Landscape: Memory

by Matthew Stadler

  The classroom was filled with men. Women were not privy to the wisdom of Mr. Legge. An older fellow with a thick sweater sat near me. He seemed to be directing the note-taking activities of a boy my age and peering every now and then at my busy drawing. Whenever I'd catch him at it with a glance he'd smile and chuckle softly as a tolerant father might do. By the mysterious insignia on his colorful sweater I surmised he was a member of one of Berkeley's men's clubs.

  As I penned in the name of the temple "Church of St. Legge," this one cuffed me on the arm and guffawed, impressed by my little witticism. His laugh was oafish, but the sweater and his age made me regard him as wise. He poked his young helper and bade him look at my sketch too. It was all quite brazen and disrespectful, I feared, but we were only three amongst more than a hundred and Mr. Legge rarely raised his eyes from the text he'd prepared. To my delight his drone ceased and class was ended. The sweater man cuffed me again, handed me an ornate card and winked. I was fumbling with my papers and didn't manage even a thanks before he'd disappeared out the door with his faithful charge.

  The card was an invitation of some sort. It began with a motto embossed in the same style of script that I'd seen chiseled across the face of the Social Science Building: "Achievement. Distinction. Loyalty." A time and date and location were given across the card. It looked like a motto thought up by Kurtz. "Desk. Hat. Pipe.'' What was lurking there in that embossed surface? What qualities rushed and rumbled within those thin black lines? If I had a knife I'd cut them open and let their contents spill out. I brushed my fingertips across the face of the raised letters and tucked the card in with my notes.

  "It's some sort of voodoo society," Duncan explained when I asked if he knew about this men's club. "It's like all these university things. Ritual and voodoo." We had walked together from the busy locker room out to the great pool. Its wet benign blueness lay there sloshing in the tile bed.

  "Like registration?" I asked.

  "Yes. And Health class."

  And Military Training, I thought but didn't say. The iron lattice rose above us to a troubling height, holding the thick glass skylights, directing the steamy moist heat back down again. Duncan dove in and I sat down on the lip, dangling my feet in the warm water. Professor Kurtz's antics seemed like voodoo to me, it was true. His rambling lectures went round in mysterious circles, punctuated by sudden scribblings on the board and the occasional protracted silence. It was as though he were conjuring, carrying out some primitive dance meant to raise dead spirits. Duncan came bubbling along back to me and pulled himself up onto the lip all wet and panting like a dog.

  "You don't really want to go?" he asked, meaning to the meeting of the secret club.

  "To the voodoo club?"

  "Yeah. It'll be so dull. They're just a bunch of stuffy old fat guys. I see them all the time."

  "On your ritual march?" Words and calls and splashing rang out in endless diminishing echoes, filling the vast iron hall.

  "In classes. They're in all those dumb classes."

  "I met this one in Health."

  "It's worse in English. They sit around puffing on pipes."

  I watched his legs wiggle in the lapping water. The surface wobbled and warped like some living thing. Down into the depths the light danced, waving across the tiles. How often did water from the bottom come up to the top? I remember Father telling me about convection currents. But with water it was so hard to see. Duncan slid back in, turning to drape his arms across the lip, so he could look up to me and talk.

  "Water never stays still," I said because that's what I was thinking.

  "No, I guess it doesn't." Duncan looked at me from under his wet hair. It was a flat swirling mess of dark brown, dripping all down his face and neck.

  "I mean the surface." It was a thought that rarely left me. It had begun in Bolinas and by now everything seemed to have a surface. Everything seemed to be either fixed or unfixed, thick or thin, honest or deceitful. For some reason it seemed suddenly very important that I tell him this. It was as if I'd had a small child or tumor growing inside me and I'd not yet told anyone, as if my new teeth had come in and no one had seen. I'd been waiting anxiously for this moment, this chance, and I'd never even realized it.

  "The surface is always moving, you see. The hidden parts come up to the surface always. It's always turning over and showing itself, all of it."

  "Not much is 'hidden' here. Max." Duncan laughed at me. "It's really quite transparent."

  "But most things aren't."

  "Aren't water?"

  "Aren't transparent. You see, that's why it's important what water does, the way its surface changes and moves. Like if I remember something in a simple, frozen way. Just remember it one way as if that was the whole experience, and I don't let the surface of that memory shift and turn and reveal its undersides, then somehow that memory is wrong."

  Duncan was staring at me with his eyebrow knit. Birds clattered about in the iron rafters, shifting in their uncomfortable nests. Really I'd covered a lot of ground in the last sentence or two. I shifted a bit on my butt, adjusting my weight so my bones wouldn't get too tired.

  "I don't understand," Duncan informed me. 'is this something from class?" I looked at his wondering eyes and wondered why this need to explain it felt so strong, or even if I yet had the words that would explain it.

  "No, it's something I thought about in Bolinas."

  "The water part?"

  "Partly that. Mostly about memory, and now sort of about everything." Duncan shifted closer to me and rested his chin on his arms. The way he bowed his head and pushed his lip out, I thought he must think I wasn't well and needed solicitations or comfort. But I know that's just his way of listening closely.

  "What about everything?" he asked. I'd never heard it sound so enormous. The question echoed up into the steamy vastness and whispered through the leaden skylights. It wobbled inside my ears and worked its way around inside me. What about everything? It wasn't so big when I began. I'd simply wondered why photos made me feel so bad, but the thought I'd come to blossomed into this lush, engulfing thing.

  "It's hard to get ahold of, really." Yes, it was. Words could help hold it. If there were words enough. "I'm suspicious of things that hold still. Things that are fixed and frozen and never change." Like words holding this thought. The more successfully they held, the worse I felt. "That's kind of it."

  Duncan held still, resting his head on his forearms, looking at me as though I'd shown him an illness. "Ice always melts," he reminded me. "Nothing ever stays frozen."

  I imagined him frozen, or embalmed, preserved somehow so he remained exactly as he was now. I thought of the unraveled mummies at the Fair. Their faces had collapsed, but their flesh remained, stretched like leather over their small Egyptian bones.

  "But we try to freeze things forever, like with photographs. Or when people want to remember every detail exactly right." Duncan nodded sympathetically. "People want their memory to be like a camera."

  "How else should it be?" he asked. "I mean, how could a memory be better than if it was exactly right?"

  This was the thought that panicked me. How could a memory be better than if it was exactly right? Why did this feel like a tight sheet of rubber enclosing me? I wanted to rip its perfect, smooth face apart so I could breathe. "Doesn't it make you want to rip something into shreds?" I asked in all sincerity. "Maybe rip a huge photo apart so it blows away with the wind?"

  "Excuse me?" Duncan pulled himself out of the pool and sat beside me. "Have I missed something?"

  I watched his ribs move as he breathed and brushed my hand across his wet shoulder. I'd skipped a step or two in my argument and went back to try and express it more completely. There was us and there was the air all around us, and the iron shell with its thick glass. We sat together, bathed in the watery green light. I looked again at his fine brown skin, all glistening and wet with water. Would I ever want to rip that away?

  "Each thing has a surface, you see.
" He nodded encouragement. "Even a thought or a memory. And if it's fixed and frozen, like a photo is, it makes me feel stuck or stifled, like I'm in a prison and the walls are straight and clean. Brittle, thin walls that cut across me so close. I can't move even a muscle."

  Duncan kept plunging his foot into the water and wobbling it around to feel the resistance. He grunted thoughtfully and lay back onto the tiles. "So you'd prefer water? A watery thought?" He meant to be funny, but he was right.

  "Watery words."

  "An immense sloshing watery world?" He seemed delighted by the thought. Duncan wiggled his head back and forth in the small puddle he'd made, mumbling silly words as though this were a matter of play. I wondered what had happened to my exquisite panic. Delight was all well and good. Funny formulations and watery babbling might be healthy, etc., etc., but I seemed to have misplaced, somehow, my fear.

  "Shut up," I said, and hit him in the stomach. "It's not so easy and fun as you make it out to be." He hit me back, still thinking it was all play, and started wrestling me toward the water. I started to explain but he smiled and wrapped his arm around my mouth, shoving us off the lip and into the sloshing blue pool.

  The water closed around us, sealing shut as my mind finally found words for part of what I meant, but now I couldn't say. There was us, all tangled in each other, and our fine brown skin. Then there was the water wrapped around us and the sounds we made, muffled and bubbling. The air lay atop the wobbling waves, and the glass cage enclosed that, offering its other face to the open air, and that went on forever.

  All the cautionary tales in my little book had such tragic endings. There was George, as you know, and Harry, who got beaten for playing in mud, and Alspeth, who was eaten by a lion, his head left severed and alone. He'd let go of his nurse's hand. Matilda, who'd yelled "fire" once too often, was left at home by her withered aunt (who went to see The Second Mrs. Tanqueray alone) and burned to a cinder in a horrible blaze.

  (Mother asked me who would I like to have at my birthday and I told her, "Paolo and Rolph and George and Alspeth," because I really didn't much like Harry and Matilda was dead. Alspeth's head survived the lion's jaws, and his head would be enough for me.

  "Tenderness," she cooed, "George and Alspeth are from a book. Wouldn't Skinny like to come as well?" I didn't like Skinny that day. He'd taken my place as digger in the Tunnel Through the Earth.

  "I don't like Skinny," I said. She brushed my downy cheek with her soft hand.

  "But dumpling, that leaves just two and I don't imagine two makes for much of a party." I knew it made four but I thought perhaps she'd start to talk nonsense if I asked more about George and Alspeth.

  "Let's just set for four, can we?" I noodled, thinking she'd never guess.

  "For George and Alspeth?"

  It was uncanny. On top of everything else she could read minds. I blushed and nodded yes.

  "Pumpkin," she exhaled my favorite name. "George and Alspeth can't come to a party. They're from a book."

  "I don't mind," I tried explaining. "I could make cards asking them. I don't have to invite Skinny, do I?")

  3 SEPTEMBER 1915

  Mr. Brown says poetry began for memory, to give meter and rhyme so troubadours could remember more and more without it being written. They sang it out in every town. They sang whole songs of news, and all of it remembered in an instant. One reading and they were off on their sturdy horses, galloping over muddy fields, through thick forests full of druids and elves, and into the smoky thatched towns to sing the news.

  5 SEPTEMBER 1915

  Pruinae perniciosior natura, quoniam lapsa persidit gelatque ac ne aura quidem ulla depellitur, quia nonjit nisi inmoto aere et sereno. Proprium tamen siderationis est sub ortu canis siccitatum vapor, cum insita ac novellae arbores moriuntur.

  I run it through my head like a vacuum, sweeping things clean of meaning. It's an incantation. A musty psalm lifting the burdens from my mind.

  Sarmenta out palearum acervos et evulsas herbasjruticesque per vineas camposque, cum timebis, incendito, Jumus medebitur his.

  Frost high in the hills one night late, very late, while walking. I hear a song at night in the wind chimes. Duncan sleeps heavy. He talks in his sleep, saying things I've said over and over in an odd voice not quite his and not mine. A night bird is singing to the chimes, calling a very soft warble into the black stars and I'm awake, listening to these voices, Duncan, the bird and the bell.

  There's a density that frightens me, words carrying so many unwelcome thoughts dragging along with them. Or a single simple person, Duncan, becoming so many things, layers and layers of need or feeling or expectations that reside in his body for me. There is his body, simply his body, and so much is there when I'm looking. It drags out from my center like those awful fears I have of every surface dissolving. Or, equally, of every surface freezing shut. I become frightened by the stillness. Fear starts in me when the world is clear and fixed.

  Dear Robert,

  Wasn't it Abbeville? I'm quite certain of it, in fact. We'd made up that silly song while walking during a summer there. Father took us for a holiday. I'd a lad from Abbeville up on the table and he kept on and on about the river and the cathedral. It was some sort of delirium and he was out and dead before I could ask him about the "mousy plum" which I'm certain was the name of a small cafe (or our innocent reading of some French name). How long ago it all seems.

  We've a pond back of the line much like Cooperstown. I was the better swimmer, wasn't I?

  I was at the Albert Hall in a lovely clean suit just ten hours ago. Truly. I'd tickets for a Gilbert and Sullivan, a matinee shortly before my leave was up. I met a sweet young woman who kept on about a stomach ailment, hoping, I suspect, that I'd offer some professional advice. We sat in those plush velvet chairs, smelling of rosewater and soap, the whole building still standing. How could they ever understand this, this table of blood, this graveyard?

  You stopped at the brow of the hill to put the drag on, and looked up to see where you were:—and there lay beneath you, far as the eye could reach on either side, this wonderful valley of the Somme—with line on line of tufted aspen and tall poplar, making the blue distances more exquisite in bloom by the gleam of their leaves; and in the midst of it, by the glittering of the divided streams of its river, layed the clustered mossy roofs of Abbeville, like a purple flake of cloud, with the precipitous mass of the Cathedral towers rising mountainous through them, and here and there, in the midst of them, spaces of garden close-set with pure green trees, bossy and perfect.

  So you trotted down the hill between bright chalk banks, with a cottage or two nestled into their recesses, and little round children rolling about like apples before the doors, and at the bottom you came into a space of open park ground, divided by stately avenues of chestnut and acacia,—with long banks of outwork and massive walls of bastion seen beyond—then came the hollow thunder of the drawbridge and shadow of the gate—and in an instant, you were in the gay streets of a populous yet peaceful city—a fellowship of ancient houses set beside each other, with all the active companionship of business and sociableness of old friends, and yet each with the staid and self-possessed look of country houses surrounded by hereditary fields—or country cottages nested in forgotten glens,— each with its own character and fearlessly independent ways—its own steep gable, narrow or wide—its special little peaked windows set this way and that as the fancy took them,—its most particular odd corners, and outs and ins of wall to make the most of the ground and sunshine, —its own turret staircase, in the inner angle of the courtyard,—its own designs and fancies in carving of bracket and beam—its only bridge over the clear branchlet of the Somme that rippled at its garden gate.

  All that's gone—and most of Abbeville is like most of London—rows of houses all alike, with an heap of brickbats at the end of it.

  6 SEPTEMBER 1915

  I watched the military drills from up on a little knoll above the field. Duncan's in charge of some so
rt of unit, getting to march all around them and yell this or that and run ahead and mind the diagonals and all that sort of thing that people in charge do with a flock of able-bodied young men. It made me sad to see him having such a time of it, like when I watched him running off into the rain that day up on the ridge in Bolinas.

  Flora's dance will be next week, in the Grove, where we went through the mysteries of registration. I'll be carried about in my diaper as the infant Spring. I won't have to do all that hysterical spinning and leaping like we tried the first time.

  12 SEPTEMBER 1915

  Maybe from it being so warm and dusty, I was nearly sleeping, but very much present. It's that Latin, really, especially in Mr. Deutsch's steady even meter.

  ''Fuere ah his et cognomina antiquis." From trees? I rather like the idea. It's best days like today when he turns the lights off and shows projections through the magic lantern.

  "Frondicio militi illi qui praeclara Jacinora Volturnum transnatans Jronde inposita adversus Hannibalem edidit." I fancy Duncan's of the same stuff as Frondicio, the sort who'd think to use a screen of foliage and be ripe to jump in any river. The pictures show the ancients to be so handsome, all with their fine straight noses and beautiful bodies. Father says they liked boys, and even made sex a part of the program of education. The words are so solid and simple to me. I imagine their simplicity comes from my inadequate understanding. It is new to me, and so each word has clear meaning. It's a great relief.

  ''Stolonum Liciniae genti," washing like water easy over me. Mr. Deutsch does love to read, "ha appellatur in ipsis arboribusjruticatio inutilis, unde et pampinatio inventa primo Stoloni dedit nomen."

  And oh, the smooth hands running rough over me in that sylvan grove, there by where Miss Tartaine sealed our fates. We had quite the audience, as Flora's made more friends than the entire population of Lowell, it seems, upperclassmen with pipes and women who wore pants. I was so delightfully bare and given the simplest of parts, the violent beauty of Spring's grand assertion having been stricken from the program. "Work in Progress" it was entitled this time around.