It must have been those dementia classes I took from my mother that
made me re-read The Memory Police,
though there was little re- to it, as I can’t remember plots. I
recalled the
concept (authoritarian state demands forgetting on an uncertain
schedule): characters are startled by disappearances. Birds,
libraries, novels, you name it until you can’t. The plot lines: a
novelist who writes about a typist whose voice was stolen
by her instructor, who imprisons her in a room full of dead machines;
a journalist hidden under the floorboards of the novelist’s house;
an old man who lives in a half-sunken ferry; a dog. Novels require
furniture, but that’s what I forget.
I did
remember the box of things forgotten, hidden away by the novelist’s
mother. I did
remember that some characters still remember what everyone else has
forgotten. They’re on the run from the Memory Police, who seem to
remember what they’re mandated to make
others forget. Everyone lives
on an island, the better to symbolize their isolation. The ferry boat
finally sinks, and the old man joins the novelist and her journalist
friend in the house with the dog.
They’re like worry stones, these
objects laid out on a narrow bed. To touch them is not to remember
their purpose, but at least to know they existed. The day the birds
flew away, I imagine their songs were pulled away like ribbons. Did
the birds escape their being forgotten? And do they look under their
nests for the old tunes to pull out like worms?
I dreamed I was covered with
feathers, like a duck, that I stayed dry under their soft slick
umbrella. Now I’m in a
small room, as if hidden below the house, typing as it rains. A
friend saw rain on the streaming video of Kilauea yesterday, but at
least she witnessed the eruption. Afterwards, scarves of steam rose
from the lava. Some evenings this is our screen saver, preserved
by our distance from the “episode,” ash and tephra raining on
black rock.
Plot lines bob and weave, run their
patterns toward the basket; score and that chapter ends. Sentences
are cords that bind the stories to pallets. Meaning’s the Matson
liner that carries them into an introspective space that grows more
bare. We might forget it soon, what with the pressures of reality
that seem so farcical, or the farce that persuades us it’s real.
The space of a small room with two narrow beds, one for each man
afflicted by demons.
They love to play chess together,
these two. We play medieval music, imagining knights, knowing
ourselves to be pawns. The pawn philosopher types and types in her
narrow room, feeling less like Wordsworth’s nuns, fretting more at
the daily news. One paper would send you to the North
Shore
for pools of clear water. Another
tells you about a mob that nearly killed a teenager
and a lifeguard.
Bird songs sound inside the rain
dropping on palm fronds behind the brown fence behind our upside down
shirts on the laundry line under the eaves. I see no source for any
of this, neither rain nor song nor palm tree. What I cannot see is as
if forgotten, the lives we didn’t have before we were born. Every
newspaper he ever read was the same, he told his son. All the news
that’s fit to type.
Note:
In lieu of a review of Yuki Ogawa's The Memory Police.
