by Jeffrey Ford
One of my professors walked over to me then and I had to turn away. What started as a friendly conversation soon turned into a gas-bag disquisition on his part, and he was one of those talkers who takes a breath at odd times so you can’t follow the rhythm and intuit the free moment when you can get a word in and escape. I managed to remain in the realm of polite respect and still steal a few glances into the crowd. On my first, I noticed that Esme and Dorphin had moved off into a corner and were talking in what seemed to me to be conspiratorial whispers. The next time I looked, he had his hand on her shoulder. And when my professor had spent his brilliance on me and gone in search of another victim, I looked to that corner again and they were gone.
I stepped into the crowd and spun around, trying to locate them. Two rotations and it appeared they were no longer in the gallery. I walked the perimeter once to make sure I hadn’t missed them in my survey while a growing sense of desperation blossomed in my gut. I went out in the hallway and checked up and down, but they weren’t there either. At that moment, I couldn’t have put into words what I was feeling. I was certain I’d lost Esme, not that I had ever really had her. The realization made me stagger over to a bench and sit down. What came to mind were all of those Sunday mornings at the Palace A, and as each memory appeared it evaporated just as suddenly, gone as if it had never happened.
“Where is she?” I heard a voice pierce through my reverie. I looked up to see a tall, thin guy with blond hair standing over me.
“Who?” I asked, only then realizing it was Farno.
“Did Esme leave with Dorphin?” he asked.
“Why?” I asked.
“Yes or no?” he said, seeming agitated.
“I think she did, what of it?”
He leaned down and whispered to me, “She’s in danger. Dorphin’s an imposter.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
Instead of answering, he pulled a pen out of his pocket, moved over to the wall where a flyer hung, and, in a second, had made a mark on the paper. I stood and walked up behind him. He pointed to what he’d drawn. It was a miniature facsimile of the scribble. I’d seen the design enough times to know his was authentic.
“Look, I’m sure she told you about the scribble,” he said. “Dorphin is passing himself off as someone who remembers as a way of drawing us out. He’s working for someone else. I can’t explain now. You’ve got to trust me. I’m telling you, she’s in serious trouble.”
I stood there stunned. “Okay” was all I could say.
“I have a car,” said Farno. “He’s from out of town but close enough that I doubt he’s booked a room. Where would she take him?”
“Her place,” I said.
He was already running down the hallway toward the exit. “Come on,” he yelled over his shoulder.
Running to Farno’s car in the parking lot, I don’t remember what, if anything, I was thinking at the time. The entire affair had become just too bizarre. Once we were in the old four-door Chevy, he turned to me and said, “She still lives on Hallart, right? That renovated warehouse building?”
I nodded.
“They’re only a few minutes ahead of us,” he said. By now we were on our way. He was driving within the speed limit, but I could see his anxiety in the way he hunched up over the dashboard and nervously tapped the steering wheel at the first red light we stopped at.
“What exactly is going on?” I finally asked. “Dorphin is dangerous?”
“I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, but I might need your help,” he said, “so try to keep it to yourself, okay?”
“I can do that,” I said.
“I can remember,” he said. “You know what that means.”
I nodded.
“That time I told you about, when Esme brought me to her place, she revealed the drawings to me and her theory. So I was aware she’d stumbled onto the scribble, something she wasn’t supposed to know about. She’s not the first, but for the most part it’s gone unrecognized for centuries. When I saw you two hanging out together, I tried to make you think she was crazy so that if she told you about it, you’d dismiss it as just one of her delusions.”
“You mean all that stuff you told me about her fucking all those people wasn’t real?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “That part’s true, but I thought if I told you, you’d be more circumspect about her theory.”
“Jeez,” I said. “What about Dorphin? Where does he come in?”
“Like I said, some people have gotten hip to the scribble over time. You can’t keep something like this a complete secret for eternity. In the past, even if people were suspicious, they just wrote it off to mere coincidence or some innocuous aberration of reality. But somewhere in the late 1960s, somebody put things together and decided that the ability to remember and all that went with it was something that was either dangerous to the rest of the populace or could be mined for economic benefit. We don’t really know what their motivations are, but there is a group, as secretive as we are, who want to get to the bottom of the phenomenon.”
“Dorphin’s been a painter for years,” I said.
“He’s been co-opted by this group. A lot of people with the scribble mind turn out to be artists—painters, musicians, writers—but not all of them. So they either paid Dorphin a huge sum of money or blackmailed him or something to work for them. They gave him the design, no doubt, which it’s obvious they now know, and he produced this painting and took it on the road to try to flush us out. Believe me, no one who remembers would go that public with the Vundesh. I knew it was a ploy when I saw the catalog and that painting, and I knew Esme would see it too.”
“The Vundesh?”
“That’s the name of the scribble design.”
“This is completely insane,” I said. “What will they do to Esme?”
“Well, if Dorphin believes she really remembers, she could disappear for good,” he said. “It all depends on if he has the device with him or not.”
“What device?” I asked, but I felt the car stopping. I looked and saw that Farno had pulled up to the curb in front of Esme’s building. Another car was parked a few yards in front of the Chevy.
We jumped out and ran up the steps. The moment we were at the door, I reached up and hit the buzzer for her apartment. We waited but there was no answer. I hit it three more times with no response from above.
“Look out,” said Farno, and he gently moved me to the side and scanned the names next to the buzzers. “I think Jenkins from our Life class lives here too.” He must have found his name, because he pressed one of the buzzers and held it down.
Before long, a window opened two stories up and Jenkins stuck his head out. “Who’s there?” he said, looking down.
Farno took a step back and looked up. “Hey man, it’s me,” he said and waved.
“Yo,” said Jenkins.
“Pat Shay’s here with me. We’re going up to Esme’s place but I think she’s got her headphones on or something. Buzz us in, okay?”
I heard the window close, and a few seconds later the door buzzed. I grabbed the handle and Farno and I ran in. The door to the stairs was locked, so we had no choice but to take the elevator. The ascent was excruciatingly slow.
“Let’s avoid fisticuffs and heroics,” said Farno. “I want to get through this without anyone getting hurt, especially me.”
When the elevator came to rest at Esme’s floor, I pulled back the heavy door, and just as I got a view of her apartment and saw that its door was wide open, I saw someone bolt out of it and head down the short hallway. It could have been Dorphin, but all I saw was a blur. Stepping into the hall, I turned and saw the door to the stairway swing shut and lock. I bounded across the hall and into Esme’s place. She was stretched out on the floor in the middle of her apartment, not moving. I dropped down next to her and took her arm to feel for a pulse, but as I groped along her wrist, I realized she was breathing.
“She’s alive,” I said over my shoulder
.
Together we hoisted her up onto the couch where she’d be more comfortable. Farno went to get her some water, and I sat holding her hand and calling her name.
She eventually came around, shaking her head as if to clear it. When she opened her eyes, she saw me and said in a groggy voice, “Hey, Pat.” A moment passed, and then she suddenly sat straight up and looked around nervously.
“Where is he?” she asked.
“Dorphin? He’s gone,” I said.
“He put this thing on my head, and then…everything went black.”
Farno walked in with the water then. She looked up at him.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What are the two of you doing here?”
She held her head in both hands as we filled her in. “Are you getting this?” I asked.
She nodded.
Farno explained that the device Dorphin had used was something that helps them, whoever they are, to determine if you actually remember. According to him it was something new and it indicated some anomaly in the natural electromagnetic field emanating from the brain that was at the heart of the phenomenon.
“Did he have something like a television remote control?” asked Farno.
Esme nodded. “My god, it zapped me like an electric shock.”
“He probably knows you don’t have it, if he used that. That’s a good thing,” said Farno. “If he thought you had it, you might not still be here.”
Esme took her hands away from her head and looked up. “Here’s what I want to know,” she said. “What is it?”
I turned to Farno and said, “Yeah, let’s have it. We know too much already.”
He got up, went over, and shut the door to the apartment. On the way back, he pulled up the chair from the computer desk and straddled it, crossing his arms over the back. “Okay,” he said. “It’s not like it’s gonna change anything for you to know. Just, please, try to keep it a secret from here on out. Can you promise me that?”
Esme and I both agreed.
“There are some people—why these particular people and not others seems completely random—who are born with the ability to remember, after they are born, what it was like in the womb.”
“Dorphin told me it was heaven—blue skies and dead relatives and omniscience, and that his device would allow me to see it,” said Esme.
“Dorphin’s an imposter. He’s not even close to what the memory is. And, in fact, it’s something that I truly can’t describe to you. There just aren’t words. It makes you different, though. It makes you experience the world differently than people without it. There’s no special powers that come with it, no grand insights, but just a calm sense of well-being. All I can tell you is that you feel in your heart that you belong to the universe, that you know you have a purpose. That’s it.”
“What about the scribble?” I asked.
“I can make it automatically. I could make it ever since I could hold a crayon; perfect every time. It’s a physical manifestation of the phenomenon. I don’t understand it, only that it’s a sign to others who have it that you also remember. There’s something to knowing you’re not the only one, and so we communicate this to one another. There’s nothing more to it than that. There’s no dark conspiracy. We’re not out to take over the world or any of that silly shit.”
“If it’s so simple,” said Esme, “then why keep it a secret?”
“First off,” said Farno, “there’s an understanding that comes with the remembering, sort of built in with it, and that is that it’s better to keep it a secret from those who don’t experience it. Look at Dorphin and the people he works for—the government; some pharmaceutical company, maybe, wanting to bottle and exploit that sense of purpose I mentioned; perhaps a vigilante group desperate to eradicate our difference from humanity. If you told people, they’d think we were talking about a memory of heaven, or the afterlife, or some realm in the course of reincarnation—start projecting onto it what they wanted it to be and become jealous they’d missed out. They couldn’t be further off the mark. Think of how religious fanatics would abuse it. It has nothing to do with God in the pedestrian sense. The anti-abortionists would have a field day with it, never understanding the least bit of what it was. The truth is, if you have it, you have it, you know, and if you don’t, you’ll never know.”
I had a thousand more questions, but Farno said he had to leave. “She should probably stay somewhere else for a couple of days just in case they come again,” he said to me. “If by then no one has broken into the apartment, it’s probably a good sign that they know she’s not authentic. No sense in calling the cops; they’re not gonna believe you.” He got up and headed for the door, and I thanked him for helping us. Without looking back, he simply waved his hand in the air. I thought Esme should also have said something to him, but she never opened her mouth. When he was gone, I looked at her and saw she was crying.
She remained silent while I helped her put a few things together and got her into her coat. It was as if she were drugged or drunk or sleepwalking. I told her I was taking her to my place, and I thought she would refuse to go, but she didn’t. On the walk to my apartment, I kept my arm around her. She leaned against me, and I could feel her shivering. “Are you all right?” I asked her every couple of blocks, and instead of answering me, she’d put her hand on my side for a moment. The only sign that she was conscious at all was when we got to my apartment and climbed the impossibly long set of steps. I opened the door and flipped on the light switch, and when she saw it, she said, “Beautiful.” I laughed, but she didn’t.
She left my side and walked over to where the mattress lay on the floor. Unhitching the back of her dress, she let it drop right there, and wearing only a pair of underpants got into bed and curled into a fetal position beneath the blankets. She closed her eyes, and I turned the lights off so she could sleep. Instead of trying to find a place to sleep, I sat in the dark in front of my easel and had a beer, thinking through what had happened that night. She seemed so different, so beaten. The experience had changed her in some way, flipped a switch inside of her and turned off the manic energy. I pondered how and why, but it never came clear to me. Finally, I just lay down on the floor at the foot of the mattress and wadded a jacket up for a pillow. The floor was hard as hell, but I was exhausted.
My eyes hadn’t been closed five minutes when I heard her voice, whispering. “Pat, come over here with me,” she said. I didn’t argue, but got to my knees and crawled over to the empty side of the mattress. Once I was under the covers, she turned to me and said, “Just hold me.” So I did, and that’s how we slept all night.
I was late getting up the next morning and had to rush to get ready for school. She was still asleep when I left. All day I wondered how long Esme would stay with me or if she’d be gone when I got home. I saw Farno in class and he completely ignored me. To show him I was true to my promise of secrecy, I also said nothing to him. When class was over, though, and we passed in the hallway, he subtly nodded and smiled at me. I took the first bus I could catch and stopped at the Chinese place up the street from my apartment, buying enough for two.
Esme was still there. She’d done the dishes and straightened the place up a bit—a very welcome sight indeed. Her demeanor was lighter, at least more cognizant. It wasn’t that she no longer seemed changed, but at least she was talkative and smiled at the fact that I’d bought us dinner. Instead of my usual, eating right out of the white cartons, we cleared the table and she found a couple of plates I couldn’t remember owning. She asked me what had happened at school, and I thanked her for doing the dishes and cleaning. After that, though, things went quiet.
Unable to take the silence, I asked her, “So, did you go out today?”
“No,” she said, “but I’ll show you what I did.” She got up and walked over to an old drawing board I had set up by the window. She pointed down at the board.
On one side, taped to the slanted surface, was one of the day-care kids’ dra
wings of the scribble. Lying next to them was a stack of drawing paper, the top sheet of which also had a scribble on it, but not the scribble.
“What are you doing?” I asked, smiling.
“I’m trying to draw the scribble freehand.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I thought that if I could get it just right, I’d be able to remember. Sometimes things work in both directions,” she said. Her smile became tenuous.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” I asked.
“It could work,” she told me.
She seemed too fragile for me to try to talk reason to her, as if she’d implode if I called her process into question. Instead, I said, “Well, there’s a lot of paper there,” pointing to the five-hundred-sheet box of copier paper I’d ripped off from school that lay on the floor.
She nodded and sat down. Picking up a pencil, she leaned over and grabbed a new sheet of paper from the box. “I’ll use both sides,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said and went back to the table to finish my dinner.
She worked relentlessly, attempting to reproduce the scribble. I sat, pretending to paint, and witnessed her mania, trying to decide what to do. Eventually, late into the night, she stood up, took off her clothes, and lay down on the mattress under the blankets.
The next morning when I awoke, she was already at the drawing board. I took a shower and got dressed for school, and when I told her I had to get going, she barely looked up. The sheets of paper holding the rejected scribbles had originally been neatly stacked, but now the stack was spilling onto the floor, and the chair she occupied was surrounded by scattered paper.
“How’s it going?” I asked, trying to get a response from her before leaving.