In Memoriam Memoriae
by Nick FranklinAn hour before she died, Riti Gill bore witness to a battle.
The black wall of the ice cave in which she lay acquired a strange, translucent depth, and beneath its uneven surface a killing tide of dark figures, red and gold ensigns bobbing above them like silken corks, crashed and crashed again upon the banks of a green-brown river. A keen observer until the end, Riti noted the guillotine glint on the edges of their curved bronze swords. She noted the low station of the sun in the crimson sky, and guessed the direction of the river's flow from the sheer number of the freshly dead.
She had never visited Punjab - not after her mother fell ill, two years ago, nor even since the state of California granted her idiot, ex-pat ex-husband full custody of their young son - but in the warped image far above her, she recognized the silted plains of its Vedic adolescence. She had never read the Rig-Veda, but as she lay sprawled and hypothermic on the icy floor of what would soon become her grave, she knew the Battle of the Ten Kings, the epic recriminations of King Sudas, Vasishtha, and sage Viswamitra, from four thousand years before.
Everyone who sailed from Punta Arenas to King George Island on the Oscar Viel that October arrived at Escudero with a nickname, granted by the friendliest members of the Chilean icebreaker's small crew. Riti was Memoria, after her startling habit of correcting, in pitch-perfect Chilean Spanish, even the most technical nautical observations of the sailors. "But señor," she would giggle to Nahuel, one of the ship's engineers, as he smoked a cigarette on deck, to his amazement and delight, "You do not mean to say that our ship still uses an Azimuth thruster with a Z-drive, do you? It's only been, what, 80 years, since the Germans developed Voith-Schneider propulsion?!"
Alain Moreau, the soft-spoken Belgian mountaineer, was El Gato - the Cat - a name common enough to suit his tendency to fade into the slimmest shadow or smallest crowd, but conspicuous enough to suggest his alarming penchant for free climbing, which often left him dangling from a balcony or turret, even in rolling southern seas.
Eduardo Torres was simply Lalo, a gregarious, red-faced walrus of a man whose combined thirst for adventure and acute sense of personal responsibility had drawn him away from his wife and four teenage daughters in Bahia Blanca to serve as one of several medical practitioners trained specifically for the current expedition.
As often happens in such close quarters, despite their many differences, Memoria, El Gato, and Lalo found themselves fast friends.
Two weeks after their arrival at Escudero, one of several year-round stations on King George's southwestern tip, Riti, Alain, and Eduardo signed out quads for a day-trip to Stigant Point, some thirty-five kilometers to the northeast, along the coast. Riti's eco-geological research would soon occupy nearly all of her time, and she felt worn from day after day of forced adaptation to her new and unusual environment - training seminar after training seminar, lab orientation after lab orientation, protocol review after protocol review. It was time for some fieldwork, and Alain and Eduardo, grateful for the opportunity to escape the monotony of their own daily routines, were more than happy to come along for the ride.
Alain led them along the ice-cliffs of the northwestern coast. Riti and Eduardo rode behind him side by side, marveling in silence at the great hills of gray-blue ice that swallowed up their quads like so many tiny insects, at the lightly white-capped seas just visible above their sometimes rounded, sometimes jagged crests.
After a few hours of leisurely riding, the basso profondo growl of the quads a constant drone beneath the sighs of the westerlies, Alain waved Riti and Eduardo to a halt. He parked his quad at the height of a small rise and dismounted to unpack for lunch.
Riti trundled up to meet him, Eduardo behind her, his round face bright with exertion and excitement. Alain extended a wiry arm out towards the sea.
"Oh," cried Riti. "Oh, my."
Drake Passage was a living mosaic, a dancing, flickering galaxy of reflected silver light. A single mammoth iceberg drifted not three hundred yards from shore, a brilliant blue monument of power among the shimmering waves. Far below, on the rocky perimeter of King George Island itself, a huge, raucous colony of Adélie penguins brayed and stamped its ecstatic rite of spring, chests pumping, flippers waving, heads and beaks so many thousand orange-tipped arrows stretched and pointing towards the sky.
Eduardo's brown eyes glistened as he watched.
"Lalo," Riti said softly as they sat and ate. "I wonder sometimes: is King George Island exactly the wrong place to see things clearly? To squirrel away our feelings about the world for a moment?" She hesitated, trying to find his eyes with her own across the blanket on which they sat. "Just when I think I've buried myself deep enough in all this ice - "
He met her gaze for several seconds then looked away, out towards the sea and the enormous, solitary berg. "Memoria, my darling," he said then, his eyes still averted, his deep voice rich and warm and compassionate. "What could be clearer than ice? What more pure than the song of a King George penguin?"
"Oh, Lalo," she said. "But that's just it. The ice - those Adélies - they're so clear and pure, I can practically see right through them. I feel so much from them, I can hardly tell what I'm looking at - what I'm listening to."
"Dear Memoria," he said. "You are very romantic, all of a sudden." He brushed a gloved hand across the farther side of his face. "Not just a geologist, but a poet - a poet, writing poems in the snow." He met her gaze again, his bushy gray brow furrowed with concern.
"Yes, yes, Lalo," she said after a pause. "Of course you're right - but I'm Memoria, remember? I remember things; I record them. That's what I do." Alain turned towards them from the seat of his quad up on the rise as her voice grew louder. "My only son is in India - and my poor mother - because I see strata better than I see people. Because I don't read between the lines: I'm a geologist, goddammit; I observe them."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she said then, her cheeks darkening rapidly. "I guess I didn't realize how much all of this was affecting me." Riti could hear the crunch of sunflower seeds in the back of Alain's mouth as she searched her friends' faces for understanding. "Listen - " she continued, her voice soft and controlled again. "It's like this. Like those Adélies. Sometimes, when they go fishing, they stay out too long and miss the tide. Instead of an easy hop back up to their families, back to the safety of their nests, they return to find an ice-cliff, a tall step just too high to - "
A prodigious crack, a deep, brittle rending that traveled through the snow and up into their bellies, cut her short. By the time their heads spun to the coast, they had missed the staggering impact of a huge, newly shorn cliff-face on the water. A giant, inverted pyramid of ice now floated on the troubled silver sea and slowly toppled away from the shore, its dazzlingly, blindingly, shockingly white uppermost face gradually sinking into the foam to expose a cool blue peak that grew and grew, a robin's-egg sea-mountain, as the new berg found its balance-point. A thick white mist rained down its edges, spilling, gusting, and finally disappearing in the roiling sea. The earth shuddered beneath them and subsided. Memoria and Lalo stared, stupid and silent.
Raveena Kaur Gill hated growing old. She hated, especially, that her once magnificent memory had begun to turn traitor. She could still remember much of her long life in extraordinary detail - the pure blue of the afternoon sky the day her father's regimental horse died; the twenty-three dusty clay bricks that lined the arch of the fireplace in the kitchen of her childhood home; the seismograph of jagged peaks and valleys that the part in her daughter Riti's coal-black hair would inexorably fall into, despite the most extravagant efforts of comb and clip. But certain stretches of her seventy-one years, stretches that only revealed themselves in moments of her most desperate, concentrated need, had now begun to elude her. Where is Riti? Why is she not here, in Punjab, with her mother and husband and only son? Have we fought? Have I said unforgivable things?
Sooner or later, Raveena's memory would come back, left alone and unbidden, but as she waited, it was a horrible curse. All it could do, mercilessly, unsparingly, was remind her of everything she'd forgotten. It would catalog her mind's failures in excruciating specificity, spewing a thin but poisonous bile of anger and shame into the already sour well of her daily incapacity.
Most of all, however, Raveena hated growing old because it put her here, in the Sharma Center for Assisted Living. Here, she was surrounded not only by the wealthy sick and weak and old and helpless, but also an unending string of insufferably solicitous nursing attendants, every one of whom treated her with the false sympathy of the healthy and young.
"Mrs. Gill? Raveena?" a bright female voice said, breaking her out of her reverie. "How are you this morning? It's time for your pills."
Raveena rolled onto her side, away from the door and the source of interruption. Hanging on the lime-green wall was a watercolor of a basket of fruit, the apples and plums and mangos and bananas all variations of the same dark, dull shade of gray in the dim bedroom.
"Raveena," the nurse said again, stepping into the room and flicking on a pale fluorescent overhead light. "Come now, dear, I know you're awake."
She didn't move. She pictured great long orange groves, like the ones Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. From California. That's where Riti is, she remembered suddenly, feeling a deep sense of relief. She went to college there, many years ago, and sent me that book. About fruit.
"Raveena," the nurse said a third time, resting a small hand on her shoulder.
About fruit? About fruit? "Goddammit!" she said aloud, turning and sitting up abruptly in her bed, nearly knocking heads with her attendant. "Goddammit! As soon as I remember one thing, I forget another! About fruit, for goodness sake. I read a big fat book about America from my only daughter and all I remember is About fruit! Fucking orange groves."
"Mrs. Gill!" cried the nurse. "Mrs. Gill! What's gotten into you today?"
"What's gotten into me? What's gotten - " She stopped mid-sentence, her jaw slack. "Oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God," she said.
As Riti Gill - ten thousand miles away on the northwest coast of King George Island, several quad-hours still from Stigant Point - watched the huge new sea-mountain wallow and shift, seeking its precarious equilibrium, her mother came to a terrible recognition. For the first time in her life, she had forgotten more than a moment, more than an event, more even than a series of events. Raveena Kaur Gill, known, like her daughter, for her extraordinary, sometimes startling memory, could suddenly remember nothing - nothing at all - since Riti left for college in California, thirteen years before.
The return journey from Stigant Point was smooth and simple until the ice gave way beneath Riti's quad. One moment, she was watching Alain reach into his pack for another handful of sunflower seeds, grinning sidelong at Eduardo; the next, she was hurtling after them, her screams drowned by a confused roar of revving engines and rushing snow.
The crevasse was black and fast and unforgiving, and one of its awful, sudden outcroppings slammed her out of her seat with a crunch as she tumbled, a grinding flash of pain ripping through the center of her back. Fighting for breath, her shuddering gasps drowned silent amid the thunder of splintering ice, Riti fell unconscious.
When she woke, she couldn't stop screaming, her cries for help echoing through the open spaces far below her until her throat was nearly swollen shut. Neither could she move, except to turn her head some few degrees to either side.
Her eyes had yet to adjust to the near total darkness, but she could see a ragged patch of daylight far above her, and from the immediate proximity of what seemed a great, smooth, overhanging ice wall in the shadows to her right, she guessed her fall had been broken by some kind of ledge.
I'm going to die, she thought, her angry tears freezing in their ducts. I'm going to die, and so are Alain and Eduardo.
Keen, unrelenting visions of her companions tormented her where she lay, sprawled and helpless. Soon, she could think of nothing but Lalo - gregarious, red-faced Lalo, and his four teenage daughters.
Jaspreet Roy wasn't much of a talker yet, at two and a half years old, but his power of recollection, like his mother's and grandmother's, was vivid and intense. As Riti fell, he shifted in his sleep, his plump left hand closing into a soft ball beside his open mouth and then relaxing. The lids of his eyes beat a delicate percussion as he dreamed.
A swirl of color, ruby and pale brown. Soft cloth and shadows, a pair of hands. Dissolving. Transforming. Opening. Pools, lakes, oceans of cool color. Outside. Outside color, outside the window. Up. Wait, wait. Breathless. Oh. Release. Release. Soft, sweet-skinned. Mother. Mother's eyes, mother's cheeks, mother's lips. Warm. Floating. Laughing, curling, rising. Floating.
Jaspreet woke, blinking. He turned his head and found the other boys and girls, their small, vulnerable bodies curled in pairs on thin blue mats, napping beside him.
Mats. Pressure. Mats. Mats?
People sounds. Voices. Louder, louder. Pressure. Dream?
Had he dreamed? What had he dreamed? Why could he not remember?
Where was his mother? Where were her eyes? - Why could he not remember?
Riti wasn't sure how much time had passed since she had fallen, but she knew that her eyes could do no more to adjust to the dim light. Dusk would come soon, even so late in the Antarctic winter, and this was her best chance to take stock. Though she could still feel nothing below her throat, raw and swollen from shouting, she could just turn her head enough to each side to examine her immediate surroundings.
It was clear that she had fallen a full thirty feet. The ledge on which she lay was substantial, jutting out some ten to twelve feet from the overhanging crevasse wall to her right, but her body had settled at its extreme outer edge, no more than a foot from a vast expanse of inscrutable darkness. As she eased her head away from the wall, to her left, she could still see nothing, neither the slightest geologic feature nor the faintest glimmer of life. Twelve inches or so of battered ice, a disconsolate sprinkling of sunflower seeds, and then darkness. Thick, indifferent darkness.
For a time, she allowed herself to drift in and out of consciousness. She held out hope that someone from camp would set out to find them, following the tracks of their quads from Stigant Point, or responding, perhaps, to a GPS beacon activated by one of her companions. But she also knew how late in the day their failure to return would register, how mortally dangerous a crevasse rescue would be for even the hardiest response team, especially at night. The winds howled through the gap above her, and Riti drifted, her teeth chattering lightly as she slept.
She woke in total darkness. The wind was screaming now, a spectral howl in the void hurling alto overtones like piercing bolts of sonic lightning through the deep, creaking groans of the ice-cave itself. Riti stared into the blackness, determined to force her eyes to adjust, her cheeks warm, her teeth no longer chattering.
And then she began to see.
She saw King Sudas through the ice, and she knew him.
She prophesied the bloody victory of the Trtsu against their own on the banks of the Parusni River. She stared, unblinking, as the killing tide swept over itself, there in the ice, and yet she also remembered.
She heard the sacred song of Vasishtha, and she trembled.
Memoria gasped and turned away, her breath a heavy stone in her throat.
What was happening to her? What was she seeing? Was this the end, a dumbshow of hallucination, a final, hypothermic bout of madness down the rabbit-hole?
She tried to turn back, but her neck failed her. She could only peer directly upwards now, towards a black patch of crevasse-wall ten feet below the screaming wind.
And she was frightened. A lean young man loomed over her, belly and hips thrusting forward, pearls of sweat like stars amid the forest of his black hair. His eyes were closed, his brow sewn tight with determination, but she knew, somehow, that their irises were green. She knew her husband on her wedding night, she knew her own self-contradictory sense of fearful anticipation, and she knew such feelings couldn't possibly belong to her, Riti Gill, broken and buried at the bottom of some vengeful god's long-forgotten ice-cave. Memoria had never seen her green-eyed lover in the ice, but she knew him nonetheless.
Her eyelids were heavy now, falling slowly as she tried to free herself from her vision. She could no longer even sense if she was breathing. With great effort, she lifted her lids one last time, the balls beneath frozen fixed in their sockets, their pupils aimed directly up and out, at the jagged, barely perceptible limit between death and night.
And then she was a child. A girl, not three years old.
She tottered across the yellow-linoleum floor of a kitchen, preoccupied, counting.
"Wuhhhn. Touuuu. Freeee. Mmf." She stumbled and changed direction, plucking at one of her greasy fingers. "Wuhhhn. Touuuu. Freeee. Faww - "
"Simar," the woodwind voice of a woman said from just behind her. "Seee-maaar, it's time to - "
Memoria gasped, deeply and painfully, thrust out from her trance by the sheer force of spontaneous revelation. Simar's deliberate counting voice was a sudden, sweet scourge on Memoria's swollen tongue, a terrible gift of understanding and imagination.
Oh. Oh no, she thought, her eyes rolling as they closed. What if - It was a struggle even to think, her mind a cold, glutinous hand grasping at the hard world. The hand was dissolving now, failing, corners and edges and crust tumbling through its oatmeal grip. What if - What if - Warming and melting and slippery - Slippery - She gasped again, her lips stretching into a taut, wide O. Not just environ - environmental, but also -
It didn't know it when she died, but the world had truly lost its memory.
©Nick Franklin
Nick Franklin is a writer and graduate student living in southern California who mourns the daily loss of the world's memory. He may be reached at nick(dot)franklin(at)hotmail(dot)com.