The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond

by Jeffrey Ford

  In his private moments away from the others, he would pore over the original sheet from the memory book. Days passed and he tried to implant some of the symbols that he found on the page into his already-existent memory palace, hoping they might imbue it with creative energy. He felt as if he was really beginning to understand the strange system when one day, while reaching into his mind to retrieve a basic mathematical formula, he discovered that his mnemonic world was slowly disintegrating. The steady forgetting confused him and made him physically dizzy.

  He grew concerned when it became evident that he would not be able to halt the dissolution of all the knowledge he had worked so hard to acquire over the years. The idea of confessing what he had done to the old man in hopes that there was some way to reverse its effects was quickly becoming his only option. During this time, Anotine could sense there was something wrong with him. She promised that if he could be patient for a few more days, she would beg Scarfinati to let them go on a vacation. During one of their midnight meetings, she wondered if it wasn’t time they should be married.

  The feelings of jealousy began to disintegrate along with his memory, but they were replaced by a sense of guilt. Anotine’s concern for him, her desire to be with him, showed that his paranoia had been unfounded. During a particularly troubling night, he decided to confess the following morning. He only hoped that even if Scarfinati could not forgive him, Anotine might find it in her heart to.

  The next day, before he could present himself to his mentor, he heard Scarfinati calling to him from the private study on the second floor. As he mounted the stairs, he wondered if his theft had been discovered. When he reached the closed door of the study, he knocked meekly on it. “Enter,” Scarfinati said from the other side.

  He opened the door and saw Anotine sitting at the study table in front of the open book. She looked straight ahead with a perfectly blank expression, her mouth slightly open. Next to the open book was the original page that Below had stolen. How it had gotten there, he could only surmise. Scarfinati must have been aware of the theft all along and taken it back through some act of magic. The mysterious old man was nowhere to be found.

  Scarfinati never appeared again at Reparata. Below came to realize that the bogus symbols he had inserted into the book on the forged page had been studied by Anotine and put to use in her mind. Because of their ill effect, her thoughts had seized. She could neither think ahead nor remember, but sat perfectly still, staring into that moment when everything came to a halt. He now could no longer deny the truth of his selfishness, and this plunged him into a great depression.

  Using a formula the old man had taught him, he entombed Anotine in a chemical ice that was impervious to heat. In that way he hoped to preserve her until he could conceive of a way to free her mind. With the last of his own fading knowledge, he set about learning the symbology of the memory book. This he finally mastered and, almost at the last second, was able to reverse the effects of his mnemonic disintegration. Even when his thought processes had returned to full efficiency, and he was using his mnemonic world as a creativity engine, he still could not discover a cure for Anotine, who lay completely immobilized in her clear sarcophagus.

  Her presence tormented him so that he invented a drug that would, for the short time it took control of his body, make him forget the pain of his guilt. Sheer beauty, as he called it, became his refuge, but when even that lost its effectiveness against his anguish, he knew he had to escape. He finally sold Reparata, and with the fortune it brought, he hired a ship and a crew in Merithae. Anotine was loaded into the hold of the ship, and Below gave orders to the captain that he was to stay perpetually out on the ocean. Once a year they would be allowed to dock in order to take on supplies and change crews. It was an odd request, but he had the wealth to back it up. The thought of not knowing with any certainty where Anotine was at any given moment came as a great relief to him.

  He spent the next few years searching for Scarfinati, but never found him. The lessons the old man had taught him proved exceedingly valuable, though, and he sold his services to the wealthy and powerful in order to survive. Each spring, he would make his way back to Merithae and wait for the ship to put into port. Then he would visit the hold where Anotine lay like a beautiful insect in amber. It was on his last visit to the coastal town, as he was watching her sail away again toward the horizon, that all at once his mind conceived of a magnificent city. This seed of a thought began to sprout behind his eyes right there on the dock as the outgoing ship diminished against the horizon to a speck of white sand and then fell through the neck of the hourglass.

  26

  When I finished telling Anotine about what I had witnessed, she remained perfectly still, staring vacantly at the hourglass as if the symbols of the story had again caused her mind to seize. I feared that it had been a cruel thing for me to reveal the secret of her past, and I admonished myself for having been so foolish.

  “I thought you would want me to be honest,” I said to her.

  She broke from her trance and looked up at me. “I’m not angry, Cley,” she said. “I’m merely confused. I know the Anotine of your story is not me, only a kind of distant relative, and yet now that you have recounted the tale, I am having memory flashes of that time and that place, Reparata.”

  She stood up and walked over to where Below sat sleeping. I followed her and stood at a distance, wondering how she might feel toward this man who had both destroyed her and then given her life in his memory. I heard her whispering and saw her hands moving in an expressive manner. She walked back and forth in front of him, continuing to expound, while he sat slumped in the chair, his arms limp at his sides. This went on for some time, but I could not hear what she was saying. I chanced a look out through the dome and saw that the sun was beginning to rise.

  She suddenly stopped talking and moved in close to the body to run her hand over his hair. Remaining in that pose for almost a minute, she studied his features, maybe trying to remember what he looked like in his youth. She then leaned over him, her breasts flattening against his chest, and brought her hands up to either side of his face. I pretended to turn away, but watched from the corner of my eye as she proceeded to kiss him on the lips. It lasted a moment, and when she was done, she leaped back and screamed in surprise.

  I could hardly believe what I was seeing, but the sleep-weighted body of Below abruptly sat straight up in the chair. Rushing over to where Anotine had backed away, I put my arm around her. Together we watched as the old man, with eyes still closed, turned the chair around to face the console. His wrinkled hands came up slowly, like the hands of a marionette, to turn dials, flip switches, and adjust the two long levers in front of him. As he performed his tasks on the board, I could feel the floor of the dome begin to rumble.

  “We’re moving,” said Anotine, and she was right. The dome had come to life at Below’s insistence and was now cutting through the thick waves under its own power.

  No sooner did we realize this than the Master fell forward, the effect of his miraculous animation leaving him as if the invisible strings had been severed all at once. His head and shoulders landed on the console, and in the process must have activated one of the controls, for the chair began moving along the low rail it was connected to, traveling smoothly around the inner circumference of the dome.

  I tried to catch up to the orbiting throne and turn it off, but I couldn’t get close enough without risk of being run down. Eventually I gave up, and Below continued to make his rounds like the hand of a clock made to indicate seconds. While he circled, Anotine and I dressed.

  “What did you say to him?” I asked her.

  “How often does one get to express herself directly to god?” she asked with a smile. “I told him how much I hated him, thanked him for bringing you to me, and then begged him to release us.”

  “Why the kiss?”

  “I could feel his fear. I remembered very clearly the day in the library at Reparata when Scarfinati materia
lized Below’s sister’s spirit. The kiss was for that part of him that is the confused child. That boy is trapped in here as much as we are.”

  “You remembered?” I asked, uncertain as to how this was possible.

  “When you told the story, there were parts of it that I saw so clearly in my mind, it was as if they were my own memories.”

  It was a dangerous business getting out onto the walkway with Below on the move in his chair. We had to time our slipping over the rail and through the portal just right so that we wouldn’t be run down. Once outside, we stood in the early-morning sun with our backs to the dome, and watched as it sliced through the lazy waves of the silver ocean. It was obvious we were heading somewhere, for the unconventional craft seemed to stay on a direct course.

  After an hour of watching the scenes in the waves and wondering what force had taken charge of Below’s body, I looked up and saw something looming on the horizon. At first, I thought it was a cloud bank moving in, and I mentioned it to Anotine. She shaded her eyes with her hand and peered outward.

  “Cley,” she said, “I think it’s land.”

  Not only was it land, but it was huge, a coastline stretching in either direction as far as the eye could see. I was amazed with the discovery of this memory continent, and was beginning to understand that the mind had an almost limitless storage capacity. I also realized that the memory had duplicate processes for retaining information. There had been the island, the ocean, the hourglasses, and now this vast territory that grew more distinct with our approach. These were both deep insights, but they did me little good. In the end, all I could hope for was that I still had some time left with Anotine before the complicated world that was Below went out like a match in the rain.

  About a mile or so from the coast, we passed a boundary after which the liquid mercury of the ocean became a clear, light blue water. Anotine had never seen anything like it before, and she marveled at its beauty. We had remained on the walkway throughout our approach, and now as we looked over the side, we could see the shadowy forms of large fish passing beneath the dome. Off in the distance, a flock of birds was headed for shore.

  “Do we have a plan?” asked Anotine while shading her eyes to get a better look at our destination. Although we were still a few hundred yards offshore, it appeared that the course set by the comatose Below was going to land us on a smooth beach of white sand.

  “Do we need one?” I asked. “We seem to have traveled beyond any influence of a purpose.”

  “Are we free?” she asked. “Or just lost?”

  “For the time being, both, I suppose.”

  “I like that,” she said.

  Eventually the heavy vibration coming from the floor of the dome stopped, and the gentle action of the waves pushed us right up onto the beach. All there was to do was hop down over the railing of the walkway. I turned and took one more look inside through the clear barrier. There was Below, riding his chair in a continuous loop. The sight was so absurd that I had to laugh. Anotine came up next to me and also looked in.

  “I tell you, there’s a dream in need of interpretation,” she said.

  Then I turned and climbed down off of the walkway and onto solid ground. I was a bit shaky from having been at sea for so long, and it took me a moment to find my balance. When I felt more steady, I reached up and helped Anotine down. Once we started up the beach, we never looked back.

  We walked for more than two hours through an intense heat before we saw our first signs of foliage. For miles there had been nothing but white sand and outcroppings of a rust-red stone. I was beginning to fear that Below had delivered us to a barren wasteland when finally the sand turned to dirt and then grass began to appear. By late afternoon, we found the edge of a forest and stopped to rest beneath a thicket of tall trees.

  The ground was soft with moss and fallen leaves, a welcome bed after the hard floor of the dome. I lay there with Anotine next to me, enjoying the breeze that rolled out of the forest, carrying with it the scent of pine and the distant sound of birds. I closed my eyes and the peaceful nature of the place brought back a memory of us lying in Anotine’s bed on the island. “So many memories,” I whispered, half-asleep, and as I began to drift off, I pictured myself inside a memory having a memory of a place created to store memories, lying next to a memory woman who stored within her the memory of the formula for a drug invented to ease the pain of memories. The mental exercise wearied me even more than the walking had, and finally the whole thing dissolved into a dream of the green veil.

  Night had fallen by the time I awoke. I came to with a splitting headache and that certain crawling of the flesh and itching of the brain that signaled withdrawal. Groping in the dark, I found Anotine next to me and initiated a round of lovemaking, even though I knew she was not fully conscious. At that point it had been almost an entire day since I had my last infusion of the beauty, and I wasn’t concerned about the ethics of the situation. She lay there with her eyes closed as I lifted her dress and moved her legs apart. I worked quickly to quell the urgency in my very blood.

  At one point my ear was near her mouth, and I heard her say the name “Drachton” very faintly. Had I not been driven by addiction, I would certainly have stopped to ponder this, but as it was, nothing could have stopped me. When I finally backed off of her, I felt ashamed of what I had done, and wondered how I could explain it to her when she woke up. The beauty, a hundredfold stronger than my conscience, was turning me into an animal.

  These self-recriminations lasted only as long as it took for the drug to produce its euphoria. Then my mind raced, spinning twisted philosophical theories that eventually smothered my guilt. I shelved my apprehensions by telling myself that Anotine would understand. As pleased as I was to have dispersed these troubling thoughts, I was now again aware of my surroundings. The fact that I could see no more than a few feet in front of me, and that we were in a strange forest in some country of the Master’s mind brought with it a brand of paranoia worse than anything I had previously been feeling.

  Twigs cracked and something moved through the fallen leaves. Who knew what nightmare creatures roamed this tract of Below’s addled mind? I considered waking Anotine for company, but I didn’t want to have to explain just yet. Instead, I huddled up, my arms clasped around my knees, and listened. The effects of the drug made everything more uncertain, and I began to see misty white forms moving through the trees in the distance. For the first time, I noticed that the temperature had dropped considerably from late afternoon, and I started to shiver.

  Anotine mumbled a phrase in her sleep, and I looked over at her to see if she was awake. Her eyes were closed, but it was obvious she was having a bad dream, for her face went through a series of grimaces and winces. When I turned back to look out into the night, there was a man standing in front of me. He was tall, and at first, my heart leaped because I thought the Delicate had somehow returned to life and tracked us. I tried to cry out, but I couldn’t. The beauty had, as always, left my throat incredibly dry. By the time I worked up some saliva and could have given voice to my fear, the shadowy figure had put his finger to his lips, motioning for me to be quiet.

  He sat down in front of me, folding one leg under the other and wrapping himself in his cape. The fact that he adopted this non-threatening posture did much to relieve my fear. When I saw his smile, I relaxed and asked his name.

  “Scarfinati,” he whispered.

  “I know you,” I said.

  Though his body appeared to be in remarkable shape, his face, a veritable web of wrinkles, showed his age. Still he seemed very spry, and there was a certain light in his eyes that couldn’t have been a reflection.

  “I know you,” he said. “Cley. Am I right?”

  I nodded, incredulous at the fact that he had my name. “This is Anotine,” I said, pointing to her.

  “She is still beautiful,” he said. “But don’t wake her.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “The same reas
on you are. To save you and Anotine, and in the process, even this son of a dog turd, Below.”

  “Do you know …”

  “I know a few things. I have it within my ability to follow the events of this world. This forest is my prison, so to speak. I can go no farther than its boundaries, but I still see with the eyes of an adept. Many things are clouded but some things are clear. Unlike your friend there, I am aware that I’m a memory.”

  “This world is dying,” I told him.

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s why I am here. I can’t stay long, but I’ve come to tell you how to reverse the ravages of the disease.”

  “Please,” I said. “Do you know the antidote?”

  “The antidote you speak of is more dangerous than the disease. I will tell you a better way to cure the illness. Enter the forest, and before long you will come across a path. Follow it. A half-day’s journey from here, due west, there is a large field, and in the very center of it lie the ruins of a city that Below was once the ruler of.”

  “The Well-Built City,” I said.

  “I would have used that title, but I can’t say it without laughing uncontrollably.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “Now listen. You must go to that place and find the memory book. I can tell you know what I am speaking of. Find in the book the page that begins with these three symbols: the eye, the hourglass, and the circle. When you have located it, burn it, but do not let the ashes fly away. Gather all of the ashes together and ingest them. I have calculated that once this strand of symbols has been obliterated from the mnemonic world, the disease that infects Below will be neutralized.”