Landscape: Memory (25 page)

"All helter-skelter," I reminded her.

"Of course, dearest. Hardly a moment with your friends, as you were saying."

I was glad she remembered. "That's right. Do eastern schools operate in this same way?" I asked, knowing she was fond of eastern schools. "I mean, do they
require
military service and force you to split off from your friends?"

"Oh, of course not, pumpkin." She drew back at the very thought of it. "Oh, no, no. Harvard, Yale, Columbia. They're much more progressive in their attitudes toward military service, I'm certain of it. Mind you, their academic demands are strict and traditional. Only the finest minds flourish." And she smiled at the thought of it. "They're much smaller in size than Berkeley, so I'm sure you'd be with whatever chums you had there."

"I was only asking for instance, not to go there."

She brushed my hair back with her hand.

"Of course, dearest. One must give Berkeley a fair shake before thinking about other schools."

I patted her knee emphatically. "Mummy, we're not thinking about other schools. I don't know if Duncan would even want to go east."

"If he's happy with Berkeley, with their military training, I don't suppose he'd want to go anywhere." She drummed her fingers on
The Thousand and One Nights.

"I didn't say he was happy here. He's as upset about the schedule as I am. That's the reason we'd want to change. Not just because of some military requirement."

'
I
find the military requirement quite troubling." "Well, yes. It is troubling." I stopped to put my thoughts back together. Somehow they'd fallen apart in the wake of Mother's various enthusiasms. "I'm happy to give Berkeley its chance, despite the problems. But we need to think what would be best for us, and maybe it'll be someplace else. Who knows?" Mother kept her lips smartly shut, pursed in a tight little line, and nodded her head judiciously. I took the book and put it in a pile I'd started by the door, blowing the dust bunnies back to oblivion and pawing through the few titles I'd rescued so far.

31 AUGUST 1915

"Your body is a battlefield. As with any battle, one finds allied forces on both sides." I wrote it down in pencil. Bar-bar bar-bar. Mr. Legge droned on.

"I speak of microbes. We must pay homage to Semmelweis, for his was a martyr's life." I was quite unsure whether I was awake or still sleeping.

"Don't imagine, like the ignorant practitioners of just six decades past, that simple neatness will suffice to protect the temple that is your body. For it is a temple." I felt certain I'd read that somewhere before. Perhaps Mr. Legge has published, I thought. I found my lazy pen sketching out temples, ornate, fleshy temples, bedecked with prayer flags and thin pillars. My notes for Mr. Legge always went beyond simple words.

The classroom was filled with men. Women were not privy to the wisdom of Mr. Legge. An older fellow with a thick sweater sat near me. He seemed to be directing the note-taking activities of a boy my age and peering every now and then at my busy drawing. Whenever I'd catch him at it with a glance he'd smile and chuckle softly as a tolerant father might do. By the mysterious insignia on his colorful sweater I surmised he was a member of one of Berkeley's men's clubs.

As I penned in the name of the temple "Church of St. Legge," this one cuffed me on the arm and guffawed, impressed by my little witticism. His laugh was oafish, but the sweater and his age made me regard him as wise. He poked his young helper and bade him look at my sketch too. It was all quite brazen and disrespectful, I feared, but we were only three amongst more than a hundred and Mr. Legge rarely raised his eyes from the text he'd prepared. To my delight his drone ceased and class was ended. The sweater man cuffed me again, handed me an ornate card and winked. I was fumbling with my papers and didn't manage even a thanks before he'd disappeared out the door with his faithful charge.

The card was an invitation of some sort. It began with a motto embossed in the same style of script that I'd seen chiseled across the face of the Social Science Building: "Achievement. Distinction. Loyalty." A time and date and location were given across the card. It looked like a motto thought up by Kurtz. "Desk. Hat. Pipe.'' What was lurking there in that embossed surface? What qualities rushed and rumbled within those thin black lines? If I had a knife I'd cut them open and let their contents spill out. I brushed my fingertips across the face of the raised letters and tucked the card in with my notes.

"It's some sort of voodoo society," Duncan explained when I asked if he knew about this men's club. "It's like all these university things. Ritual and voodoo." We had walked together from the busy locker room out to the great pool. Its wet benign blueness lay there sloshing in the tile bed.

"Like registration?" I asked.

"Yes. And Health class."

And Military Training, I thought but didn't say. The iron lattice rose above us to a troubling height, holding the thick glass skylights, directing the steamy moist heat back down again. Duncan dove in and I sat down on the lip, dangling my feet in the warm water. Professor Kurtz's antics seemed like voodoo to me, it was true. His rambling lectures went round in mysterious circles, punctuated by sudden scribblings on the board and the occasional protracted silence. It was as though he were conjuring, carrying out some primitive dance meant to raise dead spirits. Duncan came bubbling along back to me and pulled himself up onto the lip all wet and panting like a dog.

"You don't really want to go?" he asked, meaning to the meeting of the secret club.

"To the voodoo club?"

"Yeah. It'll be so dull. They're just a bunch of stuffy old fat guys. I see them all the time."

"On your ritual march?" Words and calls and splashing rang out in endless diminishing echoes, filling the vast iron hall.

"In classes. They're in all those dumb classes."

"I met this one in Health."

"It's worse in English. They sit around puffing on pipes."

I watched his legs wiggle in the lapping water. The surface wobbled and warped like some living thing. Down into the depths the light danced, waving across the tiles. How often did water from the bottom come up to the top? I remember Father telling me about convection currents. But with water it was so hard to see. Duncan slid back in, turning to drape his arms across the lip, so he could look up to me and talk.

"Water never stays still," I said because that's what I was thinking.

"No, I guess it doesn't." Duncan looked at me from under his wet hair. It was a flat swirling mess of dark brown, dripping all down his face and neck.

"I mean the surface." It was a thought that rarely left me. It had begun in Bolinas and by now everything seemed to have a surface. Everything seemed to be either fixed or unfixed, thick or thin, honest or deceitful. For some reason it seemed suddenly very important that I tell him this. It was as if I'd had a small child or tumor growing inside me and I'd not yet told anyone, as if my new teeth had come in and no one had seen. I'd been waiting anxiously for this moment, this chance, and I'd never even realized it.

"The surface is always moving, you see. The hidden parts come up to the surface always. It's always turning over and showing itself, all of it."

"Not much is 'hidden' here. Max." Duncan laughed at me. "It's really quite transparent."

"But most things aren't."

"Aren't water?"

"Aren't transparent. You see, that's why it's important what water does, the way its surface changes and moves. Like if I remember something in a simple, frozen way. Just remember it one way as if that was the whole experience, and I don't let the surface of that memory shift and turn and reveal its undersides, then somehow that memory is wrong."

Duncan was staring at me with his eyebrow knit. Birds clattered about in the iron rafters, shifting in their uncomfortable nests. Really I'd covered a lot of ground in the last sentence or two. I shifted a bit on my butt, adjusting my weight so my bones wouldn't get too tired.

"I don't understand," Duncan informed me. 'is this something from class?" I looked at his wondering eyes and wondered why this need to explain it felt so strong, or even if I yet had the words that would explain it.

"No, it's something I thought about in Bolinas."

"The water part?"

"Partly that. Mostly about memory, and now sort of about everything." Duncan shifted closer to me and rested his chin on his arms. The way he bowed his head and pushed his lip out, I thought he must think I wasn't well and needed solicitations or comfort. But I know that's just his way of listening closely.

"What about everything?" he asked. I'd never heard it sound so enormous. The question echoed up into the steamy vastness and whispered through the leaden skylights. It wobbled inside my ears and worked its way around inside me. What about everything? It wasn't so big when I began. I'd simply wondered why photos made me feel so bad, but the thought I'd come to blossomed into this lush, engulfing thing.

"It's hard to get ahold of, really." Yes, it was. Words could help hold it. If there were words enough. "I'm suspicious of things that hold still. Things that are fixed and frozen and never change." Like words holding this thought. The more successfully they held, the worse I felt. "That's kind of it."

Duncan held still, resting his head on his forearms, looking at me as though I'd shown him an illness. "Ice always melts," he reminded me. "Nothing ever stays frozen."

I imagined him frozen, or embalmed, preserved somehow so he remained exactly as he was now. I thought of the unraveled mummies at the Fair. Their faces had collapsed, but their flesh remained, stretched like leather over their small Egyptian bones.

"But we try to freeze things forever, like with photographs. Or when people want to remember every detail exactly right." Duncan nodded sympathetically. "People want their memory to be like a camera."

"How else should it be?" he asked. "I mean, how could a memory be better than if it was exactly right?"

This was the thought that panicked me. How could a memory be better than if it was exactly right? Why did this feel like a tight sheet of rubber enclosing me? I wanted to rip its perfect, smooth face apart so I could breathe. "Doesn't it make you want to rip something into shreds?" I asked in all sincerity. "Maybe rip a huge photo apart so it blows away with the wind?"

"Excuse me?" Duncan pulled himself out of the pool and sat beside me. "Have I missed something?"

I watched his ribs move as he breathed and brushed my hand across his wet shoulder. I'd skipped a step or two in my argument and went back to try and express it more completely. There was us and there was the air all around us, and the iron shell with its thick glass. We sat together, bathed in the watery green light. I looked again at his fine brown skin, all glistening and wet with water. Would I ever want to rip that away?

"Each thing has a surface, you see." He nodded encouragement. "Even a thought or a memory. And if it's fixed and frozen, like a photo is, it makes me feel stuck or stifled, like I'm in a prison and the walls are straight and clean. Brittle, thin walls that cut across me so close. I can't move even a muscle."

Duncan kept plunging his foot into the water and wobbling it around to feel the resistance. He grunted thoughtfully and lay back onto the tiles. "So you'd prefer water? A watery thought?" He meant to be funny, but he was right.

"Watery words."

"An immense sloshing watery world?" He seemed delighted by the thought. Duncan wiggled his head back and forth in the small puddle he'd made, mumbling silly words as though this were a matter of play. I wondered what had happened to my exquisite panic. Delight was all well and good. Funny formulations and watery babbling might be healthy, etc., etc., but I seemed to have misplaced, somehow, my fear.

"Shut up," I said, and hit him in the stomach. "It's not so easy and fun as you make it out to be." He hit me back, still thinking it was all play, and started wrestling me toward the water. I started to explain but he smiled and wrapped his arm around my mouth, shoving us off the lip and into the sloshing blue pool.

The water closed around us, sealing shut as my mind finally found words for part of what I meant, but now I couldn't say. There was us, all tangled in each other, and our fine brown skin. Then there was the water wrapped around us and the sounds we made, muffled and bubbling. The air lay atop the wobbling waves, and the glass cage enclosed that, offering its other face to the open air, and that went on forever.

All the cautionary tales in my little book had such tragic endings. There was George, as you know, and Harry, who got beaten for playing in mud, and Alspeth, who was eaten by a lion, his head left severed and alone. He'd let go of his nurse's hand. Matilda, who'd yelled "fire" once too often, was left at home by her withered aunt (who went to see
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray
alone) and burned to a cinder in a horrible blaze.

(Mother asked me who would I like to have at my birthday and I told her, "Paolo and Rolph and George and Alspeth," because I really didn't much like Harry and Matilda was dead. Alspeth's head survived the lion's jaws, and his head would be enough for me.

"Tenderness," she cooed, "George and Alspeth are from a book. Wouldn't Skinny like to come as well?" I didn't like Skinny that day. He'd taken my place as digger in the Tunnel Through the Earth.

"I don't like Skinny," I said. She brushed my downy cheek with her soft hand.

"But dumpling, that leaves just two and I don't imagine two makes for much of a party." I knew it made four but I thought perhaps she'd start to talk nonsense if I asked more about George and Alspeth.

"Let's just set for four, can we?" I noodled, thinking she'd never guess.

"For George and Alspeth?"

It was uncanny. On top of everything else she could read minds. I blushed and nodded yes.

"Pumpkin," she exhaled my favorite name. "George and Alspeth can't come to a party. They're from a book."

"I don't mind," I tried explaining. "I could make cards asking them. I don't have to invite Skinny, do I?")

3 SEPTEMBER 1915