Wind warbling — white wisps whip wildly — why did we come here, you and I? We thought we were walking without aim, but we knew this was the way to the cemetery. There must have been a reason, but I search my mind, and it isn’t there.
We have to go off the footpath now. All the newer graves are deeper in. Having come all this way, we may as well go and see it.
It’s hard to see ahead of us through the thick fog, but we remember the way. Stone tablets pass by our feet, old, crooked, their faces eroded and lost in the wind, like corpses in and of themselves. Some headstones are still upright, some have fallen, many are cracked open and covered in bloody red sandstone rust, granite entrails exposed to the world; it’s a morbid landscape, fitting in a place for dead things, but it has an uncanny feeling to it, nevertheless.
We go on in lockstep. The grass is soft, still wet with the teary morning dew, and yet I hear the sound of each blade crushed wordlessly beneath our feet. The sound resonates against something in my mind. It calls forth some thought, some memory, but I can’t quite grasp what it is, only feel around the edges of something that I know has to exist.
I look at you. You stare forwards, the condensation of your breath invisible in the morning fog. It still surprises me that you’re here. It shouldn’t, really, but it does, coming down here on almost no notice after years away.
When was the last time we met? I should know, but I can’t seem to find a precise answer. It was some time ago, when I went out to the big city to see you at the museum where you work. It was closing time, though we could stay a little longer, so we walked together through the spotlit mausoleum.
“It’s pretty cool,” you said, in that familiarly excitable tone of yours. “We’ve got all sorts of stuff here. Lots of fossils, and you know I love fossils.”
It was true. You’d made that clear enough, when we were younger, whenever the three of us — because there were three of us, weren't there — decided to hang around one another and let our orbits overlap for a while. You would go on and on about whatever you felt like, and we’d listen.
“It’s so awesome,” you’d always say, half shouting. We were always half shouting, because we were little kids, and we had to make sure people knew we existed, always heard if not seen. “Just from some stuff we find in the ground, we know about all these different kinds of animals that aren’t here anymore.”
I remember just thinking it was a little sad that they were dead to begin with. If you asked me now, I’d say it was a bit of a morbid thought, thinking about all those vanished species. I was outnumbered, though, by that third person — remember, there were three of us — who said “no, I think it’s cool. It’s like proof that they existed.”
Proof that they existed. Sometimes I wonder, in a hundred years, if there’ll be any proof that I existed. How long it’ll take for my name to fade away, worn down by the wind.
We continued walking through the museum, as we spoke. Sharing our memories as we weave our way through rows of taxidermy beasts, their plastic eyes piercing through the darkness. We move backwards in time, through the Cenozoic, the Mesozoic, the Palaeozoic, corpses turning into fossils turning into little frozen shards of rock, barely recognisable as anything at all. It’s there that we stop, and you turn, and you say to me, “do you ever think about entropy?” Your voice grows quiet, the usual bubbling excitement fading away.
“Entropy?”
“You know, like how there’s a certain amount of order in the universe, and no matter what we do, we lose it all the time. Something like that, I don’t know. I’m not really an expert on this sort of stuff. But it just got me thinking, like…all this stuff here. It’s all just going to disappear someday, no matter what.” You paused. “I guess keeping all of these things is all we can do. Trying to move against it.”
“Swimming upstream.”
“Something like that.”
Wind whistling — whispering, whirling, wrapping around us — in front of us, something begins to emerge from the mist, the sight pulling me out of my thoughts. A cracked and jagged figure, its broken, fractal arms erupting from the ground with its hands raised up, as if thunderstruck by some petrifying truth. We move closer and closer, stopping as we reach its feet. It’s a dead tree, its trunk split apart close to the base.
“Did it catch on fire?” You reach out and touch the blackened bark, little flakes of charcoal dandruff coming apart at your fingertips. “It must have been struck by lightning, too.”
One branch left hanging, reaching out, waiting for the other shoe to drop — shouldn’t it have been removed? The council will probably remove it with the rest of the tree later, but still, with all this wind, it doesn’t seem safe. It could fall down at any moment, come undone without warning…
From the thought springs forth a memory. Not the one I’d been reaching for before, no, but a much older one.
It was with our third person. Fresh into the adult world, raw and shivering, still lost and haphazard, we were together at the park, since we had honestly nothing better to do. You’d already moved off by then, out to the big city, ready to wait for nobody. So it was just the two of us, idle on that ancient swing set — it’s gone now, did you know that? We spent so much time there, so long ago, it’s almost a dream to me now. It was always a bit awkward, with three of us and only two seats, but we didn’t care. I should ask you if you remember it.
It was after I’d told them that I wanted to change, that I couldn’t wait anymore, that I wanted to be a me that I was happy with. The conversation had run dry since, and we were just waiting in silence until they asked, “why now? I mean, we’ve been hangin’ around doing nothing for months now. What’s got you motivated all of a sudden?”
“I was just thinking,” I began. “I don’t know. It’s weird. I just thought to myself, you know, I could die right now, right? Like, I could die at any moment, disappear with no warning, and it’s just that— if I did die right now, how would people remember me? Would it be me or would it be me, you know? And I also thought, if I died, what would be on my gravestone?” Their face was inscrutable. Their lips were stretched out like a smile, but it didn’t look like one. No smirk, no light laughs, no sardonic raise of the eyebrow. Just listening. Relaxed, ready to take it all.
“I guess it’s kind of dumb,” I continued. “In a hundred years, nobody will know me anyway. But if my name’s the only thing left, then I want to be my name, not just the one I was given, you know?”
I think I must have cried then, since I didn’t say anything for a bit after that. They just put their hand on my shoulder, the way they liked to do, and told me quiet comforts. Most of the words are lost to me now.
It was after my diction had returned to me that they thought to ask a different ‘why’. If I can remember, if I can tease out the memory…I think it was a “why do you wanna work at the library?”
Yes, the library. I would always find myself drawn there, leaving my home with no destination only to arrive at that library, moving towards the back, past the stories and novels and encyclopedias to stand in the archives at the back, running my hands over the smooth mahogany shelves, breathing through the little particles of dust that were dancing in the light. I remember thinking about what world it was built in, how everything changed around it, every day a scraping of the palimpsest, and it stood alone, preserved through the years. They renovated it in ‘57, didn’t they? I wonder, then, if someone else had stood there once, before then, and wondered about the world the library was originally made for.
Wind whining — “I think we’ve gone the wrong way,” I say. “This shouldn’t be here.”
You turn from the dead tree to look at me. “What should we do?”
“Maybe we should come back later, after the fog lifts. It’ll be easier to find the way then.”
“Do you remember which way we came from?”
“Um.” We stand gormlessly for a bit, before I speak again. “If we just walk in a random direction, we’ll reach the curb eventually, won’t we?”
“I guess we’ll do that, then.”
You nod. We walk.
The words hang alongside misty waterdrops in the air. We move forwards tentatively. Now that we have our destination, we’re not so sure of our course. The headstones are all upright now, but they’re hidden in the mist. We push through anyway, into the mystery.
I remember, now. What the grass reminded me of. That sound.
Like flicking my hands through the pages of old archives.
Like the clicking of ancient typewriters.
Like the crackle of the fire and the flames.
Yes, the fire. The elephant in the room. I’d been trying not to think of it, but there goes that. It’s why you came back here to begin with, to help with the cleanup.
“They found out why the fire started, you know. They told me this morning.”
“What was it?” You turn to face me.
“It was the lightning, after all.”
You frown. “The lightning rod” —
“Blown off in the wind. Then the library’s roof collapsed, and the fire spread inside.”
Silence, for a moment. Then you speak. “I guess that makes sense. I’ve heard the storms have been getting worse every year.”
I say nothing.
We’d been digitizing the records. Nobody knows why it hadn’t already been done. Most of them had been backed up when the fire happened, but we weren’t finished yet. Who knows how many documents are just gone now, eaten by the flames. Turned into entropy.
My office was destroyed. Perhaps I should be glad that there was nothing too important there, compared to the rest of the archives. Only things that mattered to me, my archive within the archives. Old photographs, letters from my predecessors, my precious fossil monitor. The transparent back, the rounded corners, the almost triangular silhouette. It was shaped like… something. I’m not sure what to call it. It was shaped like my memories, I suppose.
It doesn’t matter, anyway. It’s all gone now.
You stop. You squint. You speak. “Is that…”
“I think it is.” Yes, it looks like it is. Somehow, out of the fog, our third person. Proof that they existed, still upright, carved into the stone.
No words are said. You kneel down and put your hand on their shoulder, the way they liked to do.
The library will have to be rebuilt. Another layer of seasoning for the pan. Is it such a bad thing? I imagine someone else, far off in the future, standing in the library, wondering about the world it was remade for, like I had when I was younger, and someone else must have before it was rebuilt the first time.
Wind whizzing, winding, writhing around me, I stand still in the current, amongst the dead stones and living names.
