The Drowned Life (18 page)

Later that afternoon, I found myself on Hallart Street, standing on the steps of Esme's building, waiting for her to buzz me in. In the elevator, I prepared myself to eat crow. When the elevator opened at the fifth floor, she was standing there waiting for me in the doorway to her apartment. She had a smile on her face and the first thing she said was “Go ahead.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“An apology, perhaps? Esme, how could I have doubted you?” she suggested.

“Fuckin' scribble,” I muttered.

She laughed and stepped back to let me in. As I passed, she patted me on the back and said, “Maddening, isn't it?”

“Well,” I said, “you're right, but where does that get us? It's got me so I can't paint.”

“Now that we both know, and I know I'm not crazy,” she said, “we're going to have to figure out what it's all about.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because the fact that you don't know will always be with you. Don't you want to know what you're missing?”

“Not really,” I said. “I just want to get past it.”

She took a step closer to me and put her palms on my shoulders.
“Pat, I need you to help me with this. I can't do it by myself. Someone has to corroborate everything.”

I shook my head, but she pulled me over to her desk. “Before you say anything, check this out.” She sat down in the chair, facing the computer. With a click of the mouse, the machine came to life.

“Okay, now,” she said, spinning on the seat so she could look up at me. She took my left hand in both of hers, more than likely so that I couldn't escape. “After you were here last Sunday, and I had the pictures out, I studied them closely for the first time in a long while. I can't believe I didn't think of this before, but in concentrating on the intersections of the lines, I wondered what these points would reveal if they were plotted on a graph. So I scanned the drawing into the computer and erased the lines, leaving only the points of intersection.”

She clicked the mouse once and an image of the scribble appeared on the screen. After letting that sit for a few seconds, she clicked again and revealed only the points, like a cloud of gnats.

“I set them on a graph,” she said. Another click and the entire swarm was trapped in a web. “Then for a long time, I looked for sequences, some kind of underlying order to them. It wasn't long before I saw this.” She gave another click, and there appeared a line, emanating from a point close to the center of the cluster and looping outward in a regular spiral, like the cross-section of a nautilus shell.

“Interesting,” I said, “but it only utilizes some of the dots. You could easily make just as many irregular designs if you linked other dots.”

“Yes,” she said. “But do you know what that shape represents?” she asked.

“It's the Golden Section,” I said. “We studied it earlier in the year when we were covering Leonardo. You can find it in all of his
paintings, from
St. Jerome in the Wilderness
to the
Mona Lisa
. A lot of painters swore by it—Jacopo, Seurat…”

Tracing the spiral on the screen with her index finger, she said, “You're good. It's a Fibonacci series. Consciously used in art and architecture but also found occurring spontaneously everywhere in nature. To the ancients the existence of this phenomenon was proof of a deity's design inherent in the universe. It's holy. It's magic.”

“Back up, though,” I said. “It doesn't utilize all of the dots, and there's so many dots there that connected in the right way you could come up with a shitload of different designs as well.”

“True,” she said, “but look….” She clicked the mouse again. “At any one time, depending on what you choose as your starting point, you can plot five Golden Sections within the scribble, the five using all of the dots except one. Order in chaos, and the one representing the potential of the chaotic amid order.”

The picture on the screen proved her point with lines that I could easily follow curling out from central points. She clicked the screen again.

“Change the originating points and you can make five different golden spirals,” she said.

Just as I was able to take in the next pattern, she clicked the mouse again, waited a second, and then clicked it again. She clicked through twelve different possible designs of spiral groups before stopping. Turning on the seat, she looked up at me.

“That's all I had time for,” she said.

“You're industrious as hell,” I told her and took a step backward.

She stood up and came toward me. “I have a plan,” she said.

By the time I left Esme's place, it was dark. “Who do we know for sure remembers?” she'd asked, and I'd told her, “No one.” But as she'd revealed, that wasn't true. “Dorphin,” she said, and then
told me how she was going to take one of the scribble drawings she had to the opening at the university gallery and try to convince him she'd done it and was one of
them
in an attempt to get him to talk. I'd told her I wanted nothing to do with bothering Dorphin. After long arguments both reasonable and passionate, when I'd still refused, she'd kicked me out. As I walked along the night streets back to my apartment, though, it wasn't her scheme I thought about. What I couldn't help remembering was that brief period before she turned on the computer when she'd held my hand.

That Sunday, when I got to the Palace A, she wasn't there, and I knew immediately she wouldn't be coming. I took a seat anyway and waited for an hour, picking at a corn muffin and forcing down a cup of coffee. Her absence was palpable, and I realized in that time how much I needed to see her. She was my strange attractor. I finally left and went by her apartment. Standing on the steps, I rang the buzzer at least six times, all the while picturing her at her computer, tracing spirals through clouds of dots. No answer. When I got back to my place, I tried to call her, but she didn't pick up.

There were many instances in the following week when I considered writing her a note and leaving it in her mailbox, telling her I was sorry and that I would gladly join her in her plan to flush out Dorphin, but each time I stopped myself at the last second, not wanting to be merely a means to an end, another Fibonacci series used to plumb the design of the ineffable. Ultimately, what exactly I wanted, I wasn't sure, but I knew I definitely wanted to see her. I hung around campus all week, waiting for her outside the classes I knew she had, but she never showed herself.

Saturday night came, the night of the opening, and I should have been excited with the prospect of so many people seeing my painting hanging in the university gallery alongside those of well-known artists, but I was preoccupied with whether or not she would be there. Still, I had the presence of mind to clean myself up, shave,
and throw on my only jacket and tie. The exhibit was packed, wine was flowing, and quite a few people approached me to tell me how much they admired my piece. Dorphin was there, and the neocubist, Uttmeyer, and Miranda Blench. Groups of art students and faculty clustered around these stars. Just when I'd had a few glasses of wine and was letting myself forget Esme and enjoy the event a little, she walked in. She wore a simple, low-cut black dress and a jeweled choker. I'd never seen her in anything besides jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair glistened under the track lighting. She walked toward me, and when she drew near, I said, “Where were you on Sunday?” Without so much as a blink, she moved past me, heading for Dorphin, and I could feel something tear inside me.

Moving out of the crowd, I took up a position next to the wine and cheese table, where I could keep a surreptitious eye on her. She bided her time, slowly circling like a wily predator on the outskirts of Dorphin's crowd of admirers, waiting for just the right moment. I noticed that she carried a large manila envelope big enough to hold one of the drawings. The artist, a youthful-looking middle-aged guy with sandy hair, seemed shy but affable, taking time to answer questions and smiling through the inquisition. Now that Esme was on his trail, I was disappointed that he didn't come off as a self-centered schmuck. Behind him hung his painting, and from where I stood, his slightly bowed head appeared directly at the center of the scribble, which formed an aura, a veritable halo of confusion.

A half hour passed in which other students stopped to say hello and congratulate me on my painting being accepted for the show, and each time I tried to dispatch them as quickly as possible and get back to spying on Esme. It was right after one of these little visits that I turned back to my focal point and saw that in the few minutes I was chatting, she'd made her move. The first thing I noticed was a change in Dorphin's look. His face was bright now, and he no longer slouched. He was interested in her—who could blame him?
They were already deep into some conversation. She was smiling, he was smiling, she nodded, he nodded, and then I saw her open the manila envelope. Pulling out a sheet of white paper, no doubt one of the drawings, she offered it to him. He turned it around, took a quick look at the picture and then over each shoulder to see if anyone else was near. He spoke some short phrase to her, and she hesitated for only an instant before nodding.

One of my professors walked over to me then and I had to turn away. What started as a friendly conversation soon turned into a gas-bag disquisition on his part, and he was one of those talkers who takes a breath at odd times so you can't follow the rhythm and intuit the free moment when you can get a word in and escape. I managed to remain in the realm of polite respect and still steal a few glances into the crowd. On my first, I noticed that Esme and Dorphin had moved off into a corner and were talking in what seemed to me to be conspiratorial whispers. The next time I looked, he had his hand on her shoulder. And when my professor had spent his brilliance on me and gone in search of another victim, I looked to that corner again and they were gone.

I stepped into the crowd and spun around, trying to locate them. Two rotations and it appeared they were no longer in the gallery. I walked the perimeter once to make sure I hadn't missed them in my survey while a growing sense of desperation blossomed in my gut. I went out in the hallway and checked up and down, but they weren't there either. At that moment, I couldn't have put into words what I was feeling. I was certain I'd lost Esme, not that I had ever really had her. The realization made me stagger over to a bench and sit down. What came to mind were all of those Sunday mornings at the Palace A, and as each memory appeared it evaporated just as suddenly, gone as if it had never happened.

“Where is she?” I heard a voice pierce through my reverie. I looked up to see a tall, thin guy with blond hair standing over me.

“Who?” I asked, only then realizing it was Farno.

“Did Esme leave with Dorphin?” he asked.

“Why?” I asked.

“Yes or no?” he said, seeming agitated.

“I think she did, what of it?”

He leaned down and whispered to me, “She's in danger. Dorphin's an imposter.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

Instead of answering, he pulled a pen out of his pocket, moved over to the wall where a flyer hung, and, in a second, had made a mark on the paper. I stood and walked up behind him. He pointed to what he'd drawn. It was a miniature facsimile of the scribble. I'd seen the design enough times to know his was authentic.

“Look, I'm sure she told you about the scribble,” he said. “Dorphin is passing himself off as someone who remembers as a way of drawing us out. He's working for someone else. I can't explain now. You've got to trust me. I'm telling you, she's in serious trouble.”

I stood there stunned. “Okay” was all I could say.

“I have a car,” said Farno. “He's from out of town but close enough that I doubt he's booked a room. Where would she take him?”

“Her place,” I said.

He was already running down the hallway toward the exit. “Come on,” he yelled over his shoulder.

Running to Farno's car in the parking lot, I don't remember what, if anything, I was thinking at the time. The entire affair had become just too bizarre. Once we were in the old four-door Chevy, he turned to me and said, “She still lives on Hallart, right? That renovated warehouse building?”

I nodded.

“They're only a few minutes ahead of us,” he said. By now we were on our way. He was driving within the speed limit, but I
could see his anxiety in the way he hunched up over the dashboard and nervously tapped the steering wheel at the first red light we stopped at.

“What exactly is going on?” I finally asked. “Dorphin is dangerous?”

“I shouldn't be telling you any of this, but I might need your help,” he said, “so try to keep it to yourself, okay?”

“I can do that,” I said.

“I can remember,” he said. “You know what that means.”

I nodded.

“That time I told you about, when Esme brought me to her place, she revealed the drawings to me and her theory. So I was aware she'd stumbled onto the scribble, something she wasn't supposed to know about. She's not the first, but for the most part it's gone unrecognized for centuries. When I saw you two hanging out together, I tried to make you think she was crazy so that if she told you about it, you'd dismiss it as just one of her delusions.”

“You mean all that stuff you told me about her fucking all those people wasn't real?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “That part's true, but I thought if I told you, you'd be more circumspect about her theory.”

“Jeez,” I said. “What about Dorphin? Where does he come in?”

“Like I said, some people have gotten hip to the scribble over time. You can't keep something like this a complete secret for eternity. In the past, even if people were suspicious, they just wrote it off to mere coincidence or some innocuous aberration of reality. But somewhere in the late 1960s, somebody put things together and decided that the ability to remember and all that went with it was something that was either dangerous to the rest of the populace or could be mined for economic benefit. We don't really know what their motivations are, but there is a group, as secretive as we are, who want to get to the bottom of the phenomenon.”