Memory Exchange

TILDA NJOO

7:56pm. Four minutes too early.

Judith sat in her car, hands folded across her lap. Her watch face was turned upwards. She waited.

The evening’s pattern began at sundown. This was the only inconsistent part of Judith’s routine. The sun was fickle, setting later and later into the night as winter disappeared. It curved over the edge of the horizon and reflected in the car’s mirrors. Tonight, by the time she had turned her keys to silence the radio, she could no longer find the sun out of her windscreen.

7:58pm. The door clicked open.

Judith’s uniform shifted on her shoulders as she pulled herself out of the car and swiped her key card at the gate. The top buttons of her shirt were undone, consciously so, as they were every year during the warmer seasons. Judith liked her uniform, liked the feeling of being identifiable. She could look in the mirror at her otherwise weightless and shadowy body, and not see straight through herself. Her uniform reminded her of being a schoolgirl, of watching her mother in the mirror as she tugged at her hair with a brush. Of seeing dust fall to be collected on the floor amongst the feathers.

8:00pm. She lifted her keys.

Animals called out of their cages as she stepped through the gate, belt laden with keys. The evening lay suspended before her. Time ticked back on itself, like a second hand stuck in limbo. Memories of her mother emerged routinely, as if scheduled. Judith tugged them out of her consciousness, careful not to distract herself from her patterns.

She stepped onto the pathway. The animals’ calls heightened, and sound came to the forefront of her senses. Time began again, and Judith set about her routine.

It began with the birds. Their enclosure sat metres from the entrance, a conscious placement of the chattiest of the animals nearest to the cafes and ticket centres. During the day, the birds maintained the zoo’s vitality, encouraging a childlike enthusiasm in even the oldest of visitors. It was a marketing tactic, Judith supposed. Now, the birds’ calls were muffled by the night. They sat amongst each other, in glum anticipation of one day ending and another beginning. Judith didn’t like the birds much. They seemed resentful, as if she was the one that had halted them mid-flight and brought them to a city zoo. She tended to hurry through this part of the routine; reducing a thirty three minute task to one that took twenty seven.

It had never suited her to become a zookeeper. She preferred the inanimate to the animate, believing that animals belonged in storybooks and picture frames. Her mother used to keep wild animals in the house, rescued from one illegal breeder or another. Monkeys and tiger cubs and snakes in baskets were Judith’s entire childhood. She would step over them on the way to her bedroom, mildly resentful of their ability to capture her mother’s attention. Leaving home, she closed the door on their claws and tails, until she became desperate for employment only a few years later. Half-completed degrees and failed career attempts had led Judith back to the animals. Life tended to assert its control over her, leading her forever towards her past.

Stepping out of the cage after filling their trays with seed, Judith moved further into the zoo. Her routine ran like clockwork, or perhaps not - machinery too was unreliable. Her routine ran like the seasons, like the inevitable. It led her next to the alligators. She counted the twenty three steps between the enclosures, stepping on each crack in a subconscious attempt to make her body known to the zoo. Arriving outside, Judith’s torchlight hit leering eyes as they rested above the water’s surface. The alligators were uncomplicated. She was a part of their routine, and they a part of hers. All they wanted of her was their feed. After unlocking the gate into the freezer room and pulling chunks of frozen cow onto the trolley, Judith circled the enclosure on the wooden walkway above the pond. There were seventeen footsteps to the other side of the enclosure. She liked to wait until the very last step to feed them. At first, it began as a game with the alligators, but then it became so embedded in her routine that it became an agreement; a silent game of power. In the dark, she could become dictator over her creatures; could hold their attention in her hands. She became the master of more than just her patterns. Judith lifted up the food bucket.

10:07pm. The alligators snapped.

In the bear cage, Judith avoided the animals’ stares. She could feel them watching behind her as she swept up the leaves and debris on the cage floor. Her eyes shifted through night light, quickening their pace each time the minute hand ticked over. She saw her hands, her feet, the cage floor, a white feather. Her breath stopped and time escaped her and -

5:34am. Memory flared.

Thirteen years old. The patterns had started to form, and they sat neatly behind the girl’s eyes. She was curled up on the floor, her door blocking out her mother’s animal acquisitions. From this angle, she could look left and upwards towards her window. She watched the driveway, which lay empty of her mother’s car. Feeling the day sliding into night, she climbed to her feet, heavy book in hand, and opened the door. Perhaps there had been an accident on the way home, she thought. Perhaps her mother hadn’t disappeared again. Tracing her fingers on the wallpaper, she stepped towards the living room phone. The last time this happened, the police told her to call after six hours. Today, it was seven. But her intuition had been trained against birds and bats and rabbits and snakes. They tended to run away from conversation and confrontation, and so the girl had learned to run as well. Halfway along the corridor, her fingers stopped, turning instead towards the front of the house. The door lay open, allowing the evening into the house. Her mother had left in a hurry, forgetting that she hoarded animals who craved the outdoors. From her bedroom floor, the girl had watched all afternoon as the ducks walked out on a trail, followed by the rest of her mother’s poorly domesticated wildlife.

Now, thinking all the animals were gone, the girl dropped the book. It seemed a meagre weapon, but her mother had never bought her any cricket bats or toy trucks with which to defend herself. Still watching the front door for any sign of her mother, the girl counted the steps between her and the phone, mulling the number over in her head until her fear settled. The prospect of conversation made her stomach harden with each step she took toward the phone, but without the animals scratching at her senses, the girl felt safe for the first time. She even felt brave. Six steps in, and a feather floated in front of her eyes. The girl’s eyes widened. Fear took its place again in her breath. A pelican stood possessively between the girl and the phone. It dominated the doorframe, watching as the girl backed herself against the wall. Her vision blurred.

Two weeks ago, her mother had brought the bird home from the ocean, claiming to have found it with plastic wrapped around its throat. She always seemed hungry to fill her life up with more animals; to wrap herself around each of them and become their saviour. This pelican was particularly hostile towards its captor. The girl supposed that it had stayed behind just to taunt her. Trembling, she reached towards the floor, where her book lay. The bird’s eyes were blank, distant, unreachable across the room. It reared its head, and charged.

Twitching, Judith pulled herself out of her past. Images of her mother weeping over bloodied feathers dissipated into the night. The lens of the present slid itself over her eyes, and Judith could feel her uniform against her shoulders...and could hear the birds across the zoo. Biting her tongue against the memory, Judith swept the pelican feather away.

5:36am. Memory retracted.

Judith slotted herself back into her routine, conscious of being a few steps behind.

5:38am. Six minutes late.

Closing up for the night, Judith turned her keys in the cage door, and stepped out before the emerging morning. Her watch was heavy with the lack of punctuality. Judith quickened her pace, her mind tracking through the zoo towards the exit sign. The birds were screaming now, signalling the dawn. Their sound reverberated off the zoo’s cages, falling short of Judith, whose eyes were too trained towards her watch to hear them. Morning light dimmed her vision, and she was two steps too close before she saw it. A pelican sat in the middle of the path, halfway between the monkeys and the alligators. Time locked itself. Judith stood still.

Flight patterns ingrained in the sky fell at the feet of this bird. It sat kilometres away from the nearest body of water. It opened its beak. Judith watched expectantly. As if second guessing itself, the pelican closed its mouth. Breaking eye contact, it looked skyward and flew. Judith watched it until she lost it to the sky.