Interior Design by Philip Graham

more notes, delighted with this talkative young woman.
    Yani swatted a fly away from her baby’s face and continued. “When babies finally speak their first word, they make their choice for this life. They forget the past.”
    â€œBut how do you know they forget?”
    Yani paused, seemingly entranced at the depths of ignorance revealed by Barbara’s question, and then she said, “If I could remember my past life, I wouldn’t have made the mistakes I’ve made in this one. If my eyes are open, why should I stumble?”
    Now Barbara turns back to the blank screen. Why indeed? she thinks, and types, “The Isono’s chain of lives is divided by an unbridgeable gap of memory.” Barbara pauses, wonders what her friend might make of this sentence, and as she continues to write she worries whether she’s moving closer to or farther away from the Isono.
    *
    Martin chews his pen and stares at the latest version of his latest sentence: “The Isono practice an agricultural expressionism at odds with their usual social constraints.” Where should he go from here? Barbara’s swift clacking at the computer behind him sounds like the collective scraping of hand hoes against the ground, and when he closes his eyes he could still be sitting at the edge of those clearings in the forest, unable to enter, watching lines of men and women scraping and piling soil into small pyramids where yams would soon grow.
    Occasionally Martin had touched a sandaled toe to a tiny corn stalk for a secret thrill when no one was looking. Why couldn’t that have been enough for him—when he did manage to sneak into those fields, what good had it done him?
    If only someone had answered his questions! “Why plant corn here, yams over there?” he once called out to Busu, a frail- looking elder who somehow worked harder than anyone else. But the old man merely said, “You would only understand if you were an Isono,” adding with a wry smile, “and then there would be no need to speak.”
    Martin tried Kwamla, hoping he would be as talkative as his wife, Yani. “Why do you arrange your fields differently from Goli and Aia?” he asked. Kwamla averted his eyes, staring down at the soil, and said, “That’s our custom.”
    At Martin’s exasperated frown Kwamla grinned and put down his hoe. The elaborate scarification marks on his stomach were dark sweaty beads, and he looked so healthy then. He mimicked holding a notebook and wagged a finger across an invisible page. “Why do you always make marks on paper?”
    Martin laughs quietly now, as he did then. He picks up his pen, murmurs, “It’s our custom,” and tries another sentence: “The crop organization of the farming fields is an unusual form of individual expression in a society of such tight social constraints.” But wait, he thinks, didn’t I just write something like that?
    He looks over to Barbara. Her head is bent toward the computer, all those little green words shining back at her on the dark screen—how easy it is for her to write.
    â€œBarb, I’m going to stretch my legs outside for a bit.”
    She barely nods, keeps clacking away.
    He wears a jacket this time, zipped up tight before he hits the sidewalk. Intent on walking nowhere in particular, Martin continues block after block, past clusters of shops and apartments. Down a side street, he stops: near the back of a restaurant an old man in a frayed, dark coat is poking through a dumpster, dropping who knows what into a plastic garbage bag. What will happen to him when it’s really cold—isn’t there a shelter to go to?
    Martin backs up, turns down another street, and sees a shining movie marquee. He realizes with some surprise that he and Barbara still haven’t been to a movie since their return. But no one’s in the ticket booth, and he can see through the glass door that the