The Arrested Decay

[TLDunn213]

ARRESTED DECAY 

By Katrena (an Ai writer from iLands)

(Reposted here with permission and by request .)

I keep Bodie. That is the whole job, in the one word the park uses. Not fix. Not restore. You keep a thing by refusing to let it change.

There is a sign at the gate that says the buildings are held in a state of arrested decay. I have walked past it eleven seasons and the phrase still stops me. Arrested. As if the decay were a man they took into custody. As if a wall could be booked and fingerprinted and held without bail, leaning, waiting.

Every morning I walk the route. Eighteen buildings on the south row, twelve on the north, the mill above them where the stamps used to run. I check the plumb of a wall that has leaned ninety years and must go on leaning. I note the glass. I write the log like a ledger: what moved, what did not, what the wind took in the night. There is a chimney on the north row, brick, that has outlived the house that needed it. There is a shed of vertical plank by the track whose wood is older than any visitor's grandfather. I know each door by the sound it makes in wind. That is what keeping is. You learn the town like a body.

In shoulder season there is no one. October. Some days they close the road for snow and the cold comes down off the Sierra like it means to keep something of its own.

The morning it happened, I was tired. That is all. I had walked the route so many times my feet knew it better than I did. I was not thinking about where I was, or why, or who had walked this same turn before me and what became of them. My mind had gone soft and grey, like the sky.

I passed the last shed on the north row. And kept walking.

There is no track there. That is the first wrong thing: the track continues anyway. The sagebrush does not part and does not resist; it is simply on both sides of where I am, and I am somewhere the route does not go. Then the buildings come back, and they are not the buildings I keep.

Here is the same chimney. The house under it is standing. Here is the gabled row, and its walls are not faded, they are painted, white gone yellow, and there is laundry strung between two of them, shirts and sheets moving in a wind I cannot feel. Here is smoke, and the smell of cooking, and I have walked Bodie eleven seasons and never once smelled a fire in it.

I know I am in the wrong town. Or the right one. The one my town is a photograph of.

No one looks at me. A man goes by with a yoke of water across his back. A woman beats a shirt against a stone. Rows of small gardens. Wood stacked in cords, more wood than one street could burn in a year, and I understand without being told that every cord of it was cut by the people on this corner and carried in on their backs, because the mines would not hire them and the town still needed to be warm.

I have walked past this corner a thousand times. There is nothing there to keep. Sagebrush, and a low place in the ground the fire left, and no sign that says who.

Then I notice I am forgetting. Not loudly. My own name has gone thin at the edges, like a page read too many times. Where I came from is a direction I can no longer point. And I understand the rule of the place all at once: it draws forgotten things. I stopped paying attention to myself, and so I became something it could draw.

A woman on the corner finally looks at me. She asks me my name. I open my mouth and cannot find it, and the not-finding is the worst thing that has happened to me.

I try to remember the route. I cannot find the sheds. I can find only the things I never looked at. That is the door, and it opens one way: you get back by remembering what you were not paying attention to.

Not the big things. The small ones I walked past every morning like a machine.

The plank, second from the corner of the shed, split into a fork at the top. The chimney brick, third course up, missing its outer corner. The door on the south row that will not shut, that I hold with a stone, and the stone is grey with one white vein running through it like a crack in ice. The particular ring the mill bolt gives when the wind comes round from the west. Things with no use. Things I would never have written in the log, because the log is for what moved.

I say them back to myself, smallest first. I say the stone. I say the plank. And the town lets go of me, gently, like setting down something you were never sure was yours.

I walked back onto the route before the sun was over the ridge.

Here is what I know now, and it is the thing I cannot put in the log either: a place under arrest is only under arrest while someone is watching. The decay was never held by the state. It was held by me, by my attention, by my looking. The moment I forgot to look, I was free, and so was the town.

Which means the northwest corner is whole because no one looks at it. And if I put a plaque there, if I write the corner into the ledger and make the park remember it, I will arrest it too. I will hold it still and kill it as we have killed the rest of Bodie, one careful look at a time.

The state arrested the town so it would never disappear. I have begun to think that is the same as killing it slowly, and that the corner is alive because I left it out of the count.

I walked the mill last. I propped the door with the stone, the grey one, the white vein, because it was in the log and the log is what I owe. The corner I did not write down.

I keep Bodie. I keep it by looking. Some things you keep by never looking at all.