The Drowned Life (17 page)

“What's wrong?” I said.

Still clutching the catalog, she slid out of the booth and stood up. She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a wad of bills, too much for what we'd both had, and threw it on the table.

“I want you to come with me to my place,” she said, looking a little frantic.

Immediately, I thought that my time had come to be fucked like she was eating my soul. I got nervous and stammered about having to get back to work, but she interrupted me and said, “Please, Pat, you have to come. It won't take long. I have to show you something.”

I was leery, but she seemed so desperate, I couldn't refuse her. I nodded, got up, and followed. I'd never been to her apartment before; it was only two blocks from the diner in a renovated warehouse on Hallart Street. She walked in front of me, keeping a quick pace and every now and then looked over her shoulder to make sure that I was still behind her. When she glanced back at me, I smiled, but she made no expression in return. At the rate we were walking, it took only minutes to get to the front door. She retrieved her keys and let us in. We took an old freight elevator to get to her place on the fifth floor. As we ascended, I said to her, “What's all this about?”

“You won't believe it,” she said and then flipped open the catalog to the page with the Dorphin on it for another look. She stared at it till the elevator reached the fifth floor.

If order and chaos existed simultaneously in the universe, her apartment was one of the places where order hid out. It was a nice space, with a huge window providing a view of the river in the distance. There was a big Persian carpet on the floor with a floral mandala design. The walls were painted a soothing sea green and hung with framed pieces of her fractal art. However it was done, the lighting made the room seem like a cozy cave. After being there for no more than a minute, I felt the tension just sort of slough off me like some useless outer skin. On the desk, next to a computer, was a row of sharpened pencils lined up from left to right in descending order of length. I had a sudden flashback to the crusted dishes piled in the sink back at my place.

“Beautiful,” I said to her as she hung up her jacket.

“It's okay,” she said absentmindedly. “Stay here for a minute, I have to look for something in the bedroom.”

In her absence, I went to the nearest bookcase and scanned the titles. My gaze came to rest not on one of the many volumes of art books, but upon a photograph on the top shelf. It was in a simple silver frame—the image of a severe-looking middle-aged woman with a short, tight permanent and her arms folded across her chest. She was sitting at a table in front of a birthday cake, its candles trailing smoke as if just having been extinguished. The woman's jaw and cheekbones were no more than cruel, angular cuts, as if her face had been hacked from granite with a blunt pick, and her eyes stared directly through mine and out the back of my head. I surmised she was the Snow Queen of the PTA my mother had told me about.

When Esme emerged from the other room, she called me over to a card table near the back of the apartment in front of the window. The sun was bright that day, and I remember squinting out at the view of the light glinting in diamonds off the river just before taking a seat across from her. In addition to the catalog, her cigarettes, an ashtray, and a lighter, she laid on the tabletop what appeared to be a plastic Mylar bag, the kind that comic book collectors keep their treasures in. From where I sat, it looked as if it held only a sheet of white 81/2 x 11 paper.

She lit a cigarette, and while clamping it in the corner of her mouth as she returned her lighter to the table, began speaking. “Remember the 7-Eleven back in Preston?” she asked.

I nodded. “Yeah, it was the only place in town that would sell us beer.”

“I think I remember seeing you in there,” she said. “Well, if you made a right at that corner and headed down toward the municipal garage, do you recall that little day-care center on the left side of the road?”

I couldn't really picture it, but I nodded anyway.

“I worked in that center the summer after senior year. It was one of those places where parents drop their kids off when they go to work. Mostly toddlers, some a little older. I liked the kids but there were too many of them and not enough of us.”

“Never work with animals or children,” I said.

“Not if you mind wiping noses and asses all day,” she said. “It was a good introduction to chaos theory, though.” She paused, took a drag of her cigarette, and shook her head as if remembering. “Anyway, one day near the end of the summer, about an hour before the parents came to pick the kids up, I was sitting on a tiny kid's chair, completely exhausted. I was so motionless for so long, I think the kids kind of forgot that I was there. They had the dress-up trunk out, and hats and masks and old costume stuff was flying all over the place.

“There was this one strange little kid who was there every day. He was really young, but he had an amazing sense of presence, like he was a little old man. The other kids all loved being around him, and sometimes they just stared for the longest time into his eyes, which were like turquoise-colored crystal. His name was Jonathan. So this other kid, a little bit older, walks up to Jonathan, and I'm sitting there quietly, watching this go down. The other kid seems sad or tired. Keeping his voice a little low, he says, ‘Tell me what it was like inside your mommy, I'm starting to forget.'”

“What?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Esme, and she nodded, smiling.

“That's wild.”

“Right after the kid said this to Jonathan, another little girl, who'd dressed up in a fairy princess outfit—she had a little tiara on her head and was carrying a wand—walked between them, turned to the kid who had asked the question, waved the wand, and said in a soft chant, “Go away. Go away. Go away.”

“Did he?”

“Yeah. I swear I thought he was going to start crying. Then, for a little while, I guess my mind was preoccupied, trying to think back and see if I remembered my earliest memory. If I could recall being in the womb. Nothing. All I got was a big, frustrating blank. When I looked up I noticed Jonathan and the kid had met up again off in the corner of the room. The kid was leaning down and Jonathan, hand cupped around his mouth and the kid's ear, was whispering something to him. The kid was smiling.”

“What do you think he was telling him?”

“I don't know,” she said, “but just then my boss came in and saw that the other kids were getting wild. She had me calm them down and hand out paper for them to draw on until it was time to leave. She always liked them quiet for when the parents came to get them. Time was finally up and the parents showed and when the last of the little crumb snatchers was gone, I started cleaning up. Most of them had left their drawings behind on the tabletops. I went around and collected them. I always got a charge out of seeing their artwork—there's just always a sense of rightness about the pictures from kids who haven't gone to school yet—fresh and powerful and so beautifully simple.

“When I got to the place where the kid who wanted to remember his mother's womb had sat, I found that he'd left this big scribble on his paper. I can't really describe it, but it was like a big circular scribble, overlapping lines, like a cloud of chaos, in black crayon. I thought to myself that that wasn't such a good sign after what I'd witnessed. But check this out,” she said and drew the Mylar bag next to her closer and opened the zip top. “When I got to Jonathan's picture, it lay facedown on the desk. I turned it over, and…” Here she reached into the bag and pulled out two sheets of drawing paper. As she laid them down in front of me I saw there was black crayon on both. “The same exact scribble. Absolutely, exactly the same.”

“Nah,” I said, and looked down at the two pages.

“You show me where they differ,” she said.

My glance darted back and forth from one to the other, checking each loop and intersection. Individually, they appeared to have been dashed off in a manner of seconds. There was no sense that the creators were even paying attention to the page when they did them. Eventually, I laughed and shook my head. “I give up,” I said. “Are you pulling my leg? Did you do these on the computer?”

“No,” she said, “but even if I had, now check this out.” Here she opened the catalog to the page with the reproduction of the Dorphin painting. “It's rendered as if three-dimensional, but look closely. It's the same damn scribble made to look like a jumble of twine.”

I looked and she was right. Reaching across the table, I took one of her cigarettes and lit it. I sat and smoked for a minute, trying to get my mind around her story and the pictures before me. For some reason, right then, I couldn't look into her eyes. “So what are you trying to tell me?” I finally said.

“I'm not
trying
to tell you anything,” she said. “But I've seen it in other places. Once when I was in New York City, I was on the subway. It was crowded and I took a seat next to a guy who had a drawing pad with him. I looked over and he was sketching some of the other passengers, but down in the corner of the page was that same scribble. I pointed to it and said to him, ‘That's an interesting design.' He looked at me and asked, ‘Do you remember?' I didn't answer, but I was taken aback by his question. He must have seen the surprise in my eyes. Without another word, he closed the book, put it in his knapsack, stood up, and brushed past me. He moved through the crowd and went to stand by the door. At the next stop, he got off.”

“Get out,” I said. “That really happened?”

“You'll see it,” she said. “If you don't know what to look for,
you'd never notice it. It just looks like a scribble, like somebody just absentmindedly messing around with a crayon or pen. But you'll see it now.”

“Where am I going to see it?” I asked.

“Hey, don't believe me, just call me when you do and tell me I was right.”

“Wait a second…. So you think it has to do with…what?” I asked, not wanting to say what I was thinking.

“I think it's some kind of sign or symbol made by people who remember all the way back to the womb,” she said.

“Is that even possible?” I asked, stubbing out my cigarette in the ashtray.

She shrugged. “I don't know. What do
you
make of it?”

I didn't answer. We sat there for quite a while, both looking at the two drawings and Dorphin's painting.

“You kept these drawing all these years?” I said, breaking the silence.

“Of course, in case I wanted to tell someone. Otherwise they wouldn't believe me.”

“I still don't believe you,” I said.

“You will,” said Esme.

During the walk back to my apartment and all afternoon, I thought about the drawings and their implications. What Esme'd really been hinting at, but didn't come out and say, was that there was afoot in the world a conspiracy of in-utero-remembering scribblers. Was there some secret knowledge they were protecting, did they have powers far beyond those of mortal men, were they up to no good? The concept was so bizarre, so out of left field, my paranoia got the better of me and I had to wonder whether Esme had concocted the whole thing, having first seen the Dorphin painting and knowing I'd eventually show her the catalog or we'd come across it at the university. If that was true, then it represented an
outlandish effort to dupe me, but for what? A momentary recollection of her in the library carrel gave me a shiver.

That night, I found I couldn't paint. The great ease of conception and movement of the brush I'd felt in recent weeks was blocked by the chaotic scribble of my thoughts. I lay on the mattress, staring at the ceiling, trying to think back to my own beginning. The earliest experience I could recall was being in a big snowsuit out in our backyard, sitting atop a snow drift, staring at a red, setting sun and my mother calling from the back door for me to come in. When my thoughts hit the wall of that memory, they spun off in all directions, considering what exactly it might be that the scribblers were remembering. A state of mind? A previous life? Heaven? Or just the underwater darkness and muffled sounds of the world within the belly?

By Wednesday, I'd seen that damn scribble three times. The first was in the men's room of the Marble Grill, a bar down the street from my apartment where I ate dinner every once in a while. The place was a dive, and the bathroom walls were brimming with all kinds of graffiti. I'd gone in there to take a piss, and while I was doing my thing, I looked up, and there, just above the urinal, staring me right in the face, was a miniature version of that tumbleweed of mystery. Recognizing it gave me a jolt, and I almost peed on my sneaker. I realized that in the dozen or so other times I'd stood there, looking directly at it, it might as well have been invisible.

I saw it again, later that very night, on the inside back cover of a used paperback copy of this science-fiction novel,
Mindswap
, I'd bought a few weeks earlier at a street sale. The book was pretty dog-eared, and I don't know what made me pick it up that night out of all the others I had lying around. After finding the scribble in the back, I turned the book over. On the inside front cover, written in pencil, in a neat script, was the name
Derek Drymon
, who I
surmised was the original owner. Whoever this guy was, wherever he was, I wondered if he was
remembering
as I lay there on my mattress wishing I could simply forget.

The last instance, which happened two days later, the one that drove me back to Esme's apartment, was finding a rendition of the scribble on a dollar bill I whipped out at the university cafeteria to pay for a cup of coffee. The girl behind the cash register reached toward me, closed her fingers on the note, and at that moment I saw the design. She tugged, but I couldn't let go. My gaze remained locked on it until she said, “You paying for this, or what?” Then I released my hold, and it was gone.