Islands - concluded

[wytchcroft]

Three:

Like the breaking of a fever, the thing called time - fractures, cools, ebbs away, a wave in retreat. There is debris left behind all the flotsam and jetsam washed up. There are husks of butterflies everywhere; dropping like leaves from the edges of windows, from the fronds and trellises of bush and plant, from the walls and the trees. They crunch under foot.

“Ugh,” the girl exclaims twisting her foot to peer disgustedly at the sole of her boot, “disgusting!”

She looks up again and at the old man. “What is it?” she asks with an exaggerated wrinkle of her nose.

The man waits, toying with a broken I.D. disc – one of the objects found in his evidence searches, of itself just a small piece of twisted metal, the old man has decided to give some meaning to the object, to the name stamped on it – Lee Chuang.

The girl blinks and asks slowly. “Who – are – you?”

It could go on forever like that.  

The old man smiles, tugs at her sleeve, weathered fingers grasping the worn leather. “Here, look!” he smiles again and points as they stumble through the door.

The girl walks into the classroom, careful to keep her face void of expression, to keep her feelings to herself, the hot blush on the inside. She was good at that – it was easy, actually – no/one ever looked at her anyway, not the other kids and definitely not Ms – Ms…

“Name?” the girl asks aloud.

“Emma,” says the old man with the gravity that comes of pretence. “Your name is Emma. My name is Lee. Pleased to meet you.”

“What – where –we..?”

The old man beams. “We’re famous heroes!” he gushes, “Of the resistance! Look…” and he leads the girl to a wall. It’s a piece of collage, two large pieces taken in from the outside. The cryptic graffiti splashed across in fading red and mauve. The girl reaches out to touch what is suddenly familiar. She mumbles, reading the words, the letters, or least some of them. The old man tries to catch the whisper of her voice. “EMMA-NO-M-R-ISTOR-“

She turns and looks questioningly up through the thicket of her hair.

“Famous heroes!” The man says again.

The girl smiles suddenly “Yeah!” she exclaims.

And who would I be but God? I carry with me the signs and the wounds; the cross is in my hand, red as blood. The snake is in my left as I have Mastery of it and its works.

All in creation stems from me – yes, even the snake, so those works, yes, they are mine. As God I am light. But as I creation I must have darkness too.

Darkness. Even as the night through which creation slumbers. Now. My sleeping children, look down upon them, I look now upon them as they sleep, as they dream. They seem content, as fragile as they are – and so ambitious. It is Sin, in ignorance of course, but sin, Hubris. They honestly think, they believe, that I am amongst them, come amongst them even in the flesh as them, the same as them. And as the flesh is week they dare to constrain it; this place, this chair, these ropes. Ungrateful. To tie me here.

But the flesh is just a vessel, God cannot be so contained. I am in the heart of all things. I move through the hearts of all things. I move through creation. I -

The old man opens a slow and rheumy eye. “How do you expect us to dream if you keep us awake, huh?” And he swears, rising to his feet, tottering across and tugging the headset off. “Huh,” he grumbles to himself, “I should have noticed that,” pulls free the wires and the dicta-set. Throws the little device onto his blanket and stumbles after it. “That’s better.”

He flops down again, one arm shielding the girl. He snores.

The girl dreams to remember, walking briskly through the crowds as she makes her way towards the tram. Her head cocked on one side as she listens through the melee and its noise for the hard click-clack of a coin stuck to the bottom of her boot, a good clean sound.

That coin has made her late. In the tunnel (prefecture under-route 15714, to be exact), dancing on the stone flooring she had made sparks. Kicking down with a quick motion and kicking out again backwards. Flish-flash! Like magic.

She should be at the museum. That was supposed to be the destination, a once in a lifetime opportunity to actually walk amongst the beautiful mysteries of history, genuine and physical. An education.



But history was the past and the past was something faint now and elusive. She’d always had trouble with the idea of days behind her, like she ‘d lost them somehow, like she could turn around and snatch them back, hold them close. But suddenly people were saying the past was disappearing and more and more around her people were saying and people were falling silent and people were stopping and people were

Stopped.

Silent.

No melee now, no wild street hubbub and no tram, no museum. No school then maybe either. She wasn’t sure she could remember school anyway. And no/one to check, no/one to ask. The dull blank of the screens told her everything. That really was everything, that blank. Everyone was blank.

She wonders why the young, the children like her, were first. As she sits in the hallway, sprawled among the hieroglyphs of her comics a face flashes into consciousness, explodes for an instant like a firework, an old face almost recognised, the wrinkled eyes so wide and strange. The crazy woman upstairs maybe there was a crazy woman upstairs. The girl shakes her head, no, no, they took her didn’t they? Someone…

She looks again at the pages, the inky blurred outlines, the drawing of a typical generic wild girl, leaning all punk cute and smoking. The girl wonders if the drawing is of her. She is the girl in the pictures.

She looks up at the strangers around her and scowls.

In his dreams the old man does not shake. He moves through the corridors, he moves through the doors. He glides between the pieces of machinery with a calm sense of rightness, of purpose. His tool bag snug against his back, his leather gloves equally so. He doesn’t have to think, it is pure instinct, muscle memory, experience.

But there’s a sense of fatigue that weighs on him as his dreams wind on. As he begins to remember. He could remember… he was one of the few that could, that had kept his memories through everything, despite his job, despite the fashion for hook up, despite the ordinary taken-for-granted nature of it. Despite the fact that he was tired, tired of remembering, of living more and more within his memories, he wanted rid of them, he was – yes, he was envious of those around him, blank eyes and hungry though they be. They had no memory beyond what could be given them for the briefest of times, the mewling children, the wild adults. All of them. Hungry.

But not him. He has had a surfeit of life. He is full.

He remembers the bunkers and the cubicles. He remembers the monotony of life winding down - and people, all the years of people in such close proximity – and yet so far away from him. He remembers when his grandchildren stopped visiting. He remembers when his wife was added to the list of the lost. And he was so curiously untouched.

Why?

He had never been one to complain. What knocked him away from life? How does a man become so estranged?

Candles in birthday cakes, he remembers. Eyes under paper hats, he remembers. Birthday after birthday – and he could barely say their names.

But in his dreams there are mostly just machines. And when he wakes it is almost the same. It’s near enough.

Some dreams though… or memories… or the memories of dreams of memories, or-

It confuses him… fumbling about between the possible truth and the probably imagined.

There were crowds, always, brittle bodied sleepwalkers and the throng staff. The facility had become a clinic, a nursery. Shuffling like zombies as the scientists (the last few), rounded them up. He never asked why, just kept his head down and worked with his machines. He’d offered his memories hadn’t he? He’d tried. He’d done his best. He deserved some peace surely?

The old man wakes to forget.

God has been silent since they took his toy away. Not a single word, not even of complaint – and certainly not to divulge the hiding place, wherever it is that the recordings are hidden.

Together the old man and the girl had rifled through the heavy bag, poring over the contents, but there was nothing of that sort to be found.

The old man had shrugged. It probably didn’t matter anyway, and what they did find in the bag was interesting enough; bottles and bandages and syringes and skin patches and all sorts of equipment. It would be quite a task puzzling it all out. And worth the shaking for those things the old man seemed to recognise by instinct; the girl yelling at him when he bathed the scratches on her legs with the disinfectant and the cotton wool, the old man laughing and hooting. Later he did the same for God and added some sticking plaster to the wound on the back of his head, the wound that was worth the ruin of a decent torch and not just for the girl and not just for the bag, because God has his uses. In a strange sort of way he is a buffer – a constant reminder that there may be others, a world perhaps beyond the old man and the girl, beyond the island. Coping with God gives them a chance to deal with that possibility – or not, but the choice is theirs now.

And so Lee begins the rituals and routines again; the food hall and the game room, the stores and the sleeping den. Looking for fish in the lake and experimenting with animal traps, exploring the bedraggled out houses and the beaches, watching the horizon.

Collecting firewood and stripping down what can be turned into blankets and insulation. Hanging the nets and noting when the insects stir. When there is a fluttering and droning and Emma can be found smoking behind the yard wall and waving at her imagination.  

One by one watching the butterflies take to the air, fragile wings gripping the thermals and the wind.

It could go on forever like that.

At least for a while.

…………………………………………………………………………………

 
hope that was worth the read... 

although this fic is just riffing around the writer's block question it does give me the chance to add a coda  to my previous Memory Lane scribblings - of which there is a rough explanation here (although that needs some updating) and of which the best stories are probably these two. and the finale was this.

obviously that was quite a while ago now - and a lot of things have come and gone since... 
not the least of which are Joss Whedon's memory/identity exploring tv show 'Dollhouse' and the fact that i've read 'Memories of Emanon' the manga by  Kajio Shinji and kenji tsuruta.  
the shout-outs are not subtle. 

i hope however that (for better or worse) this fic stands on its own.

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