The Beautiful Fall

by Hugh Breakey

  My concern was something else again. It hadn’t taken much fooling around with the little tiles to see the strange beauty they had when they were falling. With forethought, it was possible to really choreograph things, to have the cascading dominoes fall in unison, or chase each other playfully or race towards each other. The letter had never mentioned the beauty in the work, but it was that feeling of creation, almost art, that had driven me each day.

  And now it might not be finished in time and the thought was intolerable. If the fall was to happen as I’d designed it, every part had to be finished. All of it. Otherwise it would be like a classical sculpture with rough, unfinished patches all over it. Like trying to dance when the music keeps cutting out.

  I would not let that happen. Come what may, I would get this thing done, and my new self would see the final fall exactly as I’d created it.

  Time to get back to work. First things first, though. There were still some unopened domino cartons stacked against the kitchen wall. On top of them were the two open cartons I used to store my records and my mementoes. I wrote down the date on the business card Julie had given me—Tuesday 13 September. Day 12—and added it to the records box.

  I put the groceries away, set my shoulders, gritted my teeth, and strode into the livingroom. I’d learnt from previous small accidents that although it was tempting to begin with the easiest areas—fix as much of the damage as fast as possible—the better strategy was to start at the hardest spots, in the corners.

  That was why I’d placed stepping stones, flat heavy circles of wood the size of my feet, in between the domino runs. It still took balance and flexibility to get to the corners, but the morning stretches paid off as I teetered and loomed and held myself suspended over the delicate work underneath me.

  After about twenty minutes I looked around. Before last night’s accident, I’d been enthusiastic, charging ahead of schedule: closing in on a goal of fifty thousand.

  Now I was way behind. Working at top speed, I could lay down about a thousand dominoes every hour and a half. On a rough survey the accident had cost me more than three days’ work—time I didn’t have unless I put in longer days. But I’d already been planning to work seven and a half hours on the project each day, so the disaster meant that—

  I quashed the line of thought. Better to wait and see what it looked like this evening.

  At noon I sat cross-legged in the middle of the livingroom, ate a sandwich and planned the rest of the rebuild. The good news was that rebuilding was faster than building. If I could get my speed up towards one thousand per hour, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad…

  My thoughts drifted to Mr Lester with a sense of regret. Seeing him last week, I hadn’t processed that it was for the last time. He was the closest thing I had to a friend, the only person in my life to tell me I looked too pale, that I should go outside and get some sun. By the time he returned from his holidays all my memories of him would be gone, and only my future self would be here to greet him. It seemed a shame.

  Still, I probably should be pleased he was away. Keep to yourself to keep your self, after all. My past self had been so insistent about the importance of being on my own that the letter put a positive spin on telling me that I had no family still living. Apparently my parents had died in an accident years ago. Given that the only memories that survived the forgetting were a handful of happy ones from childhood, the news had been hard to take.

  But the letter said it was a good thing. In those first moments after the forgetting even parents—maybe particularly parents—could not be trusted. No way they would miss the opportunity to make some improvements. To leave out all the past problems and mistakes that made me who I was. And in the end, I’d be remade into something new. Something I had no control or choice over. Solitude was my best defence. Which was presumably also why I’d been left with no television, radio or internet.

  If all that was true of parents, it was probably a bit true of Mr Lester as well. Maybe it was no bad thing he’d be in the middle of the ocean when the forgetting struck. But it was hard to feel thankful. He’d witnessed the whole domino process from its humblest beginnings. He would have commiserated with me about yesterday’s disaster; unlike Julie, he would have been able to see what I’d lost. I sighed and finished the sandwich, and there was no excuse not to return to the work.

  It was frustratingly slow. As the late afternoon sun began to shine through the kitchen windows, I could feel my concentration flagging. My back and thighs ached and I knew this was when mistakes could happen. But I pushed on, setting to work on another line of fallen dominoes.

  Resentment gnawed at me. The rebuilding wasn’t satisfying in the same way as new construction. It lacked any sense of breaking new ground. Actually, it was worse than that. Once it was done, the work became invisible. No one looking at the completed product could know its history, the sweat and toil of failures overcome. You had to know the history to see the person behind the work. Even the delivery person would know what had happened here—perhaps when she next arrived, Julie would mention how far I’d come in putting them all up again. Then in twelve days only she would know the history that I had forgotten. A complete stranger.

  The whole point of the dominoes was to show my history. To be my history: a baton held out to me by my past self and ultimately passed on to the future’s waiting grasp.

  Rebuilding—work that papered over a crack in history as if it never happened—seemed wrong. The dominoes fell, or they didn’t. Either way they couldn’t communicate the full story of what had happened and what I’d done. Taking the trials and pitfalls into the future required the very thing I didn’t have. Memory.

  The idea hit me with the shock of the obvious. I could write it down. A history. Not just the emergency note that I carried with me everywhere. I was talking about memory: a journal recording my final twelve days.

  My heart thumped at the idea. I would need to buy a new notebook. My telephone notepad wouldn’t cut it. The corner store had a stationery shelf with nice ball-point pens and—I felt certain of it—hardcover notebooks. Perhaps a little fancier than I needed, but probably still within my budget.

  Once the idea took hold, there was no stopping it. The dominoes were done for the day anyway. If I kept pushing on, I’d probably just make another mistake and be back where I started.

  I rubbed my hands together with new-found resolve.

  Any trip outside—no matter how brief—required preparation. While there were good reasons to expect the forgetting to follow the regular path it had tracked so far—and so strike in precisely twelve days’ time—there was no guarantee. I’d phoned Doctor Varma in my first week, and she’d stressed the imprudence of expecting the condition to follow a neat timetable. So I needed to be prepared, with enough information to get me back home and safe. I gathered together the necessary equipment and stuffed it into my backpack. Keys, wallet, map, letter.

  The door to my apartment sported two locks, an ordinary old door lock and a shiny new deadlock. Probably my past self had added the new one in the run-up to the last forgetting. He’d left the key in the envelope with the letter—making sure I couldn’t venture outside without reading its contents and discovering why leaving might be such a bad idea.

  Deep breath. It must be a few weeks since I’d been out. I swallowed, turned the key and stepped through the doorway.

  Outside, tall buildings and high ground blocked the setting sun. The yellow streetlights were beginning to come on as dusk set in. The evening air smelled fresh and alive, a warm breeze gusting through the wide streets. The weather felt hotter than I remembered. My apartment had heating and air-con, making me oblivious to the changing seasons. The last time I’d been out there had been a breath of chill in the air, but no more. The world had changed.

  The corner store turned out to stock a suitable kind of notebook at a very reasonable price—just $4.95, plus a dollar for the pen. I splurged on a meat pie and can of soft drink and sat at one
of the little tables outside the shop. To any passer-by I would have looked completely normal. Just a guy grabbing a quick snack from the local store.

  Those who did pass were mostly commuters heading home. I was connected to them in a way, though they could never know. When I’d asked Doctor Varma on the phone about where the money from my pension came from, I heard a shrug in her voice. ‘The government,’ she said. ‘Taxpayers.’ She seemed amused. ‘You want to do the right thing by all those taxpayers? Keep your good self out of an institution. Hospital beds cost more in a day than your pension does in a month.’ Still, I was grateful to the faceless crowds. They were paying for my sickness and would continue until it finally disappeared which, the doctor thought, might be years.

  By the time I got back home it was almost seven o’clock but the last of the orange light still tinged the western sky. The days had grown longer as well as hotter. Once inside, I sat down at the kitchen table, took up the pen, and opened the book to its first page. Clean white paper. Thin blue lines.

  I would make a journal entry for each of my last twelve days.

  A memory bubbled up in my mind. Like all my surviving memories, it was buried so far back in childhood that my condition couldn’t dislodge it. In my grade four classroom, a teacher who then seemed impossibly ancient asked the class to name the single book we would take to a desert island. A forest of hands; all sorts of titles called out. A quick-witted girl had won the day by suggesting a book on how to survive on a desert island.

  But it had taken me all this time to see there was only ever one answer.

  What book do you take to a desert island?

  A blank one. And a pen.

  At 6.38 p.m. on 13 September, I wrote four short words—and memory began.

  Day Eleven

  The morning alarm punched me out of bed. Wednesday. Nothing special about it to anyone looking on but today, behind every breath, minding every misstep, was the journal. Now I had a way for memories to leapfrog the forgetting, every moment seemed to have new meaning.

  TODAY, I could live and learn.

  Wearing just pyjama shorts, I threw myself into my morning exercises, warming up my muscles in the air-conditioning. Until yesterday the exercises had seemed my best way of impacting on my future self. The forgetting might destroy all my memories, but it could not touch flesh and bone, tendon and muscle. And tendon could be stretched. Muscle could be built. The exercises I did now could reach through the forgetting into the future me.

  Working out the exercises had actually been a lot of fun. The letter had only briefly referred to doing ‘morning exercises’. With no gear or equipment in the flat, it was left to me to get more detailed information from my body itself. Across the mornings of the first fortnight, I felt my way to each new stretch or strengthening exercise: push-ups (palms and knuckles), planks (side and standard), squats, crunches, lunges. Then the cardio: star jumps, burpees. And on it went. Somehow, my body knew what came next, and how it should be done. Each day I teased out a new part of the morning routine, like a musician whose fingers remember the notes of a song the conscious mind has forgotten. Whose fingers want to remember—a will to move burned into flesh and nerve itself.

  Chin-ups were the last exercise I uncovered, almost a month later than the others. That morning, exercises complete, I was heading into the bedroom when I reached up to the architraves above the doorway. There was no thought involved. It was as if a puppeteer above me tugged invisible strings running to my wrists. My biceps clenched and up I went—to come face to face with tangible evidence of my past self’s exercising. Dust and grime lined the top of the architrave. But there were two patches where the dirt was light, recent: right where my hands were. History might be hidden from my mind, but evidence was everywhere, if you only knew where to look.

  I could sense that history now, as my muscles warmed into the movement, a feeling of familiarity taking hold, my body starting to find its rhythm. I pushed through each of the reps in turn, and then cycled through them again, before turning, breathless and sweating, to the stretches. In what it could do, and what it couldn’t do, my body held as many clues as a crime scene. And not just the body, but the mind as well. There were also hints of past history in the words I knew. I could name all the muscle groups as I stretched them, one by one: quads, traps, glutes, lats, hammies, adductors and the rest. Who would know such terms? Everyone? No one? Just people like me?

  And who might they be?

  Done at last, I hit the shower. My body tingled from the exercise and the stretching and the shower, and I felt ready to face the challenge I’d avoided yesterday. It was time to crunch the numbers, to find out how far Monday’s accident had set back the dominoes task. Maybe the numbers would be awful. But at least today I had the journal. By writing it all down and passing it on, it felt as if something positive might come out of it. As if I had a chance, for once, of learning from my mistakes.

  Eating my cornflakes at the kitchen table, I braced myself and started the calculations.

  Monday: Day 13. Early evening, and everything was on track. Around forty-seven thousand dominoes—well over half the total—were in their places. Eight of the seventeen platforms were up, along with their interconnecting bridges. That was a real achievement: putting up the platforms took a lot of time.

  Then the accident. Almost half of the total floor dominoes were lost: something in the order of fifteen thousand fallen. Days of work gone in seconds. Somehow I had to cram the necessary work into my remaining hours. Yesterday had shown that rebuilding dominoes was faster than laying them from scratch, but I’d still have to work nine hours a day for the next eleven days. I didn’t know if a nine-hour day was possible. If my concentration flagged near the day’s end—as it had on Monday—then the final hours of work weren’t merely ineffective, they were dangerous.

  Still, I could only do what I could do. Sitting here feeling daunted wouldn’t help. I squared my shoulders and strode into the livingroom. The trick would be in dividing the mammoth project into smaller, more manageable sections.

  In retrospect, if I’d started full-time work earlier, it would have left more breathing space for the inevitable setbacks. But it had taken a lot of preliminary work to build up skill in laying the dominoes, and to get the placement design properly sorted out.

  And anyway, part of me was excited that the project was coming down to the wire. The idea that I’d still be working feverishly on Day Zero as the final moment approached, racing against time to see the last tile put in place. What else would there be to do on that day but while away the dwindling hours, waiting for the end? I might be devastated—furious—at the prospect of failing to achieve the one task set down for me, but at least I wouldn’t have time to myself at the end, alone with my thoughts.

  I snapped together another row of dominoes, my hands moving faster, the dominoes almost leaping to attention in my fingers.

  The corner was done: great. I moved to a more central area. Stopped short.

  Here was the source of Monday’s collapse: the intricate pattern with the whorls that made it impossible to prevent wholesale collapse once a single domino fell. I could redesign the whole section, but the spiral pattern was the centrepiece—it controlled the timing of the entire fall. Tearing it out would be like ripping its heart out. I gritted my teeth and began rebuilding, reaching out to scoop up one of the spiral arms.

  And my fingers bumped a standing domino.

  My breath stuck in my throat. As if moving in slow motion, the tile tilted, then wobbled. My hands were full of the dominoes I’d just picked up and there was nothing I could do as it toppled, finally, and fell into its neighbour and…

  Nothing happened.

  Miraculously, the neighbouring tile stood firm. The curve of the dominoes was at its tightest near the spiral’s centre. The angle, combined with the first domino’s tentative fall, saw it stand firm. Moving as if handling crystal, not daring to breathe, I reached out to the fallen piece and lifted it
to safety.

  Okay.

  Breath rushed back into my lungs. I backed away to the central path and reached down to touch my toes, fingers, knuckles, palms to the floor. Gradually the stretch began to release the surge of panic. Disaster averted.

  Still, it was a warning: something had to give. I couldn’t work fast on complex patterns without an element of risk, but I couldn’t afford risk. Julie’s words echoed in my mind: ‘You need a way of containing the damage. Some kind of barrier.’ She’d only looked at the wreckage for a minute, but she’d nailed it. I looked around the room for inspiration. Living such a spartan existence meant there wasn’t much spare stuff lying around the apartment, just the store of plastic bags from my deliveries and the packaging from the dominoes: a dozen or so empty cardboard cartons.

  I peered at them.

  Yes. The cardboard was sturdy, but thin enough to slip between the existing gaps in the dominoes. I went to work with a box cutter until I had a pile of rectangular barriers and then, one by one, the barriers went in. Slowly, carefully; until I’d imposed a strange cardboard grid over the whorls and curves of the standing dominoes. Then I got back to the real work. By the time I turned to lunch, the rebuilding was going quicker than ever and it was clear that laying the barriers had been time well spent.

  I got the tomato, cheese and ham out of the fridge, reached for a new loaf of sliced multigrain—and found that what I had was raisin bread. All three of the loaves Julie had delivered, enough to last me the week, were the same.

  The frustrating thing about these mistakes was that my order never changed. Like everything else in my life—rent, electricity, the postal service—the grocery order had been set up by my predecessor, and was paid automatically out of my account. As far as possible I’d tried to keep things as he’d left them, to feel some continuity with my past. It was only a little thing. But little things were all I had.