annoyed, so I told him, “What I meant was that your heroes were faced with choices that many of us, in the real world, are subject to. Power, but at a cost. It’s a long-familiar phenomenon.”

  “If you are trying to say that I had created conditions with which real people could identify then I will have to agree. Unfortunately, in a place like this the distinction between what’s possible and what’s not is not too clear. As you have learned by now it’s quite easy to inhabit another person’s memories.”

  “So you wrote the book or books here? In the Compound?”

  “My years of exile, I try to think of it. My period of exile in a little sanctuary. A sort of writer’s retreat. During my early years here, I had a fair bit of time to think about my life, about the industry I had abandoned and most of all about my period of success. I have tried to understand the precise point at which fulfillment and happiness intersect and why this joining can never be sustained.”

  I didn’t know what to make of his story and I waited for him to elaborate. As a means of encouraging him I said, “I have figured out the illustrations on my wall. They are like panels in a comic but not everything adds up.”

  “Destroy it,” he told me. “It’s utter nonsense. Dangerous nonsense.” He looked up at a bird circling overhead and for the first time he seemed a little frightened. “You need to stop bothering me,” he shouted, either to the bird or to me.

  “Careful,” I warned because he seemed so agitated.

  “The child has returned and the nurse tries to take her umbrella. He pokes her in the eye. Poor boy. He does not know what is in store for him. He will be locked inside his room, chained to his bed and prescribed the vilest concoctions. Poor, poor child. I must warn him. It must come to an end now.”

  I had now managed to get alongside him and when he opened his umbrella and jumped I instinctively clutched his coat. Our fall was slowed by his umbrella and I closed my eyes and waited for the crash and the pain. I felt the wind across my face and when I opened my eyes, I saw that we were floating above the Compound and then above the old town. The town was barricaded with a wall that led to a ravine and a short distance away some sort of cathedral. Then we were beyond the town and I saw a small bus terminal in a field that went on for miles and miles and which was dotted with derelict buildings with rubble strewn about. My eyes began to burn and I felt I would lose hold of the flying man’s coat as we flew over a derelict mansion and across what appeared to be small volcanoes emitting some kind of sulphurous dust. In the far distance, I saw what looked like an abandoned train station.

  Throughout this, the flying man was silent and I looked up to see if there was some mechanical attachment to his umbrella. I saw nothing, just a man with his arms raised. In my shock, I lost hold of his coat and I fell.

  STAGE

  TWO

  6 THE WATCHER AT THE WINDOW

  Three days have now passed since I awoke in the lower floor of a two-storey house and discovered your letter. You have not revealed yourself – as I hoped you would – but I am now convinced that I am not alone in the building. Each evening following my exploration of the immediate area, I see the curtain shifting but whenever I stand outside and gaze at the windows, the place is as still as it should be. On a side note, my scrutiny has thrown up other details. From a distance, the building had seemed a brick-and-mortar store, but up close it appeared fractional, as if it was an adjunct and some big part had been knocked down and the debris carted off. It reminded me in this respect of a chapter house. These precise observations have convinced me of my former profession, but everything else is a mystery. I might want to speculate that there is a punctuality to the act of shifting the curtain and it is possible this unknown person’s outward gaze has nothing to do with me. Perhaps it’s an old man grown habituated to gazing out whenever he took his nightly medication. Or maybe it’s just a draft ruffling the fabric.

  I have no idea how I found myself in this town, this street, this lower-floor residence that smells of something aged and viscous, like resin-soaked linen stored in canopic jars. This determination tells me that it is only my autobiographical memory that has been expunged. There are a few detailed geometric diagrams on a wall – of buildings and crosswalks and trails and landscaped terraces – that seem familiar but only in the sense that I may have seen similar diagrams at some time. On the opposing wall, there is a charcoal illustration of a slouching ape transitioning into an upright man and another of a man gazing at his older self in a mirror. The younger man is confused; his older self, his lower jaw thrust out with grim determination, seems to know what he wants.

  Now to your letter. There was no date and it was addressed rather formally: To Whom It May Concern. Here’s the gist in case you cannot recall.

  It is my wish that this lodge will finally bring you the peace that you claim I have stolen.... It is my additional hope that you will begin to remember in an orderly fashion...risky, I know...I have learned to forgive a side of you but your other associates, I fear, are not so understanding.... I believe you will be safe here and more significantly so will everyone else...please record everything that occurs and any anomalies you may observe...omit no details.

  And so on. Apart from the references in your letter to legacies and visions and more visions, it is littered with veiled warnings. I take these to indicate that you are afraid of me and I should feel the same way about you. I have to inform you, though, that your letter omitted the most significant detail: how did I find myself in this place and why can I not remember anything? The bleeding from my left ear has stopped but I still hear a ringing each night and an occasional bang as if something in my head is breaking loose. I am not being deliberately dramatic because I sense a shuddering memory skulking in the dark with each crescendo.

  Some of these involve a temple or monastery and flattened wings falling in spirals on a surging dam. Following one of these cranial bangs I was jolted upright not so much from the imagined sound but because this memory was so distinct I could actually visualize it. A man is released from a mechanical chair into a room where he stares for hours at a sliver of light as thin and frail as a child’s finger. As it is the only object he can see, he focuses on it the minute h
is eyes open. Hours pass, perhaps days and weeks, and the sliver of light moulds itself into a puddle from which tiny insects swarm before it briefly reshapes itself into a knife or a key. The trick repeats itself over and over, the light taking other forms but always it’s a threat followed by a means of escape. Perhaps it’s simply a nightmare; a man in my circumstance is permitted to have a few of these.

  You have left a supply of tinned food in the cupboard that should last a month or two. For this, I am thankful. But that is the only bit of gratitude you will get from me.

  Yesterday morning, as a way of pushing aside this worry about my curious circumstance, I decided to walk through this neighbourhood. I suppose I hoped I would come across someone who might march me backwards to the point of my injury, but the place is completely deserted. I returned in the afternoon and, not meeting anyone, I began to pay close attention to the buildings instead. As I strolled along, I felt that in another season, when the first showers rendered the light soft and diffuse and unreliable, it might be possible to glimpse the original rural tones of the town. I slowed to a stop several times and saw where wood had been replaced by stones and then brick, wooden windows with glass, and stone walls with hedges and wire fences. The renovations, over the generations, had been done piecemeal and frugally and it was possible to distinguish some of the features of the partially knocked down buildings – the eroded arches, buttresses and cantilevers. As I walked on, I discovered the only objects that resisted the architectural extemporizing were the statues: they were simply neglected, folded away between shrubs or staring from their lime-green bases.

  I was a bit surprised by these precise observations and they convinced me that in my former life I might have been a rustic poet or, more likely, an architect. This determination restored a bit of my confidence and I convinced myself that it might be a prelude to the restoration of my memories.