I saw Dyenne, too, and I thought that this moment before I drowned I might finally be granted my wish: my life would flash before me and I would see – however briefly – all that I had been trying to remember. I closed my eyes and waited. When nothing came, I deliberately swallowed mouthfuls of water. I forced my eyes open until I felt they would be pried out from my skull. Then I shut them, grew limp and allowed the water to take me.
A boy is in a park with his little sister. He is chasing after balloons while she is collecting flowers. Their parents, sitting on a bench, wave to them and the father points to the setting sun. Now, the boy is walking home from school and when he gets to his house, his parents are in the kitchen alone. Before them are scattered photographs. Now, the father is missing and the mother, trailed by her daughter, is not looking at the photographs but walking through the house with her huge spectacles. The house changes and there are many rooms. In one of these rooms is an old man looking at the floor while a younger man stands over him. The old man is in a wheelchair and he is dribbling on his knee. The younger man returns to a desk surrounded by books. He seems deeply occupied with his work, drawing diagrams and scribbling equations. Occasionally he glances at some of the framed pictures that had been in the first house. When he walks out of the building, he goes to a different house. A woman is waiting for him at the doorstep. The neighbour, a muscular man wearing a bandana, pauses his mowing and waves. Inside the house, the couple seems to be arguing. The man explains he must go on a trip and then he is in a vehicle looking out at the bridges and the hill in the distance.
What an ordinary life, I thought. But why should it have been different? What exactly was I expecting? Were these final moments expunged of everything traumatic; sanitized to provide a final restitution?
“Hurry.”
Something touched my shoulder. “Hurry,” came the voice again. I opened my eyes and I saw Dyenne riding on a wide plank that resembled a door. A huge wave tossed her farther away and another brought her back. I managed to grasp the end of the plank and I held on. “I told you,” she said. “I told you I could fly.”
The water was rising and soon I felt the undercurrents ebbing, but now the waves, though farther apart, were growing bigger. Once the plank capsized and I worried the girl was gone but I saw her climbing from the water, her hair splayed like wet grass. When I pulled her up, she pointed to another wave, and we both crouched low. And whenever we spotted a wave – spaced about half a minute apart – we crouched and grabbed the plank. We now seemed to be at the basin’s top and I had this faint hope that we would be carried along the route from which we came and that the surge would dash against the sides of the hills and flood all the valleys until it filled the lake I had seen from the bus.
But close to the top, I noticed we were spinning and I suspected this vortex meant that the water was being emptied from beneath and that as the vortex’s intensity increased, we would be tossed and smashed until we drowned. I pointed to the top of the basin, to a narrow outcrop, and motioned the girl to paddle toward it. But we were going against the current. I made a spinning motion with my hand to indicate we would again be reeled in the opposite direction and when she gestured frantically, I assumed she wanted some clarification so I shouted, although I was sure she would not hear. Then she released her hold on the plank and pointed to a swirling mess of cardboard from which the head of the Conductor was bobbing. I tried to reach across with one hand held out but she crept closer and began pulling my shirt. In any case, the current was carrying us farther from him.
I decided to wait until we were once more brought back to the spot, although I was sure he would be gone by then. Dyenne seemed terrified and as we made the circle, I felt she was more afraid of the Conductor than of the flood. She was frozen and I had to point to the approaching outcrop. When we were about ten yards away, I made a sudden decision and pushed her off the plank and jumped behind her; I knew she could swim because she was the only other person who seemed to have survived.
We swam madly until we managed to reach the outcrop. Just in time, too, as a huge wave was now swelling the middle of the basin. “Hold tight, child,” I said as it came toward us. Something crashed against my head, and light, ragged and dazzling, swept over me.
EPILOGUE
THE BEGINNING
The blue light is blinding and I cannot open my eyes for more than a couple seconds. My head feels numb and heavy and when I try to touch my forehead, I feel metal that is polished and curved. It takes a while before I realize I am wearing a helmet bolted to the bed. Earlier this morning, I felt skin instead of metal, the flesh raw and swollen where the screws had been implanted.
There are three of them peering over me and because of the light positioned directly above, I cannot see their faces. “We were waiting for you,” the toadlike middle man says.
“Do you know me?” I ask tiredly.
The toad says, “Well, that depends on who you are. Would you care to help us?”
I take my time in answering. “I am not sure. How long have I been like this?”
“It’s been two months and three days.”
“We have been waiting.”
“Do not be alarmed.”
“You have been drifting in and out of consciousness.”
I notice the tubes running into my arms and ask, “Where am I? Is this a hospital?”
“Don’t bother yourself. You are safe now.”
“We have all the amenities here.”
“Although we have not used them for a very long time.”
“To get back to our question...do you recall anything of the accident?”
“There was an accident?” I ask.
“Let us put that aside until you are well enough.”
“Do you recall anything?”
I shake my head and they huddle in the corner of the room, away from the light. When they return, three days later, they ask once more of the accident. Before they leave, I pose my own question. They grow unexpectedly apologetic and talk of self-harm and suicide. They hint that I have indulged in this vaporization – their word – more than once and through different means. Leaping off a cliff, wandering alone until I was dehydrated, ingesting a poisonous substance, jumping into a pond. “But you are better now,” the toad says to me.
I cannot tell if it’s a question or a diagnosis. I say, “I don’t know,” and the response seems to please them.
They visit twice a week and then weekly. I believe a month has passed although I cannot be certain. The only other visitor is an attendant, a robust woman with a metallic name tag. She brings me my meals and cleans me every morning. She is rough and appears to hate her duties and when I am finally able to take a few steps to the washroom, she appears relieved. Still, she checks up on me and I believe it is mostly to chase away the men and women I see looking through the glass window as they pass by. Some of them wave to me but I turn away.
This morning I was finally transferred to a little room furnished with a bed, an escritoire with teeth marks and an iron safe. There are drawings on the walls and beneath the escritoire is a Gladstone bag with some personal effects. Next to the bag is a wicker basket with other drawings and a clutch of letters.
The three men question me about the letters and the illustrations.
“Do you know anything of the articles in your room?”
“Who might have left them there?”
“Do you know why someone would plaster their walls with useless drawings?”
I never tell them that they are not useless. Instead, I say, “Maybe the person who occupied the room before me was trying to pass time.”
“Past time?”
When I understand the confusion, I spell the word. They seem satisfied. Still, they ask about the letters. Again, I cite the previous occupant.
“So there is nothing familiar about the letters?”
I shake my head. And I am convinced they do not suspect that I know the letters, deliberately vague, were all mi
ne; written by me, to me, insisting that I create some kind of record; a timeline to guide me through the cycles of simulations. They do not suspect either that I have discovered that the drawings serve the same purpose.
The recent interviews take place in the library. They ask about the books, particularly those that deal with memory loss. I tell them that I have not stuck with any because they are just as confusing as all the others with their chapters rearranged. Once, the fat man who always takes the centre position asked me, “Why would someone take the time to sabotage perfectly good books?”
I didn’t say it had been done to reflect my own prior states: the endless loops, the seizing of time, the commingling of different lives. I didn’t say that I had done it myself. I told them, “I see idlers around the place. One of them must have done it.”
They ask about these idlers. Do I know any of them? Have there been any contacts? What about outsiders? Sometimes, they cite passages from books or snippets of films or descriptions of fantastic places and I pretend ignorance for each. It will take a while before they are completely convinced, but I can wait. So I listen to them talk of dissociative identities and sleep paralysis and something they call “alters” and I shake my head blankly. Each day I remember something new, but because these retrievals are arbitrary, I have yet to place them in order and I know it will take a while before a chronology emerges. They ask about this, too, about my memory and I tell them that everything has been erased and with their help, I hope to slowly improve.
“It will take time. Every retrieval unspools some reconstruction.”
“I am a blank slate,” I said.
I try not to smile or show distress or anxiety or annoyance or even confusion.
During one of these conversations, the toad said, “This is the way of the world. The only certain outcome is the one we are most fearful of.” I thought he was taking of death, but he added, “Erasure. The most primal fear is of darkness and of the night. What if the night washes away our memories and we awake as someone else? What if our souls are stolen? Are you worried by any of this?”
“I want to get better.”
Sometimes, they go through a list of questions that are so unconnected I know they hope that one or more might register and I would randomly provide some information. They ask if I would leave the place if the opportunity presented itself and if I maintain a journal or a routine and whether I blame anyone for my situation, and questions about the benefits and dangers of disambiguation. During these times, I close my eyes and pretend I am sleeping. I do this often because, during these moments, they tell me in a cajoling, almost soothing manner – the tone that a mother might use in reciting a bedtime tale to her daughter – of a comic book writer who had become so close to his characters he had been unable to differentiate the events of his own life from those he had created for his characters. Once, the one who speaks in a gloomy voice used the word breakthrough. I prefer these stories, with their funny comic book character names like Cake and Kothar and Balzac to their lectures on procedural memories and psychoses of various kinds.
My ignorance is contrived but my tiredness, frequently, is not. I spend most of my days in my room, trying to arrange the pieces. In the late evenings, when everyone in the Compound seems to have settled in a kind of stupor, I walk through the zigzagging hedges, past the cemetery, to the back. Once I saw a brutish-looking man who seemed to be following me, but he soon disappeared. At first, I never ventured too far because I associated the tinnitus in my left ear and my bouts of dizziness with the altitude of the hill, but that has now passed and I am relaxed – as much as is possible – by the isolation and the view of the field beneath. In this setting, it is easy to reflect on the stories told by the three men. Earlier today, they related the tale of a lowly comic book writer who had created a group of heroes to take on all the established deities, the “old gods whom he blamed for the series of misfortunes in his life.” Unexpectedly, the stories found an audience, prompted perhaps by the writer’s decision to create heroes who were not only imperfect, but grotesque and demented. The stories were viewed as satirical and slyly subversive and darkly funny, but the writer was dead serious. He began to believe he was divinely inspired and he often referred to himself as the “last of the inspired prophets.”
This writer, they say to me, had created a mythical place he called Adjacentland. Increasingly, he began to believe that his creations were real. “As the latchets of his madness tightened, it was precisely to such a place, devoid of rules and order that the writer journeyed.” The sclerotic man tapped his head and continued in his sombre voice. “The chaos, you see, perfectly mirrored that of his mind.”
At this point in the story, the toad had laughed, his body swelling with each chuckle. “Like all prophets, this madman was inspired only by his own hallucinations. Memory is a gift, a wound, a curse, an obligation. What do you think?” he had asked.
“I cannot say,” I replied. “It may be all of those. Or none. It’s confusing.”
I remember another story. A comic book writer who, as they say, created a group of heroes to take on the gods. But their adversaries were not the old gods but the machines, the new gods who had determined the imagination, that primitive impulse, led only to chaos. And so the heroes were not superpowered beings but psychoneurotic men and women whose weapons were the only things feared by the machines. Emotions. Dreams. Visions. It took me my entire recuperative stay here to piece together the rest. To do this I had to fit together my scattered memories as I had done the books in the library, the notes I had left to myself, the cryptic warnings. I wonder at the effort I had taken to leave these elaborate clues that only I would understand.
I recall a paragraph from a book I had glimpsed earlier with the misleading title A Romance Most Likely: When it was discovered that the primitives and the blighted, those who believed in spirits and sprites were the only ones still imbued with exteroception, still susceptible to visions and fancies and fevered dreams, still capable of compassion and a degree of memory consolidation, these outcasts became the focus of extended and elaborate experiments.
But I tell the three old men, “It seems likely.”
After each visit to the hill, I return with a leaf or a pebble or a pod or a piece of glass or bark or shell. I line these up in my room. They are my new markers, I suppose, a record of the days passing by.
Last night, as I was about to return, something fell at my feet. I picked it up, glanced around and pushed it in my jacket. Late in the night, I examined the ornate carving of a bird on the boomerang and because this was a special object, I hid it in the safe, next to the pills and oblong tablets I had pretended to ingest.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Canada Council. And Paul Vermeersch for giving this novel a home. A chance encounter, a confession and a commitment.
About the Author
Rabindranath Maharaj is the award-winning author of three short story collections and five novels, including The Amazing Absorbing Boy, which won the 2010 Trillium Book Award and the 2011 Toronto Book Award, and was voted a CBC Canada Reads Top 10 for Ontario.
In 2012, Maharaj received a Lifetime Literary Award, administered by the National Library and Information System Authority as part of the commemoration of Trinidad’s fiftieth independence anniversary. In 2013, he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal, which honours significant contributions and achievements by Canadians.
[Photo credit: Vicky Maharaj]
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, places and events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
© Rabindranath Maharaj, 2018
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from the Canadian Copyright
Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Buckrider Books is an imprint of Wolsak and Wynn Publishers.
Cover design: Ingrid Paulson
Interior design: Mary Bowness
Author photograph: Vicky Maharaj
Typeset in Adobe Devanagari
Printed by Ball Media, Brantford, Canada
Buckrider Books
280 James Street North
Hamilton, ON
Canada L8R 2L3
Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.
ISBN 978-1-928088-56-1 (print)
ISBN 978-1-928088-88-2 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-928088-89-9 (mobi)
Adjacentland Page 29
