“Memory is a seamstress, and a capricious one at that.”
– Virginia Woolf, Orlando
The Mnemosyne Hotel stood high on a cliff, overlooking the town of Pilfer’s Stead. It was a perennial, red-bricked Victorian building, with a mansard roof and wrought iron fencing. The beam of the lighthouse – of whom sat just opposite the hotel, across the bay – would penetrate the hotel windows on very rainy nights, like a giant torch in a doll’s house; but unlike a doll’s house, the Mnemosyne Hotel lay solid and unyielding, while the rock face was lapped away by waves from beneath her.
Nurse Taina was taking care of an elderly woman called Mrs. Lockhart, who was 87 and had once been a successful curator of archives. She was the eldest of the residents at the Mnemosyne Hotel. Residents is a term reserved usually for places where people intend to stay for a long time, but people came and went quickly here; the only truly permanent residents were the nurses, who lived in the turret facing the village.
Mrs. Lockhart spent more time poring over her mnemographs than any other patient Nurse Taina had ever seen. While most residents chose only to display a few of their mnemographs – the hallway light from a childhood bedroom, pictures of friends at then-unknown final reunions, these scenes which had taken on their significance only in hindsight – no method of conferring order or priority seemed to concern Mrs. Lockhart. She seemed intent on possessing as many of her mnemographs as humanely possible. The bookshelves on each side of her fireplace lay racked spine-to-spine with them in systematised disorder, fending off her Alzheimer’s like a talisman.
An accident, a terrible, terrible accident. Nothing that possibly could’ve been done. She’d been painting her nails by the window when it happened – white halo. Watching the chubby little body skip zigzagging over the sand dunes, retrieving washed-up treasures; smooth, purple shells, which looked like eyes.
The basket swings like a wrecking ball. Her skipping is so frantic, her sister cannot tell if she is squealing or wailing. That was one of the five-year-old’s eccentricities: for her, happiness had always looked dangerously close to pain.
When the basket is full, she kneels and engraves her name in a cradle of sand near the rock pool. She traces over the letters with the shells she has collected and presses them deep into the sand: CLARA. A hoodwink against the waves – her name could not be lapped away so easily now, not anymore.
By the time they reach the rock pool, it’s all of her that’s left.
You mustn’t beat yourself up over it darling. I know, I wonder if things might have been different if I’d been home that afternoon too. But everything’s hard enough on us all as it is. Really there was nothing you could do.
The lights in the nurses’ turret dimmed at nine-thirty and were out by ten sharp. Nurse Taina had adopted the habit of crouching onto the windowsill over her bed – blanket tunnelling over her, pressed against the glass – and waiting for the lighthouse’s beam to pass by. This way, if she held up her mnemographs, the light would refract from the window and illuminate – in part – a jagged shape across each of them. She imagined that this half-splintered image might resemble what mnemographs looked like up in Pandora, in their most novel data forms. After all, they were still only attempts to harbour what had really happened at an event. The subjective details imprinted by each eyewitness uploaded and merged, like light prisms, to produce the technicolour photo – an illusion of perfect truth.
The mnemograph she’d been given after working at the hotel for a year was a second-hand one, one of her mother’s. It was of Taina, aged fourteen, at the top of the lighthouse, outside of the lantern room. It had been daylight in the photo – the lantern had not been switched on – though her arms were outstretched, as if to protect herself from the light.
What had she been trying to conceal herself from? She did not remember. Perhaps her mother had been trying to take a photograph of her at the same instant when the mnemograph was encoded. Beyond its borders though – resting in Taina’s hands, beneath the sheets – a different impression was given entirely. She seemed to be defending herself, obliquely, from the eyes of future viewers.
Early access to one’s Box was a special privilege for the nurses, albeit a limited one. They couldn’t pick and choose which mnemographs to take as the patients could. When you had Alzheimer’s, the purpose was to recover a sense of who you were, and to sustain this for as long as possible. But for healthy people, Sister Lindsey said, it was a petri dish of fixation for the anxious and the romantically obsessed. Better not to interfere with one’s make-believe version of themselves. Self-delusion always serves a purpose, in one way or another.
Nightmares were a regular occurrence at the Mnemosyne Hotel. Sometimes they lasted only an instant – split-second echoes of faces sharpened into detail, then dissolved back into the dark. You could hear the groans though, all the way from the lighthouse.
At the blinking of the call button, Nurse Taina would button up her robe and speedwalk towards Mrs. Lockhart’s room. Shh. Shhh. When she entered the old woman was still asleep, though she had sat herself upright against her bed frame; she repeated the same sound to herself with increasing urgency, as if she were hushing a child.
Taina sat beside her and began unfurling her clenched fists. After a moment, her face loosened, and she opened her eyes.
“Will you be alright to get back to sleep, Mrs. Lockhart? Would you like me to fetch you a sleeping pill?”
Mrs. Lockhart shook her head. She watched Taina through her pale, lucid gaze. Then she said: I was having a nightmare about shells.
“Shells?”
Shh. She wondered if the old woman was still sundowning. It happened every so often that whatever mnemographs she had retrieved from her shelf that morning – after being forgotten later in the afternoon – reemerged in some insidious way, as if from happenstance, in her dreams. She had been dreaming of walking down the lighthouse’s spiral steps, when she’d still lived independently in the town. She’d come across a name written in shells in the sand. A spattering of red just two metres away, close to the precipice; red ochre from the local artist’s guild, presumably.
She slipped a translucent hand beneath her pillow, retrieving a mnemograph. It was dated only ten years prior. The colours were unfaded, the edges sharp. It had been a memory that Mrs. Lockhart had once recalled well.
The mnemograph showed a bird’s-eye view of the beach from the lighthouse. On the water’s seam, two pin-prick figures wearing matching polka-dot rashies. The bigger one was pointing away from where they were, towards the rocks clustered on the shoreline; the little one was shrugging her shoulders, her head bowed. On the horizon – a nearing storm, purple and swollen. From the picture the elder girl looked as if she were directing her sister to walk straight into it.
If only I’d come down five minutes earlier, I might have pulled her out!
Was it possible that Mrs. Lockhart had been watching them from the lighthouse, that awful summer’s day? She had seen her spurn Clara, innocuously though irrevocably, towards the exact place where the tidal waves would be. It had only been her wanting a moment’s breath from the burden of having to surveil her all summer long; Taina had only been fourteen.
She reminded herself now: no, it was not possible. That wasn’t how the story went. In her mind, she conjured up what she had told her mother afterwards, then the police. The chorus of people who had accepted her lie, then echoed it back to her; she’d been painting her nails, the radio had been playing, the trepid cool of the glass upon her shoulder.
If I could turn back time
If I could find a way
I’d take back those words that’ve hurt you
And you’d stay
She pressed her thumb over the larger of the two figures in the print, blotting her out. She wanted to undo the stitching of Clara’s death and override it: though with what? A sequence of events unbeknownst to herself, a sequence in which she had not been at fault. From beneath the fabric and through the puncture wound, in and out, the truth: as lambent and unchanging as the lighthouse’s eye.
Would Mrs. Lockhart have forgotten the entire incident by the morning? Her own guilt – however unfounded – might be as transient as her memory was. Bound only to the physical mnemograph, she could slip it between a pile among others and it would be dissolved before you could say Timbuktu. Taina envied her, then felt sick with herself. She could not undo what she had done, could not rewrite the excavated truth of it – at least not to herself, nor to the mnemographs or the Mnemosyne Hotel.
After she had left Mrs. Lockhart’s room, Nurse Taina roamed the halls of the hotel, attempting – in vain – to avoid the lighthouse’s gaze, now steadfast and unblinking through the gallery of windows. Even when she had returned to the nurses’ ivory tower she did not sleep.
Clara, Clara, she whispered, out the window and towards the lighthouse’s eye, which shone relentlessly into her own. Was she still out there somewhere, whispering back to her? In the cloud, or beyond the sea – somewhere, crouched in between the seams of this Frankenstein’s quilt of memory?
It was pretty to think so.
