Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  He remained in that posture for a while. I asked if the song was about himself and he looked up forlornly. And here I completely astonished myself. (This disbelief lingers even now, as I am recording the event.) I walked to the doorway just in case and, keeping a close eye on him, explained that he had, most likely, at that young age formulated performances to reduce his sense of abandonment. Perhaps he had systematically neutralized feelings of attachment, of remorse and empathy. I suggested that while his mother was occupied and he was gazing at the hives, he fantasized about other lives and positions. I asked him if he was familiar with disintegrative shaming and I submitted that his belief in an epidemic of madness was a means of exteriorizing his own malfunction. It was a cry for help from an intelligent man.

  With his hands on his head, he gazed at me with astonishment, but I must admit that I was far more shocked than he was. From where did this fluent knowledge come; from where did the phrases spring? The books I had scanned had helped, certainly, but my smooth assessment was confounding. I pressed on, the urgency in my voice due to my excitement at this flow of information and my fear that it would fade away if I hesitated. I explained the concept of operant conditioning and said that his pretence at being part of some scientific experiment was really a search for symmetry. I ended by telling him, “The most integral law in the universe is that of cause and effect. It is what keeps everything in balance. The universe is constantly rebalancing itself and sometimes we are caught in its oscillations. All we have to do is anticipate the ripples and ride out the waves.” Again, I must stress my astonishment; it seemed for a moment as if Kothar was absent and I was addressing myself. The voice seemed to come from elsewhere and I had a sudden flash of three old men of different shapes lecturing in a room of unstable dimensions.

  In any event, Kothar was not impressed. “I gave you a fair chance,” he said in a regretful voice. “You think I am mad. Unbalanced. A freak pretending to be a man. You are speaking in the same old language. Trying the same old tricks. Hoisting me up and pulling me down. Banning me from the group. Discarding me like a monster.”

  I was disappointed by his reaction. “Listen to me,” I told him. “I am trying to help. I really am.”

  “Kothar knows who he is.” His shoulders slumped. He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. When I did not, he said, “The buried should not be remembered. Ghosts should not walk upright. I have spent the last six years trying to figure it out. Now I know. You taught us to remember and then to forget. You and the managers.”

  “The mangers? Are you talking about the scientists who sent us out to –”

  “You and them both were pretending to help us while all the time sabotaging our progress. We were your golems, given enough life to carry out your biddings. You wanted to see how far we would go. But it did not work. Death came in the way.”

  His last statement seemed familiar somehow. I told him, “I am sorry you have experienced this, Kothar. The person you have mistaken me for seems horrible. What happened to him?”

  “Can I have my locket, please?” When I pointed to the desk, he got up and walked across. “You have managed to escape but be forewarned. The others will come for you.” He took the locket and pushed it in his jacket. “You cannot bring someone to life and cast them aside when their tasks are completed. You cannot spark a fire and simply walk away. Be forewarned. When next we meet, a life will be snuffed out. The ripple you started will never end. Guess where I got that from?” He walked toward me without answering his question. I stepped aside quickly but he opened the door and walked out as if I were not there.

  13 THE OTHER MAN

  After Kothar’s departure, I decided it was no longer safe to sleep on the couch in the lower floor. Kothar had sneaked in too easily and he could well do so once more while I was asleep. I decided I would try to climb one of the rotted stairways to the second floor. The one on the left creaked and shook with each step and halfway up a section of the riser caved away. I held on to the bannister and made my way down. I was extremely careful with the other stairway, testing each board and holding on to the bannister tightly. Eventually I managed to make my way to the top. I walked up and down a few times to know the safe spots.

  There were three doors on the floor and I guessed the door in the middle, which was the biggest, led to the main room. I tested the door on the left and when it opened, I saw a little cot in the centre, and next to it, a tiny table with a water jug. The room was bare and I assumed that articles of small furniture might have been removed. The room on the right was furnished in the same manner but there were shackles hanging from the cot and just before the window was a wheelchair bolted to the floor. The cot was over six feet long and here, too, was the odour of scorched paper. This odour was absent in the main room and when I opened the door, the first thing I noticed was the paraphernalia of photographic equipment – camel-hair brushes, rolls of film, drying clips and a Zenit camera – at the base of an empty cage that hung about four feet from the floor. Behind the cage on the wall was a flashy photograph of a tree with spectacular scarlet flowers each enclosing an assortment of clocks. Turret clocks, pendulum clocks, water clocks and sundials. There were charcoal squiggles at the base of the tree and as I entered the room, I saw that someone had sketched in the outlines of miniature horned men with severed limbs.

  On the other side of the photograph was a closet that occupied almost the entire wall. At the foot of the closet’s sliding door was a pair of fawn balmorals atop a cardboard box. I placed the shoes aside and opened the box. I was surprised to see several novelty items, bagged and itemized. X-ray spectacles, a ventriloquist’s whistle, a bag of desiccated sea horses and a bill for the purchase of a miniature submarine. The previous owner either had a playful side or he had been collecting the items for some purpose. I was certain of this when I noticed a notebook filled with insignias and single capital letters, each enclosed within a different shape. They seemed vaguely familiar and I guessed this was because the insignias seemed based on a lunar calendar. I replaced everything but took the shoes to the bed. The right shoe was stuffed with some paper that I placed in my pocket before testing the pair. They fitted me perfectly and I got up and walked around the room, listening to the light echoes of my footsteps. I noticed that the bedsheet was rumpled and I pulled at the ends and tucked these beneath the mattress. I walked around the room, wearing the previous occupant’s shoes, gazed at his mirror and noted the reflection of his cage and his photograph. I went to the adjoining room with the shoes and watched, through the window, the view outside, the gate and the track that led to it. In the moonlight, the red dust appeared luminous and I wondered how he had managed to live in this forlorn place.

  I guessed from the shoes that he was my size and – judging from his books downstairs – was concerned with the instability of the mind. Certainly, he shared my interest in photography. I returned to the middle room, slipped off his shoes and reclined on his bed. Now that I had some idea of the owner’s possessions, I felt like an intruder in the house of this man who had chosen this desolate spot to carry on his studies. I closed my eyes and I tried to imagine him. In my half-drowsy state, I pictured him to be slim and slightly built. He carried with him a wince that he tried to disguise with a beard, but which was there for all to see in his smallish eyes. Most likely he had developed the habit of making his eyes even smaller, looking away when confronted by others and this aversion, though it had made him seem evasive, even shifty, had granted him the ability to quietly observe peripheral details; details he later patched together to see the real person rather than the figure that had stood before him. Perhaps this, rather than the books he had struggled with over the years, was his true gift. This gift grew over the years and gradually he turned his gaze outward, away from the person once energetic but now presented daily with less of everything.

  I opened my eyes and gazed drowsily at the walls. The house must have been purchased for a nominal fee and the original owner may have assume
d that only a fool would want to move to this condemned town; and he would have been surprised to be met by a man who spoke in careful and considered sentences. The original owner must have left quickly in case the purchaser changed his mind. But the new owner, who had travelled for miles and miles, had found exactly the place he was looking for and he soon set about removing the old furniture and bringing in or building new pieces. This would have taken a month or two and soon he had exactly the house that he needed. He would have walked through the house noting everything in his precise manner; looking not at the age of the fixtures but at their angles and the intersection of their shadows and the way the smell of mahogany was displaced by that of moist oak. He would have passed his fingers over the oak in the manner of a blind man testing for declinations and angles. I wondered if he ever had any visitors, perhaps a colleague who shared his interest. When I reclined on the bed I heard the rustling of the paper I had found in the shoe and placed in my pocket. There were five words that seemed to be hurriedly scrawled on the crumbled paper. Look between the frames. Just before I fell asleep, I thought of the cage and the shackles in the adjoining rooms and I remembered Kothar mistaking me for someone he believed was responsible for his state.

  What I am about to describe has the texture of a dream, but I am not altogether convinced. (Even though it is logical to assume that my reflections of the previous owner of the house had brought it along. In any event, you can judge for yourself.) It began with the shoes still on my feet when I fell asleep. I have the sense of getting up very early in the morning and climbing down the stairs. On the lower floor, I walked from one end of the building to the other trying to see – and feel – it as it had been by the man whose shoes fitted me so perfectly. I checked the doors and windows and when I was sure they were locked, I turned to the recessed bookcase and tried to understand the owner’s interests more precisely. I had left the camera on the desk and I took it with me to the darkroom, sprung the latch and withdrew the film. The counter had indicated that nine shots had been taken. An image began to take shape on the linen paper floating on the tray.

  The appearance of details in a developing negative has an almost ghostlike quality as faces and bodies and background details coalesce and register from the liquid haze; and this is how I felt while I bent over the tray, watching the appearance of a man sitting on a gnarly stool and looking through the back window. There was a book on the table behind him and a half-empty glass. It was a perfectly composed scene and I wondered who had shot the photograph. I fished out the linen paper and I saw that he was staring at his feet and the photograph had been taken in one of the rooms upstairs. I flapped the print a few times and walked up the stairs to the room with the bolted wheelchair. I held the photograph before me while I walked around trying to determine the exact spot the photographer must have stood. I pretended I had a camera in my hand instead of the print.

  This is where it got confusing. With the picture of him in my hand and his shoes on my feet, standing in the same spot as his photographer, we began a “conversation.” First, he introduced himself. He knew too little of his father who disappeared for long periods and too much of his mother, a hypochondriac whom he soon realized had been taking medication prescribed for her absent husband. So, at an early age, he had to take care of his mother and at this early age, too, he developed a narrow hatred for both parents, and sometimes they blurred into a single person. It was easier for him to concentrate his hatred toward an overexacting guest. But he had put all of that aside to work on an important project.

  What project, I asked?

  The solution to the most intractable problem can be found by asking the simplest question possible, he told me. How do you get enemies to agree? How to come to a common understanding in a world torn apart by antagonistic views? How to bring about peace? How to stall the quality we are all born with?

  I told him I did not understand and waited for an explanation. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes and glanced around. While I waited for his reappearance, I studied the photograph from every possible angle but there was nothing new. Then I thought of something. I rushed down the stairs so quickly I stumbled on the last step and fell to the floor. But I picked myself up and hustled to the basement darkroom.

  In this newly developed photograph, he was seated at the kitchen table. There were two books and a bottle on the table. I searched for the books and placed them in the exact spot as in the photograph. I rummaged about in the cupboard until I located an empty bottle of wine and I put it alongside one of his figurines, that of a three-headed baby.

  I closed my eyes and heard him clearing his throat with a sound that felt like hollow air pockets. I felt that what he was about to say was important, but the minute I opened my eyes he disappeared. I apologized and shut my eyes. He thanked me and then began to talk. He explained that the anxiety he had never been able to displace mirrored that of every other afflicted person in one profound way: the inability to answer some central question. The question would vary, he was telling me, but the outcome was always the same in that it pollinated other doubts. The first question, could be: Did my mother hate me? This would lead to the second question: Was it something that I did? Inevitably, he would then wonder whether he could have averted this maternal displeasure by modifying his behaviour, or if this flaw had affected others with whom he came into contact. I heard him leaving but this time I knew what had to be done.

  Five minutes later, I walked to his bookcase, positioning myself from the photograph in my hand. He glanced at me with some irritation as if I had kept him waiting, before he continued. He told me that the bitterness about his being singled out for persecution had voided all his assurances and allegiances. I heard him saying: One central question with no easy answers. Just one. And the misery begins. He lowered his head. But you know all of this already. I am saying nothing new.

  I told him I was happy he had decided to reveal himself. He took his time to reply. He said when a person lives alone for too long, he ceases to exist. He must have seen my skepticism because he immediately added that it is only our interaction with others that gives us a being. This seemed quite silly, this view that we are shaped wholly by the judgments of other people as if we are nothing but hollow men and women waiting for life and I wondered if he had stated this simply to examine my reaction. I was certain of this when he gave me the example of someone living in complete isolation, such as man marooned on a deserted island, slowly losing whatever personality he possessed. Vanishing in instalments, he said with a muted sadness. This sounded familiar, but I said nothing. For a while, he, too, was silent and I felt that he had regretted his talkativeness for he was undoubtedly a man accustomed to quietness. I decided to give him some time alone so I went into the kitchen and made myself a cup of tea.

  I returned with my cinnamon tea and settled onto his couch with one of his books. I saw him, hands folded against his back, staring at the book from the photograph, The Handbook of Alienism. I apologized for rummaging through his bookcase and assured him I would soon replace the books I had taken out to their proper positions. I asked if the book he was reading was any good. After a brief pause, he told me that although it had been written three and a half centuries earlier, its contents bore the same relevance as it did then. I assumed that he was complimenting the author, but he said that years from now people would look back on this period as a continuation of the Dark Ages. All we have accomplished is to modify the nature of the restriction by substituting physical restraints with pharmaceutical immobilization. Treating a patient is now like putting him in a car without brakes. Should he stop by crashing against the tree, the ditch, the hydrant, the group of children or should he continue speeding down the road in the hope that some more amenable barrier presents itself? We are the modern diviners, the soothsayers, apothecaries, thaumaturgists. Some might call us charlatans, too, and they would be half right because we are always operating in the dark. His voice was controlled by a new eloquence and I felt that he
had waited a long time to utter these words. Our profession, he added, can never be clearly defined because we constantly nibble at the edges of other disciplines. I saw frown lines on his forehead and a cynical twist to his lips. He waited until I was finished to tell me that he drew his diagnoses from a meticulous observation of human nature rather than from some moth-eaten prescription. I asked him why he had chosen to live alone in this house in an otherworldly setting.

  I reminded him that he had mentioned questions but had provided no answers. I said that I felt I knew him but there was a barrier preventing a fuller understanding.

  There had been a misfortune. He said the word gently as if it was something soft and unformed.

  What type of misfortune? I asked.

  The usual kind. The kind that time always brings about.

  I noted the minute wince to his lips; the hint of regret and pain. He turned a page in the book and told me that following a period of complete numbness he began to live each day in expectation of the following. He could not wait for the day to be squeezed out to make way for the next. So I was always waiting, he told me. Waiting for what surely must be better, improved days. Sometimes, I skipped over a day or two or a month, or years, even, and then I saw myself as an old man waiting for death. To see myself like this, like the people who lay on my couch was unbearable because I knew the outcome. I had seen it a hundred times. He was glancing at me in a sideways manner as if he was trying to come up with an answer to the questions on my mind: What was the cause of the misfortune and how had he been affected?

  I watched the veins in his hands seeming to shift position. He uttered a phrase: The passing of smaller things. He then spoke of his inability to trace fragrances to their sources. No longer feeling the tingle from running his fingers along the grain of an oak table. Looking at a photograph and not being able to separate appreciation from acceptance. Smaller things, he repeated. But they began to add up. I know you want something impressive here. Like a suicide. A striking devastation. But you will be disappointed. I am my own man.