The Drowning Hour

Daniel Moreau was forty-five years old and he had forgotten his daughter's name.

He knew this with the calm detachment of a man reading a weather report. Sophie. Her name was Sophie. He had said it three days ago, or four, or maybe five, but he could not remember which, and the not-remembering sat in his chest like a stone, heavy and cold and completely indifferent to his distress.

He was a professor of history at Boston College, which meant that his professional life was built on the idea that the past could be known, catalogued, and understood. He had published three books on colonial New England, he had served on two historical society boards, and he had a reputation for a mind that was precise and relentless and, according to his wife before she left him, entirely incapable of mercy.

The objects were in his study. A copper pot, dented and green with age, about the size of a large grapefruit. A bamboo whistle, no longer than his thumb, carved with patterns that seemed to shift when he looked at them from the corner of his eye.

He had received them from Madame Lin three weeks ago, in a tea shop in Boston's Chinatown. Madame Lin was a small woman with hair like steel wool and eyes like dark water, and she had looked at him for a long time before speaking.

These are not for you, she had said. But you will take them anyway.

Daniel had laughed. He was a man who laughed at things that were not funny, as a defence mechanism, and this was one of those times. He had taken the copper pot and the bamboo whistle with the cheerful arrogance of a man who believed that nothing in the world could possibly happen to him that he could not handle.

He was wrong.

The first time he used the pot, it was an accident. He had been at a dinner party at the house of a colleague, Professor Margaret Hale, and the rain had started halfway through the evening, a Boston downpour that turned the drive into a river and made the guests' cars unusable. Daniel had felt a strange impulse, a pulling in his chest, and he had taken the copper pot out of his bag and held it up to the window.

The rain stopped.

Not gradually. Not with the slow tapering of a storm that has exhausted itself. It stopped the way a faucet is turned off, in a single instant, as if the sky had remembered something important and decided to go do it instead.

Daniel's colleagues stared at him. He stared at the pot. Margaret Hale said, well, that is remarkable, and Daniel laughed his defensive laugh and put the pot back in his bag and went home.

He did not tell anyone about it. He did not write it down. He simply carried it inside him, this knowledge, and he carried it like a secret, and secrets are heavier than facts because facts can be shared and secrets must be held.

The whistle was different. He used it the second time at a faculty meeting, and what happened was not dramatic. It was subtle, insidious, and completely effective. He blew the whistle very softly, under the table, and Professor Voss, his rival for the department chair position, made a series of small errors in his presentation that accumulated over the course of twenty minutes into a failure so complete that the dean looked at him with something that was almost pity.

Daniel got the chair. He did not feel triumphant. He felt hollow, as if something inside him had been scooped out and replaced with the whistle, and the whistle was not very good at replacing things.

He used the pot and the whistle more after that. The pot to control weather, to make his commute easier, to create perfect conditions for the annual department picnic. The whistle to make people do what he wanted, in meetings, in conversations, in arguments with his wife before she left, with the dean, with the colleagues who had once respected him and now looked at him with a mixture of fear and admiration.

But with each use, something was taken from him.

The first thing he lost was the name of his first dog. He knew he had had a dog, he knew it had been a golden retriever and that he had loved it with the fierce, uncomplicated love of a child, but the name was gone. He could remember the dog's face, its fur, the way it ran, but the name was gone, and the not-remembering sat in his chest like a stone.

The second thing he lost was the taste of his mother's cooking. He knew she had cooked, he knew it had been Chinese food, but the taste was gone, and the not-remembering sat in his chest like a second stone.

The third thing he lost was the face of his wife. He knew she had blonde hair and blue eyes and that she had been beautiful, but the face was gone, and the not-remembering sat in his chest like a third stone.

He kept using the pot and the whistle anyway. He could not stop. The power was like a drug, and he was a man who had never been good at saying no to things that made him feel powerful.

The turning point came on a Tuesday in November, when he came home from work and his daughter Sophie was waiting for him in the kitchen, twenty-two years old and wearing a coat that was too thin for the weather and eyes that were red from crying.

Dad, she said. Dad, do you remember what I studied?

Daniel stared at her. He tried. He reached into the place where the names were and found only empty shelves, and the not-remembering sat in his chest like a fifth stone.

Sophie, he said. I...

I am a nurse, she said. I am studying to be a nurse. I told you this six months ago. I told you last week. I told you yesterday, and you looked at me the way you are looking at me now, with your eyes full of holes and your mouth open and nothing coming out.

Daniel sat down at the kitchen table. He looked at his hands. He looked at the pot and the whistle, which were sitting on the table where he had left them, and they looked at him back, and he understood something that he had not understood before: they were not objects. They were parasites. They fed on memory the way a tick feeds on blood, and they were getting full.

He picked up the whistle and looked at it. It was small and unremarkable, and if you had held it in your hand, you would have thought it was a toy, a trinket, something made by a child.

He picked up the pot. It was heavy and cold and smelled faintly of copper and rain.

He put them both in a drawer and locked the drawer. He threw away the key.

Sophie watched him do this. She did not smile. She did not cry. She simply nodded, once, and said, I am going to go home now, and she left.

Daniel sat in the kitchen for a long time. Then he opened the drawer and took out the pot and the whistle and he walked to the window and he looked at the Boston sky, grey and cold and indifferent, and he held them up to the window and he said, I am sorry.

He did not know who he was apologizing to. The objects? The sky? Sophie? Himself? He did not know. He simply said it, and the words felt like the first honest thing he had said in three weeks.

The pot and the whistle did nothing. They simply sat in his hands, heavy and cold, and Daniel Moreau, professor of history, man who had spent his life trying to understand the past, sat in his kitchen in Boston and wept for the things he had forgotten and the things he could not get back.

When he stopped crying, he put the pot and the whistle in a box and buried them in the garden behind his house, where the snow would cover them and the earth would hold them until spring, when they would wake up and try again to find someone who would take them.

Daniel did not know if they would. He did not know if he would. He simply went to bed and slept, and for the first time in three weeks, he did not dream of power. He dreamed of a dog, golden and running, and he knew its name but he could not remember it when he woke up, and the not-remembering sat in his chest like a stone.