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Display a printable version The End of Memory
"Rodin," she said. "Other artists accused him of working from casts taken of live models." He pulled his hand back and looked at her, standing there in the hall of what had once been a rich man's home, and she seemed like a ghost from that earlier time. She was beautiful in a thin-lipped, heavy-lidded way that was no longer really fashionable, her skin a pale olive that hinted at a hidden ancestry. Her clothes were impeccable, but of no definite style. He hadn't seen her at the dinner, but he'd been lost in other thoughts, painful ones. She stepped closer, slipping a hand out to touch the bronze. "Wicked, isn't it, to put your hands where a master's have been? Like borrowing power." She looked up at him. Her eyes were hazel and surprisingly pale, set among the heavy soot of her lashes. Her smile invited confidence. "Guilty. If you look, it's really just a copy of a study. He never touched it." "I know. It's empty, if you put your hand on it... nothing there. You can feel the difference. Touch it." She invited him, a stolen moment, and he put his hand out again, the cold metal unliving under his palm. "It's not alive, it doesn't remember. No history." Her voice was lovely, low and soft with a velvet burr. It fascinated him, like the barely-perceptible scent of some intriguing perfume. "What should I be feeling?" "Connection," she murmured. She moved her hand to cover his. The touch was a frisson, a shock. He glanced at her as a throb went through him like the sounding of a low and sonorous string. It was magnetism, something purely of the senses that passed below the mind and straight into the animal part of him. It was as though, looking at her, he knew her, and when she returned his glance with those grey-green eyes he felt that she could see straight to the core of him. Animal magnetism, disproved by science, yet proven in the arena of the heart, in the foreshadowing of some connection that exists before it occurs. "I like a man brave enough to fondle statuary. Come talk about it over a drink?" She leaned down and bravely kissed the cold metal cheek. Her eyes flicked to him, sidelong, when she straightened. "No point in talking to Honoré, here. He's empty, empty as dust. I've had a lot of conversations with his sort." Her fingers drummed the metal naughtily, and she gazed at the bust with something akin to affection. "They never have much to say." "I believe I can provide a little more entertainment," he said. "Come on, then." She swayed as she walked out into the rotunda, and from there, into the spring darkness. She lifted her arms in greeting to the night all around them in simple, childlike delight. *** He'd expected eccentric; she hardly seemed the sort to live in one of the awful, barren little apartments that had sprung up along the business district like so many cells in a hive, and in which so many of his cohorts made their homes. No, this was a nest, three long rooms on the third-floor corner of a walkup he imagined he could never find again. "Let's share a treat," she said, and vanished into the hall, leaving him to glean what he could from his surroundings. She lived in a raven's roost, an utter calamity of bric-a-brac and clutter. Every shelf, every surface, was crowded with objects: jewelry boxes, bottles, shells, dried flowers, smooth stones, movie tickets, animal bones, knitting needles, a keyring, a handful of hatpins driven into the shriveled carcass of an apple, a hairbrush, bracelets of boar tusk and snake vertebrae, the severed foot of a crow... a commingling of the common with the bizarre. The air smelled of fruit from the kitchen, and of incense. Water pipes in the ceiling popped like old joints. A rattle of glass announced her return from the kitchen with a tray bearing tiny vases, sugar cubes, a black-labeled bottle that contained a fluid of a poisonous emerald. She laid the tray on the table, gestured for him to sit. The slotted spoons chimed on the glasses like knives, and he watched her as she decanted the alcohol. Her motions were sure and precise, the gestures of some antique ritual in which she took obvious pleasure. She sat beside him and poured cold water into the absinthe, trickle by trickle, feeding it over the ice-white sugar. The little cubes dissolved in the water, an oily swirl, hypnotic. "I hope you enjoy it. It's a weakness of mine. It brings back so many good times." "Yes. A shame it's outlawed." "For now." She shrugged. "America. Your country has no sense of history, of memory. I've shared absinthe and memories with so many men, in so many countries..." He slipped gently into listening to her beautiful voice as the absinthe underwent its quiet evolution. Her accent was very faint, European by way of London. She spoke of cafés in Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, of what spring was like in those cities, and though he'd traveled her eye was different, cities seen through the longer lens of time and memory. It became apparent that she was older than she looked, or that she was... not exactly lying, but coloring her experience from hearsay. It both delighted and exasperated him. If an affectation, it was utterly shameless. She spoke with such authority, though, that he found it hard to doubt her. A haze had formed at the bottom of the glasses, yellow-white like venom; the absinthe separating into its component oils and alcohols. The odor of it had filled the air, coalescing around them, all fennel and aniseed. "There it is," she sighed. "Like fog rolling in. What is it called... the louche?" "Yes. Louche... it's come to mean something not decent, something forbidden." Those eyes again, under dark wings of brows. "The haze dulls memory, dulls pain. We'll drink to what we wish to forget." He frowned. "Come on. Everyone has something they wish to forget; let it go." She brushed her fingers across his arm, as she had touched the statue. His skin prickled in her wake. "I wish I could," he said, staring down at the glasses. The absinthe was clouded now like green pearls, and a seafoam of creamy precipitate floated on the surface, clinging to the glass at the edges. "I really do." "Well." Her eyes were bright and alive, fixed him in place for a moment. Then she bent, removed the spoons. The couch sighed as she leaned back. In an apartment somewhere above, a small dog barked. "I can arrange that for you." He cocked a smile at her as she took the first sip, flirting without dishonesty. "Can you?" He drank. The flavor was soft and round as honey, and finished with a fierceness as he swallowed. The alcohol burned inside him with startling cold clarity. She leaned in, close enough that he could smell the aniseed on her breath. Her words whispered against his lips. "I can. I can make you... forget." The kiss, hot and cold at once, burned his lips and tongue like magic. *** "It feels awful, to be carrying it around inside me. I feel like people look at me, and know." "Don't be silly. You're not the only one with a secret." Their talk had grown easy with drink. She leaned against him now, her body slight and warm and alive. He was not used to the absinthe; it was more powerful than he had credited, and he felt marvelously drunk. At the same time, he was lucid and aware, marvelously keen. He waved a hand. "That isn't how it feels. Secrets are lonely, you know." She was used to the drink. He could see her sobriety in her eyes; see that his loosening amused her. "Would you feel better, if you knew mine? My secret?" "I don't know. Would I?" He turned his face into her froth of inky hair. She shrugged. "Let me tell you, and you can judge for yourself. "It was long ago, in another city. I loved a married man. His wife was sweet and insipid, one of those wet-nosed, hopeful little wretches that insists that every evil thing that happens in this world is willed by God. Her husband wasn't like her; he was a man of character. I liked him immensely, and he would have been mine if not for her. It was plain he cared for me, was fascinated by me, wished to be with me. The only hold his wife had on him was a child. A little boy of about four. Precious thing. Brown hair, like his father's, with his mother's eyes. "I hated that woman. I wanted them apart. But there was that little boy like the glue that held them together. I tried everything to dissolve it, but he wouldn't leave her. I could have made him forget her, but what would that have meant? Nothing. He had to come to me. I had to know it was real. We fought, we screamed, we bit and tore and railed, and he left me to stay with her. "I blamed it on the child. I wished it dead with every fiber of my being. And do you know what happened? It did die. Drowned in the bath, a complete accident. The mother blamed herself - why had she left the room? She died not six weeks later. Suicide. "And the man, he left. Moved a continent away. I followed him for a time, but he didn't want me anymore. Poor consolation, I suppose, for what he'd lost." He sat, silent, for quite some time. "You must have felt terrible." "I did. Such futility. Such a waste. All for nothing. I don't make a habit of regret, but that... A time, a love, I'd rather not recall." "I think I'd trade you," he said. "If I could." She leaned close beside him, brushed his hair away from his neck. "I'd let you," she whispered. "A trade. Unburdening. Maybe it's our memories that make us old. All that weight collapsing in on our souls." A thought swam lazily in his brain, a brilliant star in a drifting and aqueous sky. He felt the fairy touch of something other in his mind. It was as though he had plucked the thoughts from her head. He laughed. "And if we could just be rid of them, we could live forever. Is that it?" The glance she gave him was very keen; her eyes were lucid again, with a wavering flame kindred to the one in his mind. He could still feel her kiss inside him. "You may have something there. You may, indeed." She smiled, cold and white, lifted her glass. "A toast. To forgetfulness." She downed the last of her absinthe at a single swallow and he followed suit, feeling himself caught up in her fey madness. "To the end of memory," he said, setting his glass beside hers, then pulling her from her seat. She came into his arms easily, and if he'd ever felt anything sweeter than the brand of her kiss, he did not recall. *** The absinthe drunk, and him drunker, he was bold. He drew her off the couch, over the spotted Khorasan rug and into the hall, where darknesses promised beds to lie in. A door to the left let onto the anachronism of a small and cluttered sewing room. To the right was a little kitchen, the sodium flare of a streetlight breaking through a neat row of bottles on the window above the sink. Her bedroom was a bower lined with cushions and candles, a lush den. She slipped from his grasp and preceded him in, kindled four little lights in colored glass globes. She looked unearthly, standing there with the last candle in her hand, her hair spilling black as a thundercloud behind her. Her eyes glittered. She looked older, he thought; no, she looked ageless. Here, in this now with her, it could have been any time, any place. They came together; he unfurled the clothes from the pale amber stamen of her body like petals. His weight bore her back against the bed where they lay for some time, simply drinking one another in. It was the drunkenness, perhaps, that soaked his cells like starlight, but he fancied he saw himself from outside in lightning-flash blinks. It was strange and familiar and new and old all at once. And while he had not forgotten his pain, it was buried, kept in abeyance, held back fiercely just outside the ring of their senses. It seemed they made the candlelight themselves, throwing it out of their bodies in rays, a flame that fed on itself. He slid over her, hands and mouth satisfying the thirsty curiosity of desire. Her cloudy eyes were hooded now with darkness. The taste of her was on his tongue, thick and heady and warm, and then she pulled him up by the shoulders, impatience as brash as his own, and with her body she communicated her urgency to him. Her glorious eyes drew him in, and she held him with her mouth. A delicious numbness came over his thoughts as he entered her, a clouding like the haze of the louche where they came together, as if this was something not decent, something forbidden. Blood rushed through his ears, the world was narrowed to softness, heat, wetness, strident cries. The unrepentant joy she took in her pleasure drew his own out. He let neither the ticking clock nor his own pounding heart hurry him. He was buried in her shameless, beautiful body, and all the while she stared at him with those knowing eyes, as though seeking out some part of him, trying to pry it loose. It would have disturbed him, but a recklessness had entered him with the drink and he no longer felt he had anything to fear from her. What was there to fear? They'd shared wine, shared secrets. Now their bodies were all but one. The absinthe had broadened him, a delicious drunkenness like lucid dreaming had seized him. This was but one moment in a shimmering constellation of moments, of all consequence and yet of none. And when, in the midst of it, he felt the coiling dragon unleash, felt the waters of his psyche churn, she saw it when his eyes clouded over and he remembered. Memory leaped unbidden to mind, the rush of pain, and a word half-hung on his lips. She quelled it with a hand, one soft hand, raised to his mouth. Her eyes lay open like pools beneath him. "Forget," she whispered. "Come into me, and forget." And he poured into her, water into the distillation of her thoughts. *** He woke with dawn, alone in his bed. He didn't remember coming home, remembered nothing but falling into the darkness of her eyes. And the nightmare came to him, vividly real against the weak lamplight memory of the night before, dreams of love abandoned, pain like the opening of a wound, so familiar, and yet not his own; a dream of plunging his arms into water, small limbs thrashing the water to a fine foam, the hardness of tile under his knees, the rush of bubbles tickling his forearm. The mother in the front room looking out the open front door, unaware and yet confused, turning back to the bathroom with hazy, unremembering eyes. The moment, a finger-brush, a meeting of the eyes, in which a memory hung bright and clear, a memory of opening the door to a woman, a small woman with a cloud of lampblack hair and a mouth bitten red as a bloodstain. A memory that was there and gone, leaving only clouds and mist. He scrubbed the sleep from his face with one shaking fist, shook the dream away. It was horrible in its vivid glare, and it sickened him that he should have dreamed such a thing. Where had it come from? But it didn't have the feel of dream's half-grasped illusion. This was the true, hard light of memory. And he knew, without a doubt, how it had come to him. He found the note by his bedside, propped between the flanges of an absinthe spoon. I'll keep your secret, if you'll keep mine. Fair trade.
More of Amanda's work can be found on Scarlet Letters and in The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Vol. 4, edited by Maxim Jakubowski. She also keeps an online journal.
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She caught him standing guiltily before the bust of Honoré de Balzac, one hand extended, fingers brushing the heavy bronze. In the profundity of the museum's silence, his indrawn breath seemed loud.
Amanda A. Gannon is a short, angry Oklahoman who writes a lot of porn. She has a lot of cats and snakes and a husband, so it's obvious she enjoys the company of noxious beasts. She's become a prolific writer mostly by virtue of being lousy at everything else except bellydancing, which she did quite often before a chicken-related injury left her with a permanent, Ahab-like limp. Combined with the nonstop, foulmouthed cursing that forms her primary mode of communication; this gives her the aspect of a truncated, glitter-smeared pirate. Her bark is worse than her bite, and her bite has a 62% fatality rate unless treated, so take that as a warning.