“But that’s hardly the point,” he responded. “I’m not the one who needs these things—you two are.” The old man let out a low sigh, as though lost in thought. “I truly believe they have the power to change you, to alter your hearts and minds. The slightest sensation can have an effect, can help you remember. These things will restore your memories.”
The old man and I glanced at each other and then looked down. We had known that R would tell us something like this, but now that we were confronted with his actual words, no appropriate response came to mind.
“If we do remember something,” said the old man, struggling to find words, “what do we do then?”
“Nothing in particular. We’re all free to do as we choose with our own memories,” R said.
“I suppose memories live here and there in the body,” the old man said, moving his hand from his chest to the top of his head. “But they’re invisible, aren’t they? And no matter how wonderful the memory, it vanishes if you leave it alone, if no one pays attention to it. They leave no trace, no evidence that they ever existed. But I suppose you’re right when you say we should do everything we can to bring back memories of the things that have disappeared.”
“You should,” said R, after a moment’s pause. “Our memories have been battered by the disappearances, and even now when it’s almost too late, we still don’t realize the importance of the things that have been lost. Here, look at this,” he said, picking up the manuscript pages that had been sitting on the desk. “These exist here and now, no doubt about it. As do the characters written on them. A mind that we cannot see has created a story that we can. They may have burned the novels, but your heart did not disappear. We know, because you’re sitting here next to me right now. The two of you have rescued me, so I must do everything I can to return the favor.”
I looked at the sheets of paper R had clutched in his hand. The old man held his fingers to his temples, as though trying to follow the train of the conversation.
“But what if everything on the island disappears?” I murmured. The two of them were silent for a moment. I realized I had said something that should not be said, and they seemed stunned to silence by the fear that once these words had been said aloud, it might actually come to pass.
“Even if the whole island disappears, this room will still be here,” R said. His tone was even and calm, filled with love, as though he were reading an inscription engraved on a stone monument. “Don’t we have all the memories preserved here in this room? The emerald, the map, the photograph, the harmonica, the novel—everything. This is the very bottom of the mind’s swamp, the place where memories come to rest.”
Several weeks passed largely without incident. My typing skills improved considerably, and I was given a number of projects at the office. Spices continued to sell well, and with our market expanding to include jams and jellies and frozen foods, we were quite busy. Some days I worked overtime and got home late, but thanks to the old man there was no need to worry about the house. He took care of everything, from shopping and cooking to cleaning and looking after R.
One day, the drain got clogged and we were unable to run the water. Under normal circumstances we would simply have called a plumber, but for us even a clogged pipe could have been fatal. So, instead, the old man spent a day and a half covered in mud and snow before we could use the plumbing again.
There was also a day when Don fell ill. I’d wondered why he was rubbing his head against the wall of his doghouse, and then I noticed a sticky yellow liquid coming from one of his ears. When I wiped it with a cotton ball, he squinted his eyes and looked up at me as if to say he was sorry to be causing so much trouble. But a half hour later his ear was running again.
I thought for a moment, unsure whether I should take him to the veterinarian. He was no ordinary dog, in the sense that his former owners had been taken away by the Memory Police. And I knew they kept a close watch on the doctors and hospitals, hoping to trap people who were forced out of hiding to seek medical care. So if someone realized that Don had been overlooked in a search by the Memory Police, it could mean a great deal of trouble for us. And even if I said that I’d simply adopted him when he’d been abandoned, there was nothing to prevent them from taking me in for questioning anyway.
On the other hand, had they been interested in Don, they could have taken him away with them during the raid, or when they’d come back to search the house. But they had ignored him. So there was nothing to be worried about, I concluded, deciding to take him to the neighborhood veterinarian.
The vet was an old man with white hair and a kindly, almost priestlike manner. He cleaned Don’s ear, treated it with an ointment, and prescribed some pills for me to give him for a week.
“Just a minor infection,” he said, scratching Don’s throat. “Nothing to worry about.” Don wriggled with pleasure on the examination table, looking up at the doctor as if to say he didn’t want the visit to end. I was relieved to realize that all my worry had been unnecessary.
One other small event was the haircut the old man gave R. Obviously, he had not been to the barber since he’d come to live in the hidden room, and his hair was getting unsightly, but it proved to be something of an ordeal to manage a haircut in the narrow room that was now overflowing with disappeared objects.
First, the old man spread newspapers on the tiny space remaining on the floor. Once R was seated there, he wrapped a towel and a plastic sheet around his neck and fastened them with clothespins. Then he began cutting R’s hair, moving nimbly around in the confined space to find just the right angles. I watched from the bed.
“I didn’t know you were a barber, too,” I said.
“I’m not, really. I just cut here and there, almost at random.” As he talked, the scissors moved continuously over R’s head. From time to time R would roll his eyes up, attempting to see what was happening to him, but the old man would grip his head. “Hold still please,” he told him.
The finished product proved to be quite passable. While it was clear that the old man was not a professional, R seemed satisfied, and the slightly uneven patches had the effect of making him look younger.
Cleaning up afterward was another ordeal. Despite having taken precautions with the newspaper, hair seemed to have made its way into every corner of the room, and we spent a long time sweeping it out from under all the objects.
After this period of relative calm, I was walking Don one Saturday evening when I happened to meet the old man on the hill, not far from the ruins of the library.
“Ah!” I called. “Done with the shopping already? Did you get anything good?” He was sitting on a pile of charred bricks and raised his hand to wave when he noticed me.
“No, just the usual. A shriveled cabbage, three carrots, some corn, yogurt that’s two days beyond its sell-by date, and a little bit of pork.”
I tied Don to a tree nearby and sat down next to the old man.
“Well, we can manage with that. At least for the week. But you spend more and more energy just to get enough for us to live on. I suppose it’s even worse for someone living alone. How could anyone work and still find time to hunt through the shops and markets for hours a day?”
“It would be impossible. It’s awful when food is so difficult to find.” He poked at the bricks with the toe of his shoe. Pieces fell from the pile, scattering in the snow.
The library had been reduced to a mound of blackened rubble, and it seemed as though the smoke might start rising again from between the bricks at any moment. The lawn in front of the entrance, which had been so carefully tended, was now hidden under the snow. Far below, the sea spread out to the horizon.