The Drowned Life

by Jeffrey Ford

  “There was this one strange little kid who was there every day. He was really young, but he had an amazing sense of presence, like he was a little old man. The other kids all loved being around him, and sometimes they just stared for the longest time into his eyes, which were like turquoise-colored crystal. His name was Jonathan. So this other kid, a little bit older, walks up to Jonathan, and I’m sitting there quietly, watching this go down. The other kid seems sad or tired. Keeping his voice a little low, he says, ‘Tell me what it was like inside your mommy, I’m starting to forget.’”

  “What?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Esme, and she nodded, smiling.

  “That’s wild.”

  “Right after the kid said this to Jonathan, another little girl, who’d dressed up in a fairy princess outfit—she had a little tiara on her head and was carrying a wand—walked between them, turned to the kid who had asked the question, waved the wand, and said in a soft chant, “Go away. Go away. Go away.”

  “Did he?”

  “Yeah. I swear I thought he was going to start crying. Then, for a little while, I guess my mind was preoccupied, trying to think back and see if I remembered my earliest memory. If I could recall being in the womb. Nothing. All I got was a big, frustrating blank. When I looked up I noticed Jonathan and the kid had met up again off in the corner of the room. The kid was leaning down and Jonathan, hand cupped around his mouth and the kid’s ear, was whispering something to him. The kid was smiling.”

  “What do you think he was telling him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “but just then my boss came in and saw that the other kids were getting wild. She had me calm them down and hand out paper for them to draw on until it was time to leave. She always liked them quiet for when the parents came to get them. Time was finally up and the parents showed and when the last of the little crumb snatchers was gone, I started cleaning up. Most of them had left their drawings behind on the tabletops. I went around and collected them. I always got a charge out of seeing their artwork—there’s just always a sense of rightness about the pictures from kids who haven’t gone to school yet—fresh and powerful and so beautifully simple.

  “When I got to the place where the kid who wanted to remember his mother’s womb had sat, I found that he’d left this big scribble on his paper. I can’t really describe it, but it was like a big circular scribble, overlapping lines, like a cloud of chaos, in black crayon. I thought to myself that that wasn’t such a good sign after what I’d witnessed. But check this out,” she said and drew the Mylar bag next to her closer and opened the zip top. “When I got to Jonathan’s picture, it lay facedown on the desk. I turned it over, and…” Here she reached into the bag and pulled out two sheets of drawing paper. As she laid them down in front of me I saw there was black crayon on both. “The same exact scribble. Absolutely, exactly the same.”

  “Nah,” I said, and looked down at the two pages.

  “You show me where they differ,” she said.

  My glance darted back and forth from one to the other, checking each loop and intersection. Individually, they appeared to have been dashed off in a manner of seconds. There was no sense that the creators were even paying attention to the page when they did them. Eventually, I laughed and shook my head. “I give up,” I said. “Are you pulling my leg? Did you do these on the computer?”

  “No,” she said, “but even if I had, now check this out.” Here she opened the catalog to the page with the reproduction of the Dorphin painting. “It’s rendered as if three-dimensional, but look closely. It’s the same damn scribble made to look like a jumble of twine.”

  I looked and she was right. Reaching across the table, I took one of her cigarettes and lit it. I sat and smoked for a minute, trying to get my mind around her story and the pictures before me. For some reason, right then, I couldn’t look into her eyes. “So what are you trying to tell me?” I finally said.

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything,” she said. “But I’ve seen it in other places. Once when I was in New York City, I was on the subway. It was crowded and I took a seat next to a guy who had a drawing pad with him. I looked over and he was sketching some of the other passengers, but down in the corner of the page was that same scribble. I pointed to it and said to him, ‘That’s an interesting design.’ He looked at me and asked, ‘Do you remember?’ I didn’t answer, but I was taken aback by his question. He must have seen the surprise in my eyes. Without another word, he closed the book, put it in his knapsack, stood up, and brushed past me. He moved through the crowd and went to stand by the door. At the next stop, he got off.”

  “Get out,” I said. “That really happened?”

  “You’ll see it,” she said. “If you don’t know what to look for, you’d never notice it. It just looks like a scribble, like somebody just absentmindedly messing around with a crayon or pen. But you’ll see it now.”

  “Where am I going to see it?” I asked.

  “Hey, don’t believe me, just call me when you do and tell me I was right.”

  “Wait a second…. So you think it has to do with…what?” I asked, not wanting to say what I was thinking.

  “I think it’s some kind of sign or symbol made by people who remember all the way back to the womb,” she said.

  “Is that even possible?” I asked, stubbing out my cigarette in the ashtray.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. What do you make of it?”

  I didn’t answer. We sat there for quite a while, both looking at the two drawings and Dorphin’s painting.

  “You kept these drawing all these years?” I said, breaking the silence.

  “Of course, in case I wanted to tell someone. Otherwise they wouldn’t believe me.”

  “I still don’t believe you,” I said.

  “You will,” said Esme.

  During the walk back to my apartment and all afternoon, I thought about the drawings and their implications. What Esme’d really been hinting at, but didn’t come out and say, was that there was afoot in the world a conspiracy of in-utero-remembering scribblers. Was there some secret knowledge they were protecting, did they have powers far beyond those of mortal men, were they up to no good? The concept was so bizarre, so out of left field, my paranoia got the better of me and I had to wonder whether Esme had concocted the whole thing, having first seen the Dorphin painting and knowing I’d eventually show her the catalog or we’d come across it at the university. If that was true, then it represented an outlandish effort to dupe me, but for what? A momentary recollection of her in the library carrel gave me a shiver.

  That night, I found I couldn’t paint. The great ease of conception and movement of the brush I’d felt in recent weeks was blocked by the chaotic scribble of my thoughts. I lay on the mattress, staring at the ceiling, trying to think back to my own beginning. The earliest experience I could recall was being in a big snowsuit out in our backyard, sitting atop a snow drift, staring at a red, setting sun and my mother calling from the back door for me to come in. When my thoughts hit the wall of that memory, they spun off in all directions, considering what exactly it might be that the scribblers were remembering. A state of mind? A previous life? Heaven? Or just the underwater darkness and muffled sounds of the world within the belly?

  By Wednesday, I’d seen that damn scribble three times. The first was in the men’s room of the Marble Grill, a bar down the street from my apartment where I ate dinner every once in a while. The place was a dive, and the bathroom walls were brimming with all kinds of graffiti. I’d gone in there to take a piss, and while I was doing my thing, I looked up, and there, just above the urinal, staring me right in the face, was a miniature version of that tumbleweed of mystery. Recognizing it gave me a jolt, and I almost peed on my sneaker. I realized that in the dozen or so other times I’d stood there, looking directly at it, it might as well have been invisible.

  I saw it again, later that very night, on the inside back cover of a used paperback copy of this science
-fiction novel, Mindswap, I’d bought a few weeks earlier at a street sale. The book was pretty dog-eared, and I don’t know what made me pick it up that night out of all the others I had lying around. After finding the scribble in the back, I turned the book over. On the inside front cover, written in pencil, in a neat script, was the name Derek Drymon, who I surmised was the original owner. Whoever this guy was, wherever he was, I wondered if he was remembering as I lay there on my mattress wishing I could simply forget.

  The last instance, which happened two days later, the one that drove me back to Esme’s apartment, was finding a rendition of the scribble on a dollar bill I whipped out at the university cafeteria to pay for a cup of coffee. The girl behind the cash register reached toward me, closed her fingers on the note, and at that moment I saw the design. She tugged, but I couldn’t let go. My gaze remained locked on it until she said, “You paying for this, or what?” Then I released my hold, and it was gone.

  Later that afternoon, I found myself on Hallart Street, standing on the steps of Esme’s building, waiting for her to buzz me in. In the elevator, I prepared myself to eat crow. When the elevator opened at the fifth floor, she was standing there waiting for me in the doorway to her apartment. She had a smile on her face and the first thing she said was “Go ahead.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “An apology, perhaps? Esme, how could I have doubted you?” she suggested.

  “Fuckin’ scribble,” I muttered.

  She laughed and stepped back to let me in. As I passed, she patted me on the back and said, “Maddening, isn’t it?”

  “Well,” I said, “you’re right, but where does that get us? It’s got me so I can’t paint.”

  “Now that we both know, and I know I’m not crazy,” she said, “we’re going to have to figure out what it’s all about.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because the fact that you don’t know will always be with you. Don’t you want to know what you’re missing?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I just want to get past it.”

  She took a step closer to me and put her palms on my shoulders. “Pat, I need you to help me with this. I can’t do it by myself. Someone has to corroborate everything.”

  I shook my head, but she pulled me over to her desk. “Before you say anything, check this out.” She sat down in the chair, facing the computer. With a click of the mouse, the machine came to life.

  “Okay, now,” she said, spinning on the seat so she could look up at me. She took my left hand in both of hers, more than likely so that I couldn’t escape. “After you were here last Sunday, and I had the pictures out, I studied them closely for the first time in a long while. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before, but in concentrating on the intersections of the lines, I wondered what these points would reveal if they were plotted on a graph. So I scanned the drawing into the computer and erased the lines, leaving only the points of intersection.”

  She clicked the mouse once and an image of the scribble appeared on the screen. After letting that sit for a few seconds, she clicked again and revealed only the points, like a cloud of gnats.

  “I set them on a graph,” she said. Another click and the entire swarm was trapped in a web. “Then for a long time, I looked for sequences, some kind of underlying order to them. It wasn’t long before I saw this.” She gave another click, and there appeared a line, emanating from a point close to the center of the cluster and looping outward in a regular spiral, like the cross-section of a nautilus shell.

  “Interesting,” I said, “but it only utilizes some of the dots. You could easily make just as many irregular designs if you linked other dots.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But do you know what that shape represents?” she asked.

  “It’s the Golden Section,” I said. “We studied it earlier in the year when we were covering Leonardo. You can find it in all of his paintings, from St. Jerome in the Wilderness to the Mona Lisa. A lot of painters swore by it—Jacopo, Seurat…”

  Tracing the spiral on the screen with her index finger, she said, “You’re good. It’s a Fibonacci series. Consciously used in art and architecture but also found occurring spontaneously everywhere in nature. To the ancients the existence of this phenomenon was proof of a deity’s design inherent in the universe. It’s holy. It’s magic.”

  “Back up, though,” I said. “It doesn’t utilize all of the dots, and there’s so many dots there that connected in the right way you could come up with a shitload of different designs as well.”

  “True,” she said, “but look….” She clicked the mouse again. “At any one time, depending on what you choose as your starting point, you can plot five Golden Sections within the scribble, the five using all of the dots except one. Order in chaos, and the one representing the potential of the chaotic amid order.”

  The picture on the screen proved her point with lines that I could easily follow curling out from central points. She clicked the screen again.

  “Change the originating points and you can make five different golden spirals,” she said.

  Just as I was able to take in the next pattern, she clicked the mouse again, waited a second, and then clicked it again. She clicked through twelve different possible designs of spiral groups before stopping. Turning on the seat, she looked up at me.

  “That’s all I had time for,” she said.

  “You’re industrious as hell,” I told her and took a step backward.

  She stood up and came toward me. “I have a plan,” she said.

  By the time I left Esme’s place, it was dark. “Who do we know for sure remembers?” she’d asked, and I’d told her, “No one.” But as she’d revealed, that wasn’t true. “Dorphin,” she said, and then told me how she was going to take one of the scribble drawings she had to the opening at the university gallery and try to convince him she’d done it and was one of them in an attempt to get him to talk. I’d told her I wanted nothing to do with bothering Dorphin. After long arguments both reasonable and passionate, when I’d still refused, she’d kicked me out. As I walked along the night streets back to my apartment, though, it wasn’t her scheme I thought about. What I couldn’t help remembering was that brief period before she turned on the computer when she’d held my hand.

  That Sunday, when I got to the Palace A, she wasn’t there, and I knew immediately she wouldn’t be coming. I took a seat anyway and waited for an hour, picking at a corn muffin and forcing down a cup of coffee. Her absence was palpable, and I realized in that time how much I needed to see her. She was my strange attractor. I finally left and went by her apartment. Standing on the steps, I rang the buzzer at least six times, all the while picturing her at her computer, tracing spirals through clouds of dots. No answer. When I got back to my place, I tried to call her, but she didn’t pick up.

  There were many instances in the following week when I considered writing her a note and leaving it in her mailbox, telling her I was sorry and that I would gladly join her in her plan to flush out Dorphin, but each time I stopped myself at the last second, not wanting to be merely a means to an end, another Fibonacci series used to plumb the design of the ineffable. Ultimately, what exactly I wanted, I wasn’t sure, but I knew I definitely wanted to see her. I hung around campus all week, waiting for her outside the classes I knew she had, but she never showed herself.

  Saturday night came, the night of the opening, and I should have been excited with the prospect of so many people seeing my painting hanging in the university gallery alongside those of well-known artists, but I was preoccupied with whether or not she would be there. Still, I had the presence of mind to clean myself up, shave, and throw on my only jacket and tie. The exhibit was packed, wine was flowing, and quite a few people approached me to tell me how much they admired my piece. Dorphin was there, and the neocubist, Uttmeyer, and Miranda Blench. Groups of art students and faculty clustered around these stars. Just when I’d had a few glasses of wine and was letting myse
lf forget Esme and enjoy the event a little, she walked in. She wore a simple, low-cut black dress and a jeweled choker. I’d never seen her in anything besides jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair glistened under the track lighting. She walked toward me, and when she drew near, I said, “Where were you on Sunday?” Without so much as a blink, she moved past me, heading for Dorphin, and I could feel something tear inside me.

  Moving out of the crowd, I took up a position next to the wine and cheese table, where I could keep a surreptitious eye on her. She bided her time, slowly circling like a wily predator on the outskirts of Dorphin’s crowd of admirers, waiting for just the right moment. I noticed that she carried a large manila envelope big enough to hold one of the drawings. The artist, a youthful-looking middle-aged guy with sandy hair, seemed shy but affable, taking time to answer questions and smiling through the inquisition. Now that Esme was on his trail, I was disappointed that he didn’t come off as a self-centered schmuck. Behind him hung his painting, and from where I stood, his slightly bowed head appeared directly at the center of the scribble, which formed an aura, a veritable halo of confusion.

  A half hour passed in which other students stopped to say hello and congratulate me on my painting being accepted for the show, and each time I tried to dispatch them as quickly as possible and get back to spying on Esme. It was right after one of these little visits that I turned back to my focal point and saw that in the few minutes I was chatting, she’d made her move. The first thing I noticed was a change in Dorphin’s look. His face was bright now, and he no longer slouched. He was interested in her—who could blame him? They were already deep into some conversation. She was smiling, he was smiling, she nodded, he nodded, and then I saw her open the manila envelope. Pulling out a sheet of white paper, no doubt one of the drawings, she offered it to him. He turned it around, took a quick look at the picture and then over each shoulder to see if anyone else was near. He spoke some short phrase to her, and she hesitated for only an instant before nodding.