Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (44 page)

She poured wine into both our glasses.

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Night time," she answered.

Accordion

"Do you truly feel you can read out my mind?" she asks.

"Yes. Your mind has been here all along, but I have not known where to seek it. And yet the way must have already been shown to me."

We sit on the floor of the stacks, backs against the wall, and look up at the rows of skulls that tell us nothing.

"Perhaps if you tried to think back. One thing at a time," she suggests.

The floor is cold. I close my eyes, and my ears resound with the silence of the skulls.

"This morning, the old men were digging a hole outside the house. A very big hole. The sound of their shovels woke me. It was as if they were digging in my head. Then the snow came and filled it."

"And before that?"

"You and I went to the Woods, to the Power Station. We met the Caretaker. He showed me the works. The wind made an amazing noise."

"Yes, I remember."

"Then I received an accordion from him. A small folding accordion, old, but still usable."

She sits, thinking and rethinking. The temperature in the room is falling, minute by minute.

"Do you have your accordion?" she asks.

"The accordion?" hqutfstion.

"Yes, it may be the key. The accordion is connected to song, song is connected to my mother, my mother is connected to my mind. Could that be right?"

"It does follow," I say, "though one important link is missing from the chain. I cannot recall a single song."

"It need not be a song."

I retrieve the accordion from the pocket of my coat and sit beside her again, instrument in hand. I slip my hands into the straps on either end of the bellows and press out several chords.

"Beautiful!" she exclaims. "Are the sounds like wind?"

"They
are
wind," I say. "I create wind that makes sounds, then put them together."

She closes her eyes and opens her ears to the harmonies.

I produce all the chords I have practiced. I move the fingers of my right hand along the buttons in order, making single notes. No melody comes, but it is enough to bring the wind in the sounds to her. I have only to give myself to the wind as the birds do.

No, I cannot relinquish my mind.

At times my mind grows heavy and dark; at other times it soars high and sees forever. By the sound of this tiny accordion, my mind is transported great distances.

I call up different images of the Town behind closed eyes. Here are the willows on the sandbar, the Watchtower by the Wall in the west, the small tilled plot behind the Power Station. The old men sitting in the patch of sun in front of my quarters, the beasts crouching in the pooled waters of the River, summer grasses bowing in the breeze on the stone steps of the canal. I remember visiting the Pool in the south with the Librarian. I view the Abandoned Barracks near the north Wall, the ruins of the house and well near the Wall in the Woods.

I think of all the people I have met here. The Colonel next door, the old men of the Official Residences, the Caretaker of the Power Station, the Gatekeeper—each now in his own room, no doubt, listening to the blizzard outside.

Each place and person I shall lose forever; each face and feature I shall remember the rest of my life. If this world is wrong, if its inhabitants have no mind, whose fault is that? I feel almost a… love… toward the Town. I cannot stay in this place, yet I do not want to lose it.

Presently, I sense within me the slightest touch. The harmony of one chord lingers in my mind. It fuses, divides, searches—but for what? I open my eyes, position the fingers of my right hand on the buttons, and play out a series of permutations.

After a time, I am able, as if by will, to locate the first four notes. They drift down from inward skies, softly, as early morning sunlight. They find
me;
these are the notes I have been seeking.

I hold down the chord key and press the individual notes over and over again. The four notes seem to desire further notes, another chord. I strain to hear the chord that follows.

The first four notes lead me to the next five, then to another chord and three more notes.

It is a melody. Not a complete song, but the first phrase of one. I play the three chords and twelve notes, also, over and over again. It is a song, I realize, that I know.

Danny Boy.

The title brings back the song: chords, notes, harmonies now flow naturally from my fingertips. I play the melody again.

When have I last heard a song? My body has craved music. 1 have been so long without music, I have not even known my own hunger. The resonance permeates; the strain eases within me. Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.

The whole Town lives and breathes in the music I play. The streets shift their weight with my every move. The Wall stretches and flexes as if my own flesh and skin. I repeat the song several times, thto set the accordion down on the floor, lean back, and close-Hiy-eyes. Everything here is a part of me—the Wall and Gate and Woods and River and Pool.

It is all my self.

Long after I set down the instrument, she clings to me with both hands, eyes closed.

Tears run down her cheeks. I put my arm around her shoulder and touch my lips to her eyelids. The tears give her a moist, gentle heat.

A blush of light comes over her cheeks, making her tears gleam. Clear as starlight, yet a light not from the heavens. It is the room that is aglow.

I turn out the ceiling lamp, and only then do I see the source of the glow. It is the skulls.

An ancient fire that has lain dormant in them is now awakening. The phosphorescence yields pure to the eye; it soothes with memories that warm and fill my heart. I can feeF'my vision healing. Nothing can harm these eyes any more.

It is a wondrous sight. Quietude itself. Countless flecks of light fill the space. I pick up a skull and run my fingers over its surface. Here, I sense a glimmer, a remembrance of mind, an indication of her mind. Tiny sparks drift up into my fingertips, touching me, each particle bearing the faintest light, the merest warmth.

"There is your mind," I say.

She stares at me, eyes tearful.

"Your mind has not been lost nor scattered to the winds. It's here, and no one can take it away. To read it out, I must bring all these together."

I kiss her again on the eyelids.

"I want you to leave me by myself," I say. "It will take me until morning to read it all out. I cannot rest until then." She surveys the rows of softly glowing skulls before exiting the stacks. The door closes behind her. The flecks of light dance upon the skulls. Some are old dreams that are hers, some are old dreams of my own.

My search has been a long one. It has taken me to every corner of this walled Town, but at last I have found the mind we have lost.

Lights, Introspection, Cleanliness

How long I slept, I dorft know. Someone was rocking my shoulders. I smelled the sofa. I didn't want to be awakened. Sleep was too lovely.

Nonetheless, at the same time, something in me demanded to be roused, insisted that this was no time to sleep. A hard metal object was tapping. "Wake up! Wake up!" I sat up.

I was wearing an orange bathrobe. She was leaning over me in a white men's T-shirt and tiny white panties, shaking me by the shoulder. Her slender body seemed fragile, insecure, childlike, with no sign of last night's Italian excesses. Outside was not yet dawn.

"The table! Look at the table!" she exclaimed.

A small Christmas tree-like object sat on the table. But it was not a Christmas tree: it was too small and this was the beginning of October. I strained my eyes toward this object. It was the skull, exactly where I'd placed it, or she'd placed it. In either case, the glowing object was my unicorn skull.

Lights were playing over the skull. Perishing points of microscopic brilliance. Like a glimmering sky, soft and white. Hazy, as if each glowing dot were layered in a fluid electric film, which made the lights seem to hover above the surface. We sat and watched the minuscule constellations drift and whirl. She held onto my arm as I gripped my bathrobe collar. The night was deep and still.

"Is this your idea of a joke?" she said.

I shook my head. I'd never seen the skull glow before. This was no phosphorescent lichen, no human doing. No manmade energy source could produce such soft, tranquil light.

I gently disengaged her from my arm, reached out for the skull, and brought it over to my lap.

"Aren't you afraid?" she now asked under her breath.

"No." For some reason, I wasn't.

Holding my hands over the skull, I sensed the slightest ember of heat, as my fingers were enveloped in that pale membrane of light. I closed my eyes, letting the warmth penetrate my fingers, and images drifted into view like clouds on a distant horizon.

"This can't be a replica," she said. "It has to be the real thing."

The object was emitting light into my hands. It seemed somehow purposeful, to bear meaning. An attempt to convey a signal, to offer a touchstone between the world I would enter and the world I was leaving.

Opening my eyes, I looked at the twINKling nebula at my fingers. The glow was without menace or ill will. It sufficed that I take the skull up in my hands and trace the subtle veins of light with my fingertips. There was nothing to fear.

I returned the skull to the table and brought my fingers to her cheek.

"Your hands are warm," she said.

"The light is warm."

I guided her hands over the skull. She shut her eyes. A^ field of white light gently enveloped her fingers as well.

"I do feel something," she said. "I don't know what, but it doesn't make sense."

"I can't explain either," I said.

I stooped to pick up my watch from the floor. Four-six teen. Another hour until dawn.

I went to the telephone and dialed my own number. It'd been a long time since I'd called home, so I had to struggle to remember the number. I let it ring fifteen times; no answer. I hung up, dialed again, and let it ring another fifteen times. Nobody.

Had the chubby girl gone back underground to get her grandfather? Or had the Semiotecs or the boys from the System paid her a courtesy call? I wasn't worried. I was sure she'd come through fine. The girl was amazing. She was half my age, and she could handle things ten times better than me. I set down the receiver with a tinge of sadness, knowing I'd never see her again. I was watching the chandeliers get carried out of a once-grand hotel, now bankrupt. One by one the windows are sealed, the curtains taken down.

I returned to where she sat on the sofa.

"Is the skull glowing in response to you?" she asked.

"It does seem so, doesn't it."

The unwaking world was as hushed as a deep forest. I looked down and lost myself in my shirt and pants and tie, which lay scattered on the carpet among her dress and slip and stockings. They were the shed skin of a life of thirty-five years, its culmination.

"What is it?" she asked.

"These clothes. Up until a little while ago, they were a part of me. But no longer. They're different clothes belonging to a different person. I don't recognize them as my own."

"It's sex that does it," she smiled. "After sex, you get introspective."

"No, that's not it," I said, picking up my empty glass. "I'm not withdrawing into self-reflection. I feel as if I'm tuning in on details, on the minute particulars of the world. Snails and the sound of the rain and hardware store displays, things like that."

"Should I straighten up?"

"No, leave the clothes as they are. They seem quite natural."

I reached for my pack of cigarettes and lit up with matches from the beer hall. Then I looked at our clothes again. Shirt sleeves stretched across stockings, velvet dress folded over at the waist, sweet nothing of a slip dropped like a limp flag. Necklace and watch tossed up on the couch, black shoulder bag on its side on a corner table. Even cast aside, clothes know a permanence that eludes their wearers.

"How'd you decide to become a librarian?" I asked.

"I've always liked libraries," she said. "They're quiet and full of books and full of knowledge. I knew I didn't want to work in a bank or a trading company, and I would have hated being a teacher. So the library it was."

I blew cigarette smoke up at the ceiling and watched it drift away.

"You want to know about me?" she asked. "Where I was born, what I was like as a girl, where I went to school, when I lost my virginity, what's my favorite color—all that?"

"No," I said. "You're fine as you are. I'll learn more as it comes."

"I'd like to get to know more about you though, little by little."

"I was born by the sea," I said. "I'd go to the beach the morning after a typhoon and find all sorts of things that the waves had tossed up. There'd be bottles and wooden
geta
and hats and cases for glasses, tables and chairs, things from nowhere near the water. I liked combing through the stuff, so I was always waiting for the next typhoon."

I put out my cigarette.

"The strange thing is, everything washed up from the sea was purified. Useless junk, but absolutely clean. There wasn't a dirty thing. The sea is special in that way. When I look back over my life so far, I see all that junk on the beach. It's how my life has always been. Gathering up the junk, sorting through it, and then casting it off somewhere else. All for no purpose, leaving it to wash away again."

"This was in your home town?"

"This is all my life. I merely go from one beach to another. Sure I remember the things that happen in between, but that's all. I never tie them together. They're so many things, clean but useless."

She touched my shoulder, then went to the kitchen. She returned with wine for her and a beer for me.

"I like the moments of darkness before dawn," she said. "Probably because it's a clean slate. Clean and unused."