from Startles

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.

 

Taking sides

 

What should(n't) have surprised me.

 

Twice recently, while telling other walkers about the recent firings at the cemetery, they have taken the side of management. "Maybe they need the money"; "Maybe the workers have been there so long they make a lot of money, so they're starting over with new workers"; "Let's hope it's for the better." At best, a shrug and a "too bad." At worst, a defense of vulture capitalism's inhumane treatment of workers. And always, "I hope it turns out for the best." One walker kindly offered to tell me good news the next time she hears it.

 

Coda: last night on our last short walk, Lilith and I ran into a neighbor who named her black dog Betty White. A pert dog, often dressed in raincoat or sweater, walking with her person every morning and afternoon. "Where's your other half?" I asked her, walking by herself. "She died." Rather suddenly, at five years old, though several vets had pronounced her just fine in her last week. RIP Betty White. A good dog. While she and I talked, Lilith sat on her haunches, clearly aware. "I believe in God," our neighbor said.

The view from McDonald's

 

He was one of the pilgrims of Kahekili, more frequent these days. From the back, his sandals resembled those I remember from the book of Bible stories my father gave me as a child. If he'd had a donkey, he could have been Jesus. A man with a blue bed roll on his back, he carried a plastic bag in his right hand. He'd turned out from `Ahuimanu Park, was lucky the custodian wasn't there, who guards the place like a hawk from poor people and dogs. Wore a slight limp, turned to cross the highway toward the McDonald's on the corner. Having caught up to him, I said I'd spot him a cup of coffee, if I had any money on me, which I didn't. He was a worn looking white man with a white beard, who didn't look impressed at my imaginary offer.

 

At the end of our cemetery walk, Lilith and I heard a tour guide tell his flock (one of purple hair, another with orange, others more non-descript) that that was the only place where you could get spam and rice and look at such a beautiful view. "Are you talking about 'the most beautiful McDonald's in the world?'" I asked. "And where does that come from?" He told me it was all over social media. I mean, it's a beautiful place, but he's sure there are other beautiful places with McDonald's, too.

from Startles

Startles

A big brown dog on a gurney, the other side of the window, lifts up her head, looks for her person on my side. My gaze is caught, like a vision of reddest cloth the moment after meditation. Not epiphany, which means too much, or story, meaning too little. I have been soaked in words so long, but I find none now, if words mean.

That her face was chiseled, marvelous, was not lost to me. I remarked on its beauty to the man who brought her. He’d been all the way to Waikele, where no one could see her. But this wasn’t aesthetics, not at all. Her face offered me no affect, no interpretation.

The common trigger, like a virus, is exclusion. Someone pulls it, you count it down, then the monkey enters the brain pan, scampering in its cell. The job of monkey mind, the psychologist tells me, is to make you feel alone. So there’s no monkey there, just shadows, echoes. A rope for swinging on.

You’re in the waiting room, your mind on a swing. There’s an earth mover aria on the sound system, calling out squeals and squeaks and groans. The only sense is return. The blur of it. What shutter speed could slow it down?

My husband listened to Moby Dick sped up on his kindle. It was ok, he assured me, because he could hear his own voice through the mechanical patter. A vision of Pip in a vortex comes up. A vet tech came out to lead the man toward the examination room. Lilith and I left for home.

 

The family feel

Tall, lean Jean was spidering up the hill as Lilith and I came down from the loop at the top of the cemetery, which everyone calls "the heart," but I insist is "the cul-de- sac." She'd just returned from a walking trip in Japan. "Why are all my friends going to Japan now?" I wondered. "Because it's cheap," she said. 

 

While she was away, I told her, S and J were fired, along with all the security guys. Jean retired as an x-ray technician. "When I was at Kapiolani Hospital," she said, "there was a local family feel. After the place was bought by a mainland corporation, that ended. Not the way they operate."

 

The gossip trader

 

"What, no drink of water, no bathroom break?" asked J at the front desk. "Just wanted to say hello," I responded, "and to say I miss my friends at the guard shack." She knew about S being "terminated," but nothing about Uncle J. "How is it that I sit here all day at the entrance and you know more than I do?" she asked. "Oh, I pick up gossip when I enter, drop it off at the back of the cemetery, pick up more and return it." She guessed that the boss didn't want the old loyalties any more; he's installing his own people. She was especially fond of S, who'd once called her one of the best looking people he knew. He'd been kind when she'd had surgeries a few years ago.

 

Up the hill, O and H came zooming around a corner in their John Deere vehicle (lots of them buzz around the grounds like mad golf carts). I pretended to recoil in fear. They stopped, and O fell to the ground in meditation position, right on the asphalt. Lilith came over and he formed a kind of kind arch over her, as he offered her his attention. Fur flew. "You made my day," he says. Upset with the boss. "He tell me what for do when I already know what for do; it's annoying."

 

The day after Memorial Day: acres of little American flags, paper plates, eggs, fruit cups, crackers, entire lunches, a half-peeled grapefruit. In one trash can, evidence of the new Popeyes in Kaneohe, alongside the usual McDonald's brown bags and napkins. A large Coca Cola cup, with plastic straw and loud flag motif, sat on the grass.

The [word] is not love

 

I called him on it. "[Word] Paul," O called the mortician. "Did you actually use that word?" I asked, wondering at Paul's reaction. "Oh he was ok with it. I use [the word] with my [Hawaiian word] friends on the mainland; you're my [word]," he added. They call me the [word] too. "I'd never use that word," I told him. "The word wouldn't hurt kids growing up now," H added. As if. 

 

"Well, it's just a word," said O.