Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  “I am a breatharian,” Tiffin said seriously. “I get my energy from inhaling nutritional microbes and from the morning sun. Food is an inconvenience I avoid at all cost.” As he continued, it seemed that not only did he engage in extremely prolonged bouts of absolute fasting but also that each period brought about some predetermined result. It was not easy to follow his story because he spoke in a nasal manner with an indeterminate accent, but I gathered that he was matching the dates of his fasts with the outset of droughts and famines and pandemics and other calamities, each occurring in some faraway place he called Adjacentland.

  “That is an amazing gift you possess, my friend,” Balzac said, but looking at me rather than at Tiffin.

  “I thought you were the chef,” I told him.

  “We are mortal enemies.”

  “So you have an active role in the undertaking?”

  “We are all active, my friend,” Balzac said. The Stenographer began to swish and Balzac translated, “Once, we were asleep and dreaming of missions past and present but now that we are awakened, we shall plunge headlong into those multiple timelines and do battle with the old creaking gods.”

  At this point, I felt I had to reveal my memory issues. Everyone was talking about a film in which I was either the director or the scriptwriter. Moreover, they seemed wound up from waiting and rehearsing. Perhaps they were sleep-deprived and delusional. During my brief conversation with the woman wearing a medallion necklace I had spoken about actors sometimes falling so deeply into their roles, they carried the traits of their characters into their everyday lives, but this situation seemed an extreme form of mimicry. I was about to reveal my memory situation when the Stenographer began to swish. Before Balzac could offer a “translation,” I asked the pair, “Is there anyone here who might have some idea of how we are going to proceed with the shoot?”

  Both fell silent and gazed at me as if I had committed some transgression. Then Balzac said, “It would be remiss of me if I do not point out that you have everything set out in the tome that you refuse to share with anyone else. I should also hasten to add that parables become stale and mouldy when they are not passed on.” The Stenographer did some swishing and Balzac nodded. “My esteemed colleague has advised that parables are the forte of a man who you have not yet met.” The Stenographer swished once more and Balzac added, “He goes by many names. Inquisitor. Fakir. Paladin.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about but I decided to follow the pair in the hope I would eventually meet someone with a better grasp of the plot. So once more, I followed them. We came to a carriage with the curtains drawn so it took a while before I noticed a figure hunched in the corner. He seemed quite lanky and he was wearing some sort of priest’s frock, which was odd, as on his head was a cap turned to the side. He seemed a bit familiar, although I could not determine if this was because of his features or his garments. Before Balzac had the chance to offer an introduction, the man said, “Have you ever studied a man without faith, brethren?”

  I told the man, “My friends here believe you may have some idea as to how we can proceed with our undertaking.”

  He reached into his frock and brought up a torn-off page. He held it up before him and asked, “Tell me what you see?” There was a drawing of some type of vessel but the lines were blistered with dots and crackles.

  I took the page. “It looks like a ship.”

  Balzac gasped as the man said to me, “It’s an ark powered by faith and navigated by devotion.”

  I recalled my early suspicion that the storyboard pointed to some cataclysmic event and I reached into my jacket for the ledger. I flipped through the pages, searching for an equivalent illustration. The man got up and I saw that his head almost touched the top of the carriage. In the gloom, his eyes appeared sunken and I saw there were decals stuck on his cap. He stretched his hand, but I remembered Balzac’s odd possessiveness about the ledger and I told him, “I will keep this for the time being, if you don’t mind.” I felt Balzac’s breath on my shoulder and quickly pocketed the ledger. Once more, I looked at the man’s torn-off page. “Is this how it’s going to end?”

  “It will end as it began,” he said, and I noticed his voice had an almost musical timbre. “Lo, though the heavens open up and the sky bleeds, the sanctified shall yet find refuge. They shall be shepherded into the waiting zones with the glorious promise their lives will be returned. They shall be born and born anew. The others can expect nothing for they are nothing.” I assumed this was a line from the film and I hoped it was you, not I, who had written this stilted dialogue. “I walk the land when there is trouble afoot. I right the wrongs.” Just then, there was a low growl from the back of the carriage and the Stenographer tightened his hold on Balzac. “Dog dreams,” the Inquisitor said. “They are more pernicious than anything you can imagine.”

  “I think we should leave now,” I said. “I should find a suitable carriage in which to rest.” I walked away before Balzac could offer any suggestions. As I walked on, I turned to see Balzac and his little companion watching from the tracks so I skipped across to the third line of carriages. Nine carriages down, I located an unlocked door.

  16 THE MAN IN THE CARRIAGE

  I locked the door, took off my jacket, hung it on the adjoining seat and stretched out with the ledger in my hands. I hoped that a good night’s rest finally might cajole my memory. It was too dark to properly see the storyboard, but I was familiar with the illustrations, anyway. I flipped through the pages and tried to establish some connection between the drawings and my conversations earlier in the day.

  I hoped to recall something of my prior association with this dystopian fantasy because – even with my faulty memory – I felt no connection with this type of story. Nevertheless, I attempted to come up with some semblance of a plot. I recalled Balzac’s chatter about a team of super beings or acolytes or some nonsense and I felt that Kurt, the hero who had lately languished, had been summoned with the others for a mission that would imbue them once more with a sense of purpose. But what was this mission and what were the obstacles in the way? Based on my interaction with the men and women in the carriage it possibly involved an ark and a cataclysmic flood and alternate universes and battle between gods. Was there anything else? Maybe a story concerning a brute with pretensions of acuity. It seemed there were several broad plot outlines and I was supposed to either fill in the inciting events and the resolutions or, more onerously, tie everything together. You will forgive me for believing that you wisely absconded after saddling me with this half-baked script that possesses neither instigatory event, motivation, nor resolution. It was late in the night when I closed the ledger and placed it beneath the seat’s cushion.

  I fell asleep almost immediately but my dreams were not of parallel universes and superpowered teams, but of a wide-open field. The ground was sandy and littered with bleached, pliant bones. When I looked down, I saw water swirling around my ankles and the bones took life and swam away. In the distance, I could hear a rising drumbeat as if opposing armies were assembling in formation. When I stopped to listen, the drums seemed closer and the beats were coming from all directions. I panicked and tried to escape but the water had risen and the waves were now around my chest. I saw the bones were converging around me and through the swirling water, in the distance, I saw hundreds of soldiers from opposing armies advancing toward each other. Their modes of transport were antiquated chariots and horses and elephants, and as they got closer, they also appeared to soar upward. Maces and spears and arrows cleaved the air, some dropping just beyond me.

  I tried to swim away but the current carried me closer to the battle. I was on my back, floating on the red water. The battle was now in the air and the opposing armies were arranged in constantly shifting formations that resembled eagles, turtles and wheels. From beneath, it was a wonderful spectacle, almost a dance, and I soon forgot about the blazing arrows dropping all around my body. Then the bodies began to fall from the sky, flaming downwa
rd. One by one, they fell and those that seemed to see what was happening, tried to gain altitude by flying upward but they, too, crashed down. Soon the sky was empty and I felt the hands of the fallen fighters holding on to my limbs, dragging me down.

  I awoke in a panic. I had no doubt that my nightmare had been elicited by my perusal of the storyboard. I was sweating in the enclosed carriage and I got up and opened the door. The night air was cool and refreshing and at this late hour, I knew there would be little possibility of meeting anyone, so I stepped between the tracks. In the moonlight, the abandoned carriages looked like hulking metallic monsters. I smiled at the thought; this refreshing night stroll was a good respite after my conversations with a film crew who had waited too long and practised too much. I recalled your instructions that they needed firm directions and I felt unexpectedly sorry for them. They really appeared to be awaiting some guidance as to how to proceed. Yet they appeared unpredictable and altogether dangerous. My limited memory is a big handicap, as you might well imagine, but I have decided, from my interactions with the actors, that men and women with a faulty or incomplete vision of their roles and propelled only by a vague sense of some remote mission, could either relapse into worthlessness or become ticking bombs. While I was preoccupied with this thought, I saw a figure running some distance before me. Too big to be an animal and too small to be an adult. But what would a child be doing all alone in the night? Could he or she be lost and looking for someone, as I myself had done the first week in this terminal? I followed the figure until it slipped into a carriage.

  When I went into the carriage, I saw it was a smoker and empty but for a couple dozen books scattered around an iron safe with a knuckle-shaped handle. I looked through the windows for the child and I was about to step outside when my eye caught the safe’s unusual handle, a closed fist. I kneeled before it, turned and pulled open the heavy door. Inside, I saw an assortment of 8 mm film reels and a projector. You will understand that I was extremely excited with this discovery and as I hauled out the projector and attached one of the reels, I began to suspect that this old terminal likely functioned as some sort of studio. Why hadn’t I thought of this earlier? It made sense, with the storyboard left in my care and a bunch of disoriented actors wandering around and no one else in sight. I held the hope that the stock of old films might give me some idea of the kind of movies made in the studio and I was a bit disappointed when the projector failed to turn on, either from a wasted battery or because it needed cleaning. I poked around the pile of old books to see if there was a spare battery pack or perhaps a missing part of the projector.

  I was soon diverted by the books themselves, which all bore interesting titles, but when I turned the pages, I found that torn-off chapters had been placed haphazardly into most of the books. They were all similarly sabotaged and I wondered who would have done this. Books detailing medical experiments shifted into fairy tales and romance novels into religious tracts. One of the books, slimmer than the others, bore the interesting title The Miserly Mind. The early section was missing and the first page I read described a boy whose sister had died when she was nine years old. In short order, his father disappeared and his mother committed suicide. The boy was adopted by a man who was not named but signalled by a hyphen. This – was an astronomer of some kind and he seemed quite cruel as he explained to the boy that the deaths of both his sister and mother had been caused by “snuffles,” a form of madness. He himself, it emerged, was not entirely sane and as his cruelty increased, the boy decided to run away. A section was missing here but it seemed that the boy may have been searching for his father during this period. Close to the end, the boy – now a man – found his father in some kind of home. The old man was demented at that point and for two pages, he ranted at his son (whom he did not recognize) until an unsympathetic – and possibly conniving – nurse came and took him away.

  Again, there were missing pages, but it seemed that the narrator was finally brought along to his adopted father’s view and was convinced the world was filled with madness. Surprisingly, he did not apply this diagnosis to himself, especially as he began to fuse the older man’s research with his own musings as possible solutions to this epidemic of craziness. There were cryptic references to Cold spots and Dark Flow and consciousness drugs that might allow glimpses of parallel universes and alternate realities.

  I got the impression the narrator was searching, literally, for a world not tarnished by guilt and regret and I wished I knew how the story ended. There were clues that neither his mother nor his sister had really died and as it was not an autobiography, I wondered why the writer did not deal with this more directly rather than leaving clues in the later sections. However, I had scanned it hurriedly and with the missing section, it was likely there were connections and little clues I had missed.

  I put down the book and when I poked around some more I saw a leather bag with a battery pack. I fitted it to the projector, turned on the unit and I heard the sound of the reel turning. The film was animated and within a few minutes, I discovered it was a representation of the book I had recently been reading. And like the book, it was incomplete. In fact, both ended at the same point. The only difference was a partial depiction of the sister in the background of some of the scenes, animated as a blur of cotton or some soft cloth surrounded by leaves and flowers. The next film was grainy and orange-tinted. It showed experiments of some kind being performed on men strapped to chairs or bolted with helmets onto cots. The camera was static and the frame rate was about fourteen per second so it had the feeling of both a documentary and an old-fashioned comedy. I couldn’t decide until a voiceover began to talk about biomechanically weighing, isolating and expunging guilt and regret and other disorders I couldn’t follow.

  The granularity in the third film was so bad it was almost impossible to follow. It began with a ragged old man wandering in some desert. Every now and again, he would stop either to shake his fists at the sky or to turn and gesture as if he was trailed by followers. This went on for about fifteen minutes until he came to the edge of a cliff. He tore off his rags, spread his arms as if he intended to fly and jumped. Once more, he turned as if he was beckoning some unseen person. The film ended there. I withdrew the reel and placed it on the floor with the others. The three incomplete films each bore some resemblance with the books and I rummaged through the pile to locate the equivalent texts. I put aside A Sentimental Journey Into the Mind of a Cannibal by Mausi Rampart (translated by the Reverend Thomas Loft), The Miserly Mind by Anonymous and Organ Stop by RH Bromedge, with the intention of carrying these to my room.

  “You should not be so surprised. Like most psychopaths, they are quite clever. They manage to convince others that they alone hold the key.”

  I got up in a hurry. “Hello? Is someone here?” The sombre yet mellow voice was familiar. I walked through the carriage in the hope of locating the speaker. I glanced around and saw a figure hunched on a seat blocked off from the moonlight. He was looking out the window. “Hello,” I repeated. “I did not notice you before. Did you just get in?” When there was no reply, I added, “I did not expect to find anyone here at this late hour. Were you with the group I met earlier? I was just looking at the films but they are just as confusing as the books. Someone took the time –” I stopped when it occurred that he may have despoiled the books. “I have put aside a few to read later on. I apologize if they belong to you. I assumed the carriage was empty.”

  “You are wasting your time with those books,” the person said. “They will tell you nothing. Better to listen to a story crafted by a nine-year-old.”

  “You might be right. The films I managed to see are no less confusing. Were you here all the while?”

  “I am always here.”

  “I didn’t see you. Is this where you sleep? If that’s the case, I am sorry for intruding. I was walking by and I noticed the smoker was unlocked. There is a group of actors here, too. We are supposed to be making a movie, but I honestly have no
idea because the storyboard is so fractured.” You may say this was an unnecessary rush of information, but for the briefest of moments I felt I had encountered no less a person than yourself. But, as you will see, the conversation soon proved otherwise.

  “Fractured. Yes. I can see it.”

  “The film?”

  “It constantly spools backwards. Over and over.”

  “What’s the point, though?”

  “The process will continue until they find what they are looking for.”

  “The actors? Like some kind of rehearsal?”

  “They are searching for the end by returning to the beginning.”

  “Really? I do not understand that process.”

  “They hope to find the spark before it splintered.”

  “What spark? Inspiration?”

  “Interesting. I didn’t expect you to understand. The spark of inspiration before it splintered into madness. They would like to bottle that moment. Study and replicate it. Determine why it sputtered. Why it always does. There is the theory that the world operates with myriad checks and balances to ensure that nothing happens before its ordained time. So, there are accidents and premature deaths and madness. The first two are intractable but the last can be interfered with. Adjusted to speed things up.” He chuckled lightly.

  I had assumed he was talking of the actors but he sounded just as disoriented as the others I had met. Besides, I had never heard of this strange theory. I tried to steer the conversation back to him. “How long have you been waiting here?”

  “Just as long as you.”

  I was about to tell him that I had been here less than three weeks when I was struck by a rather horrible idea. I had assumed that my memory loss coincided with my arrival at the terminal, but what if I had been wandering around, just as confused, prior to my coming here? For months, maybe, or years. I still had no idea how I had ended up in this bleak place. No idea if I had a family or friends somewhere or an office to which I would trudge every day. No idea if I was a man with a soiled past or someone who had been lauded with accolades. Maybe I was just an unremarkable person whose days followed each other in the same pattern. A failed writer or frustrated director whose projects had long dried up.