I don't know how long we stood there, but it was a considerable time. The undulation of the liquid mercury was hypnotic, and the constant flow of scenes, disjointed in time, but each obviously an integral part of some complete story, made me think that always the next one would tie it together and the entire saga would make sense.
While I watched them, feeling content with Anotine at my side, my mind wandered. It came to me that I hadn't eaten in quite some time, but I felt no hunger or use for food. I would have liked a Hundred-To-One just then, but found that my ability to conjure cigarettes had dissolved with the island. "How long would this last? Should we make an attempt to awaken Below? Now that I knew that Anotine was still with me, did I want it to change?" These were some of the questions I pondered as I witnessed the Master's life flowing by beneath me. With what we had just been through on the island, and now this, I had the impression that I was awake inside the bubble of a dream.
The sun rose to its apex and began to descend before I managed to turn away from the ocean's performance. My last subject of contemplation was that the sun, which shone brightly, was an indication that Below, back in my old reality, must not yet be too close to death. As soon as that thought had passed, I began to get an uncomfortable sensation in my head as if my brain were itching. Severe chills accompanied this symptom, and though I was feeling strange, I had an unquenchable desire to make love to Anotine.
The unstoppable urge made me bolder than I might normally have been. "Shall we find the moment?" I asked.
She smiled and pointed for me to make my way back inside. By the time we found our place on the floor, I was overwrought with desire, almost physically ill with necessity. This painful craving only began to be alleviated when I moved atop her and was working away in rhythm with the rocking of the waves. In the middle of this dalliance, I happened to look up and see Below, sitting there as if in judgment upon our love. It was then, as we teetered on the edge of the moment, that I realized the discomfort had been born of withdrawal and the desire of addiction.
When we finished, I again experienced the narcotic effects of the beauty while Anotine slept. This time, I looked out through the top of the dome to where the Fetch materialized, flying high above us. Her speed left a rapidly fading green line in its wake, and her aerial acrobatics spelled out a message against the blue. "Truth lies at the end of a circle" she wrote, and its meaning for me was profound. Everything made sense filtered through this aphorism, but the minute the hallucination ended, I lost the thread of my discoveries, which unraveled into a dullness of mind that forced me into sleep.
Two more days and a night passed in this same manner, and I combine them in the telling because, for the most part, they were indistinguishable—a hazy stew of sex, hallucination, ponderous thought, and splinters of drama, riding the backs of waves. Anotine was very much both the essence of sheer beauty and a real woman in this time. As often as my physical contact with her would send me off into flights of fancy, the conversations we shared would ground me by way of her intelligence and depth of feeling. She was both metaphor and matter, a hybrid I could never quite get my mind around.
One early evening out on the walkway we sat in the twilight with our backs to the dome. The sky was growing dark, but the last rays of sunlight streaked the silver, setting it on fire. She held my hand in her lap, and the serenity of that moment made me feel as if she had always been with me.
"I want to talk to you about the future, Cley," she said.
"I thought you specialized in the present" I said.
"I want you to know that it is all right if you must leave me."
"Nonsense," I said. "Where am I going?"
"Back to the place where you have a past."
"I've forgotten it," I said, and realized that those words might be truer than I ever could have imagined.
"What about the antidote we were trying to find?"
"We did our best. Now I am going to concentrate on being with you. That is my antidote," I said.
"Won't people die without it?"
"People will die anyway."
"What if we never find a way off this ocean?"
"We'll make this our home," I said.
"How am I your antidote?"
"You help me to forget the past, and the future is so perfectly uncertain. My guilt falls away behind me, and there is no responsibility to tomorrow. With you I am in the present. The present is a kind of paradise."
She leaned her head on my shoulder. "I long for the past," she said.
"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.