by Jeffrey Ford
As my eyes shut and I began to doze, I remembered the drawing of the hourglass on that scrap of paper I had discovered. Particles of light passed through the neck of the figure eight.
10
I came awake to the glare of sunlight flooding the room, reflecting off the smooth, whitewashed walls. There was an unreal, immaculate clarity to it, a vitality that offered perfect warmth and submerged me in a sense of well-being that ignored the countless dilemmas I faced. After rubbing my eyes and reminding myself as to who and where I was, I looked around and saw that Anotine was no longer lying on her bed.
“Hello?” I called as I stood up and stretched.
As if in answer, a shrill, steady note, like the cry of a thin-throated pig, sounded from down the hall. There was no modulation to the tone at all, and its relentless nature forced me to cover my ears. In this manner, I proceeded to search out its source. I passed a room to the left, also sparsely furnished and brimming with sunlight. Somewhat smaller than the bedroom, it appeared to be a dining area, for there was a large wooden table, surrounded by four chairs.
A few paces farther along on the other side of the hall was a small, windowless space, almost a closet. I could make out that its walls were lined with shelves and that they were filled with shadowy objects, but by then I realized that the sound was coming from the room at the end of the hall. From my limited vantage point, it appeared to be a much larger space than the others. I moved up to the opening, my hands still protecting my ears, and leaned forward to peer inside.
This room was also bathed in the clear light of morning, and, to my wonder, filled with all manner of strange-looking equipment that demanded my immediate attention. All of it, though, receded out of view as my eyes came to rest on perhaps the strangest scene I had ever witnessed.
Standing by a large window opening at the far right of the room was Anotine. Her face was lifted slightly so that she could make direct eye contact with, of all things, a human female head that floated in the air of its own volition. The sight of this caused my hands to drop to my sides, and the maddening noise that issued from the open mouth of the bodiless woman passed unimpeded into my ears, drilling my mind. The intensity of it made my head swim as I focused on the twin beacons of green light that connected one woman’s gaze to the other’s. Both the pain of the din and the utter madness of what I witnessed made me gasp. I fell against the side of the entrance for support.
Anotine’s tormentor shut her mouth, and the noise suddenly ceased. The green rays of light appeared to retract into the eyes of the floating head, and the moment they disengaged from Anotine’s, she let out a deep breath and doubled over.
Then, like a hummingbird flitting from one flower to another, the head flew across the room and hovered in the air three feet from my face. I thought of running, but instead I simply slid down the side of the entrance until I was kneeling on the floor. The horrid thing floated there in front of me, and I was hypnotized by the way its black hair writhed behind it like a nest of angry snakes. The face was drawn and appeared perfectly cruel in its pale green complexion. Its lips were deep red, its sharp teeth and irisless eyes, pure white. A growl sounded from somewhere within it, obviously not its throat, for it had none. Even in my state of panic, I understood that it was admonishing me for having interfered. I was certain for a moment that it was going to lunge at me, but as quickly as it had come, it circled once around the room, hair streaming behind it, then flew out the window.
Anotine looked over at me and smiled. “You’re shaking,” she said.
I got to my feet, somewhat put out by her offhand reaction to my fear. “I’m glad you are amused,” I said.
With this she began to laugh out loud. “There, there,” she said, and she walked over and put her arms around me.
This was almost as surprising to me as the sight of the flying head. All I could think in the brief time that the embrace lasted was how fortunate I was that she was now dressed. As she released me, I suddenly realized that the act was not one of affection but merely that of a researcher comforting a frightened lab animal. It would be dangerous for me to assume that I was anything more than Cley, the specimen.
“We call that the Fetch,” she said as she backed away.
“It’s an atrocity,” I said.
“Not very pretty,” she conceded, “but an amazing device.”
“You mean it is a machine?” I asked.
“Not a machine in the sense of gears and motors, but an organic entity that works as a tool. It swoops down from the tower and, we believe, like a dog retrieving a stick, fetches back information to whomever or whatever is up there. Doctor Hellman named it. It seems to gather our discoveries into itself through the beams emitted from its eyes. We have all been scrutinized by it many times, and we have all witnessed it probing inanimate objects in the same manner.”
“Does it hurt when it studies you?” I asked.
“It’s an odd experience. The only unpleasantness comes from the fact that you stop breathing while it does its work,” she said.
I shook my head and grimaced.
“I suppose it’s better than having to write reports constantly,” she said with a forced smile.
“How does it fly?” I asked.
She shrugged. “How does the island fly? What ocean is this beneath us made of liquid mercury? What are we all doing here? These questions have become rather useless. We do our work and live in hope that someday we will be returned to the lives we have traded away for this commission.”
I had a thousand questions, but I thought it better not to bother asking them. It was clear to me, as Misrix had warned, that Below was only limited by his imagination in this mnemonic world he had built. Flying heads and islands were probably only the beginning of it. What was pitiful to me was the belief that both Anotine and Nunnly had expressed, namely that they had real lives and loves elsewhere that they longed to return to.
“Come, Cley, let’s eat breakfast,” she said.
I could only nod, for my mind was preoccupied with an awareness of the tyranny we exercise over the creations of our imaginations. In waking from a dream, we obliterate worlds, and in calling up a memory, we return the dead to life again and again only to bring them face-to-face with annihilation as our attention shifts to something else.
Anotine led me down the hall to the room I suspected was for dining. There, on the long table, two meals had been served, the steam rising off of them as if they had come that moment from the oven.
“Oh, you’re in luck, Cley,” she said as she took the seat beneath the window. “We have caribou steak.”
How it all had gotten there—the vase of flowers, the pitcher of lemon water with ice, the baby carrots and threaded dumplings—was a phenomenon that should have floored me, but at which I hardly blinked. I sat down, lifted my knife and fork, and set to work on the meat, which was, of course, cooked to perfection.
“Delicious,” I said after my first bite, and I could see in Anotine’s eyes her relief that my utterance was a statement rather than another question.
We ate in silence for some time. I wasn’t particularly hungry, and as I continued to eat I never really felt full. It was as if we had been preordained to finish the meal. Even the fleeting realization that what I was ingesting were Below’s thoughts didn’t put me off from slicing away at the sizable portion of meat.
I was just discovering the cheese vein in a threaded dumpling, when Anotine looked up and said, “I study the moment.”
“The moment?” I asked.
“That near nonexistent instant between the past and the future. The state we are always in but that we never recognize. When we stop to experience it, it flies away into the past and then we wait for the next one, but by the time we recognize its arrival, it too has gone.”
“Why does it interest you?” I asked.
“Because there is a whole undiscovered country there. In my experiments, I try to pry a hole in the seam between past and future in order to
get a look at that exotic place,” she said.
“Interesting,” I said, and stared as if caught up in her ideas, when in reality I was caught up in the depth of her eyes.
“Thinking makes us forget the instant,” she said. “The present is not a function of thought. It is the absence of it.”
“Good steak,” I said, having lost her meaning early on.
She smiled, and I forgot not to stare. “God is there in that country,” she said. “When you are finished eating, please take off your clothes.”
A half-hour later I was in the room at the end of the hall, naked, strapped into a metallic chair, feeling very much like Cley, the specimen. Anotine sat at a table in front of me, holding a small black box with buttons. Laid out before her were a notebook and a pen.
“You may feel a little discomfort during this experiment,” she said, lifting the pen and writing something in the book. “But don’t worry, this will cause no irreparable damage.”
I was embarrassed and scared, and truly knew for the first time how my physiognomical subjects must have felt when I had called them forth to be examined.
“I will be recording your responses, so please be as candid as possible. Take your time, and search for the proper words to describe your experience,” she said.
Then she put the hand holding the black box beneath the table where I could not see it. “Now, I want you to look out the window behind me. Concentrate on the sunlight. It is warm and beautiful. Try to recall something pleasant,” she said.
I tried to do as she said, but the only image that came to my thoughts was that of Bataldo, weeping as he walked off through the dark tree line of the Beyond. I shook my head and forced myself to remember the faces of Ea and Arla and their children. Then I settled on a memory of Jarek. I had taken the boy fishing one balmy summer day on the outskirts of Wenau. There was nothing special about that particular day, only that he had caught a huge river smad with bright orange spots. He unhooked the fish and laid it on the bank. I watched as he performed a ritual his father had taught him, wherein he thanked the fish for the food it would offer him. He passed his hand over its scales to calm it as it drowned in the air, and I remembered that on that idyllic day, a soft breeze blowing, how lovely and unusual I thought the sentiment that he expressed.
Then it came like a bolt of lightning, shattering my daydream—a sharp pain in my left buttock, as if it were being burned and bitten at the same time. The sudden force of it nearly made my eyes leap from my head. I cried out.
“Can you describe what just happened to you?” asked Anotine.
Tears had formed in the corners of my eyes. “A sharp pain in my rear end,” I yelled.
“Did you experience anything else?” she asked.
“Like what?” I asked, unable to hide my anger.
“The moment, perhaps?” she said.
“It hurt like hell,” I told her, and she jotted all of it down.
“Did you see anything?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Did you feel the presence of the almighty?” she asked.
“If the almighty is a searing pain in the ass, I felt it,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and silently mouthed the words pain in the ass as she wrote them.
I tested the straps to see if I could break free but found them immovable. “What are you doing to me?” I yelled.
“Relax, Cley,” she said. “Now I want you to calculate the sum of 765 and 890.”
I didn’t even get through five plus zero before the next shock blasted me in the right shoulder blade. The torture proceeded in this manner. I cursed and yelled and begged to be released, but she simply smiled and told me always that it was almost over. I don’t recall how many times she pressed the buttons on the black box, but near the end I merely fell into silence. It was then that I actually saw the almighty. The room faded from view, and I had a vision of Below, laughing uncontrollably at me. Through my desperate condition, I wondered if, within the depth of his diseased sleep, the Master knew I was there in his memory.
My return to consciousness was a slow and painful experience, and before I was fully awake, I had determined to leave the floating island and abandon my mission. All I needed to do was let Misrix know by thought that I wanted to return. But when I sat up and opened my eyes, I found that it was night. The spire lamps in the bedroom had been reduced to the glow of a candle again, but I was not on the brown rug. Instead, I was in Anotine’s bed and she was asleep next to me. This night, she lay on her back, and one glance wilted my rage toward her, replacing it with awe.
I lay down and turned onto my side, resting my head on my hand so that I could see her. Through the window came the scent of the night blossoms and the murmur of the ocean. I reached out my free hand and cautiously passed it an inch above her body, tracing the topography of her face and breasts and stomach and thighs. I thought again of Bataldo and how he had danced with his wife without touching by the shores of the inland ocean. I remained in that position for over an hour, trapped in the moment.
11
The next morning I again woke to find Anotine gone. I recovered my clothes from where I had left them the day before in the room at the end of the hall. As I dressed, I stared at the metallic chair and shuddered at the memory of the pain it had inflicted.
A series of tables lined the perimeter of the room in the same manner they had back in the laboratory that Below kept in the ruins of the Well-Built City. Now that I considered it, the room seemed almost a scaled-down version of that place. In keeping with the original, the tables were cluttered with strange-looking equipment, sprouting wires and needlelike appendages. Mirrors, candles, bowls of powder, and huge jars of colored liquid were scattered amidst the collection of exotic hardware. The very thought of how Anotine might make use of these in discovering the present sent me quickly down the hall to the dining room.
There I found, as I knew I would, a breakfast of eggs, sausage, and, to my delight, a steaming cup of shudder. None of this had been there, when, only a few moments earlier, I had passed the room on my way to retrieve my clothes. I smiled at the perfection of how it all looked and smelled as I took a seat. When I brought the cup of shudder to my lips and sipped it, I was swamped by a wave of nostalgia similar to when I had tasted the Rose Ear Sweet two nights earlier. It came to me as I took a bite of the sausage that I had dreamt of this very meal through the night. The implications of this phenomenon abounded, but I had no interest in considering them. I ate, as before, not so much to quell any hunger, but simply to fulfill a mysterious sense of obligation.
When I was finished eating, I pushed the plate away and took the last few sips of shudder. The drink gave me that same rush of energy I had come to rely on back when I was a busy servant of the realm, and the taste made me long for a cigarette. I made a mental note to try to appropriate one from Nunnly at our next encounter. As I was considering how I might approach him on the subject, it came to me that I was wasting valuable time. It took some effort to remember my neighbors in Wenau and the dire predicament they were in. “Don’t forget,” I told myself.
I left the dining room and walked down the hall to the laboratory. Perusing the tables that lined the room, I wondered what mathematical formulas, philosophical secrets, personal memories might be contained in the souls of the objects that lay before me. “This could very well be the chemical code of the antidote,” I whispered as I lifted a gold, three-pronged fork with a diadem at the opposite end of the stem. I put it back down, and reached for a steel ball the size of a fist that perched upon a small stand. Lifting the sphere, I found that, although it appeared solid, it was lighter than a crumpled piece of paper. I decided that it was as good an object for study as anything. Taking it with me, I left the laboratory.
In passing the dining room, I looked in to find that the dishes had vanished, and now only radiant sunlight lay atop the table. Once back in the bedroom, I sat down cross-legged on the brown rug and brought the shiny ball up
close to my eyes. Its smooth surface reflected my face and, with the distortion of its shape, spread my features out, making my nose enormous.
I tried with all my will to see past myself, as if I might find some image beneath my own that would offer a clue to the thing’s essential nature. What I saw were my own eyes, and mirrored in them, twin steel orbs each bearing miniatures of my face. Of course, if I could have seen with the power of a microscope, I would have been witness to the same optical trick ad infinitum. Long after I knew this technique to be useless, I continued with it till my eyes crossed and the squinting gave me a slight headache.
The next procedure I tried was to bring the ball up to my ear. I closed my eyes and listened with the concentration I employed when listening for the weak heartbeat of a newborn child. What came to me were the myriad sounds of the island: the breeze, the distant ocean, the call of some mnemonic bird off in the wood. These gave way to the sound of my own blood pulsing in my temples. I focused so intently that I heard everything but the ball, which revealed itself to be a large marble of complete silence.
I rolled the object around in my hands, rolled it along my forearms and my face. I rested it atop my head, thinking that its symbolic meaning might penetrate my skull through some kind of osmosis. Occasionally, an image would jump into my mind, and I would see the black dog, Wood, or the jagged column that was the remains of the Top of the City, but there was no feeling of certainty accompanying any of these mental pictures. I thought for a moment of Misrix and wondered if I would ever escape the reality of Below’s memory.
I spent a good hour and a half there on the floor of Anotine’s bedroom with the ball, rolling it, dropping it, whispering and shouting at it, tapping it with my knuckle, and banging it against my forehead. My growing frustration finally got the better of me, and I threw it against the wall. In my desperation, I thought this might jolt the meaning out of it, but it didn’t. It merely struck the smooth plaster with a dull thud and fell to roll some way back to me along the floor.