Memoranda by Jeffrey Ford Page A

smile.
    â€œHow does it fly?” I asked.
    She shrugged. “How does the island fly? What ocean is this beneath us made of liquid mercury? What are we all doing here? These questions have become rather useless. We do our work and live in hope that someday we will be returned to the lives we have traded away for this commission.”
    I had a thousand questions, but I thought it better not to bother asking them. It was clear to me, as Misrix had warned, that Below was only limited by his imagination in this mnemonic world he had built. Flying heads and islands were probably only the beginning of it. What was pitiful to me was the belief that both Anotine and Nunnly had expressed, namely that they had real lives and loves elsewhere that they longed to return to.
    â€œCome, Cley, let’s eat breakfast,” she said.
    I could only nod, for my mind was preoccupied with an awareness of the tyranny we exercise over the creations of our imaginations. In waking from a dream, we obliterate worlds, and in calling up a memory, we return the dead to life again and again only to bring them face-to-face with annihilation as our attention shifts to something else.
    Anotine led me down the hall to the room I suspected was for dining. There, on the long table, two meals had been served, the steam rising off of them as if they had come that moment from the oven.
    â€œOh, you’re in luck, Cley,” she said as she took the seat beneath the window. “We have caribou steak.”
    How it all had gotten there—the vase of flowers, the pitcher of lemon water with ice, the baby carrots and threaded dumplings—was a phenomenon that should have floored me, but at which I hardly blinked. I sat down, lifted my knife and fork, and set to work on the meat, which was, of course, cooked to perfection.
    â€œDelicious,” I said after my first bite, and I could see in Anotine’s eyes her relief that my utterance was a statement rather than another question.
    We ate in silence for some time. I wasn’t particularly hungry, and as I continued to eat I never really felt full. It was as if we had been preordained to finish the meal. Even the fleeting realization that what I was ingesting were Below’s thoughts didn’t put me off from slicing away at the sizable portion of meat.
    I was just discovering the cheese vein in a threaded dumpling, when Anotine looked up and said, “I study the moment.”
    â€œThe moment?” I asked.
    â€œThat near nonexistent instant between the past and the future. The state we are always in but that we never recognize. When we stop to experience it, it flies away into the past and then we wait for the next one, but by the time we recognize its arrival, it too has gone.”
    â€œWhy does it interest you?” I asked.
    â€œBecause there is a whole undiscovered country there. In my experiments, I try to pry a hole in the seam between past and future in order to get a look at that exotic place,” she said.
    â€œInteresting,” I said, and stared as if caught up in her ideas, when in reality I was caught up in the depth of her eyes.
    â€œThinking makes us forget the instant,” she said. “The present is not a function of thought. It is the absence of it.”
    â€œGood steak,” I said, having lost her meaning early on.
    She smiled, and I forgot not to stare. “God is there in that country,” she said. “When you are finished eating, please take off your clothes.”
    A half-hour later I was in the room at the end of the hall, naked, strapped into a metallic chair, feeling very much like Cley, the specimen. Anotine sat at a table in front of me, holding a small black box with buttons. Laid out before her were a notebook and a pen.
    â€œYou may feel a little discomfort during this experiment,” she said, lifting the pen and writing something in the book. “But don’t worry, this will cause no irreparable