Exchange Place (16 page)

Oubliette

I woke. I must have dozed off as a consequence of the dope. For a moment I didn’t know quite where I was. I came to myself at my desk, left cheek on the open pages of the Muji notebook I’d been writing in, the Japanese Sailor pen in my right hand. I had been dreaming of John Harland, and, as I tried to remember the details of the dream in order to write them down, I suddenly remembered the Japanese box he had given me the last time I set eyes on him. He was wont to do that, present me with little knick-knacks from time to time: a netsuke tortoise whose head withdrew into the shell – fake, but very well done, he said, crafty piece of work; a Georgian silver salt-spoon; a lighter shaped like a miniature gun; that kind of thing. I see him now in my mind’s eye, smiling as he stands before me in a blue cotton jacket, showing me his hands, turning them this way and that to emphasize their emptiness. He cups them, rubs them together, and opens them to reveal a small package wrapped in blue cartridge paper. He hands it to me with a flourish, and I take it. He has done this kind of magic trick on me before. The package is light in my hand. I smile, and nod. Don’t open it until you get home, he said, and I left, and I never saw him again.

When I got home I undid the package. Inside was a buff cardboard box inscribed ‘The Belfast Ropework Company Limited: Ropes, Cords, Lines and Twines’. When I opened it contained yet a smaller parcel wrapped in pale green crêpe paper, and on unwrapping that I found a small cardboard box with an interlocking labyrinth pattern on the lid. I lifted the lid and inside was what? I shook out the object and held it between thumbs and forefingers, examining it, turning it over and over to admire the complicated marquetry of what seemed to be a rectangular solid about one and a half inches by one by one. I looked again at the box in which it came and saw that jammed against the underside of the lid was a postage-stamp-sized piece of folded paper. I took a philatelic tweezers to it and teased it out. Unfolded, the leaflet measured some three inches by two, and I had to take a magnifying glass to it to read the tiny print of what looked a set of instructions. ‘
MAME’
it began, 14-step Japanese Trick Box. But the more I read the more I realized it was a description, rather than a user’s manual. I quote a little here from the text which is before me as I write. The mosaic and wood inlaid work a traditional handicraft are used. In this case, the marquetry and wood inlaid work serves as the pattern for the box; and it is thinly sliced and pasted on the box. This pattern also to maintain proper function of the trick box. The trickbox, with its advanced technological aspects, requires preseverance [
sic
] to manufacture. Despite this intellectually fascinating design and function, the trickbox is anything but mechanical. The feel and sound by which the tree runs are simple and gentle. This is the charm of the trickbox. ‘
MAME’
is bean in Japanese. Under this last line Harland had written, From Harland to Kilfeather.

Underneath that again was a diagram of a box covered in numbers and directional arrows. I thought this might truly be the instructions. So I set about trying to open the box according to what little sense I could make of the diagram. Solid though the box seemed, it weighed too lightly for that. But the chamfered edges were smooth to the touch and showed no palpable means of ingress. I took the magnifying glass to it and could see no joins. I pushed and pulled at it every which way for a good half-hour, but for the life of me I could not get it to open. I tried it again three or four times a day for a day or two; again I failed, and I put it away in a place I forgot about, which I’m trying to remember now. I go through all the drawers in my room, from desk to cabinet to the two miniature chests, and discover many things I’d forgotten, but not the trick-box. I think of my procedures for putting things away, whether in a safe place, or too safe a place, or a thoughtless place, or somewhere I might identify later by some mnemonic, some incongruous but related image that might serve for the thing itself, a locus in the memory palace. I’ve been reading a good deal of French lately, and I think of a nineteenth century French-English phrasebook I bought in the market many years ago, charmed by the quaintness of its English as I had been by that of the Japanese leaflet – ‘My postillion has been struck by lightning’ – that kind of thing. I can see its faded gilt lettering glowing on an autumnal Morocco spine. But where exactly is it? I search for some time before I find it on a top shelf I have to take the three-step library ladder to. I ease out the book and crane my hand into the space behind, and find the box which contains the trick-box and the little leaflet. I take out both trick-box and diagram, trying to figure it out again. I turn the box over and over trying to find some purchase on it. Then unwittingly I do something or other I’ve never done before; there is a click, and I find an end panel of the box has shifted a fraction of an inch from its bearings. And bit by slow bit, sometimes backtracking and beginning again, trying this combination and that, I eventually crack the secret of the trick-box: a sequence of fourteen steps that turns out to be blindingly simple once you know how it works, each step leading inevitably to the next. Now I can do it with my eyes shut, for everything is in the movement, which is palpable and audible.

The inner compartment contains a miniscule scroll tied with the finest of threads. I open it. 41 Rue du Sentier, it reads, in a tiny nineteenth-century legal hand. And that is all. Intrigued, I put the address between quote marks and look for it on the internet. It is in Paris. Among the 54,300 results I come across a list of addresses of historical interest, including 41 Rue du Sentier, described as ‘
maison du notaire Jacques Ferrand, 1838
’. Further investigation reveals that the solicitor Jacques Ferrand is not a historical person but a character in
Les Mystères de Paris
, a sensationalist novel by Eugène Sue published in 1838. This leads me to an English translation of the novel in which the house is described in some detail. It has a lodge, a garden, outhouses, and offices approached by a stone staircase, all in various stages of picturesque dilapidation. I turn to Google Maps and drag the pegman icon to 41 Rue du Sentier on Street View. A modest shop front in a narrow, empty street, it looks nothing like the house in the book. It bears no name, only the number 41 above the door. The blinds are drawn. As I pan along the street I know I have been here before, in the garment district, walking past window displays of bolts of cloth and tailor’s dummies, I would have walked past No. 41 without registering it then. And I get that uncanny feeling sometimes generated by Street View, that one is actually there, a disembodied spirit roving along a street in the here and now, except it is not now, for the Street View photographs are continually outmoded by the present. There is a time lag. The Rue du Sentier I am viewing is no longer there. It is a ghost. And I picture Harland walking down that ghost street years ago perhaps, though whether it was his hand or that of another that was responsible for the scroll in the Japanese box, or whether it was magicked there from some other dimension, I have no way of knowing.

Aura

It was seven o’clock and Kilpatrick stood before the door of 41 Rue du Sentier. Earlier that day he had woken with a hangover, what was the French?
Une gueule de bois
. A wooden gob. Like a puppet, he thought. Nevertheless he had a clear memory of the night before, especially the dream, though he could not remember how he got home. Over breakfast he thought of how he might write an account of the dream, and made some perfunctory notes in the
A
6
notebook. Shifting kaleidoscopic patterns. Convolutes of intertwining tubes. He could see it in his mind’s eye as if in a cinema, and hear the sounds of rainfall on the trees. On returning to his room he looked for his briefcase but it could not be found. He rang the concierge, who informed him that he had neglected, a thousand pardons, to tell him earlier that his briefcase had been left in reception that morning, courtesy of a Monsieur Gordon. Kilpatrick went to his room and opened the briefcase. He took out the
A
5
notebook into which he habitually wrote up the musings of the
A
6
notebook. He opened it to see a full page in a hand not his own, a neat miniscule that got a maximum of words into the line. My Dear Kilpatrick, it read, thought you might like to have this. You won’t remember it, but you were talking in your sleep last night in the car, nineteen to the dozen, and I took the liberty of having Odilon record what you said. You were amazingly lucid, old man, I could almost see what you were dreaming myself, and I thought a transcript might be of interest you. So here it is, the only copy, for your eyes only; and until tomorrow evening, yours, Gordon.

Kilpatrick began to read and saw that it was so, that this was an account of what he had dreamed and how he saw and heard it. The sounds do not have the very precise frequency. For this reason, their combination is not organized according to their height but rather according to juxtaposition of tones, and so on, until he arrived in a different terrain where he became someone else, or else this was who he had always been. He saw himself looking at himself in the dream passport. He realized he was the man in the picture. A shot rang out. He took his own passport from the briefcase and looked at his photograph and his name and his autograph. I am John Gabriel Kilpatrick, he said. I am in Room 36 of the Hôtel Chopin in Paris, and I am writing a book which will feature extracts from books, fictional or otherwise, set in Paris, whether by writers living or dead, for the living writers would not write what they do were it not for the dead writers, whom they mirror, whether consciously or unconsciously. But I have been diverted from the path I thought myself on, and I find myself on another, which is proving interesting. Rue du Sentier indeed. He closed the notebook. His hangover had not entirely dissipated and he was still tired. He stretched himself on the bed and fell into a doze. He would pass the day at his leisure, have lunch perhaps in the Musée d’Orsay, perhaps taking in a little shopping before proceeding to his assignation.

Now it was seven o’clock and Kilpatrick stood before the door of 41 Rue du Sentier. By the light of the streetlamp he could see it was a plain shop front with no name above the door, just the number. He thought of an Edward Hopper painting. He took out the key that was in his pocket and opened the door. He went in and closed the door behind him. It was dark but the Venetian blinds were not fully drawn and lamplight filtered in though the gaps in the slats. He saw a desk in the middle of the floor and a man standing behind it. Kilpatrick made to greet the man before he realized it was a tailor’s dummy. He went over and examined it. The dummy was wearing a tweed suit, English 1960s cut, brown herringbone with a faint orange windowpane check, jacket with slanted hacking pockets, narrow-cut trousers with turn-ups. He turned to the desk. There was a buff cardboard ring binder on the desk, and a handwritten note, which read, If the suit fits, wear it. He took off his overcoat and his jacket and took the jacket off the dummy and tried it on. It could have been made for him. There was a cheval mirror in the corner of the shop and he went over and saw himself darkly, turning this way and that to admire the way the slats of light fell on the windowpane check. He went back to the desk and opened the ring binder. It contained a substantial typescript. The first page bore the legend
X
+
Y
=
K
. He was flicking through the pages when his eye fell on the name Kilpatrick. His heart skipped a beat. He read a paragraph:

Macaulay, Kilpatrick’s
GP
, had referred him to a Dr Holmes, whose premises at Alpha Chambers were located in the linen district. Gloomy Victorian buildings loomed above the damp pavements and the air was redolent with lint and coal smoke. Even since before the War, the industry had been in decline, but whole streets still remained that were almost exclusively devoted to textile agencies and outlets – imposing offices of exporters in fine damasks, long blank-windowed warehouses, little dim-lit shops that specialized in things like yarns and threads, diapers, handkerchiefs, art linen. He had taken the tram to Corporation Square. From there it should have been only a few minutes walk to the Alpha building in Steam-mill Lane, but Kilpatrick’s sense of the district was poor, and though he could see the entrance to the building in his mind’s eye – he had been interviewed there some years previously – he could not properly visualize its whereabouts. As he took yet another wrong turn he heard the spin-cycle din of a surveillance helicopter overhead. Feeling the invisible ray of its telephoto vision on the back of his neck, he looked up briefly. It hovered motionlessly on the many-fathomed wash of its own noise, dispassionately recording his movements. At least
they
would know where he was going, he thought ruefully …

As he skimmed the book further he felt a growing sense of bewilderment. Some bits were clearly fiction, but others chimed with his own memories, whether of his waking or his dreaming life. For example, the Kilpatrick in the book was prone to migraine, as Kilpatrick himself had been in his teens, and passages such as the following reflected his own experience:

Common to many experiences of migraine is the aura, a term first applied to the sensory hallucinations immediately preceding certain epileptic seizures. On closing the eyes, some patients experience a visual tumult or delirium, in which latticed, faceted and tessellated motifs predominate – images resembling mosaics, honeycombs, or Turkish rugs. These evanescent figments tend to be brilliantly luminous, coloured, highly unstable, and liable to sudden kaleidoscopic transformations. They are usually no more than a preamble to the major portion of the visual aura. Usually the patient goes on to undergo a longer-lasting and far more elaborate hallucination within the visual field – the migraine scotoma …

The slatted light was beginning to give him the jitters. Kilpatrick closed the ring binder and put it into his briefcase. He needed to get away and think.