The Memory Police

Chapter 6

Having written this phrase, I set down my pencil. My new novel wasn’t going very well. I seemed to be writing in circles, going backward, or running into dead ends, with no idea what should come next. Still, I often encountered this sort of writer’s block, and I no longer took much notice of it.

“How are you doing?” R asked each time we met.

“All right,” I answered, unsure whether he was asking about my novel or about me personally. But it was always the novel.

“You can’t write with your head. I want you to write with your hand,” he said. It was rare for him to make a pronouncement like this, so I found myself simply nodding in silence. Then I stretched my hand toward him, fingers extended.

“That’s right. That’s where the story should come from,” he said, but he looked away, as though he had seen into the most vulnerable part of my body.

At any rate, I was ready to give up for today and go to bed. My fingers were tired and stiff. I put my pencil and eraser in my pen box, straightened the manuscript pages, and secured them with a glass paperweight.

In bed, I found myself thinking about the Inui family. Since that night, I had passed the faculty housing at the university any number of times, but from the outside nothing seemed to have changed. The students were sprawled out on the lawn; the elderly man who occupied the guardhouse at the gate was idly reading a book on bonsai trees.

Futons were hung out to air on the balconies of the faculty apartments near the back entrance to the campus. I located the E block and counted the windows from one end to find apartment 619, where the Inuis had lived. The balcony had been cleaned off and was completely empty.

Then I stopped by the dermatology unit waiting room at the university hospital, but the square on the duty chart for Wednesdays, when Professor Inui had done his consultations, was now filled in with the name of an assistant. Nurses were circulating among the rooms with medicine or bandages or charts. Patients were rolling up sleeves or opening shirts to reveal their afflicted skin. No one wondered where the professor had gone or lamented his absence.

The entire Inui family had simply vanished, as though they had melted into thin air.

But I thought about them, wondering whether they were able to eat dinner at a proper table, with all the dishes and glasses they needed, whether they slept in comfortable beds. I had failed to ask them at the time what they had done with their cat. I should have offered to take him, along with the sculptures. Still, if Mizore had been found hanging about my house, I might have come under suspicion. No doubt the Memory Police could have identified him.

No matter how much I tried to sleep, worries seemed to form like so many bubbles, but unlike bubbles they floated about forever in my head, refusing to pop. Could the Inuis really trust their network of support? The professor had not told me much about it. And the most important thing was for the children to stay healthy. Had the little boy’s fingernails grown out inside those sky-blue gloves?

When I opened my eyes the next morning, something else had disappeared.

It had grown colder and there was frost on the garden. Everything in the house—my slippers, the faucet, the heater, the rolls in the bread box—was chilled. At some point, the wind that had blown in the night had fallen still.

I set the pan holding leftover stew on the stove and around it I arranged the rolls, wrapped in aluminum foil. When the water in the kettle boiled, I made tea, which I drank sweetened with honey. I wanted only warm things this morning.

To avoid having to wash dishes, I ate the stew directly from the pan on the stove. Alerted by the odor of toasting bread, I opened the foil and drizzled honey on the rolls.

While I was chewing, I tried to figure out what had disappeared this time. I was certain at least that it wasn’t stew or buttered rolls or tea or honey. They all had the same flavor they’d had yesterday.

It’s always sad when a food disappears. In the past, the trucks at the market were overflowing with all sorts of things, but now the selection is meager at best. When I was a child, I was fond of a salad with lots of green beans. It had potatoes and boiled eggs and tomatoes, all dressed with mayonnaise and sprinkled with parsley. Mother would ask the man at the market whether he had fresh beans. “Fresh ones, so crisp they break with a snap!” she’d say.

It’s been a long while since we stopped eating such a salad, and I can no longer recall how green beans looked or tasted.

When the stew was gone, I put the empty pan in the sink and turned off the stove. Then I drank a second cup of tea, this time with nothing to sweeten it. My fingers were already sticky with honey.

Despite the cold, the river did not seem to be frozen—or at least I thought I could hear the faint sound of flowing water, and above it the sound of footsteps, adults and children together, running toward the alley in back, and the dog next door barking. The unsettled sounds, I knew from experience, of a morning when something had disappeared.

After I’d finished the warm rolls, I followed the sound of the footsteps and opened the window on the north side of the house. There they stood, all in a group: the former hatmaker, the unfriendly couple from next door, the dog with brown spots, and some schoolchildren with their backpacks. They were staring at the river in silence.

Just yesterday, it had been an utterly unremarkable stream where, at most, you might spot the back of a carp from time to time. But now it was far too strange and beautiful to call it simply a river.

I leaned out over the windowsill, blinking again and again. The surface of the river was covered with tiny fragments of… something… in an indescribable array of hues—reds, pinks, and whites—so thick that not a space was visible between them. Viewed from above, they appeared to be soft, as they collided and merged with one another, flowing along at a pace that seemed more leisurely than the usual current of the river.

I hurried down to the basement and went out to the washing area where I had greeted the Inui family. From there I would be right above the water.

The bricks paving the area were cold and rough, with clover growing between the cracks, and right below me was the miraculous stream. I knelt down and plunged my hands in to scoop up the water. When I held them in front of me, my palms were covered in rose petals.

“Strange, isn’t it?” the former hatmaker called from the other bank.

“Strange, indeed,” I answered, and there were nods all around. The children took off running along the river, their backpacks rattling behind them.

“Get straight to school!” the former hatmaker called after them.

None of the petals were withered or brown. On the contrary, perhaps because the water was so cold, they seemed fresher and fuller than ever, and their fragrance, mixed with the morning mist from the river, was overpoweringly strong.

Petals covered the surface as far as the eye could see. My hands had cleared a patch of water for a brief moment, but petals soon came flooding in again to fill it, and then they flowed on, almost as if someone had hypnotized each one of them and was drawing them toward the sea.

I wiped my palms together, brushing the petals that had stuck to them back into the stream. Petals with frilled edges, pale ones, vivid ones, petals with the calyx still attached. They all clung for a moment to the bricks of the wash landing, but in no time at all they were caught up in the stream again and melted into the mass.

I washed my face and rubbed on a little cream. Deciding against spending the time to apply my makeup, I threw on a coat and went out. My plan was to follow the river upstream to the rose garden on the slope of the hill.

A crowd had gathered on the banks, gawking at this beautiful sight, and the Memory Police, too, were out in force, more so than usual. They stood as always, weapons on their hips, faces devoid of expression.

The children, apparently already bored, had begun throwing stones in the water and stirring it up with long poles they had found somewhere. But the current was undeterred by these small disturbances. A sandbar here or stump there proved no impediment to the overwhelming flow of petals. Were you to stretch out in the water, it looked as though the petals would cover you like a soft, comforting blanket.

“Who would have imagined this?” someone murmured.

“It’s the most beautiful disappearance ever.”

“We should take a picture.”

“Better not. What’s the use of a picture when something’s disappeared?”

“I suppose you’re right.”

The bystanders discussed the strange sight in low voices, taking care not to attract the attention of the Memory Police.

With the exception of the bakery, none of the stores had opened yet. It occurred to me to go and see what had happened to the roses at the florist, but the shop was still shuttered. The buses and trolleys were mostly empty. The sun was trying to break through the clouds, and the mist had begun to burn off, but the floral fragrance was as strong as ever.

Needless to say, not a single flower was left in the rose garden. The bare stalks, reduced to leaves and thorns, were thrust into the slope like brittle bones. From time to time, a breeze would blow down from the top of the hill—where the observatory had been—pick up the few remaining petals, and carry them away toward the river.

The garden was deserted. The woman with heavy makeup who was usually at the entrance, the caretakers, the visitors—not a soul to be seen. I wondered for a moment whether I still needed to pay the admission fee, but at last I pushed past the gate and walked along the sloping path, following the route marked out by the signs.

The few flowers in the garden other than roses had survived—bellflowers, a couple of spiny cacti, some gentians. They bloomed discreetly, as though embarrassed to have been spared. The breeze seemed to discriminate, choosing only the rose petals to scatter.

A rose garden without roses was a meaningless, desolate place, and it was terribly sad to see the trellises and other signs of all the care that had been lavished on the flowers. The murmur of the river did not reach me here and the rich, soft soil made a pleasant sound underfoot. With my hands thrust in my pockets, I wandered across the hill as though walking through a cemetery of unmarked graves.

In years past, I had carefully studied the stems, leaves, and branches and had read the tags that identified the different varieties, but I realized now that I was already unable to remember what this thing called a rose had looked like.