The Wilderness Page 30
“What day is it, Jake?”
His hands come together; he is surprised to feel his fingers touch his face. He considers the words. They are foreign words. He offers a genuine smile, pleased to be here and to see her.
“Can you tell me the year?”
“Is that, by that do you mean, in the years before?”
“No, by that I mean, what is the year we're in now?”
“Ah. Yes, yes, yes, yes. The year is, and the years is, let me see, what was that? It must be about 1935 by now.”
“Do you know why you're here today, Jake?”
He raises his eyes to her and squeezes his hands tightly. “I believe it has something to do with my hair.”
She nods. “Your hair?”
“It falls out. What must we do to keep it?”
“I suppose we must let it go. What do you think?”
“I suppose that's the law.”
She closes the folder on her desk and pushes a glass of water his way.
“A kind of law,” she says. “Yes.”
15
The train cuts through a thickening suburbia. At points it congeals and the train, unable to press through, stops to unload. More people get on. He worries that it will not be able to progress with this new burden, tries, without even the expectation of success, to calculate the lost weight against the gained. Where the balance? Is balance to be hoped for? Is it not better that things gradually thin out?
Once off the train they get into a car; someone unknown drives them through part-known streets, and once in a while, rising from the slump of inexplicable stone, places spark with a dim, distant familiarity. He seeks out the bombed areas but can find none. Shifting within him, from limb to limb, is the sensation that he ought to do something, but as the buildings drift past he sees that there is nothing left to do.
Now there are other people, it feels like crowds, and a shabby brightness bearing the stench of animals. The metal arms frighten him as they turn, so he stands back and stares at them despite the woman's best efforts at encouraging him. Come on, Jake, it's me, Ellie. Finally she takes his hand and goes through with him. His breath is short from walking these few paces and from the close air, which seems too much for his lungs, but even with these irritations his mood is peaceful where it wasn't, and hasn't been for longer than he can say.
There is a man with them, who, he thinks, has just arrived, or maybe he has been here all day—has he? Has he seen him before?
“At some point I'd like to see the aquarium,” the man says. “It has water from the Bay of Biscay—”
The woman says something in reply. He hears his name being said. Slowly he turns his head and blinks.
“Anywhere you want to go first, Jake?”
The ears are full of background noise, not unpleasant but rather as though the air itself is made of something knitted. Here has existed before, or no, perhaps here always existed, this moment has been long, or possibly short, but here is thick on his ears and eyes. Ahead of him is a patch of scrubbed dry grass and on it are the large, obvious creatures, they look like old men who have lost their jobs and taken to drink, the way they hang and loll and scratch. Macaques, he thinks, out of the blue. Just a word without meaning, a word he made up. He progresses along the fence, amused and intrigued. One sits in the hook of a tree and eyes him wearily, its arms folded. Dog? he wonders. No, it has arms, hands, look at the pale affectionate hands that it wraps around the thing.
He squints at them and creases his face in thought, the way they do. “Interesting that they have the—fingernails,” he tries. “For getting into it all.”
“It's a gorilla,” the woman says.
He frowns. He pushes his own nails into the palms of his hands and then smiles. The creatures' observation of him suggests that they doubt he exists but that, if they observed for long enough, they could make him exist just by looking, they could will him.
“Monkey,” she says.
Monkey goes. Monkey went. Mankind's existence is utterly justified by this gift it will give to earth—the gift of sight—do you understand? Yes, understand. Yes. Do you? Yes. The number of eyes staring at him is incalculable. Their scrawny arms and legs would appear to be strange servants of such large bodies. They are hairy old men, they are full of stories and little lies! He pushes against the fence to see if he might get to where they are, but the woman takes his hand and shuffles him on.
Past patches of dirt and low trees, along walkways lined with litter bins; sometimes, when he shifts his gaze from the ground, he is surprised to see animals behind wire, and feels that he wants to reach through to touch them. There are the black-and-white birds stiff in a ring of blue, some very still water that they cock their heads at as if to question its motives. There is a huge spinning wheel with the painted animals easing up and down to music.
Inside they sit at a table and the man brings drinks. It is a hot day of white sweating skies, and being in the shade is a relief. The man bends to a bag and takes out a thin book, which he opens on the table, pivoting it so that everybody can see what it says.
“This is the album we made when Helen died, just a few shots of her life. You spent hours looking at it, months, do you remember it?”
His eyes water with staring, but no recollection comes.
The man runs his finger over the first picture.
“Helen with her Bible group. Don't remember all their names—Hazel, somebody, somebody, is it Cathryn or Caroline or—” He shrugs and laughs fondly. “All the women under the cherry tree praising God. And Helen with her blessed blanket.”
Helen. Does he know her? His mother perhaps? She looks like a mother in her kind curled pose, her dress and blue-and-white shoes and socks that give her the appearance of somebody who has stepped from a children's story, and her hands tender on the book. She looks like somebody he has met, but people tend to become too small eventually and slip through the fingers. Every person too slippery to keep. And it is a shame because she has the trusting face of somebody who could make him better, but with the slipping, with the slipping she can do nothing for him.
The next image, a familiar path arched with trees and a woman with two children—one she is holding, the other is standing at her side. The one in her arms draws his attention, she has a terrible, almost frightening vacancy to her stare as if she is in pain, or not even that, as if she simply doesn't know what is what. Not confused. Blank.
“Me, Alice, and Helen,” the man says.
The woman leans forward. “I forgot all about Helen's miniskirt. That famous miniskirt.”
The man and woman laugh quietly at something and turn the page. Here is his mother, in that brown dress, standing in silhouette in front of the wraparound window of her living room. The four gold buttons at the neck beat back the darkness. Something of him remembers something of this. He gives the stubble on his cheek a lethargic rub and stares, just stares.
“Can't think why this one of Sara is here,” the man muses. He looks closer at the picture. “Oh yes, it's the first colour picture Helen took—with the Polaroid—that's why.”
They move their attention to the facing page. A black-and-white picture of a tree. Pale mallow colour across the sky. A picture of a white house. The next, a colour picture of that same tree and a woman amongst its leaves, wearing a dress and nothing on the feet except a crosshatch of branch shadows and patterns. The next picture: the edge place, the place with the water and rocks. At the front of the scene there is a man and child watching an animal, the wet animals that never move, and the child is in that animal's eye.
“And this one,” the man says, pulling a photograph from the book. “This one is here. Me, you, and Helen by the aviary.”
He nods but does not understand what connection there is between those people and him, or that place and the place they now sit, or even what this place is where they now sit, or why they sit here, or when it will be time to go home—except that he does at last feel sure that when it is time to go h
ome they will. The restlessness of recent times has abated. They bend deeper to the photographs, pages of forms and colours like debris from a car crash, like litter, or otherwise secrets found in demolished walls.
In this one there is a child in a white bed, and he recognises the open, empty features on their way somewhere, but perhaps lost. The child is grinning, but the grin still gives the impression of a journey not finished, or a lack of emotion, or something. Something. He cannot pinpoint what it is except to say his heart reaches to it. He wants to touch that smile, as he wanted to touch the animals, and he wants to take the series of tubes and machines from the bed so that she can be comfortable.
“Oh, dear Alice,” the woman says. “She had been in hospital for such a long time, look how tiny she is.”
“This was just a few days before she died.”
The two people are silent. They pick up their cups and drink without taking their eyes from the photograph.
Eventually, turning the page, the man straightens and puts his cup down. “And these last two are just two I added.”
One shows a woman stepping off a bus, blond and tall with a face that is all sunlight and no definition. Even in the vagueness of the shot she is beautiful, he sees it now, the kind of woman one would want to be associated with. The man tilts his face up from the picture, then he looks down again.
“Look, there's me.”
He points to an indefinable shadow on the bus behind the woman.
“It's the day I came back from university and Helen wanted a picture of me to see if it showed up my new distinguished intelligence. She got excited and took it a bit early and missed. So we got a picture of this random woman instead. I said it summed things up exactly. Put it in here anyway as a joke.”
He watches the man chase the memory down with a tripping laughter, as if needing something from it.
“And the others are of you, Jake. This is a newspaper clipping of you presenting your money to the council, to be sent to support the troops in the Six-Day War. A thousand pounds, your inheritance money from under the bed. Do you remember?” The man looks up. “You became a local hero. And when everybody said it was God who helped win that war you used to object that it wasn't God who gave all his inheritance away, and that he always got too much credit for everything.”
The man smiles, then is serious. “And it's true. He does.”
He picks up the last photograph and holds it to the light.
“And this one—this is you too, Jake. This is the day you took that flight over Quail Woods. That was only four years ago.”
The man in the photograph is wearing a thick coat and head thing with the ear pieces. He looks weathered, nervous, and excited in a calm, slow way. His eyes seem deep and black beneath the hat, stubble shadows the chin, the hand making a thumbs-up is reluctant, but still rather young and strong-looking.
I remember this man, he thinks. I have seen him. It is the first thing he has been sure about for as long as he can recall. An unrefuted fact of life is packed away in that face, behind the expression of a man who looks like he has been winded. He doesn't remember the time itself of meeting the man, not even remotely, but he remembers the man. The eyes. The shifting gaze, looking out to what is far away.
This animal here, at a distance on a dry bank, tears into meat, an activity from which it flicks its eyes now and again while holding the meat in place. What is this? Is this a dog? His dog? Its colours warn. That space between the ears and the prick of the fur that is oilier and coarser than he had expected. He takes the mother's hand.
A sea of mesh. They walk inside the structure along a wooden path, surrounded by birds, the birds rising rare and frantic. It should be glass, he thinks, not mesh. This should be a sea of glass, a mountain of it, a fake glittering sky of it. It occurs to him: people build things. It comes as something of a revelation.
The man walks beside him and rubs his shoulder.
“You brought me here when I was a baby,” the man says. “I almost remember it, or maybe it's just from the things Helen said. I don't know. I don't know if it really makes a difference. Did you ever bring Alice here?”
He turns slowly to face the man, awash, watered down. Alice? he means to say. Who is that? Vague memory of someone—but—but no, and he cannot ask because there are not the words.
The man turns away and rotates his thumbs around each other, then threads his fingers through the mesh. Something in that gesture of dejection reminds him of somebody. It is always this: something, somebody. Everything unspecific and free-floating.
One day he would like to build a thing like this for birds, but he would like to do it with glass. He wonders how it is done, and searches through an archive of other one-day thoughts and decides whether to guard them or dispose of them: at some point in his life, for example, he would like to marry, he would like to build something, he would like to have children. There is a clean slate and a run of events to be chosen or not. For the finest shard of time he believes that he has had his life and that it is over, and a panic grips him because he cannot remember it, not a thing, he has had it and lost it, or it has lost him. The fear isolates in a flash of yellow tearing up to the top of the glass mountain. Loss. But he must not consider it.
Nothing is lost, those choices are yet to be made. As they walk on he looks up at the mesh that knits paths above him and searches out the pattern, and the patterns in the patterns, and the patterns inside those, until he has to close his eyes to the logic and settle for the yellow on the inside of his vision, which sparks, then rapidly fades. He grips the hand that has found his, opens his eyes, and walks on.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Anna and Lorna, to all who helped with the research for this book, to my writing friends Anthea, Becky, Ian, Jason, Jenni, Karen, and Pam, to my family, to the kitchen bin, which happily turned out to be too small to fit my laptop during a crisis of confidence, and lastly, mostly, to Rick, Terri, and Dana.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SAMANTHA HARVEY has an MA in philosophy and an MA, with distinction, from the Bath Spa Creative Writing course in 2005. In addition to writing, she has traveled extensively and taught in Japan as well as lived in Ireland and New Zealand. She recently cofounded an environmental charity and lives in Bath, England.
Copyright © 2009 by Samantha Harvey
All Rights Reserved
www.nanatalese.com
DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harvey, Samantha, 1975-
The wilderness / Samantha Harvey. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Architects—Fiction. 2. Alzheimer's disease—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6108.A7875W55 2009
823′.92—dc22
2008041756
eISBN: 978-0-385-52948-8
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright