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September 20 - September 22, 2019
What in God’s name is a luminiferous ether when it’s at home?’ ‘It’s the substance through which light moves. Like sound in air, or ripples in water. It’s incredibly interesting, actually. It’s one of those things like the missing elements in the periodic table: we know mathematically that it must exist, but no one has yet proved it by experiment.’
Englishmen were rained on too often to come up with anything that imaginative.
He was not poor – he could afford ten candles and two baths a week. He wasn’t going to throw himself in the Thames for the misery of it all, and God knew most of London was worse off. All the same, he had a feeling that life should not have been about ten candles and two baths a week.
‘Women think that making clockwork leads to an attic full of model trains.’ ‘It mainly does,’ Thaniel pointed out. ‘Actually mine is full of clockwork pears.
he found Mori’s workshop door open and Katsu sunbathing on the step,
‘Won’t she be disappointed when there aren’t fairies?’ Thaniel said. ‘There are, I made some.’
There was a crash from upstairs that sounded a lot like an octopus breaking through the back of a dresser. ‘Katsu seems all right,’ Mori observed.
‘It’s summer, go outside. You’ll feel better for the sun.’ ‘It is not summer, England doesn’t have summer, it has continuous autumn with a fortnight’s variation here and there.
‘You must be Gracie’s Japanese beau!’ ‘I don’t think she has any beaux of any sort. She frightens them off with numbers and sulphur,’
I’m tired, I get things confused when – you’ve heard me do it before. I answer the wrong question, I answer the one that you were going to ask, and not the one that you did.’ ‘What are you saying?’ ‘I’m – I remember what’s possible, and then forget what becomes impossible,’ he said without moving. ‘You’ve just watched me do it. You forgot to buy the music, so I’ve forgotten how to play it. You were about to tell me about the hotel,’ he repeated. ‘You must have been.’ Thaniel didn’t let his hand drop. ‘What do you mean, remember?’ ‘I mean not seeing or knowing or deducing.’ ‘What’s possible.’
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‘Of everything that might happen, only one thing does, but I start out knowing all of them. Sometimes what’s unlikely is much better or more interesting than what’s likely. So I write it down so that there’s a record of it, when I forget. The book is for dead memories.
Today was a nearer miss than usual. I wrote it ten years ago when I never thought I would leave Japan.’
He looked at her as though he could read her motives listed on the back of her skull.
The trail of dust still hung in the air between her and the blackboard, dry-tasting. Previous mists of it had settled over the folds in her sleeves, lending to the cotton the illusion of the bright lights in silk.
The hives had glass sides so that you could see when the combs were ready, and the peristalsis writhing of the drones.
‘If he were really thinking, he would have intentions, so I would know what he’d do next, but – I – don’t.’
He leaned forward against the mattress, his head cushioned in his arms, and faded to nothing but listening.
he hid under a quilt in the parlour with Thaniel’s never-read copy of Anna Karenina. The Russians, he said, knew how to write genuinely boring novels, and he would only stop being afraid when he was bored enough. They were all the more boring because he could remember reading the end in the recent future.
‘When I forget something, I forget what I’ve said about it. Or written. It’s like having learned some French at school and then forgotten it later, but being able to recall that you used to understand.’
‘It’s your fault for bringing her back; you must have known what I’d say.’ Mori sighed. ‘I hardly ever know what you’re going to say. You change your mind too often.’
