Turn Left at Venus Page 2

  “You mean the third rule,” said The Space Traveler.

  “No, not that one,” said Otzie Lu, “I mean the rule known as non-interference.”

  “I am accustomed to that rule,” said The Space Traveler, “it is in the Code, which of course I have always observed.”

  She did not dwell on the uneasy sense that she had experienced back in her own world, when the early space travelers from other advanced worlds first came, standing and staring, collecting information, and her people felt that they were being interfered with, simply because those strangers were there, observing.

  The informant briefly outlined what she was about to witness.

  “We do not have such a ceremony where I come from,” The Space Traveler remarked. She almost said, Surely this is a distressing event and a mournful occasion for all, but she refrained, because of the rule of not making prior judgments. She was practiced in detachment in the face of discomfiting events, practiced in taking bizarre points of view

  The Space Traveler followed Otzie Lu to the entrance gate of the Great Hall. She glimpsed its curved golden roofs deep within lavish and blooming gardens enclosed by stone walls, taking her place to one side in the shadows outside the gate. No one looked at her. At the gate, the women were alighting from ground carriages and air carriages, arriving for the event known here as “The Going Out”.

  All those who lived on Otzey were, as The Space Traveler had already noted, apparently women. Their method of reproduction was a question for another time. At this time, the other most solemn question was to be answered.

  They seemed old, these women arriving now, The Space Traveler noted, some sprightly, some evidently enfeebled. Their attire was festive and gay. Skirts that would swirl as they moved, skirts made for dancing. Sequins that glittered, flounces and panels, or an especially dashing cut of shoulders, line of a jacket, cuffs on sleek trousers: their garments were chosen for the best feeling clothing can bestow upon the wearer and for the pleasure of the others. The texture loved by one’s skin. The Otzies evidently were dressed in their favorite party clothes.

  “Do they wear new clothes?” asked The Space Traveler.

  “Some of their clothes are new for the occasion,” said Otzie Lu; “some of them are frocks that have been laid aside for quite some time, unsuitable between then and now.”

  The Space Traveler thought of those wedding gowns on her own world, after the ceremony kept in wardrobes in their dry-cleaning bags for the rest of their owners’ lives.

  The Space Traveler observed the Otzies’ excitement, if that was quite the word. Some seemed as if they had never before been excited in quite this way. Some appeared to be solemn also, or solemn at first, and yet all solemn duty was done. The Space Traveler noticed the tall woman with green hair who had been singing in the market hall, but refrained from waving to her. She’d had no intimation that it might have been a song of farewell.

  “By now,” Otzie Lu informed her, “by now they’ve taken care of everything that needed taking care of, put their affairs in order, and if they haven’t it is now too late so they cannot worry. And the occasion once launched is not to be solemn.”

  Organizing and catering for these parties had become a lucrative business on Otzey; not even the ceremonies for initiations into adulthood or plighting troth with a partner called for such displays of splendor and bravura, for such feats of decoration and entertainment. Ice sculptures that should melt entirely during the night; any of its moments might be its best moments, like a cloudy sky. Streamers and banderoles, mirror balls and glittering pendants, gauzy scrims and screens, masses of blooming plants. The drugs, liquids and vapors, engendering conviviality, ecstasy, surrender.

  And the music on the highest quality high-fidelity systems and presided over by the most brilliant music-mixers, doing their work both controlling and responding to the mood, bringing the joyous gathering from an early stage of greetings and declarations to a height of dancing, and carefully managing the balance, as some would still be dancing while not all at once these women of Otzey began to realize the final stage was arriving, and started to toddle and teeter towards the areas of silken mattresses to choose their final posture, while others allowed themselves to collapse wherever they happened to be as they succumbed. Most of them chose the drugs while some preferred to use methods of the mind; this was an advanced civilization and its people understood the capacity of their minds.

  “Does no one in the party decide that life is too much fun to leave after all?” asked The Space Traveler, while taking note of a particular outfit she might like to acquire a copy of.

  This seemed to be a strange question to her informant, but Otzie Lu’s serene politeness was maintained. “Never,” she answered. “We all know this depth of pleasure is rare in life, and will never come again.” It took a while for this utterance to be translated, but it is always such a pleasure to find genuine consciousness that one does not grudge the extra time.

  The Space Traveler later reported:

  The Otzies know, or believe, that there is more of joy all at once at the Going Out party than anyone could ever experience even if they could make a sum of all the fleeting – there’ll be no other kind anymore – fleeting moments of joy left in this life if you would stay alive or be kept alive, increasingly failing and fading and fragile, not able to stand alone anymore. The Otzies are brought up to know when it’s time to come to a party, and groups of old friends, old in age, and in friendship of long duration, organize a group to attend. New friends also, the good kind of friend old people can make. The last experience in life being of a concentrated joy.

  The Space Traveler and Otzie Lu had lingered at the gate; her informant seemed to relish the sight as much as The Space Traveler did. A few others were also nearby watching the arrivals, for the Otzies had already said their goodbyes and completed what they needed to complete, and it was not the custom for well-wishers to accompany them this far. A peculiar consideration came to mind for The Space Traveler, a novel realization: How happy, she thought, if one’s death coincides with one’s death choice!

  The Space Traveler’s report continued:

  However I must tell you that when I was present, there was a disruption in which later, as I shall relate, some of the inhabitants of Otzey tried to implicate me. I would be glad for the lesson I had already been taught, that humiliation is a necessary stage in exploration.

  Even while I was observing the arrivals, and taking notes from my informant, I was beginning to think of the objections to this kind of cultural practice that would be raised on my home world. Little did I know how soon one of them would be tested!

  For, before I could formulate to Otzie Lu a question about the rituals connected with the Going Out event, we became aware that there was a disturbance at the gate.

  One of the partygoers trying to gain admittance had not come with a friendship group. She was finding her right of entry was being challenged.

  4

  THE BOAT

  You remember things that don’t make sense. Could two children have been alone out on the deck?

  No one else was around. They looked out to the stormy sea.

  In memories as in dreams you see yourself from the outside, you are the viewer as well as the point of view. They were two little girls who would not stay inside when the skies hung low and spreading in the colour of tin and tablespoons, in silver and charcoal, the two of them were bright and shiny, coloured bright, bundled up against the wind though they were on their way to a country where it was always summer, always sunny, where they would go to school and speak English all the time.

  They didn’t know each other’s language but they knew nearly as much, then as much, then more English than any of the old people even the ones who had lived in Chicago and London.

  We know everything about each other, Leyla said. This was one complete utterance Ada would always remember word for word. She understood it to mean: and we always will.

  Even while
she was to discover memory’s labile nature, she never doubted this true memory. It was reproduced faithfully each time, she was sure, and the inevitable degradation applied only to the fading of the other utterances of that moment. Making memories where you remember the flavour, the feel, but not the words.

  The waves crash against the ship’s hull – hull, bow, stern, side, words they knew in English. Gunwales. They learned English on the ship but Ada cannot dredge from memory’s swamps the person who taught them, she sees a small library room on the ship, with a low wooden ceiling, but this is the library room on the ship when she was much older, so much older, taking another ship to another place, a ship that reminded her of the earlier ship, with its own library room where she learned the words that now are the first words she can think of.

  The adults sat at the long tables in the dining hall. Ada sees their bundles and suitcases sitting alongside them throughout the meals, which they would not have been. Would they have? No, wouldn’t the bundles and cases be kept in cabins and closets? Did people on the boat lug their belongings with them all the time? There is no one to ask, no one remains who was there, no one who could furnish details which she would add to her memories, details that would become her own memory. As far as she can recall now, she has always remembered the bundles and suitcases. And the way the adults kept saying no one should take the old worries with them.

  Nobody ever discussed conditions on the boat once they had left it, left the ship, it was a ship, a big passenger ship, coming ashore one grey day in the land of sunshine, and the first thing they did was look around for kangaroos – someone on the boat had told them about kangaroos and had led Ada and Leyla to believe that flocks of them would be bouncing on the wharfs and streets and everywhere they looked or went. Ada is sure of this, the way Leyla and she looked for the kangaroos, because her family and her family both remembered it for years to come, and to this day Ada can’t be sure whether telling the two little girls to expect to see kangaroos was one of those jokes adults might play, looking complicit at each other over the children’s heads, amusing themselves with the children’s gullibility, with their trust, or whether whoever it was did actually expect they’d see this creature at once or whether there were layers tones nuances they could not have recognised, they’d have to live a lot longer to be able to recognise.

  It became a saying among them, ‘looking for the kangaroos’, meaning expecting something that would never arrive, or wanting something that did not exist, or people who bought lottery tickets (something her mother despised for reasons Ada never fathomed or questioned while she might have asked). As for the kangaroos, Ada and Leyla didn’t know whether they were the size of insects or of elephants, and when they didn’t loom giantly the little girls peered closely at the ground as queues were formed in the halls for the examination and stamping of papers. Which probably happened, or that part comes from other people’s memories or images.

  Tell me what we did then. Tell me where we went. Tell me how we came to live in those homes of childhood, those separate homes in far apart suburbs in different directions from the city centre. That empty city spreading vastly to the west away from its ocean shores, away from its harbour and along a river and towards the blue-grey hills.

  There is no one to tell her. They all died before such questions came to Ada. In the immediate future of their arrival in the country, all that – the relocations to suburbs, step by step, first a hostel, eventually a house – would have been part of her own childish memory in those years and the following years. Each separate memory, in order to survive, has to be played, like a song on your playlist, to keep its place, and it has to be played again so as not to fade and yet each playing changes it, this we know.

  Ada came to consciousness at that time. On the boat. That’s what she realised, or decided. She became herself, not yet nine years old. She has no memories from before that time, there are only ghosts and glimmers of mind-matter like fading dreams, old-movie sounds and images from others’ stories. For she was obedient to the adults saying that their life was starting now, she was as if hypnotised to forget anything from before. I became who I am is what Ada thought for a long time after, for a long time this thought having a sense of freshness and insightful truth until it became a habit of thought that could have its origin in any kind of myth-making, self-deception, reflexive falsity.

  Who even knows who they really are at the age of eight or nine?

  In Lueshira there’s a world where you can be implanted with any kind of memory you want. Anyone who can afford it applies to re-imagine their past.

  Which book, it was the third Lueshira book. The one Ada wrote mostly in France, after she had spent that summer in Budapest and learned more about how whole populations could be implanted with new memories.

  ‘I’m trying to remember,’ Ada tells Noemi, ‘and only because you asked me to.’

  The ship, the adults, Leyla and Ada scurrying along decks and corridors, hand in hand, acquainted with so many shoes and all those shins clad in loose cuffed trousers or mended stockings, some bare legs. Ladies’ bare legs, really? Couldn’t there have been. There were some other children on board, she and Leyla never spent time with them as far as she can remember. Can anyone remember truly anything after a century or near enough, you don’t remember. We met as little girls on the migrant boat, they said it countless times over all those years she would not ever count. We met as little girls on the boat bringing migrants from Old Europe to the New World.

  They woke asking for each other until they were allowed to sleep together, on that big ship that must have been all their world.

  We met as children, they would relate in the years hence dotted with their reunions, we have known each other since we were small. These origin stories die away; it’s as if they are of importance for only a limited and specific time in our lives, lives in which no moments contain all of the life, the life in whole being larger than its moments – just as memory cannot contain all of itself at any one time; the memories in memory shift about, are pushed away, drop off beyond the borders, become compressed, flattened, crowded out by fresh memories, made, multiplied, reproduced, existing in simultaneous versions.

  Lying where she is, not moving not speaking, Ada remembers something about memory, that memory is a theatre of the past, not, as you might think, an instrument for surveying the past.

  Memory changes, this is known. But Ada remembers shreds of the originary experience on the boat: darting among the legs of the adults, the ever-present baggage, the way Leyla and she went everywhere hand in hand, even slept on one narrow bed in a rocking room full of deep breaths, of snoring, they had an unspoken pact to ignore all the ugly adult noises. What she remembers is but a small part of the whole experience but it is her memory.

  At first little Ada did not understand that their parting was not more than temporary.

  They looked for the kangaroos then their mothers had to take them into different lines of people.

  Where’s Leyla?

  Leyla had been taken somewhere else.

  They were in a new country, everything was new.

  They were in the new country and if it turned out that her father was still alive he could find her here.

  ‘We have to learn again everything,’ her mother said. ‘We are seeing the world for the first time.’

  ‘And we have to forget,’ Ada was told also.

  Ada had already forgotten when she had to forget, and always kept as a deeply buried secret her thoughts.

  She tried to tell her mother that Leyla would be waiting for her.

  After a while, she didn’t try anymore.

  Her mother slapped her. She said she was sorry.

  Here came the first period of time without Leyla in it.

  Ada drew in her book and wrote poems made up of made-up words so that no one might know what they meant, unless they did know. As if she were trying to find someone who would know, but no one ever saw her poems, and she left her chi
ldish notebooks behind. And they never showed up.

  Her childhood was related in the books she read, that’s where Ada could find it if she ever needed to, was asked to. They made her memories, those books, even if they were all mixed in her mind; the early reader does not know there are categories and scales of value, and eras, and chronology. Date of publication, reputation, genre, none of that, though these days it’s the first thing you know.

  Ada arrived in Australia and sat in a corner and read. Sometimes people came into the room and could not see her.

  5

  READING LIGETI

  I had heard of A.L. Ligeti before, but this time I didn’t just keep on following links, skimming, scrolling, seeing if something would jump out from the curated arts and politics stories of the day. I’d been doing that a bit longer than I’d meant to, probably. It was work. Research the world you live in, I tell my students. Then later, making some tea and looking out the window, I realised what I was thinking about, was trying to remember, not actually considering should I sign up for ad-free Spotify. The writer who’d mentioned the story mostly disapproved of its premise, on behalf of real life, mostly because it would be too hard to draw the line.

  It seemed that in the story Ligeti had invented what seemed a satisfying answer to the question not quite formulated.

  Which is, basically, how are you going to die?

  I had been finding my thoughts frequently troubled or even animated by the sense that end-of-life was sending me questions: when and where and how. I’m old but not all that old; many people I’ve known have died, people of my age group, let’s say my age plus or minus ten. Seventy is not far off and I don’t know if I’ll make it, am not always sure I want to. Things would have to be different.

  I found a PDF of ‘Going Out’ online.

  In this story The Space Traveler gets about the universe in a vehicle well known in her own world, so no need to say much about it. She enters a pod and there are straps and monitors and she goes to sleep and she wakes up on some other planet in some other galaxy, known as the home of the Otzey people.