Opalite Wires

I have just finished breakfast with Windaline. It consisted of a pair of large eggs, both the size of fists and a pale gray color. She mixed them into a pan as large as a bowl and stirred in meat and flour until it became a flaky batter, which she served in crisps. She handed me the bowl with a spoon and at my hesitation reminded me it was my favorite.

She bade me eat and then left for an adjacent room, where I heard her quietly contact the hospital and argue with them briefly. She argued that I am not yet healed, for a while but the entire thing must have been fruitless because she returned with a reddened face and told me that today we would go shopping. I agreed.

I don't have anything else to do, that I know of.

She has gone upstairs, presumably to prepare for the outing.

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Labels: rael's journal

I now write this from Windaline's residence, which is an apartment in District Arborara. It is fairly large and nicely furnished, though still seems empty somehow. It does not seem too lived in, and when I commented upon this Windaline gave me a smile that I have come to recognize as an uncomfortable one.

She told reminded me that she likes to keep things very clean and even, to an obsessive extent. She began to make up a bed for me on a large divan in the living space, putting down dense, heavy blankets and bringing down several pillows from her room, one of which was in the shape of a stylized skybeast baby. She appeared exhausted and when she asked me if I needed anything else, I declined. She retreated.

Windaline's bed is on the next floor up, in a loft area, and there is a bathroom, a closet, and a kitchen on the landing that I am in, with sparse walls between them. These details came to mind and they're heartening to me. I have the feeling that I remember this place. Even these blankets seem somewhat familiar. They are heavy, almost ruglike, and they bring to mind dusky pale-brown colors and ink-colored rocks and weaponry. These must be memories. I still cannot attach them to anything more coherent.

Windaline left me a small light and from it I can survey the opposite wall. There are some paintings and photographs hanging on it, but the spacing between is slightly uneven. It seems to go against the "clean and even to an obsessive extent" statement that she gave me earlier.

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I write this from outside the hospital. It is the thirteenth hour. It appears that there has been an accident, and many people were wounded and injured, so many that beds containing them have spilled out of the emergency rooms and into the recovery wards where I am. There was a lot of noise and things going on, and when finally one of the head doctors came to aid in overseeing the spillage of patients, he looked over the scripts for each of the patients recovering, including myself, and determined whether they were relatively well enough to leave or not.

I was one of those that he said was in well enough state to leave. I stood from the bed just as they were placing another patient in it, bleeding and unconscious. I tugged the children's book about Low from beneath him, and a couple other baubles that I understood belonged to me, including a vase, a thick ring with a signet I don't remember, and a scarf.

Right now I am waiting on the steps outside the hospital for Windaline. Doctor Claret informed me that she had called her to come take me back home. The light from inside the hospital is dim and flickering, and there are yet more patients being brought in. The road is congested with carriages whose motion is only partly monitored, and they crash and bump into each other like buoys in a river, emitting huffing noises and, occasionally, brief sparks from beneath the orbs of their wheels.

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Windaline brought me the book. It is, as she said earlier, a very simple book illustrated for children in the elementary schools here. There is a map that pulls out from the center of the book, and it is very stylized. The majority of the map represents a topographic birds-eye perspective of Anthem High, with various colors shading different districts, and points indicating the presence of significant governmental or historical buildings. The top-left of the map, and certain patches throughout it, are shaded in a continuous, nondescript dark gray, which in legend is only labeled Low.

I looked at this map and still could not remember anything. Well, actually, this is untrue -- I looked at this map and found something unsettling about it. It does not seem right. I rotated it about, opposite the directions the text indicates it should be viewed from, and still something was backward about it.

The book has small summaries of foundings and wars and photographs of ancient art that was used then to accumulate history, before paper and quill and link were easy to obtain. The major event seems to be something called the Euphorution, which began two centuries prior the establishment of the first dynasty of Anthem High, Nebuliadem. As I was reading this, Doctor Claret entered my room and spotted me reading and laughed. She told me she was amused at seeing such a grown man reading a children's book, and told me that if I learned everything in it, that would most likely be enough to get me out of here.

It seems simple enough, but my mind catches on every sentence, like netting on the hooks of every fact. Every time I attempt to clarify another idea, my mind becomes undone, and then I am broken up into headaches again. It's a children's book, but I can't help feeling frustrated whenever I try to go on. It's not that the reading is difficult, or the words, but it's somehow like I'm trying to learn something extremely high level. Every time I try to take in a new idea, I lose the previous one -- should I come to be able to retain two ideas, they don't make sense together. It's literally as if the author of this book jumps to a completely new idea after every sentence.

I mentioned this to Doctor Claret, who did not appear too troubled. She told me not to feel too pressured, and that forcing my mind too much would not help it. The sun is already setting so I think I will let the book drop for today.

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I was brought again for testing today, with Doctor Claret. She is a very kind if portly and absentminded sort of woman, with thinning hair waxed backward. Her eyes are very bright and rimmed in red and gleam out from the folds in her face like rubies embedded in tanned hide.

Testing involves nothing more than the completion of certain tests that she assures me are only meant to re-evaluate the returning of my "common knowledge." Last week's tests proved that, though I still do not recall major events in my life, I am -- as she puts it -- "attaining common sense at a normal rate," and should be out of this place soon. I already score for average knowledge concerning math, geometry, and other rudimentary school skills; I seem to be lacking, however, in history, such as with things concerning Low.

When I returned to my room, Win was waiting for me. There was food from the hospital on a tray, as well as a glass in which a very thin, delicate-looking item had been placed. It resembled a feather and was very sugary.

Win asked me how I was and I told her that soon I would be able to obtain release, and she smiled and said that was good. I still have not asked her exactly what the nature of her relationship is to me. I suspect that she might be something like my lover, but whenever I bring myself to attempt asking if she is, I feel unsettled. I think it is because, if it's true that we have this sort of relationship, she would be hurt to know that I don't recall any of it, or in fact any affection that I might have ever had for her. I suppose the important thing is that I still care about her enough that I don't want to hurt her.

We chatted and I told her that I do not remember much about Anthem Low, and that is what is keeping me in the hospital. She said that she would bring me an elementary book tomorrow, but had to leave because it was already the thirteenth hour.

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I asked Win about how I may determine the time at night and she seemed confused. She told me that there are no hours at night. It seems that the daylight hours are maximized at approximately 12, and the night itself is one long hour, the 13th.

She asked me what might have given me the idea that the night would be counted. Though it makes sense that my brain would assume consistency for the hours, and assume therefore that the night has hours just as the day does, I asked her, if it wasn't possible that the nights have hours at all. Perhaps it was my dazed memory supplying this information for me.

She replied that in Anthem Low there is always darkness, and its residents count throughout all of it. This is common knowledge; she suggested that I had confused Anthem High and Anthem Low, and asked me if there is anything more I am concerned about. I asked her further about Anthem Low, which I cannot seem to recall, and she told me that my injury had occurred when I had attempted for some reason to visit Low. I might have been trying to drink, she said. It seems many visit Low to inebriate themselves, though the place is dangerous.

My head began to ache, and when I expressed this Win seemed very concerned; she left to obtain tea, then apologized and said that she had to leave, but she would be back soon. I think I will frame more questions about Low for that time.

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The numbers of the day turn the moment sunlight breaches the distant mountains and lays illumination to the eaves. It seems ambiguous to me that time should be measured in such a manner and I wonder if there is anything different. On some of the larger public plateaus there are thick poles at about waist-height, upon which rest large, flat plates with markings, which I recall are called ticks, and these are significant to the telling of time. One of these dials is located in the garden of the hospital and from my window I can watch the shadows shift across it, enumerating my time. About halfway through the day, however, the shadow of the tower ward dims the entire dial, and so an indeterminate amount of time passes in dilution, before sunset again begins to gently trace out the time in orange and pink.

Just now the sunlight has only just begun. At the quarter-mark of it will be the first round of nurses; three-fifths of a fraction there will be morning food, and at the next quarter, more nurses, and so on.

It will still be a while yet before I am visited by anyone, but I find it difficult to sleep. I think I will ask the nurses to spare me light for this upcoming night. Somehow the dimness is disconcerting. Somehow in the night it feels that the shadows rise and brush the room gently, feeling it out, and I can hear it prodding at wood and fabric and flesh.

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I woke up two mornings ago. I have been told that I had asleep for three months following a dangerous accident in which I apparently nearly died. A girl who spoke to me informed me this at my bedside, and appeared to become upset when I asked her who she was, and then questioned her concerning my own identity.

I understood a little thereafter that I had amnesia, and further testing with doctors failed to come up with any clearer diagnosis. I can recall some rudimentary knowledge like how to write, how to eat, how to go about daily basic survival, but I can't remember the fall or anything before it, or indeed much else other than what happened just a couple days ago.

Because it seems that I still have trouble ordering my thoughts and keeping clear hold on my memories, and because I also appear to lack some chronological reasoning in general, I was given this notebook, and instructed on the proper way to date its entries. They also suggest writing my name and a description of myself, should my memory falter in the short-term, and I lose and then come across this journal again thinking it is someone else's.

My name is Ourael Da'en-Avette. At the time of this writing, I have little hair on my head, and I have tremendous scarring on the right-back region of my skull, as well as on my right shoulder, shoulderblade, and upper arms. The hair growing back on my skull and face seems to be colored black and silver as if with age, though I am told I am not old, and the color in general is different than the brownish-yellow-red that dominates in the people that come and go from my room, and go back and forth outside my window.

The girl I wrote about earlier is named Windaline Zirconai and she calls me Rael. Everyone calls her Windy or Win and she seemed pleased when I took up this habit yesterday evening.

She is here now. It seems we are going to eat dinner. I have told her that I am coming, and so for now I will set the pen down.

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Labels: rael's journal

In the cellar I found some cans of paint. There was no green, so I wonder how the door was painted over in the first place. These are my options:

a) The paint was used up when last painting the door
b) I borrowed paint
c) I hired someone to paint

But there seems to me to be something wrong about this. Win has warned me that my medicine can make me suspicious of small things, and it is comforting to write off my paranoia to chemicals.

I moved around objects to discover the cans of paint, and it occurs to me now that I saw streaks of dark green paint beneath the cans, too huge an amount of it to be accidental, so I think I will cross off the possibility that I hired someone to do it. Of course it's still somewhat likely, but I don't think someone hired would waste so much on the floor, and in such a clumsy expanse. A streak here, a streak there. The streaks of the brush do not match with any brushes I happen to have.

The paint I found is colored blue. It seems that it dries quickly, so I will work on it now and perhaps the door will be dry by sunrise tomorrow.

The blue will be a better color for the door. I wonder if my favorite color is blue. There is something calming about it. I have not yet seen the altostratus dissipate that I can remember in my recent, broken memory, but somehow I know beyond it there will be a sky colored this same blue.

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Labels: rael's journal

The dog is here again. It's starting to wait at the back door instead of the front. I looked back further and it looks like I've suspected already that this dog is mine.

It scratched at certain areas of the door before leaving today, and I saw the scratches inadvertantly when I was leaving. It had scratched off the paint in big chips. It looks like the door was a slightly darker sort of green before. There was also a depression in the wood, and when I scratched more at the paint, I saw that the depression outlined a square shape just about the size of the dog. There were also little impressions of circles down there that had been filled in as. Maybe it had held nails for a latch before?

This is confusing. I have searched the house and I have no dog food or toys or beds or or speakers or any evidence that I have ever owned a dog, but still that dog comes back — closer today than usual, though it still won't let me touch it. When I get near it snarls and shakes its head, and it is never here when Win is here. I've mentioned it to her, and asked if I've owned a dog before, and she looked nervous. I think she thinks I'm making it up.

I need to think of excuses for the door.

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Labels: rael's journal

I want to go to Low.

I think that Windaline will protest this. She said, "I don't want you to go back to Low ever again," which told me that I had been there at least once before.

I won't be so dramatic as to say that something calls me there. But I do find myself sometimes wandering to the edges of High, past the poles and ropes to where you can see beyond the light. It looks black down there at first. Only when the sun is dimmer can you make out Low's other light. You would think it'd twinkle like stars down there. You'd think maybe it'd be like someone took the night sky and folded it and crammed it down into the stone.

Instead it's a consistent glow. At least at first, and then maybe you can see that the glow is actually more like a veil, and after a while you can see the strands that made it. You can take a telescope to it like a microscope and see this.

I want to go there.

I have to find a way to let Windaline take me there.

I have a feeling that if she says no, I won't be able to go.

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I saw him. I'm very sure I saw him. Win did not. Rather, she will refuse to say she did.

The things I'm beginning to understand do not sync up with what I (am supposed to) already know. They said that the fall broke my memories, but I wonder if it is my memory itself that is broken.

I have to build every day on the page before, because I can't keep the days in my head. No matter how many times I go back, the words are still unfamiliar.

I don't know if it's because I really forgot them, or if it's because they change.

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Labels: rael's journal