Telling myself exactly that, I looked the man in the eye as I picked up the pen. The questions weren’t particularly difficult, but in order to avoid trembling, I moved my hand more slowly than usual across the paper. The pen glided smoothly, and I could tell it must be expensive.
“Please,” said the man, nodding at the tea. “Before it gets cold.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, but at the first sip I knew it wasn’t tea I was drinking. The smell and flavor were subtly different, like nothing I’d ever consumed. A mixture of bitter and sour, as though brewed from dried leaves piled up on a forest floor. The taste was bearable, but it took considerable courage to swallow that first sip, since I was all but certain it was drugged. Was it a potion to make me sleep so they could extract my secrets, or a solution that would allow them to analyze my genes? Or who knew what else?
The man stared at me from across the table, and I could feel the eyes of the men by the door as well. I drained the cup in silence and then handed him the completed form.
“Excellent,” he said, glancing down at the page with a slight smile as he returned the pen to his pocket. The tassel on his medal brushed back and forth.
It snowed again that night. I found I wasn’t at all sleepy, wired from the stress of the afternoon and the strange drink. I took out my manuscript, thinking I would make some progress on my novel, but not a single word came to mind. In the end, I sat by the window and watched the snow through the gap in the curtains.
After some time, I moved aside the dictionary and thesaurus on my desk and pulled out the funnel hidden behind them that we had rigged as a speaker.
“Are you asleep yet?” I asked, my voice hesitant and quiet.
“No, not yet,” R answered, and I could hear the mattress springs squeaking. The funnel in the hidden room was mounted on the wall next to his bed. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing in particular,” I said. “I just can’t sleep.”
The funnel was made of aluminum, dented and quite old. Though I had washed it carefully, it retained a faint odor of spices from its days in the kitchen.
“It’s snowing again,” I told him.
“Is that so? It must be getting deep.”
“It is,” I said. “This is an unusual year.”
“It’s hard to believe it’s snowing just outside the wall here.”
I liked the sound of R’s voice through the makeshift speakers. Like a spring bubbling up from far below me. As it traversed the long rubber tube between the two funnels, all unnecessary sounds faded away, leaving only the soft, transparent liquid of his voice. I pressed my ear against the funnel, unwilling to waste even a single drop.
“Sometimes I put my hand on the wall and try to imagine what’s going on outside. It almost seems as though I can sense it—the direction of the wind, the cold, the damp, where you are, the sound of the river, all the vague signs. But in the end, it never works. The wall is just a wall. There’s nothing on the other side, no connection to anything else. This room is completely closed off. All my effort only serves to convince me that I’m living in a cave, suspended in the middle of nothingness.”
“Everything outside is completely different from when you came here. The snow has changed everything.”
“Changed how?”
“Well, it’s difficult to describe. For one thing, the world is completely buried. The snow is so deep that the sun barely starts to melt it when it does come out. It rounds everything, makes it look lumpy, and it somehow makes everything seem much smaller—the sky and sea, the hills and the forest and the river. And we all go around with our shoulders hunched over.”
“Is that so?” he said, and I could hear the springs squeaking again. Perhaps he had stretched out on the bed as we talked.
“Right now, the flakes are quite large, as though all the stars are falling out of the sky. They dance in the shadows and glint in the streetlights and bump into one another. Can you picture it?”
“I’m not sure I can. It’s almost too beautiful to imagine.”
“It’s truly lovely,” I said. “But I suppose that even on a night like this, the Memory Police are out there hunting. Perhaps some memories never perish, even in this cold.”
“I suspect you’re right. And I doubt the cold has any effect. Memories are a lot tougher than you might think. Just like the hearts that hold them.”
“Is that so?”
“You sound as though that’s a bad thing.”
“It’s just that you have to hide here because of those memories. If you could let yours fade away like the rest of us, there’d be no need.”
“Oh, I see.” The words were half murmur, half sigh.
When we talked using this makeshift system, we were forced to move the funnel back and forth from our ears to our mouths, leaving a brief silence between each utterance. And thanks to these pauses, the most mundane conversation sounded quite important.
“If it keeps up like this, I’ll have to shovel the walk tomorrow morning,” I said, reaching out to part the curtains a bit wider. “Trucks from the town hall come every Monday and Thursday to collect the snow. They dump it into the sea at the harbor near the old man’s boat. It gets terribly dirty and sad on the way, and you can hear the sound when it gets sucked into the water, as though the sea were swallowing it down its enormous throat.”
“They throw it into the sea? I didn’t know that.”
“It’s the perfect place. But I’ve watched from the wheelhouse on the boat, and I always wonder what happens to it after it vanishes into the waves.”
“I suspect it melts almost immediately,” R said. “Melts and mixes with the salt water, and then onto the fishes and the seaweed.”
“I suppose so. Or the whales drink it in, release it to the tides.”
I switched the funnel to my right ear and rested my elbow on the desk.
“At any rate, it’s gone without a trace,” I added.
“Yes, I suppose it is.” He took a breath.
The windows were dark in the neighboring houses, and no noise reached me, no sirens, no cars, not even the wind. The whole town slept, and the only waking sound was the voice coming to me through the funnel.
Though the old man had done a wonderful job of constructing our listening system, it was still extremely rudimentary, and the slightest twist of the tube or tilting of the funnel made our voices seem distant and weak. Nor did it do much good to speak louder. I put my mouth into the funnel and let my words tumble down the tube.
“When I was a child, I was drawn to the mystery of sleep. I imagined it as a land with no homework, no bad meals, no organ lessons, no pain or self-denial or tears. When I was eight years old, I was thinking of running away from home. I no longer remember why. The reason was probably something insignificant—a bad grade on a test or the fact that I was the only one in the class who couldn’t do a pull-up. I decided to run away in search of the land of sleep.”
“That was quite a plan for an eight-year-old.”
“I put it into effect one Sunday when my parents were away at a wedding. My nanny was in the hospital for gallbladder surgery. I found a bottle of sleeping pills in a drawer in my father’s desk. I had seen him take a pill every night before he went to bed. I don’t remember how many I took that day. I certainly intended to take as many as possible, but it was probably just four or five. But soon I started to feel sleepy, and I let myself drift off, satisfied that I’d taken enough to ensure that I would be going to the land of sleep and would never return.”