Amnesia

He'd always thought of himself as a Renaissance Gentleman. (I have
spent a long time wondering, my dear Alfonso). He used to take hold of
any piece of information that he could and mull on it. Building things
up slowly. Flags, trees, cheeses, capital cities, great composers,
scientific breakthroughs, religions, chemical symbols, were all filed
away. He loved the word encyclopaedic. Gentle yet impressive.

But now it's all gone. Not a flower or a painter or a currency left.
Dripped out all over the place. He could actually feel the cells in his
brain dying, the information withering away.

Every morning he would walk down the stairs from his bedroom to the
kitchen and lose another piece of knowledge that had been stored there
for years waiting to find the right moment to spring into mind. Red
corpuscles carry oxygen to muscle cells. Slipped out and trodden into
the carpet.

And it's worse than that. After the information went the memories
started to go too. And he feels faint with all of this going backwards.
This shedding weight.

He knew that this would happen. He was told that one day his brain
would start to go awry and that he would forget things. Memories would
vanish and connections would become fractured.

So he'd made plans. Set up an alternative system of maintaining a
proper hold on time. Where the past could fall into mind and cause a
ripple of illumination at any moment.

He put photographs into his books. At random. He collected his
photographs and inserted one into each of his nine hundred books,
mainly novels, stories and poetry. He didn't make any connection. He
just threw his photographs, hundreds of the things, all over the floor,
grabbed a book off the shelf and inserted the first photograph that
came to hand.

And he continued with that policy for another eighteen years. Buying
more and more books, not so much to read as to house a memory. Some of
them he knew he may never pick up again, and maybe these are the ones
that hold the photographs of the happiest times of his life. A girl
with a red umbrella standing knee deep in snow. A small pair of
swimming trunks hanging on a line.

Others he may turn to again and again only for a blurred picture of a
hand to fall at his feet.

But it's gone further now. The images mean nothing to him and make him
angry. Who is that woman? Where is that garden? Their connections are
as meaningless to him as to the pages that hide them. They have drifted
away from their moorings. Maybe these people and places will be better
off there, between the covers, trying to worm their way into the
printed words to garner some new history.

This evening a man is coming round to buy the collection for his book
store. He has had enough of this frustration and sadness.

He had made a decision that he would keep one book - there is one that
he first read when he was a young man and which thrilled him and
suggested so much to him about the ways in which he could live his
life. He does not know which picture he will find there. If he had
adopted a more formal system it should contain the most precious
photograph of all. And maybe it does.

But he cannot remember the book. He has looked through the shelves
hoping that a title, an author, a texture of cover, an opening line
would tell him which was the book that he pulled himself to. But he
cannot. There is only a vague recognition of a man walking through the
streets looking at the smallest things with a newly discovered and
unbelievable clarity.

And he has become tired of looking and has given up the search. In a
few hours it will be taken away, whatever it is, along with the
others.

His memories will be scattered now and a woman will walk into a second
hand bookshop, reach in to pick up a novel she has always meant to read
and smile at the strange photograph of a young man with an accordion
serenading a sandy haired girl against a frothy sea.