“Did you think it was the girl with the shoots growing out of her feet?”
“Yes. That’s who I thought it may have been. I remember her name now. Dawn. No, it was Dyenne.” She put her hands to her cheeks, covering her mouth as if she were horrified. “That’s all I remember,” she said softly through her fingers.
“Do you know why she led you here?”
“Maybe we were headed to the same place. I could have told her of my destination at the orphanage...if she was there among the children. Or maybe she read my thoughts like all those people I saw who knew what the others were thinking. Did I tell you how we met? My first sight of her was awakening and seeing this ragged little face above me. I had been interfered with –”
“In what way?”
“Someone had dragged me to the other side of the road.” She turned once more to the window and I felt she was either hiding something or trying to come up with a more convincing story. “It was not the girl,” she said eventually in a flat voice. “It was not her. She couldn’t have done it.”
When she turned away from the window I was surprised at the look of satisfaction on her face, in spite of all she had just said, the muted smugness of someone granted restitution. I asked her as soon as the thought came into my head, “What did you expect to find here? Did you return here to make sure the old man was gone?”
I could see her thinking. Eventually she told me, “Who knows what goes on in the minds of those whose memories are fading? Perhaps he was spooling his life backwards and expecting everyone he knew to reappear at their appointed spots.” She paused, as if waiting for me to add something. “It’s something I heard my mother say before she finally vanished. About life spooling backwards. Poor woman.” There were several questions on my mind, but I noticed her clasping and unclasping her fingers and I realized she was considering some confession. When she spoke, though, her voice was steadfast. “The minute my mother revealed her story, throughout all my journeys the one constant question has been whether personal responsibility can be washed away if the memories of these infractions are gone. Can guilt be weighed on the same scale as recollection? How can one survive without the other?” She looked away from me and now focused on the body. “Should someone be accountable for something they cannot recall? But what if the loss is not complete and they are presented with recurring slices of their crimes? Can guilt then be measured in percentages?” Now she fixed her gaze on me. “What if they are pretending? What about the consequences?” She had spoken in a rehearsed manner, with a slight lilt as if she was imitating both words and tone, as if all she had just revealed was pointless. She kept her gaze on me and I realized she had been working her way to this question and it was not idle reflectiveness. She wanted an answer.
I, too, wanted an answer. But to an entirely different question. “The world you have described seems divided into two sections. What happened?”
She shook her head. “How should I know? It was always this way. The only thing I know for certain is that those of us on the outside were feared and scorned. But we also possessed something of value. I puzzled over that during the time in the orphanage.”
“Value as caretakers and servants?”
She took her time in answering, pausing, as if she was still working her way to an understanding. “In the place I left, we believed that imagination was not a pliant, fanciful thing that could be coloured by our mood, but was...was the store of memories passed down from generation to generation. No dreams, no fancies, no visions, no pretences. Just memories...and if the memories were wiped out...the imagination followed.”
This determination was so staggering I could not believe it had come from this elusive person whose story had so many gaps. While I was considering what she had just said, my mind ran to you and I wondered if she was part of your game, this woman who had appeared from nowhere, claiming to be a sheriff, refusing to acknowledge her relationship with the old man, claiming, too, that our little moment together had somehow loosened these astonishing memories. Yet I wanted to believe her; I wanted to believe that if I had shared her harrowing experiences I would have been just as elusive, just as distrustful. I told her quickly before I could change my mind, “I have no memories.”
“You cannot remember anything?” She seemed disappointed.
“I remember the functions of things. I know how to light a stove, for instance, but I have no memory of myself ever doing that.”
“That’s it?”
“There are other memories, tiny, slippery fragments that are so random and impersonal they may mean nothing. Nothing to me, I mean.”
Once more she leaned her head against the backrest. “I have this sense that I spotted you in one of the ships. Holding on to the rigging like a wet rat.”
She said it with her eyes closed, half-smiling, and I adopted the same detached, amused tone when I said, “I hope I would remember something as stark as that. In any event, you are lucky you made it through.”
“I am not sure I did...” Her voice trailed off.
“You seem tired,” I told her. “I am going to look for someone. He says he is a mortician.”
“Here? In this town?” She seemed alert now.
I noticed the lizard on the ceiling and pointed to it. “I will be back. There’s Little Clicker to keep you company.”
Before I could move she rushed out of the room and I could hear her hurried footsteps on the stairs. I didn’t like the idea of sticking around the body alone, so a few minutes later I decided to follow her. The cat was sniffing about in the mulberry but it darted away and scuttled up the lamppost. When I got there, I could not see it, so I glanced around to see where it may have jumped and called its name a couple times before I gave up and walked in the direction of the Compound. The farther I moved from the chapter house, the more my skepticism returned. I had the vague feeling that the woman had killed her parents and absconded, but I could not recall the exact utterance that had fired my suspicion. Perhaps it was her shifting personalities and her evasiveness. I still could not understand her purpose in the town and could not believe she had been led here by a child who somehow read her mind. I could not believe that her memories were unexpectedly loosened by our little bout of intimacy.
When I drew close to the albatross gate I decided to ask the two clowns who sprang to attention when they noticed my approach.
“Halt!” the shorter man said. “Step no farther.”
“I am looking for a woman.”
“A woman?”
Too late I recalled my last conversation. “Did anyone pass through these gates?”
The taller man said, “You are not authorized to ask that question. Now stand down.”
“There was a woman at my place –”
“There once was a woman at my place,” the short man interrupted, his index finger springing up.
“Who set out looking for grace,” his friend continued.
“Instead she uncovered.”
“An expired old buzzard.”
“The man she swore she would erase.”
They conferenced for a moment and said together, “And secrets stuffed in a case.” Both applauded and linked arms, dancing and goose-stepping.
It was useless talking to the pair so I decided to return to the house. On my way, a silly thought popped into my head: I hoped the woman would stay for a while. We would plant a backyard garden and every evening we would stroll through the town and I would point out all the quaint designs and she would tell me more of her travels and of the world outside. And maybe one day, we would both leave.
This little fantasy did not last long, though. When I got to the room, both the woman and the body were gone. I recalled the clowns’ limerick and rushed downstairs to where I had hidden the Gladstone bag. When I opened the bag, I saw that everything I had packed inside was gone. The linings were torn away as if she had been looking for something specific. The only item left was a drawing I had not seen before. That of a little girl wit
h her hands against her back. She was gazing straight ahead rather than at the two bodies on the floor. The artist had drawn just the feet but I could tell the bodies were of a man and a woman. Between both bodies was an object that resembled a boomerang.
9 THE DISAPPEARING BODIES
Following my encounter with the woman, I felt more trapped than usual. I assumed what I was feeling was similar to a normal person’s reaction at being left behind and I could not put out of my mind all the fantasies I had briefly entertained of our life together. Forget what I said about being trapped. I was haunted; and I wished I understood what might lay inside the mind of those with stable memories. Would I soon forget her, too, as I had forgotten everything of my prior life?
All the old questions rose in my mind, joined now by new misgivings. Was there something tying me to this dead town? Could it be possible that I had actually spent my entire life in this place? Was the sense of some distant familiarity, recently sparked by the woman’s extravagant descriptions, just a way of looking at things through her eyes? Was she joking when she said she had spotted me on a ship looking like a wet rat?
Each evening, I walked through the town, memorizing all the little details of our encounter and what she had told me of the world outside. A place of mountains and deserts and man-sized rodents and trains and waves crashing against a boat. As horrible as her journeys were, I wanted to experience this sense of moving, of going somewhere, anywhere. I wanted to be in all these places. It was now twenty-one days following her disappearance and this evening while I was wandering around the town, a crazy idea hit me. What if she was laid up in one of the deserted houses? She had even mentioned that one of the town’s abandoned houses would be a good resting place for the old man’s body. It made sense because the town seemed completely enclosed, interrupted only by the albatross-shaped gate that housed some kind of compound, and on its opposite end, a cathedral built into the wall and a dense and possibly dangerous forest.
The next day, I made my way to the gate. Once more, I met the two jokers intent on play-acting their responses to my questions, but I could not summon the patience for their silliness. I resolved to check the town’s houses one by one. I began early the following morning and was astonished at how unfamiliar the place appeared. I felt as if I was seeing it for the first time and I worried about whether my mind was in the early stages of shutting down once more. But as I walked on I realized it was a trick of the early morning light that had hollowed out the shadows cast by the eaves and gables and had interfered with the town’s rustic charm. Now the jumbled styles seemed indulgent, and although I knew the renovations had been done over the years, I had this sense of frenetic improvisations by homeowners who, mired in poverty for a long while, had suddenly come into money. The money, I felt, went into the houses; grand projects and impractical restorations. Then, just as sudden as it had come, the money was gone. Glass louvres stood next to old wooden shutters with rotting sills, paint had been splashed to settle fraying mortar, pipes and wires snaked in and out of the gables. On some of the creaky porches with mismatched newel posts, I imagined men so frail-looking they would soon wither and blow away in the sunlight. I thought then of an epidemic that had passed through so swiftly that when the symptoms appeared no one could attribute a single causal agent. As I walked through the town, I reasoned that many of the buildings were workshops that had been converted into living quarters.
Looking at the buildings in this manner made me unexpectedly distressed by the notion of precious time slipping away. I got the sense that, even though our eyes point out shapes and structures, it is our mood that shades and adds depth. When I approached the chapter house, I tried to push aside the hope – as I had since she had disappeared – that I would once more see the woman sitting on the front step. I wondered how she had vanished with the body so swiftly and whether she was now holed up or trapped in the Compound. Yet she didn’t strike me as someone who could be easily imprisoned. Maybe she had found her mortician and they had swiftly taken the body to a funeral parlour that I had somehow missed. I decided to divert to the spot where I had seen him reaching for his hat. When I got there both the hat and the shrub on which it had been stuck were gone. I walked closer and noticed a huge hole where the mulberry once grew. The inner diameter of the hole was serrated with sharp ridges and it appeared that the person wielding the shovel had done his or her work carefully so that the plant had been withdrawn in a single clump. Who would remove an entire tree and for what purpose?
A few minutes later I entered the house and from habit, I stood at the doorway where I had last seen the woman. She had not touched all the grips and suitcases in my room and I assumed she too had been confused by the odd assortment of manuals detailing what looked like surgeries of the brain and other tracts on community housing. Such a strange combination! As I had done each night since her departure, I opened the suitcases and walked around each, occasionally reaching for a particular tract, flipping through the pages, smelling the jackets, passing my fingers along the spine, gazing at the illustrations, holding the book at different angles, hoping somehow to spark an errant shard of memory. I have to tell you that as I was doing so, I also considered that you had deliberately left the books there for me. (Though why you should leave anything for which I was so unprepared was beyond my understanding.)
The only book I could follow was titled Common Spaces. It described in a complaining tone the tendency to arrange towns around the idea of private space; where fences and hedges demarcate property boundaries and where small public areas are set aside for commingling. I state the relative simplicity of this book not as an excuse for my intended intrusion – how harsh the word sounds! – but rather to say that most of the town’s houses, constructed at a much earlier time with their shared hedges and overlapping eaves, would have been designed for common entry; built for people who knew and trusted each other. I imagined that the occupants, before they were struck down or moved away, must have regularly visited, checking up on each other’s health, bringing over some freshly baked pie, helping to adjust a piece of furniture, or just following some ritual from their younger days. During my earlier explorations, I had never actually ventured inside but had looked through the front windows and observed that most of the living rooms were organized for entertaining, with couches set together and bordered by coffee tables.
What harm would there be if I carried my explorations inside the houses?
It was three days before I actually ventured inside a building. And another three before I felt comfortable doing so. Once I was inside, I made a fair bit of noise, slamming the door and banging the furniture to awaken anyone who may have been sleeping upstairs. Only when I was sure the house was empty did I examine all the downstairs rooms, the kitchens and annexes and toilets and closets and storerooms. And during this process, I always thought of the men and women who may have once wandered about the halls and occupied the couches overlooking the lower windows. Some were easy: the cluttered living rooms of the smaller dwellings suggested a single person, a widow or widower gone to ruin, while others pointed to some sort of social life with regular visitors. There were a few, however, that withheld their secrets; in these, I lingered until I arrived at some understanding. In one of these houses the dining room was painted in white but there were quilted red borders around all the wall ornaments and the old pictures of trains and steamboats. The carpet was thick and dusty and gold rugs hung on the stairwell. It seemed the house of a happy family until I noticed the knives hidden in the steamboats and the neat cuts on the rugs. Another house was filled with steel exercise equipment and benches with cables and pulleys. It resembled a torture chamber and I was confused by its familiarity until I judged it might have once served an alleviator. Yet in this house, too, I saw signs of sabotage, with the pulleys loosened and the cables discreetly cut. A block away, I discovered a room that was bare but for a triangular cabinet with a circular revolving base. The cabinet was set at the dead centre of the room an
d it was congested with a gramophone, two radios, a guitar, a trumpet and a quartet of miniature drums. Beneath the drums were a couple of notebooks with limp damask bookmarks but when I flipped through to the marked pages, they were all empty. There were also no photographs to clarify the image I formed of this musician whose social life must have dried up as he or she got older. Two houses down, the entire space was filled with plastic plants, all decorated with hanging ornaments that resembled bereft little eggs. It seemed to be the former residence of a spinster and at the base of a plant, I saw a photograph of a woman with a long face further hardened by prominent cheekbones. I rummaged around for pictures of children but found only ornate sketches of deformed animals – elephants with missing tusks and toothless jaguars. In a street hidden by an overgrown weeping willow I saw a single house that was completely bare of furniture. The only sign of previous habitation was a doll on the step and a telescope on a window ledge. For some reason, it seemed the saddest place in the town.
I tried to memorize every single scene that caught my attention; every house or lane or piece of shrubbery that presented itself. I knew this was a way of preserving a part of my memory, but I also held the faint hope that all these images, viewed together, might trigger some type of understanding as had the pages the Watcher had thrown from his window.
Each night following my exploration, I tried to imagine a conversation with the occupants of the homes I had visited. Sometimes I fell asleep with these thoughts spinning in my head and when I awoke, with Little Clicker gazing at me, it took a while before I readjusted to the reality that the conversations were not real. I was disappointed because, for those brief moments, I felt I was not alone.
I must mention here that all my explorations were confined to the lower floors but one night while I was flipping through Common Spaces I noticed a line I could recall previously reading. “For those of advanced years for whom a stairway can be problematic, and indeed fatal, it is advisable to entertain guests on the upper floors.” It was on the last page, a curious placement, and the paper was not as yellow as the rest of the book. The next morning, I entered one of the houses on P Tree Street. It was the musician’s and I had brought along the calypso record by The Tawny Leopard as a gift. I called a few times and when there was no answer I placed the record on the gramophone. Perhaps the musician was bedridden.
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