by Jesse Ball
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The interlocutor coughed. I looked up over at him. You know, he said, we think of memory as a redeeming thing. We build monuments that appear to be monuments to this person or that person or this struggle or that, but really, do you know what they are? They are monuments to memory itself, so said the interlocutor. We want it to be meaningful that things be remembered. Everything proceeds from that. If we do not remember what has happened before, then we are powerless to give meaning to what is, day to day. Because, he cleared his throat, because we are all like the Vikings, hoping to be feasted for eternity in a mead hall, there to have our deeds shouted out again and again for the regaling of some fierce and terrible company. In fact, he continued, memory is not the heart of the endeavor. That is the human secret. Forgetting is the precious balm that helps us to travel on, past the depredations of memory. His voice slowed as he said these last words. He drew a long breath. There was a bulb overhead in a loose casing. Suddenly, it was very bright, for the lights in the hall had been turned down. A man stuck his head in the door. The interlocutor assured him it was all right. We were just finishing our business. Though we would be some time, it was all right for the janitor to leave for the night. I will lock up when I go, so said the interlocutor. The door shut. What is the rest of it? he asked, and again I was struck by the horror, as I had been, again and again, during my tale, that I was confiding all this in my grandfather. It was inconceivable to me that I would say such things to a man I had hated, and, already distraught to begin with, I recoiled at the sudden fear. Then, his eyes met mine, and they were full of sympathy. It was like that—when he was looking elsewhere, I felt that he was very much like my grandfather, and when he met my eyes, I knew him as this new person, a sort of confessor. Do you need some water? he asked. He was holding a cup. He had filled a cup with water and it was extended to me. I drank it. We arrived, I said, at the inn for the night. She was still driving. This was a territory she had often passed over. She whirled into the parking lot and stopped the car just about anywhere. She pulled up and hopped out, leaving the car, as if it were a horse, any which way in front of the inn. This was something I liked. No one else would be coming, clearly. There was no reason not to do it just the way she had. The people inside the inn did not know us, but were efficient, kind, effective, gave us the keys to a room, showed us the room, brought us some supper, a dish of cold meats that was more than we needed, and dismissed themselves for the night. Rana said, Clement, she said it from the bathroom, Clement, come here. There was a large bathtub—larger than usual, one could actually stretch at one’s length. This was the sort of inn it was—a way station, for people to get back the energy they needed in order to travel on. It must have been there forever, I said to Rana. It has been for my entire life, or at least as long as I can remember things, I can remember it. She was precise in this way—and hated to say things that were not true. Sometimes, she would correct herself, days after having said something, it would occur to her that she had not been specific enough. Then, she would demonstrate the thing she meant, at length, from several angles, to her satisfaction. I, who had never been specific, for whom specificity was a dream, and on whom specificity was wasted, was now the chief recipient of her wonderful specificity. We sat in the bath, and I remember, so I told the interlocutor, that she wanted me to tell her about my hopes for my life. Tell me, she asked, as she sometimes did, what do you plan for yourself? I hated these questions, but I was always calm and quiet. I always avoided them carefully. I had a plan, I said, once, to be a ferryman. That lasted a while, then I wanted to be a traveler, some kind of marco polo. What do you hope for? I asked her. She said, now that we are grown so close, I have begun to include you in my hopes. What if we were to move to another city, one we hadn’t ever been in, and learn it together—we could learn the whole city together. We could learn a new language, just to live there, and we could speak that language together. We could start some business, a business that we know, because it is common here, but the sort of thing that isn’t to be found at all in that city. Then, we could sit in the shop and now and then sell something, and we would have a fine life. I have enough, she said, to support us doing something like that. We wouldn’t even need to make money with the shop. It would be our pastime. Then, every so often some of our friends would travel and visit us and we could see them, and at their arrival we would be so pleased. Hello, hello, we’d say, and after they had been with us a time in that new place, they would go, and we would be equally pleased to see them leave. That’s how it would be, she must have thought to herself, before saying it out loud to me—we can have a fine life like that. I am prepared, I said, to go anywhere. I only want to know ten minutes in advance. Why is that, she asked. Ten minutes? If you will go, you’ll go. You don’t need ten minutes. Ten minutes? She pretended to be wounded at the thought, so I told the interlocutor. Only that I might bury a few things, I said. When I live in a place, I always like to bury some of my belongings in the ground near where I lived. Then, when I come back, I can have the sense that—if I like, I can dig them up. I don’t believe I ever would, but it is nice to feel, even if everything else changed, one’s few things are waiting there beneath the earth. Like bones, she said. If you were really brave, you might leave a finger or two, or an ankle. I would do it, I said, if I thought there was something there worth remembering that badly.
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When we slept that night, so I told the interlocutor, I woke and found that she was gone. The bed was empty, and the room was utterly quiet. I had the sensation, such as one sometimes has, that I had been alone for a long time. I went outside and she was sitting on the steps, staring out at nothing. It was dark—country darkness, near complete darkness, and she was sitting in it, by herself. Rana, I called, Rana. I am here, she said, and she was there by my feet. I had walked clear to the end of the porch, and she was there. I sat, and reached out, Rana, and found her. I can’t see you at all. I can’t see anything, she said. Her voice was hoarse, and when I pressed against her I could feel that her face was wet. Are you all right? It is nothing, she said. I was thinking of my parents. But, if we go to a foreign city, I said, it would be a long time before you saw them again. But, I would, she said, in that situation, I would see them again. What do you mean? I asked. Nothing, she said. Let’s find our way inside. Then, we were driving in the car, I was at the wheel, the sun was overhead. I had on a burlap sack of a shirt that fluttered all around me. She wore a light gray dress that was sewn to her—it didn’t flap at all. We shot along the road beneath a frighteningly blue sky. The forest gets deeper, and deeper, I shouted. Deeper and deeper. We are almost there, she told me, as we stopped for gas. She filled the tank, and the two gas station attendants stood watching her, eyes glued to her, as she insouciantly pranced about the gas station, filling the tank in the absolute most tom-boy fashion. My father bought this place when he was still a child, with his inheritance. This statement she repeated, as we pulled up the drive, as I stopped the car in front of the lodge, and as we got out. I carried the bags up the wide steps and she repeated, my father bought this place when he was still a boy. His father passed away, his mother, too, and he no longer wanted to live in the house where he lived. His aunt had come to take care of him, but he was not to be taken care of. He would take care of himself, so she said, I told the interlocutor. He sold the house that he lived in, and bought this one, and moved himself and his aunt there. It was an important place to him, and so I spent most of the summers of my childhood here. The truth is, I haven’t been back in five or six years. It hasn’t, she said, even occurred to me to come here. But now, I am finally here again. My father would have happily joined us. She seemed caught up by the thought. How he would like to be here again. You could contact them, I said, and have them come down. Somehow the thought frightened her. It would be…she said, hesitating, and then she fell hesitating into a sort of not-s
peech about the matter. She was turning it over in her mind and instead of telling me what she had arrived at, she did the opposite. She walked away and began to explore the house and see the state that it was in.
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I am not crying, she insisted. I had found her in an upstairs bedroom, and she was curled on the bed, shaking. You are not crying, I said, but your face is wet. Her face was wet, I told the interlocutor, and she had been crying, but I didn’t know why. I used my sleeve to wipe her nose and mouth, and kissed her, and I did everything I could to comfort her there. When we made love, I said quietly, it was a brutal, brutal thing. It was never easy. It was an intimacy so terrible that it left us both reeling. The first time we did, in my room at the boardinghouse, we could neither of us move for some hours. We lay there, entirely spent. When I found her in the upstairs room, it was almost the same. It was as though there were little walls that would spring up, again and again, between us, and the moment of our physical love was the actual breaking down, the shattering of them. She frequently would cry, abjectly weep, and it would be terror and grief that would turn to joy or joy to grief. She said to me, once, afterward, that she thought nothing physical should ever be easy. It should all be difficult. It should all be done with the maximum effort, utterly helplessly. I said that I would do, as always, exactly what she thought was right. She said, don’t do anything I say, ever. She turned her face away from me. She was crying again and could not be comforted. We rose after an hour or two and went and saw to the house. It was a hunting lodge. I hadn’t been in a hunting lodge, didn’t know there were hunting lodges, but it was one. There were various trophies on walls, and guns in places. There was a mudroom, and natural wood chairs and rocking chairs on long porches that knelt to the ground. The trees were fabulously old, older than practically any trees I had seen in quite a long time, and the house had apparently been built amongst them. The porch had a tree halfway through it that supported the porch roof. See, she said, here is what I wrote in the tree, and she showed me her name there. Raina. I wrote it this way when I was, when I was, it would have been, from nine to eleven. I wanted some self-determination, so I changed my name. Then, a dreadful thing happened. What? A girl came to the school where I studied, and her name was Raina. I didn’t like her at all. She was extremely vulgar, but she liked me, and she liked that we were alike. I remember the teacher saying her name, saying it unnecessarily in my presence, just so I would know that there was another Raina about. I was horrified, disgusted. So, I changed my name back. But, here it is. You should put your name here, she said. She took a little knife from her bag and I opened it and cut my name into the tree. Clement, I wrote. See, I said, I didn’t spell it differently, but I thought I might. You thought you would, she said, but when it came to it, you like your name. You couldn’t write it differently. There is a sacredness to names. Sacredness, I said the word over. Sanctity, she said. I guess sanctity is the word, but it feels like the meaning is wrong. You are better now, I said. You aren’t sad anymore, I told her. You appear fine, I said out loud to Rana, so I told the interlocutor. I don’t know if I wanted her to be fine, or whether she was fine, but while we were there, I kept watching her to see if she was sad, and when she was sad, I would smile and divert her mind, and when she was happy, I would say, helplessly, I would say, oh, you are happy again. If anything, this reminded her of her sadness. I couldn’t tell what it was, and she wouldn’t say. There was a telephone there, but she wouldn’t use it to call anyone. When I suggested it, she said, no, we have come here, and now I don’t want to go anywhere, to be anywhere but here. This is the place for us. We have this house, and the little town nearby where we can buy our groceries. Tomorrow when we get up, we’ll walk into the town. I feel weak now, but tomorrow, I think I will feel stronger. And when some hours had passed, she felt strong enough that we went up a ladder to the roof of the hunting lodge, where there was a sort of viewing platform. We can sleep up here, she told me. There is a thing that happens, if you are very still. The bats pass by overhead, just inches away. I went and brought up some sheets and a pillow. I found a pile of old coats, and I brought them up. We can sleep on these. This was my coat, she said. She held one up. Look, I can still fit in it.