lost in the library. cineworld.uk.co
The next few days were simple and happy. Claire and I would have lunch with Naomi and Jason near the lab and dinners next door with the Abbotts and Lucile. They’d been back for months and months now. We never did patch the break in the wall between our houses and Lucille would come to check on me or invite me over or as before, bring me meals. We talked about our friends. Mary and Jane were in Paris with Scout. They were the first to bring a large supply of wafers to the French people, a goodwill gesture from Mr. Tanaki after France negotiated a peace accord ending all conflict in Europe. The two women with their suitcase of gifts were treated like royalty, instant celebrities, feted by the media and the elite, guests to parties and gala events all over Paris while housed in some palatial suites near the river.
Jamie was in Sydney where he’d helped construct a lab bigger than our own. Now he was busy running it. Charley was back in Berkeley living behind a small shop repairing electronics for people. So much had been destroyed in the blast that he had years of work ahead of him as nearly everything was damaged.
But everywhere people were in high spirits and busy around the clock with reconstruction. The news of the chips had galvanized everyone around the world. Those in the States were put on a published waiting list, and it was only a matter of months or a year before they would be receiving theirs. Even children were a part of the program. A scaled-down version was being produced for kids, starting at age five. This allowed them to race through the old curriculum to university levels in just a few years with much more emphasis placed upon the arts and music and drama in the schools. So everyone was happy for once and looking forward to a very bright future.
Claire told me she needed to go back to Washington for a few days to tidy up her consulting affairs. I let her go, reluctantly, and then on another trip to Sacramento a few days later. But I felt like my old self again, reading whatever I fancied, visiting coffee shops and bookstores and even Charlie several times a week. He’d always be sitting at a table piled high with what looked like junk, pulling pieces from one device to put into another while I sat across from him and we talked away the hours.
One morning while Claire was away on some trip, I don’t recall which as there were so many, I was looking along a shelf in my library and once again my eyes fell upon the volume of Gulliver’s Travels. What was strange was that all at once I remembered with perfect clarity the morning over a year earlier when I had picked it out and read the first two books to Scout. Stranger still, I now recalled the text itself, every word of it, so whatever nanochip in my head had recorded the book must be still operating, and where there was one, there were bound to be others. This suspicion dominated my thoughts for the rest of the day and the days following. With a little effort, I started recalling the other times I’d spent teaching Scout with equal clarity, but there was also a haziness to the matter, especially in the timeline and sequence of events, which seemed to involve all my memories. I decided to start a journal, marking the details of each day, my readings and thoughts, and keep it in my safe away from the eyes of Claire.
But then I remembered how easily she could extract any combination or password from a person’s head and that she probably had all of mine already. She could then simply take the journal away and make me think I never kept one, and that would be that. So besides keeping a journal, I began posting notes to myself in the pages of books I was reading, that I did keep a journal and that it was in the safe. I dated them and added to their number as time went on in so many unlikely places I was bound to come across them frequently, reminders that no one could undo.
But my doubts continued to grow with her frequent absences. I knew that her powers of deception, if she chose to practice them, had only gotten better with time, more complex, more far-reaching and undetectable. It struck me one day in a flash that maybe my whole Samson and Delilah battle and turning of the tables on her was an illusion she planted in my head. Perhaps the tale was right, and I was still blind. Why were the two wafers left in the safe when all else had been removed. I couldn’t remember if we’d left them there last summer or not, or for what reason. So the very moment I thought I was catching her in her brain games she might have been reprogramming me, first, with the implanted myth of my victory over her and then with a much improved 2.0 version of her mind control. That would mean that all that had happened over that week, if it was a week or only a few minutes, and the night trip to the lab were also a mirage. When playing a game what better way to deter your opponent from all further action than to make him think himself the winner, with nothing left to do, and ‘game over’.
But I clung tenaciously to the belief that no deception, as regards a person’s mind, can be perfect. Somehow or somewhere there has to be a chink in it, and I was dead set on finding it. My gut instinct told me she had me hopelessly confused about time, a sense she seemed so perfect at that she must have thought on the matter quite a bit. Whenever she left on one of her business trips, she would always tell me exactly when she would return. I’d mark it on the calendar we kept in the kitchen and tick off the day each morning before starting breakfast. The first few times, upon her return, days later than I expected, I would bring her the calendar. She’d laugh and say I had my bookkeeping all wrong, that I’d checked off too many days and that her departure date had changed at the last minute. The next few times I noticed as we stood together examining the calendar that it seemed different but I couldn’t tell how. But my checks always matched the two days she said she’d been away. So that’s when I began my journal.
My diary amounted to about a page a day and the entries in most ways would answer to the adjectives ‘quaint’ or ‘mundane.’ But it was a project I grew fond of as I added to it at the end of each day. Strange to say, I thought of it each morning and proposed to myself new things to do, just to make it interesting. I spent time with Mr. Abbott in his shop as he puttered about, picking up knowledge of woodworking and tools. I followed Mrs. Abbott to her plants and flowers and helped her garden and I watched Lucille cook while she gave me instructions in that art. I began exercising each day. I took long walks to the avenue with a notepad and pen in my pocket in case any worthwhile observation or thought came to me, and many did. My journal became my mirror, my speculum, and I was dressing my real life to make myself presentable before it. It became a tool of self-improvement.
Claire was very encouraging of this development in all her brief visits. I showed her my diary, and she was delighted to read it. She told me honestly I needed to be more outgoing, make more friends and lead a fuller life, that I’d been a recluse and a hermit far too long and that a whole world was out there. On this visit, I felt particularly endeared to her. After she kissed me goodbye and told me she’d be back in two days, I went straight to Mrs. Abbott’s plot of roses and cut off two stems and placed the perfect flowers in a vase filled with water to present to her on her return. At first, I set them on a little entrance table right inside the front door. But then, thinking they might desire sunlight, I moved them to the sill of the tinted windows above it, on the inside of the curtains.
Claire was peculiar of all my friends in always coming to the front door of the house on her visits and always ringing the bell. My other rare visitors, like Naomi and Jason and the neighbors, came to the back kitchen door to announce themselves, where they knew they’d find me close by. My driveway gates were always open. There was less crime than ever and none in our area. So I always knew, when my front doorbell rang, it was Claire.
Once again it did ring, the penultimate time. I ushered her in, we kissed and had a soiree with Naomi and Jason, but she had to be off early next morning to quickly tidy up some business that would be finalized and set her forever free to spend much more time with me, or so she said. I let her go, as usual, with my best wishes but remembered even as she was driving away that I had forgotten about the roses in the window. When I parted the curtains, I saw that they were three weeks dead, horribly wilted, the water long ago evaporated. And I saw this as a symbol of my life with Claire, and I realized it with a certainty that chilled me to the bone.
She changed in my mind in an instant from a beaming beauty, a rose, to a shrivelled up witch from whom I had to make my escape. That sparked in my head a phrase I’d uttered in anger long ago to Samantha, ‘you’re distance retarded.’
