'The island?' I asked. 'You miss your friends?'
'I miss them terribly, but what I meant was, I don't think I was ever a child. I can't see my mother's face or even remember a favorite toy.'
'We can create a past for you,' I told her. 'Even people who remember their mother, father, toys, the house they were born in, create the past for themselves. Memories can be a record of how things were, but they can also be a record of your desire for the way things should have been.'
She was quiet for some time, and I could tell she was thinking about what I had said. When darkness fell, we went back inside the dome in order to find the moment, our third heated search that day.
When I wasn't conjuring phantoms from the past at the behest of the beauty or reflecting on the enigma of Anotine's dual nature, I watched the ocean. Hours upon hours were spent staring down into the billowing spectacle of Below's life. Although the plot eluded me, there were more than a few revelations I managed to glean from my time on the walkway.
I witnessed the death of his sister. She had been a child with bangs and plump cheeks, and then, through various fractured scenes, I saw her grow frail and painfully thin. I will never forget the tableau of Below as a boy of thirteen, kneeling on the floor before a fireplace, crying into his hands.
I did not tell Anotine, but I also spotted Hellman, Nunnly, and Brisden playing their small parts in the silver theater. Apparently, they had all been actual figures in Below's real life. Hellman was the doctor who tried to heal the young girl. I saw him sitting at her bedside, dozing off in a rocking chair, his hand moving through his beard. Nunnly appeared to have been a schoolmaster, and I caught sight of Brisden, sitting at a table, drinking and talking, having done in Below's life exactly the same thing he was to do later in the mnemonic world. As the vanishing depiction of the philosopher passed beneath the dome, I thought I saw him wave to me. Why the Master had, after so many years, chosen these people to symbolize certain ideas remained a mystery.
In addition to the three gentlemen of the floating island, I came across myself quite a few times—scenes from my days of the Physiognomy. These made me cringe. I also spotted Silencio, the monkey, lying on a table with his chest open and wires attached to inner organs. Below stood beside him, dressed in an operating gown, laughing uproariously. There was Corporal Matters of the day watch from the island of Doralice, Calloo as a mechanized gladiator, Ea and Aria, Greta Sykes, Winsome Graves, Pierce Deemer, and so many more I was both familiar with and ignorant of. By the end of that second day, the dizzying cavalcade of persons and places made me tear myself away from the edge of the walkway for fear that I would literally vomit with gorging myself on the past. I went in search of Anotine, hoping again to reach that special state of amnesia.
On the second night of those lost days, after making love to her, I sat in the dark at the center of the dome and again stared up at the stars. The beauty swam through my bloodstream, making me wonderfully weary and light. To my great joy, I heard Wood bark behind me, and I turned to stare into the shadows. Anotine was fast asleep, so I called to the dog.
''Come, boy' I whispered, but his silhouette stood its ground. I got up and walked over to where I thought I had seen his figure. He was nowhere to be found, but instead I discovered the hourglass I had rescued in our dash to the top of the Panopticon. I had forgotten all about it in the face of my intense involvement with Anotine. It lay on its side, a one-foot wooden frame securing the glass figure eight. Inside, gathered into one of the clear compartments, was an hour's worth of bleached sand. I sat down next to it and stood the object upright with the sand at the bottom. Out of the fog of the past came a memory of the scrap of paper I had found in the Master's laboratory bearing its likeness, showing it as equivalent to an eye. 'Harrow's hindquarters' I thought, 'another buzzing dung heap of mystical pretension.' The comedy of it all was exaggerated by the influence of the beauty, and I laughed till I cried.
'Let me mark this hour,' I said. I lifted the timepiece and flipped it over. The grains began to fall, bleached atoms dribbling three or four at a time into an empty, other world. It was the first instance of my registering the passage of time since we had entered the dome of the Panopticon. There was something alluring about the phenomenon, and I could understand how Misrix must have felt when, being born into humanity, the light of the Beyond went out in his head and he initially became aware of himself.
I heard someone speak, and thinking it was Anotine, I looked away from the hourglass. From where I sat, I could see that she was still sleeping. I turned in the other direction, and there I saw someone coming toward me out of the shadows. As he moved across the floor, he dragged behind him an unfolding light. Inside this light I saw a room with wallpaper and furniture, and it blossomed outward, quickly replacing the shadows of the dome and obliterating my view of the stars above. It happened so quickly, I could do nothing but stare.
I realized that the young man approaching me was unaware of my presence.
'Watch out,' I said, but he ignored my warning and continued on his course, passing through me as if I wasn't there at all.
He stopped and turned around, and I saw his face. No more than twenty, and strikingly handsome with his dark hair and piercing eyes, I immediately knew it was Below in his youth.
'Please, Anotine,' he said, as if addressing someone behind me. I looked around, first noticing that I was no longer in the dome but rather in some room in a house, and then I saw her, sitting on a pink chair, dressed in the very yellow dress she had worn when I first met her on the island. Her long hair was in ringlets, and she wore an ironic smile.
25
The hourglass proved to be the repository of jum-bled scraps of memories I was able to splice together into a love story of sorts involving the Master and my Anotine. A series of scenes melted one into the next around me, out of order but each completely convincing in its reality. I remained an invisible presence through the course of their unfolding, and though I could no more affect the outcome as stir with my phantom breath the flame of a candle within the tale, I found I had a clear omniscience about everything that transpired. This ability that came with the hallucination allowed me to automatically rearrange the events into a chronology. The beauty released me from its embrace at precisely the end of the hour, and I found myself sitting on the floor of the darkened dome, the moon and stars overhead. I woke Anotine and told her everything.
In the summer of his thirteenth year, after the death of his younger sister, Below left home never to return. Being an exceedingly sensitive child, the girVs passing so frightened and confused him that he fled from the very thought of it. He traveled as far as he could on the small amount of money he had been able to put away. It took him as far as the seacoast to a town called Merithae. The winter was coming on and he found himself in dire straits. Without so much as a scrap of bread, he was forced to hire himself out as a servant to an old man by the name of Scarfinati.
Although Below had never heard of him, Scarfinati was famous throughout much of the realm for possessing a limitless imagination and the ability to bring his dreams to life. His specialty was a kind of technomancy, and he dabbled in those regions where science and magic mingled. Through his wealth, acquired from work for various patrons, political, military, artistic, religious, he had been able to amass an impressive fortune. With this money, he had a palatial house built out at the tip of a spit of land that jutted into the ocean a mile south of Merithae. It was to this place he called Reparata (named for Scarfinati s own sister), he brought the young Drach-ton Below.
There were many rooms in the house, and Scarfinati hated dust. Below worked from early in the morning to late at night continually dusting books, furniture, scientific gadgetry, glass, primitive sculpture. When he finished every room, he was instructed to begin again. Scarfinati, though old, was large in stature and stern in his demeanor. During the first month ofBelow''s employment, his existence was barely recognized. He was fed well, paid a modest sum, and had a comfortable bed to sleep in. There was one day off a week, and he had access to the books in the libraries granted he returned them to their precise locations. When the snows came, he decided he had better stay until the spring.
At the end of his first week at Reparata, Below saw a girl his age cooking at the kitchen stove. He tried to speak to her, but she completely ignored him. When he realized she wasn't going to speak, he sat down and watched her work. He would have stayed there all afternoon if Scarfinati hadn't come through and warned him to get back to his dusting. As the days passed, he learned the girl's name was Anotine. He also began to see that she was not just a cook, but also a kind of student. Occasionally, Below would enter to dust a room already being shared by the old man and the girl. He would eavesdrop on their conversations. Tor the most part, she listened and he spoke, instructing her in processes that Below had no understanding of. He often found them in the basement laboratory, working together over a small fire with glass beakers and golden tongs.
Through the long winter, the mysterious nature of his employer and the huge house were enough to keep away memories of his sister and the tragedy of her death. When spring arrived, young Below
decided he would again take up his traveling now that he had saved some more money. This time he found himself fleeing not death but love. He had become completely enamored of Anotine, even though she had not said one word to him or cast -a single glance in his direction. The situation, as it was, had become sheer torture, as he planned out entire days to try to get as little as a mere glimpse of her.
One day, when the snow had all but melted, Scarfinati entered one of the libraries where Below was dusting. The young man cleared his voice and explained to his employer that he would soon be moving on. Scarfinati said he was very sorry to hear that, because he had had it in his mind all along to request that Below become one of his students. Below most likely would have declined the invitation had it not been for Anotine, but he saw the old man's offer as a way to get closer to her. He agreed to become an apprentice—of what, he wasn't exactly sure.
A week later, he retired his feather duster and rags and joined Scarfinati and Anotine in the basement laboratory for his first lesson, the production of a chemical ice that could not melt. In the beginning his ignorance was always evident, and his inability to grasp the concepts the other two discussed fluently made him physically clumsy. He broke equipment, burned himself, and dribbled a highly corrosive acid onto the toe of Scarfinati's boot. The old man had a great deal of tolerance for his ineptitude, but the girl was impatient, rolling her eyes and calling him a fool.
On a rainy afternoon in late spring, as they all sat quietly having tea in the library on the third floor, Scarfinati, by mumbling and tossing a pinch of blue powder onto the carpet, conjured for Below the spirit of his sister. The little girl walked out of thin air and up to her brother. His immediate reaction was to bolt from the room, but the old man commanded that he return and stay seated. With this, he found he couldn't move. 'Is there something you wanted to say to your brother?' asked Anotine of the spirit. The little girl nodded. 'Drachton, your mind is in a fist with the thought of my death. If you love me, you will relax it, so that I may travel over into the next world. Release me and open yourself to possibility.' The girl vanished then, and Below broke down in tears.
From that time on, his ability to learn seemed to grow exponentially. The lessons that had seemed so obscure to him just a week earlier, mathematics and the properties of chemicals, all began to fall into place in his mind. He began to notice that with every procedure he was able to accomplish in the lab without spilling the contents of the beaker, every complex problem he was able to solve without benefit of pencil and paper, Anotine began to grow more interested in him. This
