The doorway. The smile. Her hand. The kiss. Her skin, smelling of seabreeze and almonds. I do not search, now, for further memories of this woman. Her face is lost beneath her mask, beneath the screen of aristocrats’ gossip and nightmares. I have tried before to find her and only failed. Now, this is enough. I let it be enough.
Around me, what is left of the city folds in on itself. Buttresses extend to brace only air. Fences cage collapsing homes. Lamp posts stretch like skinny arms so high above the sidewalks that their light dilutes before it reaches the ground. Tonight I will take on more memories still—more, perhaps, than I can stand.
Again and again I return: doorway, smile, hand, kiss.
I have never known religion, but the rhythm becomes a kind of prayer. That this memory will rise to the conscious mind of at least one person who drinks my blood. That it, though it will be buried, will bloom.
I keep this hope at the forefront of my mind and close my eyes and walk on, no less lonely in this ingrown city.
When I arrive at the Rain Dog, Arras is polishing the counter. There is already a glass of milk waiting for me, which clears the salty threads of blood from my throat.
“Rough this time?” she asks.
“Rough every time.”
The tavern is thus far untouched by the city’s plague. Arras pours another glass, and I drain it too. I look to the darkened back of the tavern and see that there are already three people waiting near my usual table. There will be more soon.
“Who are they?”
Arras points. “She was displaced by the wars out west. The tall one was kicked out of the writers’ guild for indecency. And the pale one is a royal plumber.”
I slide her the gold coin, a stilled flame on the polished bar. Enough money to feed someone for a year. Arras spirits it away, replaces it with ten stacks of ten silver coins. I pass her one for the milk and she waves it away. I know better, by now, than to argue.
“Themis,” she says. “Are you sure you want this?” She doesn’t know why I’ve requested that she find so many people for today’s session—usually two or three leave me full of cold light and reeling, losing track of the king’s memories and everything else. But this is how it has to be.
I smile and hope it’s not too disconcerting. “A mnemosyne wants nothing but to serve.” I bow so that I needn’t see her frown.
My table is set with jars of thyme, coriander, salt, and aqua vitae. There is a candle and matches. Syringe, needles, vials. The method for treating blood is meant to be secret, but this, too, is a common thread across my mnemosyne memories.
I mix, I heat. On the floor is a cool jug of milk; I catch Arras’s eye, mouth a silent thanks.
One by one people sit before me. I take their blood, treat and drink it.I ask for their names and details of their lives and slide five silver pieces to them as payment. The plumber is particularly interesting to speak with. It seems the palace pipes have sprouted new pathways that spill sewage into a duke’s garden. I laugh, even as the familiar cold of new memories seethes through me.
I take in the deaths of beloved children; the losses of cherished homes. I see old lovers say things they wish they could take back. I see dancing children splash through the city’s puddle-pocked streets; smell fresh roasted corn from the market. I let all these blot out the king’s lusts and tantrums. Obscure his petty, miserable life. Whoever next drinks my blood will know that the dying words of a washerwoman’s grandmother were “God, isn’t this boring then?” They will know the names for different wrenches, the contours of a child’s ugly drawings, the rhymes of forbidden songs.
People come to me and tell me of things they’re proud of: the most elegant chair they ever made; a love poem they wrote for their wife; how clean they keep their home. I do not tell them that I have no control over which particular memories last; I hope they will forgive me that. All that matters is that something lasts—something more than the kingdom’s wretched memory.
Each new dose leaves me shivering and gasping. After each, I take a gulp of milk. After each, I think: doorway, smile, kiss. Fox mask. Laughter. Her hand in mine.
(I know as much of memory as anyone. I know that to remember is to corrupt, to rewrite. Whatever truth is hidden in this memory, I move further from it every time it repeats. I do not care. It is not truth I’m after.)
I steel myself. My legs shake. More people come. A violist whose wrists were broken by the king’s guards; he hums some of a concerto he’s written that he will never play again. A woman with a sick daughter, who needs the coin. A boy no older than twelve, whose memories are full of delight in the taste of fresh apples, in the miraculous change of leaves from green to red. These are wondrous as the northern auroras.
By the time I have run through my funds, the tavern is loud and full. I lean on the counter woozily and talk with Arras. She helps keep me in the present.
I do not let on what little time I have left. I do not feel good about this—that I will leave without saying goodbye. But what could I say?
Even so, perhaps she can tell. Perhaps I am not the first of my kind who has come through the Rain Dog.
“You should run,” she says. She knows that I cannot; that I am followed everywhere I go.
“What about you?” I say. “Surely one of the northern cities has need of another bar.”
“With the way northerners drink?” Arras snorts. “I could retire within the year.”
“So why stay?”
“It’s home. Even if it’s dying. You think other cities don’t have their problems?” Both excuses ring hollow.
I met Arras when the city was still stable. Overwhelmed by the memories of some long-gone high-ranking soldier, I had fallen into the gutter. Shivering, vomiting blood. (This did nothing to purge the memories, already lodged inside me.) Arras found me, cleaned me up. She suggested how I might counterbalance, might rally against the memories I was forced to carry, might preserve this world as it was—ordinary, wonderful. I think of her hands against me, the warm bath in her rooms, the softness of her towels. This memory is mine alone.
I watch the people whose memories I now share, their bodies integrated into the crowd. They laugh and dance, spinning beneath low lights to the sounds of mandolins. I wish I had something more to give them; wish I could help them flee the city in more than mere memory.
Would they, though? They, too, are attached by memory. The streets they ran through in childhood games. The eaves they made their livings under. The rooms where their children were birthed and their parents breathed their last breaths. The doorways that sheltered their secret kisses.
And perhaps the city will survive. Maybe whatever drives its growth will stop. Maybe the king’s magisters will lift the palace, and all the court will be crushed under its own weight. Anything might happen.
I take Arras’s hand in mine and spin her onto the open floor. We hang onto each other, stabilized against our own centripetal force. Swinging and twirling and kicking through a dance that is a hundred dances, a hundred lives lived and died before any person here was born.
Tomorrow, or the next day, I will die. But for a moment, that does not matter. For a moment, all those lives, all of the wretched false dreaming I have ever known, fades. This is a permanent thing. A still point in the unboundaried world. Arras is here, her hands in mine, eyes bewildered and full of joy—and mine, I think are the same.
I watch the skirts swirl and legs weave about each other. The familiar rhythm of images matches the steps of their waltz: doorway-smile-kiss, doorway-smile-kiss. This will live on. This and more.
© Copyright 2020 Jeremy Packert Burke
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Jeremy Packert Burke - [BCS311 S02] Page 2
