Let the Dark Flower Blossom (24 page)

Eloise's black silk nightdress was draped over a chair.

Salt's dark hair was close cropped; his thick eyeglasses fogged over in the damp. He wore a peacoat, no gloves, no hat; wound about his neck was an impossibly long red knitted scarf. He called his eyeglasses
goggles
. He called his scarf
a muffler
. He called his trip
a journey
. He was on a
quest
for an
artifact
. Like the heroes of old. He was determined to get here; to get to this place. He had traveled such a distance to get to this island. He was not to be stopped by the obstacles that might have thwarted a lesser traveler. His eyes were large and damp and dark. His hands were soft and white. A reporter for the BBC had described Salt's hands as
small furious doves
.

Salt stared up at a black-bellied bird perched on an icy branch.

Inj called to him—
Benny
.

He turned toward her.

And then looked back to the bird.

It had flown.

It was gone.

Oh well, eternity was far away; even from a place called Damascus.

“What are the rules of the memory game?” said Louis.

“People still want the old stories,” said Zigouiller.

Sometimes late, out of pity or kindness, the night porter's wife brought coffee to Susu.

Susu had black hair and green eyes. She bore a striking physical resemblance to her mother. They could; they did; they used to place their hands palms flat against each other, and their hands met palm for palm and finger for finger; bone for bone.

Salt and Inj drove on—that is, were driven by the boy who existed, like the ferryman, for only their necessity, for their journey, their story—through the snow to Schell's cottage. Salt looked out the window. Inj watched him. In her hooded parka, her boots, her woolen cap and fleece-lined gloves: she looked, hadn't Salt told her this himself?—like the last girl in the world.

Why didn't Dibby open the box?

Inj was Benjamin Salt's research assistant.

The members of the Mnemosyne Society were dwellers in the field of memory.

Eloise wanted the old stories.

Susu looked very much like her father, too; didn't she?

Salt came to Pear Island to make the acquaintance of a recluse who possessed something that he wanted.

“I call the recollection of images as expressed in a narrative: the memory game. Because,” said Louis Sarasine, “like all games it is an enterprise that is both childish and dangerous—”

“Do you believe,” Eris asked Liz, “that ‘the novel' is dead?”

Inj looked at Benny sitting beside her in the truck. He was wiping his eyeglasses with a white handkerchief. She invested this small utilitarian gesture with mythic symbolism.

Sheldon Schell was in bed suffering with a headache.

Beatrice was in the kitchen watching
Tomorrow's Edge
on the black-and-white television set and turning the spoon round in the mixing bowl, when she heard the knock upon the door.

A French bulldog made her way up a staircase.

Beatrice helped the guests with their bags.

Salt looked around the room. There were flowers on the wallpaper.

Inj sat on the bed. She leaned back against the pillows. Inj said that it was so nice to get out of the city.

Schell turned on his side. He heard bedsprings. He smelled smoke and roses.

And then the scent drifted away.

A red ball rolled step by step down the staircase.

“Why do we admire the way that an actor can memorize his lines? Or revere a painter who can call to mind the shadows of an afternoon long lost to time? Or delight in the exquisite lie of a writer who creates a world within a nutshell of infinite space? And yet,” said Louis Sarasine, “when having lunch with a friend who in the course of telling an entertaining story reveals that his story is a deception—we feel affronted. Yes?—Because we were lied to—but when is it, exactly, that we want the lie? Is it only when we set the rules of the game? Does the lie become its own kind of truth? Do we feel anger at having been duped—or experience a secret terrifying pleasure? If the lie can so please us—of what use is the truth? If it affords no real reality or moral high ground, what is its utility? Is it a crime for an actor to address the audience? Or for an artist to admit that he paints his dream of a garden and not the flowers in the vase before him? I say this: truth is the ax wielded by the listener against the teller. It is his only weapon. He demands not:
tell me what you recall;
not
tell the story as you remember it
. He says:
tell me the truth
.”

Zola looked at Zigouiller.

Eloise laughed.

Zigouiller intoned, “I am Odysseus son of Laertes, known before all men for the study of crafty designs, and my fame goes up to the heavens.”

Eloise stopped laughing.

Have the grape blossoms opened? Are the pomegranates in bloom?

Eloise's nightdress slipped from the chair to the floor.

Zola gave a mournful sigh and lay her head on the black silk, perfumed.

Schell opened his eyes.

He did not know where or who he was.

Then he saw Beatrice's white nightdress.

A white nightdress was draped over a chair.

What did Salt want?

Dibby was typing.

The story was dark and terrifying.

Beatrice caught her reflection in a plate as she set it on the table.

Susu would have rather been called a thief than a liar.

Olga, the nanny, was making cocoa for the boys.

She brought it to a low boil in a pot on the stove, with cream and cinnamon.

Beatrice went into the bedroom, and she whispered to Schell.

Chet and Jules, playing cops and robbers, burst into the study, calling out
STOP THIEF
! and each boy took one of his mother's hands, lifted the hands, left and right, from the typewriter.

Olga took three mugs from the cupboard and poured out the cocoa into them and set them on the table for Chet and Jules and Dibby.

Salt put his ear to the wall.

“We played games of memory as children. Some games involved repetition—like telephone—the repetition of a phrase that changes for the group as each child reinterprets it. One does not win or lose at this game, only takes part in a chain of meaning. What causes me to move from one word to the next? What causes me to recall in words: a perfume? I can say: it bore the single note of rose; and yet in my experience of this perfume, there were—or are—no words. In the
transcription of the sensual into the literal, comes the lie. It is, of course, not the kind of lie that matters. It is the kind of lie upon which we depend for both our dreams and responsibilities.” Louis Sarasine paused. “For from that single note of a rose, one suddenly recalls a garden.”

Beatrice sat beside Schell on the bed.

She was tiny and slightly strange.

With her large gray eyes and dark decisive brows.

“Has it happened?” he asked.

“Have they come for me?” he said.

The curtains were drawn.

The cat leapt from the window ledge.

“There's a girl too,” said Beatrice.

“The girl,” Beatrice said. “Is beautiful.”

“What girl?” he said.

Eris said to Liz that these days the novel had about as much appeal as a monster from an old movie. One pitied it. One was horrified by it. For a moment even, the thing was adorable. And then one became annoyed that it hadn't crawled off somewhere to die a dignified death. Instead it went around smashing into things and gobbling up girls and stomping on cities like Godzilla.

Inj lay on her side like a fallen heroine.

“No really,” said Eris, “What's more silly than a book in which one thing happens and then another thing happens? This,” she said, “this
very conversation has already happened. And we can revise it to prove or to disprove any version of reality. Have I told you my thesis? The fixity of the page is a prison of infinite space. In the future,” she said to Liz, “the novel will be a polyphonic electric/tronic dialogue between all the readers in the world, and we will have no more of this, this, this monster called the author. We won't be bound by binding or ink. In the future,” Eris said, “the future will have already happened. Do you see?”

“She's so beautiful,” Beatrice said.

Liz picked up a plastic dinosaur that Bruno had left on the table.

“She's like a girl on television,” said Beatrice. “She's been places. I can tell. She's done things.”

Schell looked at Beatrice in the darkened room.

“Do you want to go places?” he said.

“That's just it,” she said.

“What?” he said.

He touched her cheek.

He touched a hand to her hair.

“I don't want anything,” she said.

Elizabeth Weiss felt that a novel should offer—if not moral instruction, then—a roadmap for the reader. It should tell the reader where to go and how to proceed in the world.

At the heart of all things is a knife.

Inj unpinned her hair.

Salt had a secret.

Susu, when she was a little girl, had liked to sit at her mother's dressing table before the mirror; to unstopper the glass bottles and jars; to open the jewelry box; to rope the pearls around her neck; to dab rose on her wrists. Susu had liked to dress in her mother's black silk slip and read aloud from a book of Poe. And when she grew up, she found that what was once a game was the very reality of her existence. Which did not mean that it was no longer fun to play at it. Only that sometimes she felt like the raven and other times like the writing desk.

Bruno Salt, age four, tired of being good for the whole of the long afternoon alone in his room with his trucks and puzzles, tromped into the living room wearing one snow boot (he couldn't find the other) and holding by a tangled leash the long-haired dachshund called Kafka, and announced to his mother that the dog really really really wanted to go outside
now
.

Louis said, “The invention of humanity relies on the device of collective memory. Yet, this collection of shared knowledge, of the very
meanings of pain and of pleasure, of yes and no, itself relies on the subset of the individual's memory within the collective. If we locate memory in
difference
, that is, the difference between the real and the unreal; between belief and disbelief; between story and plot; between now and then; or in the skittering ligature-bound variation between
s
and
z:
how will we know where one begins and the other ends? It may be a token of the final illogic of logic, that we must first premise our disbelief on belief. We must pick a point and call it an established truth. Upon which rock will we build our church? We call absence itself presence; and say: it is time to begin. It is time to begin. Here is where we will begin: God is the beginning not because he is known, but because he is unknown. Gentlemen, friends: I will tell you my story. The story of my memory game. It begins, as all stories do and must, with a girl.”

Dibby Stone almost forgot—the cocoa was so sweet and warm—

That Roman was dead.

What had become of the knife that had stabbed him in the heart?