All the while, Byron watched. Fascinated now, unable to hide it, enthralled, until she blurted, “How do I forget you?” The tightness in her face was more than curiosity, more than a flush of success. It was almost erotic in its intensity.
I shrugged. “Just happens.”
“Please.” Contempt, insult, what an answer.
“If I knew, I wouldn’t have followed you.”
“I’m involved?”
“The treatments that Filipa developed made the only one of my kind I have ever met memorable. It erased his kindness, his intelligence and his soul, but I can remember him. That gives me two choices — I can go to Filipa and beg that she repeats the process on me, minus the eradication of my heart and mind — or I can give the information to you, with the understanding that you will one day do for me what I cannot do alone — make me memorable. As you cannot remember this bargain apart from the physical evidence it leaves behind, I’m here, following. Why did you record our conversation?” I asked.
An easy answer, sharp and true. “Because I’m getting old. My memory is excellent, but a nuance may make itself apparent in the second or third listening.”
“And how did you recognise me?”
“I have your photo.”
“That’s… never usually enough.”
“I stared at it for hours, but no matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t remember you. So I remembered words. I created mnemonics to capture your description, and remembered the process of remembering. Gender, height, age, hair, eye colour, clothes — just words, useless without a face but, here, enough perhaps. Enough that if I led you to an empty path there could be no doubt. You don’t use a machine?” Incredulous, trying to fathom it out.
“No.”
“Have you drugged me?”
“No. You saw me,” I replied. “Then you forgot.”
“How?!”
“I said: it just happens.”
“That isn’t possible.”
Her eyes moved to the two tourists who stood behind me. “Do you remember me closing my eyes? Do you remember this woman standing here?” she demanded.
“Yes, ma’am,” said the woman, and, “Yes, ma’am,” said the man, their voices softly accented, a hint of American perhaps in their English.
“They had a physical contact with me,” I explained. “Their eyes were open, I did not fade in their short-term memory. People only forget when the conversation stops. You’ll forget this moment too, even though you have your recordings.”
She nodded, slowly. Questions came, questions went, none seeming suitable. For a minute, now for two, we stood. Now two minutes are three, now three are four, and I realise that Byron is counting. She is counting backwards slowly from sixty, and then from sixty again, using the rhythm of the numbers to settle her mind, to suppress a torrent of hypotheticals, of might and maybe, of impossible and probable, proven and inexplicable, boiling her thoughts down to just this moment, and the thing that must happen. The revelation brought a single gasp of laughter to the top of my throat, which I swallowed down before it could break, and so we waited.
Sixty, and sixty more. Then, as if time were nothing, and the wind had not blown and the present had not become the past, she looked up and said simply, “If I ask you to come with me, will you?”
“Probably not.”
“I won’t hurt you.”
“You might not remember that promise.”
“Please: come with me.”
“No. Sooner or later you’ll need to sleep, and when you sleep, you’ll forget.”
“I remembered our conversations online.”
“I leave a memorable footprint. You will remember reading words I’ve written — it’s just my face and my actions that vanish.”
“So I will forget this conversation, but if you transcribed it and emailed it to me, I’d remember it?”
“You’d remember the transcription; it’s a different thing.”
“You want treatments.”
“Yes.”
“Then as you say, you have a choice — either go to Filipa and let her wipe your soul, or stay with me.”
Seas eroded the land. Volcanoes rose from the centre of the earth, molten basalt turned to stone, ash fell, the world turned. The moon waxed and waned, waxed and waned, slowed in its orbit, drifted into space. The sun grew fat and red, the graves of the dead turned to fossilised stone.
I said, “I’m hungry. Do you know if there’s anywhere round here that does sandwiches?”
Chapter 59
Her helpers had managed to get a four-wheel drive up the muddy tracks to a small courtyard behind the grotto on the top of the hill. From the side of the road you could almost see the sea, a line of greyer grey where the sky stopped. The forest swayed below, the clouds rushed above, heading east in a hurry, trailing loose hairs as they ran.
The inside of the car smelt of chemicals and hire companies. On the back of every seat was my photo, pinned up large, and a note in the same stiff hand which read: She is _why.
The driver, a man in a baseball cap and owl sunglasses, was waiting, a cigarette burning between two yellow-stained fingers, a Manchester United T-shirt billowing around his skinny chest. He threw the butt away as we approached, nodded wordlessly and swung into his seat. I huddled in the back, between Byron and the woman, and said nothing.
We drove in silence, until the driver’s phone rang and he answered irritably, holding it in place under his chin. His mother, checking that he was all right. Yes he was, of course he was, he was always all right. Well, she’d heard… Mother, I’m working… Oh well yes dear but I just wanted to tell you…
The driver hung up. We drove in silence, Byron never taking her eyes from me.
At one point, the man in the front turned away, and grew enthralled by the passing of the forest around us, and when he looked back, he gasped to see me, and his colleague’s eyes flashed to his face and he mumbled in Korean, something about truth and memory — I couldn’t decipher more.
Then the woman’s eyes narrowed, and she looked away, and perhaps intended only to look away for a minute at most, but forgot that she was deliberately diverting her attention, so looked back five minutes later, and caught her breath, and held onto the handle above the door as she stared at me, in case she might bounce out of her seat.
Then she crossed herself.
Census, 2005, South Korea: Buddhism 22 per cent. Protestantism and Roman Catholicism combined: 28 per cent. Flaws in the survey, however: no one was asked if they practised Confucianism, or honoured their ancestors, or sought the guidance of shamans. In this corner of the world, it was perfectly normal to pray to both Jesus and Kuanyin, manifestations, perhaps, of the same entity, expressed in different manners.
I glanced over at Byron, unsmiling, who said nothing. She would not take her eyes from me, not permit herself to break awareness of my presence.
At a motorway service station, we stopped for burgers. There weren’t sandwiches to be found, and the burgers were hot halfway-houses between McDonald’s and bibimbap, but it was food. Byron ate in silence as we pulled away, and only when she’d finished every corner and I was licking the last of the pickle sauce from my fingers did she say, “How do you live?”
“I steal,” I replied. “I am a very good thief.”
That seemed to be all the questions she had.
Some fifteen miles short of Daegu we stopped in a small town of 1960s concrete blocks, clinging to the terraced side of a mountain. A small building of beige-washed walls and pink-tiled roof overlooked a tumbling mountain stream that rushed over shallow smooth stones. A black and white cat regarded us from on top of the wall, while beneath it, a lethargic dog, grey with no collar, opened one watery eye to consider first us, then the cat, then us again, and finding nothing interesting, went back to sleep.