by Octavia Cade
“Shit,” said Rosemary. “Shit, shit, shit.”
She couldn’t do it, couldn’t leave. There had to be time for her to save at least some of them. Generations of memories, of collecting, of planning, of improvement. Generations of her family’s work . . . there was no insurance that could cover a loss of this enormity. Even if the monetary value could be replaced, it wouldn’t be with memories of the same caliber—such did not exist, outside of other private collections or the world’s great public galleries and museums. Rosemary didn’t think she could bear a restitution made of up piles of commonality. That bloody child! She had destroyed works that contributed more to the human condition than she ever would. The capacity to understand and preserve simply wasn’t in her daughter, any more than it was in Rosemary to abandon what that daughter was trying to live up to, or compete with, or revenge herself upon, or whatever twisted reasons she would no doubt use to try and explain herself.
Rosemary had no intention of making it easy for her. Let the brat experience some real hardship for a change, and not by proxy.
Rosemary had never considered her talents as including the smash and grab, but circumstances were extreme, and soon slipcovers littered the floor, pillaged and thrown aside, coins like pieces of eight shoved into the corners of her dress, memories glowing through thin fabric and smoking the seams. When no more coins could fit into her pockets she started stuffing them into her bra. They burned her badly, but the pain was preferable to the loss. The coins she saved were fundamental parts of what Rosemary considered to be the human experience; they were museum pieces of consciousness. She could no more let them burn than the curators of the Louvre could have left a da Vinci—she was the curator, the responsibility was hers. Especially as it was her daughter who had wrought the destruction, who had lit the match, and turned off the sprinklers. Especially so, the charred reminder of Rosemary’s twin failure as parent and guardian.
Her bodice smoldered, and she had to beat at the sleeves to stop them bursting into flame. Her hands peeled skin, the joints blistered and painful, fingers too swollen to bend far. There was no room left in her bra, so Rosemary fumbled at her belt, but while her hands could loosen it she couldn’t grip it enough to pull it tighter, to pull her bodice out looser and secure the belt beneath the billowing folds, make a pocket against her belly. Instead, she used her wrists to pull the belt off, its clasp scalding pale skin. She pulled her dress with one hand, her skin oozing and sticking, succeeded in lifting the front of the material upwards, and clamped her forearm under the fold. With only one hand free, it was harder to wrench open slipcovers and dump their contents against her stomach. Her flesh cringed from the contact, some of the coins half-melted, their edges molding to her, making her bleed and blister.
At first, the smoke made her dizzier than the pain, but when her eyes smarted, swelling shut, Rosemary could no longer see the covers scattered around her feet, the furniture overturned and thrown aside to make access easier. When she tripped, hitting her head sharp against shelves and sent sprawling, the coins no longer collected at her waist but spread, shocked and spilling, over her chest. The softer disks, smoldering, caught and Rosemary kicked, involuntarily, the kick of a pike’s prey in murky pool, but here the murk was smoke and the pike long fled into clearer waters, her bony gape empty and vicious. The disks caught and spread, melting into skin and each other, and Rosemary was lost in pain and fire, dizzier than swirling ash and the clogging of her lungs.
Unable to move, uncomprehending of anything but her own burning flesh, Rosemary thrashed and cried; tried to scream but choked instead, smothered by hot air fiery with flecks. She clawed at the floor, at hard heated beams and overturned desks with black fingers and burning palms; curled in a ball, clutched herself to herself. Her hands clenched tight around small objects. Pressed to her breasts, the skin so charred she could no longer feel it, was an inkwell (so old-fashioned!), a keychain, a memory recorder, a paperweight (a butterfly immobilized in clear glass), a holographic photo frame that flickered, half melted, before her eyes, a three dimensional record of her life that merged with the shock of disconnected memories and sensations of the coins embedded in her flesh . . . Unconsciously, Rosemary collected until the end—blindly snatching and releasing in an attempt to find something to ease the pain, something to hold onto to make the horror less, to drain it away and leave her cooled and settled back into a body that wasn’t a torture to die in.
As Rosemary burned within the tinderbox of her library, chimneys of smoke belched sluggishly from the building. Choking the air, already heavy and thick from the unrelieved sun, the endless baking heat of the coastal summer, they towered above the hills, above the island. Above the fire service, arriving in a clang of burning bells and pumping sea water from the harbor to douse the flames. Above the birds that swung and tumbled in the hot currents, the albatross rising far above the earth and hovering, diving back towards the water when their wings grew too stained with soot, their feathers clogged with particles of past lives, of memories stored and catalogued, kept for rarity and praise.
The particles blew and smeared, stuck and clogged together, the ashes and remnants of a thousand lives, of ten thousand . . . The childhood experiences of a young woman mixed with the coin of one born generations after her death; the copper tang of the ocean dweller clung to the dried continental clay of a community that had never seen the sea; the subtle scent of charred beech overpowered by the quick, sharp-oiled manuka fire, which burned first and fastest, floating higher and higher above the rest and then sinking from the thinner air and down back into the swirling heated atmosphere, spreading and seeding over the land below, forming moisture banks and condensing into clouds.
Birth
She awoke to pain and the sound of rain on the roof, and little understanding of either.
Light refracted through falling water swept the ceiling, spattered above her, a scattered, fragile refulgence that caught her attention and held it—swept her away from her body to float above herself, skimming over the surface of her own consciousness. Her awareness of herself skipped like a stone over water, brief touches where she sank into her own body between hovering in the blistered brilliance of the light that drummed above her.
Cool linen surrounded her, anchored her to the bed. It was scentless, and slightly rough. The material caught at her chest, clung over her heart, while sliding over bare feet and lying smooth under her fingers. Those fingers moved slightly, unconsciously, a blind effort to prove that they could, and that her fingertips retained enough sensation to determine the woven texture of the fabric, a sensation that expanded and grew until she was surrounded, and the slight cobbled surface of the linen filled the entire world, surrounded her.
Faint breaths of wind swept over her exposed face and the hand that was closest to the light, the brighter half of the ceiling. It smelled of something she couldn’t recognize, a high sweet scent that calmed and flattered, stroked her skin, her forehead and her cheek . . . It soothed, but the sensation caught at her dimly. The faint touches seemed to extend too far over the dome of her head, slipped over her gently, smoothly, and she could not understand why that scented coolness didn’t catch at her eyes, but it was too hard to think, and so she closed her eyes and let the wind carry her upwards like a leaf, billowing.
Strange noises jarred her out of the endless, easy complications of light and dark. They boomed above her, carried by shadows that extended over her and then drew back. Different tones that rolled like the echo of thunder, into strange shapes that she could not recognize but which washed around her like waves on water. Pressure accompanied them, touches on her face and chest, movement and pain, but always the same booming, rolling tones that reverberated in her head, a puzzle of sound that shattered into fragments, brief, disconnected syllables that accompanied her but did not resolve themselves; she drifted on their motion.
Sometimes when she woke there was darkness outside her eyes as well as beneath them, and though the sound of r
ain continued, comforting and dim, there were no reflected patterns of light above her. She found the loss strange and a little sad, but hard to hold onto. There was still light, a glowing pallor of shape like a succession of pale slices outside her window, out where the rain was. It fascinated her, this smudged shape, and once when the booming came while she looked out one repeated sound speared her to its shape. The round faces of the attendants shone in the night, mimicked the moon, so was it so surprising that they knew it also?
Slowly her mouth moved, mimicked, found the fascination of discovering new muscles and lips shaped in a moue, the deliberate placement of tongue behind teeth. Moon she shaped to herself, silently, and the booming resolved like drops around her, became more intelligible. The sound was the shape, and she could feel the shape on her lips, round like she could not remember what, and tasteless.
When they propped her on pillows, raising her head, she could see a group of objects that were the same shape as the moon but had a vibrancy she did not recognize—there was nothing in the room that looked the same. When she pointed they made sounds that she learned to associate with them, a long lilt and a short plosive that she repeated to herself over and over again, the sounds from her own throat croaking into life and slowly gaining mastery.
They had a sweet warm smell, and when they painted her lips with slices—and there was the moon, inside them—she was surprised, and not a little delighted, to taste sweetness, and how it covered a sharp taste like crisp slippery linen on her tongue.
The first time she could turn her head enough to see them take her blood, the shock of the prick and the pretty running liquid, she watched in fascination. “Apple,” she said, pointing at the blood, but they shook their heads at her. She didn’t understand. The colors were the same. Was that not apple? It was a treachery she could not comprehend.
They brought something to her with their hands hidden in wool—she had learned wool, and how it smelt of sheep and oil though she did not yet know those things—an object of strange shapes and insufficient material. To her new-peeled eyes it appeared fragmented, different shades and textures merged into each other, patch-worked into wholeness. The shape seemed familiar to her, pleasing, if too delicate. She couldn’t understand it, but felt it needed to be thicker, the curves rounder, fatter. The way it dripped at the edges disturbed her.
They offered it to her to touch: she, who loved to touch all new things, to learn and collect the sensations beneath unbandaged fingers and add them to her library of knowledge like smooth jewels of light, illuminations that bound the shards of her world together.
She did not want to touch this. Its completeness repelled her, did not invite confidence. Sensation made her sufficient, but this curving plate was sufficient in itself. She did not understand it, but her desire not to touch it was not matched by her eyes—they returned to its familiarity, comforted by its shape. When they touched it to her fingers she wailed, a high shattered sound, and snatched them back—but the pain and horror did not unmake her, and slid from her mind like water off oiled stone. Moments later, she was interested and amused to see the apprehension on their faces—she did not comprehend what it meant, could not translate it to the expression that had been so recently on her own. Their fear interested her; it made their faces funny and flickered.
Wings fluttered at the window, muffled against glass. Turning her head, she could see the soft flash of feathers, the small brown bird, as it righted itself and minced along the ledge, baffled. The glass was a barrier it could not understand, and, still limited to the bed she could not comprehend it either. If she had thought about what it would feel like, she would have said air—the glass was as clear as air, so why not? And cool, except when it was sunny, though she didn’t have much experience of sun. All she could remember was rain, now a gentle trickle that sometimes slowed at night and left patterns on the window and walls and ceiling. When sunshine appeared through the clouds, there were also patterns on her skin from the drops on the windows, small clean shadowed tears that were nothing like the virulent striations that so interested her when they cleaned her wounds, replaced the bandages.
She would have liked to be as free as the bird had been, to touch the glass and to feel it hard against her, to collect glass and add it to herself. The word tasted clean in her mouth, and she wanted to know if it felt the same to her fingers.
She would have liked to hop also. And the pillow restricted her from truly mimicking the pert movements of the bird’s head. She wondered if it would let her touch it, feel bird feathers, smell bird wings. It would be nice if it hopped on her hand. Instead it minced before her, untouchable, and made her smile at skipping for they could do that together.
One day she surfaced to see a new moon in orbit around her; surrounded with hair as dark as the sky-socket of the first and earliest moon. She was permitted to touch, and the smooth shining silk of it slid through her fingers like water, warm and faintly scented. When she put her face in it, rubbed it against her cheeks and lips, the moon began to tremble. Rolling sounds came from its mouth, and she was allowed to touch that as well.
One sound was repeated, over and over. She tried to reflect the shape in her own mouth, stared at how the other moved and tried to replicate it. The beginning was easier than the end, for she already knew how to say moon, and the sounds were the same. But sticky water came from her mouth before she could make the other.
Eventually: “Mother,” she repeated, and the moon split, gleamed teeth from the cradle of bone. She was pleased with herself, knew she had made the sound right, knew she had a name for the person before her. “Mother,” she said again, pointing at the girl, and smiling. “Mother, mother, mother . . . ”
When Mother’s eyes watered and Mother ran from the room, she could not understand what she had done wrong. But she could see that Mother moved as jerkily as the bird, and that was amusing.
When they brought back the curved mongrel surface their hands were again covered and they would not look her in the eye. Mother was with them, eyes still leaking, and she would have liked to taste the drops to see if they were different than the drops that fell outside and gave her vision such pleasure—they had let her taste those.
They rested the hollow arch on her torso, and she looked at it with interest, not wishing to touch but pleased to see how the hues and textures ran into each other. Her bandages prevented it from touching her skin, but it was too small to fit round her and perched on her chest. Again she could perceive a familiarity to its shape, but did not know the source.
It was taken away, and her bandages stripped carefully from her. It hurt less now, and sharpness in her arm made the pain recede further. It made her sad that they never let her trace the tints and ridges of her chest with her fingers, but held them gently away. She wanted to touch, to see how the different parts of the landscape of her torso were matched together. She smelled sweeter than the apple-covered moons, but darker, and her tongue could not reach to taste.
When they fitted the shield over her chest, snug to her body, Rosemary knew herself. All the memories of her life assaulted her at once, a terrifying, exhilarating mélange that left her as incapable and as lost as she was in their absence.
She could not hear herself screaming; was too focused on the one dominating remembrance that fitted her fragments together—the agony of flame and melting metal, charred wood, curling plastic, singed stone . . . the instinctive clutch of the memory recorder and the rapid draining away of all that made her Rosemary, the final hideous knowledge that her entire life had been a slow prelude to that one experience, a dying by inches before she was burned away in the conflagration of her life. There was no way to separate it from the other memories—only in burning was she Rosemary, and even that Rosemary had been crippled by her own willing loss.
She flung it from her, overpowered her attendants, forced their faces to her sculpted torso and only stopped when their screaming outdistanced her own.
Thereafter they did not brin
g it back, and she was left with a growing detritus of experience that surrounded her bed, clogged her room. Rocks, paints, leaves, fabrics, paper glass instruments toys twigs pictures leathers fruits powder—
“Mine,” she said, when they tried to take them away. “Mine.”
The new room had wallpaper that smelled of paste when she put her nose to it and snuffled, so different from the clean white walls of the hospital, the dry smell of paint interspersed with the sharp stink of antiseptic, the faint tinge of sweat. The faces that came to her in the new papery room wore the same clothes as those of the last, but these carried clipboards and brightly colored books instead of basins and bandages and needles, and they smelled of perfume.
She breathed them in as they sat by her bed, sniffed and sniffed until they brought her things that smelled of themselves. She had lilac and lavender and geraniums, the bright apple shine of the last glowing in the sun as it came through the window, less for the color, although that was pretty, than for the warm clean scent of the leaves in sunlight.
On the table by her bed was an ugly lump of ambergris, brought to her when it was still wet with seawater and a little crusted with sand. They had tried to take it from her as it dried, the cloying, fecal scent making the faces twist and hide behind the orange bottles until it aged into earthiness.
She had carved pieces of sandalwood and bowls of nutmeg, cinnamon sticks, black pepper. There was a whole range of bottles, bottles over every surface, hundreds of them, squat and skinny and strangely shaped and all with glass stoppers . . . dill and jasmine and bergamot, and she liked to roll the oil between her fingers and breathe in the scent of rose and juniper, of mustard and musk and myrrh . . .
