With a sly smile he passed the bowl to Danlo, who was the last to drink from it. Danlo touched his tongue to the kalla and took a long, deep drink, and then another. It tasted both cool and bitter. Because he was in a wild mood, out of his devotion to wildness, he took a third sip. In truth, he drank much more than a sip; three times altogether he did this, and there was no way to tell how much of the kalla drug he swallowed. When he was done he looked at Hanuman, who was standing close, shoulder to shoulder, and watching him in his intense but anguished way. Haw he hates this blessed drug, Danlo thought. How he hates this ceremony. He looked around the circle, then, and he was amazed that thirty-seven civilized people could suffer such a shared and intimate touching of their lips to the bitter kalla.
'Sit down, now,' Bardo called out. Among the futons he strutted as if the kalla were rocket fuel powering his limbs. He was almost dancing with the energy of something beyond himself. He moaned and laughed and shook his head. His eyes rolled right and left, his great, soulful, brown eyes. Then he threw his hand up to his forehead; he closed his eyes and said, 'Ah, mmmm, yes, there it is. Do you see it? All of you sit down before you fall down, the memories will soon begin. We'll guide you through the layers. Begin with your first childhood memory. You may use the imaging attitude, or olfaction, if you'd like, to bring it to mind.'
Everyone returned to their futons then. Danlo sat down too hard, and he felt the shaft of his shakuhachi gouge into his thigh. Always, he kept the bamboo flute shoved down into the long pocket of his pants, where most people stow their skate blades after leaving the ice. He slid the shakuhachi out of his pocket. He pressed its ivory mouthpiece to his lips. Many times since Old Father had given him this gift, he had used its intense, piercing sound to send him into reveries. But he made no music that night, for Hanuman was next to him, watching, and he knew well how his friend hated the breathy cry of the shakuhachi. There was really no need for such music, he thought, nor even the lost music of the Handel which Bardo had brought back from his journeys and now reverberated throughout the room. Already, inside him, the memories were forming up, great waves of memory that rushed through his mind and broke upon the lens of his inner eye. He beheld these memories, and he listened to them, to the sounds. His heart was a beating organ of sound that pumped a rich blood music into all the cells of his body. The skin of his face burned, and his fingers dripped sweat into the holes of the shakuhachi's bone-yellow shaft. He felt wild and wary and full of wonder, all at the same time. Had he wanted to stop the tide of memory, he could not have, nor could he understand why anyone would ever wish to do so. He could not understand how Bardo and Thomas Rane kept their feet as they walked about the room, here whispering helpful words into a woman's ear, there touching a man's closed eyelids, or the arteries of someone's throat, or placing hand upon rising belly to help with the breathing and to quell the fear of the inner world, the lost world of experience and remembrance. Perhaps, Danlo thought, one became immune to kalla after consuming it many times; or perhaps Bardo and his master remembrancer had merely faked the drinking of it, and were as free from memory as lumps of stone.
'We're all children inside,' Bardo said. His voice sounded distant, as if it were falling off the rocks of a sea cliff far away. And yet the words were close to Danlo, like hot breath in his ear. 'We're all children now, folded up into babe, into fetus and embryo and egg, back into our goddamned DNA. Find the way you're folded, and you'll find the Elder Eddas.'
Danlo closed his eyes, and he immediately smelled milk, rich mother's milk all warm and slippery and sweet. He guessed that the smell was wafting out of the synthesizer, but he could not be sure. In the music room the air was hung with pungent smells of no particular direction, or rather, smells that pointed in thirty-eight private, individual directions, straight through the nostril and deep into the brain's smell centre. And there, inside Danlo, as inside all non-engineered human beings, the olfactory nerve fibres connected synapse to synapse with the hippocampus and the almond-shaped amygdala, those ancient brain structures which mediate the neuro-chemical storms of memory. 'We use smells to evoke the early memories,' Thomas Rane had said. Danlo remembered him saying this, and he smelled milk, and the memories that came then were so vivid and real it seemed that he was an infant again, suckling and swallowing, his nose pressed up against his found-mother's swollen breast. Even as he sucked air through his nose and drank in his mother's warm, seal-oil smell, he knew he was deep into the recurrence attitude of remembrancing; in truth, he was not really remembering at all, but rather reliving the moments of his life.
'There are many levels of memory,' he heard Thomas Rane say, 'and deepest of all is recurrence.'
I am two years old. Danlo thought, and he opened his eyes.
In most people the earliest memories are like pieces of ice floating in a twilight sea: fragmented, disconnected and hard to perceive. With difficulty these fragments can be reconstructed into a semblance of past events, but this reconstruction always wavers like a sea mirage and does not satisfy. Danlo had been born with the rare 'memory of pictures', an eidetic memory which imprinted the colour and detail of objects seen, and then, at will, brought these perfect images before the mind's eye. He had always been able to see things more clearly than others, to remember, but even he had never guessed that the images of recurrence could be so intensely real.
I am always two years old.
In truth, the eidetics' attitude is like a key unlocking the door of recurrence, an opening into sights and sounds that cannot be destroyed. Danlo opened himself to reliving the moments of his life, and he saw with all his senses. There was light, then, the soft yellow light of oilstones filling up a cave. The light was everywhere, and it touched everything. The cave's curving rock walls and his busy little hands and his mother's face were suddenly blazing with light. He was curled up naked in his mother's lap, deep in soft white furs and the warm smells of his mother's body. Sitting close by the oilstones were other people, his near-brothers and sisters, Rosalehe and Yoshi and Arri, and he could see them clearly, their faces, their brilliant brown eyes and each of the thousands of hair follicles erupting from their sun-burnt skin. They spoke liquid, musical words that he could barely comprehend, but that he, Danlo wi Soli Ringess, in the timelessness of his remembrance, recognized all too clearly: 'Ali, pela Ali, losa li pelasa i hallasa Ayeye.' Yes, God was truly a blessed and beautiful silver thallow, but Danlo could see, even with his two-year-old eyes, that God was also something other. Moments earlier, on the far side of the cave, his brother Choclo had finished painting a picture of God. Everyone was looking at it. God's painted feathers blazed silver against black stone. God's wings were outstretched to beat the air, and in his great black talons he clutched a moon, one of the six silver moons that circled the planet. And God's eyes were black and fierce, and God was dying to hook its beak into the moon, to tear it into pieces and devour it. Gazing at this brilliant painting made Danlo's eyes lock with fear. The fear rippled in waves through his body down into his scrotum. He could feel perfectly what it would be like when the great thallow's beak ripped open his belly. He grasped his hands over his navel then and he screamed, and the sound of his own voice was as high and wild as a thallow's, and that was the most frightening thing of all, this terrible scream. There, in his mother's lap, he was sobbing in terror, in hatred, in pain. There, too, his awestruck mother bent over him, touching him. She touched his hands, his belly, the skin above his throbbing heart; she touched the tears away from his face. This image he saw and felt with all the cells of his body. He marvelled at the way image connected to emotion, to the feeling of intense love his mother's voice and fingers called up in him. He had long forgotten this love, the warm and liquid pleasure of it deep in his blood. But now he lived the child inside him again, and his delight was pure and timeless. He was connected not memory to event, but rather joy to joy, and lip to lip, connected directly with the spacetime of a singular moment as his mother kissed his mouth, his forehead, his burning eyes. That was the wonder of recurrence, he thought, the way this intense reliving of himself connected him with the source of his life and being. And at the centre of his deep self was just pure laughter. He had always known this, but now he felt his belly opening to waves of laughter. His brothers and sisters gathered in close, standing over him as they dug their fishy-smelling fingers into his ribs and belly, tickling him out of his terror. Laughter the holiest state and brings one closest to God – he remembered this saying as he convulsed in laughter and kicked about on his mother's lap. There, in the music room, he lay back upon his futon convulsing in remem-
brance, and the swells of love and laughter overwhelmed him.
I will always be two years old.
He heard a voice whispering this, and he recognized it as a truth. He had a clear and compelling sense that all the events of his life (and, perhaps, of the universe) were eternal and folded up in each present moment of time. He could almost see the folding. He listened to the sound of his laughter and followed it backward into himself, into all the selves he had ever been. This was a classic remembrancing technique. Making this journey was something like a snake swallowing its tail, or like a child trying to crawl back into the bloody womb of time. And in the deepness of experience and life, there was always terror. Always, each seeker of remembrance reached a moment of supreme terror. This moment, like a sharpened wooden stake buried in a snow-trap, might be embedded within any layer of memory, but it was always there. As Danlo relived the laughter of his infancy, he thought he had escaped the worst of terrors, but it was not so. He was only stepping nearer and nearer to it. He suddenly sensed it beneath him, hidden by the thin and icy crusts of memory. It was essential, he had been told, to relive the moment of his birth, but he suddenly knew that this was impossible.
'No!' he heard himself shout. He lay writhing on his futon, with fists clenched and muscles cramping as he convulsed in terror. 'No ... I cannot!'
Almost immediately, Thomas Rane was kneeling over him, massaging his knotted limbs. Danlo could feel the pressure of his long, skilful hands and hear his voice, but he could not see him because his eyes were shut much too tightly to open.
'Danlo wi Soli Ringess,' Thomas Rane said, 'you're fleeing yourself.'
'Take one sip of kalla and flee God,' Danlo whispered. 'But I took ... more than one sip.'
'Very well, but the drug cannot take you where you will not go.'
'It should be so easy,' Danlo said. 'They say I was born laughing. The laughter should carry me back to the first moment, yes?'
'It's always hard to remember your birth.'
'It is so close. I can almost see it. Almost be ... there, the blessed moment.'
'You must force yourself, Young Pilot.'
'No, I cannot. If I was born laughing, truly, the holiest consciousness ... Once I've returned, I could never leave it again, don't you see?'
Thomas Rane touched Danlo's eyelids, then, and with difficulty he opened his eyes. He turned his head. Next to him, on his blue futon, Hanuman lay still as a corpse. All around the music room were women and men lying straight and still, frozen into the position of remembrance.
'Ah, what's wrong?' This came from Bardo, who stepped across the room lightly and carefully. He, too, knelt by Danlo's futon, and his eyes were like bottomless brown pools.
'He's reached the fleeing stage,' Thomas Rane said. His face was grave and impassive, as if he thought that a master remembrancer should always wear such a face.
'And what is he fleeing?'
'His birth. He's been told – and he believes – that he was born laughing.'
'Ah,' Bardo said. 'Ahhh.'
'We must take him through it.'
'Must we?'
'He's told us enough,' Thomas Rane said. 'We might be able to use word keys, now.'
'Words?'
'To force him back to the image storm.'
'But is that wise? By God, look at him! He's gone back faster than any of the others.'
'Who remembrances faster, remembrances farther,' Thomas Rane said.
'Well, let him go straight back, then, as far as he can. He can remembrance his birth some other time.'
Danlo looked straight into Bardo's eyes, and he saw that he too was deep in remembrance. Although he thought it was impossible that Bardo could have witnessed his birth, he sensed that the huge man was reliving the images of it, even as he smiled sadly and looked Danlo eye to eye. Friends who drank kalla together sometimes claimed they shared an almost telepathic remembrance. Danlo lost himself in Bardo's deep eyes, and he wondered if Bardo could be pulling lost images out of his mind.
'Go back if you can, Little Fellow,' Bardo said.
'If we circumvent the proper sequencing,' Thomas Rane said, 'he may remembrance the Eddas imperfectly.'
'Well, by God, has anyone but Mallory Ringess ever remembranced them perfectly?'
Thomas Rane smiled, then removed a blue vial from the pocket of his robe. He held it so Danlo could see it.
'Am I to have more kalla, sir?'
'No,' Thomas Rane said, 'this isn't kalla. It's water. Just plain sea water. Please open your mouth.'
Danlo lay back with his mouth open as Thomas Rane opened the vial and used its dropper to let a little water fall onto his tongue. Instantly, the essence of pure salt burst through his mouth.
'It tastes saltier than the sea,' Danlo murmured. 'Almost like blood.'
'Smell and taste are almost the same sense,' Thomas Rane said. 'Taste the ocean, inside; this is what it was like before you were born.'
'To live, I die,' Danlo whispered.
'No, don't speak. Taste what's in your mouth, the ocean. You were never born. Never-born, endless as the ocean – how can you die?'