“Well done,” he said. Raising her fingertips to her lips, she played the coquette. On her left eyelid, the same third eye had been drawn, to match the old man’s. What antic games, I wondered, occur in my absence?
He turned to me. “Your line, I believe, was ‘When I came home today, there were seven bicycles out on the lawn, glowing in the something something sky.’ ”
“Mirrors to the sky,” I said. “On the chrome handlebars and bumpers, a million little suns reflected. But that’s all I can remember.”
“The opposite of the elephant,” Dolly said, “who never forgets.”
“A leaky cauldron.”
“An unwound clock.”
“The cyclical amnesiac.” He bowed.
“Well played.” Now, she addressed me directly. “Whenever I lose something, I always retrace my steps beginning with the end and ending with the beginning. Or until what’s missing is found. Shall we look for your mind? What is the last thing you can recall?”
Falling. My face smashing against the bathroom floor, a tsunami of blood sweeping across the tiles and washing against the white wall of the tub. “Checking the time on my watch.”
“Good,” the old man said. “Progress. So, you arrive home this afternoon at eight minutes till the hour and there were seven bicycles heaped in a tangle of spokes and chains, and then what happened?”
“I have never seen bicycles out in front of the house, but then again I am not usually here at that particular hour during the workweek, and I thought perhaps they belonged to some schoolchildren who left their bicycles and ran off to play. They looked chained and locked together, the bicycles, not the children, and there were no children. Nobody was about despite the fineness of the hour, the warm weather returning. You can feel the change in the air.”
“The days are on the mend,” the old man said.
Dolly patted his leg and deposited her hand upon his knee. “June. The birds and the bees, the scent of love a-bloomin’ yet again. Maybe you left work early because of an assignation?”
“An illicit rendezvous with delight,” he said.
“Love in the afternoon,” said Dolly, and the point was won.
I was reasonably certain that was not the case, though this talk of love whipped another chain of images through my brain. A woman, surrounded by fireflies, and something I intended to do or say to her. Love, yes. I knew I was in love with someone I could not quite remember. On a spring afternoon when I opened the door of a taxi for her, she touched my arm and smiled when she got in and drove away. After she was gone, she lingered in the air. A different story unfolded in the pea of my brain.
“No, not a tryst. It was a day like every other single day. I was a bit fatigued and bored, nearly fell asleep at my desk, so having nothing pressing, I left the firm a little early. The bicycles waited in the yard in front of the house all jumbled together like a knot, and I just stood there wondering when the singing began—”
“Singing bicycles!” Bemused, he clapped his leathery hands together, sending a talc of dead skin puffing like a cloud.
“Not singing bicycles, singing from the windows.”
“Even better,” Dolly said. “Singing windows. Or maybe it was the house itself that was singing?”
Bachelard would allow such a possibility in his poetics, but only in a metaphorical sense, with a house so imbued with happiness that the windows could be said to sing. He speaks of the archetype of the “happy house” that young children reproduce when asked to take up their crayons and color their idea of home—a square with a peaked roof, two windows and a door that suggest a face, and around the house a tree and flowers, a line of blue at the upper border to indicate the sky, and a sun, often smiling, radiating from its tucked position in the corner. While there is no good reason to dispute the existence of a companion to such an idealized fantasy, say, a singing house, a family place so full of joy that it hums a musical score night and day, I have never seen or heard of such a space. My own childhood, as my father would attest if he is indeed my father, lacked all such song, unless one includes the dirty ditties he would sometimes croon late at night after arriving filled to the lid with drink.
“You have misunderstood me, or perhaps I did not make myself clear. It was like the opening prelude of some fantastic play or movie, and the house itself was the theatre. I was on the lawn marveling at the bicycles’ sudden strange appearance and studying the light reflecting off the chrome when I heard someone singing from one of the open windows. ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca.”
“Verdi?” the old man guessed.
“Not so. A common mistake, but I believe it is Puccini.”
“If you two are going to hide behind the screen of dead white male Eurocentric cultural references, I will take my skullcrusher and leave.”
“Apologies. The actual composer is not as important as the song, and the song itself is not as crucial as the singing. And it only truly gains significance through the hearer.”