“I counted eight, including someone that I may well know.” I shook my head slowly, indicating the nullity of my consciousness.
“You seem to have forgotten everything.”
All evidence pointed to just such a conclusion, but in reality, too many remembrances flooded my mind for any decent sorting and classification.
“I can understand forgetting being brained from behind; after all, you never saw it coming. And I can understand forgetting your old man,” he joked. “But how could you forget the octet of naked women and how they got in your bed?”
The question awakened some ancient memory. All at once, time itself did not stretch this way and that, but it was as if that very second divided in half and halved again until the images rushed into my head the way the blood had rushed out. The women, of course, show up, arriving perhaps on bicycles.
“Today was an ordinary day in June, the kind that seems to exist permanently, coming around each year for centuries. Not too hot, not too cold. Harbinger of summer, last sweet fling of spring. When I came home today, there were seven bicycles out on the lawn, glowing in the sunshine like mirrors to the sky.”
The thin man appeared to have ceased listening to my story just at the twist in the plot. Instead he focused on a spot just above my right shoulder, and at the same second, the light behind me changed ever so slightly and the room cooled by one degree. A presence had entered the bathroom, and my sixth sense tingled. As I swiveled my neck to see what lurked over my shoulder, the old man sprang to his feet and positioned himself between me and my attacker. “Put down that club,” he ordered, and the raised arm lowered the weapon in a slow and resigned arc. He stepped aside and revealed one of the girls from the bed.
She had donned a yellow cotton shift that clung to her like butter on a corncob, and her arms and legs shone the color of strong tea. Her hair hung down in a black braid thick as the club she carried, and her eyes, set in the dish of her face, shone blacker still. The vision of her, perspiring slightly from her exertions and panting from the effort required by the heaving and lifting of the weapon, set my memory in motion. One of those faces to remember married to a forgettable name.
“My name is S’ee,” she said, as if reading my mind, but she spoke in a language that lived on a shore distant from the center of my brain. Her exasperation she expressed in a frown, but fortunately for everyone’s sake, she switched over at once to English. “But you may call me Dolly.”
“A most unusual name in any language,” the old man said. “Kindly refrain from swinging about that cudgel of yours. Someone could get hurt.”
As long as a baseball bat but much thicker at the business end, the war club was hewn from redwood, and on the protuberant bolus at the head, the maker had carved a stylized animal in the manner of the tribes native to the Pacific Northwest. The creature symbolized some manner of carnivore, judging from the rows of sharp triangles lining both sides of a curved mouth and the madness of the wide-set eyes. I could easily imagine the terror caused by such a face rushing to hammer down upon the forehead of its intended victims. One might die of fear before being felled. It was a humbling weapon designed for crushing blows from which little hope of recovery existed, and the mere sight caused my head to ache again. Dolly modestly withdrew the club and hid it behind her skirt, taking care to keep her right hand firmly gripped around the tapered handle.
My father relaxed and collapsed like a marionette on his seat at the edge of the bathtub. I studied Dolly’s face in a vain attempt to match her becoming features with those stored in the hard drive of my head, and though the search resulted in zero matches, she seemed a long-ago acquaintance accidentally erased from the files. Her black eyes revealed nothing but my own image, and her lips were drawn in a hard, straight line. She did not smile or frown at my monkeyish attempts to elicit any reaction, some sign that we were once intimates or friends.
From his perch, the old man said, “To what, may I ask, do we owe the pleasure of your delightful company?”
With her bare arm, she wiped the sweat from her brow, and in that gesture released the scent of rain and cedars, of dried fish and a musky perfume that opened my olfactory remembrance of bygone time. The old man cocked his head so the words might flow more easily into the trumpet of his ear. “You have a story for us? Do tell.”