Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [57]
Coop’s memory, the Coop she knew, seemed to have sunk without trace. Only his motor skills remained adept. When she went for groceries, she bought a deck of cards and a Sharpie pen. Deal, she said when she returned to the chalet, and he immediately and efficiently slid fifty-two playing cards out of his fingers into four piles. But there was no knowledge of the game until she explained the basic rules. Then he knew where he was. Whatever Claire said to him he learned, though if she gave an alternative possibility he became confused. When she tried, on the second day, to correct Coop about her name, it proved too difficult. We remember the first things we learn.
With forgetfulness, what remains of the desire that consumed Coop? Where does it go? Obsession, so finely tuned, is misplaced with this dramatic loss of autobiography. So that someone watching him on his hands and knees on the thin chalet carpeting is perhaps witnessing a frantic search for that physical half that longed to lock itself like a claw in the body of another. A few hours later he is no longer aware of what has left him, the body’s role muted, the brain refusing to give any clue as to what he once wanted so badly. He falls into a relieved sleep in the single bed, unaware of the panorama of his week, unaware of a motive for these wounds, unconcerned with the need to avenge himself. Desire and obsession so slight. One organ, the hippocampus, closes down, and we are redirected into an emptiness.
Faces become anonymous to him now, like shadows in the grass. Who is this woman who is here with him? Another woman rises from a bed. When does that happen? He sees himself pulling her into the spray of the shower, her yellow hair turning brown around her face, he cannot connect this person with anything— a house, a street. He likes being in the small bathroom with her, and her lazy strength. Flecked with water, she opens a drawer and pulls out a hair dryer, tests it on her arm, and lets it blow into her hair, lightening it, tossing it like wheat. Her face changes as she does this, her head surrounded now with a texture. She diverts the cone of hot air across her body and pulls the cord out of the wall, and he hears that subliminal sonar tumble in its dying sound.
She would wake in the night and go to kneel beside his bed and listen for his breath, stare at him. She kept trying to recognize the young face she had known, beneath the bruises and the stubble. Coop. She had spent half of her life with Coop and Anna, and now there was only this unclear shadow of him in the moonlit room. As she watched him he opened his eyes, and she could tell he recognized nothing. It was as if she did not exist in the room. Do you want some water? Yes. Here. She held the glass to his dry mouth.
They took slow walks on the trails above the chalet. If Coop went alone, Claire would write her mobile number on his arm with the Sharpie. One night, when he had been gone for a while, she looked down from the deck and saw car lights at the foot of the hill and then three men struggling their way up the chalet stairs. They were surprised by her presence. When they asked for Coop, she pretended no knowledge of him. The previous tenant skipped town, she said, left a few things behind. She was leasing the place now. She gave them the owner’s name, which Vea had mentioned. They took Coop’s things and said they might return, in case he came back. She called Vea then and told him what had happened, what she had found when she got to the chalet, that she was