Beyond Memory’s Edge
The young woman begins her evening like she would any other: she boils the water for her tea in the electric blue kettle and contemplates exactly what she’d like to dream about that night. She thinks of a city she’s never imagined, streets unfolding like bolts of fabric between ancient stone buildings, studded with secrets ready to be plucked. Youth makes routine a prison, and her only escape is her mental insistence that days to come will bring something new. For now, she contents herself with dreams.
As she makes her way around her apartment, her feet hit the ground in a rhythm that is half in her head. The walls are butter yellow, accented by artistic shots of people she’s never met, mementos from trips she hopes to go on, and glazed windows she can’t quite see through. She snaps the blinds down, dims the lights, and checks the front door’s lock before traipsing to her bedroom, mug in hand.
The room is pristine, save for the tall mirror in the corner, whose glass is fractured into splinters. The nail gave out a few days ago, and she finds herself unwilling to get a new one. It’s the frame she’s always liked anyway; a collection of seashells encased in enamel. Somehow it survived when the glass didn’t. She suspects it’s even worse luck to sleep in the presence of a broken mirror, but she isn’t the superstitious type.
She reclines against a pile of pillows, her back softening gratefully into their support. She begins reading a mystery with the bookmark near the front. The lighting is so low that her eyes labor to pry the letters from the page, yet she doesn’t move to turn on a lamp. She begins weaving in the blurred names and faces from the characters of the novel into the dream she will have tonight, her breathing punctuated by the turn of the pages. She has only reached the second chapter when she hears the rattle of metal. From the timber of the sound, she knows it’s the front door, the antique doorknob protesting the effort someone is taking to turn it. At first, she thinks this also is only setup for the dream, but then it strikes her that the sound is too grating to fit the liquid night she has started to conjure in her mind. A bolt of fear peels down her spine, and she stills, wrenched from the sleep she hadn’t yet entered.
She knows she just went to the door, can see herself gripping the handle in a gentle fist. Yet her body can’t remember the motion of turning the latch to its locked position. As she steals her breath, her mind scrambles for remembrance, for certainty.
And then it arrives. She hears the door creak open softly, the bottom of the wood panel dragging across the rug at the entrance of her living room. Her fingerprints disappear from the lock she never turned. She closes the book and places it gently on one side of her bedside table. She watches the crack of visibility between her bedroom door and the outside world. Feet make themselves known against her hardwood floors, the gait of the encroaching stranger heavy and intentional. Her heart hammers in her chest.
She assesses the room around her, searching for something, anything, that could change the way she suspects the night will end. Her eyes settle on the lamp next to her, the bulb dark and the shade crooked. But the body of the lamp is a solid pillar of wood. She grips the lamp in both hands, holding the hard edge of the base aloft.
She slips from the bed, then presses herself against the wall next to the door frame. She can hear the sound of the intruder’s steps hollow as he transitions from hardwood to the tile of her kitchen. She thinks that maybe he will go away when he looks around and finds no one here. She doesn’t consider the prospect that he might be a thief or a vandal. It is her that this man has come for, though the reasoning behind this certainty is wispy and opaque.
The door is open a crack. She watches the giant’s frame, his shadow curving up her elegant cabinetry. She realizes with a start that the leftover water in the kettle is still giving off steam, abandoning proof of her presence. The man examines the kettle, then unplugs it.
His back is broad, and he carries no weapon she can make out, but in the darkness, she can’t fully trust her sight. She sinks farther into the shadows as he looks around. His gaze slides over the crack in the door. And then, his eyes settle on hers. He begins moving towards the bedroom.
She is so far removed from the dream she was planning; without her noticing, it has tipped into a nightmare, garish and cold. The unfairness of it all strikes her. She has not yet seen the world. Borrowed memories and pictures can only count for so much. The reality hurtling towards her is grim. The man stalks forward. Her breathing quickens. Each second he draws closer, her arms grow more fatigued, and she resorts to lofting the lamp at her waist level. When the man finally pushes the door open, she makes to swing the lamp at his head. She loses momentum halfway through the blow and only manages to knock the man in the shoulder. He grunts in pain, then pries the lamp from her hands and holds it out of her reach. She tries to claw at his face, her fingers jabbing as close to his eyes as she can reach, but her strength is already waning.
“Stop!” he orders. After a few more seconds of struggling, he finally knocks her back to the bed and flicks on the light.
He is older than her, with weathered skin and exhaustion stamped beneath his eyes. Seeing his features in full relief, she squints, an image tugging at her consciousness. It is the subject of one of her pictures; an artsy shot taken of a man on a train car, the city behind him indistinguishable in a blur of colors and textures. The longer she looks at him, the more his features seem to dissolve as well, till there's nothing connecting him to the man in the picture but a faint insistence in her chest that it is him.
However, this knowledge is accompanied by no other association. Her body is still tense, ready to spring or flee as necessary. She racks her brain. Why would the man in her picture break into her apartment?
“It’s me,” he says, unhelpfully.
“What do you want?” she demands, shrinking farther away from him. Her voice comes out in a rasp, and she clears her throat.
He looks around the room and inhales sharply. She narrows her eyes and follows his gaze, which has stopped on the shattered mirror. She thinks of it as her own mosaic of sorts. She rests her attention on the segments of glass, most of which are too narrow to reflect a clear image, but then she spots the top corner, which is yet unbroken. It irks her that it does not match. She’s stepping closer to the mirror when she catches sight of someone else in the glass.
“You shouldn’t be living like this,” the man says.
She is not listening.
The woman in the mirror is frail; the flesh hanging limply from her bones, her hair more white than gray, with deep wrinkles serving as proof of the years she has conquered. The young woman stares at her aged counterpart, wondering which one of them is trapped.
Her lips go dry. Her skin loosens and turns papery. The strength seeps out of her muscles. Her body is unwound from itself.
She is first struck with such a profound sense of grief that she is unable to make a sound. But then realization strikes her, cool and sweet. She stumbles past the man in her bedroom, traipsing to her kitchen, then her living room, examining the butter yellow walls, covered in the proof of a life lived well. Fragments of a Moroccan Berber rug, batik panels from Surakarta, a Venetian mask, a Gaudí-inspired mosaic, silk fans from Hangzhou; dozens of places explored and memorialized for a time when memory might fail.
Her sharp intake of breath rattles in her hollow chest, but beyond the feeling of emptiness is remembrance that her worst fears never came to pass.
The man has followed her to the living room, his arms crossed over his chest. But his stance softens as he watches the woman take object after object into her hands, clasping them to her still-beating heart. She runs fingers over paint whorls and symbols, the pigments derived from lands distant and varied. She takes in the scent, earthy clay and time-worn fabric, still carrying proof of their origins. Tears well in her eyes.
Finally, after minutes or hours, the old woman turns around to the young man behind her. With age comes confusion, agitation, and uncertainty. She left the door to her haven unlocked. Even as she’s finding herself anew, part of her knows she’s losing the banal ‘it.’ Her voice lacks any of the accusation or fear she directed towards him before. Instead, she poses the question in the same tone she’d inquire about the weather. “How did you get in?”
The man’s hand goes to his pocket, and he fishes out an antique key.
Just like that, the tape rewinds. Her fingerprints brand themselves onto the latch of her front door, the same patterns that have always been unequivocally hers. Now she smiles, strangely proud. She nods once to the young man, then turns back to the bedroom, the shuffle of her feet slow and steady. Routine may be a prison, but right now the old woman is tired and unhurried to escape. It is time to dream, or rather, to remember.
