Adjacentland

Chapter 4-2

In the late afternoons when I am watching from the same spot, I notice the gaps between the ivy-covered single-room cabins and the wobbling lanes leading to the cemetery on a hill collapsing into implausible angles and the light scrambling around the glutinous trees appearing alive and combative. Perhaps I should add that the old men and women on the pathways are always losing their mooring and caroming forward and backward like rubbery toys. This disorienting vision, thankfully, recedes with each passing day. As do my bouts of dizziness.

I will mention here that I have not yet convinced myself that it is prudent to reveal all of this to you. You, my imprisoner. Faceless and nameless. And curt, too, judging from the letters I found in the jacket and from these two sentences, more clearly visible, written in block letters and left on the escritoire: You are in possession of your notebooks and letters and the drawing implements. You need nothing further. I have wondered during every one of the last nine days why you chose not to go beyond this. Nothing about your reason for doing so and more worrying, no clues as to why I acquiesced. Why did you leave the hidden warning I should trust no one, not even myself?

Perhaps I am relating this also with the hope that you will suddenly show yourself and accompany me during one of my surreptitious evening strolls. And as we walk together, avoiding the main areas of congregation (along the barrack-like enclosure that houses a canteen, a dispensary, a launderette and a stockroom), you will explain why you left me here. We will walk side by side to the cluster of single-cell buildings that serves as living quarters and just beyond, the derelict pavilion dotted with rusted spears and iron balls and at each building you will remind me of something I have forgotten. A date, a name, a place, an event. When we arrive at the chapel built like a capsized boat and decorated with copper snakes on the stern, you will pause to reassure me that my stay here is temporary. You will reassure me that I am not crazy and as my memories become more stable, I will understand everything and I will no longer worry that I am in a prison or a madhouse or an unwilling participant in some horrible experiment. But I know you will do none of this; your cryptic instructions left on the escritoire do not suggest a lingering friendship.

And so, I walk alone. I have seen the congregants milling about and a few standing reverentially before the Compound’s massive front gate, designed to imitate the outstretched wings of a ridiculously stylized albatross clutching a leaking hourglass in its claws. From a distance, the worshippers resemble crustaceans gazing from beneath their carapaces at the town outside. These gazers or acolytes, I have noticed, soon get bored and shift their attention to one of the many billboards, empty but for the signs of age: mildew, rust, frayed paint and a few tantalizing letters hanging like lopped-off limbs. The gazers stand apart from each other, making no attempt at cooperation; nothing to communicate what the missing words might signify. For my part, I try to avoid any eye contact and whenever I slip up, I see dullness, hostility or a flickering curiosity that is so brief it barely registers. Once, I spotted an old man, immaculately dressed, holding a suitcase as if he planned to leave and another day a little man afflicted with blepharism who pointed to me and muttered, “It’s your fault we are struck here. You made us do it. Over and over.”

Another day, a stutterer, dressed in the clothes of an unemployed auctioneer, told me, “There are-are...”

“There are what?” I prompted him.

“Two of-of every-every...” I could see his frustration both at his difficulty in completing his sentence and at my inability to help. “L-look.” He pointed to the sky and I saw a circling bird, its revolutions remarkably unvarying.

“I can see just a single bird,” I told him. “It seems stuck in a particular orbit.”

He seemed excited with my observation but unfortunately this did not help his stammering. When I eventually walked away he was still grunting.

In the evenings, I resume my observations before I head to the huge library that is different from every other part of the Compound I have seen so far. Its sorting room smells of blue cheese coated with rat dropping and dusted with magnolias. Perhaps for this reason, the library is always empty, although this could also be because someone had taken the time to pluck random chapters from a variety of novels, memoirs and manuals and glue these between bogus covers.

For instance, there was this paragraph in one of the fantasy novels, The Model Monkey. “It was in the year 2075 when it was first observed that the fusion of man and machine into a unified consciousness, a singularity, had gradually eroded the ability to speculate. Patterns and coincidences had been decoded, mysteries solved, enigmas demystified, puzzles resolved. There was no need to dream or reflect because everything could be predicted through algorithmic interpolations. And because there were no mysteries, the imagination was seen as a vestigial reflex. In time, it was viewed as worse.”

Yet in the same novel I saw this segment that had been plucked out, I suspect, from a romance novel and placed in The Model Monkey. “She sat on the bed, packing photographs and sewing needles and pieces of fabric on which were stitched a variety of insignias. ‘So you are really leaving?’ he asked her and when she did not reply, he added, ‘If you really intend to go to that place I should warn you that it’s pure madness. You will be surrounded by rogues and vagabonds.’ She zipped her bag and got up. ‘They celebrate craziness and worship tricksters. What do you expect to find there?’

“‘Chaos,’ she replied sweetly as if it were a special brand of chocolate. ‘It’s the gift we all have been looking for. Haven’t you?’ She blew away a tuft of hair above her almond eye, spread her arms and sang, ‘I cannot live like this anymore. I want tohubohu and bedlam. I want freedom.’

“‘Please. We can –’

“‘You believe memory is a tattered thing that can be stitched and joined but what’s gone is gone. Wouldn’t you say?’ He remained silent, wondering what exactly she was talking about and she repeated her question, watching around as if she was addressing a hidden audience.”

Book after book followed this pattern. Overblown romance novels shifted in my hands to manuals detailing the diseases of farm animals and handbooks on brain surgeries diverted to fairy tales fluttering with genies and swooning princesses. Religious tracts, consuetudinals, devolved into advice on fashion accessories. Who, I wondered, would take the time to rearrange these books and for what purpose? The violations were even more confusing when chapters from the same books were rearranged because there was no sense of time advancing.

Three days ago, I was forced to adjourn my visits to the library. In a reading room, I saw a tiny, n***d man squatting on a stool. He was shivering but there was a celebratory grin on his blubbery baby face when he looked up from his knitting. He seemed crazy with his bamboo needles in one hand and a mess of yarn in the other. I was certain of this when he leaned forward and said, “Lolo still want a cuddle.”

“What are you doing here?” I managed to ask.

“Waiting all the time. When are we leaving? I must finish this.” He held up his knitting that looked like serpents looping into each other. As I hurried away, he shouted after me in a topsy-turvy voice that sounded like a litany of crazy names. His appearance there was unfortunate. Every night, before I departed the library, I would tiptoe on the same stool on which his aged testicles had been dangling and stare through the lancet window at the town outside the Compound’s towering wall.

I have to tell you that I used to look forward to the view of the shingled housetops that all seemed to be slanting at odd angles as if the ground had curled beneath the foundations and the walls were balanced on roller bearings. Later and alone in my modest room, I would try to picture this old town outside the gate but could only come up with scenes from the illustrations on my wall: dungeons with spike traps that led to perfectly furnished kitchens with wide-eyed women sitting around a table and not seeing the toddler wandering into the garden, mauve with poison. Beyond the garden, I pictured lopsided streetlamps swaying in the breeze intermittently casting their aureoles around capsized lorries frozen in steely blue ice. The trucks were always decorated with bright stickers and decals and there were stiff tufts of fur embedded in their carriages and wheels. At first, I imagined the town to be a facade with nothing beyond the front walls, but in the nights, I heard a choppy wailing as if the wind was fretting against the gables and alcoves and once, I saw beams of lights that appeared to be gambolling across the sky. I can think of no other verb.

Here is a confession: I believe a man who does not know if he is a prisoner is worse off than someone whose status is less ambiguous. The prisoner becomes habituated to his limited space as his glances retract while the deluded man or woman, inventiveness fuelled by threadbare hope, constantly gazes outwards; constantly adds to his horizon. And so, locked in my room, the noise outside withering to a single and prolonged squall, I envision the slow passing of winter bringing ribbons of mist that obscure the supple hills behind the town, giving the place a liquid appearance. It always ends as an underwater scene, and when I awake in the early mornings and fall into the realization that I am in a place not of shimmering and indolent sea creatures but of deformed and slouching brutes with lips of unacceptable angles and eyes that shift from blank to hostile; men and women given a last gasp of life by their inquisitiveness, I wish I could hightail it to a region a thousand miles away. But where? Where, I ask you? What else is out there? And what if the world of which the might-be-prisoner dreams is just as malformed and incomplete as the one in which he is trapped?

I know I sound hysterical and my excuse is that one of my retrievals unspooled a universe in distress. I glimpsed, ever so briefly, men who resembled each other attempting to erase this resemblance with every type of weapon. Maces, clubs, hammers and glistening armours that shot firebolts that resembled sprigs of marigold. I saw other men with flowing beards heaving out roaring machines they claimed would stop the flow of time and children scurrying into caves to escape the flashes in the sky and young women lying on brown, flattened fields. I saw transparent walls being built, rising higher and higher as if they were ladders to heaven and beyond the walls, ragged women throwing their screaming babies in the air. I saw a flood that was replenished not from the storm above but from the water surging from every vent and rathole on the ground. I saw gods cavorting among their creations and forgetting they were gods. I saw the beginning of time and its end.

I have to tell you that I have struggled with these visions or dreams or whatever they may be. One of the books in the library had advised, before its transposition into a diary of a widowed farmer’s account of his mutated livestock and tractors rejigged into weapons, that what is gone is gone forever and it was just as pointless to peer into the probable future as to glance backwards. We favour our memories like a wayward uncle, long dead and of no use to us, was one overwrought description. It was utter nonsense, of course, this early section, but this is how I measure my retentiveness. Moments, instalments and episodes, boxed-in sequences that spring from nowhere and lead to nowhere. Think of tracks that are pulled away the instant the carriages roll over them. I have determined that for me, there is no simple return voyage. I say this because I cannot determine a starting point.

As silly as this sounds, there are moments when I wonder if I am as real as the people shuffling about. Sometimes I have to touch things, to feel pain, grate my fingers along a rusted iron railing or the nail dents on a wall to assure myself that I am not trapped in a dream. I listen to the snuffling on the roof at nights and in the mornings, I inhale the acrid aroma of vitriol and dead trees. I must admit that I have not entirely convinced myself. This, I believe, is why I have recorded the beginning of each day with the phrase I saw on the day of my awakening. Today is a new day but yesterday was the same day. Beneath, I affix the phrase Day One and Day Two and so on. My last entry, earlier this morning, was Day Nine.

In assessing my condition, limbo is the most charitable word that comes up. Limbo, a word that suggests flexible tunnels, interlocked caves and vast empty spaces that lead to nowhere. I know it’s not an exact definition, but this is how I measure my life, or the little that I remember of it. You may wonder why I do not stop here; why I am recording and relating an account that does not promise a resolution. No one wants to hear of jumbled memories and capricious experiences. What is the significance of recording my misery, you may well ask? It’s a valid question and I will use an analogy you might remember. “My thoughts seem to take their cues from my visions; they are like moths circling a gloomy room. It is only when I record that I can trace their arcs and glimpse their trajectories. I record so I might stumble upon some connection.” I have no idea when you mentioned this to me and if your face was thickened by some shared distress or if there had been a mischievous smile when you noticed my confusion. I even wonder sometimes if we spoke in English because, in recording this, I feel as if I am translating my thoughts from another language. I cannot recall – or I can recall only fragments of – colloquialisms and slangs and farcical expressions and nips of tart humour and I am aware that this formal account might be stilted and whinging to you as it is to me. I feel that I was once gifted with a humorous manner of transcribing events, but unfortunately that is gone now and I can only describe my situation with the tools left to me.

This evening I decided I would not avoid the library because of a n***d old man so I placed the boomerang totem into my jacket and headed in that direction. Midway there, I discovered the same craziness that had led to the creation of the hybrid books in the library had also incited the recent placement of contrary signs and directions along the pathway. I ended up in a room that was, in a manner of speaking, new to me. This room, tilting to the left and smelling vaguely of brine and camphor, does not belong here, I thought at the exact moment I stumbled through the canting doorway.

“Come in, come in, come in.” The voices, though different in pitch, seemed to harmonize with each other and the blended effect was not unlike the throbbing purr of a damp and dangerous cat.