"And did he find happiness?"
"He spent the next three years trying to find out who he had been and what had become of him. He discovered the names of his wife and children, but he could never acquire what they had looked like or any of the moments he had spent with them."
Anotine asked no more questions after that, and realizing my mistake, I relented on my pharmacopic lecture. As we walked along, I saw her very subtly lift her hands, as if she were merely adjusting her hair behind her ears. When she did not think I was looking, I saw her wipe tears from her eyes.
We came across the path that Scarfinati had described to me. It wound through the forest with unnecessary turns and loops as if it had been forged by a drunkard. Nevertheless, I made a point of sticking to it. Anotine hummed the tune from Nunnly's music box as we walked, and I lost myself for some time in the beauty of her voice and the haunting nature of that melody.
Sometime after midday, we came upon a small lake that the path cut across the middle of in a narrow land bridge. Being hot and tired, I suggested that we take a swim. Anotine said she had been feeling somewhat faint and agreed that it was a good idea. Leaving our clothes on the bank, we eased into the cool water.
I let myself slip down beneath the surface and slackened my muscles so that I sank slowly like a dead man. In that dark and quiet place, I remembered sinking in a similar fashion toward the bottom of the river at Wenau on the day that Below's metal bird had exploded. This brought to my mind images of the settlement and my own humble home off in the woods. I saw behind my eyes all of my neighbors, and for the first time in what seemed years I thought about the situation I had left them in. Jensen and Roan, the women I had assisted in childbirth, all of the children I had always thought of in some part as my own, beckoned to me for help.
I carried these troubling images with me to the surface, but the minute I burst through into the atmosphere of Below's memory and took a deep breath, I wanted only to find Anotine. Turning to look for her, I was startled when she appeared from under the water right behind me. She neither smiled nor spoke, but swam to me and put her arms around my neck. Her breasts gently pushed into my chest and her legs came up around my waist. The ends of her hair swirled on the surface of the water in spiral patterns as I joined with her and moved toward the moment. Wavelets began to break against the bank, and in the midst of our passion, she told me one of her dreams.
"I was paralyzed in the present, trapped in a block of unmelting ice in the hold of a ship bound for nowhere. I could not breathe. I had no pulse or heartbeat, yet I could see through the clear substance that was my tomb. Time had no hold on me, and all that passed before me, I saw only in the present, so that I saw it all at once. The faces of the crew when they would come down into the hold to stare at me, Below when he would make his yearly visits, the monkey that was bought by the captain during one of the voyages, the destruction of the ship in a typhoon, volcanoes and krakens at the bottom of the sea, my rescue by a strange race of amphibious people, a great city of dripping mounds where my frozen image was worshiped, and you, Cley. You were there somewhere," she said, climaxing with a sigh that sounded like dying.
When we finished, she swam backwards away from me. "It was a love story bound within an instant," she said, and then dived underwater.
The beauty had me in its clutches before I even climbed out of the lake. We dressed without drying off so that we would stay cool well into the afternoon. I felt refreshed and calm as we again began our journey along the twisting path. The effects of the drug helped me to remember the loss of my neighbors I had felt while floating beneath the surface of the lake. It all came back to me with the same vitality that my visions of Wood and the Fetch and the scenes from the hourglass had when wrapped in the afterglow of Anotine's love. What I experienced this time was a single thought, but one so powerful that it caused me to stop in my tracks. What, I wondered, was to be our future? Were we destined to wander aimlessly through Below's memory until it dissolved?
I turned to look at Anotine and in that very second, she put her hand to her forehead and fell into me with a great sigh.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I feel weak, Cley," she said.
"Are you simply tired or are you ill?"
"I'm dizzy and I cannot feel my hands or feet." Her eyelids were half-open and fluttering madly.
I quickly moved my hands beneath her arms and carried her off the path. Finding a moss-covered spot that looked soft, I laid her on the ground and knelt at her side.
"Just give me a moment," she said. "I need to rest." With this, her eyes closed and she either fell asleep or passed out.
I didn't know whether to wake her or to let her sleep. "Anotine," I called to her, brushing the hair away from her face. I was relieved somewhat to see that she was breathing steadily. Leaping to my feet, I began pacing around her. My instinct told me that there was something truly wrong. Although I kept telling myself that she was merely resting, I knew that what had happened carried deeper implications.
The beauty heightened my paranoia of being left alone, and I began to circle frantically. "Just sleeping, just sleeping," I repeated aloud to myself. I changed directions and walked across to the other side of the path. While I still had my back to her, I heard a voice, not hers, say, "She's not sleeping, Cley."
I spun around and saw a misty figure sitting on the ground next to her. It was a man, someone familiar to me. I squinted, and this brought, what appeared to be, the ghost of Doctor Hellman into focus.
"Doctor," I said, the hair on the back of my neck rising, my pulse quickening, "how are you here?"
"Nothing in the memory is ever really destroyed unless the mind that contains it is destroyed. I have suffered a mild erasure through a willful act of forgetting, but Below can't eradicate me completely. Traces of me will exist as long as he does."
The sight of him back from the dead brought tears to my eyes. I could barely continue in the face of this new assault on my reason. "I have been through too much," I said to him.
"Listen, Cley. She is losing energy now that she is away from the island. We were designed as complex memory markers. You will lose her unless you do something."
"What? I'll do anything," I said.
"Go to the ruins of the city and find the book," he said. "Destroy the page as Scarfinati instructed."
"How do you know about Scarfinati?" I asked.
"I now have all the knowledge of one who has died," he said.
"But where do I go?" I asked.
"You must hurry," he said. "I will wait with her, but I can't remain for too long. My being here requires great effort. You must go, now."
Anotine then opened her eyes. "Doctor," she said weakly.
He smiled at her.
I walked over and knelt down. "I am going to leave you for a short time," I said. "Do you understand?"
"Don't go, Cley. Stay with me," she said, a look of panic in her eyes.
"I'll only be gone for a very brief time. I have to do something that will make you feel better."
"Promise you will come back," she said.
"I promise," I told her. I reached into my shirt pocket and pulled out the balled-up green veil. Reaching down, I put it into her hand. "Keep this for me until I return. This is my promise to you."
Her hand weakly grasped the veil, as I leaned over and kissed her. Before I could pull my head up, she put her arms around my neck and pulled me gently down again. I could feel her breath on my ear. "I believe in you," she whispered.
"You must leave," said the Doctor. "Hurry."