Adjacentland

by Rabindranath Maharaj

  Balzac and the others acted as if they knew me and I took it for granted this was because they had mistaken me for the screenwriter or the director. Eventually, I asked the man in the carriage, “Did you write the script?”

  He turned as if the question interested him. The meagre light hollowed his eyes and his mouth. “It’s not finished. It never is no matter how many times we travel back. They are wasting their time. They believe memory can be stitched and joined.” When he walked away, I saw that he was my size but I still had not fully glimpsed his face.

  I left a few minutes later. There was a reddish tinge to the sky and I realized that it would soon be morning. The sprigs of red tumbleweed blowing across the tracks looked as if they had bled from the sky. I had spent half the night in the carriage. I hurried along so I would not meet anyone on the way. I had mentioned to the crew that I would meet them all in the morning, but I needed an hour or two of sleep. Perhaps I would meet the man who had been silently viewing the movie with me and he would explain his odd utterances and hopefully connect it with the film we were supposed to make.

  When I entered the carriage, I saw the cushions on the floor. Someone had been rummaging around. And the ledger was gone.

  17 THE CONDUCTOR

  I could not sleep after the discovery of the intrusion. I locked the windows and the door and double-checked everything, but I still felt insecure. What if I had been sleeping in the carriage during the intrusion? I remained inside reflecting as to how I should approach this situation. At first, I resolved to confront the group and reveal that someone had broken into my carriage and stolen the ledger. I would then explain that the confusing movie they were all ranting about could not proceed without the storyboard. I quickly changed my mind about this approach not because the ledger had been useless so far but because I had no idea how Balzac and Fingers and the others would react in their demented state.

  When I went to the canteen, it was empty. I had with me the three books from the previous night because I feared they would be stolen from my carriage. Half an hour later, Balzac walked in. He was followed by the group I had met earlier. No one said anything, but I was aware that everyone was looking at me, and from the corner of my eyes I noticed some of the group moving to tables closer to mine. Balzac and the stenographer were now at an adjoining table and the little man was holding on to Balzac’s arm like an infant.

  I got out Organ Stop and began reading. The man who had been introduced as Tiffin came across and asked, “Where did you get those books?”

  I glanced up and noticed his bony face, the doe eyes, the high nose and thin lips. Unexpectedly, I felt angry with the group. “That is none of your concern,” I told him.

  I heard Balzac saying, “It takes a callous man to be so cagey about his actions.” To Tiffin he said, “Tell him why you are so upset.”

  Immediately Tiffin said, “I lost control during my fasts. There were innocent victims.” He proceeded to describe a child who had died following one of his fasts and a young woman who had jumped from her balcony following another. “I have an obligation as you well know.”

  “Tell him how you discovered your power.” Balzac tried to prompt him out of his sulkiness.

  “I found your book in an old phone booth. There were drawings. I could not understand the messages at first, but after reading the book, I felt stronger and faster. I knew it had been left there for me.”

  “Tell him about the book,” Balzac said.

  “Yes, it was about a man who got his strength from a phone booth. He always came out stronger and faster. But one day he discovered that all the booths had been destroyed overnight. He built a new booth and another, but it was useless. You know how it ends.”

  “He moved to another town?”

  “That is unnecessary, my friend,” Balzac intervened. “You know full well that the man could not recover from this backhander. You know full well that he lost his appetite and ended up like a lion caught in one of those drought places. Mangy and demented and famished beyond belief.”

  Balzac seemed to be waiting for me to say something. When I remained silent, he transferred his gaze to the Stenographer. “I myself could never possess such power because I am an eater. The tear of gristle and the crunch of tender bones is what gets my engine going.” The Stenographer swished a bit and when Balzac patted his shoulder, he began to purr, at the same time pointing to a nearby table.

  Maybe it was Balzac’s threat or the Stenographer’s purring or my dismay about my memory, but I felt my anger growing. I took a deep breath and said in a voice loud enough for the entire group to hear, “There are a few things we need to address here. Clear up some misconceptions. I should have done this earlier and I blame myself for not doing so. When I met you all earlier, I got the impression that you had been awaiting my arrival. I mistakenly assumed everything would become clearer, but so far I am no closer to determining the cause of your error. Secondly, I have not written any book or script. Not the one to which you, Tiffin, mentioned, nor these before me.” I tapped the books on the table. “And before you begin to jump to your usual conclusions I will tell you that I discovered these in an abandoned carriage. They were there with a dozen old films, some of which I managed to view.” I heard a gasp from the group and I continued, “And finally, last night someone broke into my carriage and stole the ledger that contained the storyboards. I am less concerned about the loss of the ledger than with the realization that there is someone within this group who believes it’s okay to intrude into another person’s space. A thief.”

  No one said anything. I got up and walked away but my annoyance remained. I passed the smoker carriage and when I glanced back, I got the distinct feeling that three men in white flowing coats were following me, so I walked down a platform into a narrow hallway and slipped into a tunnel that led to sturdy concrete stairs. Across the road, I saw a building with crumbling pillars. I walked across quickly and hurried down a long stairway that led to an underground pathway. I picked up my pace until I was running and twenty minutes later, I came to what looked like a whistle stop. There was a small waiting area and when I entered, I saw a row of old men and women sitting quietly on a long bench. They seemed not to notice me and I guessed they were waiting for the station clerk to return to the empty booth. They all glanced at me and I observed how tiny they were, almost shrunken in their overcoats. “What are you all doing here?” I asked. “Isn’t this place abandoned?” They were all smiling in a tranquilized manner. The man on the edge said, “We are waiting for the train. The others have left. Every day the train takes a dozen.” He glanced at his companions and they nodded. “But thank you for asking. Thank you. No one cares anymore. Soon we will be forgotten.” They resumed gazing at the window.

  “Where are you going?” I asked them. “This place looks abandoned.” I glanced at the clock stuck on nine.

  “We are close to the end so it does not matter.” He closed his eyes and I saw that they all had tiny strips of bandages on their arms. The group looked exhausted and when I left them, I wondered how long they had been waiting.

  “Where are you going?” I asked once more.

  “We were the last ones,” the man said. “We tried to warn them, but no one would listen.”

  “Warn about what?”

  He looked so distressed I regretted asking the question. But he said, “Children who could no longer dream were no longer children. We warned them, but they would not listen. Men who followed a single directive were no longer men. We warned them, and they laughed at us. Women who forgot they were girls were no longer women. We warned them, and we were punished for it.”

  “I don’t understand. Who punished you?”

  “In the beginning they were harmless. They were our caregivers and chauffeurs. They made life easier.”

  “I don’t understand who you are talking about,” I told the group. They looked too old and frail, but I asked, “Are you here for the film, too? Would you like to join the other actors in
the carriages?”

  “Each time you ask us we tell you the same thing. We are tired. Tired...”

  I decided to leave them there, as I wanted to explore the area to see if there was a waiting vehicle. My mind was still on the group when I came to a sort of junkyard littered with engines and overturned hulls. In the distance, I saw what appeared to be a forest, but after half an hour or so, my feet began to hurt from my stiff balmorals, so I decided to return to rest awhile with the group of old men and women. Maybe they would explain if a bus or some other type of transportation came weekly to this dead place. They were not there, which was odd because I had not heard the sound of a vehicle. I looked around for a while before I made my way back. I got lost a few times but eventually I saw the line of carriages.

  There was no one around and I headed for the smoker carriage where I had spent the previous night. I looked around for the man who had been sitting silently viewing the films with me before I attached a reel onto the projector. The first was some sort of dance routine featuring two men. It began with the shorter man shimmying around the taller, who was chewing a cigarette. Then the taller man sprang into action, contorting and spinning so that his companion had to duck. The dance was a compendium of styles with stamping and pirouetting and curious eye movements and finger-twirling. My exasperation from earlier faded as I watched the odd pair’s antics. Half an hour later, I attached another reel. Here, a very tall man was placing metallic plates across his chest and fitting some sort of goggles over his eyes. He looked perfectly mad as he glanced every now and again at the camera. Suddenly he rushed forward and the camera must have fallen, for the man now appeared in a vertical position. He stepped back, raised his leg and the film went black. The abruptness of his action was exceedingly funny.

  I expected the third film to be just as funny. A man was walking around an abandoned town, the camera following him from a distance, as he talked about religion. “Those afflicted with religious delusions are the most difficult to treat as their fantasies frequently spring from some biologic blemish. Undifferentiated schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or epilepsy that renders them impervious to counselling.”

  He paused before a hedge before he continued. “In every other profession, these men would be condemned and punished, but in the cathedrals, their sobs amplified into soaring arias, they are embraced with great fondness.” I tried to understand what he was saying. Following my encounter with the rest of the crew, his utterances were no less startling and in an odd way – perhaps because of my limited memory – they seemed reasonable. “Most delusions can be whittled down by explaining to the patient that there’s no context in reality to sustain their fantasies. This is not possible with those suffering from religious delusions because these patients immediately adopt an adversarial tone during a deconstruction of their apparitions. The one trying to help becomes an agent of the devil, testing their faith.”

  At a mulberry bush, he paused to glance up at a chapter house’s window. “Everything is predicated on the presence of trust. The impaired must have faith in the proposed remedies, and the alleviator must believe his words have magnetized pockets of rationality, however deeply recessed these may be. Do you understand why it is impossible to counsel an acolyte? Or, for that matter, someone who cannot accept his insanity?” He offered a prolonged sigh as he glanced around. “The so-called custodians fail to understand this simple truth.”

  I recalled Balzac talking about the Amazing Acolytes and felt it curious that the film had also referenced the word. “Even with my disdain of this medieval belief in possession and sorcery, I am still in awe of the sturdy discipline and forbearance of men whose lives are tied to their faith. And I am not ashamed to admit there have been rare moments in my own life when I lamented the absence of an omnipotent figure.” Suddenly he began to run, weaving in and out of streets. “I am not going to do this again,” he shouted. The camerawork was shaky here and it was only when he got to the edge of what appeared to be a basin and turned that his face was shown. “No one is perfect,” he screamed. I replayed this bit several times to be certain it was the man who had been in the carriage the previous night.

  I turned off the projector and got out a book titled The Sacred Heresies. I chose this book because I felt it would mirror the last film, but so many pages were missing it was impossible to arrive at a thread. I must have fallen asleep and when I glanced through the window, I saw it was already dark. On the way to my carriage, I jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was still dark and the hand felt rough and heavy. I spun around and the man released his hold. In the gloom, I was able to see his big ears and squat figure but nothing else. “You shouldn’t be sneaking up on me at this ungodly hour, my friend. What if I had not properly recognized you and dismantled you limb by limb?”

  I recognized the voice as Balzac’s. “What are you doing here so late?”

  “Although your question is most impudent, I will grant you the courtesy of a straightforward response. I am a nocturnal creature. In the nights, I allow the beast to roam free. It’s the only way I can keep him under control.”

  I told him, “I wouldn’t want to get in the way, so I should leave now.”

  “Far from me to disagree, but before you do, may I ask where you have been all day?”

  I decided against mentioning the films. “Exploring the terminal. I met a group of old people there, but they have left. I should be on my way now.”

  “You, my friend, are amazing.” I suspected that Balzac used this statement when he had nothing else to say. “You have seen something where there is nothing. It is a paradox worth examining.”

  “Well, you will have to do that by yourself because I have not eaten all day.” I dreaded the thought of going to the canteen because the group would surely be there. When I entered, I saw Fingers, Kurt, Toeman, Tiffin, Boing and the countess woman sitting together. At another table was the group of men I had met in their carriages. And sitting alone was the Stenographer. I glanced at everyone quickly, not making eye contact before I gathered tins of meat and beans.

  They all looked so expectant I felt a twinge of guilt when I left and I steadied myself by thinking that I needed some time alone to determine what I was doing in this place and my connection with the group who had been awaiting my arrival. They could not all have mistaken me for someone else, yet I had not the slightest sense of familiarity with any of them. That’s not true, though. Every now and again, I got the sense that I had heard some of Balzac’s nonsense and the man who called himself the Inquisitor had spoken in a rich voice that seemed familiar. The woman with the medallion had an odour that set my mind to an intimate act but surely neither of us would forget something like that.

  I have not addressed you directly for some time, but I wished you had left something less meagre than the instructions for the film. Anything at all, even slender clues. That night I occupied myself by trying to make sense of the three books. It was close to midnight when I realized that even though they were of several genres, they all possessed common stylistic tics. Long sentences, semicolons, an abundance of adjectives, random paragraph shifts and so on. I cannot overstate my excitement as I tore off the pages from the three books and tried to create some sort of chronological sequence or at least a pattern. This jigsaw was not an easy task because I had before me a children’s book, an archaic medical manual and a religious treatise. Yet slowly, a sort of similitude emerged. All three were involved in a search for perfection by walking backwards and attempting to exorcise points of trauma or doubts or dislocation. All three books mentioned a process called either lethal sequencing, remote pivoting or resetting. You will forgive me my exhilaration; in this crazy situation, this was the first riddle I had come close to understanding.

  There was something else: one of the paragraphs in a science fiction story reminded me somehow of my conversation with the group of old men and women waiting for a train.

  It began harmlessly. The machines helped us. The old, the lonely.
The disabled. Then we gave them new tasks. We asked them to perform surgeries. Assuage our boredom. Make decisions. We asked them to show us the world as if we were lizards that had been living under a rock. We delighted in pretending to be children with adults who were forever obedient. We allowed the machines to think for us. Dream for us. We made them smarter. Then they made themselves smarter. And the dreams changed. Then they stopped. The machines began to edit us, removing cancerous cells, obesity genes, fallacies, illusions, visions, empathy. They anatomized our molecular information and determined what should be excised. We entrusted them with everything, with the certainty their values would mimic those of their creators. And they did.

  My discovery of these books and the proper sequencing of the pages brought other problems. I had no idea who the writer was and why he or she had disguised the books’ genres and had compounded this fragmentation by rearranging chapters and covers. I thought of the man in the smoker talking mysteriously about regressing to the precise point of madness to reset the switch that had precipitated the trauma. (I also briefly considered that you may have been the instigator of some convoluted prank before I decided that the other players were far too convincing to be part of such an elaborate ruse.) When I left my carriage, I took the books with me because there was no way to lock the door from outside. Halfway to the smoker, I saw sparks shooting upward. I broke into a run and even before I got to the fire, I knew it was the place to which I was headed. By the time I got there, the fire had burnt itself out and when I looked through the window, I noticed that even though the steel structure was impervious to the flames, the interior was completely destroyed. A bat was flying in a circular motion. I walked back quickly to my carriage and locked the door. I was certain that the fire was set deliberately and I also knew it was no coincidence that it had occurred so soon after my discovery of the books and films. Someone was trying to impede my progress, which was confusing because I had no idea what I was looking for. Like the previous night, I went through a list of likely suspects. It could be anyone.