Exchange Place

Full Fathom Five

As I considered the implications of the Japanese box, I looked at my watch. It was nearly three o’clock, and I remembered I had to meet a client at four to show him a watch. Nice Omega Constellation, 1960, running strong. It was a bright and sunny October day, perfect weather for the Livingstone suit. But when I went to the wardrobe where it should have been, it wasn’t there. I looked in the other wardrobes. Maybe I had stored it in the attic? I was still disorientated from the events of the past few days. I would look for it later, it must be somewhere in the house, suits don’t just get up and walk away by themselves, though I did remember Lazenbatt the tailor saying the trousers could stand up on their own, or was that the Burton suit? Whatever. I settled for an oatmeal Donegal tweed three-button jacket, navy-blue cord trousers, and dark tan Oxford brogues that matched my briefcase.

I was almost out the door when I remembered I’d forgotten to take my medication. So I did, a tablet each of clopidogrel, atoravastatin, bisoprolol, amlopodine and perindopril. Reminded of Glenn Gould’s prodigious consumption of pharmaceutical drugs — Nembutal, Luminal, Berutal, Valium, Librax, Indocin, Naprosyn, and Aldomet, among others — I took his CD of Contrapunctus XIV with me to play in the car. When I turned on the audio I got a crackle of static and reckoned it must be in radio mode, and was about to switch to the cD player when I heard the words, L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts — the bird sings with its fingers — and recognized the phrase as one of the enigmatic communications received on the car radio by Orphée in Jean Cocteau’s film of the same name, based loosely on the Orpheus myth. It seemed I was listening to a radio adaptation of the screenplay. In the film, the messages are transmitted from the Underworld by the young poet Cégeste, who has been killed by two motorcyclists, emissaries of a mysterious princess. Orphée publishes the messages as poetry and is accused of plagiarism. I heard another few fragments of dialogue before the radio emitted another burst of static. Then there was silence before I heard the phrase again, loud and clear: L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Deux fois. L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts. Deux fois. Je répète …

The radio went dead. I twiddled the knob; but instead of the mysterious broadcast, a Radio Ulster news bulletin came on, announcing that a suspect device had been found in the vicinity of Corporation Square and that the area… I switched to CD mode, and drove into town, listening to Contrapunctus XIV unfold itself, as I had so many times before, hearing different permutations in it every time, echoes overlaying other echoes. The traffic was slower than usual due to the putative bomb; but as it happened, the journey took precisely the twelve minutes and eighteen seconds of Gould’s playing, for the music came to a stop with that familiar gunshot of silence just as I parked behind the Central Library: a happy coincidence that I thought augured well for the day. I had still a good three-quarters of an hour before my assignation. On a whim I decided to revisit Exchange Place. It had been some years since I had been there, but my thinking about Harland had become more productive of late, and I was sure the sight of the place would prompt new memories. As I entered the narrow entry I remarked, as I had so many times before, the cannon-shaped iron bollards that flanked the entrance, bearing the dints and dents of so many years of traffic. My feet on the cobblestones passed over the footfall of so many others, including my own, because I was someone other then: I did not know then what I now suspect. I came to the door of 14 Exchange Place to find it open. I entered. The vestibule had an air of disuse. I rapped on the door of Federman the stationer, whose depot took up the ground floor. I rapped again, and it opened to reveal the man himself, not much changed since I had seen him last, and still with a pencil in the breast pocket of the tan cotton drill shop-coat he’d worn ever since I’d known him. He threw himself back in mock surprise. If it isn’t himself! he cried, returned from the dead, John Kilfeather, how are you? and he thrust his hand forward. We made some small talk before I came to the question. And Harland? I said, have you heard anything more of him? Well, said Federman, you know how I felt about him even before he took off, and nothing much has happened since to make me change my mind. But would you listen to me? And as I listened to him I knew that he was right. We had talked of these matters before at some length. But somehow or other I never thought of asking to see the attic studio back then, perhaps it was a matter of pride; I thought of the enquiries I had conducted as being casual and perfunctory, but in retrospect I can see that Federman would have thought otherwise. So I put the next question to him. But of course! he cried, I thought you’d never ask! And he went into the shop and came out with a key. Onwards and upwards! he cried, and I mounted the long, high, narrow stair to the attic studio, my passage lit by a skylight in the roof of the stairwell, my heart quickening with every tread.

I put the key in the door and had to jiggle it a bit before the lock gave. I entered to find the studio in what must have been the state that he left it in. There was the familiar chaos dimly replicated in the deteriorating mirror: crumpled images lying amid crumpled champagne boxes, layers of stuff that had been walked upon by Harland. I scuffled some of it about with my shoe, something I would never have dared to do before, when I tiptoed my way gently through it as I would through an precarious labyrinth. I looked down. The scuffling had revealed a pale blue cover like those of the school exercise books in which Harland kept a journal of sorts, not that I had ever read it. I picked it up with some trepidation. Even now I hesitated to intrude on his innermost thoughts, if that was what they were. I put that thought behind me, opened the book, and read these words in Harland’s writing:

Research has shown that the hippocampus region of the brain is specifically responsible for processing memory. It is so called because its shape resembles that of the seahorse, in Latin called hippocampus. Coral reefs are a favourite habitat of the seahorse, and I sometimes like to think of human consciousness as one of those vast underwater cities whose fabric is accumulated from the skeletons of its builders: a necropolis which teems with life. Here are massive blocks and towers of stone, hanging gardens of the most varied hues, purple, emerald and amethyst, which undulate and flicker beautifully in the transparent water. Fishes skim the galleries and avenues like flocks of birds, and the nooks and crannies are populated by a myriad of other species. What can the little seahorse know of this fantastic ecosystem? We cannot know. But we can say that its experience is a microcosm of the ongoing, thousands of years old saga that is the life of a coral reef, and which, like the human brain, we have yet to fully fathom.

The passage was familiar to me from somewhere. My heart gave a lurch as I realized that it had come from my abandoned novel, X+Y=K.