109.
Inj lay on her side like a fallen heroine.
110.
“No really,” said Eris, “What’s more silly than a book in which one thing happens and then another thing happens? This,” she said, “this very conversation has already happened. And we can revise it to prove or to disprove any version of reality. Have I told you my thesis? The fixity of the page is a prison of infinite space. In the future,” she said to Liz, “the novel will be a polyphonic electric/tronic dialogue between all the readers in the world, and we will have no more of this, this, this monster called the author. We won’t be bound by binding or ink. In the future,” Eris said, “the future will have already happened. Do you see?”
111.
“She’s so beautiful,” Beatrice said.
112.
Liz picked up a plastic dinosaur that Bruno had left on the table.
113.
“She’s like a girl on television,” said Beatrice. “She’s been places. I can tell. She’s done things.”
Schell looked at Beatrice in the darkened room.
“Do you want to go places?” he said.
“That’s just it,” she said.
“What?” he said.
He touched her cheek.
He touched a hand to her hair.
“I don’t want anything,” she said.
114.
Elizabeth Weiss felt that a novel should offer—if not moral instruction, then—a roadmap for the reader. It should tell the reader where to go and how to proceed in the world.
115.
At the heart of all things is a knife.
116.
Inj unpinned her hair.
117.
Salt had a secret.
118.
Susu, when she was a little girl, had liked to sit at her mother’s dressing table before the mirror; to unstopper the glass bottles and jars; to open the jewelry box; to rope the pearls around her neck; to dab rose on her wrists. Susu had liked to dress in her mother’s black silk slip and read aloud from a book of Poe. And when she grew up, she found that what was once a game was the very reality of her existence. Which did not mean that it was no longer fun to play at it. Only that sometimes she felt like the raven and other times like the writing desk.
119.
Bruno Salt, age four, tired of being good for the whole of the long afternoon alone in his room with his trucks and puzzles, tromped into the living room wearing one snow boot (he couldn’t find the other) and holding by a tangled leash the long-haired dachshund called Kafka, and announced to his mother that the dog really really really wanted to go outside now.
120.
Louis said, “The invention of humanity relies on the device of collective memory. Yet, this collection of shared knowledge, of the very meanings of pain and of pleasure, of yes and no, itself relies on the subset of the individual’s memory within the collective. If we locate memory in difference, that is, the difference between the real and the unreal; between belief and disbelief; between story and plot; between now and then; or in the skittering ligature-bound variation between s and z: how will we know where one begins and the other ends? It may be a token of the final illogic of logic, that we must first premise our disbelief on belief. We must pick a point and call it an established truth. Upon which rock will we build our church? We call absence itself presence; and say: it is time to begin. It is time to begin. Here is where we will begin: God is the beginning not because he is known, but because he is unknown. Gentlemen, friends: I will tell you my story. The story of my memory game. It begins, as all stories do and must, with a girl.”
121.
Dibby Stone almost forgot—the cocoa was so sweet and warm—
That Roman was dead.
122.
What had become of the knife that had stabbed him in the heart?
123.
Chester Stone wiggled a loose tooth with his finger.
124.
“Well aren’t you something?” Eris asked Bruno.
125.
Said Louis Sarasine, “I’ll begin, as I said. With the girl.”
126.
Bruno thought that it was a silly question. Between something and nothing, he would always choose something.
127.
Eris was wearing striped stockings.
128.
There were times when Dibby thought that she saw Roman in the darkness. She saw him at his typewriter. And then the shadows shifted. And she knew that he wasn’t real. He was a ghost of her memory. Yet, if she could create him—from will or reflex, from habit or desire—who was to say that he wasn’t entirely and hadn’t always been a monster of her own creation?
129.
Louis Sarasine told to the members of the Mnemosyne Society a story.
130.
The wind banged against the windows—Eloise, naked on her hip, had the awful feeling that somewhere someone was digging her grave.
131.
The story—dark and terrifying, as stories told on New Year’s Eve should be—was about a girl who found her mother and father dead.
132.
Susu had a very silly name.
133.
Said Louis, “The girl walked along a dirt road to her house on an October evening. The house was dark. She stood in the garden looking up at the windows. An apple fell from a tree. A bird flew from a branch. She waited. She waited. And then she went in the house. She took the stairs in the darkness. She called out; no one answered. She went from room to room. Calling out. And then she stopped calling.
134.
Eris apologized to Liz, where had the time gone?
135.
Eloise was the one who found the bodies.
136.
Kafka barked.
137.
Eris packed up her laptop computer and collected into an oversized leather bag: her tape recorder, her cell phone, keys, a glove, coins, butterscotch candies, a lipstick, another glove, that she had during the course of the visit spread out across the table to mix with Bruno’s clutter of Legos, colored pencils, plastic dinosaurs, and a much-prized grimy white feather. Eris shrugged into her coat. It was blue and furry. Bruno reached out with his damp little hand to touch it.
Liz asked Eris as the girl rose to go, did she have big plans for the night?
138.
Louis said, “What happened next? I confess: I don’t know. Her story is unfinished. She won’t allow it to end. She tells me the story. I listen. By day we live in the real world; yes, there is such a place. But at night we wind our way through a labyrinth of her creation.”
139.
Eris said that she hated New Year’s Eve, and wasn’t it stupid? the idea of it; of one year ending and another beginning? It drove her bananas. It really did. She liked to think of the revolution of the planets. Slow, dull, and incomprehensible: like the best novel. It neither began nor ended.
140.
Liz said good-bye to Eris. Bruno took both his mother’s hands in his. The girl smiled and pretended that this was adorable. And then Eris said good-bye to the boy and his mother and went off down the street, happy to be free of them, and sad too.
141.
The Mnemosyne Society met once a year, on New Year’s Eve. They began long ago with a commitment to the theoretical examination of memory. Oh, but as the years passed, these great men found little and ever-diminishing comfort in theory. They had become, bit by bit: older, whiter, fatter or skinnier, more wanting of story than discourse, more desirous of desire than disproof of the immutable substance of dreams. Memory had long since become remembrance. And so it was that when Louis Sarasine told of the girl who became his wife, who led him nightly through a labyrinth, twining her way in the darkness with a knotted rope of story; binding him with her noose; each man felt looped in the loop himself; bound at the wrist and blindfolded. His bruises were real, or at least real enough; for he had heard a story about truth and beauty.
142.
Zigouiller slept on his stomach, like a hero hiding his fatal flaw.
143.
“I had a recent case,” Louis Sarasine said. “No doubt you saw it on the news?—a young man stood accused of rape and murder. Three girls were found, each one packed in a suitcase: one suitcase left by the side of a road; one thrown in a lake; one in a train station. There was circumstantial evidence, but he claimed that he had no memory of the events. He passed polygraph tests. He never broke nor faltered in his denials. He was candid, young, and credible. His sincerity confounded even his most certain accusers. He might have gone free; he might not have gone to trial—but there was another girl, a girl who had survived. She had been found wandering the woods, but she was so traumatized that she couldn’t speak for months after, let alone recall specific details, nor could she identify her attacker, until seeing his picture on television. My task was to discredit the girl and engage the sympathy of the jury toward the accused. Which, of course, I did.”
144.
Zola, sleeping on the silk nightdress, dreamed that she was a girl and that Zigouiller was in love with her.
145.
Liz and Bruno walked along a snowy street with Kafka.
146.
Eris, who was writing a paper, though no actual paper was involved, on the topic of postfeminist ergodic technoiconography vis-à-vis la morte de la novel as a phallogocentric assault and thusly thrust conversely upsidedownedly: the feet-first kicking breech birth of the eco-polyphonic carnival text, was kinda sorta disappointed that she hadn’t gotten to meet Salt.
147.
Salt knew that he had a book within him.
There was only one problem.
148.
Beatrice pared a potato.
149.
Salt was suffering from writer’s block.
150.
Suffering?
151.
Susu closed the door to the balcony.
152.
“The victim could not recall the crime, and the accused could not recall committing the crime,” said Louis Sarasine. “Yet a crime had been committed. The case was like a game of telephone; the circuitry of the act had given way to myriad possibilities, not negating reality, but creating subsets to it, inexhaustible what-ifs and why-nots? And it occurred to me; I had a belated revelation, not in the courtroom, but later, on the plane home, delayed by a snowstorm—”
153.
Beatrice set the timer on the oven.
154.
Inj was naked.
155.
Roman was dead.
156.
Dibby had quick small fingers.
157.
Kafka licked the salt from his paws.
158.
“—I understood how my wife had helped me,” said Louis. “She told me her story. Each time that she told the story, she changed it. She believed in each version of the story that she told. I understood; I learned from her how it is that the truth is less relevant than a belief in the truth.”
159.
Eloise and Zigouiller slept on through the darkening afternoon.
160.
Dibby wanted to know how the story would end.
161.
It was not a story.
162.
Beatrice knocked on the bedroom door; did anyone want to go for a walk in the woods?
163.
Inj buttoned her blue jeans.
164.
Salt had gone dry.
165.
Bruno licked peanut butter from his fingers.
166.
Said Louis Sarasine, “A story is a labyrinth, and all paths lead to the monster. Who is the monster? Is it the storyteller? A good storyteller must be a monster. The best stories tell of the worst of human nature. The worst, our broken laws. Our nightmares realized. To write of such things, an author must commit the act himself; if only on the page. And what of us? What of the readers? In the real world, we read our newspapers. We butter our bread. We read of murder, and we are sickened. But in fiction, in the story: we want the dead girl. So—who is the monster? You? Me? Am I guilty? Are you, dear friends, guilty? Because you want to know about a dead girl? Am I guilty for wanting to know what my wife found in the dark house years ago? I want her story. My client told me his memories, that’s all. I listened. I defended not him, but his dreams. I defended the story. I defended the right of a dreamer to imagine the worst. I have read the oldest most beautiful stories in the world—tales of rape, destruction, and murder. I have found the beauty in violence. In my mind I have killed so many girls. Yet, I never lifted a hand. I never held a knife in anger, but I did imagine the knife in my hand. Am I guilty? Because what one dreams is always possible? Am I guilty of reading a story?”
167.
Bruno danced to a song on the radio.
168.
Liz at her laptop computer set on the kitchen table, while waiting for the water to boil for macaroni and cheese, was tapping out a particularly relevant passage in her new novel. She was wearing a sweater knitted of organic cruelty-free Peruvian wool. She lived dedicated to the principle of a cruelty-free life. The impossibility of this had not yet occurred to her.
169.
Susu Zigouiller went down to the hotel bar.
170.
In the winter woods walked Inj and Beatrice.
171.
Salt had a story within him, but he had no mechanism—neither ghost nor machine—by which to tell it.
172.
Schell was not sure what was real and what was not.
173.
Louis Sarasine said, “Eloise was not sure what was unreal and what was not. This was the gift—or the grace—that helped me prove, if not the innocence, then the lack of guilt of a monster.”
174.
In the kitchen, Salt ate bread and marmalade.
175.
Schell closed the door to his study.
176.
Beatrice told Inj the names of birds.
177.
Said Louis, “I want to know what will happen. Each time she tells me I want to know. Hearing the story does not diminish my desire. I am looking for a clue, a twist, a turn, an exit. I am searching for a fallen candle, a hidden letter, a lost key. I want more. I want to know more.”
178.
Salt left a sticky knife on his plate.
179.
Schell picked up his pen.
180.
The black cat went from room to room.
181.
Louis Sarasine went to the window and looked out.
“There is more to the girl’s story,” he said. “You see, she had a brother.”
182.
Salt opened the door to the study.
183.
Inj chased the dogs round and round through the pine trees.
And fell laughing in the snow.
184.
Said Louis Sarasine, “It is the story of a brother and a sister.”
185.
Schell put down his pen.
186.
The girls talked about actresses they liked. And how nice it was to be able to talk about actresses they liked without very smart men telling them they should talk about more meaningful things.
187.
Let the Dark Flower Blossom Page 17
