BY SEVEN O’CLOCK, twilight is draping the attic in blues, grays, and blacks. The little lamp on the piano glows daffodil yellow. Four storys below us, I see the manager of the bookshop bidding a staff member good night. He then walks off arm in arm with a petite lady. The couple make an old-fashioned sight under the mist-haloed solars of West Tenth Street. I draw the curtains on the drizzlestreaked bulletproof glass. ōshima, Unalaq, and I spent the afternoon debriefing Holly further on Horology and our War with the Anchorites, and eating Inez’s pancakes. Going outside would have been a needless risk after this morning’s near disaster, and we’ll avoid 119A until our rendezvous with D’Arnoq on Friday. Arkady and the Deep Stream cloak will keep the place safe. On the evening news the “Police Impostor Fifth Avenue Shootout” was a lead story, with reporters speculating that the dead men were bank robbers who’d had a fatal argument prior to their heist. The national networks haven’t run with the story, due to yesterday’s gun massacre at Beck Creek, Texas, the reignited Senkaku/Diaoyu standoff between China and Japan, and Justin Bieber’s fifth divorce. The Anchorites will know Brzycki was killed by psychosoteric intervention, but how it affects any plans they have for our Second Mission, I cannot guess. I’ve heard nothing from our defector, Elijah D’Arnoq. I hear Unalaq and Holly’s feet on the creaky stairs, and they appear in the doorway.
“You have a psychiatrist’s couch,” says Holly.
“Dr. Marinus will see you now,” I say. “Again. Ready?”
Holly unslippers her feet, and lies back. “I’ve got over half a century of memories stored away, right?”
I roll up the sleeves of my blouse. “A finite infinity, yes.”
“How do you know where to look for Esther Little?”
“I was sent a clue via a cabdriver in Poughkeepsie,” I say.
Unalaq puts a cushion under Holly’s head. “Relax.”
“Marinus?” Holly flinches. “Will you see everything I ever did?”
“That’s how scansion works. But I’m a psychiatrist from the seventh century, remember. There’s not much left that I haven’t seen.”
Holly’s unsure what to do with her hands. “Do I stay conscious?”
“I can hiatus you while I scansion you, if you wish.”
“Uh … No need. Yes. I dunno. You decide.”
“Very well. Tell me about your house, near Bantry.”
“O-kay. Dooneen Cottage was originally my great-aunt Eilísh’s cottage. It’s on the Sheep’s Head Peninsula, this rocky finger sticking out into the Atlantic. There’s a drop to a cove at the end of the garden, and a path going down to the pier and …”
AS I INGRESS, I hiatus her. It’s kinder, somehow. Holly’s present-perfect memory, I notice, is dominated by today’s bizarre events, but older memories soon billow around my passing soul like windblown sheets on a washing line. Here’s Holly catching a taxi from the Empire Hotel early this morning. Meeting me at the Santorini Café, and at Blithewood. Landing in Boston last week. I go further back, back to Holly’s pluperfect memory. Holly painting in her studio, spreading seaweed on her potato patch, watching TV with Aoife and Aoife’s boyfriend. Cats. Storm petrels. Jump leads. Mixing mincemeat at Christmas. Kath Sykes’s funeral in Broadstairs. Deeper, faster, like rewind on an old-style DVD, showing one frame every eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four … Too fast. Slow down. Too slow, this is like searching for an earring dropped somewhere in Wyoming, I must take care. Here’s a vivid memory of Dr. Tom Ballantyne: “I sent off three samples to three different labs. Remissions are fickle, yes, but for now, you’re clear. I won’t pretend to understand it—but congratulations.” Deeper, further. Memories of Holly meeting Crispin Hershey in Reykjavik, in Shanghai, on Rottnest Island. They loved each other, I see, but both only half guessed it. Holly’s first U.S. book tour for The Radio People. Holly’s office at the homeless center. Her Welsh friend and colleague Gwyn. Aoife’s face when Holly tells her that Ed died in a missile strike. Olive Sun’s voice on the phone, an hour earlier. Happier days. Watching Aoife perform in The Wizard of Oz while holding Ed’s hand in the darkness. Psychology lectures with the Open University. Look, a glimpse of Hugo Lamb … Stop. Their night in a room in a Swiss ski town, which is none of my business, but what muffled, baffled joy shines in the young man’s eyes. He loved her, too. But the Anchorites came knocking. Fateful or fated? Scripted, Counterscripted? No time. Hurry. Deeper. A vineyard in France. A slategray sea—is the asylum here? There’s no sign of the freighter. Too far or not far enough? Look closely. The wind must be squally and the engines churning. Stop. No time, no noise. Passengers become photographs of themselves. Gulls, balancing gravity and the battering wind. A squaddie’s tossed away his cigarette, it hangs there, threads of smoke, vapor trailing … This is Holly’s first Channel crossing, back before the tunnel was built. Back further, a year or two or three … An iced “17” on a birthday cake … Further. An abortionist’s clinic in the shadow of Wembley Stadium, a young man on a Norton motorbike outside. Slowly now … A slope of gray months, after Jacko’s disappearance. Picking strawberries …
And look—look! Blank, redacted scenes. Two hours’ worth. Neatly done. That must be the bungalow murders. Before the blanks I find scenes of a petrol station, and a bridge. Rochester? There are ships below, but we’re still the day after the Star of Riga, not the day of it. Church bells. Back through the night, spent in a church, with a teenage Ed Brubeck. The Script loves foreshadow. Back to the day before the First Mission. Holly on the back of Ed’s bike, fish and chips by the sea, more cycling, Ed’s T-shirt glued to his back with sweat. We pass a couple of anglers, but both look male and neither sports Esther’s famous hat. Esther fished alone. “Angling’s like prayer,” she said. “Even together, you’re alone.” Slow right down. Holly looks at her watch at 4:20, at 3:49, and again at 3:17 before Ed came along. Her backpack’s rubbing her skin, though backpacks were called “rucksacks” in 1984. Holly’s thirsty, angry, and upset. She glances at her watch at 2:58. I’ve gone back too far. “Three on the Day,” begins my marker. I reverse and inch forward, slowly, to the Thames on my left, and … Oh.
I’ve found you.
FAR OUT IN the Thames sits a cargo ship, halfway between Kent and Essex, and the name of this quarter-mile-long signpost is the Star of Riga. Esther Little saw the ship “now,” at three P.M. exactly, on June 30, 1984. I had seen the ship earlier in Tilbury Docks, as I waited in a rented flat in Yu Leon Marinus’s body before transversing over the Thames to the Captain Marlow to ingress Jacko’s head. Esther submentioned the freighter as we all waited for Constantin. Holokai submentioned he’d lived in Riga for a few months as Claudette Davydov.
There Esther sits, at the end of the jetty, as Holly saw her on that hot, thirsty day. I transverse down the embankment and along the planks. Like an Oriental ghost I lack feet, but my progress is soundtracked by Holly’s memories of her own footsteps. Look. Esther’s cropped gray hair, grubby safari shirt, and floppy leather hat.
I subspeak: Esther? It’s Marinus.
But Esther doesn’t react in any way.
I transverse around her, to study her face.
My old friend flickers like a dying hologram.
Am I wrong? Is this just Holly’s memory of Esther?
Then her chakra-eye glows dimly. Holly couldn’t have seen it. I subaddress her: Moombaki of the Noongar People.
Nothing. Esther fades like a shadow as the sun goes in.
Her chakra-eye flickers open, shuts, open, shuts. I try to ingress, but instead of strong, coherent memories, like in Holly’s parallax, I find only a nebula of moments. Dewdrops, clinging to a spider’s web on a golden wattle flower; a dead infant, flies drinking from his eyes; eucalyptus trees crackling into flame and parrots shrieking through smoke; a riverbed alive with naked-backed men panning for gold; the warbling throat of a butcher bird; a line of Noongar men in chains, lugging blocks of stone; and then I’m out the other side of Esther’s head. Her mind’s gone. It’s smashed. Just those shards remain.
The hologram solidifies and speaks: “Cold tea do you?”
False hope hurts like a broken rib: Esther, it’s Marinus.
“Five perch. One trout. A slow afternoon.”
This is recorded ghost speech, uttered by the Esther Little whom Holly remembers, not spoken by Esther’s soul here and now.
Esther, you’re trapped in a memory in the mind of Holly Sykes.
A bee lands on the brim of her hat. “Lucky you’re not fussy.”
Esther, you sought asylum here, but you forgot who you are.
“I may need asylum.” She watches me, sniperlike. “A bolt-hole.”
Horology needs you for a Second Mission to the Chapel of the Dusk, Esther. You left me signs.
“You won’t find a shop until you and the boy arrive at Allhallows-on-Sea …”
Esther, what do I do? How can I bring you back?
She fades to a shimmer. I’m too late, years too late. Esther’s soul has cooled to an ember that only Esther herself, or maybe Xi Lo, could have breathed back to life. I cannot. The misery I feel at finding her but losing her this way is insupportable. I look out across the memory-generated Thames. What now? Abort the Second Mission? Resign myself to managing Horology’s slow decline? Circles radiate out from Esther’s float. And Holly’s memory-Esther takes a stick of chalk from her pocket and writes on a slat of wood: MY—
Another word on the next slat: LONG—
Then one more word: NAME—
AS ESTHER WRITES the final E the loop ends, the time resets to three P.M. Once more Esther sits gazing at the Star of Riga, going nowhere, the weather-bleached planks by her foot not yet written on.
Yet those three words mattered. They matter now.
Holly must have thought that Esther Little was a crazy old witch but what if Esther was transmitting an instruction to me? I begin to subrecite Esther Little’s name, her true name, her living name that she taught me three selves ago, to Pablo Antay Marinus in the half hour between night and the pink-and-blue Australian dawn on the Emu’s Claw rock over the Swan River valley. Esther fixed it indelibly, she said. Could she truly have seen so far ahead, so long ago? One by one I subintone the syllables. Hesitantly at first, afraid to make an error and invalidate the sequence, but the pace picks up until the name is the player and I the instrument. Is it wishful thinking, or do I sense a coalescence in the head of the memory-Esther? Word by phrase by line, archaic Wadjuk Noongar gives way to nineteenth-century Wadjuk Noongar. The space around us brightens as particles and threads of Esther’s soul reassemble, reintegrate, reravel …
… and without noticing I’ve finished, I’ve finished.
Esther Little gazes out at the Star of Riga. The ship blasts its horn. Across the water, in Essex, a vehicle reflects a tiny pinprick of June sunshine. Esther picks up her flask and peers down it. It looks as if the loop is restarting.
Why hasn’t it worked?
A subvoice tells me, You speak Noongar like a chain saw.
My soul pulses. My teacher disappeared for forty-one years.
The oldest Horologist looks into her bucket. Not many fish, for forty-one years. I guess my signs found you?
One from Trondheim and one from Poughkeepsie.
Esther allows herself an amused growl. The Script contained an invitation to the Chapel. Is a Second Mission in the offing?
Two days away, or possibly only one by now.
Time we were back, then. Esther’s soul egresses the chakra of her long-ago remembered forehead and hovers, rotating through 360 degrees. Goodbye, she tells the vanished day.