Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. The dog scratched urgently to get out. Wind buffeted the windows. The house shook, tilting like a ship at sea. He had forgotten who he was.

There were books stacked beside the bed, a spiral bound notepad on top open to the first page. “Moss, Your schedule for today. Don’t skip ahead. Please cross each item off when completed (yesterday you phoned the funeral home 16 times).” Followed by a bullet point list.

The house trembled and heeled like a ship at sea. The dog scratched furiously to be let out. In the distance there was a regular metallic thumping like the sound of an industrial anvil. Sometimes it would stop only to resume a few moments later. The blankets felt like concrete slabs. Moss couldn’t move. He had forgotten when today was.

The red book just beneath the notepad caught his eye. He reached for it but then forgot what it was he had wanted.

There was a red book just by his hand now. Curious, he picked it up.

Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. He knew it was 6am because there was a clock next to the bed. It always said 6am, which puzzled him a little. The dog scratched insanely at the door to be let out. The wind shrieked against the window panes. There was an insistent metallic pounding in the distance. He had a red book in his hand.

He felt like a man in a box. He had a red book in one hand and a notepad in the other. “You need to pee. The bathroom is straight ahead when you go out the door. Put on your slippers. It’s cold. Keep the notepad with you.” The handwriting was exuberant, plunging descenders, extravagant ascenders, generous vowels like small breasts, tiny hearts for dots and periods. But the tone was imperative, even mildly coercive. “Don’t turn off into any of the other bedrooms or you’ll get lost again.”

He opened the red book. The first lines were hauntingly familiar as if he had read them before. “I always wake at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. I remember nothing before the awakening. I have a notepad in my hand. I don’t know why. Today I intend to remain awake as long as possible because in all probability as soon as I fall asleep I shall forget everything or I will be dead. I am not sure there is a difference.”

The title of the book was Angle of List.

The notepad cautioned. “Love-Love, don’t start reading before you pee. Pee now.” The dog was throwing itself against the door to get out, as dogs will, he thought.

He felt like a man in a book. Only the next line could tell him what to expect.

Moss woke at 6am to the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen below. Wind thrashed against the house on the hill. The dog howled at the door to be let out. There was a tap at the door. It sounded like kettle drums. The door latch clicked ajar. Moss frantically skimmed the notepad list for instructions about the door. He was uncertain who else was in the house. Intruders perhaps. Psychopaths. Aliens. Housebreakers. Young women. People who had suffered breakdowns on the road. UPS men. Home health workers. Infant prodigies.

The handwriting on the notepad was youthful, naive, intimate, demanding. The os and as were like breasts, he thought, for no reason. The notes made him anxious with their easy air of superior wisdom and expectation. Thunderous tapping at the door reminded him of the strange metallic thumping in the distance, like a factory stamping press.

The door began to open. Moss was having trouble with the concept of now.

He thought it would be good to go back to the beginning, to clarify the sequence of events, everything leading up to now, which might then exhibit a concrete character, something he could grasp.

He remembered waking at 6am, the dog, the wind, the industrial press outside his window, the swiftly tilting house, the pots and pans in the kitchen below, but as he reviewed these events he forgot why he was trying to remember them. It was as if the entire morning were beginning again. It was like déjà vu, he thought, but then he forgot and it wasn’t déjà vu any longer. It was happening.

Moss woke at 6am suddenly aware of the din of pots and pans in the kitchen below. Wind thundered against the windows. A dog whimpered in his ear wanting to go out. He was dimly conscious of a metallic thumping sound that came from the valley below the house or perhaps inside his head. He distantly wondered if he was male or female. He knew these things made a difference to the world outside the room.

The thought of a world outside the room filled him with uncertainly, anxiety, and dread. The notepad in his hand contained notes addressed to someone named Moss, aka Love-Love. The names manifested intimacy and expectation. They filled him with uncertainty, anxiety, and dread.

Then it occurred to him that these notes were meant for someone else, that he was reading another person’s mail, that he was in someone else’s bed, inhabiting someone else’s room. The os and as were like a woman’s breasts. House lights still twinkled in the valley below. The ship heeled, approaching angle of list.

There was a tap tap tapping at the door. He was about to be found out, exposed. He thought desperately about the non-continuity of things and the general fraudulence of existence. As soon as the words “fraudulence of existence” came to mind, he forgot them.

He felt safe in bed with the book and the notepad. No demands, no pressure, but research material to guide his inferences about who he was and the character of now, not to mention the world outside and the nature of the lower level inhabitants of the house.

The door latch clicked. The hinges meowed like a cat, he thought. The dog was at the door. He wondered why, according to the notepad, he had called the funeral home 16 times. Luckily, in about a second he would remember none of this. He would wake in another world.

(Now is a fungible concept, he thought, distracted. Or someone thought it. As soon as he thought the thought the someone who might have thought it began to coalesce into a finite shape in his mind like the film of a nuclear explosion run backwards. The shape was, yes he thought, recognizably female. As soon as he had the thought it was gone.)

Moss woke at 6am precisely to the sound of someone pottering in the kitchen below, no doubt the android subartificer the home help agency had sent. The dog went for the door in a rage, barking alarms. The wind pummeled the house on the hill, shaking the window frames. It was like being on a ship in a hurricane, he thought, heeling, heaving, surging. He had to hold onto the bedstead to keep from being thrown to the floor.

The distant metallic whump-whump resolved itself into someone’s fingernails tap-tapping at the door, then the dog’s tail thumping the floor.

He had a red book in one hand and a notepad in the other. He felt safe in bed, but that thought conjured its inferential obverse, the feeling of anxiety and dread as if the two thoughts were inextricably entwined, as if he couldn’t feel safe without the twin feeling of terror.

The notepad contained a bullet list of instructions. The clock next to his bed ticked ominously but the glowing mesmeric digits remained fixed at 6am. The bullet list went on for pages and pages, enough to get him through the day it looked like, different coloured pens (the door was ajar), different moods expressed in the thickness of line and emotive flourishes, annoyance, rage, passion, delight, reflection, frustration, patience, kindness, and comedy, on the whole a youthful, feminine hand with vowels like breasts and tiny hearts for dots.

One entry caught his eye: “I am not an android subartificer, you ninny.” The thought of an android subartificer had never occurred to him before. Who was I?

Upon examination the bullet point list was littered with asides, admonitions and retorts. The writer claimed to know him better than he knew himself. When had he called the funeral home 16 times and why? What was a funeral home?

“Darling, do you remember the day you and Mummy met? Any of it? It was a place called Mount Horrid. The name made you laugh. There were spring beauties along the path. After you had walked along together a while, she took your hand. Remember? Then you fell in love.”

He examined the red book. At first glance its elegant font, the letters massed regimentally upon the page, dots instead of hearts (poignant), was reassuring. But then he noticed all the os and as, miniature breasts, marching in the columns. And the words: “Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below.” Something insidiously familiar there he could not put his finger on, and he felt so sleepy suddenly. A metallic thumping like a dog’s tail in his ears. A tapping on the door frame.

She used to tap her pencil against her upper incisors, he thought and forgot.

When she was thinking of me, he forgot instantly.

Moss woke at 6am to the din of pots clattering in the kitchen below. The dog scratched urgently to get out. Wind buffeted the windows. The house shook and tilted like a ship at sea.

He held a red book in one hand and a notepad in the other. The notepad was to remind him of something, he thought. He had written the bullet list to keep himself on track after he developed his problem with the concept of now. But he’d forgotten writing the words or when he had written them. Why hearts instead of dots and periods? The notebook was like an ancient document in Sumerian glyphs.

There was a persistent metallic thudding sound, a throbbing, like the tapping of a pencil on someone’s upper incisors or the thumping of dog’s tail or the whisper of a fingernail on the door frame.

He found a pencil on the table beside his bed and quickly wrote down the words “There was a persistent metallic thudding” only to discover that someone had already written them on the previous page and the page before that and the page before that.

He began to feel a little lost. But he had the feeling he had felt exactly this way before. He had an intuition suddenly about the recursive nature of existence, that life was only an infinite repetition of the exact same moment called now.

He found these words written in the notebook on the last page and on the 39th page and the 52nd page …

It was 6am when he woke. Someone was being annoying with pots and pans in the kitchen beneath. The dog was trying to dig its way through the door to get out. A nor’easter was roaring against the window panes.

He didn’t know whether to read the notepad or the red book first. The blankets felt like granite blocks. He realized all at once that two people had been writing in the notebook. The vowel-breast-hearts author and someone who wrote a thin spidery hand, almost invisible to the naked eye because it was so tiny.

Tiny, thin, and spidery, nearly lost in the white space. Fearful, defensive, seeking concealment, he thought.

He wrote a note about this in the notepad. When he compared the note he had just written to the others on the page he realized that his handwriting was just as tiny, thin, and spidery as the other.

He forgot this, then noticed it again, then forgot it, then noticed it again, then he totally forgot that he had written the last note and wrote it again.

He noted this observation in the margin and added the time. 6am.

Then he flipped through the pages and discovered that someone imitating his handwriting had made the same note 13 times.

The door latch clicked ajar.

The clatter of pots in the kitchen below woke Moss at 6am. It felt too early, as though he had only just gone to sleep. But he couldn’t remember a single thing about the day before, about the evening, about going to bed, about falling asleep.

The din was terrific. A nor’easter blasted the windows, a small dog yipped and whined at the door to be let out, the entire house seemed to tilt and trim like a ship at sea. He could just see from where he lay three deer bowing into the gale by the concrete bird bath and the liquid amber gum tree.

The fact that he couldn’t remember seemed odd. Odder still, after he’d been awake a while, listening to the wind and the dog, the clock still read 6am. He had a notepad in one hand and a red book in the other.

In the notepad he read the words: “I don’t remember going to sleep or anything else before this moment. In fact as I write these words I find myself forgetting that I wrote these words. The beginning of my sentence might have been written by someone else.

“As far as I can tell I can only be sure that I have existed in the time it took to write the last six words (and still it is 6am). It is theoretically possible that I have been awake before this perhaps dozens or hundreds of times, but I have no way of proving that, and if I can’t remember those other times, they don’t matter anyway.

“If I wake tomorrow and see this note I will never know the person who wrote it, myself.”

A relentless metallic thudding sound echoed inside Moss’s head. The room seemed to roll like a ship at sea. He imagined himself in quarters in the stern castle of a galleon. He wondered how he knew what a stern castle was.

The notepad admonished him to pee. The bathroom was down the hall. But the blankets were like lead weights. He had telephoned the funeral home 16 times. The hand was feminine, youthful — vowels like breasts, hearts over the is like tiny effusions of love.

The bullet list of instructions and the appended notes were the only evidence of a previous existence. This fact had been noted in the notepad a dozen times. At least once he had attempted to journey from the bedroom to the bathroom and had gotten lost. (It must be a long way, he thought.)

There were only five or six things he knew but they swirled in his mind like wreckage inside a tornado. If the notepad were to be believed he had once had a life replete with love. And a child.

The metallic clangor, like a machine press, banged away incessantly like the beating of a heart.

Then the door latch clicked ajar. His last thought: there is no way I am staying around to see who that is.

The instant blinked out like a night light and Moss woke up at 6am after a dreamless night. He might have dreamed, he thought, but he had forgotten them. Wind whistled in the window frames, the sound rising and falling with the gusts. There was an insistent metallic banging sound as though one of the gutters had shaken loose. The wind pounded the house, whistling and booming; the house pitched and rolled like a ship running before a storm.

A small dog yipped frantically at the door, every so often turning its head back to meet his eyes. He had never seen the dog before in his life, though to be truthful he could not recollect much before the moment when he opened his eyes at 6am.

When he glanced at the clock, it was 6am.

*

In the kitchen below, a girl named Nuala, hair like a lion’s mane, a flight of ravens traveling up the inside of her right forearm, leather thong with blue enameled pendant around her throat, hunched over the oak-plank table, writing a letter to her lover Mouff. She wrote to him every day, an old-fashioned practice, but never mailed the letters.

“Dear Mouff,” she wrote, her hand adolescent and full, with vowels like breasts and hearts for dots. “It’s 6am by the clock. The usual time for my blurt. If you were here, we could fuck. It would be a necessity. I’m in the mood. It’s a shame you think more of your studies than of love. To be frank, I am a little bored with absence and waiting. Waiting for you makes me feel I am incomplete on my own. It makes me feel artificial and hypocritical. Love can’t wait, m’dear.”

Her eyes and the enameled pendant are same shade of blue. A pile of books by the cutting board.

“I have come to the conclusion that my curiosity will soon outrun your ability to satisfy it. Like many boys, your erotic imagination is limited. You think you are being audacious while you are stalled at the you-show-me-and-I’ll-show-you stage, all exposure of parts and hasty orgasms. I say this to you with love. In the inimitable words of the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liasons Dangereuses, ‘I wasn’t concerned with orgasms: I wanted knowledge.’

“Of course, we must never underrate orgasms; they are good for passing the time.

“I know you find me exhausting. This is just to let you know that if you could get away, you would get the lay of a lifetime. Just saying. It’s a question of values.

“Blustery outside. The wind howls around this place. It’s on top of a ridge, sticking up like an ancient rock from the hillside. The wind funnels through the valley and explodes against the house as if it were an affront. If this were the ocean, they would be issuing small craft warnings.

“Sometimes when he is asleep—inert, becalmed—I slip into his room and lay my head against his chest. Listen to the frantic thudding of his heart.

“There’s a liquid amber gum tree, a concrete bird bath, and the ruin of a swimming pool the Old Man let go years ago. Black raspberries, wild grape, white campion, and milkweed along the decaying pool fence. Green frogs, newts, and tadpoles are thriving, and there is a resident grass snake who slips out now and then, like the Angel of Death, to harvest a frog. Dog dances at the sliding door, demanding that I let him out and accompany him to the pool, where we spend inordinate amounts of time observing the private life of amphibians.

“Now and then the Old Man’s face appears in the bedroom window on the top floor, an anxious, haunted look as if I reminded him of something he can’t remember. Sometimes it’s as if he was looking right through me, seeing some other scene entirely.

“A sign of the times: I miss you so much that I fell in love with the UPS man yesterday, on a thirty-second acquaintance. I know you think that signals desperation; I think it’s mostly that I adore getting to know someone that way. Plus sex is fun, beats the hell out of small talk. Don’t you agree? Sigh. Perhaps not.

“Here’s what I think: I am sure the study of ancient cuneiform tablets is rivetting, all those lists of goats, sheep, cows, and wine jugs. But if you came up for a visit, you could lick my ass. Just saying.

“Nothing to do here but wait.”

---

Douglas Glover is the author of five story collections, four novels, four collections of literary nonfiction. Between 2010 and 2017, he published the online monthly magazine Numéro Cinq. His novel Elle won the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction in Canada and was a finalist for the Impac Dublin Literary Award.