memory lane

[wytchcroft]

Islands

There's a scraping, he is, a scraping away, I can hear it, I can see him, scraping. He thinks, I have never been so awake. I have never been so aware. The pale girl is staring at him as he scrapes at his plate with the blunted cutlery. She says, “I think something bad happened here.” But it doesn't feel that way to him, it can't do, must not do - this sensation, this miracle awakening. That's all he has to hold onto.

That's in the kitchen, if it is a kitchen. Somewhere else there is a garden of sorts,, a neglected scrub of green at least, and there are cliffs, a wide lake. Sitting by the edge she says the same thing again.

“No,” says the old man. “I don't know about that...”

“Who are you?” she asks, and looks about her, the wind whipping the greasy strands of her hair into her face, obscuring it from the Man's sight. “Where – what is this place, where am I?” she asks with a note of hysteria.

In the corridor she sits feeling her back stiffen against the cold walls, her legs are splayed and she is tugging at an ill-fitting boot. He looks down at her and she looks up uncomprehendingly. “Who?” she asks, her voice is cracked and dehydrated.

And the old man is shaking, uncontrolled his limbs are quivering and spastic. The girl gapes with an open mouth and wide frightened eyes. Just a moment before he had been laughing, had opened the laughing about something that what and who is this man in front of her and what is this place and she opens her mouth wider still and screams.

And the door is opening and there is a note of triumph in the man's voice. “There!”

The girl smiles, impressed, pointing at the code lock she asks him how he did that and he tells her that he did it yesterday but he didn't know how he did then and now - now he starts to shake, uncontrolled his...

“I don't remember” he says.

“What do you remember?” she asks.

“Yesterday I watched you walking round in circles. What have you forgotten?”

“I don't remember – I mean I...”

She knows though, she remembers a lot. A who, a where and a when. Just not hers – or at least she doesn't think so – and while she's trying to recall she looks at him and is suddenly blank. “Where am I?” she asks.

I have never felt so supremely awake. Now I am really awake. Now I am completely awake. For the first time I am -
“What are these?”

“What are what?”

“These insects.”

“Insects... what?”

It could go on like that forever or be over in a blink of an eye. Her eye. He looks at her eyes. He watches them blink, the tiniest shudder flickering under the skin, an electrical pulse that throws the flesh of the lid forward and shut.

I know the words, he thinks to himself, I know so I remember but I can't remember how I know and I don't know how I remember and

it could go on like that forever.

A fluttering at the windows, the drumming of wings against the glass. An insistent beating.

“You beat your head the same way yesterday,” he says to the girl.

“I have a nosebleed” she says.

“Yes.”

He reaches into his pocket, a wide pocket in his baggy pants. She is smiling, she likes his pants, they reassure her somehow. “Are you my father?” she asks.

He doesn't think so.

He is dragging her by the sleeves as she kicks against him, resisting, she always resists but he doesn't know what else to do – sooner or later she must start to learn her way around, her muscles must familiarise themselves with the environment. Good word that, he thinks, very good. “Come on,” he orders, one hand pointing down the flat chrome corridor. “It's getting dark, it's getting cold. There might be dogs.”

She tells him distractedly about the dog she had when she was a child growing up in the prefecture and how the dog was her best friend and her other best friend, her real best friend, human, ha ha, was allergic to the canine companion and how awkward it was and how she cried when her mother took the dog away and how sad she is because that might not have even happened to her really she can't tell but it's possible right? And on, down the flat chrome corridor. He sees their shadows, gray on the gray. We are in a 2D universe he thinks, we are cartoons.

She is looking at the floor, so clean it doesn't even seem to attract the dust.

“I think something bad happened here,” she says.

“You met me.” he says.

“Who are you?”

She comes to him as he scrapes away at the the plate, as he sits at the metal table in the wide room filled with metal tables and nothing else, she always comes to him like this now, a truculent expression on the blank of her face, eyes dark and round under the confusion of her hair. Her hands balled into the pockets of the scrappy piece of jacket she wears.

This time he looks up and demands to know what it is the room is missing, he has to know, he must know!

“Lights,” she tells him, voice neutral, mouth goes open-shut as if he had put a coin into her head, into her workings, “there are no lights.”

He squints at her and she is taken aback by the leathery foldings of his face. Half raising a hand towards it.

“No lights,” he mutters. “Why, I wonder.”

What would light attract. What else could be here but themselves?

“Who are you?” the girl asks.

It's a waking up. I have never been awoken so completely before. Before... there is no before.

I am now I am the waking moment the watching moment.

The man and the girl stand outside among the weeds and the pieces of wall and the scrawled and cryptic messages. And the man traces his fingers over the rough textures. The girl leans into a non-existent gale and draws hard on a cigarette.

“Where did you get that?” the man asks. The girl shrugs into her coat. The man waves his arms looking suddenly crazed. “No!” he shouts, “how did you know – you smoke?”

The girl looks at him blankly for a moment – then yells as the cigarette burns her fingers. “What the f-?!?” she drops the cigarette and looks at it without recognition. The man finds this funny and starts to dance around laughing. The girl looks on stupefied, rubbing her fingers instinctively.

For a long time the man ignored her. He supposed she might be young, might be pretty, he knew 'she' WAS a 'she' but there was no point of comparison, nothing in his mind he could dredge up, no image at all, and he had no apparent animal desire to protect or procreate. He didn't even have those words to use to help him think it over. There were words, he found them slowly and pulled them to the surface, looked at them carefully in the long afternoons, but where they came from was simply the blackness.

It did not occur to him that he might be very old.

“But there's nothing there!” the girl points at the empty plate, catching the light as it sits on the metal table before the man who scrapes at it with his knife.

He nods slowly, very slowly, counting seconds in his head. “You wouldn't understand,” he says wearily, “it's important.”

“Why?” she asks. And that is a little longer the man notes.

The girl blinks.

“Who are you?”

.....................  

end of pt 1.