The Memory Police

Chapter 11

Ten days had passed since R had taken refuge, but it was apparent that it would take longer still before we accustomed ourselves to this strange way of living. We needed to decide about each little detail—when to bring more hot water for his thermos bottle, what time to bring meals, how often to change his sheets.

Then, too, when I sat down at my desk to write, I found myself thinking about the hidden room and I made very little progress on my novel. It would occur to me that R might be lonely and want someone to talk to, but then I’d reconsider, still holding the funnel at one end of our intercom, and conclude it would be better to leave him in peace. No matter how hard I listened, there was never any sign of someone living under the floor, and yet this silence made me all the more conscious of his existence.

Eventually, the days came to pass according to a fixed schedule. At nine o’clock, I would bring the tray with his breakfast and a thermos of boiling water and knock on the trapdoor. During that visit, I would retrieve the empty water tank and refill it. Lunch was at one. If R needed anything, he would give me a list and some money, and I would do the shopping when I went out for my walk in the evening. Mostly he asked for books, but there were other requests as well—razor blades, nicotine gum (since the cramped quarters made smoking impossible), notebooks, tonic water. Dinner was at seven. He bathed in the evening every other day, using a basin of hot water to wash himself. After which, he had nothing to do but wait for the long night to pass.

The only time I lingered in his room was when I came to retrieve his dinner tray. If I’d been able to get something good for dessert, we sometimes ate it together. I would put the cookies or pastry on the desk and we would talk at length, reaching out from time to time for another bite.

“Are you feeling a little more settled?” I asked him.

“A bit, thanks to all your kindness,” he answered. He was wearing a plain black sweater. Lined up on the shelf that hung on the wall were a mirror, a comb, a tube of ointment, an hourglass, a good-luck charm. Books, all of them old, were stacked high next to his bed—a memoir by a composer who had committed suicide long ago, a treatise on astronomy, a historical novel about the time when the mountains to the north were active volcanoes.

“If something’s wrong, please tell me.”

“No, everything’s fine.”

But it seemed that he was not yet completely accustomed to this room. He sat with his back hunched, his hands on his knees, constantly worried that any unguarded movement would mean bumping into the lamp or the shelf or the wall around the toilet. The bed was clearly too narrow, and there was nothing to brighten the room, neither flowers nor music nor anything else. It was as though the air around him and the air in the room had gone stale, having failed to blend together.

“You should eat,” I told him, pointing at the cookies on the desk. Food became scarce during the winter, and it was especially difficult to get sweets. The old man had made the cookies from oats he had obtained from a farmer he knew.

“They’re delicious,” R said, popping one into his mouth.

“The old man could make his living as a cook,” I said. There were a half-dozen cookies. R ate two and I ate the rest. He refused a third cookie, saying he had little appetite since he could not move about much.

The electric heater was turned down low, but it was not particularly cold. When the conversation died, I could hear R’s breathing. There was no choice here but to sit practically touching each other. When I glanced over at him from time to time, I could see his profile outlined in the orange glow of the lamp.

“May I ask you something?” I said, still looking at him.

“Of course,” he answered.

“How does it feel to remember everything? To have everything that the rest of us have lost saved up in your heart?”

“That’s a difficult question,” he said, using his forefinger to push up the frames of his glasses and then leaving his hand at his throat.

“I’d imagine you’d be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things.”

“No, that’s not really a problem. A heart has no shape, no limits. That’s why you can put almost any kind of thing in it, why it can hold so much. It’s much like your memory, in that sense.”

“So you have everything inside you that has disappeared from the island?”

“I’m not sure about everything. Memories don’t just pile up—they also change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island.”

“Different how?” I asked, rubbing my fingernails.

“My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls. And even if a memory disappears completely, the heart retains something. A slight tremor or pain, some bit of joy, a tear.”

He chose his words carefully, as though weighing each one on his tongue before pronouncing it.

“I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,” I told him. “I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside, so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember, there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?”

“Would you really like to remember all the things you’ve lost?” R asked.

I told him the truth. “I don’t know. Because I don’t even know what it is I should be remembering. What’s gone is gone completely. I have no seeds inside me, waiting to sprout again. I have to make do with a hollow heart full of holes. That’s why I’m jealous of your heart, one that offers some resistance, that is tantalizingly transparent and yet not, that seems to change as the light shines on it at different angles.”

“When I read your novels, I never imagine that your heart is hollow.”

“But you have to admit that it’s difficult to be a writer on this island. Words seem to retreat further and further away with each disappearance. I suspect the only reason I’ve been able to go on writing is that I’ve had your heart by my side all along.”

“If that’s true, then I’m glad,” R said.

I turned my palms up and held them out. Then we stared at them for a time, without so much as blinking, as though I were actually holding something in my hands. But no matter how hard we looked, it was painfully clear that they were empty.

The next day, a call came from the publishing house. From the new editor who had taken over responsibility for my work.

He was short and thin, a few years older than R. His face was so ordinary that it was difficult to make out the expression it wore. On top of that, since he spoke almost in a whisper and mumbled a bit, I missed a good bit of what he had to say.

“When will you be finished with the novel you’re working on?”

“I have no idea,” I told him, realizing R had never asked me this sort of question.

“The story seems to be reaching a delicate phase, and I think you need to proceed cautiously. Please let me know when you have something more to show me. I’m very anxious to read the next section.”

I leaned forward, my elbows on the table.

“By the way,” I said, as casually as I could, “what has become of R?”

“Well,” he mumbled, and I could hear him picking up his glass and gulping down some water, “he has… disappeared.”

The last word of this I heard quite clearly.

“Disappeared…,” I repeated.

“Yes, that’s right. Have you heard anything from him?”

“No, nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.

“It was quite sudden,” he said, “and everyone is a bit baffled. He simply didn’t show up at the office one morning. No message, nothing. Just your novel, sitting out on his desk.”

“Really?”

“Yes, that was all. But of course I suppose it’s not that unusual nowadays for someone to disappear.”

“I hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. You don’t suppose…”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I have some records I’ve borrowed from him. I don’t know how I’ll be able to return them.”

“If you like, I could take them for you. I may get the chance to pass them along to him.”

“I’d be grateful,” I said. “And if you find out where he is, could you let me know?”

“I will. If I find out,” he promised.

We decided it would be the old man’s job to be in touch with R’s wife. The toolbox on the back of his bicycle let him pass as a repairman, allowing him to visit her without attracting attention.

Soon after R vanished, she went home to her parents’ house to deliver the baby, but that plan had been made well in advance and had nothing to do with recent developments. Her parents owned a pharmacy in a town to the north that had once been home to prosperous smelting works, but that was deserted now that the factories had been closed.

We decided to use the abandoned elementary school in the town as our point of contact. On days ending in zero—the tenth, the twentieth, the thirtieth—she would leave things she wanted to send to R in a wooden box in the courtyard that held meteorological instruments used by the children at the school. The old man would go on his bicycle to retrieve them, leaving items R wanted to send to his wife in their place. That was how we had arranged things.

“Everything seems quieter in winter, no matter where you go, but that’s the loneliest place I’ve ever seen,” the old man reported after his first trip. “As soon as I got over the hills, a cold wind hit me in the face. That must be right where the north wind starts to blow. The streets were nearly deserted, more cats around than people, and the houses were old and mostly empty. I expect folks moved away when they closed down the smelters, which look pretty spooky just sitting there, like crumbling rides at an amusement park. No matter where you go, there’s another one, sad as can be, as though they died, trapped in place by layers and layers of rust.”

“I had no idea,” I told him, filling his cup with hot cocoa. “When I was little, there was a beautiful orange glow in the night sky that came from just over the hill.”

“I remember, too. There was a time when the men who ran those works were respected all over the island. But that’s gone now, and lucky for us it is, since the Memory Police don’t go there anymore. It’s not likely they’ll ever suspect us.” He took a deep breath and lifted the cup with both hands.

“How is R’s wife?” I asked.

“Tired, as you’d expect. She told me she’s having trouble understanding what’s happened to her, but that’s normal enough. Her husband’s been snatched away just as she’s about to give birth to their first child. But she’s smart and tough, and she didn’t try to find out where he is or who’s hiding him. She just told me to say how grateful she is.”

“So she’s gone home to her parents to wait for the baby to be born?”

“Yes. But their pharmacy doesn’t seem to be doing too well. While I was there they had just one customer, an old woman who’d come for a bottle of Mercurochrome. It’s a tiny little place and everything’s showing its age—the sliding door, the floorboards, the old glass cases—I almost wanted to get my toolbox and go help fix it up. R’s wife works behind the cash register, but I could see her big belly when she moved around the shop.” He sipped his cocoa for a while, and then, as if the idea had suddenly occurred to him, he unwound his scarf from his neck and stuffed it in his pants pocket. I refilled the kettle and set it back on the stove. Drops hissed as they fell on the burner.

“And there was no problem with the handoff at the box?”

“Everything worked perfectly. The school is small and there was no one in sight. The whole place seems to have gone cold, with no lingering warmth or smell from the children, not so much as a footprint. It was freezing, like a laboratory of some sort. Not a place I wanted to hang around, so I came straight home.”

The old man retrieved the cloth bag that was hidden under his sweater and pulled out a white envelope and a package wrapped in plastic.

“These were in the box,” he said.

I took the package from him. It appeared to be several items of carefully folded clothing and a few magazines. The envelope was thick and tightly sealed.

“The box hasn’t been used for a while and it’s in pretty bad shape,” he continued. “The paint is peeling and the latch was so rusted it was tricky to open. But I figured it out. The instruments are all broken—no mercury in the thermometer and a bent needle on the hygrometer—but that means no one else is likely to look inside. R’s wife had left the package tucked out of sight in the back, just as we agreed.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry to have put you in so much danger.”

“No, that doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head. The cup was still pressed to his lips and I worried the cocoa would spill. “The important thing now is to get these things delivered.”

“You’re right,” I said. I clutched the packet and the envelope to my chest and started up the stairs, feeling the warmth of the old man’s body still lingering in the objects.