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.