The Beautiful Fall

by Hugh Breakey

  ‘Can I put some music on?’ Julie held up her phone.

  ‘Sure.’ I tried not to sound too unenthusiastic. Music obviously wasn’t my thing, otherwise I would have left myself some record of it, or equipment for it, like I had with the exercises and the dominoes. But part of me was curious to know what music Julie had semi-permanently belting into her ears.

  She placed her phone on the first of the empty platforms we’d already constructed. A quick tap or two on its surface, and the murmurs of a song began. It sounded nothing like the half-heard disharmonies that twanged through the weekend night air from the cafes below. There was a soft synthesizer melody, but beneath it a driving rock beat with drums building. A strange feeling washed over me, like being sucked up skyward and forward. I placed the drill back on its platform and turned to face the little device. My chest felt buoyed but my feet stayed anchored, grounding me against the sensation.

  I could sense Julie’s eyes on me. She must think me a complete weirdo. But the sense of possession held me transfixed. My fingertips itched and my core buzzed.

  Julie spoke up, as I leaned in towards the phone. ‘It’s a Sydney band. You may not have—’

  I stabbed at the screen and the music halted. Silence fell, and a wave of freedom flooded through me. Breath flowed back into my body; my limbs felt like my own again.

  I felt Julie’s eyes boring into the back of my head. The quiet shifted in a heartbeat from blissful to awkward. The overwhelming urge to remove the source of the seasick feeling had bypassed my brain and run straight to my hands. Any concerns about whether it would be rude to cut off Julie’s music, or to touch her phone at all, hadn’t had a chance to register.

  ‘Sorry,’ I stumbled an apology, turning to her and trying to summon up a remorseful smile. ‘I’m feeling a little unwell and the music…it’s hard to concentrate with it on.’

  It wasn’t a lie. The music really had made me feel sick.

  ‘Oh. I didn’t realise. And I foisted myself on you today.’ She pulled away. ‘Should I go?’

  A tiny pang of guilt twisted inside me. ‘It’s nothing really. Just a headache—just enough not to want any noise.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound right without a proper sound system anyway.’ She scooped the phone up and slipped it back into a pocket.

  I nodded supportively. Not too supportively—she might pop over some time with a sound system.

  We got back into the groove of work without too much awkwardness. At least now it was clear why my past self hadn’t left me a stereo. Though some sort of warning might have been nice.

  A third platform—this one higher and more difficult—was complete before we stopped at four o’clock. I could hardly credit how much we’d accomplished. This day did deserve celebration. The champagne would be perfect.

  I got the table ready while Julie busied herself with the paper bag from the bakery, which turned out to contain two thickly iced cupcakes large enough to be miniature cakes. All my food came from the same grocery lists set up before the last forgetting: plain and healthy fare. Yet my mouth remembered food like this. It was already salivating.

  We’d just started peeling back the wrapping from the cupcakes when I realised what was missing. ‘Wait! We have to do the song.’

  It felt a bit weird starting up ‘Happy Birthday’ by myself, but Julie went with the flow. ‘Happy birthday to me,’ she chimed in. She plucked out her lighter, sparked it to life and held it over her cupcake like a candle; when we got to the end of the song she blew it out and I laughed.

  We bit into our cupcakes and sweetness exploded in my mouth. ‘Wow. That’s good.’

  ‘I only found this bakery last week. Dangerous stuff.’

  I nodded. Best not to include anything like this on my grocery list.

  ‘So,’ Julie said between mouthfuls, ‘I have to ask. How much did all those dominoes cost you? It must have been thousands of dollars.’

  I coughed, almost choking on my cupcake. ‘Thousands?’

  ‘Well, yeah. Each of the little packs holds about fifty, don’t they? Even at wholesale they’d have to be at least two dollars a pack.’

  I swallowed. ‘That sounds about right.’

  ‘So for eighty thousand-odd dominoes that’s, what, three or four thousand dollars?’

  I struggled for breath. I’d never actually thought to do the maths. How on earth had my past self ever had that kind of money?

  ‘They were actually bought for me by someone else, so I don’t know exactly.’

  ‘Oh.’ Julie smiled. ‘What an amazing gift.’

  Amazing indeed. I hopped up from my chair and retrieved the wine from the fridge. ‘I didn’t get you a cake. But I did grab a bottle of bubbly.’

  My previous worries were forgotten. The champagne fitted perfectly with the celebratory atmosphere.

  But Julie drew back in her chair. Her eyes skipped from me to the bottle. ‘Sorry.’ She winced. ‘That’s such a nice thought. You didn’t have to. At the last minute and everything.’ She shook her head. ‘But I don’t drink, I’m afraid. At all.’

  ‘Oh.’ This possibility hadn’t crossed my mind. What a stupid blunder. ‘Sorry.’ I turned back to the fridge.

  ‘You weren’t to know.’

  It was nice of her to say, but part of me stung as if I’d been rebuffed along with the gift. I thrust the bottle to the back of the top shelf and busied myself for a moment shoving jars and cans in front of it as if I could bury the whole event.

  ‘I did promise I wasn’t going to take up too much of your day.’ Julie stood, picking up her handbag. Maybe she felt my discomfort. Her gaze lowered as she rummaged for something in the bag. ‘Before I go, I wonder if I could just get you to take a picture of me in front of the platforms we did?’ She produced her mobile phone and offered it to me. ‘It’d just be nice to remember.’

  ‘Sure.’ I perked up at the proposal. From my perspective, this was the point of the whole visit—for it to be marked and carried forward.

  ‘Great! So you just…’ She gestured towards the camera icon and led me into the dominoes room, tidying her fringe.

  ‘Yeah, I’ve got it. No worries.’ And I did have it. The phone nestled easily in my hand, my thumb perched above the little button. I knew how to work this, or at least some of it. Just like earlier I’d known how to stop the music.

  Julie was standing in front of three of the newly constructed platforms, bare feet astride the stepping stones. Butterflies stirred in my stomach. Posing for a photograph allowed you to look directly and unapologetically at someone.

  I positioned the phone firmly between us, like a safety barrier, and moved forward until I had a good shot. Rule of thirds: the vertical line of her body one-third across the picture frame, the domino platforms behind her on either side, and her smiling face two-thirds high—

  I blinked. Where had that come from? What second nature had powered that movement? Julie’s visit had unearthed more questions than a month of searching the corners of my apartment.

  One tap of the button: the shutter clicked. She looked happy. Even proud. Years later, she could point to this photo and tell her friends of something strange and half-beautiful she did on her first birthday in a new city.

  ‘Great, thanks.’

  ‘One more.’ I framed a closer shot, just her head and shoulders, and the platforms unfocused behind her, like a strange backdrop. The shutter clicked again. Beautiful. ‘Done,’ I announced, quashing the instinct to continue. To move in closer again.

  A pity I didn’t have a copy of the photo myself, for my own records. A memento.

  Julie thanked me, reaching out to take her mobile back. ‘You want me to take one for you? Do you have a smartphone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hmph,’ Julie huffed. ‘That’s sort of cool really.’

  ‘That’s me.’ Probably no one in the history of the world had called me cool before. ‘Still, it must be nice always having the camera with you.’ Such a perfect form of
memory, the photograph.

  Julie shrugged. ‘It’s the music I’d miss. Wherever you go, it’s right there.’

  Just for a second, our eyes met. I swallowed.

  ‘Do you want a hand tidying up the tools before I go?’ she said.

  ‘Sure.’ A warm flush of success spread through my chest. There had been more than a few blunders, yet here we were at the end of it all, smiling away as we packed up together.

  Much of it was a credit to her, of course, and the sunny mood that matched her dress. Still, I’d entertained a visitor who had stayed at my house for hours. Hours. And at some point—I’d been too preoccupied to notice when exactly—it had stopped being awkward and started being something else.

  I stood up at the thought. Julie stayed on her knees beside me, putting the last of the tools away. Perhaps I was actually getting better at being around other people. Even beautiful women like Julie.

  But that made no sense. My social awkwardness followed from the forgetting. It stripped me of all knowledge of what was normal, expected. So how could I be doing better? My memory was still as empty as before. Maybe this was not about conscious memory after all, but something deeper. Faster. Snap judgments honed by practice until they became instinct. Not memory but…mental muscle. Developed over time, just like biceps and triceps.

  Just like biceps and triceps.

  And if so, then open to training. To practice. And able to be recorded in a form—unconscious instinct—that could survive the forgetting.

  Julie had stopped tidying up, and was looking up at me. ‘This was fun,’ I said, my heart in my mouth. ‘Thank you. If you’ve ever got any spare time in the next week, and want to help me out again, let me know.’

  She lifted herself to her feet. ‘I think I’ve got an old phone. Maybe three years old. The camera probably still works. I’d be happy to see it go to a good home.’

  I looked at her blankly, unsure what she was proposing.

  ‘Would you like to have it?’ she asked. ‘Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’m free. I could bring it over.’

  ‘Okay. Yeah. Definitely. That would be great.’

  ‘Do you want anything left on it? Music? Games?’

  ‘No, thanks. Just having the camera would be fantastic.’ Her birthday and she was offering me a present. My own camera. It would be like the journal on steroids.

  Julie packed away the rest of her stuff, and we said our goodbyes with cheery see-you-tomorrows.

  I tried to rein in my excitement. In my earliest moments, full of fear after reading the letter, the future forgetting had loomed in my mind as a mental wrecking ball. It was almost a death sentence, at least as far as my consciousness—my awareness of myself—was concerned. But in the past few days I’d unearthed some ways of skipping stones through time. First the journal. Tomorrow the camera. Now this new idea of training the mind through new experiences, building skills and habits until they became second nature. And after all, aren’t those the instincts that really make the person who they are?

  My condition had never seemed less terminal. For the first time, I felt like I could build something capable of holding together through time. A great mass of instincts and skills and muscles, journal pages and camera shots and dominoes, that would see me ride out the forgetting. Survive it.

  The exhilaration sustained me through the next domino session, and by late afternoon I’d filled one more of the three platforms Julie had helped me set up. In a single day, the entire shape of the room had transformed. With thirteen platforms now complete—thirteen—the dominoes seemed to be swarming upward.

  I switched out the light. In the glow from the kitchen, shadows leapt to life in the strange sculpture surrounding me. The pale platforms were nodes floating in space, linked by a complex web of neurons. With only their black angles and white dots showing, the dominoes seemed like an electrical current streaming through all this crazy circuitry, motionless but humming with poised energy. I could start to see how it might look when it was complete.

  It was late. Dinner time had come and gone, but I still didn’t feel hungry. I poked around the fridge. The champagne bottle glowered out at me, lurking shamefaced behind the milk. The urge gripped me to pour it down the drain and bin the bottle—thirty-six dollars and ninety-nine cents be damned—but in the end I decided to keep it. The work was going well and, with Julie’s help tomorrow, perhaps the project would be done in time. On Day One, there might be cause for a quiet celebration of my own.

  I fixed myself a quick sandwich before starting on the maths. Since the Day Thirteen accident, the evening calculation of remaining work had served only to hammer into my brain the prospect that I couldn’t make it.

  Now things had changed. Today’s numbers surpassed anything I’d previously thought possible. As I scribbled them down on my notepad, the work hours remaining shrank back before my eyes. I drew a line through the calculations and rechecked them from scratch.

  Back on target. No more nine-hour days. With ordinary work times for the last seven days, the task would be complete—even without factoring in Julie’s help tomorrow. A few hours with her on the platforms, and I would be cruising.

  I finished up the last of the day’s chores, a smile pasted on my face. It was safe once again to imagine my new self, mind rinsed clean, awakening to something beautiful, basking in the pride of an extraordinary achievement. And tomorrow, sometime, there would be Julie, presenting me with another opportunity to train myself for society, and a new avenue to muscle my way past the forgetting and into the future.

  Day Seven

  My body groaned as I wrenched it out of bed, pecs, lats and abs aching after yesterday’s workout. I let myself go easy today. No point passing a muscle strain to my future self.

  IRONICALLY, the fact that Julie and I had worked so fast yesterday meant hard decisions would soon have to be made about the final dominoes.

  One carton remained in the kitchen. Sometime today, all going well, that one would be used up. It would then be necessary to break into the remaining dozen unopened cartons. But they made up the base of my bed. A thick yellow ratchet strap ran around the perimeter to hold the cartons together, and a double-bed mattress lay over the lot, fitting almost perfectly on the strange base. It wasn’t a fancy bed, or a large one. But with the strap ratcheted tight, the whole thing held together surprisingly well.

  Raiding those cartons for their contents meant that the mattress would have to lie on the floor. I sighed. Having a proper bed gave the bedroom an air of permanence. Without it, the whole apartment would seem more transient, as if I was just passing through the place. Not a pleasant reminder of my situation.

  Maybe I could keep the bed for a little while longer. If one row of cartons was removed the mattress would overlap the edges, but it would still feel like a bed. I released the ratchet strap, split off four cartons and re-tightened the strap around the remaining eight.

  Armed now with a healthy pile of dominoes, I got to work on two long ramps that had to run upwards along each of the side walls. The brackets needed to be fixed to the wall, then the ramps screwed on. If I got them both done this morning, Julie and I could tackle something more challenging later.

  She hadn’t mentioned what time I should expect her, so I kept waiting for a knock on the door. I drilled the holes expecting a knock; attached the brackets to the walls and fitted the two completed ramps expecting a knock. I ate my lunch expecting a knock. By the time the smart rat-tat-tat finally echoed through the apartment in the early afternoon, I’d been rolling the sound around in my head for so long the actual knock took a moment to register.

  Julie bustled in, a mess of movement and colour. Today she wore neat shorts and a trim sleeveless top, yellow again. She carried several large bags, including some more baked goods, but the real prize lay elsewhere. As promised, she had brought the phone.

  ‘It’s an old one.’ She handed it over. ‘But the camera works okay. I checked it this morning.’

  The phone ma
y have seemed old to her, but it looked new to me. I sat down at the table, bowled over. I now held in my palm a new type of memory. Another way to reach across time and pass knowledge to my waiting self on the other side.

  A strange sense of pride—or maybe something like a sense of belonging—gripped me. What if I passed this object on to my future self? Would this same feeling pass from me to my future, as if I could hand down personality along with my possessions?

  The phone nestled comfortably into my hand and my thumb hovered above the screen. The whole thing felt intuitive, just as it had yesterday.

  And why shouldn’t it? I had probably owned such a device in my earlier life. Before the condition struck, I would have had some sort of job, presumably. Money. Friends and contacts, just like everyone else.

  But if so, why didn’t I still have the phone? Perhaps it had broken or just worn out, and I hadn’t thought it was important enough to preserve as a memento. Perhaps my missing phone represented another one of those perplexing gaps in my life where an absence spoke louder than any one of my existing mementoes.

  ‘It’s vanilla.’ Julie’s voice returned me from my reflections.

  An odd thing to say. The phone was silver and black.

  ‘Nothing on it,’ she explained. ‘It’s wiped completely clean.’

  ‘Vanilla.’ I nodded. She meant nondescript. Blank.

  ‘We can fix that right now, if you like.’ She grinned and took the phone back from me, her fingertips brushing my palm. Then she was crouching, bringing herself down to my height. Her shoulders leaned back, pushing so far into my space that her hair brushed the side of my face, tickling it. The smell of her perfume rushed in.

  For a moment, I had no idea what was happening, but I followed her line of sight to the phone. Its screen showed Julie’s gorgeous face tilting towards mine. I knew what this was called. A selfie. The shutter clicked, capturing my cautious smile alongside Julie’s dazzling grin.