Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  She took her own time before she told me, “Everything looks the same from the outside, too. After a while, the borders get blurry and everywhere looks alike.” She seemed to be addressing the old man. “Travellers are less interested in adventure than in finding something familiar in an unexpected spot. We move further and further just to belong and to know there are these connections everywhere and we have not been abandoned. It’s funny in a way. Travelling further and further just to get home.” She looked away from the body. “Were there any conversations or anything?”

  I did not want to tell her about the cryptic messages he floated down. “We did not get far. His death came in the way.”

  “‘His death came in the way.’ What an odd thing to say.” She repeated the phrase once more and looked at me with a bit more interest. “Do you know what I felt when I saw him here? I believed he was napping and when he awoke, the world would shift in some crazy way. Some little adjustment that was too easy to miss. I imagined him being obsessed with this and spending hours staring out of the window, noticing the smallest thing. Like the drizzle of tiny insects against the window and the last tremor of wind in the few seconds between evening and night.” She sighed as if she were releasing some great pressure and I noticed her blouse tightening.

  I couldn’t tell if this new pose was genuine or not, but I felt a flicker of sympathy for her. Even though I had already decided she was no sheriff, I couldn’t yet determine her association with the old man. I suspected she too was trying to gauge my own connection. I told her that whenever I saw him he was always immaculately dressed. As if he were stepping out or expecting a visitor. When I was finished, she said, “It’s exactly how I imagined it would be. Standing before two windows with reflecting panes. One showing the road travelled and the other the journey still to come. If you sit down with pen and paper, you could look forward just as easily as you look back. Figure out how it will come to a close, too. Maybe he was doing that. What do you think?”

  “I can’t answer that. You know far more of him than I do.”

  “That’s not true.” Unexpectedly she began to cry, the sound, stifled by her palm, fluting, intimate and almost melodious. For a second I felt I should grant her some privacy, but when she looked at me and I saw her eyes, inflamed with sadness, I walked across and sat next to her. She slid closer, dusted my collar and leaned in. Here I must make a confession: because of my memory situation, I cannot say with any assurance if all men of a certain age find women who are secretive and who flirt with lies alluring because of the sense that something deep inside is broken and can be fixed. But at that instant, looking at this woman, a decade, perhaps two, younger than me, I felt unexpectedly drawn toward her; drawn toward her difficulty in presenting herself; drawn by her breath on my neck and her fingers on my chest. I have gone over what happened next and I am not yet certain who took advantage of whom. When she shifted her position to straddle me, I assumed she was simply manoeuvring to adjust the body at the end of the couch. I could have pushed her off or remained neutral; instead, I placed my hands lightly on her neck. I felt overpowered by her energy and her ferocity, her pupils rolled back so that from my position her eyes appeared to be milky and wistful and maniacal. Up to that point I was transfixed rather than overpowered, but when she wrapped her fingers around my throat I began to struggle, almost passively at first by trying to free myself, but as I began to suffocate, I pushed upward and just before I blacked out, I slapped her with as much force as I could muster. She screamed and everything went black.

  When I came to, she was on the couch, a knee to her chest as she adjusted her clothing, clipping the buttons in such a remote manner we could have been strangers who, sitting opposite one another, had just finished our meals, straightening our clothes and dusting off the crumbs. “What just happened?” she asked me in a gentle voice.

  But I was having none of that. I sprung up and when my pants fell over my knees I stumbled between her legs. “What happened? You tried to kill me.”

  “I can’t remember...I don’t think it was me...I wish I could sleep now.” She slid down to rest her head on the couch. “I can’t remember what just happened, but I remember everything else.” She patted the seat and asked sleepily, “Would you like to hear what came unstuck?”

  “I prefer to stand here if you don’t mind.”

  And in this tranquil state, her eyes still half-closed, as if she was nodding off, she began with a land where she claimed people lived and died in a blink.

  8 THE WORLD OUTSIDE

  Standing a safe distance away, alert to any sudden moves, I listened as she proceeded to tell me the most unbelievable story. She had grown up in a shack between two scrapyards in a faraway land where she claimed, “Man-sized rodents walked out from the deserts on two legs.” When she was thirteen and rummaging through the scrapyard for metal, her mother revealed that her biological father was not the grizzled man who was shovelling some distance away, but someone who had disappeared years ago. Her mother brought out a photograph and she felt that the sun sluicing through the latticed fretwork of an abandoned building made it appear as if the photo’s subject was peering through the bars of a cell. “Where is he now?” she had asked.

  Her mother addressed the question half a year later in an eating house. “He’s gone,” the older woman had said. “He was supposed to take us, but he disappeared in the night.” She remembered the eating house in every detail – the flies on the ruffled tablecloth, the lachrymose couple seated across, the pear-shaped mole on the waitress’s nose, an animated argument between two drunks outside the glass wall – but nothing of her mother’s expression.

  Following that conversation, her mother began to disappear in small instalments. In the beginning, “her gloves and long boots seemed emptied.” One evening in the kitchen, while her mother was knitting, the older woman’s hands disappeared completely. “I was astonished to see a piece of thread commanded like a puppeteer’s string.” Shortly, her mother’s quiet smile, her wide-eyed stare and her eyebrows, one higher and more severely arched than the other, were wiped out. Gone, too, was her sweetish odour of milk and sweat, replaced by the odour of steeped arsenic. The opposite took place with her adoptive father. She now noticed that the features on both sides of his big imposing nose matched entirely. Sometimes she looked at his nose as a kind of spirit level reflecting the perfect symmetry of his features. “I felt he was mocking me with his beard and hair. I felt he was saying, ‘Look at you. Just like your mother. No wonder. Look at her!’ I tried but she was mostly gone by then. Not much to see.”

  She had paused in her story to lean forward, her chin on her knee. I was still affected by our very brief moment of intimate violence, but I suspected the mother’s “disappearance” was due to the daughter’s shame and her desire to tune out the older woman. She told me that one day her mother disappeared completely. And once again, she recalled only the surroundings, the noisy back door creaking shut, the steam rising from a saucepan on the stove, the eyes of the man whom she had assumed to be her father watching out from the door jamb. This final disappearance was unfortunate because her mother had been describing the person from the photograph. “Then poof, she, too, disappeared with her story inside her. Erased. First her insides hollowed and then the rest of her.”

  She paused for a while and I wondered if the man her mother had been describing was now lying next to us, dead and cold.

  “Do you think it’s possible to suffocate from too many strangulated stories?” She glanced at the body and continued. She was seventeen at the time and fled her mother’s house early the next morning. “When I looked back it seemed as if the sun had fallen on the house. I didn’t care.” She moved to a small town. Every single person was crazy and starving and dancing. She followed a troupe to another town. Everyone was moving at the time and she did the same, although she had no idea of her destination. Soon she fell in with another group, another town. And another. “The caravan grew larger with each stop. A
nd more frenzied. But I couldn’t stop.” Over the next year, she repeated these moves, journeying farther from her mother’s place. She mentioned places: bright streets, dirty basements and motel rooms, arguments and knives. She described all of this but little of the people she met. I felt that she may have been a prostitute and that she had blocked off her clients as she had done her mother, but then she said, “Everyone was running away. Those who had forgotten got new reasons from those they met on the way. Until every single person had the same story. Those that survived, anyway.”

  “What was this story?” I interrupted.

  “Dead parents. No water. Empty syringes. Diseases not yet named. Deserted bazaars and blood everywhere. The world was ruled by bullies who were as funny and depraved as a bad stepfather. All rules and obligations and penances.” She glanced at the body before she continued. Sometimes she came across battles where weapons were constructed from the most intimate items. “I remember green and violet clouds smashing into each other and once a woman in a silk gown detonating some device. There were dead babies everywhere. You didn’t know who to trust. One day your friends became enemies and the next day they could be either. All around there were towns not fit for ghosts. Yet that was all that was left. Ghosts.” Then the scenery in her story changed. Suddenly there was water, “The waves crashing down and picking themselves up and crashing down again in the same way and with the same shape.” The caravan had thinned considerably by then; some had given up and returned, and others fell at the sides of the road, gazing at the sun. The sea voyage was even more perilous. Boats were flung in the air, spilling out their passengers like insects before the vessels fell to earth, crashing against the rocks. There were scuffles that led to outright mutinies, and these captainless boats drifted away from the convoy and disappeared. “Then we saw the outline of this place we were all moving toward. It seemed covered with pale dust and trees that had not spreading boughs, but formed perfect triangles. As we got closer, we could hear a mechanical clanking in the distance. I am sure everyone must have been wondering if it was all worth it. Five percent of us had made it to that point and while we were lined up on the beach the dead bodies of our former shipmates floated around us. It was horrible. How did I forget something like this? Or the containment camps we were pushed into while we waited?” Her voice was softer and I couldn’t tell if she was addressing the old man. I was still not sure I believed anything she had said.

  Still, I asked her, “Waited for what?”

  “There were men in iron costumes asking us questions. Showing us pictures...crazy pictures of puppets with women’s clothing. Mallets and lanterns and brass knuckles, too. A few were drawings of wheels and cages.”

  I was astonished; she was describing the illustrations the old man had flung from his window. Yet, I also suspected she had been through my things. I asked her, “It seems odd that after that dangerous trip, you all would be presented with pictures –”

  “Yes, it was. What’s even odder is that I was the only one let through. The rest were packed into boats and...and sent back. Or sent somewhere.”

  “Why did they let you alone through?”

  “I can tell from your voice that you don’t believe me, but it doesn’t matter. In any event, I was just thankful. All I know was that I was too exhausted to answer their questions about the images. I told them they were meaningless.”

  She seemed flustered with my questions, so I told her, “Sounds like a perilous journey. You are lucky that you made it through.” She glanced again at the old man and I felt she was really telling this story to him; emphasizing how much she had suffered. “Sorry. Please go on.” This – real or not – was my first picture of the world outside and it was both horrendous and fascinating.

  “Finally, I was let through the gate. There were lights everywhere, an unstable bluish light and I wondered why there were so few people and why there was so much silence. I was taken to a building and made to sit in an enclosed room. This bluish light was more than a light. It curled around me and I felt it entering my mouth and nose. I lost consciousness. When I came to the only thing I was wearing was this necklace.” She fingered her sheriff’s badge and I realized she had possibly found it when she had been searching for metal with her mother. “I was moved from place to place. This procedure was repeated at each station. I can’t recall much of that period. Maybe it was the blue light.” She began to rock back and forth and instinctively I stepped back. “Soma. That was the name they called me. There were others who had been let through at an earlier time. We were all given the same name.”

  “What did it mean?”

  “Who knows? Something? Someone? Some? I wish I could remember my real name.” Then she stopped her rocking and said in a slightly excited voice, “There was a mountain.”

  In spite of my skepticism I was enthralled by her description of the place. The narrow roads were bordered by steep ledges overlooking dungeon-like canyons and foaming water that, from a distance, appeared to be boiling. The mountain, metallic blue in spots, seemed carved from a luminous material she had never seen before, but, as she got closer to the top, the colours were loosened and everything took its hue from the clouds that were so low they obscured the finger-tipped birds that flew out abruptly from hundreds of crevices. The winding road fell suddenly at times and, because the entire area was misty, the experience was like dropping from the sky. In fact, she felt as if the mountain were attached to the clouds. The sky seemed so vaporous that after a few days she could not gauge how far away it was.

  Her account, although familiar, had the distance of something not experienced but heard. Perhaps I had read this somewhere. I closed my eyes and imagined I was before a canvas looking out at the scene and I saw instead a hunched man sitting before a desk, spitting and cursing and writing in a journal. “Are my accounts so tedious?” she asked me lightly.

  “I am trying to see what you are describing. To see it as a memory fragment. I do that sometimes.”

  “Well, the next fragment won’t be pretty. When I reached the summit, I realized that everyone there was disfigured in some way. I felt at first that they too had come from outside, but these were children too young to have made the journey.” She described a series of interconnected camps that seemed more like orphanages. Children struck with diseases and horrible nightmares were dragged along at regular intervals. “At first, I turned away and swore at the children who came close. ‘Get the fuck away,’ I told them. ‘Go find your mother or something. Where’s you father? Did you kill him, too?’” But they were everywhere. “I am not your caretaker,” she said to a girl with one eye, even though she had already begun to suspect the opposite. Eventually she relented. “The first child I treated had shoots growing out from her feet. It was so sad. I felt this was the worst thing that could happen to a little girl. Then I realized that the shoots were also growing inwards. She was in so much pain.” She seemed to be waiting for me to say something and when I did not, she continued, “I told the child that she was becoming a beautiful plant. That God had chosen her as his special shrub.” This seemed like a horrible thing to say to a suffering child, but I kept quiet. “And it worked. She died smiling. I told her she would bear the most adorable flowers.” She pressed her palms against her cheeks and offered her own elegiac smile. “I told her that when the flowers floated in the sky she would be able to fly with them.”

  Then there was the description of another young girl – the camp seemed to be stacked with young, diseased girls – who was stricken with an abdominal parasite. “Such a pretty child. And so strong.” She explained how she evacuated the worm by perforating the abdomen through the navel and encouraging the extruding worm to curl around a twig. “Each morning as I gently twirled the twig, I felt the worm resisting my pressure and retreating farther into the child’s abdomen. On the third day, the twig snapped and the worm retreated.”

  “Did the child survive?” I had no idea why I asked the question because I could not believe her
account of this orphanage place to which she had been sent or assigned.

  “She died. And in that moment, so did I. I fled. I ran and ran and ran. Sometimes I heard the voices of my pursuers and their machines and I felt I should just stop, and at other times I stared over a gorge and closed my eyes and wished I could take that final step. But I had sacrificed too much to get in. So I continued, hiding in the shadows, stealing scraps during the nights...”

  As she trailed off I said, “Surely someone might have helped if you asked.”

  “Someone? There were no someones. One night while I was skulking outside a café I watched this family smiling at each other and nodding...and the group at the table opposite doing the same. I had seen the men in uniform acting in that manner but felt then they were just following protocol. They all seemed connected, as if they each knew what the other was thinking.”

  As fascinating as her story was, it made no sense. Was she a sheriff or a woman on the run? What was her relationship with the old man? And how did she find her way here? She seemed to have guessed my thoughts because she got up and watched through the window. I asked her, “How did you find this place?”

  “It’s no use. You wouldn’t believe me. I can see you doubt all that I have revealed so far. I would doubt it, too.”

  Maybe it was her last statement, but I wanted to believe that she, too, was struggling with her memories. Yet hers – if true – were different from mine, which were disconnected and useless. “I don’t know if I believe you, but I would like to hear it to the end.

  Now she turned toward me. “You asked if anyone helped. There was a child.” She said this abruptly as if she had made a sudden decision. “A child. It was a child that led me here. At first, I felt she was one of the orphans I had treated and I called out to her, but she kept disappearing at will as if it were a game to her. Sometimes I would see her in the distance and when I got there she would be farther ahead. I couldn’t understand how she managed to move so quickly.”