Memory Wall: Stories (18 page)

“Okay,” he says. “Let’s put them in.”

She wades out into the cold water. Pebbles stir beneath her shoes. The current parts lightly around her knees. The schoolteacher is a trembling weight at her elbow. She floats the basket out alongside them. The bottles flash and flash. Eventually the
two of them—seed keeper and schoolteacher—are submerged to their waists.

Maybe the river is already beginning to slack, to back up and rise. Maybe ghosts pour out of the Earth, out of the mouths of tombs up and down the gorges, out of the tips of twigs at the ends of branches. The fireflies tap against the glass. More than anything, she thinks, I’ll be sad to see the speed go out of the water.

She hands him the first bottle and he sets it in and they watch the river take it, a green-blue light winking out into the current, turning slightly as it picks up pace.

Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?

The bottle disappears. She hands him the next one. When he turns she can see he is crying.

Everything has trained her to expect this to work out badly. Li Qing with his cigarettes; the schoolteacher with his questions. Our side, their side. But perhaps, she thinks, there is no good and bad to it at all. Every memory everyone has ever had will eventually be underwater. Progress is a storm and the wings of everything are swept up in it.

She leans forward and wipes the schoolteacher’s eye with her thumb. The second bottle is gone.

Teacher Ke drags his forearm across his nose. “All this trouble,” he says, “and still—doesn’t it feel good? Doesn’t it make you feel young?”

The river murmurs against their bodies and the bottles go out of the basket one after another. The old man takes his time. The bottles glow and flash in the current and round the bend
and are gone. She listens to the current, and the old man sends his letters downstream, and they stand in the water until they cannot tell where their legs end and where the river begins.

J
ULY 31

On the last day, five or six steady, level-faced servicemen with chainsaws come for the trees. They bring them down in four-foot sections, and load the logs onto handwagons, and bounce the handwagons down what’s left of the staircases, past the broken pavement and the sunflowers and the seed keeper’s gardens in the neighbors’ yards. They take the oaks, the ginkgos, the three old sycamores from the garden behind the Government House. They leave the lions.

All day she does not see the schoolteacher and she hopes he is already gone, making his way upriver on some old trail, or squatting in the canoe of a passing fisherman, watching the gorges drift past. Maybe she is the last person in the village; maybe she is the last person on the river.

In the afternoon three policemen come to sweep the village, shining flashlights into rooms, lifting discarded plywood with the toes of their boots, but it is easy to hide from them and in an hour their hydrofoil is gone, roaring toward the next town.

She spreads a blanket across her table and upends containers of seeds onto it. Mustard tuber, pak choy, cabbage, eggplant, cauliflower. Millet, chestnut, radish. Her mother’s voice:
Seeds are the dreams plants dream while they sleep.
Seeds big as coins; seeds light as breath. They all go onto the blanket. When all the containers are empty she folds the corners of the blanket over each other and ties the whole thing into a bundle.

In her arms it is maybe as heavy as a child. The sun rolls down behind the gorge. By now the diversion has been sealed off, and water is piling up behind the dam.

A wool cap. A jacket. She leaves her dishes stacked in the cupboards.

She walks down the staircases for the last time and out to the Bridge of Beautiful Glances and sits on the parapet. The day’s heat rises from the stone into the backs of her thighs. Everything is radiant.

Birds are landing on the roof of the Government House. Coming up the river is the low growl of a motor launch, and when it rounds the corner she turns. Behind its windshield is a pilot and beside the pilot is Li Qing, waving at her and wearing his ridiculous eyeglasses.

Y
EARS
L
ATER

She lives in a blocklong building called New Immigrant 606. Her apartment has three rooms, each with a door and a single-paned window. The walls are white and blank. She never receives a bill.

Sundays Li Qing comes by and sits with her for a few hours, drinking beer. Lately he brings Penny Ou, a divorcée with a gentle voice and a trio of moles mushrooming off the side of her nose. Sometimes they bring her son, a round-faced nine-year-old named Jie. They eat stew, or noodles with bean sprouts, and talk of nothing.

Jie swings his feet back and forth beneath the table. A radio burbles on the sideboard. Afterward Penny takes the dishes to the sink and washes and dries them and stacks them in the cupboard.

The days seem made of twilight, immaterial as shadows. Memories, when they come, are often viscous and weak, trapped beneath distant surfaces, or caught in neurofibrillary tangles. She stands over the full bathtub but cannot remember filling it. She goes to fill the kettle but finds it steaming.

Her seeds sit moldering or cracking or expired altogether in a prefabricated plywood dresser that came with the apartment. Occasionally she stares at it, its unvarnished face, its eight shiny knobs, and a sensation nags at the back of her consciousness, a feeling like she has misplaced something but can no longer remember what it is.

Her mother used to say seeds were links in a chain, not beginnings or endings, but she was wrong: Seeds are both beginnings and ends—they are a plant’s eggshell and its coffin. Orchards crouch invisibly inside each one. For a school project Jie brings over six Styrofoam cups filled with peat. The seed keeper offers him six magnolia seeds, each bright as a drop of blood.

The boy pokes a hole into each cupful of dirt with a finger; he drops the seeds in like tiny bombs. They put the cups on her windowsill. Water. Soil. Light. “Now we wait,” she says.

We go round the world only to come back again. A seed coat splits, a tiny rootlet emerges. On the news a government official denies reports of cracks in the dam’s ship locks. Li Qing calls: He’s going to be traveling this week. Things are very busy. Penny Ou will try to stop by.

The seed keeper goes to the window. In the plaza, tides of people drift in a hundred directions; bicyclists, commuters, beggars, trash collectors, shoppers, policemen. Teacher Ke would have aged even more; it would hardly be possible for him to still be alive. And yet: What if he is one of those figures down there, inside one of those cars, one of the shapes on the
sidewalk, a head and shoulders, the infinitesimal tops of his shoes?

Out past the square, tens of thousands of lights tremble in the wind, airplanes and shopfronts and billboards, guide lights and lamps behind windows and warning lights on antennas. Above them a handful of stars show themselves for a moment, murky, scarcely visible between clouds, flashing blue and red and white. Then they’re gone.

My name is Allison. I’m fifteen years old. My parents are dead. I have a poodle named Mishap in a pet carrier between my ankles and a biography of Emily Dickinson in my lap. The flight attendant keeps refilling my apple juice. I’m thirty-six thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean and out my smudgy little window the whole world has turned to water.

I’m moving to Lithuania. Lithuania is in the upper-right corner of Europe. Over by Russia. On the world map at school, Lithuania is pink.

Grandpa Z is waiting for me outside baggage claim. His belly looks big enough to fit a baby inside. He hugs me for a long time. Then he lifts Mishap out of his carrier and hugs Mishap, too.

Lithuania doesn’t look pink. More like gray. Grandpa Z’s little Peugeot is green and smells like rock dust. The sky sits low over the highway. We drive past hundreds of half-finished concrete apartment buildings that look as if they’ve been hit by tornadoes once or twice. There are big Nokia signs and bigger Aquafresh signs.

Grandpa Z says, Aquafresh is good toothpaste. You have Aquafresh in Kansas?

I tell him we use Colgate.

He says, I find you Colgate.

We merge onto a four-lane divided highway. The land on both sides is broken into pastures that look awfully muddy for early July. It starts to rain. The Peugeot has no windshield wipers. Mishap dozes in my lap. Lithuania turns a steamy green. Grandpa Z drives with his head out the window.

Eventually we stop at a house with a peaked wooden roof and a central chimney. It looks exactly like the twenty other houses crowded around it.

Home, says Grandpa Z, and Mishap jumps out.

The house is long and narrow, like a train car. Grandpa Z has three rooms: a kitchen in front, a bedroom in the middle, and a bathroom in the back. Outside there’s a shed. He unfolds a card table. He brings me a little stack of Pringles on a plate. Then a steak. No green beans, no dinner rolls, nothing like that. We sit on the edge of his bed to eat. Grandpa Z doesn’t say grace so I whisper it to myself. Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts. Mishap sniffs around skeptically between my feet.

Halfway through his steak Grandpa Z looks up at me and there are tears on his cheeks.

It’s okay, I say. I’ve been saying it’s okay a lot lately. I’ve said it to church ladies and flight attendants and counselors. I say, I’m fine, it’s okay. I don’t know if I’m fine or if it’s okay, or if saying it makes anyone feel better. Mostly it’s just something to say.

It was cancer. In case you were wondering. First they found it in Mom and she got her breasts cut off and her ovaries cut out
but it was still in her, and then Dad got tested and it was in his lungs. I imagined cancer
as a tree: a big, black, leafless tree inside Mom and another inside Dad. Mom’s tree killed her in March. Dad’s killed him three months later.

I’m an only child and have no other relatives so the lawyers sent me to live with Grandpa Z. The Z is for Zydrunas.

Grandpa Z’s bed is in the kitchen because he’s giving me the bedroom. The walls are bare plaster and the bed groans and the sheets smell like dust on a hot bulb. There’s no shade on the window. On the dresser is a brand-new pink panda, which is sort of for babies, but also sort of cute. A price tag is still pinned to its ear: 39.99 Lt. The Lt is for litas. I don’t know if 39.99 is a lot or a little.

After I turn off the lamp, all I see is black. Something goes tap tap tap against the ceiling. I can hear Mishap panting at the foot of the bed. My three duffel bags, stacked against the wall, contain everything I own in the world.

Do I sound faraway? Do I sound lost? Probably I am. I whisper: Dear God, please watch over Mom in Heaven and please watch over Dad in Heaven and please watch over me in Lithuania. And please watch over Mishap, too. And Grandpa Z.

And then I feel the Big Sadness coming on, like there’s a shiny and sharp axe blade buried inside my chest. The only way I can stay alive is to remain absolutely motionless so instead of whispering Dear God how could you do this to me, I only whisper Amen which Pastor Jenks back home told me means I believe, and I lie with my eyelids closed clutching Mishap and inhaling his smell, which always smells to me like corn chips, and practice breathing in light and breathing out a color—light, green, light, yellow—like the counselor told me to do when the panic comes.

*   *   *

At 4 a.m. the sun is already up. I sit in a lawn chair beside Grandpa’s shed and watch Mishap sniff around in Lithuania. The sky is silver and big scarves of mist drag through the fields. A hundred little black birds land on the roof of Grandpa’s shed, then take off again.

Each house in Grandpa Z’s little cluster of identical houses has lace curtains. The windows are all the same but the lace is different in each one. One has a floral pattern, one a linear pattern, and another has circles butted up against each other. As I look, an old woman pushes aside a zigzag-patterned curtain in one of the windows. She puts on a pair of huge glasses and waves me over and I can see there are tubes hooked through her nose.

Her house is twenty feet away from Grandpa Z’s and it’s full of Virgin Mary statues and herbs and smells like carrot peels. A man in a track suit in the back room is asleep on a bed with no blankets. The old lady unhooks herself from a machine that looks like two scuba tanks hung on a wheeled rack, and she pats the couch and says a bunch of words to me in Russian. Her mouth is full of gold. She has a marble-sized mole under her right eye. Her calves are like bowling pins and she is barefoot and her toes look beaten and crushed.

She nods at something I don’t say and turns on a massive flat-screen television propped up on two cinderblocks, and together we watch a pastor give mass on TV. The colors are skewed and the audio is garbled. In his church there are maybe twenty-five people in folding chairs. When I was a baby Mom talked to me in Lithuanian so I can understand some of the pastor’s sermon. There’s something about his daddy falling off his roof. He says this means that just because you can’t see
something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in it. I can’t tell if he means Jesus or gravity.

Afterward the old lady brings me a big hot stuffed potato covered with bacon bits. She watches me eat through her huge, steamy eyeglasses.

Thanks, I say in Lithuanian, which sounds like achoo. She stares off into oblivion.

When I get back to Grandpa Z’s house he has a magazine open in his lap with space diagrams in it.

You are at Mrs. Sabo’s?

I was. Past tense, Grandpa.

Grandpa Z circles a finger beside his ear. Mrs. Sabo no more remember things, he says. You understand?

I nod.

I read here, Grandpa Z says, clearing his throat, that Earth has three moons. He bites his lower lip, thinking through the English. No, it used to has three moons. Earth used to has three moons. Long time ago. What do you think of this?