Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  “Limbo.” She seemed to be considering the word. “Do you think someone is also looking for you? If she has not died like everyone else. Do you have a mother? A daughter? A wet nurse?” She asked this with genuine sadness and before I could answer she added, “You mentioned a child. We must find her.”

  “It’s just someone from the painting in my room.”

  “Can I see them?” I felt a flush of anxiety about taking the woman to my room, yet I was disappointed when she added, “I shouldn’t. It’s not right. Will you describe them for me?” I described those of the dead city and the train station and the little girl with two bodies in the background. I included the more recent sketch of the trio and she grew suddenly frightened.

  “We must find her,” she said.

  “The child? It’s just a painting –”

  “We must warn her. We must warn her of what is happening.”

  Her words left me frozen. I had heard this admonition before. Here I must interrupt this conversation to address you directly. I cannot say if the statement had been issued from me to you or the other way around, but I know it had been attached to desperation and panic. When I recovered, I asked her, “What should we warn her of?”

  “They are going to take her away because she is different. She can see things...colours and shapes and ghosts. Monsters hiding beneath bridges and candy houses and flying horses. Yes. And a woman in the water. She has a snake’s body and can fly through the air over a man with chains on his feet. Poor child. We must warn her. Is her foot fixed?”

  I was a bit disappointed. I told her, “I only know this child from the painting.”

  “Then I must do it myself. Will you help me?” Before I could defer she began to explain what we were going to do. I was intrigued; and for the next hour, I guided her around the library. She described the targets her fingers touched and asked me to assess her galvanic responses from her pulse rate. The next day we did the same. She told me that her compassion was nourished by creating direct connections with objects and our exercise was to prevent further erasure; and when we returned to her chair, her fingers softened on my wrist and I realized she had fallen asleep. Her lips parted and I heard a string of snores followed by a gentle gasp, all of which sounded like little secrets to herself so I waited for a while before I left. The next day, she recounted a dream in which children were descending from scorched wombs.

  I began to look forward to meeting her and I imagined us outside the library, perhaps even outside the Compound where I pictured bushy hedges overlooking cobblestone pavements and grassy trails. Eventually, we would wander to a terminal or station and return, both of us separately, to wherever we had come. But she grew quiet when I mentioned this and I felt that she was afraid she would disappear in the sunlight.

  Then one day, a little over a week after our first encounter, I saw her with huge sunglasses instead of her mask. Uncharacteristically, she had on a feathery wool sweater and a weathered grey toque. She seemed upset and I noticed how birdlike and capricious her gestures were. I asked if everything was okay. “I am ready,” she told me, adjusting her sunglasses and holding out her other hand.

  She was extremely nervous and I was afraid she would faint. Outside, I steered her away from the loitering groups and the main buildings – the canteen enclosure, the block of rooms, the chapel, to what seemed, from a distance, a knoll but which I saw was an overgrown cemetery.

  “Where are we now?” she asked. When I mentioned the old cemetery, she added, “Can you look among the tombstones and tell me what you see?”

  “Numbers but no names. Maybe those crumbled away.”

  “So there are no children?”

  “I cannot tell from the numbers.”

  “Numbers,” she repeated slowly, tugging me away from the place. Her steps were as unsteady as when she wore her mask and I was certain that her eyes were closed behind her sunglasses. I also wondered whether her admission of twilight vision was not a cover-up for some kind of blindness. As a means of encouraging her, I said that when we immerse ourselves in nature we soon realize that not everything we see is idyllic. I pointed to blight on a tree, to a tuft of dried grass, to a clearly injured gull hopping around, and as I described each, I explained that when we observe these apparent imperfections we understand that we are part of a broader canvas. Sadness usually comes from the notion that we have been singled out for persecution. Careful observation disproves this, I said. I told her she was not alone. When she asked how I could know all of this with my faulty mind, I tried to explain that it was mostly my autobiographical memory that had been erased. Perhaps I was boasting but my observation unbolted more questions about my long-forgotten occupation. Also, how did I know of these empathetic connections?

  “You can recall every scene until you step into it?” She thought for a while and added, “But how can you truly know anything unless you step into the picture? And what if it changes when you leave?”

  “I can remember dry facts like faces and events and places, but I can never arrange these into any meaningful pattern.” I told her that the fragments of memories I recalled were like dreams that were vivid upon first recall but which quickly receded because – like the events of the dream – they could never be rearranged to represent a real experience. “It’s the same, I think, but I am not certain of anything. Not even of my dreams.”

  “You can still dream?”

  I nodded. She was the first person to whom I had tried to explain my condition and I was a bit excited because listening to myself seemed to better clarify my situation. “I try to stitch together scenes until they make some sense,” I told her. “But even then, I cannot say for sure if they really happened or if I have compromised particular occurrences.” She said nothing for a while and I wished I could go on. Perhaps she did not believe me or, more likely, felt I was like all the other loiterers roaming the Compound. “I want to know more of my prior lives,” I told her. “I know the beginning was far from this place.”

  “How do you know it was far off?”

  In one of my letters, there was this description: Everything is frozen but for the flakes falling outside my window. They fall in dancing patterns and when I close my eyes, I can hear their music: tinny and plaintive and ethereal. I wish there were faces imprinted on each flake so that I could collect them all and form a pastiche of my memories. I told her, “My romantic and childlike view of snow tells me that I am from a place where there is never ice on the ground.”

  “Describe what you mean by romantic.”

  “It’s a way of thinking. Of using the imagination to –”

  “Imagination?” She stopped suddenly.

  “The dreams dancing in our minds. I don’t know how else to describe it. Maybe it’s like looking at that hawk up in the sky and trying to imitate its vision.”

  “Is the bird trying to imitate ours?”

  It was such a childish question, but I glanced up and noticed the circular pattern of the hawk over us. “I think it’s simply curious.”

  She said nothing for a while and I felt she was recollecting her own life. As we walked away from the cemetery, up the hill, her steps, surprisingly, became surer and when we got to the top, I stopped. She took off her sunglasses and her milky eyes swept the scene beneath us. For close to half an hour she said nothing, then she began to describe what she saw, felt and heard. A drizzle resembled a cavalcade of bees. The light units on the abandoned railway track beneath seemed like a pack of wolves. A shifting cloud formation looked like spreading cancerous cells. Marigolds appeared to be pods for the souls of aborted babies. She grew excited and the world she witnessed was both grotesque and wondrous. There were curlicues and whorls of colours and a slow liquefaction of rocks and cobblestones. And babies everywhere. It seemed as if she was peering into a dimension that gathered new contours as it violently reformed itself. She had asked about the imagination but her outpouring suggested no deficit in this respect. Maybe she had been waiting for a moment like
this, I flattered myself. “Leave me here,” she in a surprisingly resolute tone.

  “Are you certain? I have nothing to do otherwise.”

  She stepped away and because we were so close to the edge, I grasped her hand. “Please.” Reluctantly I released my grip and when I walked away, I felt I would never see her again. But she was there the following morning, waiting for me in the library with her sunglasses and her wool sweater. What followed was the same as the previous morning – inquiries about the numbers on the tombstones – and when she asked me to leave her, I said we had already seen everything this angle had to offer and that together we should explore the town outside. I mentioned the first time I peered from the library’s stockroom. I described the play of light from the misaligned lampposts on the sloping roofs, but she pulled her shoulders up and seemed to close herself against what I was saying. I left her hunched up and when I glanced back, I saw a woman who seemed to be gazing at a coming storm.

  The next morning when we left the library, we were shadowed by three men who soon gathered their own followers. I steered her to the main gate but she pulled away. Her hand was trembling. She asked me if I had ever been outside and I described my shifting memory of what I assumed was the town outside. The roofs could be perpendicular, the fretwork beneath the gables might be intricate with intersecting ringlets, the upper walls may very well have been streaked with a pale-blue luminous coat, there could be bales of lustrous hay on the porches and the entire scene could be distorted by funnels of bright red dust. The colour was never the same, I explained.

  I expected disbelief but she seemed enthralled, nodding her head and when the group of men who had been following us came up to listen to my description, she said, “I don’t want to be here.” Yet she resisted as I directed her to the gate, the soles of her feet fairly scraping the ground. I pushed open the huge gate and stepped onto a plank bridge that led to a narrow path bordered with ugly croupe-shaped flowers. Beyond the flowers was an asphalt lot. From a distance, the town appeared to be a mélange of grocer’s shops with blocky lower floors all fixed by narrower upper levels with deep rectangular windows. This was quite different from the drawings on my wall and the tremble of her fingers added to my own nervousness as I reflected on how often I had imagined this view.

  Now it was she who was urging me on and as we walked on, she asked me to describe what I was seeing and I told her that we were now at a promenade with three concrete statues of men partially crouched, their hands in some sort of defensive gesture. One of the figures had toppled and it seemed to be digging into the pale grass. I explained that the street signs were all streaked with blue and, as in the Compound, the missing letters made them impossible to read. I added that the place seemed completely abandoned. “The colours are odd,” I told her. “They seem unstable. Maybe it’s because we have been cooped up in the Compound.” I did not mention the brightness added a good twenty years to her face or that she seemed to grow older with each step we took away from the Compound.

  “The other day you said you had come from far away.” I nodded and she continued, “Was it from Adjacentland?”

  “The place from the book? I wish I knew,” I told her. “For all I know it may not even be a real place.”

  “They brought babies from there and put them into schools and squeezed away their dreams. Poor children. I don’t know where they have all gone.” As we continued walking, she said, “Tell me about the light.” When I did not answer quickly enough she asked me in her slight voice, “Is it green and violet and smashing into each other and forming new colours? Is there a woman in a silk gown detonating some device? She is on the ground and her face is missing. Someone is turning her over with a laced-up boot and her lips are somewhere on the pavement. There are dead babies everywhere.”

  “Are you recalling something that happened to you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it hasn’t happened as yet. Is it real if it has not occurred? Why should one be real and not the other?”

  “Because we remember the things that have passed by. We can only speculate on what is yet to come.”

  “You said you couldn’t remember. Are you not real?” She posed the question as a child. I would have smiled but I felt her fingers tightening around my wrist. “What is that sound?”

  “Perhaps it’s the wind.” I looked up. The clouds were stationary but a hawk was flying overhead. Then I heard a faint buzz.

  “There is someone here. Can you not see him?”

  I glanced around. “The place is completely deserted.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Then you should leave me here.”

  “I can remain for a while.”

  “This is where we always separate. I must go now.”

  “We always separate? Did you say we?”

  “I must find the child and warn her. Thank you for helping me. I must go now. Can I get a hug?” When she embraced me, I tried to feel some substance beneath her clothes, but she felt as slender and lifeless as a mannequin. “What is that you are hiding in your jacket? It hurts.” I withdrew the bamboo boomerang and showed it to her. “Is it a bird?” she asked.

  I had not noticed that one end was frayed like a plumage. “It’s a boomerang.”

  She passed her fingers along the ribs. “Does it always return as a different creature? Or fly in circles and never return?”

  “I never threw it at anything.”

  “Then you should not.” With each pronouncement, she took a step away from me, and as she had done in the library, she seemed to disappear with each step. I called after her and I heard my voice echoing through the empty streets and then a soft tumble of sounds: from one of the upper windows I heard what sounded like a rattling clockwork jingle followed by a child’s laughter and finally a series of flat thuds like bodies falling into each other.

  A wave of sadness fell over me and I could not say whether it was connected to some long-lost memory – a child’s dangerous toy, a mother absconding – or whether it was the notion that I would never see the wet nurse again. I peered over the bushy hedges, all the while shouting to attract her attention in case she was hidden in one of the houses. The temperature outside the Compound was a good five degrees or so colder and I regretted not wearing a thicker coat. There was a strong breeze, too, which kicked up several spirals of dust that smelled of spilled diesel or perhaps machine oil. I put my hands against my nose and continued my search. Yet I arrived once more at the plank bridge even though I assumed I had been running in a straight line. Just before I stepped on the bridge, I had a sense of someone behind me and when I turned, I saw a lanky figure in an overcoat that was blowing upward in the wind. Then the figure was gone.

  I knew it was not the woman, but I recalled that she had mentioned seeing someone in the town. As I ran, the shadow seemed to be moving with me, keeping its distance until I arrived at a street where the buildings, taller and narrower, were so close to the road that tenants on opposite sides could easily carry on a quiet conversation. I glanced up and felt a sudden crush of claustrophobia, as the buildings appeared to be slowly sliding toward each other. Again, I saw the bird and I felt like throwing the boomerang at it. Instead, I stopped, took a deep breath and slowed my pace. I wished I knew the woman’s name and I felt silly to stop every five minutes or so to shout at buildings that seemed completely abandoned. I suppose I was so taken up with my observation of this area I had no idea I had once more arrived at the promenade. I stood there to rest and to puzzle over why, in spite of my trajectory, I was right where I had started.

  When I returned to the Compound’s gate, the group of men who had been following us cleared a path. One of them, a chubby man with a hanging lower lip, said, “You are in big trouble.”

  “Did you see a woman returning through the gate?” I asked him.

  Someone from the crowd shouted, “What woman? Can I have her?”

  “She went out with me.”

  “
Maybe you killed her,” the fat man said.

  “Can I have her?”

  “You must be reported to the Gatekeepers. They are not here today. You are lucky. But only today. Lucky only once.”

  This was the first I could recall ever addressing one of the loitering groups and I tried to control my annoyance. “Look, I don’t have time for this. There was also a figure by the asphalt lot. Did you see anyone?”

  The man who had shouted, stepped forward. Everything about him was grimy but for his hair, neatly oiled and brushed. “Do you know how long I have been here? Make a guess.”

  “I am more concerned with the person outside. There was a woman and I am afraid he may have –”

  “May have what?” the fat man asked. His companions came up closer, surrounding me. “Did you do it again?”

  “Do what?”

  “The same thing.”

  “Would you mind describing what that same thing was?”

  “Why describe it if it’s the same? The description would be the same, too.”

  “The same thing is the same when it is not different.”

  “Everything that is the same is different when it’s not the same.”

  So this is what conversations in this place are like, I thought as I stepped away. “Don’t bother,” I told them. “It was most likely my imagination.”

  They all applauded and grouped into a huddle. Then the fat one said, “How can you tell what occurred after did not happen before?”

  And a man with a smug and almost cherubic look on his small face added, “So it is written and so it is said.” When I walked away, he shouted, “The childkiller has been cancelled. End of text.”

  “Erased.”

  “Everything will be erased.”

  “You, too.”

  When I hurried away I had a sense of someone from the group following me so I circled around the block of containers in which my room was located and walked through the canteen to the other side of the Compound where there was an abandoned sporting field with rusted javelins and iron balls strewn about. I didn’t want anyone from this place to know the location of my room but when I was returning to the container-like cells I stumbled on a figure turning a corner at the same time. He was a severely whiskered man with a face too round for his slim body and he seemed extremely startled at our minor collision. “Were you following me?” I asked.