Twelve days to go. So much work to do—now more than ever. I’d set my alarm for 6.00 a.m. but the reason for the early start, the accident yesterday, was also what made me want to stay in bed. I dreaded having to face the enormity of what had happened. Take things one step at a time, I told myself. You don’t have to deal with it straight away. Just work through the morning routine.
I PULLED myself to my feet. My workout proceeded like any other day, except that I kept my eyes averted from the archway between the kitchen and the livingroom—and the wreckage lying there. I focused on the exercises, pushing myself harder than normal through the reps. The burn in my muscles took my mind off anything else.
But when I started my stretch-down and my pulse stopped hammering in my ears, my thoughts went straight back to yesterday’s accident. How many hours did I lose? Have I got enough time left to fix it?
I couldn’t face up to it, despite the sense of urgency. I dawdled through my shower and breakfast. Did some tidying; cleaned the toilet. It doesn’t count as procrastination if you’re being productive.
Finally the jobs ran out and I slumped down at the kitchen table. Fine. Now I’m officially procrastinating.
I could feel the minutes crawling by. Twelve days. The sum total of all I had left. About two hundred waking hours which was—a scribble on the nearby notepad—around twelve thousand minutes. Minus the three I’d just spent doodling.
‘Delivery,’ a voice called, with a sharp rat-tat-tat on the apartment door.
I sat up straight. Tuesday: grocery delivery day. Perfect. I’d have to go through the livingroom archway to get to the apartment door. The problem of facing up to the wreckage had been taken out of my hands.
As I rose from the chair, it struck me that the voice was different: it wasn’t Mr Lester, who usually brought the groceries. Then I remembered about his holiday, the cruise he’d organised for his wife’s sixtieth. He’d been going on about it for weeks but, with the accident yesterday, it had fallen off my radar. Somehow Mr Lester had failed to mention that the new delivery person might be a young woman.
It was months since someone new had crossed my threshold. I ran my hand through my hair and realised how long and scruffy it had grown. I set my shoulders and took the central path through the livingroom to the door, trying to avoid looking at the chaos on my left.
‘Delivery,’ the voice called again. Rat-tat-tat.
Deep breath. Shoulders back. All I had to do was act normal. Remember to breathe. I slipped the chain off its latch. With one final wish that at least she wouldn’t be pretty, I swung the door inward.
I peered out into the dimly lit hallway. Green eyes shone out of the shadows, matching the flicker of two earrings and a jewelled piercing above her lip. She had jet black hair, cropped short with a fringe falling over one side of her forehead.
Dammit. She’d look good wearing a sack.
I could tell because she was wearing a sack. Her uniform top, in the familiar blue of the delivery company, looked at least three sizes too big. Perhaps the company didn’t have any uniforms for someone of her slim build.
A white earbud sat in one ear, the other hanging loose over her shoulder. Tinny music squeaked from it. My heart thumped against my chest. I hadn’t been this close to a woman under fifty in months, much less an attractive one.
‘Robert, right?’
I was staring.
‘Robert Penfold?’ Wide eyes looked up at mine, thin dark eyebrows arching. She flashed a polite, tight-lipped smile.
I tried to nod, and for a crazy moment it felt like I’d forgotten how to do that as well—as if an amateur puppeteer was making a hash of tilting my head.
But she seemed satisfied. ‘Julie.’ She held out her hand. ‘Hi.’
I stuck out my hand, and her delicate fingers folded around it. Did I have a memory of touching a young woman? Maybe once. A shop assistant’s fingers grazing my palm as she took my money.
I swallowed. The trick was just to plough through. No way they were paying her enough to deal with my awkwardness.
‘Come in…’ Hell. I’d been so busy taking in everything else that I’d already forgotten her name.
‘Julie.’
‘Julie, right. Sorry.’ Julie-Julie-Julie. I pressed the name on to my mind. If I could keep it in my head until she left, I could write it down. Then it would be fixed, ready for next time.
Julie produced the chock of wood the deliverers always had handy and wedged the door open. She loaded herself up with groceries from the trolley. I stepped back, making room for her to enter.
‘Careful with the, um…’ I smiled weakly. ‘Well, you’ll see.’
Julie stopped short. A central path ran straight through the middle of the room, like the parting of a strange sea. On each side, an ocean of dominoes covered the entire floor and stretched up several thin bridges to raised platforms: rectangular wooden boards fixed to the wall with metal brackets.
‘Hmph.’ Julie looked the dominoes up and down, side to side.
Reluctantly, I looked with her. It was every bit as bad as I’d imagined. On one side of the room the dominoes stood neatly on end where they had been so carefully placed. On the other they lay toppled over, thousands of them, like a forest levelled by a meteor strike. If I had to guess—and I really didn’t want to guess—about fifteen thousand dominoes had fallen.
At least all my raised platforms were untouched. The stepped ramps to each platform were only wide enough for a single line of dominoes. I’d been able to snatch a handful of those linking dominoes and halt the spread of the damage, but I couldn’t contain the damage on the ground. The collapse there spiralled out in every direction. Days of work destroyed. Days I did not have left.
Beside me, Julie looked this way and that. ‘Neat.’ Her eyes flashed towards mine, and it felt like she was seeing me for the first time. Actually taking an interest.
A little tug of pride warmed my chest. Then another pang: of regret that she hadn’t been able to see the work the day before, with all its thousands of tiles still standing poised, ready to unleash at a touch on its hair-trigger, charged with life and energy.
Julie pointed towards a group of collapsed dominoes at the centre of the wreckage. ‘I like the whirling patterns.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘But that’s what caused all the destruction. Once that part went, I couldn’t stop it.’
‘Oh.’ Her eyebrows arched. ‘Oops.’
‘Yeah. Oops.’
‘Just through here with the bags?’ Julie turned and motioned towards the kitchen. I nodded, and she left me standing alone in the room, a flicker of hope in my heart. Yesterday, all I could see was the days of work ruined. But the delivery woman had seen the work still standing, and was impressed. Maybe things weren’t so bad after all.
‘Cold bags on the table?’ Julie’s voice carried from the kitchen.
‘Thank you. I’ll grab the rest.’
On the trip back to the kitchen, I had to step around her. Our eyes met for a moment. She really was beautiful.
Her polite smile returned and she stepped away to let me pass.
Back in the livingroom, I found Julie looking at the dominoes again. In one hand she held a small bunch of papers; the other twirled the cord running from her earbud, coiling it along her finger. ‘So you accidentally bumped them and they just…?’
‘Yeah.’ I nodded. ‘Those spirals are the worst. The damage corkscrews out in all directions. It’s impossible to stop.’
‘Hmph.’ Her finger paused its coiling. ‘You need a way of containing the damage. Like firebreaks, you know? Some kind of barrier thin enough to fit in the gaps.’
‘It would interfere with the patterns.’
‘Hmph.’ She shrugged. ‘This one’s for you to sign.’ She handed over papers and a pen. Once I’d returned them to her, she gave me a shiny blue card. ‘That’s our info, with the number to call if there’s any problems.’ Under the company logo, Julie’s details stood out in dark blue lettering. I ran my thumb along the smooth surface with a sense of satisfaction. Documentation: tangible. This was going straight in the records box. And now I wouldn’t need to write her name down as soon as she left.
‘Any problems, my number’s on the back,’ Julie said. ‘Don’t call the old number, he’s on holidays.’ She pushed the loose earbud into her free ear. ‘See you next time.’ Her voice was louder as she spoke over the music in her ears.
‘Next Tuesday.’ I nodded.
Almost out the door, she stopped as if struck by a thought. ‘Can I just ask?’ Her fingers pointed at my work with a neat flick. ‘Why dominoes?’
‘Well,’ I stumbled, ‘because they’re there, I guess.’ Stupid answer.
But Julie seemed satisfied. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Like Everest.’ A quick nod and she was gone.
I shut the door behind her. With the security chain and deadlock snapped home, I was safe at last from pretty women and disturbing questions.
Why dominoes?
Standing in the middle of weeks of ruined work, it felt like a reasonable question. The answer I’d given was partly true, but normally when people say it about climbing mountains, they mean they’re out there somewhere on the horizon. My own particular mountain—a stack of heavy cartons filled with boxes of dominoes—had been left for me, piled up in the centre of my livingroom. A bit harder to ignore.
Early on, I’d started work on the project for the reason set out in the letter: to have some kind of mission that spanned the forgettings. My past self had handed me the task, and all the required materials and tools, leaving the design and assembly to me. And then, when the final hour arrived, it would be my future self who would see what we had achieved, who would witness its final wonderful fall. In this way, we would show that we still had a life and could achieve things. Maybe even things no one else ever had.
The forgetting might take our memories, but our choices, plans and work could still control our lives.
Why exactly my past self had chosen dominoes for this purpose, I didn’t know. It made sense for the work to be done alone and in private. The letter had hammered home that lesson: For someone with our condition, solitude is the best defence. Keep to yourself to keep your self. But still…why not card towers or a scale model of the Taj Mahal made of matchsticks, or poetry? And why not something more productive, or less costly? These thousands of dominoes—83,790 of them, by my count—couldn’t have come cheap. I didn’t know. Maybe someday I would.
Anyway, none of that explained why I felt physically sick at the thought it wouldn’t be finished on time. Not the weight of expectations from the mountain in my livingroom. Not the need for projects that extended past the forgetting’s assaults on my mind. Not even the investment of so much of my very short life into all I’d done so far.
My concern was something else again. It hadn’t taken much fooling around with the little tiles to see the strange beauty they had when they were falling. With forethought, it was possible to really choreograph things, to have the cascading dominoes fall in unison, or chase each other playfully or race towards each other. The letter had never mentioned the beauty in the work, but it was that feeling of creation, almost art, that had driven me each day.
And now it might not be finished in time and the thought was intolerable. If the fall was to happen as I’d designed it, every part had to be finished. All of it. Otherwise it would be like a classical sculpture with rough, unfinished patches all over it. Like trying to dance when the music keeps cutting out.
I would not let that happen. Come what may, I would get this thing done, and my new self would see the final fall exactly as I’d created it.
Time to get back to work. First things first, though. There were still some unopened domino cartons stacked against the kitchen wall. On top of them were the two open cartons I used to store my records and my mementoes. I wrote down the date on the business card Julie had given me—Tuesday 13 September. Day 12—and added it to the records box.
I put the groceries away, set my shoulders, gritted my teeth, and strode into the livingroom. I’d learnt from previous small accidents that although it was tempting to begin with the easiest areas—fix as much of the damage as fast as possible—the better strategy was to start at the hardest spots, in the corners.
That was why I’d placed stepping stones, flat heavy circles of wood the size of my feet, in between the domino runs. It still took balance and flexibility to get to the corners, but the morning stretches paid off as I teetered and loomed and held myself suspended over the delicate work underneath me.
After about twenty minutes I looked around. Before last night’s accident, I’d been enthusiastic, charging ahead of schedule: closing in on a goal of fifty thousand.
Now I was way behind. Working at top speed, I could lay down about a thousand dominoes every hour and a half. On a rough survey the accident had cost me more than three days’ work—time I didn’t have unless I put in longer days. But I’d already been planning to work seven and a half hours on the project each day, so the disaster meant that—
I quashed the line of thought. Better to wait and see what it looked like this evening.
At noon I sat cross-legged in the middle of the livingroom, ate a sandwich and planned the rest of the rebuild. The good news was that rebuilding was faster than building. If I could get my speed up towards one thousand per hour, then perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad…
My thoughts drifted to Mr Lester with a sense of regret. Seeing him last week, I hadn’t processed that it was for the last time. He was the closest thing I had to a friend, the only person in my life to tell me I looked too pale, that I should go outside and get some sun. By the time he returned from his holidays all my memories of him would be gone, and only my future self would be here to greet him. It seemed a shame.
Still, I probably should be pleased he was away. Keep to yourself to keep your self, after all. My past self had been so insistent about the importance of being on my own that the letter put a positive spin on telling me that I had no family still living. Apparently my parents had died in an accident years ago. Given that the only memories that survived the forgetting were a handful of happy ones from childhood, the news had been hard to take.
But the letter said it was a good thing. In those first moments after the forgetting even parents—maybe particularly parents—could not be trusted. No way they would miss the opportunity to make some improvements. To leave out all the past problems and mistakes that made me who I was. And in the end, I’d be remade into something new. Something I had no control or choice over. Solitude was my best defence. Which was presumably also why I’d been left with no television, radio or internet.
If all that was true of parents, it was probably a bit true of Mr Lester as well. Maybe it was no bad thing he’d be in the middle of the ocean when the forgetting struck. But it was hard to feel thankful. He’d witnessed the whole domino process from its humblest beginnings. He would have commiserated with me about yesterday’s disaster; unlike Julie, he would have been able to see what I’d lost. I sighed and finished the sandwich, and there was no excuse not to return to the work.
It was frustratingly slow. As the late afternoon sun began to shine through the kitchen windows, I could feel my concentration flagging. My back and thighs ached and I knew this was when mistakes could happen. But I pushed on, setting to work on another line of fallen dominoes.
Resentment gnawed at me. The rebuilding wasn’t satisfying in the same way as new construction. It lacked any sense of breaking new ground. Actually, it was worse than that. Once it was done, the work became invisible. No one looking at the completed product could know its history, the sweat and toil of failures overcome. You had to know the history to see the person behind the work. Even the delivery person would know what had happened here—perhaps when she next arrived, Julie would mention how far I’d come in putting them all up again. Then in twelve days only she would know the history that I had forgotten. A complete stranger.
The whole point of the dominoes was to show my history. To be my history: a baton held out to me by my past self and ultimately passed on to the future’s waiting grasp.
Rebuilding—work that papered over a crack in history as if it never happened—seemed wrong. The dominoes fell, or they didn’t. Either way they couldn’t communicate the full story of what had happened and what I’d done. Taking the trials and pitfalls into the future required the very thing I didn’t have. Memory.
The idea hit me with the shock of the obvious. I could write it down. A history. Not just the emergency note that I carried with me everywhere. I was talking about memory: a journal recording my final twelve days.
My heart thumped at the idea. I would need to buy a new notebook. My telephone notepad wouldn’t cut it. The corner store had a stationery shelf with nice ball-point pens and—I felt certain of it—hardcover notebooks. Perhaps a little fancier than I needed, but probably still within my budget.
Once the idea took hold, there was no stopping it. The dominoes were done for the day anyway. If I kept pushing on, I’d probably just make another mistake and be back where I started.
I rubbed my hands together with new-found resolve.
Any trip outside—no matter how brief—required preparation. While there were good reasons to expect the forgetting to follow the regular path it had tracked so far—and so strike in precisely twelve days’ time—there was no guarantee. I’d phoned Doctor Varma in my first week, and she’d stressed the imprudence of expecting the condition to follow a neat timetable. So I needed to be prepared, with enough information to get me back home and safe. I gathered together the necessary equipment and stuffed it into my backpack. Keys, wallet, map, letter.
The door to my apartment sported two locks, an ordinary old door lock and a shiny new deadlock. Probably my past self had added the new one in the run-up to the last forgetting. He’d left the key in the envelope with the letter—making sure I couldn’t venture outside without reading its contents and discovering why leaving might be such a bad idea.
Deep breath. It must be a few weeks since I’d been out. I swallowed, turned the key and stepped through the doorway.
Outside, tall buildings and high ground blocked the setting sun. The yellow streetlights were beginning to come on as dusk set in. The evening air smelled fresh and alive, a warm breeze gusting through the wide streets. The weather felt hotter than I remembered. My apartment had heating and air-con, making me oblivious to the changing seasons. The last time I’d been out there had been a breath of chill in the air, but no more. The world had changed.
The corner store turned out to stock a suitable kind of notebook at a very reasonable price—just $4.95, plus a dollar for the pen. I splurged on a meat pie and can of soft drink and sat at one of the little tables outside the shop. To any passer-by I would have looked completely normal. Just a guy grabbing a quick snack from the local store.
Those who did pass were mostly commuters heading home. I was connected to them in a way, though they could never know. When I’d asked Doctor Varma on the phone about where the money from my pension came from, I heard a shrug in her voice. ‘The government,’ she said. ‘Taxpayers.’ She seemed amused. ‘You want to do the right thing by all those taxpayers? Keep your good self out of an institution. Hospital beds cost more in a day than your pension does in a month.’ Still, I was grateful to the faceless crowds. They were paying for my sickness and would continue until it finally disappeared which, the doctor thought, might be years.
By the time I got back home it was almost seven o’clock but the last of the orange light still tinged the western sky. The days had grown longer as well as hotter. Once inside, I sat down at the kitchen table, took up the pen, and opened the book to its first page. Clean white paper. Thin blue lines.
I would make a journal entry for each of my last twelve days.
A memory bubbled up in my mind. Like all my surviving memories, it was buried so far back in childhood that my condition couldn’t dislodge it. In my grade four classroom, a teacher who then seemed impossibly ancient asked the class to name the single book we would take to a desert island. A forest of hands; all sorts of titles called out. A quick-witted girl had won the day by suggesting a book on how to survive on a desert island.
But it had taken me all this time to see there was only ever one answer.
What book do you take to a desert island?
A blank one. And a pen.
At 6.38 p.m. on 13 September, I wrote four short words—and memory began.